Letting Blacks Persecute Whites is “Bigotry of Low Expectations”

Scoring against the New York City Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, and the American left generally, for embracing the visiting Zimbabwean despot Robert Mugabe, The Wall Street Journal nevertheless remains confused about the real nature of the problem. Mugabe, of course, has been leading a campaign of dispossession and terror against the white farmers of Zimbabwe, virtually the only economic producers in that virtually all-black country. Surprisingly, the Journal concedes that the campus left ignores Mugabe’s crimes because his “targets are white. In the canon of the politically correct, that means that they don’t qualify as victims.” But, having come so close to the forbidden racial truth, which is that Mugabe and his minions are ethnically cleansing whites and that the left supports them in that campaign, the Journal wheels around and describes the Left’s failure to hold this black tyrant accountable for his outrages as an example of … you got it, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” In other words, the Journal is telling us, when the left fails to hold black power holders to the same standards to which it would hold whites, but instead lets the blacks do exactly as they please, including persecuting, killing, and seizing the property of whites, the left is really guilty of anti-black racism.

This is exactly like the establishment conservatives’ pathetically weak and evasive argument against affirmative action. Instead of condemning AA as a system under which blacks unjustly get the goodies they want, often to the direct harm of whites and of society generally, conservatives invariably, with cloying concern, object to affirmative action because “it hurts blacks.” Never mind that the overwhelming majority of blacks don’t see it that way, but rejoice in their new-found racial privileges. In the minds of establishment conservatives, the soothing notion of black victimhood at the hands of white liberals continues to block out the harsh reality of black racialism—a racialism that may well have been encouraged and licenced by white liberals, but that exists quite independently of white liberals. If we were of the same mind as these conservatives, we might cutely chastise them for their “soft bigotry of low expectations.” The problem, in fact, is their sheer unwillingness to face inconvenient and frightening truths about the values and motivations of all too many blacks.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 17, 2002 02:57 AM | Send