[Click here to order Sam Francis' new monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future]

"I do not like the Confederate flag," black pundit Shelby Steele informed the readers of the Wall Street Journal last week in a long commentary on Vermont ex-governor Howard Dean's recent remark that he wanted to be "the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks."

"It excludes me, profoundly," Mr. Steele asserts. [Yo, Howard! Why did Dean have to embrace the Confederate flag? November 13, 2003]

It seems to follow that whatever excludes him—hotels and restaurants he can't afford, your private home, most nations on the face of the earth—he dislikes.

But what was important about Mr. Steele's pontification is not what it said about him or the flag but what it says about white people.

Misinterpreting Mr. Dean's remark as an effort to use "identity to seek political power in precisely the same way that Rev. Al Sharpton does," Mr. Steele went on to ruminate about why there is no white identity in American politics, even though, as he freely acknowledged, there are certainly non-white identities"

"It is quite acceptable for either party to explicitly go after the black, Hispanic, or even the Jewish vote,"

Mr. Steele wrote,

"In fact both parties gain an indispensable moral authority by doing so. But it is absolutely verboten for either party, or any white candidate, to appeal to whites as a racial identity group. Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say 'I'm white and I'm proud' and you are a Nazi."

Those who have said it know Mr. Steele is quite right, and so does Mr. Dean, even though that's not what he said.

There is therefore a "double standard on race" in this country—it's OK for non-whites to have a racial identity, but not OK for whites, let alone to base a political movement on white identity.

Moreover, Mr. Steele sees nothing wrong with the double standard, though he does understand it needs a little justification.

His justification is predictable—whites are just too evil to be trusted with racial identity:

"No group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites. This race illustrated for all time—through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism—the extraordinary human evil that follows when great power is joined to an atavistic sense of superiority and destiny. This is why today's whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity."

But in the first place, it is simply a lie—not just a lie but a whopper of titanic dimensions—that whites have the kind of monopoly on evil Mr. Steele attributes to them.

Colonialism, slavery and "racism" have been at least as common among non-whites as whites, and indeed until the superior technologies created by whites began yielding global power, whites were mainly on the receiving end of racial aggression—from Asians, Moslems, Mongols and others.

As for "Nazism," OK, it was a white phenomenon, but the Nazis were pikers compared to what the Japanese, Chinese communists and Cambodians cooked up in the same era or a bit later.

Nor would such African apostles of liberty as Idi Amin and Robert Mugabe, among several others, have been far behind if they had the means to do it.

On its merits, Mr. Steel's nakedly anti-white claim that whites illustrate for all time an "extraordinary evil" is not only flapdoodle but in fact illustrates his point—white racial identity, let alone pride, is forbidden.

Otherwise, a white controlled newspaper like the Wall Street Journal would never have published his little gob of racial spit at all.

But the larger truth is that no one does forbid whites to have a racial identity—except whites themselves.

All the witch hunters in the world could not stop whites from resisting their coming dispossession and the not unlikely racial tyranny they face from the emerging non-white and anti-white majority if they wanted to do so.

What does it tell us that every other race and ethnic group can and does develop a group consciousness and pursues political power based on it, but whites don't?

And what does the additional fact that whites are becoming a numerical minority in this country suggest is going to happen once they become a minority?

If you think—as Mr. Steele seems to—that whites are evil and other races aren't, then not to worry.

If you know that non-whites are at least as capable of "extraordinary human evil" as whites, then the lack of racial identity among whites as a means of protecting themselves against their racial aggressors just might be a problem—at least for whites.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection of his columns, America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available from Americans For Immigration Control. Click here for Sam Francis' website. Click here to order his monograph, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future and here for Glynn Custred's review.]