This Sunday’s Week in Review section fronts with a non-groundbreaking quote corral on the Times’ favorite issue of late: Will whites vote for Barack Obama?

Not if he’s too much of a black power fist-pumper, concludes black journalist Marcus Mabry, in what I would describe as a “revelation” fit to print only by the sliding standards of affirmative action. (Really? We couldn’t figure this out?)

Mabry, whose own background suggests he’s a sort of journalistic Obama himself, lazily phones around to the short list of race talkers: John McWhorter and Orlando Patterson (black conservative, black liberal, roughly), Jesse Jackson, Jr., academic Alan Wolfe and author Rick Perlstein. Also on the list is Pat Buchanan, who’s allowed to mention that if blacks are going to support Obama by 90 percent, it’s a little silly to cry racism when whites exhibit a pattern of voting for whites. My neighbors should be grateful that Buchanan, and not David Frum or Bill Kristol, was chosen to speak for the white point of view.

Here is Buchanan, by the way, schooling Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on this very issue. Do take a moment to watch Cohen squirm.

While not boring us with insights any third-rate blogger could have given us months ago, Mabry wrongly suggests it’s a “prejudice” for whites to think blacks are less patriotic (a little hard not to think, with Rev. Jeremiah Wright damning America and Michelle Obama saying that only now that her husband is successful is she proud of America). Mabry also thinks its prejudicial to link blacks to crime (readers not familiar with the positions of white advocacy should consult Jared Taylor’s “The Color of Crime” report to see that this is not, in fact, counter-factual).

He concludes with that media favorite: Economics, not race, tells the real story.

Mabry’s central point—that whites won’t vote for a too-black candidate—isn’t necessarily wrong. But he stops short about why: Even in this age of near-maximum saturation of political correctness and egalitarian dogma, many whites simply balk at embracing blacks. To white advocates, of course, this is perfectly natural and easily explained: Blacks are a different race with markedly different behavior patterns, intelligence levels and value systems.

The premise that members of different races are fungible is completely mistaken. Only in the deepest reaches of their subconscious do whites still get this. And to my mind, their enthusiasm for Obama is only more evidence of this: It’s the exaggerated gesticulation of a white person forcing themselves to be, or appear, “non-racist.” TOO contributor Hereward Lindsay observes this superficial overfriendliness when a white person will grunt or merely nod to another white, but all of a sudden becomes animated and solicitous when speaking to a black.

In other words, the Obama ascension isn’t a sign to me that races have changed, or even that the human capacity for dealing with racial difference has changed: we have simply moved the furniture around.

There’s another point that the Times and much of the blogosphere has missed in the swoon over this “historic moment”. Obama is a politician. He is not the first black politician. Blacks, in fact, are pretty well suited to politics: they are often gregarious, good speakers, able to command loyalty and work the room. They are typically elected where blacks are concentrated. And indeed, Marion Barry, Wilson Goode, David Dinkins, Cory Booker, Ray Nagin and many others fill a volume like this.

This is not, I repeat, not, a sign that blacks have achieved more than they would have absent intelligence and behavior levels on parity with that of whites. It’s a sign that blacks are loyal to blacks, and have figured out (mostly) how to pull the lever at the local voting precinct (though apparently, requiring them to produce ID is “racist”). Clearly, Marion Barry’s “stewardship” of Washington, D.C. did nothing to improve crime rates or education problems in that heavily-black city — and he personally actually made them worse.

Asians are good counter-example: they are quieter and far less adept at politics, as their anemic numbers in those ranks demonstrate. But they fare better because they’re entrepreneurial, hard-working and math-smart.

So Obama’s securing the Democratic nomination is not, in fact, a sign that blacks have “progressed” to actual equality with whites, only that our media and minders have hustled a black man to the front of the line for their own purposes. President Obama will not erase inherent racial differences. He will not make it so that whites in Cambridge will invite black gang members into their midst. He will not make it so that blacks outscore whites on the LSAT. He will not make the Bronx a friendlier environment for whites (and might even make it more dangerous, with that extra boost of confidence for the swaggering black male).

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In fact, as others have noted, it might actually do some damage to the black cause, in so far as affirmative action starts to look still more ridiculous with a black man sitting in the White House (though I am confident that the anti-white network will manage this situation effectively, patiently explaining to credulous whites why they must accept this contradiction). One hopes for some white consciousness-raising, but every time I think to myself that some catastrophic event will “wake whites up,” it never does. Whites, despite their revealed internal instincts, are determined to consciously believe that “race is just a skin color,” and many will use the image of President Obama to sustain that illusion.

Our task as white advocates is to show that the reality on the ground is a far cry from black Camelot.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.

Jeremy Waldron, in the latest NYRB, has reviewed what looks to be a valuable book by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the thought that we hate: A biography of the First Amendment. However, Waldron ends his review with a rather insidious plea concerning the legal restriction of public pronouncements about other races and ethnies. Here’s what he says (p. 44) [emphasis added]:

Lewis’s settled position, I think, is that we do better to swallow hard and tolerate ‘the thought that we hate’ than open ourselves to the dangers of state regulation. I am not convinced. The case is certainly not clear on either side, and Lewis acknowledges that. But it is worth remembering a couple of final points.

