by Ben Shapiro
That night, Touré explained that only Obama’s blackness could explain the interruption. “This disrespect of this human being cannot be disconnected from the fact that he’s black,” said Touré. “There is a basic, lesser humanity generally ascribed to black people, even one this alpha, this much in power, this much in control.”61
Now, Touré admittedly has the IQ of a kumquat. But other, smarter people tried to make the same point: opposing Obama made you a racist. The late Sam Donaldson, the White House correspondent who had heckled Ronald Reagan, denied that he had ever interrupted a president; he said that the reporter reflected not only “the growing incivility of the times,” but “let’s face it: Many on the political right believe this president ought not to be there—they oppose him not for his policies and political view but for who he is, an African American!”62 Donaldson failed to explain whether Dan Rather had presented forged documents about President Bush to the American people because Bush, of course, was black.
Politico, the house organ for the Democratic Party, agreed; Joe Williams said, “It’s very, very difficult to place race outside of this context. Mostly because a lot of the interruptions, a lot of the disrespect has been unprecedented. We haven’t seen anything like this before.”63
It was one thing to suggest that Bush had lied America into a war for oil. It was another to speak while Obama was speaking. Why, the latter was just degrees from enslaving blacks again! Or, as Joe Biden would later put it about Republicans, “they gonna put y’all back in chains!”
President Obama was elected, at least in part, because he was black. It was a positive for him. Many Americans believed that America needed to elect its first black president to move beyond issues of race once and for all. Instead, they got a champion race bully masquerading as a racial unifier.
THE HISTORY OF RACIAL BULLYING
During the Trayvon Martin case, a reporter asked Representative Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO) whether he was exploiting Martin’s death to push a political agenda. “Any time somebody is forcefully stepped up and speaking out against injustice, there are those who say they are using it for their own purposes,” said Cleaver. “We have always had to face people making those accusations since the civil rights movement began; that’s not going to stop.”
He’s right, and he’s wrong.
He’s right that civil rights workers often faced accusations that they had a political agenda rather than a justice-oriented agenda. He’s wrong if he thinks that such accusations are as untrue now as they were originally. Yesterday’s race-baiters were brutal white bullies. Today’s are left-wingers invoking fictional white racism to achieve their goals.
At the beginning, the race bullies were race victims. Blacks were, of course, a victimized class. They did face brutal and evil systemic discrimination, from lynchings to race laws to the voting booth to restaurants to government agencies. But the victims fought back, and the victims won. Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition to create a society in which people were judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin was the opposite of bullying—it was full-fledged tolerance.
The problem began to arise as soon as African-Americans won their initial victories. Liberals insisted that it wasn’t enough to push for a color-blind society. Instead, they claimed—not without some justification—that the systemic racism of the American system had to be undone only by instituting reverse racism in favor of blacks. If blacks had been coerced under the Jim Crow system, now whites would be coerced to push society back to a stable center. If society had been bent too far in the direction of racism, now it would be bent just as far in the opposite direction.
The left saw measures like affirmative action and school integration in this way. They were explicit about it. In Green v. County School Board of New Kent County (1968), the Supreme Court okayed a mandatory busing system that would take children from one end of town to the other to achieve certain racial quotas in schools. The purpose, they said, was to establish a color-free system—but that couldn’t be created by being color-free in the treatment of children. Instead, said the court, Brown v. Board of Education (1955), which mandated desegregation, didn’t mean that schools could just open their doors to anyone. It was “a call for the dismantling of well-entrenched dual systems tempered by an awareness that complex and multifaceted problems would arise which would require time and flexibility for a successful resolution.” If whites didn’t choose to go to black schools, they could be forced to do so . . . temporarily.64
Nobody expected affirmative action—an inherently coercive, bullying system—to last beyond a few years, in which blacks would achieve equality and the racism of the old system would be wiped away. That’s exactly what the Supreme Court said in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). In that case, a white male with high scores was refused admission to the University of California, Davis, thanks to racial quotas. Though the Supreme Court said that hard-and-fast racial quotas were no good, they did say that affirmative action—giving people special treatment based on race—was justified, again as a temporary measure.65
These were not effective policies. Forced busing had the unintended consequences of destroying many public schools, as well as many well-integrated communities. The problem was obvious: black schools had been historically mistreated, and the students weren’t properly educated. That was the fault of a deeply racist system. But forced busing was not the solution. Creating an influx of undereducated students into previously white schools ended up lowering standards across the board—including for many black students, who fell behind quickly and never caught up. Meanwhile, many white parents weren’t happy sending their kids across town on buses to historically black schools, many of which were located in lower-income areas. Instead, they fled to the suburbs and enrolled their kids in local schools or private schools.
Affirmative action was similarly counterproductive. Instead of providing a leg up for equally qualified students who had seen difficult circumstances growing up, race-based affirmative action created stigmas on blacks who did make it into top colleges—stigmas that last until today. The fail rate for affirmative action admittees at top schools is far higher than the fail rate for non–affirmative action admittees at the same schools.
