“The Help”: Courageous, Color-Blind Strivers Overcome Racist Nitwits

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“Looking after White babies, that’s what I do,”  answers Abileen, the long-suffering Black heroine of  The Help when asked by Skeeter, the courageous budding journalist from the right side of the tracks, how it feels to raise someone else’s children while leaving your own at home.  And we’re off to another two hours treat from Hollywood on one of its two favorite themes, the suffering of Black folks.  You know the other one.

Viola Davis, who plays Abileen, says in an interview that she had a chance to act in a movie ‘depicting a part of our history we have a tendency to be silent about.’  Say what?  Did she say we have a tendency to be silent about the South and Blacks?  Does she live in the United States?  Am I deaf?  Is she deaf?

White boys, move over, because when it comes to vicious racism, pettiness, cruelty, and all over mean-spiritedness, you ain’t got nothin’ on your women.   And this is theme of The Help. When it comes to obsessing on the evils of racism in the South, no effort is ever spared in Hollywood and certainly not in this joint effort of Blacks, Jews and self-loathing liberals.

The Junior League set depicted in this movie about Black maids in Mississippi in the early 60s are uniformly despicable.  They are shallow, vain, lazy, as well as largely dim-witted and completely petty. Their brittle little personalities are acted out with malicious delight.     They play bridge and order the Blacks around.  And that’s all they do.

Thank God we have Hollywood to teach us the evils of racial stereotyping. Read more

Jury Rejects “White Supremacist” Motive in Brandon McInerney Trial

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The Brandon McInerney hate crime trial has ended in a hung jur,y voting 7-5 for a manslaughter verdict rather than the first degree murder verdict sought by the prosecution. The good news is that “jurors universally rejected the prosecution’s contention that the shooting was a hate crime carried out by a youth filled with white supremacist beliefs and a hatred for homosexuals.” This was nothing more than an attempt to prejudice the jury against McInerney. If the prosecution goes for another trial, they would be ill-advised to again try to frame this as having something to do with having a White identity.

If there is a villain in this case, it is surely School administrator Joy Epstein. She  was criticized “for allegedly being more intent on protecting King’s civil rights than in acknowledging that his dress and behavior were causing problems.” There was also testimony that Epstein is a lesbian. One can imagine that Epstein thought of the victim’s behavior as a teachable moment–an in-your-face assertion of homosexual rights, with no concern about the intense emotions brought on by the victim’s taunting and sexually harassing of McInerney.

The verdict is also a blow against precluding the “gay panic” defense where people claim they victimize someone in an emotional panic when they learn he is gay. As noted previously, gay rights advocates saw McInerney’s defense that he was humiliated and harassed by the victim as a classic “gay panic” defense. The majority of the jury seems to have taken the common sense view that McInerney’s anger was entirely understandable and quite relevant to understanding McInerney’s actions. A first degree murder conviction would have been a travesty of justice. The scary thing is that five jurors thought that first degree murder was the appropriate verdict.

David Starkey: No Refuge in Cultural Arguments

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British historian David Starkey’s indiscretion continues to rankle among the morally uplifted (“David Starkey’s views on race disgrace the academic world, say historians.”) 102 academics are horrified by his behavior, complaining that

his crass generalisations about black culture and white culturrrre as oppositional, monolithic entities demonstrate a failure to grasp the subtleties of race and class that would disgrace a first-year history undergraduate. In fact, it appears to us that the BBC was more interested in employing him for his on-screen persona and tendency to make comments that viewers find offensive than for his skills as a historian. (See the letter here.)

This episode is a good example of policing elite levels of discourse. People like Starkey represent a potentially grave threat to the system because they not only have excellent academic credentials, they also have access to the elite media. Deviations from the path of moral and political righteousness by people with Starkey’s stature must be severely punished. If at all possible, he must be removed from access to the elite media. The letter clearly aims at getting Starkey removed from his position at the BBC:

We the undersigned would therefore ask that the BBC and other broadcasters think carefully before they next invite Starkey to comment as a historian on matters for which his historical training and record of teaching, research and publication have ill-fitted him to speak.

I suppose it’s fair enough to bring up Starkey’s lack of academic publications on current race relations, although I rather doubt that they would have been disturbed if he had blamed it all on an evil monolithic White culture.  In the original interview he mentioned a study he did of rap lyrics illustrating a Black subculture of hyper-masculinity, dominance, and violence. This is the culture he was portraying as at the root of the rioting, both because it is common among Blacks (Starkey explicitly stated it didn’t characterize all Blacks, so his comments are quite compatible with different Black sub-cultures) and because the (relatively few) Whites involved seem to have similar tendencies.

The historians’ letter simply asserts that things are more subtle and differentiated than Starkey represented them without saying exactly how they are more subtle and differentiated in a way that would make a difference to what Starkey is saying. One would think that  when attacking  a colleague, they might feel a little guilty for not being more specific–that they would feel a need to say what added subtlety would have cleared away all the clouds. I guess the idea is that if moral righteousness is on your side, you don’t have the usual scholarly obligations. Read more

Shame and Fear–The two Emotions of White Self-Destruction

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A correspondent from the UK recently wrote:

I am still very fearful and very programmed…to the extent that I still cannot stomach supporting outfits like the British National Party (I’m English). I’m not saying this to you as a criticism of the BNP, but as a psychological point in that, I am totally committed to a lifetime of fighting for our cause. I see it. I’ve seen it all. But so intensive has the propaganda been in my own country about parties acting there, that I am still, sort of, compartmentalized….in that if my mind turns to the BNP I start feeling shame and fear. Shame for thinking ‘fascist’ thoughts, and fear for being found out.

Fear and shame. Fear because of the very real threat that people who publicly support organizations like the BNP or ideas linked with them will be victimized by losing their jobs, their families, their friends, and their place in the world. And shame–the emotion that wells up because so many of us have internalized attitudes of guilt about having a racial identity or pursuing (entirely legitimate) racial/ethnic interests. It’s a problem that seems especially acute for White people: We tend to create moral/ideological communities where the ingroup is defined in moral terms. To violate these norms is to remove oneself from one’s social moorings–evolutionary death in the environments we evolved in. Read more

UK Riots, American Flash Mobs and Kyrgyzstan

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Uzbeks setting up a road block to stop the Kyrgyz

Ethnic tensions between native Kyrgyz and the Uzbek minority still simmer in Kyrgyzstan. The country of 5 million is an obscure Central Asian nation, one that only the most geographically astute would be able to pinpoint on a map.  It is home to just one of literally dozens of ethnic conflicts that have wracked former Soviet Union countries.

A year ago, the tensions reached a deadly boiling point, culminating in riots and pogroms that left 400, mostly Uzbeks, dead. Though the unrest was quelled, the Uzbek community still live in fear, voluntarily ghettoised as they fear for their safety when leaving their various enclaves. There has been an exodus of wealthy and educated Uzbeks.

The Soviet Union represented the most ambitious attempt in history to mix a mass of different racial, ethnic, national and linguistic groups together, whether they liked it or not. ‘Multiculturalism’ was alive and unwell there long before it became the mantra of the West. This giant empire once comprised of, besides Russia itself, what have now become 15 independent countries.

From Mongolia in Asia to Lithuania in Europe, a myriad of different ethnic groups and religions were subsumed into the USSR, and mandated to think of themselves not as Kyrgyz, Latvians, Muslims or Orthodox Christians, but as “Soviet Citizens.” Read more

Race realism: Breaking into the mainstream

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A friend  and I were talking about Arthur Jensen–the psychologist who reignited the race and IQ debate with his 1969 paper “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?” published in the Harvard Educational Review. My friend said that starting with that paper there had been a huge amount of supportive research published in reputable academic journals like Intelligence and Personality and Individual Differences. There have also been major works like The Bell Curve that provoked a national discussion in newspapers and intellectual media. And there have been major works by J. Philippe Rushton and Richard Lynn published by academic presses.

The thrust of my friend’s comments was that it was just a matter of time before it becomes standard wisdom, informing all respectable discussions of the issue, even among politicians and the mainstream media. Read more

American White Awareness during World War II

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World War II is often referred to as the war against racism, as if it were fought to prevent future racial discrimination. This is far from the truth. In fact there are numerous accounts which show explicit White consciousness. This piece does not pretend to give a complete picture, but rather points out some illustrative examples.

Pearl Harbor and war in the Pacific

The editorial of Life magazine in May 1945 included the following remarks: “Americans had to learn to hate Germans, but hating Japs comes natural—as natural as fighting Indian wars once was.” This is in a nutshell is the difference between the average American attitudes towards the enemy during World War II: the Japanese were a different race. Besides this, the Americans felt treacherously attacked by Japan in Pearl Harbor, but they did not feel any need for revenge or hatred against the Germans. In the government propaganda the emphasize in the war against Germany was placed on the National Socialist (commonly referred as Nazi) regime rather than the Germans, preventing the feeling among second-generation German-Americans that they were fighting their own kind.  Read more