First, the issue is not thought that we hate, as though defenders of hate speech laws want to get inside people’s minds. The issue is publication and the harm done to individuals and groups through the disfiguring of our social environment by visible, public, and semi-permanent announcements to the effect that in the opinion of one group in the community, perhaps the majority, members of another group are not worthy of equal citizenship. The old idea of group libel — as opposed to hateful thoughts or hateful conversation — makes this clear, and it is no accident that a number of European countries still use that term.

Well, the term “libel” is a good one. But when applied to the libeling of a private individual, whose reputation has supposedly been unjustly tarnished, the libeler has to have made a false statement. If the statement turns out to be true, it is not libel. “Reputation” is a critical feature of social relations. It can take a long time to establish a good one and an instant to lose it. But when an accusation is valid, the person’s reputation deserves to be affected. The same holds for “group libel” when one calls attention to group differences (e.g., blacks have lower IQ) or mentions the activity of ethnic organizations (e.g., the role of the organized Jewish community in ending immigration policies that favored the European majority in the U.S.).

A court punishes a libeler via due process in which both the falsity and the harmful nature of the statement must be demonstrated to the court’s satisfaction. But truth is a perfectly adequate defense. If the truth is harmful or distasteful to a group, that’s just too bad, just as is the case for an individual. Of course, when people are interacting in good faith, there is no reason for not conveying the truth diplomatically and politely.

One must also consider the fact that to be consistent with principle, any law must apply equally to all parties. Therefore harsh criticisms of ‘whites’, ‘white society’, and ‘Western civilization’ would also have to be examined as potential cases of ‘hate speech’. In that case, would the words of Rev. Wright constitute an offense? Or those of the late literary darling of NY intellectuals, Susan Sontag, who retracted her remark that the white race is the cancer of human history by saying that it slandered cancer patients? To do otherwise would be to violate neutrality, one of the fundamental principles of, dare one say it, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ jurisprudence?

Waldron continues:

Secondly, the issue is not just our learning to tolerate thought that we hate — we the First Amendment lawyers, for example. The harm that expressions of racial hatred do is harm in the first instance to the groups who are denounced or bestialized in pamphlets, billboards, talk radio, and blogs. It is not harm — if I can put it bluntly — to the white liberals who find the racist invective distasteful. Maybe we should admire some lawyer who says he hates what the racist says but defends to the death his right to say it, but this sort of intellectual resilience is not what’s at issue. The question is about the direct targets of the abuse. Can their lives be led, can their children be brought up, can their hopes be maintained and their worst fears dispelled, in a social environment polluted by these materials? Those are the concerns that need to be answered when we defend the use of the First Amendment to strike down laws prohibiting the publication of racial hatred.

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Of course people may be offended, deeply hurt even, when members of other branches of humanity look down on them because of behaviors which are indeed widespread within the targeted group. But traditional Mormons (LDS) and Muslims really do sanction polygamy and many of these polygamous families are indeed on welfare. And the organized Jewish community is indeed the main force influencing U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. We should be able to say these things even if those discussed are offended by such remarks.

This is something that Waldron and other racial apologists cannot accept and why his special pleading is insidious. Of course, Muslims who oppose polygamy and Jews who oppose the Israel lobby don’t deserve to be included as guilty of these actions. But they either have a moral imperative to control the perpetrators in their midst or, if that is not possible — as it usually is not — to dissociate themselves from them and their anti-social acts (as many members of many groups have).

Human cognitive systems are evolutionarily preprogrammed to attend to cues for danger and to avoid things that are disliked. Such stereotyping, when applied to other human groups, may not appeal to many people’s moral sense, but it is a form of generalization which is an invaluable and constant cognitive process for all humans — even when the stereotype does not apply to all members of the group.

Stereotypes are rules of thumb. When we are in an in-group, we tend to exaggerate the extent to which members of out-groups have negative traits. These perceptions are useful for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that they make us cautious in dealing with members of the out-group. If I know that young black men are much more likely than whites or Asians to be street criminals, I would be well advised to keep a good distance from a young black man even when a particular black is not a criminal. “Better safe than sorry” is a good mammalian rule. Like it or not, our evolutionary history has been dictated by an eye toward survival, not canonization.

And if the information that young black men are much more likelyto be street criminals is useful in everyday life, then we should be able to state it without incurring the wrath of the thought police — even if it hurts the feelings of blacks.

Typically lost sight of is the fact that hate is a complex emotional/motivational mechanism that evolved as part of a defense system. If it were totally absent, our ancestors wouldn’t have lasted long in the face of the predatory humans of other tribes, ethnies, or races. Why? Because they wouldn’t have been motivated to defend themselves. Remember all those propaganda images from WWII. They promoted hatred toward stereotyped enemies.

Of course today’s politically correct dogma has pathologized “hate”, presumably on the grounds that there is no good reason to have negative stereotypes of certain targets, especially other races and ethnies. To the extent that we can know anything in the social sciences, this is simply untrue.

