What has changed is my appreciation for America's constitutional framework and the commitment of the American people to those ideals. America's unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical understanding that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England are the nations that led the world in abolishing slavery and establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion — or that we are a nation besieged by peoples "of color" trying to immigrate to our shores to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them.
The establishment of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire was historically essential to the development of institutions that today afford greater privileges and protections to all minorities than those of any society extant. White European-American culture is a culture in which the citizens of this nation can take enormous pride, precisely because its principles — revolutionary in their conception and unique in their provenance — provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white and non-Christian (and which are not so tolerant in their lands of origin). That is why America's democratic and pluralistic frame- work remains an inspiring beacon to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana, who have not yet won their freedom, but who aspire to do so. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the understanding of those who have been able to resist the discredited and oppressive worldview of the "progressive" left.
The left's war against "whiteness" and against America's democratic culture is integrally connected to the Cold War that America fought against the marxist empire after World War r. It is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are merely updated versions of the ideas and agendas of the marxist left that once supported the communist empire. The same radicals who caused the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct administrators and faculty of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts, and even leaders of this left display a striking continuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America's national identity and, in particular, of the moral, political, and economic institutions that form its social foundation.
The left's response to the observations contained in this volume is not difficult to predict. Impugning the motives of opponents remains the left's most durable weapon, and there is no reason to suppose that it will be mothballed soon. In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of "class bias" was used by communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with whom they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into "enemies of the people," a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror through the Stalinist purges and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left's self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on intimidation and smear to enforce its increasingly incoherent point of view.
It is not that no one else in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so well. In the battle over California's Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) to outlaw racial preferences, for example, the left's opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy, whose purpose was to strip its proponents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, though he himself is black, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. (The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the nonexistent connection, even paying his expenses for the trip.)
During the campaign, NAACP and ACLU lawyers who debated the Initiative with its proponents relied almost exclusively on charges of racism and alarmist visions of a future in which Mrican-Americans and women would be deprived of their rights should the dreaded legislation pass. To make their case, the anti-CCRI groups sponsored television spots that actually featured hooded Klan figures burning crosses. A fearful voice-over by actress Candace Bergen explicitly linked Ward Connerly, California Governor Pete Wilson, and Speaker Newt Gingrich with the KKK, claiming that, if CCRI's proponents succeeded, women would lose all the rights they had won, and blacks would be thrown back to a time before the Civil Rights Acts.
In the years since the passage of the California Civil Rights Initiative, not a single one of the left's dire predictions has been realized. Women have not lost their rights and segregation has not returned. Even the enrollment of blacks in California's system of higher education has not significantly dropped,** although demagogues of the left — including the president of the United Stateshave used a shortfall in admissions at the very highest levels of the system (Berkeley and UCLA) to lead the public to believe that an overall decline has taken place. One year after the Initiative passed, enrollment had significantly fallen only at six elite graduate, law, and medical school programs in a higher-education system that consists of more than seventy-four programs. Yet there has been no apology (or acknowledgment of these facts) from Candace Bergen, the NAACP, the ACLU, People for the American Way, or the other leftist groups responsible for the anti-Civil Rights Initiative campaign and for the inflammatory rhetoric and public fear-mongering that accompanied it.
When an earlier version of a chapter in this book, "Why Democrats Need Blacks," was published in Salon magazine, the editors printed several long responses from black readers, including the award-winning Berkeley novelist Ishmael Reed. Reed suggested that I did not really care what happens to blacks and that I am insensitive to injustice when it is inflicted on blacks-a not-so-subtle imputation of racism. In a futile attempt to forestall such attacks, I had cited the opinions of black conservatives in the article itself. The critics' response was to dismiss these conservatives as "inauthentically black," "Sambos," "Neo-Cons," and "black comedians." From the point of view of leftists, the only good black is one who parrots their party line.
There is no real answer to such patronizing attitudes and nasty attacks. Nonetheless, in closing this introduction, I will repeat the response I made to Ishmael Reed in the pages of Salon:
I have three black granddaughters for whom I want the absolute best that this life and this society have to offer. My extended black family, which is large and from humble origins in the Deep South, contains members who agree and who disagree with my views on these matters. But all of them understand that whatever I write on the subject of race derives from a profound desire for justice and opportunity for everyone in this country, including my extended black family. It springs from the hope that we can move towards a society where individuals are what matters and race is not a factor at all.
* * *
*Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York: Penguin, 1997); see also Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
† See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, "Abolish the White Race By Any Means Necessary," in Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90-114.
