The Southern Poverty Law Center recently issued one of their reports on racism. Immigration reformers including VDARE were in for a pasting, because, you see, the majority of Americans are white, and the majority of immigrants are non-white.

Therefore, opposition to immigration is racist. People get upset at this accusation. It is intended to drive the victim out of decent society. The SPLC functions like Red Channels in the McCarthy era.

Some of you may wonder how to avoid being called racist. It can't be done. "Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny." as Hamlet told Ophelia., who committed suicide on the strength of it. Admittedly, Sam Francis and Jared Taylor aren't trying very hard to be nice, unlike, say, Roy Beck, who is nice (not that it does him any good).

But no amount of backing and filling, surrendering, apologizing, or groveling will allow you to escape this accusation. Neither will suicide.

Here's a short list of people and organizations who've been called racist, in spite of flaming liberalism:

1. Rudy Giuliani, the liberal Republican Mayor of New York. There's a whole site devoted to this.
2. Terry McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee chairthing. (He said "colored people" when he should have said "people of color". But the NAACP forgave him.)
3. Bill Clinton, by Kimberley Wilson, an African-American woman, and also by Christopher Hitchens.
4. Nadine Gordimer, the anti-apartheid South African novelist.
5. Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist, accusing both himself and his four and a half year old son.
6. Hillary Clinton. She, like Giuliani, supported the Clinton Administration's "putatively tough and essentially racist initiatives on criminal justice."
7. Frosty the Snowman. I wish I could make these things up; I'd make a lot of money selling them to comedians.
8. Abraham Lincoln.
9. The entire YMCA.
10. The USDA. They recommend two servings of milk a day, and "lactose intolerance" is mostly a non-white problem.
11. And one non-European racist: Mahatma Gandhi.

The last one requires a quotation:

There are those who wonder why Mohan [Gandhi] did not fight the cause of the African natives of South Africa. Some historians have uncharitably labeled Gandhiji as a "racist", but I think they miss a very important point.

Gandhiji was unfamiliar with South Africa and the conditions and the language of the native Africans. He was also equally unfamiliar with the philosophy of non-violence which was being evolved one campaign at a time. It was hard enough for him to convince his own people about this philosophy without having to translate it for the native Africans who were known for their militancy.

All these people are liberals, and part of the Liberal Consensus (with the exception of Frosty, whose association with Christmas renders him suspect). The Gandhi quote was written by a Hindu relative of Gandhi's who is also outside the Consensus.

"Known for their militancy," indeed! Who does he think he is? Pat Buchanan?

So it's not surprising that Thomas Jefferson is called a racist, and so are black conservatives, the whole Republican Party, anyone to the right of Nelson Rockefeller, (who was also called a racist while he was alive), libertarians like L. Neil Smith, the entire Catholic Church, and of course, the United States of America.

When I was doing volunteer work in a local prison, I took an orientation course. The Correctional Officer doing the orientation made the following statement:

"No one can insult me without my permission."

It's only when you internalize the insult that you feel bad.

To make this work, however, you need to have a certain contempt for the insulter, and it's easy for a prison guard to have this kind of contempt for a convicted felon. When I remember how Joe McCarthy's scattershot tactics ended up hurting anti-Communists worse than Communists, it's easy for me to feel that same contempt the SPLC.

White racism, as represented by Tom Metzger, David Duke and various Aryan felons, may be a problem in society (a small problem numerically, compared to its opposite). But the SPLC isn't going to do any good by crying "Wolfgang!" when it sees a demographic argument.

May 30, 2001