Dr. Laura, the “N” word, and the rule of black supremacy

I just got around to reading the exchange between radio host Laura Schlessinger and a black female caller in which Dr. Laura repeatedly said the word “nigger.” There was nothing there to object to. Laura was not saying “nigger” in her own voice; rather, she was describing and quoting black men who say “nigger.”

I have not followed the controversy closely, but the widespread condemnation of Schlessinger for her use of “nigger” in that exchange makes it clear that an extraordinary new rule of liberalism has now been put in place. Under this rule, not only is it prohibited for whites to say “nigger,” even though blacks and especially black performers say it all the time, but it is prohibited for whites to refer to the fact that blacks say “nigger” or to quote blacks saying “nigger.”

This new dispensation is very much like Islamic dhimmitude, in which non-Muslims living under Islamic rule are not only prohibited from doing all kinds of things that Muslims may freely do, and not only are they systematically humiliated and debased in all kinds of ways, but they are prohibited from making any critical or even merely objective comment about Islam. Under dhimmitude, non-Muslims are themselves the objects of Muslim rule; therefore they may not speak or comment about Islam, because that would mean that they were treating Islam as an object—as an object of their own, non-Muslim consciousness, which would be tantamount to exerting power over Islam, when, of course, the whole point of dhimmitude is that Muslims are exerting power over non-Muslims. Similarly, under our racial dhimmitude, whites are treated as objects, and all kinds of insulting and demeaning things may be freely said about them by blacks (and by white liberals), even as the whites are forbidden to make even neutral and factual statements about blacks, because that would be to treat blacks as objects of white consciousness, which would be tantamount to whites exerting power over blacks. Most of all, whites may not treat the rule of black supremacy itself as an object of white consciousness. Whites may not comment on black supremacy even in a neutral and factual way, such as quoting blacks’ constant public use of the word “nigger.”

Of course, blacks and liberals will scoff at the notion that we live under a regime of black supremacy. And they are right in the sense that blacks remain at the bottom in terms of various socio-economic indicators. But in terms of the rules and arrangements governing the interaction of the races, it is another story. When it comes to the behaviors allowed to black and the behaviors forbidden to whites; when it comes to endemic black on white violence combined with the total silence of whites about such violence; when it comes to black racial preferences combined with the silencing of whites about such preferences, when it comes to the glorified portrayal of blacks in the media combined with the portrayal of white men as evil and neurotic, we are most certainly living under a rule of black supremacy and white inferiority.

—end of initial entry—

LA writes:

On another point, Schlessinger’s explanation in the wake of the “nigger” incident of why she is leaving radio was incoherent. She’s supposed to be so smart. Can’t she do better than this?

Ben W. writes:

One has to use the “N” word in niggardly fashion…

LA replies:

Or else one’s mainstream job and career will disappear into a black hole.

August 20

James N. writes:

I’ve heard of her, of course, but not in years.

Anyway, you are very sharp to point out that the thoughtcrime has now gone well beyond saying “nigger” or harboring any negative feelings towards blacks. It is now impermissible to think about blacks, as a distinct group with group attributes, at all (although, of course, most blacks think about themselves this way constantly).

Why might this be?

I believe it is because, if whites were able to think about blacks as blacks, then they would, in short order, begin to conceptualize THEMSELVES as a coherent group—with a culture, with a polity, with interests, with strengths and weaknesses, some in need of improvement, some worthy of defense—and, if whites were to begin to do this, it would end the world as it now exists.

I do believe, as I think you know, that the majority of whites are mired in a neurotic conflict about this—they actually DO have such mental images of blacks as a group, but they struggle to keep them from consciousness, and the resulting (classic) neurotic conflict is expressed as what we call “white guilt”.

LA replies:

Try to imagine the mental state of a white person who is toiling in the conflict you describe. He has negative thoughts about black violence, black job performance, black racial preferences, black anti-white racism, and so on, but he can never speak these thoughts aloud, and he can never even allow himself to think them clearly to himself. Even I, who have written a fair amount about the phenomenon of white guilt, cannot fully picture to myself what it’s like to live day to day in such falsity, to be always maneuvering and negotiating inside one’s own head between certain thoughts that one has and the absolute imperative not to speak or think those thoughts because they are evil. I suppose that there would be, not one, but several typical “protocols” by which white people manage their forbidden racial thoughts. If readers have ideas about what these protocols might be, please send them in.