‡ Ibid., 80.
** The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 5, 1999, reported that enrollment of blacks on all the University of California campuses was only twenty-seven fewer students than in 1997.
I
GET WHITEY
1
Racial Paranoia
WHEN BILL AND CAMILLE COSBY'S SON, Ennis, was brutally murdered in 1997 during a robbery in Beverly Hills, the entire nation grieved with them. But a year later Camille Cosby unburdened herself in print with a diatribe against white Americans in a USA Today column entitled "America Taught My Son's Killer To Hate Blacks." The feelings expressed in this column could not be regarded simply as grief over her terrible loss. For such pain a mother could
be forgiven almost any emotional excess. Written a year after the fact, however, the sentiments expressed in her USA Today column reflected long-held, carefully scrutinized, patiently-edited sentiments of hostility and rage against her native country and its white citizenry that could not be so easily excused. It was a form of race hatred that has become all too common among educated and successful African Americans.
Unlike the mothers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, who were destined to be disappointed by racially motivated "jury nullification," Camille Cosby saw swift justice rendered by the American system to the murderer of her son. The mainly white jury was not swayed to acquit the killer of Ennis Cosby be17 cause of his skin color, nor was there a racial constituency outside the courtroom hoping that he would "beat the system" and go free. Instead, the white prosecutor, judge and jurors worked to bring in a verdict of guilty with all deliberate speed. This was better justice than most Americans receive, white or black. Nonetheless, Camille Cosby was not satisfied; she believed that true justice had not been served. In her eyes, the killer himself was a victim-of America itself.
By then, most of the sailent facts in the case had come to light. It was questionable that race had played any role at all in the killing of Ennis Cosby. The gunman, a Ukranian immigrant, was high on drugs at the time of the shooting and told police shortly after his capture that he regretted what he had done and that he had pulled the trigger because the young man "took too long" to remove his wallet. But none of these facts impressed Camille Cosby: "Presumably [the killer] did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero," she wrote. "Nor was he likely to see America's intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union before the killer and his family moved to America in the late 1980s." In Cosby's fevered view, America's "intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs" were responsible for the death of her son.
It is a logic that is as familiar as it is paranoid. The charge that white Hollywood portrays blacks in a stereotypically negative fashion is a standard protest heard from black spokesmen ranging from Louis Farrakhan to Jesse Jackson. But it has little basis in fact. Going back to the 1940s, white Hollywood has produced and directed an entire library of features about black Americans and their struggle for equality (Home of the Brave, Pinky, Sergeant Rutledge, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Defiant Ones), not to mention many of the principal epics of black liberation and pride, Roots and Makolm X (both produced by whites) and Amistad (written and directed by whites) to name three, and television sitcoms and series focusing on admirable black families (Julia, The Jefersons, Good Times, Sister Sister, I'll Fly Away). At the same time, black artists have themselves produced many of the negative stereotypes, from "blaxploitation" films like Super Fly to gangsta rap videos, which are the targets of many of the complaints.
But it is the name Cosby that almost by itself represents a refutation of the paranoid claims that white America and Hollywood are hostile to blacks. Camille Cosby enjoys a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions because of the success of a television show featuring her husband as the head of a model black family. For ten years, the Cosby Show was the top-rated television program in America (and Bill Cosby the top-earning entertainer) thanks to the loyalty of tens of millions of viewers who happened to be white. If America was the country of Camille Cosby's paranoid imagination, the success of both the real and fictional Cosbys would be inexplicable.
As if to demonstrate the irrationality of these complaints, the Cosby Show was actually attacked quite regularly in the years of its popularity, often by the same people. They accused the show of being "unrepresentative" and "unrealistic," in other words of being an attempt by white network executives to portray African Americans as better than they actually were, while hiding the poverty, oppression and other injuries of race that white America had inflicted on them.
Nor does the illogic stop there. On what basis does Camille Cosby make the claim that because there were no blacks in the Ukraine, the killer of her son must have learned racism by watching American television? Is she suggesting that the presence of a persecuted group is necessary to provoke the irrationality of bigots? Do racists need evidence to substantiate their racism? There are no Jews to speak of in countries like Poland and Japan, but Jew-hatred is rife in both places. Has Cosby forgotten (or as a leftist has she merely blanked out the memory of) Russia's racist culture that led to the mass expulsion of African students from Moscow's Lumumba University and Moscow's official protest at the Olympics that the American team's inclusion of black athletes was an unfair advantage because of blacks' innately superior abilities?
