The Racism Monster Eats Its Young 2

The first article in this series noted an abrupt and seminal shift in how the mainstream media report racial politics.  The NAACP, which both blesses and promotes black discrimination against whites, approved when the Secretary of Agriculture fired a low-level black USDA employee when he thought she'd made racist remarks.  The USDA and the NAACP both reversed position on her firing when the entire context of her remarks was examined, but the fact that they'd ever approve of a black government employee being dismissed for racism is a remarkable change.

In the past, the media have been a lot harder on Republicans who seem to have a taint of racism in their past than on Democrats.  The MSM tried not to mention that Sen. Byrd had been a high-level KKK recruiter and Kleagle in his youth, for example, but in 2002, Sen. Trent Lott was hounded from the Republican leadership after he gave a routine, throwaway compliment to colleague Strom Thurmond who, a half-century before, had run unsuccessfully for President as a segregationist member of a splinter group of the Democratic party, another fact never mentioned.

As the media have been discussing this latest incident, however, they pointed out a number of overtly racist actions by the Obama administration which is something they don't generally do.

It is perfectly natural for the Obama administration to act in a racist manner because it's full of racists.  It's been unheard-of for the media to bring this to our attention or to talk about the harm done to white people by the government-mandated anti-white bias in most of our institutions, but better late than never.

The problem is that according to scientific research, all people tend strongly to prefer people like themselves to people who are different.  That's the definition of racism.

The political establishment has declared that racism is unfashionable and should be punished by having any perpetrator be banned from politics.  Since all people are racists to a greater or lesser extent, the establishment has had to re-define racism as something that only Republicans and other conservatives do.  The mainstream media have dutifully gone along with this scam, but the actual facts of black against white racism as well as black on white crime appear to be leaking out for all to see now that we have the Internet to bypass the MSM.

That's the major impact of the Sherrod incident: for the first time we can remember, a black person was fired, albeit unjustly as it turned out and only briefly, for race-based actions and the NAACP approved.  The fact that the NAACP retracted and she was offered her job back doesn't lessen the impact of both the government and the NAACP agreeing, briefly but publicly, that black people are fully capable of racist actions and should get the boot when found out.

In the meantime, there have been so many bogus accusations of racism that white people are beginning to ignore them.  Overplaying the racism card has destroyed the credibility of some of the most respected civil rights groups; a few of their wiser leaders may soon begin to realize the old weapons don't work anymore.

The truly wise in both camps have known all along what any grandmother can tell you - the best way to get your kids to hate each other is to favor one of them over the others.  Hebrew history tells the story of Joseph, whose brothers were so enraged when their father loved him best that they plotted to murder him and sold him into slavery.  Similarly, affirmative action leads members of disadvantaged groups, in this case whites, to dislike or despise the favored groups, in this case blacks and Hispanics.

The Moynihan (D, NY) Solution

There is a simple solution to stopping these accusations of racism from harming our body politic.  It's been around for a long time, but when it was first proposed, the liberals hated it so greatly that they trashed the person who suggested it even though he had impeccable liberal credentials.  Let's take a peek at the record.

New York's Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a man of prolific ideas.  It was said that he had written more books than most senators had read, and there may be some truth to this.

Moynihan first came to wide notice in 1965 when he wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.  In this report, he noted that in the past, welfare rolls dropped when employment rose and went up when employment went down.  In 1963, Moynihan noticed that the number of black families on welfare rose when unemployment was declining.

He recommended vigorous government action to help blacks find work, but his report also touched on politically-incorrect facts about Negro families.  He pointed out that the rising number of out-of-wedlock births and of female-headed households would weaken the black community and make it harder for blacks to achieve economic success.

Despite his call for government action to help blacks, liberals trashed him for implying that black behavior had anything to do with black poverty.  Liberals preferred to blame white racism for all problems afflicting all blacks anywhere and vilified Moynihan for "blaming the victim."

Moynihan was making the age-old observation that sound families are the foundation of a sound society, but politicians and scholars who gain money and power by promoting black victimhood vehemently rejected the idea that blacks were at all responsible for their situation.  The lengths to which liberals were willing to go to criticize this rather obvious idea shows their utter lack of concern for genuine solutions and their preoccupation with gaining wealth and power by exacerbating problems.

