Left-Wing Racism and the Election of 2012

A Whig Manifesto ^ | Nov. 21, 2011 | Chuck Morse

[Chuckmorse]

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton floated the rumor that Barack Obama, was not born in the United States and was therefore not c0nstitutionally qualified to serve as president. Almost three years later, April 2011, President Obama responded by authorizing the release of a long form birth certificate which he claimed proved his American birth. Pressure from Republican presidential aspirant Donald Trump had forced his hand as did Where’s the Birth Certificate by Dr. Jerome Corsi, published by WND Books, which reached number one on the Amazon Bestseller List. Dr. Corsi damaged the presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry in 2004 with a book about the swift boat veterans.

Donald Trump responded to the birth certificate release by Obama with a request for additional information such as the president’s college records. Such requests of public officials and candidates are routine except it seems when they are made of Obama who acknowledged, in a humorous context, that he is given a pass by the media. As a candidate and to a certain degree as president, Barack Obama receives scant scrutiny and lots of adulation. Indeed, a protective bubble seems to hover around Obama and this has been the case since he started running for president a month or so after winning his Senate seat in a special election in Illinois.

After Obama finally released the birth certificate, and after years of marginalizing and smearing those who had simply asked him to do so, Trump was publically denounced as a racist. While real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump could certainly be criticized for a lot of things, racism was obviously not one of them. To suggest that Donald Trump did not like African-Americans or to suggest that he would seek to prevent a person from any form of advancement because of their race was ridiculous. Yet this very serious and ugly charge was lodged against him on national TV by CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer who stated that Trump had displayed an “ugly strain of racism” by his requesting Obama’s college records. Schieffer’s attack was echoed by late night TV talk show host David Letterman. These charges were based upon the assumption that Trump had claimed that Obama had benefited from affirmative action when he was admitted to Harvard and Columbia Universities. Such charges, it may be recalled, were made against now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas by many liberals during Thomas’ confirmation hearings.

Affirmative action, which is a legally protected program that has garnered support from Americans over the years as a means to redress centuries of state sanctioned racism, had little if anything to do with the request that Obama release his records. Really no one cares how Obama got into college or about his report card as Barack Obama is obviously and without question a highly intelligent and accomplished man. The salient question regarding Obama’s records is why he engaged in such a high degree of secrecy around this and other issues. The release of Obama’s college records would offer possible insights into his political thinking by studying his writing and his activities in college. It is reasonable, after all, for the public to know such things about the man who holds the most important position in America.

Yet President Obama has gone to great lengths to conceal many aspects of his professional as well as his private life. While it is understandable for any politician to seek to maintain the maximum level of control over their public image, Obama has taken secrecy to an unprecedented level. This penchant for secrecy on his part is reflected in his administration which has classified more information than any in history. Such secrecy breeds public distrust. The American people have a right to know about the President and his actions as well as the activities of the administration and the media has a professional obligation to find out as much as possible. This obligation should be intensified when the office holder is deliberately evasive and the administration is particularly censorious.

When I asked Dr. Patrick O’Heffernan, my liberal co-host on our daily radio program “The Fairness Doctrine – left, right and uncensored,” if he believed that Donald Trump was a racist, as stated by Schieffer and Letterman, he demurred by stating that while he did not think Trump himself was a racist he believed that Trump was sending out coded messages, what he referred to as “dog-whistles” to racists. He further claimed that Joseph Farah, the CEO of World Net Daily, who he also stated was not a racist, was also sending out these same “dog-whistles” to racists through the World Net Daily superstore page. My good friend Patrick O’Heffernan could not furnish any examples of these so-called dog whistles yet he attempted anyway to impugn the characters of both Donald Trump and Joseph Farah, who is the publisher of my book “The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism.”

I took the bait by offering to prove to Patrick that World Net Daily and conservatives were not racists. After wrangling over the fact that Patrick had called conservatives racists by smearing World Net Daily, a publication with a largely conservative following, I proceeded to point out that World Net Daily had published a long series of columns over many years by former UN Ambassador Dr. Alan Keyes. I pointed out to Patrick that Dr. Keyes, who is African-American, drew his support for his presidential campaigns from the same conservatives that Patrick was attempting to smear as racists.

If conservatives did not want Barack Obama to be president because of his race, I asked, than why did these same conservatives support the presidential campaigns of Alan Keyes? World Net Daily has recently written about and has carried links to articles about congressman and presidential aspirant Allan West, an African-American conservative, and features columns and has published a book by Erik Rush, also an African-American conservative and the author of “Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal, America’s Racial Obsession.”

Does racism exist in America? Of course it does. Objectivist author Ayn Rand once referred to racism as “barnyard socialism.” There certainly is a tendency, perhaps hard wired into the human psyche, in which people at times and in certain settings view themselves and others in a collective context based upon perceived racial differences however the term is defined. Obviously racism is not unique to America as race awareness appears to be part of the human condition to varying degrees. America, unlike societies such as Sweden or Japan which have been historically dominated by one race, is a multi-racial society that has been therefore prone to varying degrees of racial tension. In addition, America remains tarnished by the great sin of our history, the fact that African-Americans are mostly descended from an ancestry that arrived on our shores as chattel slaves.

