The worst of black America

A bit of the old Patrick Buchanan is back in a good column excoriating Obama’s despicable speech (many intelligent people have been fooled by the “nice” parts of the speech, not seeing its ultimate drift). Far from Obama’s view that whites are still mistreating blacks, which according to Obama justifies blacks’ interminable grievances against whites, including insane conspiracy theories such as that white America deliberately created the AIDS virus to kill blacks, the truth, Buchanan shows, is the most fantastic outpouring of benevolent help by one race for another in human history. Yet blacks, even and especially those who have benefited the most from it, acknowledge none of this, and still nurse corrosive hatred.

The psychology I’ve just described is the most damning aspect of black America. And, to my still fresh astonishment, it turns out that Barack Obama, who we thought represented the best of black America, a higher, more amiable, and more intelligent black America, is immersed in this same mentality of black resentment. He makes it clear—to anyone who actually attends to his words—that the resentment can never end until whites do the right thing by blacks, by which he means that whites must make blacks completely equal with themselves in all social outcomes, from law school attendance to wealth to incarceration rates. But since, given actual racial differences, such collective equality of outcome is not possible, Obama is laying out a future of endless, self-justifying black hatred of whites and America. This, from the man who was going to lead us beyond race.

So Obama is not the best of black America. He is the worst. The myriad other black spokesmen who have put forth this anti-white argument over the years have been obvious demagogues, ranters, or self-interested careerists whose irrationality and animus showed on the surface, making them easily dismissible by intelligent whites. But for Obama, underneath the cover of his high-toned, eloquent, benevolent image which so appeals to whites, to put forth the same old unreconstructed black racism makes him the most dishonest, the most morally objectionable, and the most dangerous black spokesman I’ve ever seen. When you add onto this his ever-more-evident narcissism and messianism, he becomes outright evil. It is the evil narcissism of a man who, to justify and glorify himself, trashed before the eyes of the world his 85 year old grandmother who had sacrificed for him. Which makes for an interesting theme on Good Friday.

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As I said in my speech, “The War Against White America, in 1994:

I came across a remarkable example of this in the coverage of the South African election. Amidst all the media’s joyous talk about a “nonracial” or “multiracial” democracy being born, Newsweek came out with a sensational cover with bold letters crying “Black Power!” So deep is the doublethink in which we live today, that I wonder if more than a handful of people noticed the gross contradiction of celebrating black power in what was supposed to be a “nonracial” election. But of course it’s not a contradiction at all: What “nonracial” really means is that it is whites who are supposed to be indifferent to race, in order to help nonwhites advance their racial interests.

This same double standard and delusion works across the board. For example, the belief that all the peoples of the world are equal in intellectual abilities is thought to be a race-neutral or “nonracial” idea, since it is saying that race doesn’t matter. But since the races are not equal in average abilities, this “nonracial” belief in equality turns out to be completely racial. It holds that blacks have far greater abilities than they in fact have, and invariably blames white racism for actual black inequality. It is therefore the duty of whites, until the end of time, to exhaust their wealth and spiritual energy in a hopeless effort to make blacks collectively equal to themselves. The “nonracial” belief in equality thus turns out to be a kind of black racialist mythology.

—end of initial entry—

Jeremy G., who sent me the Buchanan article, writes:

I agree with your recent posts. Four years of Obama would be four years of white racial consciousness. With a conservative media now firmly in place, the left would not be able to stop this. Bring it on!

Mark K. writes:

I find it quite disturbing that in liberal America, the black man has become the “authentic” American; whites are inauthentic. Somehow due to the victimhood and the suffering of the black race, the black man is now the embodiment of all hopes for the ultimate humanization of America and Americans. America and Americans are “incomplete” as long as the black man is not The sine qua non American Persona. The Renaissance phrase that “man is the measure of all things” becomes in America “the black man is the measure of all things.” The white self is incomplete as long as the black self is not “at home.” It is not that the black has to be equal with the white, the black has to be beyond all alienation since alienation of the black self is created through white society. White society has to be “redeemed” through an act of atonement offered by whites sacrificially towards blacks. This runs as an undercurrent throughout Obama’s speech.

LA replies:

Mark is right, it’s not just about demanding “equality of outcomes,” as I put it above. It’s about demanding a total sense of non-alienation. The problem is, given that blacks are a racially and culturally distinct minority in a still-white majority America, they can never feel that total 100 percent sense of identity or belonging. There is always going to be, at the very least, a certain element of racial tension, the sense of “those people are the majority and running things, and we’re not a part of that,” which blacks and white liberals translate into “white discrimination” against blacks which the whites must still do something to fix. But nothing can be done to fix this “discrimination,” other than the elimination of the white majority and its culture, as I’ve been saying since my first article on multiculturalism in National Review in 1989.

John D. writes:

The equality mandate seems to be our punishment for committing the “original sin” of slavery. Our penance is that we must acquiesce to the liberal directive of achieving racial equality ad infinitum. But our sentence can never be fully served, nor can we be redeemed (given this way of thinking) because of the impossibility of completing the task at hand. This brings us full circle to our past, current and future lifetime incarcerations in the prison of the equality mandate. We are forever bound by the combination of committing the “original sin” on the one hand, and the stark reality of racial differences on the other, neither of which are possible to overcome.

If we were to look on the “bright side,” when we finally do rid ourselves of America’s pesky white majority problem, maybe there’s a fat chance that the equality mandate will simply go away and we can then all be “free at last.”

LA replies:

Unfortunately, the problem won’t end then. Whites are only a fifth of the population of South Africa, yet there are still all sort of programs to equalize blacks with whites. Ten years ago, according to Wikipedia, whites were something like 2.5 percent of the population of Zimbabwe, but war had to be waged against them to equalize blacks. Now the white population is something like .5 percent, and the equalization effort seems to have wound down, mainly because there are no more whites whose property can be expropriated.

By the logic of Obama, Jeremiah Wright will be justified in his hate-whitey rhetoric until there are no more whites left in America.

Mark K. writes:

Having seen the choice Obama has made—to justify Wright at the expense of throwing his grandmother under the bus—aren’t people now suspicious that as president Obama will make the same move? That is, he will jettison white America (which will have voted for him the same way his grandmother brought him up) as he empowers black America—diverting all sorts of resources that way.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 21, 2008 01:26 PM | Send