Black racial preferences at Annapolis; and a conversation with Paul Gottfried about white guilt,, Jews, and Protestants

There are two separate admission tracks at the United States Naval Academy, according to a professor who teaches there. Blacks are routinely admitted with SAT scores which result in the automatic rejection of whites. In many cases blacks are admitted with scores on each part of the SAT that are more than 200 points lower than the minimal requirement for whites.

We live under a disgusting racial socialism that elevates sub-par blacks and Hispanics to positions for which they are not qualified, degrading the standards of our civilization for the sake of manifestly less capable people, who, by the way, do not like us, and in the process making us a society of Orwellian liars and conformists with Orwellian lies. This repulsive racial socialism will continue until the white majority rejects the egalitarian fiction that drive it, the belief that all races have the same abilities and potentials and must be equally represented in every area of society.

The information comes via Phi Beta Cons (The writer is Bruce Fleming, a professor of English at Annapolis. He is not named in the Corner entry. Here is the article by him that the entry quotes.) :

Affirmative Action at the Naval Academy [Robert VerBruggen]

A professor there blows the whistle:

Midshipmen are admitted by two tracks. White applicants out of high school who are not also athletic recruits typically need grades of A and B and minimum SAT scores of 600 on each part for the Board to vote them “qualified.” Athletics and leadership also count.

A vote of “qualified” for a white applicant doesn’t mean s/he’s coming, only that he or she can compete to win the “slate” of up to 10 nominations that (most typically) a Congress(wo)man draws up. That means that nine “qualified” white applicants are rejected. SAT scores below 600 or C grades almost always produce a vote of “not qualified” for white applicants.

Not so for an applicant who self-identifies as one of the minorities who are our “number one priority.” For them, another set of rules apply. Their cases are briefed separately to the board, and SAT scores to the mid-500s with quite a few Cs in classes (and no visible athletics or leadership) typically produce a vote of “qualified” for them, with direct admission to Annapolis. They’re in, and are given a pro forma nomination to make it legit.

Minority applicants with scores and grades down to the 300s with Cs and Ds (and no particular leadership or athletics) also come, though after a remedial year at our taxpayer-supported remedial school, the Naval Academy Preparatory School.

By using NAPS as a feeder, we’ve virtually eliminated all competition for “diverse” candidates: in theory they have to get a C average at NAPS to come to USNA, but this is regularly re-negotiated.

06/18 11:39 AM

- end of initial entry -

Paul Gottfried writes:

While I agree with your critical judgment about the loathsome discrimination that whites at Annapolis and elsewhere inflict on themselves, what I find difficult to accept is that this manifestly unjust system proceeds from a misguided racial egalitarianism on the part of whites. There is lot more that must be taken into account in order to explain the degree of white self-abnegation involved in the use of racial preferences by whites to discriminate against other whites. My book on multiculturalism and the politics of guilt attempts to see the religious side of this development, although the religion I discuss is an obvious perversion of Christianity.

LA replies:

What do you say is the source of the guilt? I say it is the belief that everyone has equal abilities and worth, and therefore that the absence of such equality means that we must be holding down the blacks, we are responsible for black inferiority. Once people understand the reality of racial differences, the guilt would go away.

What do you say is the source of the guilt, and the solution to the guilt?

Paul Gottfried replies:

Admittedly racial egalitarianism and some crude form of Boasian environmentalism contribute to this guilt, since presumably blacks, Hispanics, Hottentots, etc. would have achieved as much as whites and Asians, were it not for bad white Christians who have humiliated other groups. What drives the desperate, unending attempt to make amends, however, is an inversion of Christian ontological sinfulness into social guilt toward designated victims. Liberal Christians have been pushing this theme for several generations, and by now social guilt has become normative Christianity, as I try to show in my book. I would never equate Jewish and Christian liberalism, or even Irish Catholic liberalism with the kind of Protestant liberalism I’ve encountered in my work. Believing that WASPs have gone you dirty or that Christians are innately anti-Semitic does not produce a true-believing liberal, that is, one who thinks that one’s ancestral group is the scum of the earth and that as soon as one proclaims that belief and acts upon it, one can begin the task of endless expiation.

LA replies:

Let me see if I can reconcile these statements.

You seem to be saying that the egalitarian fiction (the races are equal in capacities, so blacks’ backwardness must be due to white racism) is the source of white guilt, but that the energy pushing this guilt and never giving it a rest is the projection of Christian spiritual guilt onto secular racial guilt about nonwhites.

Is that an accurate summary of what you’re saying?