It is true that America has been dominated by the white race and it is a fact of history that America embraced white supremacy as an acceptable creed from colonial times until recent decades. This is an ugly part of American history and culture that cannot be denied. To a certain degree white people still hold a privileged position in America and this remains a continuing cause of tension and inequality with regard to opportunity. This book examines the recent history of racism, the use of racism for political purposes, left-wing racism in particular, and whether racism is specifically a part of the conservative movement.

Race, ethnicity, language, religion, regionalism, and political economic and societal differences between individuals and groups of individuals exist and will always exist. Jewish and Islamic texts maintain that a biblical era leader named Nimrod attempted to build a tower into the heavens, known as the Tower of Babel, in order to reach God and to dominate the world with one language and one government. The God of the Bible responded to this utopian scheme by knocking down the tower and by scattering humanity across the planet and confounding man with different languages.

A theme that is fundamental to the Bible, and one that is reflected in secular human understanding, is the concept of separation. Man is separate from God, time is separated by days, weeks, months, years centuries etc. Individuals, man and women, families, tribes, and nations are separated from each other. In the beginning, God separated the heavens from the earth. Judaism developed the concept of separation to a high art form as the Sabbath is separate from all other days, food is separated between kosher and non-kosher, the sacred is separated from the profane, certain sexual relations are allowed and others forbidden as, for example, adulterous relations are forbidden.

Thus for reasons that are clearly intrinsic to our nature as human beings, we tend to congregate with each other based upon complex sets of factors and we tend to naturally separate ourselves from others in the process. This basic part of our nature will never change nor should it ever change. The core mission of the negative side of the late 18th and 19th Century European social enlightenment movement was to change this aspect of human nature, to create a worldwide human collective in which mankind would forget his differences with each other and would form a new and more socially evolved consciousness. Political philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx and many others claimed that this idea was virtuous.

The attempt to eradicate human difference, and to thus create a collectivist utopian society, was made in the 20th Century and could be exemplified by the two great European socialist experiments, those carried out respectively in Bolshevik Russia and in Nazi Germany. The results of those two attempts to ultimately eradicate racial, ethnic, economic, and religious differences between human beings are recorded in the most blood stained pages of human history as is understood by reasonable people. The Nazis believed in a super race that would ultimately dominate the planet with all other races, viewed as less evolved sub-humans, living in a condition of subservience. The communists sought to end all races by ending individual identity and all the institutions that foster individual consciousness such as property, family, religion, and ultimately government itself. While the negative side of racial and other differences must be addressed by the just and moral society, the idea of eradicating these differences, the idea of collectivism, must be seen for what it is, immoral and unnatural, and must be therefore completely and utterly rejected.

Chauncey DeVega, a columnist for the left-wing online publication AlterNet, wrote an article on April 29, 2011 entitled 10 Ways That the Birthers Are an Object Lesson in White Privilege. This article, written in response to President Obama’s release of his birth certificate, serves as a rich illustration of a left-wing view of race in America, and how race is used as a political football by the left. Significant portions of the article are reprinted here with commentary. DeVega begins with the highly sarcastic assertion that: In an era of racism without racists, the Tea Party GOP Birther brigands provide one more lesson in the permanence of the social evil known as White privilege. The author defines our era as one of racism without racists and at first glance this appears to be a sarcastic rejoinder to the assertion by conservatives that they are not racists. Yet this comment raises the question of whether America is a society of racism without racists. Going one step further, this comment begs the question regarding how racism is defined in America today. Who is a racist? What did pressure for Obama to release his birth certificate and other classified information have to do with White privilege?

Of course there are racists in America today as the term has been classically defined. There are still KKK men who parade around in white sheets and who burn crosses on lawns. There still are fringe organizations, neo-Nazi groups come to mind, which adhere to white supremacy which was mainstream in America before World War II and even into the mid 1960’s in some quarters. The image of George Wallace, the Democratic Governor of Alabama, blocking the school door to stop an African-American child from attending school comes to mind as does the Birmingham Alabama police chief Bull Connor turning water hoses on civil rights protesters. In 1968, the Republican civil rights leader, the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, was brutally murdered, shot down in the prime of his life and at the peak of his creativity, by a white supremacist. Lynching was a not an infrequent practice in America until the 1950’s.

While noting the extraordinary accomplishment brought forth by the election of an African-American President, an aspect of President Obama’s election that was universally celebrated by the vast majority of Americans from all sides of the political spectrum, DeVega proceeds to paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa with the following observation: During this same moment America witnessed the rise of Sarah Palin to fame and glory, a woman who rides White populism and racial resentment in the same way that a witch rides a broom. Much could be written in criticism about former Alaska Governor and Republican Presidential nominee Sarah Palin but the charge that she is promoting racial resentment, for that matter that populism is particularly a white phenomenon, is wrong.

Sarah Palin is an easy target for scorn from the left and the ugly attack against her has more than a whiff of sexism. Palin didn’t attend an Ivy League College and she doesn’t talk like, walk like, or look like your typical liberal eastern seaboard liberal establishment type. President Obama, on the other hand, has the Ivy League College cred, the language, the look, and the walk of the liberal establishment type down to a tee. Like many conservatives before her, Palin is marginalized by the left as “stupid” and therefore as a person who is not to be listened to or taken seriously.

