So why is the government of the United States—the same U.S. that defeated slavery and promoted civil rights—using Bob Jones University admissions forms as federal questionnaires? The same reason Bob Jones and the Old South did: to treat people differently based on their race.
Oh, sure, the ethno-proctologists who designed the census will tell you it’s for research purposes only. They just want to watch trends in health, life span, education, etc. You know, just research.
Then they promptly used the information to pick my next congressman. Yours, too.
The government uses this census data to decide where to spend money on roads and bridges, based in part on the racial makeup of the community. They use it to decide who gets a new park or a new school. They use it to figure out what the skin color or ethnicity should be of the new employee at the local work site.
When a black man showed up to meet a white girl for a date at BJU, the school determined that he was the “wrong color” and sent the assistant dean for idiotic policies to shoo him away.
When a black child shows up at a magnet elementary school that has all the opportunity his family wants for him, but the school is already “too black,” the public school administration shoos him away.
When a white family from the suburbs starts looking at fixer-uppers in a downtown neighborhood, the city’s “anti-gentrification” representatives shoo them away.
When an Asian student shows up at a state college looking for admission, or for financial aid, the state education system takes a look at her features and shoos her away.
These are just a few of the thousands of examples of formal public policies treating people differently because of their race. And every one of these policies is defended more proudly by mainstream Northerners than Bob Jones ever was by the South.
This isn’t just my opinion, by the way. When the 2000 census forms were being planned, mixed-race couples lobbied to have a Mixed Race box on the form so children wouldn’t have to choose between the racial identity of their mothers and fathers. This certainly sounds as reasonable as the rest of the census, so who opposed it?
The NAACP, of course. They, along with La Raza and other race-obsessed organizations, fought against an accurate census questionnaire and urged instead an advantageous one—advantageous to their perceived interests of having as many folks as possible check their racial boxes. More checks in the Mixed Race box meant fewer checks in the Black or Hispanic box. These racial interest groups had more political clout, so their less accurate approach prevailed.
If you have any remaining doubt that the purpose of government policy is segregation, I refer to the painfully liberal governor of the excruciatingly liberal state of Maryland, Parris Glendening. When Maryland finished its post-2000 census redistricting of legislative seats, several black lawmakers were outraged that there weren’t more black-majority districts to “give black voters an opportunity to participate in the process,” as one former NAACP leader put it (you know, because in that racist enclave of Maryland, black candidates aren’t allowed to participate without special permission…).
Then-governor Glendening defended himself from charges of racial insensitivity by bemoaning the problems created by that most terrible of social trends, integration. The governor wanted the state to create more legislative districts with black, Hispanic, and other racial majorities, but, as his spokesman told the Washington Post, “it’s difficult… where minority populations are not concentrated in any single area.”
See the problem? White folks, black folks, Asian folks, all living among each other, shopping together, going to school together. This is a problem, a “difficulty” as the governor put it. What this good liberal wants are more black and Hispanic “areas of concentration.”
The Maryland governor’s idea is not a new one, of course. Across the pre-civil rights South, there were all-white and all-black communities. “Citizens’ councils” were formed to maintain segregation, and homeowners signed restrictive covenants to keep black citizens in the appropriate “areas of concentration.” Perhaps Governor Glendening would like to try that idea?
Another liberal Democrat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, went even further in creating “areas of concentration” for members of America’s Japanese minority. A few barracks, some barbed wire, one or two confiscated pieces of property, and… violà! And think of how easy it would have been for those interned Japanese Americans to elect a congressman of Japanese descent.
That’s a cheap shot, obvious and unnecessary. Then again, so is the racism of the Maryland state government. (I should add here that the Maryland GOP also supported racially segregated voter districts.) The governor’s gripe about the ill effects of integration didn’t garner so much as a raised eyebrow from the Baltimore Sun or Washington Post, by the way, yet another indicator that integration—once the core principle of northern ideology—is all but abandoned.
Let me stop here and disabuse you of the idea that I am preaching the “poor white man” message of reverse discrimination. There are few things as nauseating as watching some redneck high school dropout standing on his front porch in his wife-beater T-shirt, holding a beer, rubbing his belly, and complaining that “them niggers took all the good jobs. You can’t get a job if you’re a white man.”
Right, Virgil. I’m sure the fact that you’re forty-two and still living in your mom’s trailer has nothing to do with flunking out of the sixth grade, your continued illiteracy, or the half dozen arrests for public drunkenness. No, no, no, I’m with you, buddy. Why, the earning potential for a lazy, gap-toothed clod who can’t operate a pencil sharpener without trained supervision must be enormous! It is only through constant thwarting of your superior Anglo-Saxon genetics by a vast conspiracy of “niggers” (probably with the help of their friends the Jews) that you’ve been prevented from moving up to assistant night manager at the Wal-Mart.
