How this language is exclusionary today, Senator Bryant never explained. He was never asked to explain. He’s learned the key rule of the Redneck Nation: never explain. Just announce that your opponents will never understand.
If the phrase “all men are created equal” is offensive today because it once excluded blacks (and women and non-property owners and people under twenty-one, for that matter), then isn’t the term “human being” also exclusionary? After all, there were people who once considered Africans less than human. The prevailing view in America once was that slaves were merely property. Should every mention of the word “property” in the U.S. Constitution be stricken?
We could all pretend that the Declaration was, in fact, a racist document and that these words are racist on their face. In order to take Senator Bryant seriously, we would have to. And a majority of his fellow state senators, much to their discredit, did.
But instead of pretending to believe this sheer, utter nonsense, wouldn’t it be easier for a rational person to just stand up and point out that this man is an idiot? That what he’s saying is clear and demonstrably untrue?
Ah, but that’s the problem. In our modern, multicultural America, it’s enough that his opinions are true to him. And really, who are we to judge? Does it matter that these words from the Declaration of Independence aren’t actually offensive? Isn’t it more important that some people think they’re offensive?
As any solid citizen of the old, segregated South would have told you, it’s completely possible for a word or phrase to be offensive to one group and not to another. So take your damn “Freedom Now!” placards and get back on the bus, Yankee!
For Confederate-style multiculturalists, there is no obligation for any group to explain the reasonableness of its actions or attitudes to any other. Consider again the ongoing fight over Indian mascots for sports teams. That poll of American Indians by Sports Illustrated showed that more than 80 percent were not offended by Indian mascots or team names. Surprising to me, more than 60 percent weren’t even bothered by the “Redskins” nickname.
This is interesting because you don’t have to be a descendant of Geronimo or Sacagawea to find the Washington “Redskins” offensive. Reasonable people articulate and understand why a team name that appears frequently in movie dialogue accompanied by the modifier “them dirty” might be inappropriate for public use.
So when a group of Native American activists stands up and says, “Calling a team ‘Redskins,’ which has frequently been used as a racial slur, is unacceptable,” I can understand their point—a viewpoint I share, by the way. It’s rational and comprehensible to anyone. But when folks like Richard Regan of the Maryland Commission for Indian Affairs announce that all Indian mascots—Braves, Seminoles, Warriors, etc.—are offensive, they are uttering nonsense.
Regan, a proud Lumbee Indian from North Carolina, fled his political failures back home to become a leader of Native American causes in the People’s Republic of Maryland—a state with virtually no Indians. He has declared community sports leagues like youth soccer and Little League baseball “a hate growth market” because they allow Indian team names. When a school district in Havre de Grace, Maryland, refused to change its team name from the “Warriors,” Regan told the Baltimore Sun, “I think it’s a sad day when the public school system has more in common with the Ku Klux Klan than an advocacy group representing Maryland’s American Indians.”
Lynching black people, blowing up churches, putting a bow and arrow on your basketball jersey—to multiculturalists like Regan, it’s all the same. What’s bizarre is that Regan and his allies have never answered the first, fundamental question: What’s offensive about a group of kids who want to associate themselves with Indian culture?
Well, my fellow white people, the secret is out. I might as well confess right now. Yes, Richard Regan, you’re right: The reason that Boy Scout troops and baseball teams choose mascots is that they’re looking for someone to insult. You’ve been right all along. The reason multimillion-dollar university sports programs choose mascots like Irishmen or Celts or Vikings or Aztecs is to sow hatred and show solidarity with the Klan.
Why, whenever four-time Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Greg Maddux pitches another shutout for the Atlanta Br—uh, you-know-whos, wearing a Native American warrior name on his chest, you can practically hear the cries of humiliation from the Great Tribal Meeting of Indigenous Peoples in the Sky. Oh, the anguish! Oh, the shame! All those talented athletes—white, black, and Hispanic—calling themselves “Indians” or “Warriors” and “Illini,” wearing uniforms and logos with traditional symbols of Native American culture as they appear on national TV before millions of cheering fans. I mean, it’s not like people look up to athletes in America these days. My God, it’s got to be incredibly humiliating.
Which probably explains why the NAACP’s favorite college mascot is the Rebel of Ole Miss.
Your heart has to go out to the poor Confederate loyalists, mocked every football Saturday by a stadium filled with Confederate flags. There, on the field, all those black players (except the lily-white QB, of course) calling themselves “Rebels,” while some guy pretending to be a Confederate officer mocks and demeans the sacrifices of their southern ancestors. There are even historically inaccurate and culturally insensitive attempts to sound the infamous rebel yell. Oh, the shame must be almost too much to bear.
Why, the ongoing insult to Confederate heritage at the University of Mississippi is so complete, I’m left to assume the entire enterprise is an outlandishly clever conspiracy organized and conducted by vengeful black Mississippians from a secret headquarters deep in the Delta.