With the type of scorn that has been heaped upon her, it is easy for the left to take the next step and label her as a racist and DeVega performs this hit is classic left-wing style with snide and indirect references to her engaging in racial resentment while calling her a witch on a broomstick to boot. The very idea of actually taking what Palin has to say seriously is not considered as she is instead denounced in classic left-wing agitprop fashion. Palin, who in her at times awkward way is a plain spoken truth teller, poses as a threat to the edifice of left-wing ideology. The populism that she at times espouses is universal to all Americans and that is socially conservative values, limited and honest government, low taxes, and national sovereignty. There is nothing white about these ideas unless DeVega and the left entertains the racist idea that African-Americans are not capable of making up their own political and philosophical minds. In a sense, Palin, by posing as a threat to the left, threatens the attempt by the left to influence the thinking of African-Americans.

DeVega goes on to write that as a second addition to the Tea Party GOP's Rogues Gallery there is a carnival barker named Donald Trump, a man who once lurked stage left but is now the GOP front runner as he perfectly embodies PT Barnum's famous observation that "there is a sucker born every minute," while shilling for the worst and most ugly nativist and xenophobic impulses of the White Conservative Soul. While mean, this actually starts out as a fairly hilarious send-up of Donald Trump until you get to the punch line at the end of the sentence. Why does DeVega call Trump as nativist and a xenophobe? This is because Trump has been vociferously attacking the concept of free trade while advocating, in his many public appearances, an economic policy that puts America first. Specifically, Trump as called for tariffs on foreign imports as a means to protect American industry and American jobs, particularly blue collar jobs.

Trump is the only presidential candidate to raise this issue and he is motivated by concern for the American economy. Trump, a businessman, has pointed out that he would rather do business, place orders for products for his hotels and properties for example, that manufacture their products inside the United States. Whether one agrees with Trump’s approach, his intention is to protect American manufacturing which means protecting American employment. American workers who would be employed by such protected American companies would include African-American and other minority workers. What DeVega calls nativism is actually an advocacy of an American economic system that puts American workers, all American workers first. Perhaps DeVega and others who would make this scurrilous charge might be asked what they think would serve as an alternative to Trumps idea of saving American industry and jobs. Or maybe they just don’t care about the interests of working people.

DeVega continues: Imagine if Sarah Palin, a person who wallows in mediocrity and wears failure as a virtue, were any race other than White. Would a black (or Latino or Asian or Hispanic) woman with Palin's credentials have gotten a tenth as far? Treading very carefully here, it might be suggested that Sarah Palin got where she today is because she was picked out of relative obscurity as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee in 2008 by the Republican nominee Sen. John McCain at least partially because she was a women. Indeed the mainstream liberal media, if the Boston Globe is any representative of the same, had been focusing on the race, gender, and ethnic backgrounds of the perspective presidential contenders of both parties and of congressional candidates for well over a year leading up to the general election. Virtually every article in the Boston Globe covering the campaign would mention the race, gender and ethnicity of the candidate, why this was important, and what this would potentially mean if the named candidate were elected.

Indeed, might I suggest, the liberal media, and liberals in general, were obsessed with these factors. The women Hillary Clinton versus the African-American Barack Obama, versus the Hispanic Bill Richardson and what it all meant for the nation. Much more time was spent on this than on issues that might actually affect the future. Hillary Clinton specifically was touted as a woman first and foremost and that it was important to elect a woman as president because she was a women. Perhaps, just maybe, John McCain made note of the enormous spade-work done by the liberal media to promote a woman as a presidential candidate when he chose a woman, Sarah Palin, to be his running mate.

Conversely, and in direct response to the question posed by Chauncey DeVega in her article, I would respectfully ask the reader to imagine if an African-American, or a Latino, or an Asian, or a Hispanic, or for that matter if a liberal white man, assuming for the sake of the discussion that all of the aforementioned were liberal and not conservative, were referred to in such an insulting manner, as a person who wallows in mediocrity and wears failure as a virtue. Imagine indeed.

DeVega proceeds to entertain another scenario: If the Tea Party and their supporters were a group of black or brown folk, who showed up with guns at events attended by the President, threatening nullification and secession, and engaging in treasonous talk, how many seconds would pass before they were locked up and taken out by the F.B.I. as threats to the security of the State? This is, of course, a vicious lie and a piece of propaganda. Indeed, left-wing rallies were organized in American cities by the radical left-wing group International ACTION in the wake of the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. These rallies were, by any objective standard, seditious and treasonous in their tone. The rallies also contained well documented degrees of anti-Semitism. While there were no doubt a couple of bad apples at the Tea Party rallies, possibly agents provocateurs, the attendees represented a cross section of Americans concerned about the future of the country.

The Tea Party movement is a genuinely organic movement that started in the final years of the Bush Administration and grew during President Obama’s tenure. The movement started out on opposition to the big financial bailouts conducted in the final months of the Bush Administration and the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which precipitated the mortgage meltdown and the loss of billions of dollars in equity and credit. President Obama, while promising change as a candidate which garnered him a share of the moderate and conservative vote, instead continued the Bush economic policies by bailing out AIG and General Motors and by expanding the national debt with a stimulus package that favored government employees. The concerns of the Tea Party movement were and are shared by Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. The majority of Tea Party supporters are working class people concerned for their jobs.