Often the people complaining most about negative stereotypes are quite prone, themselves, to stereotyping when it suits their interest (e.g., blacks blaming white “racists” and “hate mongers” for their own especially high black crime rate). And it is doubtless true that people do sometimes make mistakes and falsely accuse others (e.g., certain extreme varieties of “Holocaust Denial”). But the solution to that is to educate, inform and explain.

If  a public verbal attack on a group turns out to be malicious accusation where the accuser cannot back up his accusation with facts, then the accuser  might well be held accountable for “group libel,” even if the punishment is nothing more than hostile public opinion. For example, the loss of one’s job as a broadcaster for saying blacks have superior athletic ability because of breeding practices is certainly substantial punishment — especially since the essential notion (that racial differences in talents can arise through differential breeding) is true.  To go beyond that and enlist laws and tribunals of the state to penalize such speech, as a form of “group libel”, would absolutely require following the logic of libel for individuals: prove that the defendant intended to defame a whole group and not just some individuals within it and that what the defendant said was false. This won’t be easy since most people who hold negative views of out-groups probably genuinely believe whatever they may have expressed publicly.

Thus, if “group libel” is so difficult to prove, don’t mess with the First Amendment! The best solution, if ethnic or racial groups cannot seem to resolve their hostile opinions of each other, is that they simply live separately where they can’t get on each other’s nerves. As Steve Sailer says, “It’s what separate countries are for.”

Those tempted to take the anti-hate speech arguments seriously, might want to reflect on the words of Heinrich Himmler, quoted by Lothrop Stoddard who interviewed Heinrich Himmler in Germany back in 1939 and asked “Is any political opposition allowed?”

“What a person thinks is none of our concern,” shot back Himmler quickly.  “But when he acts upon his thoughts, perhaps to the point of starting a conspiracy, then we take action.  We believe in extinguishing a fire while it is still small.  It saves trouble and averts much damage.

Sounds like Waldron’s view of the First Amendment.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the editor and Travis Woodson for their suggestions on the article.

Anthony Hilton is Associate Professor of Psychology (Ret.) at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada.

Only for today’s mainstream media is something illegitimate by virtue of being all-white.  Needless to say, something that’s all-black or all-Hispanic is vivid, authentic and inspiring;  anything all-white is stultifying, boring and evil.

The New York Times’ Frank Rich, a Jewish liberal, complains Sunday that of the Republican Party’s 247 senators and representatives in the Congress, all are white.  This, Rich says, is “the elephant in the room of our politics” and is “rarely acknowledged”.  More on that in a second.

Rich’s piece begins with a lengthy and flaccid complaint that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the black supremacist preacher and spiritual mentor to Barack Obama, gets far more attention than the anti-Catholic and fanatically Christian Zionist Rev. John Hagee, who has endorsed John McCain and whose antics are also caught on YouTube. (Hagee’s anti-Catholic animosity seems directed at the Church for what he sees as the Church’s misbehavior against the Jews.)

It’s a sorry attempt at a comparison for reasons that are 1) almost too obvious to get into (McCain doesn’t go to Hagee’s church) and 2) blogged about already by countless liberals.  It makes you wonder what justifies Frank Rich’s paycheck.

The piece winds through to Rich’s point, which is that the racial discord among Democrats revealed by the Clinton-Obama contest is better than the racial unity of Republicans.  Naturally, because that unity is white, it’s something to be ashamed of, “racial dysfunction in their own house.”

(Whiteness as inherently “dysfunctional” is a favorite and sadly unchallenged theme of the liberals, the left, Jewish activists and other anti-white operatives.  Conservatives are always on the run against this charge.  Never do they confront it by asking what’s wrong with being part of a predominately white group.)

Rich takes the standard MSM tack here, demanding to know why there aren’t blacks and Hispanics among GOP ranks, and assuming that anything not graced with their presence must be flawed.  But he’s wrong to say that Republican whiteness is “rarely acknowledged”;  in fact, Howard Dean has done just that, and it seems unlikely that many even casual observers of American politics would guess that the Republican Party is a black stronghold.  Rich seems not to get that it’s “rarely acknowledged” in the specific because it’s so relentlessly acknowledged in the general:  Our entire media is geared toward the idea that white is bad, anything else is good.

Rich concludes, “anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades.  Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.”

Frank is on the precipice of truth here, but we know he isn’t going to jump.  Yes, America is plunging toward a white minority.  Yet to Frank, this is a good thing, and whites should prepare by learning to genuflect to new minority power.  To white advocates, it does not bode well.

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And yes, there isn’t any candid conversation on race.  But what Rich means by “candid” is whites rending their garments over their collective guilt and shame and speaking frankly about what goodies should be doled out to other racial groups.  What white advocates mean by “candid” is an acknowledgement of inherent racial differences, the unworkability of racial integration, and the legitimacy of white unity and political power.

Ultimately, the real elephant in the room isn’t the evil of white dominance.  It’s the reality of racial differences.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist.