Who has racial power in this country? If you guessed white people, you guessed wrong. Whites still have some political and economic power, but racially and morally they have completely disarmed themselves in the face of non-whites. They did this by elevating “racism” to the status witchcraft had in Old Salem, and making it America’s most unforgivable sin. Any whites guilty of it have no moral standing, so whites must constantly prove a negative: that they are not “racist.”
The result is a demanding — and demeaning — racial etiquette for whites. They must police their speech, behavior, and even thoughts lest they “give offense.” Most have become so practiced in the art of “sensitivity” that it has become second nature to them.
And yet, danger always lurks. The rules keep changing, and what was common practice yesterday could be “racism” tomorrow. Even the most exquisitely sensitive whites cannot always think through every possible negative stereotype a phrase or word may imply — and there is always someone ready to pounce. Even what is obviously harmless or just a slip of the tongue can be a serious infraction. And jokes? Not allowed in grim, multicultural America. Needless to say, blacks are not the only people whites have to worry about. All minorities are now equally well trained in how to keep whitey on the hop, and they are not required to play by anything like the same rules.
In 1930, the New York Times announced in an editorial that it would henceforth capitalize the word “Negro.” That was back when whites made accommodation to others out of courtesy. No longer. One of the hallmarks of the decline of whites — in numbers, influence, and especially, integrity — is that what they once did out of consideration they now do out of fear.
Pitfalls Everywhere
Whites must bow and scrape at the slightest misstep. In 2004, the Tennessee Department of Health ran a radio ad that was supposed to promote good diet by encouraging listeners to “try baking your chicken, eating a fresh tossed salad on the side, and scrumptious watermelon for dessert.” Merely to mention watermelon and chicken in the same sentence was a sin. The department apologized and pulled the ad.
When one computer controls the operations of another the two machines are called “master” and “slave.” A black employee in the Los Angeles Probation Department said these terms were offensive, so the department ordered all outside vendors to start using the terms “primary” and “secondary.”
For at least ten years, the Veterans Administration hospital in Indianapolis had a display of Second World War memorabilia, including the front page from the August 14, 1945 Indianapolis Times with a large headline, “Japs Surrender.” In 2009, the hospital took down the newspaper when an employee complained the word “Jap” might give offense.
In 2002, volunteers for the Fort McHenry Military Museum in San Pedro, California, decided to raise money through a December 7 showing of the film Tora Tora Tora about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There were to be ushers in World War II uniforms, Pearl Harbor survivors, and vintage cars at a gala evening at the 1930s-era Warner Grand Theater in Sand Pedro. The Department of Cultural Affairs of Los Angeles, which runs the theater, canceled the program, explaining that having an event on Pearl Harbor Day would insult Japanese-Americans.
It has now become nearly impossible for a theater to show D.W. Griffith’s silent classic, Birth of a Nation, because of its portrayal of blacks. In 2004, the Silent Movie Theatre in Los Angeles got so many threats it cancelled a showing. The owner had lined up a film scholar to explain the movie’s value despite its “racism,” but that wasn’t enough.
Joseph Smith had a corn field in East Lyme, Connecticut, and wanted to scare away geese that were eating his crop. He made scarecrows out of discarded environmental suits farmers use to spray crops. The suits were white and had hoods, and blacks complained that they looked like Ku Klux Klan robes, so Mr. Smith had to take down his scarecrows.
In Chandler, Arizona, when police described a 2007 rape suspect over the radio as “Hispanic,” Mayra Nieves, vice president of programming for KMYL Radio near Phoenix, complained that this was “racial profiling,” and said the police should describe suspects as “dark-skinned.”
These days, whites must never dress up in blackface unless they are Navy Seals on a night mission — and even then, they probably need permission from top brass. Four hockey players at Colorado College were suspended from the team for four weeks after blacking their faces at a dress-up golf outing. Participants were to come as television characters, and they had chosen the program, “Family Matters,” which is about blacks. Syracuse University suspended a student’s entire fraternity after he went to an off-campus costume party in blackface as Tiger Woods. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign launched an investigation of four white students who went to a Halloween party as characters from a movie about Jamaican bobsledders called Cool Running. In not one of these cases did the students mean to insult blacks. They modeled their costumes on people they liked or admired.
Whites need no prompting from non-whites; they bow and scrape all on their own.