Scholars and activists have described Whiteness as a type of property, unearned privilege, normality, and invisibility. Donald Trump and the Birthers exhibit a surplus of all of these traits...and more. There is undeniable truth in this statement. Indeed, it is easier to get along in this country by passing as White, this cannot be denied. Whiteness does, indeed offer the person passing as white a level of unearned privilege, normality and invisibility. Most Americans sincerely hope that our society evolves out of this condition as evidenced by the incredible successes that African-Americans have achieved in American history in spite of racism, achievements that have greatly accelerated in the last half century. Today African-Americans occupy positions of power and success in every field and all indications point to this as a factor of American life that is universally celebrated. Indeed the election of Barack Obama represents a milestone in this regard for most Americans. Yet America is, essentially, a society that is based, even within the context of racial struggles, on the achievement and rights of the individual. As such, Americans tend to hold themselves, their fellow citizens, and particularly their leaders, to a very high standard. While President Obama has achieved that standard at least as well as any American president, nevertheless he ought to expect to be held to the same tough scrutiny as most other American leaders have been held to. The notion that such a vigorous test for President Obama is racist should be rejected because it is not true. President Obama himself seems to understand this yet many of his left-wing followers, who view reality through the prism of collective identity such as race, would rather focus on a type of societal divisiveness that would tear at the fabric of our American unity to the degree that we share common interests. Their agenda, when placed in the context of socialist ideology, is entirely self-serving. The Chauncey DeVega column concludes with the following ten points, re-published here with commentary. 1. Just as Pat Buchanan did with Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the Birthers have sullied President Obama as being an unqualified,” affirmative action”benificiary. It is impolite and impolitic to raise the question of whether Affirmative Action might have played a role in the career advancement of, in this case, an appointee to the Supreme Court and a President of the United States. Nevertheless affirmative action has been and remains a public policy that has largely been supported by liberals. Indeed Justice Sonia Sotomayor herself, as a judge ruling on the case of Ricci v. DeStefano, a case brought by white applicants who were denied jobs with the New Haven Connecticut Fire Department, ruled that even though the applicants had scored higher on exams they would be passed over in favor of minority applicants who had scored lower. Affirmative Action addresses one evil, an unjust history of systemic racial discrimination, with another evil, reverse racial discrimination. There is justification for affirmative action as there has been state sponsored racial discrimination going back centuries and therefore it could be argued that the state ought to play a role in “leveling the playing field” so to speak. It is, however, always unjust and unfair for any person to be denied an opportunity based upon their race whether the person is white or a minority. It is true that, as matters of state policy, some minorities have obtained advancement based upon their race and that this advancement has possibly occurred at the expense of others who might have been more achieving. We can hope that the day will arrive in which racial discrimination will be reduced to such a degree that the perhaps necessary but inherently unfair policy of Affirmative Action could be abolished. Meanwhile, it is no more racist, per se, to question whether a person has benefited from Affirmative Action than it is to question whether a person has benefited from any other form of patronage. During the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Sotomayor there was a great deal of talk from the establishment left regarding the nominees Hispanic ethnic background and gender. Indeed this focus bordered on fascination which bordered on an obsession as liberals seemed to fall all over themselves as they dissected every minute permutation regarding the race, ethnicity, and gender of each of the Supreme Court justices and what this meant to judicial philosophy. The general consensus of liberal opinion was that these factors related to how a given justice viewed the world and how they would render judgments. Clearly the assumption was that an individual who was not a straight white male would be liberal. The consensus of liberal opinion was based upon the assumption that all minorities think alike and this is, indeed, the very essence of left-wing racism. This author recalls an interview on NPR during the Sotomayor hearings with a liberal analyst of the Supreme Court who stated that when Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to hold a seat on the Supreme Court, entered the room the conversation changed in a progressive direction and that Marshall’s presence as an African-American was therefore important. In very sophisticated tones, this commentator spoke of this as proof of why it was essential for a minority to sit on the Supreme Court. Based on the overall direction of the commentary, however, it would be safe to assume that this did not apply regarding Thurgood Marshall’s successor on the court, Justice Clarence Thomas who, it should be noted, is African-American. Regarding DeVega’s comment that the Birthers have sullied President Obama as being an unqualified,” affirmative action” beneficiary, two points should be made. Firstly, the release of President Obama’s birth certificate, which the President refused to release to the public for over 3 years, had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with affirmative action. The question raised around the birth certificate was not whether Barack Obama was qualified to be President in terms of his intelligence, capabilities, and skills as a leader, these qualifications on the part of Obama were absolutely and universally accepted. The question was a rather simple one and that was whether Obama was born in the United States and, if not, than this would have raised constitutional questions regarding his qualifications to serve. The second point, which was whether Barack Obama was a beneficiary of affirmative action, when approached separately, is a more difficult and sensitive question, one that might be examined without getting into demagogic charges that to do so would be racist. As mentioned, many liberals, obsessed with the advancement of various individuals in society because of their minority status while operating under the assumption that such individuals would be supporters of liberalism, are proud and unabashed expositors of the concept and practice of affirmative action in those cases. Yes, affirmative action played a role in the advancement of Barack Obama in that his support was derived at least partially because of his race. There were other candidates running for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008 that were as qualified as he, Hillary Clinton comes to mind. Yet Barack Obama maintained an edge in the competition, with the media and with the public at large, at least partially