| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
13 Apr 2005 01:38:27 PM |
| Object: |
Interesting, detailed summary on Christian racism |
Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads
From National Review to the New York Times
Extra! March/April 2005
By Steve Rendall
Resurgences of biological determinism correlate with periods of political
retrenchment and destruction of social generosity.
----Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man.
''If the black man wins,'' warned a New York Times editorial on the eve of
the historic 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and ''Great White Hope'' Jim
Jeffries, ''thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will
misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere
physical equality with their white neighbors'' (New York Times,
7/3/1910—as cited on PBS’s Unforgivable Blackness, 1/17/05). In an earlier
editorial (11/1/1909), the editors worried over the fight while revealing
what passed for discretion at the Times of nearly a hundred years ago:
''[We] will wait in open anxiety at the news that he has licked the—well,
since it must be in print, let us say the Negro, even though it is not the
first word that comes to the tongue’s tip.''
Of course, great strides have been made by American media and society
since that editorial, and many others like it, were published. But
progress seems to come in fits and starts. It doesn’t help that
journalists often fail to recognize and challenge racism, even when—or
perhaps especially when—it involves their own institutions.
Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media
institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways
of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and
John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of
Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.
''Ghetto hellions''
Following the November elections, David Brooks used his column (12/7/04)
to celebrate something he called the ''natalist'' movement. Natalists,
said Brooks, defy Western trends toward declining birth rates by having
lots of children and leaving behind the ''disorder, vulgarity and
danger'' of cities to move to ''clean, orderly'' suburban and exurban
settings where they can ''protect their children from bad influences.''
According to Brooks, natalists are more churchgoing and conservative than
their less wholesome neighbors in more liberal urban areas, and are an
increasingly important political force.
Though the movement sounds a bit like the post-World War II demographic
trend dubbed ''white flight,'' Brooks makes no reference to ethnicity
until halfway through the column, when he cites Sailer on white fertility:
As Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative, George Bush
carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25
of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.
Brooks is well-known for lightly documented demographic analysis
(Philadelphia, 4/04), but he never explains why he believes white
fertility is more important than that of other groups.
Did Brooks understand his source’s views? A look at the American
Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he
cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In
it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are
trying to escape: ''illegal immigrants and other poor minorities,''
''ghetto hellions'' and ''public schools.'' Are these the things Brooks
meant when he alluded to ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' and ''bad
influences'' in his Times column?
As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals
Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal
columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia
Dare, the first English child born in the ''New World,'' Sailer (e.g.,
2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as
a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a
staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist
research (as well as of VDare.com).
On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it’s usually to make some
other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a
gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly
caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): ''An infectious disease itself
could cause homosexuality. It’s probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an
intestinal or respiratory germ.''
A New York Daily News column (12/13/04) rebuked Brooks for plugging
Sailer, suggesting that the Times columnist ''might want to do a
background check on the next 'expert' he quotes,'' pointing out that
'Sailer also writes for VDare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty
Law Center has labeled a 'hate group.''' According to the News, the Times
failed to respond to inquiries about the matter. No other mainstream
outlets seem to have commented on the affair.
Conservative "bona fides"
In addition to writing for VDare.com and American Conservative, Sailer has
contributed to the National Review and National Review Online. He also
maintains a private email discussion group called the ''Human Biodiversity
Group'' that includes many leading white supremacist intellectuals and
''scientific'' racists.
Sailer’s job as a national correspondent for United Press International
(UPI) may seem surprising to those unaware the old mainstream wire service
has drifted far rightward since its purchase by Sun Myung Moon’s
Unification Church in 2000.
A lucid writer with an accessible style, Sailer is a smooth propagandist
operating in a community of increasingly sophisticated nativists and
racists. Neither a researcher nor a scientist, Sailer’s value to the
movement is as a popularizer of its ideas and theories.
Weeks before the Brooks column, Times reporter John Tierney (10/24/04)
quoted Sailer, describing him as ''a conservative columnist at the Web
magazine VDare.com and a veteran student of presidential IQs.'' Tierney
cited Sailer’s claim that George W. Bush’s IQ was likely greater than John
Kerry’s, information Sailer extrapolated from the results of different
tests the two had taken—tests that were not intended to measure IQ.
Were Brooks and Tierney aware of Sailer’s racist work? Were they sucked in
by Sailer’s sophistication, his academic sounding arguments? Or was it his
bona fides with ''mainstream'' conservative outfits like the National
Review and American Conservative?