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC, the Society of Professional Journalists issued guidelines on how not to offend Muslims. Writers were to avoid terms such as “Islamic terrorist” or “Muslim extremist,” and to “make an extra effort to include olive-complexioned and darker men and women, Sikhs, Muslims and devout religious people” in articles. They were also to follow the American Muslim Council’s rules in spelling such words as “Quran,” (not Koran) and “Makkah,” (not Mecca).
But whites can never know if they are doing the right thing. In 1953, scientists at the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) began giving female names to Atlantic hurricanes. Women’s groups said this was insulting, so in 1979 the WMO added men’s names. Since women were insulted by hurricanes with girls’ names, blacks might have been pleased that no hurricanes had names like Jamal, Keisha, or Latonya. Not so. Black Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) complained that the names were “lily white” and demanded black names.
Out the door
A single breach of diversity etiquette can ruin a career. Dan Issel used to make $2.5 million a year as the coach of the Denver Nuggets basketball team, but in 2001 he got into a shouting match with a fan after a 99-96 loss, and concluded the exchange with: “Go drink another beer you Mexican piece of s**t.” It was “Mexican,” not “s**t,” that got him in trouble, and Hispanics threatened to boycott games. Mr. Issel groveled — publicly and tearfully — but the team suspended him for four games and fined him $112,000. This did not satisfy Hispanics, so the Nuggets fired him.
David Lenihan used to be a talk show host on a Saint Louis radio station, but one word ended his career, too. He was telling his audience how excited he was at rumors that black Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice might become commissioner of the National Football League: “She’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that.” Everyone knew he meant to say coup rather than coon, but the station fired him on the spot.
Tom Burlington used to be a weekend anchor for Fox News. In 2007, he was discussing plans for the evening’s news broadcast, which was to include the NAACP youth council’s decision to “bury ‘the N-word’.” Mr. Burlington pronounced the word, saying he thought that in a discussion of that kind refusing to use it gave it even greater power. A black woman who was present was offended. He apologized but was given sensitivity training and later fired.
E.D. Hill was the anchor of the Fox News program, “America’s Pulse,” until she broke the rules. After Barack Obama secured the Democratic nomination for president he bumped fists with his wife. On the air, Miss Hill said “a fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently.” She apologized for using the word “terrorist” but lost her program anyway.
In 2008, Prof. Donald Hindley, who had taught at Brandeis University for 47 years, was censured for explaining to a class that Mexican immigrants are sometimes referred to pejoratively as “wetbacks.” Simply for uttering this word, he was sent to sensitivity training and had a monitor posted to keep an eye on him until the provost was satisfied Prof. Hindley was “able to conduct (himself) appropriately in the classroom.”
In 2005, Governor Ted Kulongoski of Oregon recommended state senator Neil Bryant for a post on the board of Oregon Health & Science University. As part of the vetting process, Mr. Bryant filled out a three-page form on “gender and ethnicity.” For a question about disabilities Mr. Bryant wrote “white/male” as a joke. This was such an outrage that despite an apology, Mr. Bryant was removed from consideration.
Kelly Tilghman was a reporter on the Golf Channel and friends with the black golfer Tiger Woods. During a broadcast, her on-air partner joked that Mr. Woods was so dominant that the only way to stop him would be for young players to “gang up” on him. “Lynch him in a back alley,” replied Miss Tilghman, with a laugh. Al Sharpton demanded that she be fired for what was “an insult to all blacks.” Mr. Woods issued a statement saying it was a “non-issue.” The Golf Channel nevertheless suspended her for two weeks without pay. When Golfweekmagazine wrote an article about Miss Tilghman and put a picture of a noose on the cover, editor Dave Seanor was fired immediately because the image was considered insensitive to blacks.
Just talking about nooses is dangerous. Travis Grigsby was a drummer in the marching band at Lee’s Summit High School in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. He was talking about the best knots for tying up drum equipment and a fellow drummer asked if he knew how to tie a hangman’s noose. Mr. Grigsby, an Eagle Scout, said he did. A black who overheard the conversation said he was offended, and this was enough for the school to suspend Mr. Grigsby from the band for two weeks.
When Des Moines Area Community College published its student calendar for 2008/2009 it contained a typo: “Black History Lunch and Learn” was “Linch and Learn.” The college immediately printed stickers to cover up the mistake, and no less a person than the college president, Rob Denson, had to apologize.