I’ll start the submissions with one of my favorites, which I’ve quoted several times over the years. In his 1997 book, “A Country of Strangers: Black and White in America,” David K. Shipler writes: “This is the ideal: to search your attitudes, identify your stereotypes, and correct for them as you go about your daily duties.”

The Shipler type is half old-fashioned guilt-ridden liberal Jew, half self-examining Puritan who is always hard at work on himself. He acknowledges that he has a sinful tendency to harbor racist thoughts, and when he becomes aware of their presence in his head and heart he consciously sets about correcting them.. So, for example, when he sees some rowdy threatening black youths and feels an upsurge of fear and resentment, he will deliberately say to himself something like this: “My negative response to those black youths is wrong. It is based on wrong premises. I see these people out on a wilding spree, and my primitive, knee jerk reaction is to blame them. But the truth, which is so easy to forget, is that these young men have been made into what they are by white racism. They are entirely innocent, and do not deserve my contempt, but my sympathy. My anger and disgust and fear should be directed not at these blacks, but at the racist white society that shaped them. And now I turn my negative thoughts into positive thoughts by rededicating myself to the project of building a new society where racism will be no more.”

LA continues:

By the way, I last listened to Dr. Laura’s radio program around 15 years ago. I found it unsettling. These people would call her up, asking for her help with their personal problems, and she would just tear into them for their bad behavior, their weaknesses and so on. Nothing wrong with chastizing and correcting people, that’s fine. But she took it way too far. There was a weird, bullying, almost sadistic quality on her side, and a masochistic, “Yes, Dr. Laura, tell me how bad I am, yes, yes!” quality on the side of her callers. It wasn’t my cup of tea.

August 20

Amelia writes:

It’s not just the N-Word.

Our local radio station regularly plays a “public service announcement” in which a person of unidentifiable sex lectures us in a serious tone about how mean it is to say “that’s so gay,” and admonishes us to “knock it off!.” Of course, it is never pointed out that the alternative sex enthusiasts are the ones who took a lovely word from our everyday vocabulary and turned it into something with a vaguely cheerful and gossamer hint to signal—what?—homosexual behavior?—libidinal urges?—release from dull normalcy?

And it’s not just the word “gay.” There is a whole new lexicon of words and expressions (“teabagging”) that signal practices and enthusiasms of a particular subculture—innuendo and code for communicating just below the radar of the rest of us.

The word they are currently working on changing the meaning of is “marriage.”

Not only have they hijacked the vocabulary, now they are entitled to determine how it can be used and by whom.

It’s the “Humpty Dumpty Effect”: “Words mean what I say they mean, nothing more, nothing less!”

Those who control the language, control thought, and, ultimately, the culture.

James P. writes:

You wrote:

Of course, blacks and liberals will scoff at the notion that we live under a regime of black supremacy. And they are right in the sense that blacks remain at the bottom in terms of various socio-economic indicators. But in terms of the rules and arrangements governing the interaction of the races, it is another story. When it comes to the behaviors allowed to black and the behaviors forbidden to whites; when it comes to endemic black on white violence combined with the total silence of whites about such violence; when it comes to black racial preferences combined with the silencing of whites about such preferences, when it comes to the glorified portrayal of blacks in the media combined with the portrayal of white men as evil and neurotic, we are most certainly living under a rule of black supremacy and white inferiority.

The old Moldbug quote, to the effect that blacks constitute America’s new nobility, remains relevant.

Alan Roebuck writes:

Alt right had a post on this subject, to which I posted this comment:

At the deepest level, the fact that blacks use the word “nigger” frequently but punish non-blacks who use it shows that the word is sacred to blacks: If any non-black uses it, he has defiled the sacred and must be punished severely. Just as in ancient Israel, gentiles who entered any but the outer courts of the Temple were supposed to be put to death, non-blacks may not participate in what is sacred to blacks by saying “nigger.”

This shows that the sacred need not be something good. Anything that arouses strong emotions among a people is likely to viewed as sacred, and participation in it by outsiders arouses strong feelings of hatred. And, of course, this is not just a Jewish or Black thing. The general idea is part of human nature.

[end of comment at Alt Right]

Your analysis says something very similar: Non-blacks, especially whites, are not allowed to participate in black society by using one of their sacred words. But most people don’t acknowledge this. Just as the word “anti-Semitic” has become nearly useless because neither side acknowledges the reality to which it refers, most people are unaware of exactly what black anger over white use of the N word signifies.

Leonard D. writes:

On the question of the “protocols by which white people manage their forbidden racial thoughts,” there are several that stand out most to me. I think what is common about them as I see them is that they are oriented around not having such thoughts to begin with.

First is simple ignorance. Most people do not know enough about racial differences to have a valid opinion on it. This ignorance is carefully cultivated by the press and other progressive institutions, i.e. the state and private education systems.

Another protocol is what one might call benevolence bias combined with thoughtcrime. The idea here is that people should never believe anything an expert tells them, unless they are convinced he is benevolent. But progressives have staked out certain ideas as thoughtcrime, so that the merest expression of them is proof of malevolence. Race is one: any expression of racial difference is racism is evil, ergo, anyone who talks about race must not be listened to.

Combined with ignorance is the progressive/scientific insistence on hard proof for anything. Even if you, personally, happen to feel menaced on the streets of the inner city, so what? That’s just your personal experience, an anecdote. You can’t generalize from it without a controlled study! This allows almost anyone to crimestop easily in almost any context. If you don’t know anything, and you don’t have to believe anyone who attempts to educate you, you never have to learn anything except what you want to learn. I note that the Internet has partially overcome this one, since at least a lot of us get political opinions off the Internet far more than we do from other sources, and on the net, avoiding hard proof is harder. If you just have to click on a link to see a hatefact, its much harder to avoid.

One more protocol is the modern radical rejection of the use of statistical thought about people. More familiarly, this is the delegitimization of “stereotypes.” Progressives want life to be fair, and it is true that for an individual be judged only by a stereotype is unfair. So, progressives have decided that using stereotypes is wrong. Consequentially they have educated everyone to believe that no statistical truth about people means anything if there is even a single counterexample. I don’t know how they did this, perhaps by mere negligence working with a weakness in human thought. But regardless, now if you ever attempt to generalize about any group, you’ll almost immediately be presented with a counterexample by some well-meaning listener. This is sufficient to work as crimestop for the most listeners, namely, progressives, and sadly, the progressively educated. I.e., “Men are taller than women.” “What? No, I once knew a woman who was taller than me!” “Muslims are prone to religiously-motivated violence against non-Muslims.” “No, I know many peaceful Muslims!”

James N. writes:

On the question of the “protocols by which white people manage their forbidden racial thoughts,” that’s simple—they vote for Deval Patrick and Barack Obama.

August 21

Edward L. writes:

Leonard D. wrote:

One more protocol is the modern radical rejection of the use of statistical thought about people. More familiarly, this is the delegitimization of “stereotypes.” Progressives want life to be fair, and it is true that for an individual be judged only by a stereotype is unfair. So, progressives have decided that using stereotypes is wrong. Consequentially they have educated everyone to believe that no statistical truth about people means anything if there is even a single counterexample. I don’t know how they did this, perhaps by mere negligence working with a weakness in human thought.

That is an excellent insight and one that I think certainly merits a new thread in its own right. He’s entirely correct about the left’s visceral hostility to statistical generalization and, for that matter, patterns of any kind. I would add two things:

(1) Liberals do not reject statistical generalizations when there’s any kind of affirmative action angle at stake: e.g., “If you’re a black male, you’re X times more likely to be incarcerated than if you’re white.” That kind of generalization flies because it has the effect of thrusting a sense of embarrassment onto whites and implicitly demands lesser criminal penalties for blacks. Since it’s white racism that’s notionally at stake, the disproportionate incarceration rate supposedly does not reflect intrinsically on blacks in the same unfavorable light that racial intelligence generalizations do.

Note also the habitual use of the passive voice (e.g., “be incarcerated”) in reference to blacks. This could be added to the list of protocols.

(2) The right too has militated against statistical generalization on the issue of census sampling. I don’t think that it’s quite as intellectually unsound as what Leonard is talking about, but unsound nevertheless.

LA replies:

I’ve taken your suggestion and have copied the several comments relating to the “protocols” into a new entry.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 19, 2010 05:56 PM | Send