''Civilized standards''
American Conservative was co-founded by Pat Buchanan, Peter ''Taki''
Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell, who serves as editor. When McConnell
was a New York Post columnist in the mid-'90s he suggested a brand of
apartheid might be the solution to U.S. race problems (10/11/95):
I do believe that American race relations would not be the worse for
acknowledging that blacks and whites have between them the power to
develop alternatives to living together. Indeed, it seems to me
possible that the very act of considering seriously such alternatives
would, in and of itself, bring a rapid halt to some of the more
flamboyant rhetorical and behavioral excesses now flourishing in the
black community.
McConnell would later be named the Post’s editorial page editor, before
being fired in 1997 for writing a series of anti–Puerto Rican columns—but
only because they reportedly threatened Post owner Rupert Murdoch’s
business prospects (New York Daily News, 9/17/97). Sailer is just one of
the racist writers McConnell has published in American Conservative (see,
e.g., Robert Stacy McCain, 5/19/03; Sam Francis, 6/7/04).
The National Review’s support for racism traces back to its founding in
the mid-'50s. A 1957 editorial titled ''Why the South Must Prevail''
(8/24/57) asked ''whether the white community in the South is entitled to
take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and
culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically?'' Citing
the ''cultural superiority of white over Negro'' and ''civilized
standards'' National Review editors answered, ''Yes—the white community is
so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.''
Similarly, the magazine supported apartheid South Africa’s white minority
rule (4/23/60): ''The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in
South Africa.'' When Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced
to life in prison in South Africa, National Review editors mocked critics
of the verdicts (6/30/64): ''The South African courts have sentenced a
batch of admitted terrorists to life in the penitentiary, and you would
think the court had just finished barbecuing St. Joan, to hear the howls
from the liberal press.''
Over the years many leading eugenicists and ''scientific'' racists have
been warmly received by National Review. In a positive review of Race,
Evolution, and Behavior, a 1994 book by Philippe Rushton, the current
Pioneer Fund president, reviewer Mark Snyderman eagerly recounted the
book’s ''ambitious'' and ''fearless'' thesis (9/12/94): ''Orientals are
more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller
genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more
readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the
same relationship to blacks.'' (To be fair, this kooky book also got a
thumbs-up from New York Times science writer Malcolm Browne—10/16/94. See
Extra! Update, 12/94).
National Review tapped Rushton to write a review of a new edition of The
Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould’s critique of eugenics—resulting in a
predictable pan (9/15/97). And when Gould died in 2002, the magazine
called on Steve Sailer (5/22/02) to do some grave-spitting.
''War against the white race''
Until his death on February 15, the award-winning writer Sam Francis was
another member of this tightly knit circle of sophisticated racists.
Francis had come far since his 1995 firing by the Unification Church-owned
Washington Times for a speech he gave at the white supremacist American
Renaissance conference.* Francis (Washington Post, 9/24/95) had told the
gathering that a ''war against the white race'' was underway, and insisted
that fellow whites reassert
our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly
racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as
whites . . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe
and America could not have developed apart from the genetic
endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to
believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a
different people.
Francis was also a contributor to VDare.com, and since 1999 he had been
the editor of the Citizens Informer, the publication of the Council of
Conservative Citizens, the racist offspring of the old white citizens'
councils of the Jim Crow era.
Francis also wrote a twice-weekly column for the mainstream Creators
Syndicate. According to Creators, the column was distributed to 22 of its
newspaper clients. The column also ran on right-wing and racist websites
such as Townhall.com and Amren.com.
In one recent column (11/26/04), Francis attacked an ABC Monday Night
Football promo because it featured a sexually suggestive scene between a
black football player and a white TV actress. Francis wrote that the ad
was meant to ''hurl a pie in the face of morals and good taste, but also
of white racial and cultural identity,'' concluding:
Breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon
of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the
cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family, and,
ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself.
When the media watch group Media Matters for America (12/7/04) wrote to
Creators decrying the ''clear bigotry'' of the column, and asking why the
syndicate would circulate it, Creators editor Anthony Zurcher defended
publishing the column: ''Did I disagree with the column? Yes. Did I feel
it was so reprehensible that it shouldn’t have been sent out? No.'' With
that judgment, Creators asserted that white supremacism was just another
point of view in the marketplace of ideas.
