The Emmett Till smear

In response to my much-noted American Spectator column of yesterday, some obnoxious troll commenter asserted that I had once wrote a column "praising the lynching of Emmet Till." For the record, I never wrote any such column.

At the time that this libelous accusation first emerged on the Internet, I was employed as an assistant national editor at The Washington Times. My employers ordered me not to respond to this libel, and I was compelled to remain silent under penalty of being fired if I dared defend my good name. Duty and loyalty required me to obey, but when I resigned from The Washington Times in January 2008, no one even bothered to say "don't let the door hit you on the way out."

C'est la vie! C'est l'amour! C'est la guerre!

Having acquired a bad reputation in such a manner, I am loath to deny anything unnecessarily. Being notorious is not the same as being famous, but it's better than being anonymous. So if it helps my career to be thought a vile "white supremacist" hatemonger (like the notorious Walter Williams), then I'll laugh all the way to the bank.

I write for money, and if someone wants to pay me enough to explain how a fundamentally unserious person, a "tedious nothing" like myself, could ever acquire such a monstrous notoriety, please make an offer. Don't lowball me, because it's a very long story and the value of the continued mystery is not neglible.

Let the mystified think on this: Saturday evening, I was introduced to the old college boyfriend of a beauty whom I'd introduced to her most recent boyfriend. The college beau's eyes were burning with rage, his upper lip glistened with perspiration, and when I shook his hand, it was cold, damp and unsteady. With jocular courtesy and good cheer I greeted as an old friend this fellow whom I'd never met before and who, for all I knew, was even then contemplating whether to pull out a .32 semi-auto and blast me into oblivion.

And he never saw me flinch, not once.

Perpetual victimhood, permanent grievance

Observing Black History Month with my latest column at Pajamas Media:

With so many problems afflicting America today, especially with the economy in crisis, what purpose was served by [Attorney General Eric] Holder's remarks? Trillions of dollars in asset value were wiped out by the collapse of the housing "bubble" and the ripple effects of that collapse have shaken financial institutions worldwide to their very foundations. It hardly seems a convenient moment for an angry racial harangue from the nation's chief law enforcement official.
Particularly odd was that Holder chose to deliver his lecture in the middle of Black History Month, when America's school children are annually immersed in the subject of race. Originally conceived by pioneering scholar Carter G. Woodson as a means of inspiring black youth by celebrating the accomplishments of overlooked achievers, in recent decades Black History Month has been hijacked by those who view the story of African-Americans not as one of hard-earned progress, but of perpetual victimhood and permanent grievance.
Most Americans over age 30 have little idea how the teaching of history has been perverted by the damaging attitudes Shelby Steele examined in his 2007 bestseller, White Guilt. And because history has been hijacked by grievance mongers and guilt-trippers, most Americans under age 30 have absolutely no idea of what a triumphant tale our nation has to tell . . .

You should read the whole thing. And here's a half-hour documentary video (a rough-cut of a new production by Nina May scheduled for release next month) that defies Holder's "nation of cowards" slur:

New video: WHO SHOULD PAY?

Based on the documentary Emancipation, Revelation, Revolution, this 30-minute film will be released this spring. (Excuse the formatting issue: The original is in HD letterbox. This is a roughcut edit.)

Honkies are too uptight

That seems to be the basic point of a Tufts University research project about how "self-control" -- self-censorship might be a better phrase -- isn't the answer to better race relations. (Via Kathy Shaidle who, of course, is completely out of control. And yes, I do mean that as a compliment.)

Personally, I feel that there are inherent limitations to what "experts" can tell us about race, just as there are limits to what "experts" can tell us about sex. Common sense and careful observation will teach you just as much in the long run.

Richard Spencer, who witnessed the lunacy of the Duke lacrosse "rape" fiasco as a Duke student, has some wry observations.

Justice by percentage

Ta-Nehisi Coates gets interviewed on NPR and James Poulos reflects:

Ta-Nehisi was challenged to affirm that a Senate which lacked even one black Senator, in this day and age, was by definition an unjust and/or unacceptable Senate. . . . "Okay," I told the radio evenly, "imagine I grant that a Senate without any black and/or African(-)American Senators is unjust and/or unacceptable. Why doesn’t the minimum threshhold then become two such Senators? Or three? Or…?"

Or how about 12? If 12% of the U.S. population is black, and the Senate is a representative institution, then why aren't blacks equally represented? And why aren't there 51 women senators? Why don't we have a Senate that "looks like America"?

We are once again back to the liberal fetish of equality, rooted in the hidden premise that equality and justice are the same thing, the obverse of which is that wherever one finds inequality, one has also found injustice. And James discovers CNN giving voice to Latinos who assert that they are underrepresented in the Obama Cabinet.

The unexamined "truth" that equality and justice are synonymous is pernicious enough when it involves ethnic mau-mauing over political spoils. Egalitarianism is actually more dangerous when applied to economics, as Ronald Reagan once wryly observed:

We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion that the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one.

And it is this same egalitarian fallacy, I have argued, that motivates both feminism and the gay-rights movement. Mere liberty -- the freedom to live their lives with a minimum of government interference -- will not do. Rather, they demand that the coercive power of government be applied to rearrange society for their benefit.

Believe me, sir, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levelers, therefore, only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground.

The egalitarian fallacy rears its ugly head not merely in complaints of underrepresentation, but in overrepresentation, as in the ADL's fearfulness that some people suspect Jews of controlling Hollywood. Well, they do -- so what? And, to bring the subject back around to the Senate, while Jews are less than 2% of the U.S. population, they are 14% of the Senate. My own ethnic group, redneckus Americanus, might be said to be overrepresented among NASCAR drivers and country music stars. Is this evidence of a fiendish hillbilly conspiracy?

