Because I am in New York for a short visit and, as the world well knows, the city of my birth is in a period of racial turmoil, I am going to say something I have been thinking about for a long time. And because I am one of the relative few to have spent long periods of his life on both the left and the right and because I was a civil rights worker in the sixties. I think — though it is purely personal and based only on observation — I have earned the right to an opinion. So here goes.
The left is vastly more racist than the right. It’s not even close. Since I was publicly identified with the right, roughly from when I started blogging in 2003 (although it was actually several years earlier in private), I have personally witnessed not a single incident of racism from anyone who could be considered a right winger and heard only one racial slur — and that was from a Frenchman. In the seven years I was CEO of PJ Media, I came to know or meet literally dozens of people who identified with the Tea Party. I did not hear one word of anything close to racism from any of them even once. Not one, ever. This despite their being accused of racism constantly.
The left, on the other hand, is filled with racism of all sorts, much, but not all, of it projected. I used to hear racist comments all the time during the seventies and eighties when almost all my friends were leftist or liberals. During that time black racism was pretty much continuously on the rise, aided and abetted by whites.
It had been going on for a while. I first encountered black racism from the person of none other than Julian Bond (later the president of the NAACP), who treated me, a civil rights worker involved in voter registration, in a racist, anti-white manner in the SNCC offices in Atlanta in 1966. Stokely Carmichael treated me that way also. That was at the beginning of the Black Power movement and I excused it then as “a phase” that had to be gone through. I was mistaken and naive. It was racism pure and simple. I, and others, never confronted or named it then.
Now we live in culture where there is considerably more black racism than white racism. Someone like Al Sharpton, clearly the equivalent of David Duke, is far more powerful than Duke ever was. No one pays attention to the execrable Duke, as they shouldn’t. But they shouldn’t pay attention to Sharpton either.
But he’s only a part of the problem. There’s also the mayor of the city of New York, Bill de Blasio, the prototype of the leftwing fellow-traveler racist who assumes someone is more moral or better because he or she is “of color.” Of course this is condescending — and therefore racist — to the people he thinks are so pure. No one is. The whole theory of “white skin privilege” is racist and totalitarian to the core: actually it was invented by totalitarians. And while I’m ranting here, all racial identity organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus are inherently racist and dangerous, just as the White Citizens’ Council was and would be.
You only end racism by ending it, not by talking about it. That only results in the reverse. If you keep talking about it, what you get are two dead cops in Brooklyn, the kind of guys who had been spending their lives largely defending the weak and the poor, “of color” or otherwise. The cops didn’t care. They just did their jobs. Black, white and brown, we owe them our gratitude. They protect us and, as far as I can tell, almost all of them without racial bias.
But we live in a time when two black men, Barack Obama and Eric Holder, came into office clinging to racism more desperately than Obama said right-wingers cling to their guns and religion. Both of these men arrived at a moment when racism was truly beginning to disappear and did everything in their power, consciously or unconsciously, to reverse the trend. Now we are in a miserable situation when, as recently as 2008, things were looking pretty good. We have come to a point where Bill O’Reilly is doing more substantively for black people than the president of the United States, who is himself a black man. How crazy, and deeply sad, is that?
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