Interesting articles

A Brief for Whitey

By Patrick J. Buchanan
Friday, March 21, 2008

How would he pull it off? I wondered.

How would Barack explain to his press groupies why he sat silent in a pew for 20 years as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered racist rants against white America for our maligning of Fidel and Gadhafi, and inventing AIDS to infect and kill black people?
How would he justify not walking out as Wright spewed his venom about "the U.S. of K.K.K. America," and howled, "God damn America!"

My hunch was right. Barack would turn the tables.

Yes, Barack agreed, Wright's statements were "controversial," and "divisive," and "racially charged," reflecting a "distorted view of America."
But we must understand the man in full and the black experience out of which the Rev. Wright came: 350 years of slavery and segregation.
Barack then listed black grievances and informed us what white America must do to close the racial divide and heal the country.

The "white community," said Barack, must start "acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination -- and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past -- are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds ... ."

And what deeds must we perform to heal ourselves and our country?
The "white community" must invest more money in black schools and communities, enforce civil rights laws, ensure fairness in the criminal justice system and provide this generation of blacks with "ladders of opportunity" that were "unavailable" to Barack's and the Rev. Wright's generations.
What is wrong with Barack's prognosis and Barack's cure?

Only this. It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, "everybody but the rioters themselves."

Was "white racism" really responsible for those black men looting auto dealerships and liquor stories, and burning down their own communities, as Otto Kerner said -- that liberal icon until the feds put him away for bribery.
Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.
Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.
This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.
Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.
We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

Barack talks about new "ladders of opportunity" for blacks.
Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for "deserving" white kids.
Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

Is that the fault of white America or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?
As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?
We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena.
And all turned out to be hoaxes.
But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago. Pat Buchanan is a founding editor of The American Conservative magazine, and the author of many books including State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America .

Uprooting the New Racism

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Friday, March 28, 2008

In his Philadelphia address on race, Sen. Obama identified as a root cause of white resentment affirmative action -- the punishing of white working- and middle-class folks for sins they did not commit:
"Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," said Barack."As far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything. ... So when they ... hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed ... resentment builds over time."
On this issue, Barack seemed to have nailed it.
But then he revealed the distorting lens through which he and his fellow liberals see the world. To them, black rage is grounded in real grievances, while white resentments are exaggerated and exploited.
White resentments, said Barack, "have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. ... Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."
What Barack is saying here is that the resentment of black America is justified, but the resentment of white America is a myth manufactured and manipulated by the conservative commentariat. Barack is attempting to de-legitimize the other side of the argument.
Yet, who is he to claim the moral high ground?
Where does this child of privilege who went to two Ivy League schools, then spent 20 years in a church where racist rants were routine, come off preaching to anyone?

What are Barack's moral credentials to instruct white folks on what they must do, when he failed to do what any decent father should have done:
Take his wife and daughters out of a church where hate had a home in the pulpit?
Barack needs to reread the Lord's admonition in the Sermon on the Mount: "And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?"
Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote that all great movements eventually become a business, then degenerate into a racket.
That is certainly true of the civil rights movement. Begun with just demands for an end to state-mandated discrimination based on race, it ends with unjust demands for state-mandated preferences, based on race.
Under affirmative action, white men are passed over for jobs and promotions in business and government, and denied admission to colleges and universities to which their grades and merits entitle them, because of their gender and race.
Paradoxically, America's greatest warrior for equal justice under law and an end to reverse racism is, like Barack, a man of mixed ancestry. He is Ward Connerly. And his life's mission is to drive through reverse discrimination the same stake America drove through segregation.
And when one considers that the GOP establishment has often fled Connerly's cause and campaigns, his record of achievement is remarkable.
Connerly was chief engineer of CCRI, the 1996 California Civil Rights Initiative, Proposition 209, which outlawed affirmative action based on ethnicity, race or gender in all public institutions of America's most populous state. Two years later, Connerly racked up a second victory in Washington.
In 2006, Connerly went to Michigan to overturn an affirmative action policy that kept Jennifer Gratz out of the University of Michigan, though she had superior grades and performance records than many minority students admitted. The Michigan proposition also carried and has been upheld by the courts.
One U.S. senator, however, taped an ad denouncing Connerly's Proposition 2 in Michigan and endorsed affirmative action for minorities and women. That senator was Barack Obama.
Comes now the big test. Connerly is gathering signatures to place on the ballots in Nebraska, Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado and Missouri -- the latter two crucial swing states -- propositions to outlaw all racial, gender and ethnic preferences. Voting would be the same day as the presidential election.
"Race preferences are on the way out," declares Connerly.
Now that our national conversation is underway, Barack should be asked to explain why discrimination against whites is good public policy, while discrimination against blacks explains the rants of the Rev. Wright.
America is headed for a day, a few decades off, when there will be no racial majority, only a collection of minorities. When that day arrives, if some races and ethnic groups may be preferred because of where their ancestors came from, while others can be held back because their ancestors came from Europe, America will become the Balkans writ large.
Folks need to be able to separate the true friends of racial justice from the phonies who believe with the pigs on Orwell's Animal Farm -- that "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."