cultural norms (and once did so with a fair amount of rigor) today bring to any matter involving black behavior a toxic mix of condescension and excuse making. Black people are not the same as us, so the implicit thinking goes, and given their tragic past, it is not just reasonable but understandable that they not be held to the same standards.
Of course, occasionally unavoidable, an especially high-profile instance of anti-white bigotry will cause a serious stir. The Reverend Jesse Jackson gave rise to much hand wringing in left-liberal circles when he was caught on tape in 1984 referring to New York as Hymietown. And then there was Wright, the plus ultra in black racial demagoguery.
Yet even in such cases, the denouement is predictable. A lot of anguished commentary, followed by explanations/apologies and the earnest determination to put it all behind us. In brief, the usual double standard on especially vivid display.
What too rarely gets observed is how profoundly damaging this endless nursing of resentments is to blacks themselves in alienation from the American mainstream, or the incalculable damage the victim mind-set does to race relations in general.
Then, again, for some, it is damage with a purpose, and the costs more than justify the reward. For it is also only the specter of racism that keeps in business a civil rights establishment long since given over to economic and moral corruption. The NAACP and other “social justice” outfits need the racism charge every bit as much as in their day the George Wallaces and Ross Barnetts needed the bugaboo of integration: as a means of holding and exercising power. They depend for their very existence on the perpetuation of the notion that white racism in its varied and nefarious forms remains the overriding impediment to minority progress, and so must be confronted via the expenditure of bottomless amounts of government cash and corporate capital until the source of the vile inequity ceases to be or the end of time, whichever comes last.
That over the years they’ve exploited the charge to the fullest is a melancholy matter of public record. Indeed, with the actual white racists of old happily a distant memory, they’ve had remarkable success in endlessly conjuring up new ones, largely imagined and always exaggerated.
It hardly needs to be said that the masters of this debased art are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But among white progressives, Morris Dees and his colleagues at the Birmingham, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, surely lead the pack. Ostensibly “dedicated to fighting hate and bigotry, and to seeking justice for the most vulnerable members of our society” by “monitoring hate groups,” the SPLC is a veritable fund-raising behemoth, forever sending out ominous warnings as fund-raising appeals to its massive list of credulous supporters. Alas, as Mark Krikorian writes in the National Review Online, with the all-but-nonexistent “Klan an increasingly improbable stand-in for the SA,”—Hitler’s brownshirts—“the SPLC needed new enemies to keep the cash registers ringing. So, after the collapse of the Bush/Kennedy/ McCain amnesty push in 2007, it joined with [the National Council of La Raza and other open-borders groups that wanted to effectively criminalize disagreement with their positions to find new ‘hate groups’ among immigration skeptics, designating the Federation for American Immigration Reform as a ‘hate group. . . . Who will be the next ‘hate group’? The Catholic Church? The Southern Baptist Convention? The Orthodox Union? Or maybe they’ll go after Second Amendment groups next, or anti-tax groups, or the anti-Islamists.” In fact—no joke—it turned out the next group to make the list was the Family Research Council, deemed a “hate group” for its opposition to gay marriage. Hey, if you’re going to “claim in fund-raising letters that there’s been a 54 percent increase in the number of hate groups since 2000,” as conservative columnist Ashley Herzog observes, “you do what you have to do.”
Yet by far the most fruitful instrument in the racial extortionist arsenal in recent decades has been the concept of “institutional racism,” a term invented by Carmichael in the late sixties, which he defined as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture, or ethnic origin.” The beauty part, of course, is that it is organizations, as opposed to mere individuals, that are to be held responsible for the racism and made to make restitution; a circumstance that no one has exploited with greater gall than Jackson, dubbed with endless justification the Godfather of Shakedowns. Among the many organizations that over the years have shown the “civil rights icon” their neck, and thanked him for the privilege, are Toyota, Viacom, Ameritech, Anheuser-Busch, and Coca-Cola.
Meanwhile the NAACP, routinely accorded the respectful designation as “America’s most venerable civil rights organization” by the mainstream press, has repeatedly resorted to gutter tactics to pass for relevant, tossing out the racism angle with disgraceful abandon. It might well have hit bottom with its ad during the 2000 presidential campaign accusing candidate George W. Bush of complicity in the 1998 murder of a black man named James Byrd Jr. by three white men. “On June 7, 1998, in Texas my father was killed,” intoned Byrd’s daughter in the ad, which ran the final week of the campaign. “He was beaten, chained, and then dragged three miles to his death, all because he was black. So when Governor George W. Bush refused to support hate-crime legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”
Nor was it coincidence that Bush’s rival, Al Gore (who in the 1988 Democratic primaries unearthed Willie Horton and used him to beat up rival Michael Dukakis before George H. W. Bush did so in the general) chimed in on the NAACP’s behalf. “James Byrd was singled out because of his race in Texas, and other Americans have been singled out because of their race or ethnicity,” Gore piously intoned during the second presidential debate. For, needless to say, a relationship between the civil rights movement and the Democratic Party that at its inception was largely grounded in high principle has long since been reduced to a corrupt bargain; the race baiters posing as champions of social justice receiving legitimacy and consistent infusions of public money in return for assured and overwhelming black electoral majorities.
What’s surprising, and deeply disheartening, is how intimidated even otherwise principled conservatives have invariably been by the threat of being branded racist. When accused of racial insensitivity of any kind, the impulse of many on the right has been to retreat in panic and confusion, slavishly apologizing or claiming to have been misunderstood or misquoted.
To be sure, the reasons for such feckless behavior are varied and complex. For some, it is at least partly driven by the recognition that having often been on the wrong side of the civil rights movement when it counted, conservatives must now make a point of their commitment to inclusion; Barry Goldwater, for one, who opposed the landmark civil rights bills of the mid-sixties (on principled if, he later decided, mistaken states rights grounds), spent much of the rest of his career doing a kind of penance.
But more often, preemptive surrender—or invisibility—on race-related issues is just easier for conservatives than taking on the massed forces of civil rights orthodoxy. This is, of course, understandable: Who the hell needs the media questioning your racial bona fides, which is to say, your very morality? Still, to be MIA on an issue of such incalculable importance to the nation’s well-being is not just a gross abdication of responsibility, it lends credence to the charge at the very heart of progressives’ worldview that, in contrast to their profoundly decent selves, those on the right are callously indifferent to the plight of the underclass.
It hardly need be said that the racism charge remains a particular problem for conservatives from the Deep South. When Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour was considering a presidential run in early 2011, the Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson asked the prospective candidate why his hometown of Yazoo City had been spared the racial violence suffered by other Southern towns. Barbour gave what seemed like a reasonable response. “You heard of the Citizens’ Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town.”
But, of course, “up north” is where the history of the civil rights revolution is written and revered, largely by those who know of it secondhand, and in the accepted version the White Citizens’ Councils were themselves among the era’s chief villains, bitter obstructionists in suits