Professor Robert W. Sussman (email him) of Washington University in St. Louis recently published an attack on Jared Taylor in Salon.com: America’s virulent racists: The sick ideas and perverted “science” of the American Renaissance Foundation. [October 11, 2014]
Unlike everything published on VDARE.com, and for that matter in American Renaissance, this attack contained no links and no footnotes.
If I say someone said something, I say where they said it and provide both a link and a citation. Leftists apparently don’t feel the need to bother.
This made somewhat difficult for American Renaissance Editor Jared Taylor to reply to Sussman’s attack, as he can only say he didn’t say the things he’s accused of saying. Nevertheless, he was easily able to show that Sussman’s piece was riddled with factual errors. See: Harvard University Press Defames American Renaissance, Amren.com, October 16, 2014.
The reason Taylor’s headline mentions Harvard University Press rather than Salon.com is that Sussman’s crazy piece is excerpted from his book The Myth of Race, published by that venerable, respectable, and now very Leftist press.
The Myth of Race is already published in hard copy, although it hasn’t been released as an e-book. It is, however, in Google Books. Using the “search inside” feature, I see that it does have the critical apparatus of footnotes you’d expect from a scholarly book. This allows us to prove Sussman’s horrifying sloppiness because we can compare what he said to what he’s quoting from.
There’s a lot of horrifying sloppiness. But there’s a limit to how much time Sussman is worth.
For example, however, this is from Sussman’s Salon piece:
To the foundation, [JF: i.e. the American Renaissance magazine] race is an essential ingredient for citizenship. “Blacks and Third World immigrants did not really belong in the United States and certainly could not be ‘real’ Americans.”
That bit inside the quotation marks was utterly mystifying to Jared Taylor. He wrote: "Prof. Sussman offers this sentence as a quotation from AR...This sentence has never appeared in AR."
The answer: this picture of the inside of Sussman’s book shows the footnote, which looks like this:
For the benefit of those who can’t see the graphic, the reference is “(Taylor 1992a, quoted in Tucker 2002, 182).”
“Taylor 1992a” in Sussman’s bibliography is Jared Taylor’s great book Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. “Tucker 2002” turns out to be an awful book called The Funding of Scientific Racism |Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, by William H. Tucker, University of Illinois Press, 2002. (Reviewed by Kevin Lamb in The Occidental Quarterly here.) Tucker [Email him] is a professor at Rutgers-Camden who specializes in this kind of witch-hunting.
You can read Tucker’s book online, via Archive.org. In chapter 4, we see this:
The basis for citizenship, AR regularly lectured, was not "the American democratic faith," nor "the ideal of America as a country where advancement is open to anyone," nor "allegiance to an idea that all people everywhere must be free"; race was the essential ingredient of citizenship. Blacks and Third World immigrants did not really belong in the United States and certainly could not be "real" Americans.
The footnote looks like this:
J. Taylor, "To Each His Own," (review of The Disuniting of America by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.), American Renaissance 3 (April 1992): 11; L. Auster, "Multiculturalism and the War against White America," American Renaissance 5 (August 1994): 4; "George Bush on America," American Renaissance 2 (September 1991): 9. [All links added by me.]
In the links above, Tucker is quoting accurately. But the part about “certainly could not be "real" Americans” is Tucker’s conclusion: the phrase “real Americans” does not appear in any of the quotes.
So at least two things are wrong with Sussman’s quote and footnote:
1) Taylor didn’t say what Sussman claims, Tucker said it.
2) Tucker wasn’t quoting from Taylor 1992a (Paved) at that point, he was reading and citing actual issues of American Renaissance. (I will have something critical to say about Tucker in moment, but he’s clearly better at this “scholarship” thing than Sussman).
Now remember what all this shows about Sussman [Email him] as an “anti-racist” researcher:
Sussman hasn’t done any of that. He’s copying from “Tucker 2002.” And he’s getting it wrong.
