I recently read James Edward’s book, Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the 'R' Word to Push the Obama Agenda. I was quite interested in it because in his three-hour weekly radio show, The Political Cesspool, James’ treatment of the racism smear is not dissimilar to my own.

The book is – as you might expect from its author – a short, easy, and especially funny read, being comprised mostly of James’ witty commentary on the last few years’ worth of news stories covering alleged White racism. Said stories are discussed very much like in James’ show, and an abundance of internet sources are provided to facilitate independent investigation. Needless to say that the stories are absolutely ridiculous, defying belief in some cases, even for someone whose inbox is flooded daily with the reports of White ‘racism’ collected by Google’s news alerts. A reader can expect to roll his eyes, shake his head, and / or find his trachea rippling with laughter practically on every page.

There is the case, why not, of the federal hate crime investigation triggered by a ham sandwich; and there is the case of a mayor’s lengthy written apology to a Black citizen for allowing police officers to eat bananas in public. There are also several examples of White so-called conservatives being far more paranoid, obnoxious, and vociferous in their denunciations of supposed White racism than the usual liberal suspects. I was astounded to read, for example, that in at least one case, said conservatives even complained about their not being condemned vigorously enough in the liberal media; and that a conservative radio talk show host branded high gasoline prices racist because they encouraged farmers to use corn for the production ethanol, when that corn could be going to feed African children.

By now all who are interested have read that so-called satirical work of Mark Williams, which got him in hot water, not only with the usual suspects on the left but with his own Tea Party crowd. His "Letter to Lincoln," as has been pointed out by his own compatriots, was downright shallow. A commenter on the Radio Patriot blog correctly assessed it as being severely overwritten, while it soon took on the tone of kicking a dead horse. No wonder the black-led Tea Party "Federation" was able to score points.

What is so disheartening about people like Mark Williams is that they have imbibed every cliché taught them by the Left, and yet they call themselves "conservative."  For instance, his notions about the early NAACP and its origins, and of W.E.B. Du Bois, is boilerplate propaganda. He has obviously consecrated this history, as it was taught to him.  He writes on his blog:

W.E.B. DuBois never intended the organization to work against civil rights and use the government as an extortionist for favored social classes.  The difference between then and now is that DuBois knew real racism first hand. He also knew the power of government to perpetuate and enforce that racism.

Williams knows nothing about the initial creators and founders of the NAACP, most of whom were socialist Jews.  Du Bois was a later entry into the group.  The Dapper Dan Du Bois, more culturally white than anything else, already held a Harvard PhD in 1890, and traveled in social circles unknown to most blacks. This is what made especially contemptible his opposition to Booker T. Washington's determination to help the poorest and lowest blacks elevate themselves.  Here was Du Bois, a professed Communist, and yet Williams babbles on about how Du Bois would look at government. How idiotic is that?

And many blacks are laughing their heads off at this comment:  "Jealous and his cronies would be set upon by the original NAACP founders and run out [of] the organization ..."  Benjamin Jealous is exactly the type for whom the NAACP was founded and is following in the footsteps of all the chiefs who preceded him. It is his mentality that was sought by Julian Bond, when the time came to pick a new organization director.

But, of course, like most whites, Mark Williams would not want his little world disturbed by such "revisionist" history.

Thomas Sowell once explained why whites accepted the rule of the NAACP in the first place, instead of taking into account the differences between the many contending groups and philosophies then prevailing regarding the future of blacks.  Sowell claimed that people normally just want to get on with their lives and not be bothered with sorting out truths and other finer points involved in complicated issues.

Mark Williams also goes on to explain his farcical take on the word "colored," by castigating the NAACP for using such a term.  Yet, the only reason that the word "colored" has been tinged with the charge of "racism" is because the left/multiculturalists discovered that they could make Whitey jump through hoops by denigrating any term they choose, and claiming that a new one is in order.  There was no ignominy attached to the word when ordinary blacks used it to refer to themselves. It is only when the clever elites learned that they could use it as yet another bludgeon against whites, along with a host of other words and terminologies, that it was given a "racist" meaning.

I was hoping that Mark Williams might be The One who would stand up and make some kind of sense. But, as might have been expected, he turns out to be just another disappointment.

As Steve Burton has already pointed out, Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia) has written an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal attacking the diversity-industrial complex.  It's rare to see such an honest look in a major paper at what "diversity" really means.  Thess parts are worth quoting again.

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy....

In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

While the Indian and Chinese numbers are due partly to selective migration, the Jewish stats are incredible.  Even if we give them an average IQ of 110, it means that it's common place for members of the tribe with IQs below 100 to be college graduates.  This shows what a culture focused on education can do and probably explains the Ivy League overrepresentation.  It seems that if Jews with IQs of 100> can graduate in higher numbers than their European counterparts from State U it's not surprising that those with IQs in the 130-145 range are more likely than their gentile counterparts to put in the work to get into an elite college. 