Early press reports of the Cosby murder indicated that, as a youth, Ennis Cosby's killer was raped by blacks in prison. What would Camille Cosby's reaction be to the claim that black rapists were responsible for her son's death? Yet that is exactly the logic she employs in attacking America for the drug-induced act of one immigrant sociopath. "Yes," she writes, "racism and prejudice are omnipresent and eternalized in America's institutions, media and myriad entities." Eternalized? Are white Americans born racists and destined to die as such? This is indeed the accusation made by black racists like law professor Derrick Bell, who in several popular books has claimed that America is irretrievably hostile to blacks. How are Cosby's and Bell's views that white Americans are inherently morally depraved different from the attitudes of southern crackers and KKK racists towards blacks?
Like Cosby, Bell is culturally a product of the communist left, which fifty years ago brought a petition to the United Nations, at the behest of the Kremlin, charging the United States with "genocide" in its treatment of blacks. Perhaps it is also appropriate to recall that the Cosbys were vocal supporters of the notorious Tawana Brawley, who falsely accused a group of whites of raping her. (Brawley, incidentally, has made an after-the-fact career out of touring campuses to repeat her lies at the invitation of black student associations who reward her with handsome fees for her testimony.) At the time, the Cosbys put up reward money for anyone who could prove Brawley's lies were true and appeared at rallies organized by Al Sharpton to incite hatred and violence against the innocent whites she smeared.
In her USA Today column, Cosby began her "proof" of what she believed to be America's ineluctable racism with the meaningless fact that the Voting Rights Act would technically expire in ten years. From this she concluded, preposterously, that "Congress once again will decide whether African-Americans will be allowed to vote" and commented "no other Americans are subjected to this oppressive nonsense." On what planet is Camille Cosby living? What could possibly have inspired the idea that whites are plotting to take away the voting rights of American blacks? What majority in this country would deny African-Americans the right to vote, a right guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment? To be sure, this right was once denied in the American South, but black Americans led by King and supported by the overwhelming majority of white Americans-including the government, the courts, and law enforcement agencies--restored it. The Voting Rights Act was passed by 90 percent majorities in Congress. The once segregated South is today a region whose major cities are run by African-American elected officials, while black legislators like congresswoman Cynthia McKinney are now regularly elected in majority white districts.
Camille Cosby is a woman whose country has showered her with privilege, making her family wealthy and famous beyond the wildest dreams of almost anyone alive, including all but a handful of the white targets of her wrath. Yet Camille Cosby's hatred of her country is so deep as to provoke the following preposterous observation: "African-Americans, as well as all Americans, are brainwashed every day to respect and revere slave-owners and people who clearly waffled about race . . . Several slave-owners' images are on America's paper currencies: George Washington ($1), Thomas Jefferson ($2), Alexander Hamilton ($10), Andrew Jackson ($20), Ulysses Grant ($50) and Benjamin Franklin ($100)." Forge
t that the characterizations of Hamilton, Grant and Franklin (whose last act was to file an anti-slavery petition to Congress) are probably libelous. What American is taught to praise these men for having owned (or possibly having owned) slaves? America is probably unique among the nations of the world in teaching every one of its children from kindergarten on that slavery was wrong, that all people are created equal, and that tolerance of differences is a cardinal virtue. Perhaps Cosby should direct her concerns to black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan who are still waffling about slavery in Africa more than a hundred years after the spiritual heirs of Washington and Jefferson abolished the institution in the United States. Camille Cosby's column is, in fact, a cornucopia of common but unfounded complaints about "institutional racism" in American life made by the political left. She refers, for example, to the fact that "America's educational institutions' dictionaries define 'black' [as] harmful; hostile; disgrace; unpleasant aspects of life." She describes this as evidence that white people, who control language, apply the term "black" to African-Americans in order to denigrate them. But the responsibility for the term "black" is properly assigned to Malcolm X and his militant followers, who demanded that AfricanAmericans be called "black" at a time when whites and their dictionaries universally referred to African-Americans as "Negro" and "colored." Subsequently, Jesse Jackson demanded that blacks be called "African-American," and white Amerïcans again acquiesced.
The irrational hatred of America in general, and of white America in particular, manifested in Cosby's screed, is unfortunately the expression of more than an individual paranoia exacerbated by a perfectly understandable grief. Suppose, for example, that the mothers of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman had authored a parallel column titled "Black America Taught Our Children's Killer to Hate Whites?" Is there a (white-owned) newspaper in America that would even print such a claim?
Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Page 2