However, this leads me to another point, I think I have just finally understood something you’ve been saying to me for a number of years. You have often told me that Protestant liberals are worse than Jewish liberals, and I never quite understood what you meant by this. But now I think maybe I see it.

What distinguishes Jewish liberalism from Protestant liberalism is the following.

Jewish liberals see white Christians as guilty. The Jews feel ok about themselves, they think the white gentile majority is the problem.

By contrast, white Protestant liberals feel guilty about themselves. This leaves them without a confident group selfhood. They believe only in equality, only in their own guilt for somehow standing in the way of equality. It is this lack of collective and even individual selfhood, this inner nothingness, this willingness to be destroyed, that makes the white Protestants the true liberals. The Jews, whose collective and individual psyche is not guilty under liberalism (since in the liberal world view Jews are victims and the champions of victims), have psychological power and self-confidence and thus are not true liberals.

A true liberal is a person who is willing to accept his group’s extinction. Protestants are willing to accept their group’s extinction. Jews are not. Therefore Protestants are closer to the true liberal essence than the Jews are.

Is this what you’ve been saying?

Paul Gottfried replies:

You’ve summed up my views on the differences between Jewish and Christian liberals with more succinctness that I’ve been able to apply to the problem. And your conclusion is spot on. True liberals, who incarnate the Freudian death wish, yearn for the extinction of their ancestral group.

LA replies:

Thank you. Of course this has been greatly simplified for the sake of discussion, with all kinds of qualifications left out. But it’s worth thinking about further.

LA contnues:

However, what about my first question:

You seem to be saying that the egalitarian fiction (the races are equal in capacities, so blacks’ backwardness must be due to white racism) is the source of white guilt, but that the energy pushing this guilt and never giving it a rest is the projection of Christian spiritual guilt onto secular racial guilt about nonwhites.

Is that an accurate summary of what you’re saying?

Also, what about the white Protestant elites? It’s often said that the liberal elites do NOT feel themselves guilty, they love themselves, it’s OTHER whites that they see as guilty.

How does this fit in your picture?

Paul Gottfried replies:

In response to your last two questions: The source of white guilt in relation to blacks and to a lesser extent Hispanics is the belief that non-whites would have achieved at least as much as whites if they had not been oppressed and degraded. What underlies this belief, which fuels white guilt, is a presumption of racial egalitarianism. If races were understood to be cognitively unequal, a compelling reason for the guilt would be removed.

On the second question, while admittedly white Christian liberal elites feel superior to supposedly less enlightened whites, what this produces is not a sense of group solidarity as members of the same race. Rather those who define themselves as liberals feel no obligation to support white societies as such. They work for their disintegration and displacement in order to show their moral superiority. In Germany the antinational Left combines moral arrogance with ostentatious loathing of their nation. The two qualities, moral self-importance and repugnance for one’s nation or race, are hardly incompatible.

LA replies:

Thanks for the exchange. Most interesting.

June 21

James N. writes:

Quoted below is part of an email I sent you in 2007 on the topic of white guilt in elections. I don’t have time to recompose it to be responsive to the Paul Gottfried interchange, but I think you are both discounting the fear and even the loathing that present day young whites have for the blacks, especially when they live or work in majority or near-majority black environments. They have been raised in a way that the feelings that blacks evoke in them are unacceptable, and we know that when we have unacceptable feelings that are blocked from consciousness, what results is guilt—not real guilt (conviction of sin) but unhealthy, neurotic guilt, which is exactly what we see, all over the white world.

Here is my 2007 e-mail:

This question—why are whites in 2007, especially young whites, SO guilty that they flock to candidates like these nobodies?

The answer, I believe, is that they are expressing a neurotic conflict. Everything they know from outside of their own heads tells them that blacks and whites are the same—except in professional sports, where blacks are superior. Every black person they are taught about is a hero, or a victim of whites. But their experiences as they grow to voting age and beyond bring them into contact with more than a few actual blacks. This is the first generation for which this is true.

They search everywhere—at school, at work, listening to music, watching the news, and (especially) walking home after dark for the blacks who are just like them. They send their children (when they are very small, at least) into venues where they will be in contact with large numbers of blacks. But as they grow and develop into adulthood, the search for blacks who are like whites becomes to some degree frustrating. What can this mean?

To some of them, it means, “I am a racist.” But most of them have sufficient self-regard to know this is not true. They can’t discuss this among themselves. They can’t talk to their teachers, or their parents, or to their husbands or wives. They can’t read, or see, or hear discussion of this phenomenon. But it’s real. What to do? How can they, as Senator Obama says constantly, “heal”?