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white. The need for inclusiveness in our society is undeniable and irreversible, both in our markets and in our communities. Our government should be in the business of enabling opportunity for all, not in picking winners. It can do so by ensuring that artificial distinctions such as race do not determine outcomes.

Pace Burton, this isn't really a "Nixon goes to China" type of event.  I've always been impressed with Webb (at least as far as politicians go).  I remember seeing on TV that even though he'd been a Republican, he decided to run against George Allen in 2006 after he asked the incumbent about his support for the Iraq war and the sitting Senator replied with something along the lines of "What, do you expect me to go against my own president?"  Webb is also pro-gun, tough on illegal immigration and has drawn criticisms from feminists for writing a paper against have girls in the military entitled "Women Can't Fight."

Of course, he's a Democrat for a reason and it's because he believes in class war.  But nobody's perfect and it seems to me that Webb is more of a Buchananite than anyone else in the Senate. 

Webb is also the author of a book called Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America, a sypathitic portrayal of his group and its roll in determining American values. 

This article appears around the same time of Ross Douthat's New York Times piece on anti-white discrimination in college admissions. 

What is going on here? I have a theory that in modern America, our niceness tends to makes us think those who complain the loudest have a point.  I think most Americans and the intellectual class in general look at groups like the Black Panthers and say, "Well, they may take things a bit far, but if they're that angry, there must be some objective reasons.  Let's be 'moderate' and adopt programs X, Y, Z."  Before the Obama election, the appointment of the dense black supremacist attorney general and the "Wise Latina" making it on to the Supreme Court, whites believed the propaganda that they were the ones still in charge.  Even though the black bureaucratic class would disappear in a heartbeat without the support of white and Jewish liberals, as things now stand, they do have objective power to implement their racialist agenda. It took the Obama election and these racially tinged stories that have become weekly events to make this clear to the white masses.  They began to organize and make their anxieties clear and voices heard and a trickle up effect is causing the intellectual class to look at ways American Caucasians have been wronged.  The concept of "White Privilege" is starting to look silly and even that of white victimhood is getting a sympathetic hearing in the MSM.  

Some may not like the idea of whites turning into another self-pitying minority, but the truth is that people act when they feel wronged.  As declining white influence becomes more and more obvious, the more backlash we'll continue to see. Needless to say, a McCain/Palin presidency would've encouraged complacancy. 

We are making progress. 

Under the title "Diversity and the Myth of White Privilege," Senator James Webb (D., Va.) says what no mainstream Republican politician would ever dare to say:

Forty years ago, as the United States experienced the civil rights movement, the supposed monolith of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance served as the whipping post for almost every debate about power and status in America. After a full generation of such debate, WASP elites have fallen by the wayside and a plethora of government-enforced diversity policies have marginalized many white workers. The time has come to cease the false arguments and allow every American the benefit of a fair chance at the future.

I have dedicated my political career to bringing fairness to America's economic system and to our work force, regardless of what people look like or where they may worship. Unfortunately, present-day diversity programs work against that notion, having expanded so far beyond their original purpose that they now favor anyone who does not happen to be white.

In an odd historical twist that all Americans see but few can understand, many programs allow recently arrived immigrants to move ahead of similarly situated whites whose families have been in the country for generations. These programs have damaged racial harmony. And the more they have grown, the less they have actually helped African-Americans, the intended beneficiaries of affirmative action as it was originally conceived...

Those who came to this country in recent decades from Asia, Latin America and Africa did not suffer discrimination from our government, and in fact have frequently been the beneficiaries of special government programs. The same cannot be said of many hard-working white Americans, including those whose roots in America go back more than 200 years.

Contrary to assumptions in the law, white America is hardly a monolith. And the journey of white American cultures is so diverse (yes) that one strains to find the logic that could lump them together for the purpose of public policy./The clearest example of today's misguided policies comes from examining the history of the American South.

The old South was a three-tiered society, with blacks and hard-put whites both dominated by white elites who manipulated racial tensions in order to retain power. At the height of slavery, in 1860, less than 5% of whites in the South owned slaves. The eminent black historian John Hope Franklin wrote that 'fully three-fourths of the white people in the South had neither slaves nor an immediate economic interest in the maintenance of slavery...'

In 1938...[o]f the South's 1.8 million sharecroppers, 1.2 million were white (a mirror of the population, which was 71% white)...

Generations of such deficiencies do not disappear overnight, and they affect the momentum of a culture. In 1974, a National Opinion Research Center (NORC) study of white ethnic groups showed that white Baptists nationwide averaged only 10.7 years of education, a level almost identical to blacks' average of 10.6 years, and well below that of most other white groups. A recent NORC Social Survey of white adults born after World War II showed that in the years 1980-2000, only 18.4% of white Baptists and 21.8% of Irish Protestants—the principal ethnic group that settled the South—had obtained college degrees, compared to a national average of 30.1%, a Jewish average of 73.3%, and an average among those of Chinese and Indian descent of 61.9%.