because of his race. Virtually all Americans felt the time was right to elect an African-American as President and Barack Obama scored on three counts, he was African-American, he was a brilliant and qualified candidate, and he was liberal. Barack Obama had been a local Illinois politician from Chicago until he won his senate seat in 2004 after being granted national exposure with a keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Upon his election to the US Senate, Obama almost immediately began running for president. The race issue, the idea that it was time to elect the first African-American president, was central to his candidacy from day one. Indeed, it is a great accomplishment for our nation and for our society to have elected an African-American as president. Such an event was a long time coming and was a watershed event for America. I proudly remember the morning after the election when, as I walked toward by favorite take-out coffee establishment on my way to work, walking by a group of smiling African-American men and spontaneously reaching out my hand in congratulations. The whole country cheered, liberal as well as conservative. It should be noted, however, that Barack Obama became president not merely because of his race but also because he was a liberal. When it comes to politics, particularly national politics, affirmative action only applies to minorities who are liberal. DeVega continues: His academic and professional accomplishments are irrelevant. The fact that he won an open and honest election are unimportant. We should know at this point that the life successes of people of color (and to a lesser degree some women) are always questionable and suspect when viewed through the gaze of Whiteness (and sexism). White men are never burdened with the question or doubt of being qualified for any job, at any time, or any place. Their greatness and ability is a fact not a question, never is it to be interrogated. This self-delusion exists despite the fact that white men have historically been the greatest beneficiaries of unearned privilege in the history of the United States. Their mediocrity has been rewarded at every turn. On this point DeVega is at least partially correct. Indeed white privilege continues in many respects to be the dominant creed. Those who pass for white often assume levels of privilege and this remains true at all strata of society including the lower strata. It is also true that minorities have to work harder and have to be smarter and more motivated than do white people in order to succeed. This may partially account for the extraordinary level of both success and failure within the African-American community in particular. This has absolutely nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative but is rather a more systemic phenomenon. In practice, as opposed to in rhetoric and posturing, conservatives are no more or less a part of this social milieu than are liberals. From a public policy standpoint, the issue ought to be studied from the perspective of which policies lead to the most success for the most numbers of people in the long run. 2. Naturally, the President should be White. Of course, the leaders of trade and industry should be White. The natural order of things equates being White and male with having natural authority and ability--a set of traits which exist without question or doubt regardless of competence or ability. Whiteness deems the inverse for people of color. While a persistent milieu of white privilege continues to permeate our multi-racial society this comment is nevertheless outdated. Other than some fringe groups such as the KKK, very few Americans believe that the President or leaders of trade and industry should be white. African-Americans have achieved the highest levels of success, wealth, and authority in virtually all avocations in this country and this is absolutely accepted as the norm today. While the natural order of things equates being White and male with having natural authority and ability this no longer applies in the literal or practical sense. The relevant question is which public policies are most likely to reduce the vestiges of this outdated outlook to the degree that the most of the remaining barriers melt away. As President Obama has learned, by mere fact of his birth, and coincidence of the color of his skin, his legitimacy will always be in doubt. This is absolutely false and is a smear against those who asked for the President to make his birth certificate public. Disagreeing with some of the presidents policies, and criticizing the president and his administration for those policies, has nothing whatsoever to do with questioning the president’s legitimacy to hold office. This question pertains entirely to questions regarding the jurisdiction of his birth. It may be recalled that there were those who questioned the legitimacy of the presidency of George W. Bush, and many who still do, due to the false allegation that he stole the election of 2000 in Florida but this is a topic for other books. 3. Whiteness equals authority. Thus, any White person, at any time, can question the accomplishments of a person of color. The most mediocre of White people, the sum total of whose life has amounted to 1/100th of President Obama's successes (or that of other people of color) can feel legitimate in questioning how the latter came to find their "unnatural" position in the social hierarchy. The questioning of the authority of a person of color is due to affirmative action and is not motivated by race. Such questioning does not emanate from a belief that people of color are less capable or qualified per se, as this was the emanating idea of Eugenics which was common, particularly amongst American elites before World War II. Notions of eugenics have largely been dispelled. It is widely understood and accepted, even by hard-core racists, that African-Americans in particular are absolutely as capable as white people in all fields, indeed, if anything, that African-Americans in positions of authority are probably more capable. The only degree in which an African-American would be viewed as holding a position that would be “unnatural" in society would be due to the suspicion that the person in question benefited from state intervention or affirmative action. This is not a condemnation of affirmative action per se as some white people have been advanced in their professions over the centuries due to the fact that they could pass as white. Mediocre people are, indeed, often advanced due to family connections, inheritance, or sheer luck and such people are also held up to suspicion. It is unfortunate that affirmative action has caused such questions to be raised regarding certain people of color in certain circumstances yet the person in question would likely bear some responsibility for such questions being raised. To re-iterate, while President Obama benefited politically from his race, and therefore informally benefited from notions associated with affirmative action, there has been no question regarding his qualifications as a person or as a professional to hold the office of president. The issue of white privilege is used as a standard cudgel against capitalism and against the world’s most prominent capitalist nation, the United States. Yet racial and ethnic privilege has been a part of almost every society since the beginning of recorded history. In African societies, for example, members of the black race dominate