And if black Mississippians ever came to a Rebels football game, I’d ask them about it…
To think otherwise is to think that schools, clubs, and organizations choose mascots and team names from cultures and people they want to honor and emulate. To think otherwise, you must believe that athletes and fans want to be associated with Braves, Warriors, and Indians because Braves, Warriors, and Indians represent, in their minds, virtues they hope to attain, like courage, strength, and cunning.
To think otherwise, you must think that the Richard Regans and Indian-rights activists of the world are total and utter dopes.
It might, however, explain the fate of the Fightin’ Whiteys, an intramural basketball team started in 2002 by Solomon Little Owl at the University of Northern Colorado. Upset by the lukewarm response to his protests over Indian sports mascots, Little Owl decided to turn the tables: He named his team the Fightin’ Whites (though the players called themselves the “Whiteys”), complete with a geeky white-boy mascot. Their slogan: “Everythang’s Gonna Be All White!”
“The message is, let’s do something that will let people see the other side of what it’s like to be a mascot,” Little Owl said. “I am really offended by this mascot issue.”
Unfortunately the “other side”—that is, the white people of Colorado—refused to be offended. In fact, they seemed to be… flattered. “I think it’s great!” said one white e-mailer who contacted Little Owl’s team. T-shirt sales surged. Rush Limbaugh talked about them on the air. When the date arrived for their first intramural game, more than half the crowd were members of the media.
The Fightin’ Whites got trounced, by the way. Apparently Little Owl’s multiethnic basketball team even played like white guys.
And still the Indian activists complain. The poor kids at Maryland’s Poolesville High lost fifty years of tradition when the county school board forced them to bench the “Indians.” The students, teachers, and parents voted overwhelmingly to keep the team name, but the elected school board members shot them down. “This is not a democracy,” one school board member allegedly told a Poolesville supporter.
Well, not in Montgomery County, Maryland, anyway…
Some Poolesville folks asked me at the time what I thought their new mascot should be. I insisted that they follow the dictates of the multiculturalists.
Poolesville needed a mascot that was not specific to any ethnic or racial group, and would be popular among high schoolers and promote good values. I made these suggestions:
The Poolesville Scalpers. Young people should be encouraged to learn about the free market, and the go-getters who snag tickets to popular concerts and sporting events and resell them at a significant profit are the perfect role model. The mascot could be a guy standing outside a stadium, holding up some tickets, and shouting, “Got two! Got two!”
The Medicine Men. Academic excellence is important, too. Why not honor those students who plan to major in premed when they go to college? Such a mascot would inspire these high schoolers to a higher calling. (For female squads, the obvious choice is “Medicine Women,” though the Poolesville “Earth Mothers” or “Juju Women” might also be popular.)
The Firewater. Sensitivity to stereotypes has encouraged many sports teams to choose abstract concepts and inanimate objects as names. Along with “the Heat,” “the Flame,” “the Storm,” and “the Liberty,” “the Firewater” would be completely inoffensive, and it might also spur interest in the team from New Age types.
But the best choice for a new mascot, in my humble opinion, would be the Poolesville High Engines. Young people love cars. They love rockets, jets, anything with an engine that goes fast. Why, just look at the success of the film The Fast and the Furious. What could be more inspiring for a sports team than to be known as the “Red Hot Engines” of Poolesville High?
The “Red Engines” for short.
The internal combustion engine has its critics, however, and nothing will ruin a school pep rally faster than a protest led by Al Gore—with or without the beard. Therefore, I proposed the mascot be a steam engine, say a locomotive. Powerful, fast, and relatively environmentally friendly, this would be the perfect, nonethnic, nonoffensive sports team name.
Just imagine this scene at the next Poolesville High football game:
The Poolesville High football team, dressed in red, waits to take the field. From the stands comes the chant “Engines! Engines! Engines! G-o-o-o-o Engines!” Can you hear it? Then frenzied fans join in the “Engine Dance,” a cheer in which fans imitate the piston motion of a steam engine by extending their arms forward and chopping them up and down, all the while wailing “Whooo! Whoo-whoo!” Then, as the band sends up puffs of steam (or, more likely, smoke) to signal the team, the Engines race onto the field!
From the Indians to the Engines: finally, a high school mascot that sends a real message. I wonder if the activists will ever get it?
JOHN C. CALHOUN, MULTICULTURALIST
Advocates of multiculturalism will reject the above examples as fringe, as though I’m overlooking the “good” aspects of having a respect for the beliefs of other cultures. But by co-opting the southern philosophy of “exceptionalism”—what I believe and how I behave need not meet any rational standards but should just be accepted without judgment—multiculturalists have gone from merely laughable to possibly dangerous. There is, for example, a theory about black culture which states that young African American men do not have the ability to understand or obey the law. And because of this cultural heritage, black people should be treated differently in court than white people.
Does this sound familiar? It should. It’s a racist sentiment that every white Southerner has heard expressed at one time or another.
I know I was taken aback when I ran across this theory in the Cincinnati Enquirer. The defendant in question was a young black man. The person making the argument that he was culturally incapable of discerning right from wrong: his attorney.