When children are thwarted, they are wont to complain, "That's not fair!" And as my parents inevitably replied, "Whoever told you life was supposede to be fair?" There is something puerile in the complaint that every inequality is unfair. Political maturity -- statesmanship -- requires a certain indifference to such complaints, and if Obama can resist pressure to apportion his appointments by quota, he will deserve praise for his statesmanship.

'With the best intentions'

"Even within families with the best intentions, race can intrude in ugly ways. We can't escape ... this historical legacy that this country's created."
-- Barack Obama, 1995

There's probably some kind of profound essay I should write about this, but between the "dog whistle" smears and everything else, I just don't feel like it right now.

What Obama is dealing with here, in his ultra-sincere bien pensant manner, is the nature of identity in a multiethnic society. At some level, we cannot escape who we are -- the subtitle of his book, after all, is "A Story of Race and Inheritance."

Non-Obamamaniacs, I think, will focus on his contextualization of his own identity within "historical legacy that this country's created." What, exactly, does he mean by this? Any conservative, hearing a liberal speak that phrase in such a context -- essentially smearing his own grandmother as a bigot -- automatically senses a classic anti-American sentiment, the idea that racism is something invented by America, a sin of which America is uniquely guilty.

That Obama seemed so drawn toward his Kenyan father, who had abandoned him, and so indifferent to the American family who raised him, is the kind of puzzle that would tempt an armchair psychologist. But as I said, I'm weary of the whole subject, and merely note a few points on the graph, perhaps for future reference.

Please feel free to comment. By the way, there are two other segments of that 1995 interview online: Part 2 and Part 3.

Mississippification, Obverse Dept.

"[P]eople who live in states with few blacks seem more open to the idea of a president who is not white."
-- Tim Egan, New York Times

This is the flip side of Mississippification and, furthermore, adds important evidence of The Urkel Effect, a related phenomenon I'm too tired to explain in depth right now.

Our first semi-honky president?

Joe Curl attempts to decipher the nomenclature of Barack Obama's ancestry:

Debra Dickerson, a contributing writer and blogger for the liberal Mother Jones magazine, said at the Salon.com Web site in January that Mr. Obama is not even technically black, defining the term "in our political and social reality" as applying only to "those descended from West African slaves."

This kind of stuff seems a bit nitpicky to me. It's much easier to apply what I call "the Sand Mountain test."

Sand Mountain is a region of northeast Alabama that has a legendary reputation for racism. So, whenever somebody asks if Obama is "black enough," just ask yourself, "Would he be called the n-word on Sand Mountain?"

I don't think a sociological research grant will be necessary to determine the answer.

Race, Rush, Hillary & Hugh

Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias and Maureen Dowd all depict the Democratic primary battle between Hillary and Obama in terms of race and gender.

Yglesias takes the cake with his assertion that Hillary won because of "the crucial racist vote." This is based wholly on an MSNBC exit poll that showed 20 percent of Ohio Democratic primary voters Tuesday said the race of the candidate was important, and of those, Clinton topped Obama by a 14-point margin, 57-43.

Question: Has Matthew Yglesias ever studied statistics? Because if my math is correct, 14 percent of 20 percent is 2.8 percent, which is surely less than the margin of error in that exit poll.

Given the inherent sampling problems, exit polls are very hard to read, and you certainly can't put a lot of faith in a 14-point gap on the 35th question in a survey. If you get a 2-to-1 margin on a question like that, OK, then maybe it's fair to declare that a "crucial" factor. But 14 percent? No way.

Besides which, you can't say those are "racist" voters, because there's no demographic breakdown of the respondents on that question. It's well known that many black Democrats are supporting Hillary because they don't think America will elect a black candidate. So it may well have been black voters (and Hillary got 12% of the black vote in Ohio, according to that poll) who gave Hillary her edge on that question. Either way, it's still just an exit poll, and as such, it's too flimsy evidence to justify hurling the word "racist" around (even if it's amusing to see Democrats called "racist" for supporting the wife of Our First Black President).

Meanwhile, Hugh Hewitt appears shocked at the thought that Rush Limbaugh's radio campaign to encourage Republicans to vote for Hillary in the Democratic primaries may have actually saved her hopes for the nomination.

The difference between Hugh and Rush, I think, boils down to this: Hewitt is a linear thinker, whose natural tendency is to plot the most direct and efficient path from Point A to Point B. Limbaugh, on the other hand, is an improvisational thinker, always considering contingencies and alternatives, trying to keep his options open as he looks forward to a future of unanticipated outcomes.

If you're a football fan, you could compare Hewitt to a classic dropback quarterback (Johnny Unitas) who stays in the pocket, counts on his blockers to contain the pressure and looks for the assigned receiver, whereas Limbaugh is like Fran Tarkenton or Ken Stabler, calling audibles, scrambling out toward the sidelines, changing the play even after the ball is snapped.

If you're a real football fan, you know that most Super Bowls are won by classic-type quarterbacks, who also account for most quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame. But there are exceptions to the rule, and in 1977 Stabler -- the left-handed wild man from Foley, Alabama, they called the "Snake" -- led the Oakland Raiders to victory in Super Bowl XI over Fran Tarkenton's Minnesota Vikings. (Tarkenton's in the NFL Hall of Fame; why Stabler has been snubbed three times by Canton is puzzling.)

So while Limbaugh's (tactical) endorsement of Hillary may seem mysterious to some people -- including a Johnny U. kind of guy like Hugh Hewitt -- I remain confident in Rush. His latest move make look as crazy as Stabler or Tarkenton scrambling on a broken play, but Limbaugh knows exactly what he's doing.