It's hard to see how white racism can persuade black girls to let black men get them pregnant outside marriage, but that's the idea the mainstream media have promoted ever since.  Bill Cosby suffered similar criticism when he suggested that black fathers ought to be encouraged to care about their children.

Like Mr. Moynihan, Mr. Cosby was accused of blaming the victim, of imposing white values on blacks, and of having no respect for black culture.  The fact that inner-city black culture tends to lock black people into lives of poverty and crime seems to be beside the point.

Moynihan and Patriotic Pragmatism

Moynihan was an empiricist in that he believed that neither liberals nor conservatives had a monopoly on truth.  He was always concerned with the actual outcome of government policy regardless of theory.  Just setting up a government program didn't satisfy him, he wanted government programs to achieve their stated objectives.

He scandalized Democrats by going to work for the Nixon administration because he believed that it was better to have whatever influence he could have from inside the administration than be an impotent exile without.  While working in the Nixon White House, he wrote an internal memo to Mr. Nixon documenting a solution to the then-new poisoning of American politics by race-based falsehoods:

The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of "benign neglect."  The subject has been too much talked about.  The forum has been too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides.  We may need a period in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades.  The Administration can help bring this about by paving close attention to such progress--as we are doing--while seeking to avoid situations in which extremists of either race are given opportunities for martyrdom, heroics, histrionics, or whatever.  Greater attention to Indians, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans would be useful.  A tendency to ignore provocations from groups such as the Black Panthers might also be useful.  (The Panthers were apparently almost defunct until the Chicago police raided one of their headquarters and transformed them into culture heroes for the white and black middle class.)  You perhaps did not note on the society page of yesterday's Times that Mrs. Leonard Bernstein gave a cocktail party on Wednesday to raise money for the Panthers.  Mrs. W. Vincent Astor was among the guests.  Mrs. Peter Duchin, - the rich blonde wife of the orchestra leader, - was thrilled. "I've never met a Panther," she said. "This is a first for me."  [emphasis added]

Then as now, Washington DC is the land of leaks and the memo found its way to the mainstream press.  Even though Mr. Moynihan called for Negro progress to continue while the rhetoric faded, liberals pilloried him for seeming indifference to the sufferings inflicted on Negroes by white racists.

Their real problem wasn't that Mr. Moynihan wanted to hold Negroes back; his memo stated clearly that he wanted the administration to help blacks succeed economically.  The problem was that he wanted "hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers" to stop yelling about race.  Since inflaming racial passions was their entire stock in trade, being urged to calm down represented a mortal threat to their livelihoods which they criticized without mercy or any regard to what Mr. Moynihan had actually said.

We can now see that Mr. Moynihan was absolutely correct in saying that progress should continue while racial rhetoric fades.  High-powered verbiage poisons our political system and makes it impossible for either side to see whatever progress is being made.  In the same spirit as the prescient Mr. Moynihan, we proposed that the entire issue of reparations for slavery should be settled by offering each black person two beers on condition that they find an awkward white, share a beer, and have a conversation.

It Might Work Now

Although liberals, hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers are still as unwilling to consider toning down their rhetoric as when Mr. Moynihan wrote his "benign neglect" memo in 1970, times may have changed a bit.  Long ago, Solomon pointed out that he who digs a pit shall fall therein; liberals' bogus accusations of racism are beginning to be reflected back onto them and are being ignored otherwise.  When the New York Times falls off the political-correctness bandwagon enough to point out that minorities commit 98% of the gun assaults in New York City and that affirmative admissions to universities harms whites, it may be that this liberal scam is beginning to unravel.

Unfortunately for the liberals, the racism card may be all they have left.  The Obama deficits and stimulus have showed everyone that they're clueless about economics, Mr. Obama's hypocirsy in closing down a successful program to educate black children in Washington DC at the behest of the teacher's unions has shredded their credibility on education, Obamacare can't possibly work as currently structured, and both left and right have only the most tenuous of confidence that Obama can successfully pursue the war in Afghanistan.  What else is there for them?

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail - and when you run out of nails, you will find yourself at a desperate loss, which is exactly what the Democrats are staring at come this November.