their respective societies and likewise in Europe which has been dominated by whites. Japan is a society with a small white indigenous minority on their northernmost island and this group is on the lower rung of Japanese society. India has a traditional caste system. The Arab and Islamic nations have a two tiered system in witch non-Muslims are considered to be dhimmi’s, or second class citizens. The communist movement, the most dominant movement to emerge from the so-called progressive social movement of 19th Century Europe, promised to abolish all forms of privilege by abolishing all aspects of human nature that led to any form of inequality. This included private property, family, committed relationships based on love, religion, political sovereignty, and ultimately individual identity itself. They believed in the creation of a new collectivist social order that would transform the world. The results of their experiments, wherever they were tried, have been poverty, disease, suffering, and death to the tune of hundreds of millions of innocent people. It is contended here that the American capitalist system, with all of its faults, is the better way to go in terms of addressing any form of supremacy by any group. Whiteness is an advantage in the Marathon of life. Through this unearned head-start a psychic wage is paid, one that allows any White person, anywhere, to question how a black or brown person came to be ahead in life for such a thing can never happen in a "just" world. Whiteness allows white folks to not feel embarrassed or ashamed in asking such impolitic and rude questions. Actually, most people understand that such questions as whether a person earned their position in society, for whatever reason the question is raised, is sensitive and impolitic and should be as such. Regarding rudeness or impolitic sentiments that may be directed toward President Obama there have actually been very few, certainly less than those directed toward his immediate processors. Generally, President Obama has been criticized for his policies and legitimately for aspects of his public persona in a manner that ought to be directed at any person in a position of authority. This is particularly true regarding any president and indeed such criticism is essential to a free society and serves as a natural aspect of our system of checks and balances. Real rudeness, the type that should have made folks feel embarrassed but did not, was the impolitic remarks routinely leveled at former President George W. Bush and members of his administration. As a conservative who is surrounded by liberals, this author was exposed to some of the vilest and hateful language directed at Bush. One example shall suffice. I was driving my 10 year old daughter home from school and I was giving ride home to two of her classmates that day. In the back seat, these two ten year old girls started singing songs about President Bush that were so vulgar and obscene that the lyrics shall be omitted from this text. This type of attitude, heard time and again by this author, was no doubt learned at the dinner tables of these two girls. If I had ever spoken in such a manner then I was that age, about anyone let alone a president of the United States, and my parents heard of it, I would have had my mouth washed out with soap. Yet, there was no shame, no embarrassment attached to such hate and ugliness. It made me wonder if Nazi children had come up with such charming ditties regarding Jews. Yet most people on the left, if they heard these nursery rhymes even today, would think they were uproariously funny. 4. Whiteness is a get-out-of-jail-free card. Whiteness is also the freedom to be utterly unreflective regarding the foolishness and madness of one's deeds and statements as long as the target of such madness is the Other. The Birthers, Buchanan, Trump, Palin, Bachmann, Limbaugh, Breitbart, and Beck engage in routine crazy talk. But Whiteness allows them to be taken seriously (at least at first) for White privilege allows the luxury of being utterly unreflective in most things. It is an all too common tactic for liberals and left-wing activists to call their opposition crazy or stupid. This type of schoolyard bullying is an easy and cheap way to divert attention from what the opponent is saying. Doesn’t pay any attention to anything that person might bring up, they want you to think, he’s crazy or stupid. What they are really saying when they launch this type of character assassination is that the person is mentally ill and should therefore be ignored. It should be noted that this type of tactic is employed in a particularly vicious manner when the opponent to the left is a person of color. 5. White privilege is freedom from accountability. Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, and the rank and file Birther brigands will not face any consequences for their ill deeds in slandering the President of the United States, or for openly fomenting sedition and rebellion against the government of the United States. Fomenting sedition and rebellion against the United States? This is a very serious charge to make against an American citizen, one that should be made with carefully documented evidence that is brought to the bar of judgment. The American Communist Party, the Nazi Party, the KKK, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground, these groups fomented sedition and rebellion against the government and as such they were engaged in a conspiracy to overthrough the US government and alter the social order by means of a combination of violence and subversion. They deserved to be investigated by the government and were investigated in most cases. Such charges should not be lightly tossed around. If Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan were involved in sedition or rebellion than a congressional committee should be convened at once and an investigation should commence with testimony and the naming of names. 6. The Obama birth certificate debacle has exposed how to be truly American a person must be white. This is one of the central unspoken (and widely accepted) truths of race in America. There is historic truth to this, as indeed America has a white supremacist past and this must not be denied, but great progress has been made, progress that seems to have been lost on DeVega. There is not question, none whatsoever, regarding the Americanism or the citizenship of African-Americans. There was no question regarding the Americanism of Barack Obama, only questions regarding the constitutional technicality of the exact location of his birth. This controversy existed because the Constitution has two qualifications for an individual to be president. Those qualifications are that the president be a natural born citizen and that he or she be at least 35 years old. Challenges to residency requirements are common routine matters. Hillary Clinton, when she ran for the Senate in New York, was described as a carpetbagger because of her short time residing in New York. Mitt Romney, when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts, was challenged by his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Shannon O’Brien, who claimed that Romney had not resided for enough days in Massachusetts to qualify as governor. Romney had spent the previous two years as the head of the Olympic Committee and in that capacity had spent a great deal of time in Utah and elsewhere. Romney, to prove his residency, spent a day before a local