Mugged (19 page)

This is not to say all problems of black people are caused by white people. But it has been white liberals in positions of power—in the media, academia, Hollywood and the judicial system—who thought it was fun (and quite hip!) to elevate all the worst elements of the black community as heroes and martyrs.

The beginning of Clarence Thomas’s dissent in
Grutter v.
Bollinger
, about the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program, should be tattooed on every liberal’s buttocks. Thomas wrote:

Fittingly,
New York Times
columnist Bill Keller attacked Thomas for his dissent in this case, characterizing it as “the angry exclamation of a black man who feels personally patronized and demeaned” and calling Thomas an affirmative-action appointment.
⁵²
Liberals demand gratitude for their malignant interference.

Their Landlord and Their Friend

It was the misfortune of black Americans that they were just on the verge of passing through the immigrant experience when these damaging ideas about welfare and crime took hold. It could have happened to the Italians, Germans, Jews or Irish, but luckily for them, there were no liberals around to “help” when they arrived.

Until liberals started driving the bus, black Americans were doing better in individual pursuits than immigrants.
¹
For about a century after the Civil War, black Americans had good reason to have a chip on their shoulder, but, somewhat amazingly, most did not—until liberals put it there.

Notice the absence of sullen resentment in massively accomplished black Americans in the first generation or two out of slavery—Kelly Miller, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Archibald Henry Grimké, George Washington Carver, Jack Johnson, Huddie William Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Louis Armstrong, Thurgood Marshall, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson (whose middle name, Roosevelt, was in honor of the Republican president by that name
²
) and many others. And, unlike the immigrants, they had very good reasons to be aggrieved.

Liberal icon Franklin D. Roosevelt put a Ku Klux Klanner on the Supreme Court and refused to desegregate the military, but he was more than happy to put blacks on “Irish Welfare”—government jobs. With the proliferation of government work and welfare under the New Deal, black progress was instantly frozen, ineluctably tied to the growth of government. That is why, in the thirties, for the first time in seventy years, the black vote migrated from the Republican Party to the Democrats. That was, of course, limited to northern blacks: Democrats in the South still weren’t letting blacks vote.

The black writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston observed the change and commented: “Throughout the New Deal era the relief program
was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes.…Dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the ‘Little White Father,’ more or less. Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on and on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few.”
³

Liberals took blacks as their pets and then tried to kill them by patronizing them to death.

In the rainbow of diversity that is the left in this country, a remarkably large number of these white friend-of-the-blacks came from as far west as Riverside Drive, south to Columbus Circle, all the way east to Central Park—and as far north as Morningside Heights. Their basic assumption was that anyone outside of Manhattan—especially white people in Queens—sympathized with the Ku Klux Klan.

Michael Moore managed to be both self-flattering and groveling in his book,
Stupid White Men
. Nothing gives liberals a better sense of their own courage like attacking the only group it’s okay to malign and winning standing ovations from cretins.

Liberals have got to get some new material. They’ve been working that bit about sneering at nonexistent racists forever.
Goddamn it, this may cost me my career but I’m going to speak up for racial equality and let the chips fall where they may!

It’s apparently hard for some people to grasp that it’s not brave to tell an audience what it already believes.

Start with the title of Moore’s book. Really. White men have contributed nothing? Since you brought it up—no one wrote a book called
Smart White Men
—shall we compare SAT scores, cultural contributions and inventions of white men compared to others? It’s one thing to say pink is white, or beige is white. But to say black is white is to have no compunction about sounding like a complete idiot in public.

Reminiscent of a modern-day Jimmy the Greek, Moore urges whites to marry blacks and procreate so we can breed the whiteness out of the country.
⁴
Hacks think statements like that make black people like them, when it’s just creepy and weird. Only a very, very few blacks get to be Al Sharpton. The rest of them have to live in the same world we all do.

Liberals pioneered the method of calling anyone who disagrees with them on politics a racist, based on standards that they themselves could never withstand. It’s a favorite hobby of MSNBC hosts to count the number of black faces at a Tea Party rally or the Republican National Convention.
James Meredith, the first black person to attend the University of Mississippi in the face of violent attacks, worked for Jesse Helms. How many blacks work for Michael Moore?

How about Chris Matthews? He is an aggressive bean counter when it comes to the number of blacks at Tea Parties—as if the Tea Partiers can control who shows up at their rallies.

Blacks as a group are overwhelmingly one-party voters. Jews have more Republicans. As a result, any group that espouses Republican principles obviously isn’t going to have a lot of black people—although probably more than the schools Chris Matthews’s children attended.

While living cheek-by-jowl with the nation’s capital, which happens to be a majority black city, Matthews’s kids managed to go to schools that are probably about 3 percent black. When Matthews had an opportunity to associate with blacks by sending his children to public schools, he chose not to. His obsession with race is all about self-congratulation. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

The Tea Parties weren’t as white as Chris Matthews’s office. They weren’t as white as Matthews’s neighborhood or television audience. (It’s doubtful that even Eugene Robinson watches
Hardball
.)

This is
New-York-Times
-Charlie-Rose-PBS thinking. We’re not racist, they are. This pompous self-perception allows liberals to be offensively, self-righteously preening in the positions they take, such as demanding school busing for other people but sending their own kids to private schools.

If we attended a party at the Matthews home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, how many blacks would we see? Could we at least wave to the black neighbors? The
New York Times
write-up of his son’s wedding
⁵
included a panoramic shot of the church, showing nearly a hundred guests. Not one of them is black. You may check for yourself here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/fashion/weddings/04vows.html?pagewanted=all.

A Republican saddled with the facts of Matthews’s life would be convicted of racism in five minutes.

No one is required to be a friend to someone else because it’s good for society, and people should be able to hire anyone they please. But you better have your own house in order if you’re going to run around accusing everyone else of racism based on a dearth of black associates.

Like Matthews,
New York Times
columnist Tom Wicker made a career of proclaiming that America was a deeply racist country. But he sent his
own kids to lily-white private schools and then retired to the whitest state in the nation, Vermont. Wicker being so right-thinking and the scourge of racists, people were curious about why he didn’t send his kids to New York public schools. Did he just screw up? Asked about the hypocrisy of sending his own children to sanitized private schools, Wicker said, “It gives me a lot of intellectual discomfort, but I am not going to disadvantage my children to win more support for my views.”
⁶

It’s not a question of winning support for his views, it’s whether he really held those views to begin with. The surest proof of racism is not what people say, but what they do. The only thing in his whole life Wicker could have done that wasn’t just running his mouth was to send his kids to public schools, and he didn’t do it. On what basis did Wicker have a right to self-congratulation on his racial attitudes? Because he worked especially hard to make sure other people’s kids had to go to crime-ridden schools?

It’s often said that those who are unduly bothered by gays are latent homosexuals. Isn’t it possible that people obsessed with racism are themselves racist?

Treating blacks like special-needs children, liberals bury them in ludicrously gushy praise. In a field where the competition is brisk, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow stands out. When not spinning conspiracy theories, Maddow can usually be found patronizing her very, very special black guest, Melissa Harris-Lacewell with fulsome, flowery praise.

Harris-Lacewell (who became Melissa Harris-Perry toward the end of 2010) is professor of being a black woman, which is one of the most demanding, hardest-to-qualify-for positions at any university (you have to be a black woman). She is never treated like some regular nerd guest. Maddow is compelled to tell her she’s “amazing,” “wicked smart” and “one of the smartest people I’ve ever talked to about anything, anytime, anywhere.” (Then again, the smartest person at MSNBC is the guy who replaces the toner, so that last one might not be false praise.)

Here are a few examples: