A national census should be nothing more than a statistical exercise, arousing no more emotion than renewing one’s driver’s license. However, given the fact that the US has become a cauldron of competing ethnic interests where anti-White hostility is the norm for the mainstream media, it has aroused all sorts of controversies, especially among liberals with the usual axes to grind.
The mainstream media is using the census as a teachable moment to spinpropaganda on multiculturalism and the ‘destiny’ of the United States as a non-White and miscegenated country. An example that I cannot not resist discussing is CNN.com’s series “Census: Who Am I?” It asks some prominent — and not so prominent — figures their opinion on the 2010 US census. Each article is filled with the usual multicultural mantras such as “what we do matters more than labels,” “I can’t fit in a single box on a census form” or ” “‘where are you from’ is not the right question.”
It is so obviously biased that out of the twenty essays currently on display, only five are written by Whites — not a random selection of Whites, of course, but Whites who have been carefully selected to exhibit appropriate White guilt or who, as victims themselves, can be safely counted on to be sympathetic to all things multicultural. At times the articles are nothing but rabid anti-White rant.
Exhibit A is novelist Walter Mosley whose anti-White tone perfectly reflects the sentiments of the rest of the articles — Whites as oppressors, haters, murderers, and rapists:
[I am] an American whose black-skinned ancestors were stolen from their lives and cultures and piled in the holds of ships like so many sacks of skin. An American whose Jewish ancestors stowed their lives into the holds of later vessels running from a thousand years of anti-Semitism that was soon to blossom into a Holocaust. An American whose ancestors walked across the frozen waters from Asia to North America discovering a new world that would one day be stolen from their descendants. … An English-speaking American whose language is also … sublime Spanish from the Mexicans and Mexican-Americans I rubbed shoulders with growing up in Southern California. … I might be related to Thomas Jefferson or any of 10,000 masters who raped and sometimes even loved their slaves.
Exhibit B is Iranian-American Maz Jobrani, a comedian who helped lead the “Axis of Evil” comedy tour poking fun at Middle Eastern stereotypes and recently made a television pilot called “Funny in Farsi.” He has suffered greatly since coming to America, showing that anti-White hostility is not reserved only for Blacks with a long historical memory. People just off the boat understand that the best way for them to get ahead in America is to adopt the anti-White perspectives being spewed by the mainstream media.
Jobrani says he once met a woman at a club who asked him about his heritage and she walked away when he told her he was Iranian. (GASP!) He also claims he was called “sheikh”, “towel-head” and was told to “go home, Iranian” while living in the San Francisco Bay area during the Iranian hostage crisis in the early 1980s.
He now bemoans the fact that the census considers him White. Jobrani has a message for other Arab- and Persian-Americans: “Check it right; you ain’t white!”Jobrani says that people should check the “other” box and spell out their ethnicity on the form.
I obviously agree that people like Jobrani should not be considered White Americans. But from their point of view, it’s all about ethnic pride and money. In fact, Arab American Institute leaders aren’t shy to say that “information from each census is used for everything from determining federal and state funding for communities to awarding grants”, so naturally they wish to have their own category.
Cheryl Contee, the co-founder of Jack and Jill Politics, an African-American political blog, also gets the opportunity to tell us about ourselves. She says she is at least 25% Native American and is also part White, but she is not at all comfortable with expressing her White origins publicly.
When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot. … I do know from family stories and whispers on both sides that being Indian somehow felt even more scary than being Negro. Given the intensity of the oppression of African-Americans in this country says something about how Native Americans have been historically treated. … I’m proud to be African-American — I’ve co-founded in my spare time one of the most popular and influential Black blogs on the Internet:JackandJillPolitics.com. It doesn’t get much Blacker than that!. …
Another essay was written by the other co-founder of the Jack & Jill Politics blog, a comedian who goes by the name of Baratunde Thurston. His essay is supposed to be funny, but he has a hip-hop sense of humor I could not grasp. He makes a bunch of disconnected statements about his mother’s “rabble-rousing days in Washington during the ’60s and ’70s”, and says that he still has “a lot of her original vinyl records from that era, and to commemorate Malcolm X this February, [he] live-streamed several of his speeches via Ustream.” He describes his lecture “How to Be Black (Online)“: “I talked about the different ways African-Americans access and use the Internet and raised the question: Are we merely consumers of the new technologies that abound, or are we also creating them?” (I’ll answer his question: Users.) His Harvard education also prepared him to write his forthcoming book How To Be Black and to be called “someone I need to know” by Barack Obama.
Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor of English at Brooklyn College, the City University of New York, was chosen because he represents the cosmopolitan non-White expatriate from whom we have much to learn. He is an Arab, who was born in Switzerland, grew up in Canada and now lives in Brooklyn. Although is piece is far less intense than the others, he still describes his struggle with his identity as an Arab-American, the discomfort he feels when being asked about his origins and concludes by saying that “it’s up to us to douse the flames of hatred and intolerance before they start”.
Anousheh Ansari, an Iranian-American entrepreneur was the first female commercial space flight participant and the first Muslim woman to travel to space. She is also the author of My Dream of Stars: From Daughter of Iran to Space Pioneer. She comes up with platitudes like “by labeling ourselves or others, we create boxes, boundaries and decide who belongs on what side of the line. We divide ourselves and […] determine which side of the line is better.” Even less original was the following remark: “When I was floating freely in space and looking back on Earth from my safe haven amongst the stars, I saw a world without division […] I knew that back on Earth, these imaginary lines were very much present and causing all of our problems. But up there, the lines did not matter. They did not exist.”
Ines Hernandez-Avila is professor and incoming chair of Native American Studies and co-director of the Chicana/Latina Research Center at the University of California, Davis. She is also a founder of NAISA, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and a member of the Latina Feminist Group. She is a Ford Foundation/National Research Council Fellow, at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. In other words, she is a complete product of affirmative action and the grievance industry. She goes on describing her complex ancestry composed of many breeds of native Americans, how she was an activist in the Chicano Movement in Texas in the 1970s and early ’80s, and concludes that“naming matters” and that her identity is “Nimipu/Tejana” — that is, a Nimipu (a member of the Nez Perce tribe) and a Tejana (a Chicana from Texas) .
The rant goes on in the next essay, written by Raquel Cepeda, an “award-winning” journalist and documentary filmmaker. She was also editor-in-chief ofOneworld Magazine, a defunct hip-hop rag run by rap tycoon and black activist Russell Simmons. Cepeda is a mixed-race women: “a Latina, Dominican-American and Latino-American, interchangeably.” Through commercial genetic genealogy testing, she says she discovered that she is “the face of miscegenation in the New World. And the journey is just beginning.” Praising the miscegenated make-up of Latinos, she says: “As our numbers grow to more than 130 million in the next several decades, so will the racial landscape of the nation shift radically.” She warns about the coming pushback by Whites: “Couple anti-immigration hysteria and a 41 percent spike in hate crimes against Latinos over the past six years with a troubled economy, and one may find a pressure cooker waiting to explode.”
She also complains about the reintroduction of the offensive term “Negro” and blames the U.S. Census Bureau for a “failed attempt at engaging the hip-hop generation” saying it is “alienating the very people it’s spending millions of dollars trying to target.” Keeping an eye on government subsidies given to protected groups, she adds: “On the one hand, it’s important for every citizen to be counted because the information collected determines how $400 billion dollars of federal funding is allocated”. Taking a staunch anti-White position, she concludes: “While we collectively continue to ignore the festering wound, I intend on honoring my ancestors on the census form by rejecting the term ‘Negro’ and opting to identify my African, Amerindian and Arabic roots by filling in the blanks under ‘some other race’.”
Then we have U.S. representative Anh Cao, a Vietnamese-American who arrived in the United States as a refugee when the Vietnam War ended. Throughout his life, he has been an activist for the rights of refugees and an immigration lawyer. He says that Japanese-American and minority rights advocate Mike Honda encouraged him to run for office when he saw that there were not enough Vietnamese-Americans in public service. Another piece is written by Chang-rae Lee, a Korean-American novelist whose “books explore identity and assimilation among immigrants and first-generation American citizens”, while another one is written by Jean Kwok, a Chinese-American writer whose first novel, Girl in Translation, explores “these issues of identity through the story of an immigrant Chinese girl and her mother, who not only survive difficult circumstances, but triumph over them.” Kwok also tells the story of her father who, when she was a child, gave her the family’s genealogy book: “These are your bloodlines,” he said. “Four-thousand years that went into making you. We copy this book, generation after generation, so that we won’t forget.”
Nafees A. Syed who was born in the state of Georgia to Indian parents also gets her say. She is a senior at Harvard University, an editorial writer at The Harvard Crimson and a senior editor for the Harvard-MIT journal on Islam and society,Ascent. She claims that one time on Independence Day, she and her family were taunted by a man who said “what planet are y’all from?” She also claims that she is occasionally told to “go back where [she] came from.” Then she also utters the cliché “if all of us ‘went back to where we came from,’ meaning the places of our family origin, there would be nobody in America except for Native Americans.”She then adds more clichés like “I am a Muslim and I am an American … a fair study of Islamic and American values would find corroboration, not contradiction”. She concludes with: “There are three important dimensions in my life — my religion, my ethnicity and my country — and they are all at peace.”
Next in line is Lila Downs, a Mexican/American singer, Latin Grammy Award winner as well as Academy Award nominee who lives in New York, Mexico City and Oaxaca. Her father was a White university professor and her mother was Mixtec (an indigenous groups from the state of Oaxaca, in Mexico). She goes on describing that she first “chose to deny [her] Mexican heritage at one point in [her] life, since [she] felt it made people uncomfortable.” She adds: “I didn’t realize I was denying myself, but that I would at one point have to confront and accept who I really was.” She claims her identity journey began when her father died: “I was left with my mother, a very independent Indian woman who was also mestizo. […] We spoke about her Indian-ness, about Mexican social ideals, about being a strong woman … I was curious about this new self that had been buried in shame. I was hungry to learn more about why I was the way I was.”
Finally, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, lectures us in her essay called “I’m a criminal and so are you”. She is a mulatto who was the director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California and of the Civil Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School. She now holds a joint appointment with the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University. All of which illustrates that being an anti-White advocate has a very nice payoff in today’s academic world.
She seems to think there is no difference between misdemeanors and felonies:
Haven’t you ever smoked pot, didn’t you ever drink underage, don’t you sometimes speed on the freeway, haven’t you gotten behind the wheel after having a couple of drinks? Haven’t you broken the law? … As I see it, you’re just somebody who hasn’t been caught. You’re still a criminal, no better than many of those who’ve been branded felons for life.
She then goes on with her antics:
If everyone were forced to acknowledge their own criminality, maybe we, as a nation, would second-guess our apparent zeal for denying full citizenship to those branded felons … In this country, we force millions of people — who are largely black and brown —into a permanent second-class status, simply because they once committed a crime.
The cultural Marxist line becomes even clearer when we look at the few Whites they chose. The first two are young Whites, 23 and 31 years old respectively. They are devoured by White guilt and can only be described as brainwashed far-left lunatics.
One is David Paul Strohecker, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is covered with tattoos and piercings. He says his sociopolitical views are a large part of his identity, and he incorporates these into what he wears — for example, T-shirts with the faces of activists whom he admires. He is aware that others see how he presents himself as a “measure of [his] character” and “it is to this end that [he] deliberately tries to throw people off.” He says his body is a “billboard” for his “life.” and his “tattoos tell the story of [his] identity”. His earliest tattoos were direct quotes and Bible verses that “captured [his] identity as an outspoken social-justice advocate.” He then says hebegan to display his political views more directly in later tattoos: “I have the ‘female’ sign behind my left ear to reflect my commitment to feminism and women everywhere; I have the Human Rights Campaign logo behind my right ear to reflect my commitment to LGBT struggles.”
The very politically correct and handsomely tattooed David Paul Strohecker
The other bubblehead is Christian Lander, the Canadian-born writer living in Los Angeles who published a satirical book called Stuff White People Like and has a blog with the same name. “I’m not attempting to assert some sort of superiority through my Whiteness; quite the opposite actually. Thanks to my liberal upbringing, I am imbued with the appropriate amount of guilt and shame about my ancestors and their actions in the New World”. Thinking he’s funny, he then says: “Even in my home, I can’t offer a blanket to a nonWhite friend without the fear that they [sic] will look at me and say ‘no smallpox on this right?'”
I’m a White male. I belong to a group that pretty much always been [sic] able to own land and to vote. I’m more or less from the kind that grabbed power somewhere after the fall of Rome and never let go. In other words, I’m the kind of White guy that has never experienced any real oppression.
I am sure that he will welcome the coming oppression of Whites when they become a minority among people with all that anti-White hostility. And he’s completely forgotten about the long wars with Muslims — the fact that the Balkans, Spain and Constantinople were taken and ruled by Muslims invaders. Like everywhere else in the world, Europe has a history of both invading and being invaded. But he is completely programmed by the education system and the mass media, both of which relentlessly bombard the populace with the culturally Marxist line of thinking.
Lander goes on citing Marxist activist Noel Ignatiev, who is on a crusade to deny the existence of race as a biological reality and to “abolish the White race,” describing Ignatiev’s book as “actual, intelligent research.” Lander is the sort of liberal who thinks he understands everything when he is in fact completely brainwashed by conventional anti-White propaganda — the morality tale that White people are the only evil people in the world:
America has a long history of welcoming immigrants who will never be able to check that white box on the census, and unfortunately that means America also has a long history of discrimination against those people. … Just one example would be the treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II contrasted against the treatment of German-Americans. … But all of that was in the past right? Well, ask yourself this: Who is more likely to get pulled over and forced to show his papers in Arizona today? A first generation Canadian immigrant, or a 10th generation Mexican-American?
But of course, the reason Mexican-Americans are more likely to get pulled over is because they are literally invading this country with perhaps has many as 20 million illegal aliens. If Canada sent as many illegals to the United States, it would lose two thirds of its population!
He then concludes with: “What I hope this census will force the country to deal with is the fact that White immigrants like me will never again make up the majority of people that come to this country. America is not getting Whiter, it will never get Whiter. Well, unless we start handing those blankets out again.” The sad reality is that it America will not remain White as long as Whites think like Lander.
While Bill Ayers could not have done a better job writing the articles by Strohecker and Lander, the three other essays written by Whites do not reach the same level of delirium. They are written by middle age Whites. The reason they were chosen by CNN.com is because they all belong to a minority victim group: they are disabled. In other words, CNN’s survey of Americans does not include even one White person who has any doubts about the non-White future, even though a major political theme recently has been White rage, especially among working class Whites who are being dispossessed by the onslaught that is celebrated by CNN.
One White victim is Anne Feeley, a brain cancer survivor and an activist for brain cancer research who labels herself a “feminist.” Another is Robert David Hall, an actor best known for his role as coroner Dr. Albert Robbins on the TV show “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.” Robbins, the victim of an accident in which he lost his legs and was burned over 60 percent of his body, is an advocate for the disabled. The last White victim is Shane Stanford, the pastor of Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church, a hemophiliac and has been HIV positive for more than 20 years, due to a contaminated blood supply.
None of these three essays had anything to do with race or ethnicity. They were chosen because their authors belong to the “disabled” minority. As victims, they are in the same boat as the ethnic grievance industry — a group with special claims on society. Leaving that aside, I must say that the hardships they have gone through are truly moving and make the other minority writers look like a bunch of arrogant, spoiled and selfish whiners, whose little worlds revolve around their phony ‘identity’ struggles.
The funniest thing about this series of articles is that at the end of each essay, CNN inserts that “the opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of [the author].” But it’s obvious that they were deliberately chosen by CNN.comprecisely because they beat the drums of multiculturalism, miscegenation, anti-White hostility, and ethnic minority grievances. The only Whites allowed into this forum are those who have internalized a powerful sense of guilt or who are victims themselves — the coalition of the aggrieved that is now such a powerful political force in the US.
Needless to say, there is no space for White victims who have lost their jobs to immigrants or to affirmative action. Nor are their stories by Whites who have been victimized by non-White criminals. This, after all, is the mainstream media, and those aren’t the stories they want to tell.
William Davis (email him) is a freelance writer.
