Sleeper, Liberal Racism, Viking, 1997.
The magazine Race Traitor is the theoretical organ of this academic cult, emblazoned with the motto: “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” This is hardly a new theme on the left, echoing, as it does, Susan Sontag’s equally perverse claim that “the white race is the cancer of history.” (Sontag eventually expressed regrets about her remark, not because it was a racial smear, but out of deference to cancer patients who might feel unjustly slurred.) According to the Race Traitor intellectuals, “whiteness” is the principal scourge of mankind, an idea that Louis Farrakhan promoted at the Million Man March when he declared that the world’s “number one problem . . . is white supremacy.” Consequently, according to Race Traitor, “the key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race.” The new racism expresses itself in slogans directly out of the radical Sixties. According to the Whiteness Studies revolutionaries, “the abolition of whiteness” must be accomplished “by any means necessary.” To underscore that this slogan means exactly what it says, the editors of Race Traitor have explicitly embraced the military strategy of American neo-Nazis and the militia movement, and call for a John Brown-style insurrection that would trigger a second American civil war.
These attitudes promote a widespread denigration of Jews, Arabs, Central Europeans, Mediterranean Europeans, East Indians and Armenians—who are multi-ethnic and often dark-skinned, but who for official purposes (and under pressure from civil rights groups) are designated “white.” Unlike anti-black attitudes, which are universally decried, and would trigger the expulsion of their purveyors from any liberal institution in America, this racism is not only permitted but encouraged, especially in the academic culture responsible for the moral and intellectual instruction of tomorrow’s elites.
An anthology of the first five years of Race Traitor has been published by Routledge, a prestigious, academic-oriented publishing house, and was the winner of the 1997 American Book Award. Its jacket features praise by Harvard professor Cornel West, who writes: “Race Traitor is the most visionary, courageous journal in America.” West’s featured role as a speaker at the Million Man March and his coziness with Farrakhan have done nothing to tarnish his own academic reputation, his popularity with students or his standing in the civil rights community. The same is true of Afrocentrist racists like Derrick Bell and the late John Henrik Clarke, who have also been honored voices among the academic elites for decades, often running entire departments. By contrast, a distinguished Harvard scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, who is white, was driven out of his classroom by black student leftists who decided that his lectures on slavery were politically incorrect because they didn’t reflect prevailing leftist prejudices.
In recent decades, anti-white racism has, in fact, become a common currency of the “progressive” intelligentsia. Examples range from Communist professor Angela Davis, who recently told an audience of undergraduates at Michigan State that the number-one problem in the world was white people, to Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, whose boundless suspicions of white America amount to a demonization almost as intense as Elijah Muhammad’s. In her introduction to an anthology about the O.J. Simpson case, Birth of a Nation ’Hood, for example, Morrison compared the symbolic meanings of the O.J. Simpson case to D.W. Griffith’s epic celebration of the Ku Klux Klan, insinuating that white America acted as the KKK in pursuing the guilty Simpson for the murders of Ron Goldman and Simpson’s ex-wife.
With university support, Race Traitor intellectuals in the field of “whiteness studies” have produced an entire library of “scholarly” works to incite hatred against white America, against “Euro-American” culture, and against American institutions in general. Thus, according to the editors of Race Traitor: “Just as the capitalist system is not a capitalist plot, race is not the work of racists. On the contrary, it is reproduced by the principal institutions of society, among which are the schools (which define ‘excellence’), the labor market (which defines ‘employment’), the law (which defines ‘crime’), the welfare system (which defines ‘poverty’), and the family (which defines ‘kinship’). . . .” Left-wing racists, like the editors of Race Traitor, characterize the presence of whites on this continent as an unmitigated catastrophe for “peoples of color” and an offense to everything that is decent and humane. In the perspective of these race radicals, white America is the “Great Satan.” In academic cant, they replicate the poisonous message of the black racists of the Nation of Islam.
I once occupied the other side of the political divide, but my views on race have not changed over the years. I opposed racial preferences and double standards when segregationists supported them in the 1960s, and I oppose them now. I believed then that only a government neutral towards racial groups was compatible with a multi-ethnic democracy. I believe that today. Where my views have changed is in the appreciation I now have for America’s constitutional framework and its commitment to those ideals. America’s unique political culture was indeed created by white European males, primarily English and Christian. It should be obvious to anyone with even a modest historical understanding that these antecedents are not incidental to the fact that America and England led the world in abolishing slavery and in establishing the principles of ethnic and racial inclusion. Or that “people of color” are attempting to immigrate to our shores in large numbers in order to take advantage of the unparalleled opportunities and rights our society offers them, as theirs do not.
The creation of America by Protestant Christians within the framework of the British Empire has afforded greater privileges and protections to all minorities than any society extant. European-American culture is one that the citizens of this nation can take enormous pride in, precisely because its principles provide for the inclusion of cultures that are non-white, non-Christian and ethnically diverse. That is why America’s democratic and pluralistic framework remains an inspiration to people of all colors all over the world, from Tiananmen Square to Haiti and Havana. This was once the common self-understanding of all Americans and is still the understanding of those who have not been seduced by the worldview of the progressive left.
The left’s war against “whiteness” and America’s democratic culture is in many respects the Cold War come home. The agendas of contemporary leftists are updated versions of the ideas of the Marxist left that supported the Communist empire. The same radicals who launched the social and political eruptions of the 1960s have now become the politically correct faculties of American universities. With suitable cosmetic adjustments, the theories, texts and leaders of this left display a striking continuity with the radicalism of thirty and sixty years ago. Their goal remains the destruction of America’s national identity and, in particular, of the moral, political and economic institutions that are its social foundation.
In the heyday of Stalinism, the accusation of “class bias” was used by Communists to undermine and attack individuals and institutions with which they were at war. This accusation magically turned well-meaning citizens into “enemies of the people,” a phrase handed down through radical generations from the Jacobin Terror in revolutionary France through the Stalinist purges in Russia and the blood-soaked cultural revolutions of Chairman Mao. The identical strategy is alive and well today in the left’s self-righteous imputation of sexism, racism, and homophobia to anyone who dissents from its party line. Always weak in intellectual argument, the left habitually relies on accusation and defamation to promote its increasingly incoherent worldview.
It is not that no one else in politics uses such tactics; it is just that the left uses them so reflexively, so recklessly, and so effectively. In the battle over California’s Civil Rights Initiative, which outlawed racial preferences, the left’s opposition took the form of a scorched-earth strategy whose purpose was to strip its proponents of any shred of respectability. The chief spokesman for the anti-discrimination initiative, Ward Connerly, himself an African-American, was accused of anti-black racism, of wanting to be white, and of being a bedfellow of the Ku Klux Klan. The left invited former Klan member David Duke to California to forge the nonexistent connection, paying his expenses for the trip. During the Initiative