Another example: Tucker wrote that psychometrician Arthur Jensen judged “at least one quarter of all blacks "mentally retarded" and "not really educable," [emphasis added] and footnotes it to "A Conversation with Arthur Jensen (Part II) " American Renaissance 3 (September 1992)”
Here’s what Sussman converts this into in Salon:
“Here are just a few examples, as pointed out by Tucker. [JF: This is the first mention in the Salon excerpt of Tucker.] Arthur Jensen in an AR “conversation” stated that the country’s attempt to build a multiracial nation “is doomed to failure.” He also claimed that at least one-quarter of all blacks are “mentally retarded” and “not really educatable.”[Emphasis added]
There’s really no such word as educatable, and if Sussman were a psychologist rather than an anthropologist, he’d know that. Also note the scare quotes around “conversation”, although it’s the title of an interview in a magazine.
This slip over educable/educatable is significant: it shows that Sussman was copy-typing from a dead-tree 2002 book.
This, of course, is why Sussman’s examples of “hate” are so old. Thus Jared Taylor writes:
Sussman makes much of a poll of AR readers, helpfully adding that the poll was taken ‘before Obama’s presidency.’ Indeed, it was taken 17 years ago and consisted of 391 people.
This passage occurs in Salon and on page 276 of Sussman’s book.Note the similarities between this and the passage below from Tucker’s 2002 book:
AR’s list [sic, it’s actually a survey] of some of its subscribers provides insight into the historical underpinnings and views of the American Renaissance Foundation. [JF: Remember, these are the views of a self-selected group of subscribers—391 people, none of whom was a writer for Amren.com.] Included on its list of “Americans Who Have Advanced White Interests” are Jared Taylor; David Duke; Robert E. Lee; Arthur Jensen; William Shockley; Wilmot Robertson, who viewed Hitler as defender of the white race; Revilo P. Oliver, who argued that Hitler should be recognized as “a semi-divine figure;” William Pierce, founder of the Nazi group National Alliance; George Wallace, past governor of Alabama; Madison Grant; and Theodore Bilbo. In a survey of subscribers, Adolf Hitler ranked first (by a large margin) among “Foreigners Who Have Advanced White Interests.” Hitler also ranked as first among “Foreigners Who Have Damaged White Interests,” probably because his policies were a public relations disaster for the racist and anti-Semitic causes. [At this point in the book, but not in the Salon extract, Sussman cites “(Tucker 2002)”]. Among the list of “Americans Who Have Damaged White Interests” is every U.S. president since 1932 except Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. The first four people on this list are Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, William Clinton, and Abraham Lincoln (the list was compiled before Obama’s presidency).
Now, this is from Tucker’s 2002 book:
"According to AR's own survey of its subscribers, Jared Taylor himself ranked first on the list of "Americans Who Have Advanced White Interests," but also among the top fifteen "helpful to our cause" were David Duke, Wilmot Robertson, Nathan B. Forrest, the Confederate general who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert E. Lee, Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, and William Pierce, founder of the Nazi group National Alliance and author of The Turner Diaries, the fictional blueprint for race war used as a model by the neo-Nazi group The Order, which murdered Denver talk show host Alan Berg in 1984. Further down the list were George Wallace, Madison Grant, Carleton Putnam, Ed Fields, Pearson's old friend from the National States Rights Party, and the Colonel's old ally, Theodore Bilbo. [JF:This is reference to Col. Wickliffe Draper, founder of the Pioneer Fund, the focus of Tucker’s book, and some more inside-baseball stuff that Sussman left out.] By a large margin Adolf Hitler ranked first among "Foreigners Who Have Advanced White Interests" (although he also ranked first, just ahead of Karl Marx, among "Foreigners Who Have Damaged White Interests," no doubt because he has been such a public relations disaster for racists and anti-Semites). With the exception of Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, every president since 1932 was named among the "Americans Who Have Damaged White Interests," the first four persons on the list being Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt, William Clinton, and Abraham Lincoln. "
You can see a slight rearrangement of words, but it’s surely enough of a rip-off to raise both academic plagiarism and copyright questions.
