A Great Light Dawns Part 2: The Racial Front Lines

There are days I find myself wondering what's become of America's spine, that we tolerate so much viciousness without even rousing ourselves to denounce it. The many eruptions of racialist demagoguery, wherein black (and sometimes Hispanic) hucksters strain themselves to their limits trying to whip up resentment and hatred toward whites are typical occasions for that sentiment.

Now and then, such...persons even gather into "conferences" that include a few self-denouncing whites:

The April 2014 [White Privilege Conference] in Madison, Wis., was the 15th consecutive year of an event explicitly dedicated to training college and public school teachers to indoctrinate students with an intellectually toxic combination of critical theory, bogus history and ideological absurdity.

Officially, the "WPC is a conference that examines challenging concepts of privilege and oppression and offers solutions and team building strategies to work toward a more equitable world," according to its website.

WPC organizers also insist on their website that their event is "not a conference designed to attack, degrade or beat up on white folks."

That message clearly didn't get communicated to Kim Radersma, a former high school English teacher who led a breakout session in Madison.

According to the MacIver Institute, Radersma's presentation included these gems:

• "My racial identity, as a white person who believes that I am somehow better or more deserving, is the problem. The white supremacy, the structure is the problem ...
• "It's that savior mentality, like 'save them, because they are not like us,' and that normalization of whiteness. Whiteness is best and those poor others aren't as good as us ...
• "I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose everyday to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way."

Other speakers at the conference said, according to a video provided by Progressives Today, colonial Americans invented racism.

"Racism is central to America. It's central to how the country was developed. It is central to how it operates right now," claimed Professor Adrien Wing of the University of Iowa. She also described President Obama as "the face of global white privilege."

Similarly, Professor Jacqueline Battalora of Saint Xavier University told attendees that "white supremacy has been embedded in America from its founding."

I don't think these folks -- whatever their skin colors may be -- are fans of the white race, do you? But enough of that. The point here is that this is par for the racialist course: their usual, preferred tactic for creating social and political divisions along racial lines. The WPC merely presents it in a more organized fashion. Suitable for strafing, you might say.

Whatever the organizers had in mind, they can't be terribly bright. This makes it all too clear that there is a strategically coherent attempt in progress to demonize American whites, to persuade whites to condemn themselves and to grant all manner of social, political, and economic privileges to blacks, and to inculcate firmly in blacks the conviction that we are their enemies.

Yet 75% of Americans alive today are whites. We hold so many edges over the minority races that were we minded to crush them into inescapable servitude, we'd have no trouble doing so. Indeed, the greater part of the progress blacks have experienced over the century past is owed to whites' collective decision to include rather than exclude them: in our social institutions, in our economic arrangements, and of course as equals before the law. They have no rational grounds for resenting us, much less for hating us and wishing us ill.

So why do so many listen attentively to the racialists? Why do they lap up the venom being poured out before them?

You won't like my conclusions.

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Hearken once more to the great Clive Staples Lewis:

Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological experts have already done in the corruption of human language makes it unnecessary to warn you that they should never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won’t. It will never occur to them that democracy is properly the name of a political system, even a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor of course must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle’s question: whether “democratic behaviour” means the behaviour that democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.

You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate. And of course it is connected with the political ideal that men should be equally treated. You then make a stealthy transition in their minds from this political ideal to a factual belief that all men are equal. Especially the man you are working on. As a result you can use the word democracy to sanction in his thought the most degrading (and also the least enjoyable) of human feelings. You can get him to practise, not only without shame but with a positive glow of self-approval, conduct which, if undefended by the magic word, would be universally derided.

The feeling I mean is of course that which prompts a man to say I’m as good as you.

The first and most obvious advantage is that you thus induce him to enthrone at the centre of his life a good, solid, resounding lie. I don’t mean merely that his statement is false in fact, that he is no more equal to everyone he meets in kindness, honesty, and good sense than in height or waist measurement. I mean that he does not believe it himself. No man who says I’m as good as you believes it. He would not say it if he did. The St. Bernard never says it to the toy dog, nor the scholar to the dunce, nor the employable to the bum, nor the pretty woman to the plain. The claim to equality, outside the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior. What it expresses is precisely the itching, smarting, writhing awareness of an inferiority which the patient refuses to accept.

And therefore resents. Yes, and therefore resents every kind of superiority in others; denigrates it; wishes its annihilation. Presently he suspects every mere difference of being a claim to superiority. No one must be different from himself in voice, clothes, manners, recreations, choice of food: “Here is someone who speaks English rather more clearly and euphoniously than I — it must be a vile, upstage, la-di-da affectation. Here’s a fellow who says he doesn’t like hot dogs — thinks himself too good for them, no doubt. Here’s a man who hasn’t turned on the jukebox — he’s one of those goddamn highbrows and is doing it to show off. If they were honest-to-God all-right Joes they’d be like me. They’ve no business to be different. It’s undemocratic.” [from Screwtape Proposes A Toast]

I'm as good as you, with all the accompanying resentments and licenses for foul behavior, is the sentiment being purveyed by every racialist huckster at work today. He seeks to have his audience adopt it for their mantra, but aimed at the white race: we who constructed and still maintain the society that coddles them. To wit:

1. Only whites can be racists.
2. Whites cannot be victims, at least if the aggressor is black. (They're only getting what they deserve.)
3. Whites have preferred positions in American society only because blacks have been excluded.
4. A black who attacks a white should be presumed innocent, but a white who defends himself against such aggression is an oppressor who deserves to be punished regardless of the facts or the circumstances.
5. Asiatics, who have prospered by conforming to the white-entrenched norms of this oppressive society, should therefore be considered "adopted whites," and equally deserving of black resentment and vengeance.

The black who accepts this unholy creed has prepared himself to commit injustice after injustice against whites while preening himself for his "racial solidarity" and murmuring that "they deserve it." But note: Not all blacks accept the racialist doctrine. Indeed, it appears to be palatable to a relatively small fraction of American blacks: probably less than a third thereof. What accounts for the difference?

I contend that C. S. Lewis pinned it, through Screwtape's mouth.

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"No man who says I’m as good as you believes it." Indeed. No man would lower himself to such a statement unless he were persuaded, by objective evidence, of the reverse. I'm as good as you is at its core a demand that someone else step forward to equalize the complainer with his target, for the complainer knows he cannot do so for himself.

When a white man says I'm as good as you, he almost always makes himself into an object of derision, even contempt. But when a black man says so, whites are expected to agree enthusiastically, perhaps with a tug on the forelock for emphasis.

My reply?

"You think so? Prove it.
"Match my accomplishments.
"Equal my erudition and eloquence.
"Prove that you've met your responsibilities as well as I've met mine.
"Until you can do those things without flinching,
"You're just a mouthy, resentful idiot."

Somehow I don't think that would be a popular stance at a "White Privilege Conference." But then, my other opinions would suffice to keep me outside in the first place.