judge with records proving that he had spent enough days at his home in Belmont. His records, including how many times the toilet was flushed in his home, were pored over. Romney recounted that it was one of the most depressing days of his life. When this author ran for Congress in 2004 against Rep. Barney Frank it was suggested that Frank’s residency be challenged, a suggestion that was ignored. For example, Sarah Palin channels The Blood Countess Erzebet Bathory and bathes in this bigotry with all of her "real America" talk. Although it is a lie in the face of history, because America is a mulatto culture where the majority of black folks (and of course our Native American brothers and sisters) were in the U.S. many decades (if not at least a century) before the great unwashed masses of white ethnics arrived here, Whiteness still imagines African Americans and other people of color as semi-permanent outsiders. In total, to be American is to be Black. The Birthers in their racial heliocentrism--where to be White is to be the center of the world--are repulsed by this fact. There is no information available, at least none to be found by this author that would indicate the race or ethnic background of those who asked President Obama to release his birth certificate. Joseph Farah, the publisher of World Net Daily and one of the main point people in the effort to pressure President Obama to release his birth certificate, happens to be an Arab-American and, it could be argued, Arabs are Caucasian but are Semitic. For that matter this author, it could be argued, is not Caucasian but, as a Jew, Semitic. All of this would depend on how race is defined. Either way, race had absolutely nothing to do with concern over the president’s birth certificate. 7. White privilege is the ability to be "normal" and "invisible." Whiteness is never interrogated. Consequently, the White nationalism of the Tea Party GOP and its embrace of the Birthers has been long able to deflect the charge that they are racist or tinged by yearnings for a return to "the good old days" when "those people" knew their place. There is simply no evidence that the organic movement that is known as the moniker “tea party” is white, embraces any particular form of white nationalism, or is in any way racist or concerned with racial issues. It is true that those who loosely identify with the ideas embodied by the tea party are nationalist, in that they seek to insure that America and American interests come before those of other nations but this is based on common sense and has nothing to do with the particular race of any American citizen. Indeed, the motivation to place ones nation first is based upon the same principle, natural to human nature in the best sense, as the motivation to place ones self or ones family first. After all, if the individual, the family, or the nation does not put itself first that who are they placing first and why? Certainly the idea of self interest, private interest, and national interest, as such concepts that are an inherent and necessary aspect of human nature, necessary for survival, are instincts that serve all people of all races and backgrounds. One would expect the people of France, or Chile, or Zimbabwe, or any other nation to place their nation in front of other nations and for obvious reasons. Because Whiteness is invisibility it works like chaff to obscure the obvious fact that much of the opposition to President Obama has always been about his race and not about policy. This is obviously false. Indeed, a portion of support for President Obama is because of his race and the justified good will, good feeling, and pride that the vast majority of Americans feel about electing the first African-American president. Opposition to President Obama has been based upon his policies, not his race. Even those Americans who might be inclined toward racist views either support or oppose President Obama essentially because of his positions whether real or perceived. Ultimately, opposition to President Obama is based, in general, on lack of confidence in the economy, high unemployment, the credit and mortgage implosion, and the weakening of the dollar. Such opposition was lodged against President Herbert Hoover, who was white, and this was based on the bad economy to which he presided. Whether or not the economic stagnation is President Obama’s fault, or for that matter whether the depression was the fault of President Hoover is beside the point. Presidents are always held to account for the economy that exists on their watch. The signs of the Tea Parties are ignored or explained away, the racist emails laughed at and/or minimized as trite and silly, and bigoted White folks who display their bonafides whenever given the opportunity are labeled as outliers. There is slippage in naming the White racism of the Birthers as such because so many are invested in denying the semi-permanency of White supremacy in America, a sentiment that still lingers decades after the end of Jim and Jane Crow. The Tea Party and the Birthers are no more or no less racist than most any other American group and that would include most liberal or progressive groups. That would also include groups made up of people of color. DeVega perceives the Tea Party as racist because it is primarily conservative and in this regard DevVega is displaying a form of bigotry. Conservatism whether one agrees or not with its principles, stands for a set of political and economic principles that have absolutely nothing to do with race. Conservatism is embraced or rejected by members of all races. Indeed, it is contended here, that a great deal of credit for the level of success that is experienced by the African-American community is due to their embrace of conservative political and economic principles. 8. Whiteness is the default position for viewing the world. It is a cognitive map and means of processing reality. This statement goes to the very core of the leftist view of society and speaks directly to the dialectical process that defines the activism of the left. Leftism instructs its adherents, either by open or subtle means, to view individuals as cogs in a collective wheel. Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, drawing from social revolutionary ideas that were forming in their time, theorized that modern man, as opposed to those who were either in the primitive or feudal stage of human social progress, were divided into two distinct groups which they called the bourgeois and the proletariat. In the 20th Century, left-wing theoreticians, particularly Franz Fanon, the author of The Wretched of the Earth, extended these two categories to include divisions of society into racial, regional, and ethnic collective categories. In our own times, these categories have become numerous and even at times minute when various sub categories are included. Thus the left looks to collective categories based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, region, and even physical and medical conditions such as deafness. Once these categories are established, various attributes are observed and emphasized as this is partially the work of sociology and anthropology when these disciplines are conducted within a political context. Once the individual is placed within any particular category or group of categories, the left, and this is subtle and generally not conscious, actually believes that the individual, within this manufactured collective context, processes