There are people watching over us all the time, protecting us from noxious stereotypes. Speedy Gonzales is a cartoon-character mouse who was a Warner Brothers favorite for nearly 50 years. He wore a sombrero, spoke with a heavy Mexican accent, and outwitted foes like Sylvester, “the Greengo Pussygato.” The 1955 animated short “Speedy Gonzales” even won an Academy Award. However, in 1999, when the Cartoon Network got exclusive control of Speedy, it permanently banned him from American television. That was “because of its ethnic stereotypes,” explained spokesman Laurie Goldberg, who conceded that the mouse was “hugely popular” on The Cartoon Network Latin America.
Beware of violations of racial etiquette even if you think you have been promised confidentiality. In 2001, officials at Montachusett Regional Vocational School in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, conducted a survey about race relations at the school. They told students the results would be confidential, and they got frank answers. Whites said minority students got special treatment and were starting fights. School administrators identified five white students who gave these answers and suspended them for three days for “behavior causing a dangerous condition” and making “racist comments.”
Putting whites on the defensive gives non-whites such enormous advantages that they are sometimes tempted to take things too far. For example, at a 2008 meeting of Dallas County, Texas, commissioners, Kenneth Mayfield, who is white, complained about the number of traffic tickets that got lost in the central collections office, comparing it to a black hole. “Excuse me!” said black commissioner John Wiley Price very loudly, and insisted that the office was a “white hole.” Another black, Thomas Jones, demanded an apology. There was no apology, but several days later Mr. Price explained there were other expressions whites must not use, such as “angel food cake” and “devil’s food cake.”
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City got into similar trouble when he said that heads of the transit union had “thuggishly turned their backs on New York City” by calling a strike. A black city council member and other black leaders complained that since the transit unions were majority non-white, the word “thuggish” was “racist.”
In 2003, Grace Fuller and Louise Sawyer, both black, were about to fly out of Las Vegas on Southwest Airlines, when a white flight attendant urged passengers to take their seats, saying, “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe; pick a seat, we gotta go.” The second line is usually “catch a tiger by the toe,” but Miss Fuller and Miss Sawyer said the rhyme was directed at them, since an older version is “catch a nigger by the toe.” The flight attendant, who was 22 at the time she recited the lines, said she had never heard the “nigger” version, and that she learned the rhyme from a co-worker who used it to encourage passengers to take seats. The U.S. District Court in Kansas City allowed a suit for damages against Southwest but a jury found the airline not guilty.
Southwest had the gumption to fight this absurd case rather than settle it, and a jury recognized a shakedown when it saw one, but that such a case could even go to court says a lot about the racial balance of power in America. You can always find liberals who agree with the famous British Macpherson Report of 1999 that anything anyone says is “racist” is “racist,” especially if a non-white says so.
This is why whites police their language so ruthlessly. One woman wrote about paying for food at a Wendy’s drive-through and grabbing madly at a dollar bill that a gust of wind blew out of her car. “Oh, boy; that was interesting” she said, when she managed to pin the bill to the side of the car. “I beat myself up as I drove away,” she added. Why? Because the person she handed the bill to was a young black man and she had used the word “boy” in his presence.
This is, of course, crazy, but whites impose rules on themselves because they never know when blacks, in particular, will take offense. Radio host Dennis Prager writes that he learned from a firm that specializes in analyzing how people react to radio talk shows that it uses no blacks in the listening panels in puts together for studies. The company discovered that almost no whites are willing to disagree with a black. As soon as a black voiced an opinion, whites stopped saying what they really thought. When Mr. Prager asked his radio audience about this, whites called in from around the country to say they were afraid to disagree with a black person for fear of being thought racist.
Some non-whites are never satisfied. In 2009, there were complaints from minority staff in the Delaware Department of Transportation about insensitive language, so the department head, Carolann Wicks, distributed a “Diversity Spotlight” newsletter describing behavior and language she considered unacceptable. Minorities were so offended that the newsletter spelled out the words whites were not supposed to use that the department had to recall every copy and destroy them.
A clever laboratory test has demonstrated the lengths to which whites go to avoid breaching racial etiquette — or even mentioning race at all. In experiments at Tufts University and Harvard Business School, a white subject was paired with a partner and each was given 30 photographs of faces that varied by race, sex, and background color. They were then supposed to identify one of the 30 faces by asking as few yes-or-no questions as possible. Asking about race was clearly a good way to narrow down the possibilities, but when whites were paired with a black partner, only 10 percent could bring themselves to mention race. If they had a white partner, 95 percent of whites adopted this obvious strategy. Samuel Sommers, an assistant professor at Tufts, explained that whites are “worried that they’ll look bad if they admit they notice it [race] in other people.”
Small children haven’t learned racial etiquette yet, so they mention race in the experiment, but whites start avoiding it by about age 10 or 11. Because they deny themselves an obvious way to identify the correct photograph, older children do worse on the test than younger children. “This result is fascinating because it shows that children as young as 10 feel the need to try to avoid appearing prejudiced, even if doing so leads them to perform poorly on a basic cognitive test,” said Kristin Pauker, a PhD candidate at Tufts who co-authored the study.
During Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva asked the white students in his class to raise their hands if they had a black friend on campus. Every one raised his hand. When Prof. Bonilla-Silva asked the blacks in the class if they had white friends on campus not one raised his hand. At the time, blacks were about 10 percent of the student body, so for every white to have one black friend, every black would have had to have an average of eight or nine white friends.
What’s going on here? Even if, statistically speaking, it was nearly impossible for all whites to have black friends, they were afraid someone would think they were racist if they couldn’t claim to have at least one. There is no pressure on blacks to claim they have white friends. In fact, many blacks pride themselves on keeping away from whites.
There is another kind of pressure blacks and other non-whites do not face. They can say pretty much anything without being called a “racist.” Claire Mack is a former mayor of San Mateo, California. In a 2006 newspaper interview, she complained that too many guests on television talk shows were “wrinkled-ass white men,” and wondered why there were not more blacks. No one ever asked her to apologize.
Daisy Lynum, a black commissioner of the city of Orlando, Florida, angered the city’s police when she complained that a “white boy” officer had pulled her son over for a traffic stop. When the police union demanded an apology, she refused, saying, “That is how I talk and I don’t plan to change.”
When a white man explained to Willie Brown, then mayor of San Francisco, that racial preferences for blacks could hurt whites, he replied, “I don’t care about your idiot kids.” Mr. Brown’s political career suffered no harm.
Charles Barron of the Brooklyn city council once explained at a rally for reparations for slavery, that he sometimes wants to go up to a white person, tell him, “You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing,” and then “slap him just for my mental health.”
During his 2002 reelection campaign, Sharpe James, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, referred to his light-skinned black opponent as “the faggot white boy.” A largely-black electorate returned him to office.
Comments like these would have ruined the careers of white politicians.
One of the clearest examples of blacks not having to face the same music as whites is from the autobiography of Nathan McCall, who worked as a reporter for the Washington Post. In Makes Me Wanna Holler, he wrote about an episode from his early years:
The fellas and I were hanging out on our corner one afternoon when the strangest thing happened. A white boy . . . came pedaling a bicycle casually through the neighborhood . . . Somebody spotted him and pointed him out to the rest of us. ‘Look! What’s that motherfucka doin’ ridin’ through here?! Is he crraaaazy?!’ . . . We caught him on Cavalier Boulevard and knocked him off the bike . . . Ignoring the passing cars, we stomped him and kicked him. My stick partners kicked him in the head and face and watched the blood gush from his mouth. I kicked him in the stomach and nuts, where I knew it would hurt. Every time I drove my foot into his balls, I felt better . . . one dude kept stomping, like he’d gone berserk . . . When he finished, he reached down and picked up the white dude’s bike, lifted it as high as he could above his head, and slammed it down on him hard . . . We walked away, laughing, boasting, competing for bragging rights about who’d done the most damage.
Mr. McCall expressed no regrets for this brutality, and this and subsequent books were so successful he had to leave the Post to meet the demand for his lectures.
Whites, on the other hand, can’t even name sports teams without checking with the diversity police, but the deck is stacked against them whichever way they turn. A team named the “Rebels” is unacceptable because it glorifies slave-owning Confederates but the name “Indians” is unacceptable because it insults Native Americans. Obviously, what is going on here has nothing to do with consistency, but with trying to find any possible way to thwart and hector whites.
It is obvious that the Army named an attack helicopter the Apache out of admiration for fighting skills of Indians. The people who named teams the Atlanta Braves or Washington Redskins clearly felt the same way. In any case, Rebels have been more or less wiped out, and activists are hard at work trying to exterminate the few Indians who survive. In 2009, a 17-year lawsuit to abolish the Redskins finally came to an end only because the US Supreme Court refused to hear it. In California, activists persuaded the legislature to forbid the use of any Indian-related team name by any public school, except for schools near “Indian-controlled land.” Indians on reservations are the only people who can use Indian names.
The Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, Triple-A baseball team, the IronPigs has a large, furry pig mascot. Two days after naming it “PorkChop,” the team had to change it because a Hispanic said it was insulting. Guillermo Lopez, vice president of the Latino Leadership Alliance, said that decades earlier he had been called “pork chop.” The team owners said they had never heard of the term being used that way — neither have I — but they renamed the pig “Ferrous.”
Houston wanted to name its soccer team the Houston 1836 after the year the city was founded, but Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia led Hispanics in a campaign against the name. She said it was no good because that was the year Sam Houston defeated Santa Ana’s army at San Jacinto, securing Texas independence. That should have made the name even better, but the team owner folded and changed the name to the Houston Dynamo.
Occasionally some misguided white person tries to stand up to the pressure, but he usually doesn’t last long. Americans have apology fits from time to time, and between 2005 and 2008, the legislatures of Alabama, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Virginia, and Florida all officially apologized because their states had once permitted slavery. One Virginia delegate, 79-year-old Frank Hargrove, was having none of it. There’s been no slavery for 140 years, he said, and “our black citizens should get over it.” Of course, the heavens fell on poor Mr. Hargrove, and he quickly wilted. He didn’t just change his mind and express the “profound contrition” required of the apology. He went even further and introduced a proposal to make Juneteenth — June 19, 1865, when the last slaves found out they were free — a Virginia state holiday.
The great irony in all this self-flagellation and groveling is that it is other whites who make it possible to keep whitey in a state of fear. There is no better way to advertise racial virtue than to kick a fellow white after he has been smacked down for “insensitivity.” If at least a few whites in the Virginia legislature had stood with Mr. Hargrove, he might have stuck to his original, sensible guns, but he was a target too tempting for other whites to resist. Spitting on him was an irresistible chance to prove that elusive negative: that they were not “racists.”
In his excellent book White Guilt, black author Shelby Steele argues convincingly that black power exists only as a byproduct of white guilt. Blacks have nothing like enough real power to push whites around if whites locked arms and refused to be pushed, but blacks have two enormous advantages. First, most whites are spineless and give in right away. Second, even if a few show fight, the spineless ones — who only under these circumstances cease to be inert — gang up on them. It is whites who have loaded the gun, handed it to blacks, and told them, “Here’s the trigger, fellas.” And, of course, every other race is now fully armed.
Signs of change?
Are things changing? There may be some signs that they are. Barack Obama’s endless spending and his ideas about medicine have stirred up vehement opposition, almost exclusively from whites. Lefties insist this is “racism.” Actress Janeane Garofalo — although why anyone pays attention to inconsequential twits like her is a mystery — said of the anti-tax Tea Parties, “This is about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”
Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell says she doesn’t trust people who say socialized medicine will encourage people to depend on the government rather than their own resources: “That language of personal responsibility is often a code language used against poor and minority communities.” As usual, leftists claim to be able to read the minds of people they have never met. They just know why people went to Tea Parties even if they never went to one themselves.
What is most striking about these accusations of “racism” is that they are a virtual admission that whites do have sound racial reasons for objecting to high taxes and new handouts. No one knows how many whites have conscious, racial motives for yelling about high taxes and “Obamacare.” The fact remains that they have every reason to oppose yet more government indebtedness their grandchildren will have to pay off. They have every reason to fight a giant medical bureaucracy that will put indigent, alcoholic, illegal immigrants on the same waiting list for brain surgery and dialysis as tax-paying US citizens. Whenever there is debate about government spending and lefties accuse their opponents of “racism,” you can be sure that the plan is to milk whitey.
So far, these accusations aren’t working. Whites who have no racial motive and just oppose creeping socialism are getting angry about the name-calling. Whites who do have a conscious racial motive already know it and certainly aren’t going to change their minds just because actresses and Princeton profs start screeching. Very few whites are actually going to admit to racial motives, but, for now, it doesn’t matter.
If Barack Obama fails to socialize medicine or manages only to tinker a bit with the system, he will be badly wounded. The great black hope is proving to be dangerously vulnerable, and no matter what happens, he will be badly battered even before he brings up the issue that really matters: amnesty for illegal immigrants.
That is when whites will show whether they have been completely denatured or whether they are capable of doing something in their own interests — and doing it in their own name. There will be a terrific fight over amnesty that will make the current debate about medicine look like a minuet. White people are slowly getting angry enough to say it out loud: that they refuse to sit quietly while their rulers turn the United States into a Third-World dung heap. This will be one of the all-time great battles over the future of the country, and there is an excellent chance we will win.