Although these policies turned out rotten, they were justifiable on a moral level. Unfortunately, they became the basis for racial bullying by the left, which saw affirmative action, forced busing, and the growth of the welfare state, among other causes, as the only solutions to racism. Anybody who opposed these policies became, by definition, racist.
This is where victims began to turn into perpetrators. Where civil rights leaders had once called for equal rights, now they called for special rights.
Again, it is worth remembering that at the beginning, these special rights were seen as temporary remedies for the ills of Jim Crow. But they soon became permanent features of the political landscape. Crime and poverty were blamed on white people; calls for harsher policing and less welfare cash were labeled racist. Suddenly it was racist to call for equal treatment under the law.
But this presented a bit of an issue. For equal treatment under the law to truly be racist, America had to be portrayed as a place of endless racism—not a country transitioning from racism to acceptance, but rather an incurable mass of bigoted whites who had to be curbed by the power of government. All black ills had to be presented as results of white racism. The system was unfixable. And white people had to get used to it and bend over backward to make amends. But no matter what sort of amends they made, they’d never be done paying the piper.
This was a pretty nasty point of view. It suggested the collective guilt of nonblacks in America. Forever. Do not pass Go; do not collect $200. It was racist. And it was bullying.
That point of view was articulated in nasty ways, too. Even as Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of a postracial day, Malcolm X was preaching hatred of the “white devil” keeping him down—even though he s
ays in his autobiography that he had a chance at becoming a lawyer, and could undoubtedly have made his way in America without becoming a career criminal, and then a racial rabble-rouser. Instead, he chose to denigrate America and create paranoia-driven false histories of white man’s racism invariably leading to black man’s downfall. “Every white man in America, when he looks into a black man’s eyes, should fall to his knees and say ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry—my kind has committed history’s greatest crime against your kind; will you give me the chance to atone?’ But do you brothers and sisters expect any white man to do that? No, you know better! And why won’t he do it? Because he can’t do it. The white man has created a devil, to bring chaos upon this earth. . . .”66
But, of course, that’s precisely what liberals did: they spent the decades since the civil rights movement trying desperately to buy the love of radicals like Malcolm X. But the radical race bullies wanted no part of them, because even the existence of such white folks disproved the very case they were making. That’s why Malcolm X rejected a young white woman who asked what she could do to help him. Malcolm X was, in short, a racial bully.
Even Malcolm X recognized that, which is why later in life he rejected his earlier racist teachings. And then he was shot by members of the Nation of Islam, many of whom had bought into his earlier agenda.
Malcolm X’s radical teachings lived on; his less bombastic statements about peace and racial harmony did not. After all, the nastier teachings were attractive to many blacks, who had an easier time addressing ills of the black community as the fault of whites rather than looking to fix them from the inside out. Even President Obama admitted his sympathies for Malcolm X’s teachings in Dreams from My Father.
The Black Panther Party formed in the aftermath of the murder of Malcolm X. They espoused precisely his old program, with an added twist: they bred Marxism into the mix. After all, America was capitalist, and everything associated with America was racist; communism, by contrast, was not American, class- rather than race-conscious. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale formed the group in 1966; their program was a blatant combination of Lenin and Malcolm X. Racism inherently dominated all aspects of social life; therefore, anything bad that happened to black folks resulted from racism. So they called for the release of all blacks from prison; all blacks had to be exempted from military service; they wanted to rewrite history in a way that would “expose the true nature of this decadent American society.” As Stokely Carmichael, their honorary prime minister, said, “This country is a nation of thieves. It stole everything it has, beginning with black people.”
They didn’t bully nonblack Americans just with their rhetoric. They bullied nonblack Americans with all-out violence, working in coordination with their leftist friends in the Weather Underground. In 1968, Newton murdered a police officer. Thanks to the sympathies of liberal whites, he walked free within two years. Seale allegedly issued kill orders against suspected informants to the police. Angela Davis, a prominent member of the party and a communist, helped criminal black high schooler Jonathan Jackson and two of his allies kidnap and murder a judge, a juror, and a prosecutor. Overall, the Panthers injured dozens of police officers.
The bullying worked. They drew precisely the same pathetic white liberal admirers Malcolm X had. Tom Wolfe documented in his hilarious 1970 essay “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” how New York literati like Leonard Bernstein invited Panthers to his house to show off to his liberal friends: “That huge Panther there, the one Felicia [Bernstein] is smiling her tango smile at, is Robert Bay, who just forty-one hours ago was arrested in an altercation with the police, supposedly over a .38-caliber revolver. . . . The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone.” It’s their violence, their nastiness, their downright refusal to recognize the good in America that turned on liberals like Bernstein, as Wolfe describes: “These are no civil-rights Negroes wearing gray suits three sizes too big—no more interminable Urban League banquets in hotel ballrooms where they try to alternate the blacks and whites around the table as if they were stringing Arapaho beads—these are real men! Shoot-outs, revolutions, pictures in Life magazine of policemen grabbing Black Panthers like they were Vietcong—somehow it all runs together in the head with the whole thing of how beautiful they are. Sharp as a blade.” The attendees ignore Black Panther references to violence and racism and drug dealing. They were just happy to bask in the forgiving glow of the Panther sycophancy.67
Eventually, the Black Panthers disbanded, crippled by their consistent fighting with the law. But their legacy had already pervaded the black community—and the liberal white community, who became their enablers. The media now chalked up every black riot to white racism; every serious societal problem in the black community was seen as the inevitable result of a white legal system. White liberals made common cause with black radicals: both became race bullies, targeting conservative principles.