The lawyer, Victor Sims, was representing one of three young black defendants found guilty of looting a local department store of $131,000 in easily transportable goods during the April 2001 riots. After hearing his view of race and character, I began to suspect that he was being financed by the Aryan Nations legal fund.
Pleading for a light sentence, Sims first argued that his client was racially entitled to loot whatever he wanted because it was a department store with a large black clientele. As the Enquirer reported it: “Sims contended that… Deveroes [the looted department store] shouldn’t complain too much because the store benefited from those living in that community. ‘It’s been the black community and these young boys,’ Sims said pointing to the defendants, ‘that has kept them in business.’”
This is an interesting view of property rights, and no doubt Sims believes that Cincinnati’s suburban hausfraus would be completely within their rights to loot SUV’s from nearby dealerships during the next period of social unrest. Sims then went on to offer an even more disturbing reason why his client should be spared: “It’s not their fault. They wouldn’t be running the streets at 2 A.M. if they had opportunities or if government programs weren’t killed by budget cuts. We make a different inference for these young black men than we do for better economically situated white males.” Sims said.
Setting aside the “Republican budget cuts turned me into a looter” nonsense, the cultural condescension drenching this statement is nauseating. I know lots of people who make “different inferences for young black men” than they do for others. I grew up with these inferers, watched them gather around burning crosses among the scrub oaks of Lexington County, South Carolina, and heard their ignorant claims of white supremacy and the inherent inferiority of black culture. I just never thought I would hear a black lawyer north of Ohio make these inferences, and without an objection from the local black community and civic leadership. But then again, what would the purveyors of southern-style victim status object to? Sims is merely preaching from the gospel of cultural exceptional-ism, which is the accepted doctrine in the Redneck Nation.
Fortunately for reason and justice, the judge in this case rejected the “looting as an alternative lifestyle” argument and he gave the looters a race-neutral sentence. The judge argued, as I do, that even if you were a member of a social or ethnic group that accepted and promoted crime and violence as a norm, there is no reason for the rest of us to accommodate your cultural proclivities.
And there are indeed cultures of death and violence jockeying for our attention, as every American learned on September 11, 2001.
I had hoped that one of the unintended bits of collateral damage of 9/11 would be the death of multiculturalism. How could Americans continue to make the southern argument that no culture was inherently bad or good after three thousand of our fellow citizens were killed by practicing members in good standing with modern Muslim fundamentalism?
In the days immediately after the terrorist attacks, Confederate-style multiculturalism was clearly on the ropes. TV ads appeared that would have been unimaginable in the ethno-maniacal era of Clinton. The most moving ad I saw featured child after child from various ethnic groups and religions, each announcing solemnly and with determination, “I am an American.” It was as though our nation’s entire supply of hyphens had been wiped out in a single blast. You could almost feel David Duke and Al Sharpton cringing in their lairs.
But the loyalty to our Union didn’t last. Soon there were black firefighters in Florida complaining about riding in trucks flying the American flag, while one of them insisted “that isn’t our flag.” (So, can I get you a Confederate one?) Then some American Muslims began complaining that all this talk about fighting terror should in no way discourage Palestinians from killing Jews. And on and on.
If America ever needed an object lesson in the dangers of irrational multiculturalism and regional exceptionalism, we got it in the aftermath of September 11 as we tried to apply Western values to the violent, arcane warrior faith of Islam.
If ever there was a candidate for thorough and utter cultural rejection, it is Muslim fundamentalism. As practiced in the vast majority of Middle Eastern nations, Islam is a religion of peace in the same way that Nazism was a philosophy of racial understanding.
“We understand that you are a Jew. Get in the truck.”
Even the mos
t cursory review of the teachings of Islam (a word that means “submission,” not “peace,” by the way) reveals that, in addition to the encouragement of admirable traits like compassion, self-control, and sobriety, it is a faith that teaches its followers to kill in the name of God. Wake up, say your prayers, skip the bacon, cane your wife, kill an infidel, and call it a day.
No other major Western religion in the twenty-first century allows for the killing of the unconverted. None. The tired arguments that Christians launched the Crusades and have engaged in anti-Semitic violence miss the point entirely. Yes, Christians have killed in the name of Christ, but they have always been hard-pressed to demonstrate that the killings were His idea. Western culture is a violent culture despite the teachings of Christ, not because of them.
But look at the nations governing themselves by Islam and its laws, or shari‘a. These are places where, under direct orders of their faith and its recognized leaders, the government lops off heads, hands, and other limbs in the name of Allah. You’ll also find the rejection of democracy, prohibitions on the practice of other religions, public executions for “crimes” like adultery, and governmental support for fatwas ordering the death of infidels and blasphemers.
I laugh whenever I hear a modern American Muslim insist that these nations do not represent mainstream Islam. They remind me of the earnest young woman at Oral Roberts University who tried to convince me that most sorority girls are virgins. They both need to check their math.
Once again, multiculturalists ask me to accept the beheadings, stonings, and dictatorships as inappropriate perhaps for America but part of the cultural life of the Middle East. Okay, fine. But what of the Muslim subculture in America that brings these Neanderthal notions to us?
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