Francis' death occasioned fond remembrances across the white racist
spectrum, from groups he contributed to like VDare.com and American
Renaissance, to neo-Nazi websites like Stormfront.org (''A Great Man Has
Fallen''--2/16/05) and NationalVanguard.org (''Pro-White Columnist Will Be
Missed by Many''--2/16/05). David Duke’s website (2/16/05) had a telling
farewell to what the one-time Klan leader called a ''true brother in the
Cause'':
When I entered some presidential primaries, he invited me to the
editorial board of the Washington Times, where I was asked to
explain and expound on my presidential platform. Sam was right
there in the lion’s pit—sometimes backing me up from some
scurrilous attacks before I had a chance to respond.
"Race-relations expert"
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Jared Taylor was talking about King on half
a dozen radio shows in cities spanning from Orlando, Florida to Columbus,
Ohio. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Dennis Roddy (1/23/05), who
carefully tracked Taylor’s media appearances that day, summed up Taylor’s
depiction of King as ''a philanderer, a plagiarist and a drinker who left
a legacy of division and resentment, and was unworthy of a national
holiday.'' According to Roddy, in one appearance, on Pittsburgh’s KDKA
radio station, Taylor was introduced repeatedly as a ''race-relations
expert'' by conservative host Fred Honsberger.
Roddy described calling Honsberger to ask him about Taylor:
What Taylor did not say, and what Honsberger didn’t seem to know
until I picked up the phone and called in myself, was that Jared
Taylor believes black people are genetically predisposed to lower IQs
than whites, are sexually promiscuous because of hyperactive sex
drives. Race-relations expert Jared Taylor keeps company with a
collection of racists, racial ''separatists'' and far-right
extremists.
In fact, Jared Taylor is one of the country’s leading white supremacists.
Yale-educated with a soft-spoken manner, Taylor may not fit the stereotype
of an active racist, but he has links to Ku Klux Klan and Council of
Conservative Citizen leaders. And as the president of the Virginia-based
New Century Foundation, he publishes the racist magazine American
Renaissance and organizes conferences featuring speakers such as Philippe
Rushton and Sam Francis. (It was at one of these conferences that Francis
gave his job-ending speech.) The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Mark Potok
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 1/23/05) describes Taylor as “the cultivated,
cosmopolitan face of white supremacy. He is the guy who is providing the
intellectual heft, in effect, to modern-day Klansmen.”
The past isn’t even past
Although sophisticated racists are thriving in conservative outlets and
are gaining a foothold in centrist, mainstream outlets, the subject of
racism is not one to which most newsrooms devote a great deal of
resources.
When Ken Burns' PBS documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall
of Jack Johnson (1/17/05) highlighted the poisonous racism that Johnson's
career had inspired on the part of editorialists a century ago, the Los
Angeles Times published a belated editorial mea culpa (1/14/05) titled
''Shame on Us.'' In it, the editors republished some of the paper’s
ugliest commentary of the time, e.g., an editorial (4/6/1910) headlined
''A Word to the Black Man'' that cautioned, ''Do not point your nose too
high.''
In concluding, the modern-day L.A. Times editors joined a call for a
posthumous pardon for Johnson, who’d been the victim of a phony federal
morals conviction, and stated: ''Count the members of this editorial board
among those who believe that the best way to surmount the past is to
confront it.''
That’s good advice. Would it be too much to ask that they confront the
present too?
* Francis’ firing shouldn’t give people the wrong idea about the
Washington Times. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report
(8/14/03) noted, the Times continues to employ assistant managing editor
Robert Stacy McCain; McCain, a member of the white-supremacist League of
the South, is noted for posting Internet comments like, “The media now
force interracial images into the public mind and a number of perfectly
rational people react to these images with an altogether natural
revulsion” (New York Press, 12/11/02). Managing editor Francis Booth
Coombs, meanwhile, is married to Marian Kester Coombs, a contributor to
racist publications (as well as to the Times) who has urged white men to
marry “racially conscious” white women (Intelligence Report, 2/9/05).
---
http://www.ElmerFudd.US/ http://www.notserver.com/
Scientology crooks: http://sf.irk.ru/www/ot3/otiii-gif.html
Scientology spin-off scam: http://www.avatarscam.com
http://PerkinsTragedy.org http://www.rightard.org/
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