Of course, this was the very sentiment expressed by the His High Holiness the Ayatollah Farrakhan shorty after the attacks. What’s interesting about this case is the gathering is made up largely of self-hating whites who are either intentionally or unkowingly parroting Farrakhan’s argument. People like these deserve to live in utter Dhimmitude.

From the Journal Sentinel article:
“Gayle Becker-Protz, executive director of the YWCA, said the ultimate objective is to show suburbanites that their lives would be more fulfilling if they experienced black, Hispanic and other cultures more regularly.”

I.e., Becker-Protz thinks that suburbanites’ lives are un-fulfilling, and that black, Hispanic and other cultures can provide the missing ingredient.

But even more than the implied insult, notice the unquestioned assumption of personal “fulfillment” as a moral standard. Becker-Protz and the other women quoted in the article obviously consider themselves more fulfilled, because of their sensitivity toward other cultures (and, probably, their contempt for their own.) This is an instance of the kind of liberal self-satisfaction Lawrence Auster described in the talk he posted today.

Why would anyone ever want to attack empathetic people like them? If the terrorists hate America, it obviously can’t be people like Ms. Becker-Protz they have in mind! No, no, it must be those evil racists…

Charlie writes:

“Becker-Protz thinks that suburbanites’ lives are un-fulfilling, and that black, Hispanic and other cultures can provide the missing ingredient.”

Aah, but this is EXACTLY the reasoning of the Supreme Court in the Grutter decision, and of Justice Powell’s earlier opinion in Bakke that is the basis of it. White people are lacking in something, a something that may be variously described as interracial empathy, cross-racial understanding, or just plain aliveness and vitality. This missing something can only be supplied by nonwhites. Nonwhites represent an indispensable value that whites lack. A white person is incomplete—a morally and psychologically defective human being—so long as he doesn’t have a black person at his side, or preferably, permanently attached to his hip.

On this basis, blacks are given racial preferences and guaranteed racial proportionality in university admissions and every other area of life, not because blacks have lesser abilities and need unfair advantages in order to be made equal, and not because blacks are discriminated against and deserve compensation, but because blacks have special and superior qualities that whites need.

Thinking of this insanity, I’m reminded of an exchange with an aquaintance years ago, as we were talking about some incredibly twisted development in modern liberalism. I asked rhetorically: “How many perversities can be squeezed into a single situation?” He replied: “America is about finding out!”

What interests me most about this newspaper article is that Becker-Protz et. al. are obviously convinced that *they* are not the target of the terrorists’ ire.

If we take the terrorists at their word, it is precisely the universalizing, one-world liberals whom they despise and want to destroy. The terrorists describe themselves as defending their own particulars against the imposition of a global culture.

I agree with everything you have said here, Lawrence. I think many liberals find something lacking in themselves —- no doubt, as a result of their denial of the transcendent —- and they look to the other to provide it. Since they think in material terms, the “others” they look to are *not* the religious people who are the true others compared to liberals; instead they look to the people of different races or cultures. People who *look* different from them, who have different skin or different clothes. This materialism is why their obsession with diversity remains focused on such superficialities, and why they don’t respond to a request to include conservatism or religion in their diverse utopia.

(It is also, if you will forgive me for introducing this into yet another thread, what I had in mind when I said we need to avoid repeating their mistake by over-emphasizing race.
The problem with racial preferences is not that they are preferences, but that they are preferences based on the wrong distinctions. Surely no conservative would disagree with a college admission policy which gave preference to academic achievement!)