Well, they can vote for Deval Patrick or Barack Obama, that’s how. The Boston Globe ran a piece before the November election which revealed much, much more than they intended. Listen to the wife of an out-of-work union plasterer in Massachusetts. She said her husband was unemployed because illegal aliens were doing all the work. Deval Patrick wants to facilitate and to protect from Federal action illegal aliens, but she’s voting for Deval Patrick. Why? “I don’t know. He is so well-spoken.”

Well spoken compared to what? To nigg*, that’s what. She’s voting for Deval Patrick because she thinks blacks don’t speak well, and she feels guilty because she thinks that.

This guilt over one’s own white thoughtcrime is the rocket fuel in Barack Obama’s spaceship. Can it carry him to the White House? Perhaps.

James N. also writes:

As the child of liberal Protestants who spent most of his life in a sea of liberal Jews, an observation. I don’t think liberal Jews feel guilty about themselves, not in the slightest. They have extreme pride, almost a vain pride, in their group identity, and they go to great lengths to preserve it. One of my son’s closest little friends was a girl who lived across the street. They were together every day. He wasn’t invited to her seventh birthday party, which was quite unusual.

Even more remarkable was that, after that day, she couldn’t play with him anymore, not even call across the street. That was because he wasn’t a Jew, and she was now old enough for it to matter.

The parents were the most liberal people on the planet. Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, blacks, all should get everything, every possible grace or favor from society, but white Americans? Forget about it!

LA replies:

These were liberal Jews, not Hasidic Jews or something? Where was this?

James N. replies:

This happened in a suburb of Boston, about 70 percent Jewish. These people were very liberal politically, I don’t know which branch of Judaism they subscribed to (they were not outwardly Hasidim). It’s interesting that, among liberal Jews, some appear quite devoted to religion—many, of course, don’t.

My point isn’t to kvetch about this family—just to point out that I don’t think most liberal Jews are motivated by guilt.

LA replies:

Did you ever ask them why their daughter didn’t play with your son any more and didn’t even speak with him? I’m trying to understand the parents’ thinking. “Our daughter can play with every type of child, except a white gentile child”? Or did the parents have a particular problem with you?

James replies:

They didn’t have any choices except white gentiles, or Jews (the town was “exclusive”). Yes, I asked—it was to fight intermarriage.

The anecdote is meant to illustrate the point that liberal Jews of my acquaintance are NOT ashamed of, nor guilty about, their religion or their ethnicity. I believe that their adherence to “white guilt” is an expression of hostility to their white non-Jewish neighbors.

To conclude: Liberal Jews preach that ethnicity and religion don’t matter—unless you’re Jewish.

Larry G. writes:

You are assuming that these actions are a reflection of white guilt combined with a belief in racial equality. Perhaps, instead, it is due to a recognition of black intellectual inferiority, and a recognition that they will never be admitted in any significant numbers without a thumb on the scale in their favor. And so these actions are taken for purely political reasons: to buy peace, to keep the Jessie Jacksons and Al Sharptons out of their hair. What happens to these blacks and Hispanics when they do enter the force? I have heard—I cannot prove—that most end up in support roles and clerical roles, jobs like loading and driving trucks and filling out forms, jobs where they can’t screw up badly enough to actually put people in danger. It’s a cowardly political compromise forced on the military by cowardly politicians who cannot bring themselves to face the truth about racial differences and act accordingly. But there is no question that many or most of those politicians have bought into the myth of racial equality themselves and are pushing these policies out of blind conviction.

David B. writes:

I just read your exchange with Paul Gottfried about white liberal Protestants. In my youth, I was a liberal who happened to be a white Protestant. However, there were other factors.

I was raised to be a New Deal Democrat who believed that the Democrats were for people who needed things from the government. My father impressed this on me. One of the most important Democrats in Tennessee once helped my father to get a job and he never forgot it.

At my rural Tennessee high school in the spring of 1968, many of my classmates were for George Wallace. I was for Bobby Kennedy. I felt that I was on the moral high ground by being for RFK. That fall, I entered college and became a strong liberal.

This changed over time as I began to work for a living and see the world as it was. I noticed the social breakdown and the indifference of liberal elites to it. As liberals took on more of an anti-American outlook, I turned to the right. I had a political science teacher who was a right-winger, believe it or not. He would say, “If you are liberal you consider yourself morally pure.” Later in the 1970s, I came to agree with him. People like George W. Bush and my college professor friends take pride in their moral superiority to white conservatives who are “racists.”

Thucydides writes:

While I agree that Progressivism or modern left-liberalism, including the guilt aspect, can only be understood in light of its origins in Protestant religion, particularly New England millenarian Protestantism, there is another factor at work. This is the very popular modern conception of morality in our culture, whereby to judge morally is to judge impersonally, i.e., independently of one’s interests, one’s identity, and one’s social connections. One is to abstract oneself from all particularity and partiality. What is required is neutrality between one’s interests and those of others and neutrality on competing views of what is the right way to live. The moral standpoint is seen as that of impartial decider, giving equal value to all different desires and beliefs. This is broadly consistent with the Kantian, utilitarian, and contractarian strains of modern liberalism. The objective is to judge all social arrangements from a standpoint ostensibly above and disconnected from any of them. Obviously, this rules out supporting one’s own (country, ethnic identity, social arrangements, morality, etc.); indeed it treats that approach as a vice. This is why it is so comical to see liberals occasionally becoming highly indignant when they say, “How dare you question my patriotism.”

If one thinks, in Alasdair MacIntyre’s words, that rules of morality are justifiable as productive of and at least partially constitutive of a form of shared social life enjoyed by members of the community, then one will see a commitment to one’s own as justifiable. The liberal view on the other hand requires one to adopt the stance of an impartial actor completely disconnected from his own life, and therefore rootless, a kind of cipher stripped of all the things that normally constitute an identity.

Much more could be said, but I thought that this aspect of liberal moral theory needs to be brought into the picture.

Terry Morris writes:

Ha ha! Your exchange with Paul Gottfried ought to give the anti-semitic, anti-Auster crowd a month’s worth of fodder to talk about. :-)

Vincent Chiarello writes:

Your electronic conversation with Professor Gottfried demonstrates once again why this website is an invaluable tool in deciphering the mental and moral shortcomings of an American society dominated during the past half century by untrammeled liberalism. Allow a few comments, please.

I attend Mass at a Traditional Catholic church in which there is a disproportionate number of former U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) graduates, including ex-U.S. Marines. About 15 percent of each graduating class of the USNA can opt for service with the Marine Corps. These men are not surprised at all by Professor Bruce Fleming’s article; in fact, many who maintain contact with their alma mater have commented to me about the “dual track” eligibility and acceptance system. One was the classmate of the current Superintendent. Fleming is just publicly exposing what has been going on for years, while the brass in charge of Annapolis pretend that such blatantly anti-white practices do not exist.

Further, another parishioner, a USNA English professor for nearly three decades (he retired last year), has described to me in detail the lack of basic skills that are now a commonplace amongst far too many of these “diversity” midshipmen (or are they soon to be “midshippersons?”). I suspect that each military academy does what the USNA is doing, but Fleming’s expose probably came about because the USNA has a far greater civilian teaching population than does, for example, West Point. Few instructors at our oldest military academy would write what Fleming did because it would summarily end their military career.

I write, however, mainly to clarify and/or expand Prof. Gottfried’s point about Christian groups having inverted the notion of sinfulness into social guilt. I also note that he uses the term, “Christian” to apply exclusively to Protestant groups, although at one point he alludes to Irish Catholics. I’m not sure that any reader of this thread would interpret Gottfried’s absence of “Catholic” groups as indicative of their being apart and separate from their Protestant brethren in this regard, but were they to do so, they would be very wrong.

It is not an exaggeration to claim that the ecumenical movement since the end of Vatican II (1962-65) had a far greater impact on changes within the Catholic Church than it did with Protestants. Aside from the liturgical revisions, the single most visible consequence of these revisions has been on the Church’s increasingly secular perspective toward society as a whole. In short, the Church has been Protestantized in its societal outlook, and nowhere is this more evident than in dealing with regnant liberalism, once considered the bane of the Church’s existence. I can give no greater proof of that transformation than by citing the fervor by the officials at the University of Notre Dame, mainly priests, to confer an honorary law degree on a president whose very core beliefs are totally at odds with major teachings of the Church. What was at work here is pure and simple Catholic white guilt. For further evidence of this worldview, one need only check what is taught at Jesuit educational institutions.

The contention, therefore, that Catholic liberalism is far less in evidence today than its Protestant and/or Jewish counterparts may have been valid thirty or forty years ago, but not so today. By all measures, the American Catholic Church has become virtually indistinguishable from its Protestant brethren in its decline, as well as its obeisance to the regnant liberalism.

June 22

LA replies to Terry Morris:

What do you mean? That it will confirm their view of me or upset it?

Terry Morris replies:

They will use it as confirmation of their view of you in particular, and of Jews (and Jewish influence) in general. Two Jews hashing it out about why white Protesant liberalism is worse than Jewish liberalism? Surely Tanstaafl is busy putting together a article on the subject as we speak.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 20, 2009 01:23 PM | Send