reality differently than those of other categories. When taken to the extreme, as it was by the Eugenic followers of Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, this different perception of reality becomes a matter of genetics and biology. The materialistic and atheistic nature of leftism serves to further emphasize this outlook. In other words, left-wingers, whether consciously or otherwise, actually believe that people are literally different not as individuals but because of their race or designated category. This idea, which is inherently racist as opposed to racist in the old fashioned sense, which would be a backward and regressive belief that one race is superior to another, is based on a collective as opposed to a view of the uniqueness of the individual. This idea completely contradicts the American conception of society, based upon the Biblical principle that every single human being is created in the image of God, which is that each individual life is sacred and unique and that rights are inherent and natural to the individual and not to the collective. Indeed America, furthering the process set forth by the Bible, represents the process by which mankind moved away from the collective state and toward individual rights. The American conception is that rights come not from a collective, or from the state, but from the creator, from nature and natures God. The election of Barack Obama upsets this world view. Many of those drunken on Whiteness and invested in the version of events that are offered by the White Racial Frame really do think they are operating as a "principled" opposition or that they are "colorblind," when in reality race, and fears of the racial Other, are driving their behavior. Here, Whiteness and white privilege work as pathologies that make a person immune to the real motivations driving their anti-Obama derangement syndrome. Nothing could be further from the truth. The election of Barack Obama as president was the culmination of a rejection of collectivism that harkens back to the struggles of the American founding generation. The American Republic, established with the ratification of the US Constitution in 1789, established the right of white men of a certain age who owned property to vote. The same republic allowed the continuation of the barbarous institution of chattel slavery with all of its horrors and injustice. Yet even in that context, America established freedom and individual and religious rights to a greater degree than had ever experienced such rights in human history. Since the founding, indeed, the quest of America, the true meaning of our creed to borrow a phrase from the late great Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, has been to move our society toward freedom and away from the regressive hold of those who still clung to collectivism. Founding fathers such as Alexander Hamilton were vocal opponents of slavery and slave holders such as Thomas Jefferson, while hypocritically benefiting from slavery, sought its eventual peaceful dissolution. America endured the Civil War, the bloodiest in history up until that time, which led to the abolition of chattel slavery. The Civil Rights movement, the labor movement, Feminism, and Gay Rights are all movements that have been motivated by a need to further expand individual rights to more people yet the left has often attempted to subvert these movements based on the American ideal, with regressive notions of collectivism. 9. Whiteness is the ability and power to reframe reality. This goes to the foundational principle of leftism which is one of nihilism, that ultimately there is no objective reality and therefore no reality at all. Reality, as such, can be manipulated by means of deception and fraud, but reality cannot be reframed. Reality is real. There is only one reality and it is reality. The left-wing ideal, as embraced by social revolutionaries starting with the Illuminati of Adam Weishaupt, the Jacobins of Robespierre, the egalitarians of Gracchus Babeuf, the science of Henri Saint Simon and Charles Darwin, the dialectic of Hegel, and the political action of Karl Marx were based upon the principle that the human social condition was based on a false and manufactured paradigm. Marx called this false consciousness and he contended that the false consciousness was manufactured by a cabal of power hungry exploiters. He believed that groups of people were hypnotized into a condition in which they were willing to be exploited. In his essay On the Jewish Question, Marx contended that the Jews were responsible for manufacturing such human attributes as self interest and what he called huckstering. By huckstering, he was criticizing the need for people to trade in goods and services. Marx felt that by annihilating Judaism, these human attributes could be abolished and mankind would move toward the ultimate state of social existence, the collectivist stage that he called Communism. Contrary to the beliefs of Marxism, that reality could be reframed, the American idea is based on a more scientific notion which is that reality is objective and by understanding and studying that objective reality, mankind could progress in the real sense. Despite whatever documents or evidence that President Obama may offer to silence the growly, rabid hostility of the Birthers and the White Conservative Soul, the terrain for debate will be continually shifted. Conservatives are not necessarily white as, obviously, conservatism knows no race or collective category. Indeed conservatism is a rejection of all ideologies. Conservatism seeks a society that reflects human nature in all of its natural imperfections. In other words, conservatism reflects reality which is accessible equally to all human beings. This is a function of ideology plus partisanship mixed together and combined in the Right-wing echo chamber. This reframing of reality is also born of the narcissism that is Whiteness, for the world is what they/he/she says it is. As a courtesy Chauncey DeVega has the last word: 10. White privilege is also surprising. Many black and brown folks (as well as others) have been saying from day one that the opposition to President Obama, and the silliness suggested by the conspiranoid Birthers in particular, have been motivated by racism. Those voices were often silenced and attacked as being too sensitive and wedded to some outmoded notion of political correctness. The pundit classes have finally seen the obvious: race is the driving force behind Trump and the Tea Party GOP's obsession with Obama's birth certificate. When those not White said as much they were dismissed. Lesson for us all: Despite our protests and the evidence that black and brown folks may bring to the table, racism does not exist until good White folks say that it does.

Who is a racist?

[jmacusa]

What twaddle. Like any of us get to choose our skin color. Skin color doesn’t have anything to do with one race being more advanced or enlightened than any other to to argue that point, though it isn’t done here, per se, is the bigotry of low expectation, something the Left is adept at. Sarah Palin ‘’wears failure’’ and ‘’wallows in medioctry’’? The woman has more accomplishments to her credit than most men, white or black. What this author doesn’t point out that for a great many in America racism is a business. Al Sharpton and Spike Lee certainly have made it theirs.

[freedumb2003]

Ran out of paragraph markers at the end there?

I could loan you some...