The Leftist New York Review of Books notoriously attacked Charles Murray in an article headlined The Tainted Sources of ‘The Bell Curve’” [By Charles Lane, December 1, 1994]. It contained a lot of Sussman/Tucker style stuff about the 1937 founding of the Pioneer Fund, and hatred of the journal Mankind Quarterly. Lane wrote:
No fewer than seventeen researchers cited in the bibliography of The Bell Curve have contributed to Mankind Quarterly, a notorious journal of ‘racial history’ founded, and funded, by men who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race.
Charles Murray replied in “The Bell Curve” and Its Critics [Commentary, May 1995]:
“..The Bell Curve draws its evidence from more than 1,000 sources. …[A]mong the scholars in Lane’s short list are some of the most respected psychologists of our time, and that the “tainted sources” consist overwhelmingly of articles that were published in respected and refereed journals.
But this “anti-racist” witch-hunting from Tucker and Sussman is nothing but tainted sources. The method used by Tucker, and purloined by Sussman, is a combination of what I’ve called “Ransom Note Racism” (out-of-context snippets, sometimes single words, frequently unsourced) “guilt by association”, (whether actually associated or not) and something very like the parlor game of Telephone, in which smears are repeated from ear to ear until they become nonsensical/ super-smears.
An example of this “Telephone” Effect: in 2000, journalist Jonathan Tilove covered the American Renaissance conference for Newhouse News service. Taylor answered a questioner who asked: “How, then, have whites lost ground?” Tilove reported:
It is a puzzle that Taylor said confounds him. He ran through the various theories, all of which he considers inadequate. Maybe it was the terrible white fratricide of two world wars, or the universalist message of Christianity. Maybe it is the Jews, he said, to a small burst of applause. White Nationalists Seek Respectability in Meeting of 'Uptown Bad Guys', April 5, 2000
Two years later, in 2002, Tucker, who wasn’t at the conference and apparently didn’t view the video, wrote this in Chapter 4 of Funding Hate:
"There was no doubt that AR was a gathering point for many neo-Nazis. A journalist at the 2000 conference reported that when Taylor, speculating aloud on the reasons whites had lost so much ground during the last century, suggested that "maybe it is the Jews," there was a "burst of applause."
The word “small” has vanished, and so has Taylor’s context. But give Tucker credit, he did provide a footnote:
…Taylor is quoted in J. Tilove, "White Nationalists Seek Respectability in Meeting of 'Uptown Bad Guys,'" Newhouse News Service, at http://www.amren.com.newhous.htm.
Fourteen years later in Salon, however, Robert Sussman reduced the story to:
"At the 2000 AR conference, Taylor was greeted with a burst of applause when he speculated that whites may have lost so much ground in the last century because of Jews."
It’s the game of Telephone—with not much in the way of footnotes.
In fact, what Taylor actually said, in response to question on why whites are in such bad shape, was even more judicious than Tilove could convey in his brief summary. Taylor noted that he found all theories inadequate, and went on: "Then, of course, there are some people in this room who would argue that Jews have been a decisive or important factor in trying to denature the racial or national consciousness of people—” and it’s at that point that there’s a smattering of applause from what I’d guess was the 7-12 people in the audience who would argue that.
I know that, because unlike all these professors I actually watched the video [Jared Taylor — “Prospects for the New Century” (American Renaissance Conference, 2000)]. It’s available from RenAudVis.com for $2.99. If you do the same thing, the colloquy starts at 49:30 on a one hour speech.
But all of this means apparently nothing to the hate haters of Salon, who have issued no corrections as yet. (Email Salon’s editor here. Comment on Sussman’s article here.)
Perhaps Harvard University Press will have higher standards.
Email William Sisler, the Director of Harvard University Press, and ask him if it does.
James Fulford [Email him] is a writer and editor for VDARE.com.