Policy makers ignored such disparities within America's white cultures when, in advancing minority diversity programs, they treated whites as a fungible monolith. Also lost on these policy makers were the differences in economic and educational attainment among nonwhite cultures. Thus nonwhite groups received special consideration in a wide variety of areas including business startups, academic admissions, job promotions and lucrative government contracts.

Where should we go from here? Beyond our continuing obligation to assist those African-Americans still in need, government-directed diversity programs should end.

Nondiscrimination laws should be applied equally among all citizens, including those who happen to be white...

Wow.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't quote so much while commenting so little - but, hey? what could I possibly add?

Needless to say, the PC brigades are out to get him.

When commentating on a public figure it’s important to judge him by what makes him different instead of by what he shares with everyone else in society.  If there was a Saudi Arabian talk show host, and I told you he glorified the Prophet Muhammad, it wouldn’t tell you much.  I may criticize the society as a whole for following the founder of their faith, but it would make little sense to get after the individual talk show host for being a Muslim.

This is leading into what I find strange about Paul Gottfried’s criticisms of Glenn Beck. Yes, he reveres Martin Luther King, Jr.  And though I’m no King scholar, I would bet that if the man were alive today he would see affirmative action, other black supremacist legislation and big government in general as just reparations, as blacks in general tend to. But what the man’s true ideology was is irrelevant.

Latin American socialists claim Jesus as one of their own, as do American Christian fundamentalists.  His teachings have been used to justify everything from anarcho-capitalism to communism.  What creed would the Savior believe in if he were resurrected today?  I'm guess he'd be so fascinated by computers, TV, running water and how tall everyone's gotten that he wouldn't have time to think too much about politics.  As a beloved public figure with vague political views, he'd be recruited by both the Republicans and Democrats to be their next presidential candidate, the way Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s after winning WWII.  The point is it doesn't matter what Jesus would think about progressive taxation from a political perspective, but what you can convince people he would want.

With MLK, we can better guess how he'd feel on contemporary issues.  But this still shouldn't matter.  Leave it to sites like this one to deconstruct Martin Luther King and what's he done from a historical/philosophical perspective and Glenn Beck to convince the rubes that the man would oppose affirmative action, socialized medicine and the entire Obama agenda. 

The other day, Beck "set the record" straight on King by "showing" that he rejected social justice and collective salvation, which the Fox host sees as staples of the left. As his witnesses Beck brought on a black preacher and a niece of King.

 Things get weirder in the second segment, when the two black guests start demanding reparations from Planned Parenthood and decry the "eugenics movement" still operating in America!  But even this has its uses.  Seeing that abortion is in the hands of the Supreme Court, convincing black people that liberals want to kill them off may get them to vote for pro-life anti-redistributionist Republicans who can't do anything about abortion anyway.  We'd then have smaller government while the purifying of the gene pool that the legality of the procedure entails would go on unabetted.   This kind of paranoid and faith based pandering would probably work much better than the Bushian/Rovian attempts at getting blacks to develop the right "values" and become economic conservatives.  One can use the values, prejudices and fears that African-Americans already have instead of inventing new ones for them.  It doesn't have to be honest and it doesn't have to be in their real interests.  And all the while, no matter what you're advocating, tell them that Martin Luther King, Jr. would've supported it. And Jesus too.  This is precisely what liberals do when they try to use the words of the Founding Fathers to justify homosexual marriage or race replacement immigration, and it works.  

This is politics.  Leave more honest discussions about the "real Martin Luther King" to the historians.

As I was turning on TV earlier in the week (my wife keeps the set permanently on FOX), I heard Glenn Beck complaining about the Black Panthers. Viewers were then shown a picture of a presumed Klansman in a truck carrying a noose. Supposedly this is what the Black Panthers were planning to do, by looking tough in the presence of approaching voters near a polling station in Philadelphia. Beck then began screaming about how we were ceasing to judge people by “the content of their character,” a reference to the government’s failure to take action against the Panthers’ interference with voting procedures. For the next five minutes Beck dwelled on the idea that “Dr. King gave his life to prevent this from happening.” Indeed King, who had spent his life bearing witness to the truth, would be truly upset to see “how we’ve blown his legacy.”

Three observations are in order here. One, there is nothing in what the Panthers were doing that looked as they were planning a lynching. It’s not even clear that the white guy shown earlier was about to engage in the same quaint custom. Two, I couldn’t imagine that the real MLK would have been entirely unhappy with what Beck disapproved of. King favored all kinds of favors and set asides for his race and would undoubtedly have been delighted with a lopsided black voting majority in Philadelphia or anywhere else that brought his soulmates to power.

An isolated phrase from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech admittedly reveals very little about the speaker’s leftist politics, but perhaps Beck could bestir himself to notice what else King said and wrote. Perhaps Beck could even be induced to stop quoting that magic line that he uses in his monologues once he discovers more about King. But then perhaps he shouldn’t. If he keeps on long enough with his drippy routine while inventing new black founding fathers, he may achieve a victory of sorts, by lifting the GOP’s share of the black vote from 2 to 2.1 percent. But I certainly won’t listen to him as he engages in this Herculean task.