If you’re a liberal racist gerrymandering congressional districts, you want to argue about racial discrimination and its historic legacy. If you’re a conservative racist, you want to argue about reverse discrimination and the plantation mentality of America’s black leaders.
Either way, you are a racist. You are clinging to the fundamentally southern worldview that race is determinant, relevant, an inescapable part of the human experience. You divide the world by race, as when you draw voting lines or school districts. You treat people differently by race, through so-called hate-crime laws or racial-profiling police tactics. You view your neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens, not as individuals, but as representative members of a larger, ethnic gang.
“All black people should get a reparations check for slavery, regardless of their circumstances, and all white people should pick up the tab.” Or: “All black people are bad students in school, disruptive and incompetent; and good white children shouldn’t have to go to class with them.” There is no different in the philosophy behind either of these statements. They are the ravings of a race-obsessed redneck, and I reject them both.
I reject the premise of reverse discrimination (“The only people you can be prejudiced against are white Christian males!”) for the same reason I reject the premise that underlies affirmative action (“Whitey is keeping me down!”). They both start from the same premise as Bob Jones: Race matters.
Which is what makes the constant battering we Southerners take from Northerners on the issue of race so unbearably annoying. I have actually had Northerners who support government-funded, racially segregated, blacks-only public schools accuse me of racism for supporting school choice!
The tendency among the typical (racist) American is to dismiss my rejection of race as Pollyannaish. “Of course, race matters, Michael,” I have been told hundreds of times. “You can pretend it doesn’t, but it does. Are you saying America isn’t racist?”
Of course, I’m not saying that. I’m saying the exact opposite, that the same New York Times and CBS television network that helped lead the assault on redneck r
acism in the 1950s and ’60s are enthusiastically practicing an updated version of the same racism today.
I’m not arguing that we live in an America where race doesn’t matter, but rather that we have rejected the idea that race shouldn’t matter. That was the premise of the Civil Rights Movement, that racism was fundamentally wrong. Dr. King summed it all up in one sentence: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., gave that speech before a crowd of 200,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Today, every American who agrees with him could fit in a booth at Denny’s, where they would wait for hours without ever being served.
The premise of Northernism, as presented by Dr. Martin Luther King, is that knowing someone’s race means nothing. He longed for the world where judgment was made on the content of one’s character, while Bob Jones and Co. stared stubbornly at the color of one’s skin.
I ask you, for the record, who has won this argument in America?
THE SOUTH ROSE AGAIN
Forty years after the Civil Rights Movement, America is committed to the principles of southern-style segregation. Listen to the national conversation on race, and all that’s missing forty years later are the dogs and fire hoses.
Glancing through the Washington Post in September 2001, for example, readers were asked the question “Is Chocolate City Turning Vanilla?” The piece was written by Natalie Hopkinson, a Post staffer who tells of how proud she was to have bought a home in a downtown D.C. neighborhood. Buying this house in a gentrifying neighborhood sent a message (in her own words): “We damn sure are not about to let white folk buy up all the property in D.C.”
She went on to decry the fact that white people—affluent white people, who are even worse for some reason—were moving into traditionally black neighborhoods. This is a bad thing. “From our perspective,” she wrote, “integration is overrated. It’s time to reverse an earlier generation’s hopeful migration into white communities and attend to some unfinished business in the ‘hood…. We not only have to invest in the inner city, but we can’t let white people beat us to it.
“[My husband and I] wanted to hold a line, stake out our turf,” she went on. “As black middle-class parents, for example, we may be more open [than whites] to the idea of sending our children to public schools…. Many whites want to help out, too, and their privileged racial status can only improve the city’s prospects. But this is the Chocolate City.”
The conclusion: “A few months ago, as I left a take-out on Georgia Avenue, a gentleman passed me a flier. It invited me to a community meeting where residents planned to debate the question, ‘Is the Chocolate City turning Vanilla?’… Not if I have anything to say about it.”
Wow.
Now, ask yourself what is worse: that there was a college-educated, professional woman spouting racist homilies straight out of the Jim Crow “concerned citizens’ councils” of the 1960s or that the Washington Post was comfortable enough with these overtly racist statements that it ran them without edits?
And how could anyone in the year 2001 get away with using the term “Chocolate City”? Why not “Nigger Town,” a favorite geographical marker of the racist losers I grew up with? Both are racial road signs reading “Ours” and “Yours.”
In fact, Ms. Hopkinson is just one small voice in a national chorus of Americans, white and black, North and South, who long to bring back segregation. In this modern, post-civil rights era of resurgent redneckery, the buzzword of the day is “resegregation,” which is a code word for “good racism.” Self-declared leaders of America’s black community are, according to the Boston Globe, “tossing around the word ‘resegregation,’ using it with a new kind of cachet—segregation without the meanness of the fifties or the fire of the sixties.” Translation: There wasn’t anything actually wrong with the idea of whites-only and blacks-only public spaces, segregated rest rooms, etc. There was just a failure in the execution. These new black leaders want to have another try at racial segregation, doing it the right way.