This newfound consonance between traditional white liberals and black radicalism needed to be upgraded, however. The Black Panthers may have been sexy, but they were vulgar. So was Malcolm X. They were crude, blunt instruments in the arena of political discourse. White liberals needed a better partner, a more palatable partner, than folks who walked around talking about CIA conspiracies to distribute drugs in the inner cities.
And so the race bullies went upscale. Sure, there were still old-school race-baiters like Jeremiah Wright, who railed from the pulpit about the “US of KKKA”—and President Obama was only too happy to sit in his pews for decades on end. There were racial hucksters like Al Sharpton, the man who in 1991 incited riots against Orthodox Jews in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn by shouting about “diamond merchants” at the funeral of a black kid, and who accused a white prosecutor of raping a black girl without any evidence whatsoever—and a man who is still welcome in Obama’s White House. There were charlatans like Jesse Jackson, shaking down businesses for cash while threatening to call them racist—and Jackson, too, gets to visit the White House. And there were outright scumbuckets like Louis Farrakhan, whose virulent anti-Semitism and racism are well-known—and who thinks Obama is a messianic figure.
But Obama is embarrassed of all these people. That’s because, at heart, Obama is stuck somewhere between the white liberals and the black radicals. He needed a unifying philosophy of race that would justify his politics while allowing him to sympathize with the race bullies.
And he found one at Harvard Law School.
Professor Derrick Bell was the father of a school of thought called critical race theory (CRT). CRT was a subset of a Marxist philosophy called critical theory, which taught that all law, and particularly the Constitution, had been pervaded by the capitalist system. In order to get rid of inequality, critical legal theory said, the legal system would have to be deconstructed—criticized—and torn to the ground. Endless criticism; hence, critical theory. Once scholars had razed the current legal system, the theory said, a new Marxist superstructure could be built.
Critical race theory also posited that the Constitution—indeed, the entire legal system—was a creation of racists, and that all laws resulting from it were inherently racist, no matter what they said. Laws against robbery: racist. Laws against drug use: racist. Laws of neutral applicability—laws that on their face had nothing to do with race—were racist.
In order to make that case, the critical race theorists had to engage in a fair bit of historical revisionism. They had to argue that the founders were racists, that the system they designed was inherently and incurably racist, and that even the Civil War and civil rights movement could not wipe away that stain. And that’s precisely what Professor Derrick Bell argued.68
In Derrick Bell’s view, even Brown v. Board of Education becomes a way for the white man to keep the black man down.69 Bell actually spun Brown v. Board as a way for the United States’ white majority to fight the Soviet effort to portray America
as racist.
If the system is inherently racist, and there’s no way to change it, then liberalism is always the answer. Affirmative action becomes a permanent feature of the political landscape, not a temporary attempt to solve a deep wrong. School busing becomes a permanent corrective mechanism.
Meanwhile, facially neutral statutes become racist. All statistics suggesting that blacks commit a disproportionate share of crimes, for example, are racist in and of themselves, since they reflect the underlying racism of the society. When Mumia Abu-Jamal murders a white police officer, it’s not because he’s a violent piece of human feces—it’s because he’s the product of a racist system. That’s why Derrick Bell signed a petition on behalf of Mumia.
It is no coincidence that Barack Obama saw Derrick Bell as a philosophical mentor during his halcyon Harvard Law School days, rallying for him and hugging him, explaining to classmates that they ought to “[o]pen up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.” Even the lower-class race-baiters embraced this race theory. Jeremiah Wright loved it so much that he invited Bell to speak at his church—the same church where Barack Obama would sit in the pews for twenty years.
There is no worse form of bullying than racial bullying. Because America has been cursed with the blight of racism for centuries—and because it is such a deep and at one time pervasive evil—the word racist ought to be reserved for actual racists. But now the term racist is applied to every conservative cause—hell, every non-racially-discriminatory-in-favor-of-minorities cause.
ENFORCING THE LAW = RACISM
Because white America is so irredeemably racist, the Obama administration has deemed it hunky-dory to allow black thugs to stake out polling places to intimidate potential voters. When two members of the New Black Panthers hung out outside a polling place in Philadelphia on Election Day 2008 brandishing nightsticks and wearing military gear, the Eric Holder Justice Department quashed an investigation. “There is no doubt that some people were hostile to this case,” said Justice Department lawyer J. Christian Adams, who quit the department over their selective prosecution.70