Who knows, maybe they’ll take another crack at slavery while they’re at it…
The same Boston Globe piece quoted Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights under President Clinton and a steadfast integrationist, as saying that “integrationists are losing in a fight that was never fair. Since Martin Luther King, we have not had leaders who talk about integration as an inherent value.”
And so today, you have segregated dorm rooms at prominent Ivy League universities like Cornell and Dartmouth, not because white students refuse to shower naked with persons of color, but because segregated dorms are demanded by black and Hispanic students. After fifty years of struggle for integration, this renewed segregation is viewed as a positive.
What do the minority students say when you point out they’ve created the same kind of college campus George Wallace faced off against federal agents to create? “They call it separatism when a bunch of minority students decide to live together,” one black senior at the University of Massachusetts told a reporter. “But I have lots of white friends who come here and hang out with us.”
Hey, you’ve got a lot of white friends! That’s great. And let me guess: You’d let your sister date a white guy, too. That Rocky Graziano—what a fighter!
Erran Matthews from a segregated dorm at Cornell didn’t stoop to the “I have a [fill in ethnic blank] friend” argument, but he echoed another old southern platitude when he said segregation was about wanting “a place to feel at home. Everybody wants to go ‘home’ sometimes.”
If you’re a believer in what would have once been considered northern-style integration, it gets worse: The Reverend Raymond Hammond, president of the Ten-Point Coalition, an umbrella organization of Boston ministers, says that while he and his organization don’t want a “legally mandated separate-but-equal society” (emphasis added), he believes “a community works best economically, educationally, and socially if it stays together.”
Ah, yes: another all-black, racially segregated community for integration.
It should be obvious to all concerned that this is warmed-over Jim Crow served from the other side of the plate. Can anyone argue that the rejection of integration and acceptance of segregation (the “good” kind) is a triumph of 1960s northern, liberal values? No, this is Confederate theology swallowed whole and spit up again, twice as ugly.
I say it’s uglier because, quite frankly, we ought to know better. My grandmother, who was born in 1912 and lived her whole life sharecropping in rural South Carolina, used the word “nigger” nearly every day, sometimes with malice and sometimes without. But she didn’t grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn’t benefit from forty years of intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession.
You and I have. We’ve had Selma and Greensboro and the Boston bus riots and the Skokie Nazis and a thousand real-life parables to instruct us. If there was one idea of the solid South upon which a family-sized can of whoop-ass had been dumped, if there was one form of southern stupidity that should have been reduced to rubble in the struggle, it was the southern approach to race. And yet it is the one idea that is most clearly triumphant across the land.
The triumph of racism is the supreme accomplishment of the Redneck Nation.
The defense of our new love of racism is inevitably some version of “fighting fire with fire.” The timid counterargument from supporters of segregation and racial quotas is that we need Chocolate City or Hispanic Haven or Indigenous People’s Island because our entire society is an oppressive, white, European pressure cooker. Black, brown, and citizens of various hues must escape this dominant culture to protect themselves from the debilitating forces always present.
It cannot be said too often that, yes, racism is alive in America. And there is another inescapable truth, which is that it is
harder in America today to be black than it is to be white. But adopting the war aims of your enemy means that the bad guys are always going to win, regardless of the outcome. This is why people who want to defeat racism should return to the idealism of the Freedom Riders and become actual “anti-racists.” Racism will die when the southern ideas that underpin it are rejected, not before.
Unfortunately, there are Americans who are trying to talk me, Michael Graham, into becoming a racist—and they think every other geeky white boy should, too.
Don’t laugh. Okay, go ahead and laugh, but some very earnest people are very sincere in their belief that white Americans need to learn to love our inner honkies.
Just ask Jeff Hitchcock of the Confederate State of New Jersey. He runs the Center for the Study of White America, where he argues that the road to racial harmony is through more racism. Hitchcock wants his fellow Caucasians to “embrace their own culture while abandoning the privileges that come with it.”
C’mon, white people—you know the privileges he’s talking about: the reserved parking at Starbucks, the discounts on Wonder bread and mayonnaise, free long distance on all calls to Utah. And all those free short-sleeve button-down shirts. Ah, the good life!
According to the Associated Press, Jeff Hitchcock is “an avowed anti-racist—a diversity consultant who has been married for more than 15 years to a black woman and argues strongly for the United States as a multiracial melting pot.” He’s part of the burgeoning “white studies” movement in American academia that is currently thriving at places like UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and Harvard.
Charley Flint, a professor of sociology at William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey, and Hitchcock’s wife, explains the goal of “whiteness studies” succinctly: “We want to racialize whites. How can you build a multiracial society if one of the groups is white and it doesn’t identify itself as a race?” (emphasis added). Instead, Hitchcock told the Chicago Tribune, “White people need to develop a sense of pride not based on saying we’re superior, but based on the fact that we’re working on building a multiracial society.”
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