| MND COMMENTARY |
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Black Man Bears Child! June 11, 2004 by Nicholas Stix A recent news story about a mouse born to two “mommies” suggested that the feminist fantasy of parthenogenesis, in which women would bear children without any “input” from men, might someday be realized. But New York Times columnist Bob Herbert went the pc feminists at the ABC one better: On June 4, he suggested that Illinois politician Barack Obama was birthed by Obama’s father, without a female (what used to be called a “mother”) playing any role in the matter. O.K., Herbert didn’t really say that, though he’s said things just as outrageous in the past. What he did was refer to a man as black, whose late mother was white. “At the moment he has a substantial lead in the polls. If that lead holds and he wins in November, he'll be only the third African-American to take a seat in the Senate since Reconstruction.” The term “African-American” is silly enough, seeing as it is a euphemism for black, which used to be a euphemism for brown, yellow, or off-white. But in this case, there is a double insult at work. For not only is Barack Obama the son of a white woman, and thus as much a white man as he is a black man, but his father deserted the family “early on”; thus, young Barack was raised almost exclusively by his white mother. From Herbert’s column, you’d think she were a mere white dry nurse, who “don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies!” (Ironically, in Obama’s case, the term “African-American” is for once accurate. But Bob Herbert could care less about things “African”; he refers to anyone with a drop of black blood in him as “African-American.”) Actually, Herbert doesn’t even tell us that Obama Sr. was black, only that he was “Kenyan.” Herbert either assumed, erroneously, that all Kenyans are black, or he simply decided to write the Asians and whites out of the country, the way he wrote Obama’s mother out of his genetic code. (Granted, only one percent of Kenyans are non-black, but if Herbert were writing about a region that was one percent black, you can be sure he wouldn’t write the blacks out of the place.) I’d never heard of Barack Obama before Bob Herbert wrote about him, but I’m not writing about Obama. I’m writing about Herbert, who provides no credible information about Obama’s politics. “In a political era saturated with cynicism and deceit, Mr. Obama is asking voters to believe him when he talks about the values and verities that so many politicians have lied about for so long. He's asking, in effect, for a leap of political faith.” Obama, says Herbert, supports the war in Afghanistan, but not the one in Iraq. Herbert tells us that Obama is a “left of center” pol who believes in "a set of core values that bind us together as Americans." According to Herbert, Obama’s “partisans describe [him] as a dream candidate, the point man for a new kind of politics designed to piece together a coalition reminiscent of the one blasted apart by the bullet that killed Robert Kennedy in 1968.” The multiculturalists who have for 30 years waged war on white, heterosexual males often play the “core values” song, when they’re not the playing the opposite one. For instance, we need to get “beyond race” … as far as white folks are concerned, but “everything’s racial,” where blacks and Hispanics are concerned. “Core value” talk -- logic and morality be damned -- always seems to lead to the demand that black and Hispanic Americans (and Hispanic NON-citizens!) be privileged under the law, and white Americans be disenfranchised. And in fact, Obama is a rabid supporter of affirmative action, though Herbert failed to divulge that fact. The title of Herbert’s column is, “A Leap of Faith.” But the leap of faith is not in support of Barack Obama; it is in support of Bob Herbert. Ultimately, Herbert is saying we should support Obama, because he told us to. Herbert crafts two cover stories, as to why we should support Obama: 1. He is left of center candidate whose message transcends partisanship; and 2. He is (as defined by Herbert) black. Forget number one. Herbert wants Illinoisans to elect Barack Obama to the senate, because Herbert has defined him as black. If a white columnist called on voters to elect a political candidate, merely because the latter was white, Herbert would shout from the rooftops of 43rd Street, that the white columnist was a racist. It’s a Black Thing, You Wouldn’t Understand Bob Herbert is a racist, black newsroom enforcer, a type that was born with affirmative action, and which over the past 15 years, as Ruth Shalit and William McGowan have chronicled, has reached a critical mass, such that it dominates most mainstream, American newsrooms. Though you won’t hear it expressed explicitly in front of whites, the mentality of the black media enforcer goes something like this, which admittedly, does not form a classic, Aristotelian syllogism: 1. The coverage of all race-related issues must be determined by black staffers and editors; 2. Ultimately, everything is racial; 3. Thus, all coverage must be determined by black staffers and editors. In May, 2003, Times managing editor Howell Raines confessed at an extraordinary public meeting called for Times staffers at a local movie theater, that journalistic fraud Jayson Blair had only managed to work and remain at the Times for so long because of the color of his skin. Five days later, Herbert published a column that not only denied that race played any role in the Blair scandal, but went on the offensive, with some classic race-baiting. Raines, on May 14, 2003: "Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts he appeared to be a promising young minority reporter. I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities." "Does that mean I personally favored Jayson? Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes." Herbert, in his May 19, 2003 column: "Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair's reporting. "But the folks who delight in attacking anything black, or anything designed to help blacks, have pounced on the Blair story as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with The Times's effort to diversify its newsroom, and beyond that, with the very idea of a commitment to diversity or affirmative action anywhere. "And while these agitators won't admit it, the nasty subtext to their attack is that there is something inherently wrong with blacks. "There's a real shortage of black reporters, editors and columnists at The Times. But the few who are here are doing fine and serious work day in and day out and don't deserve to be stigmatized by people who can see them only through the prism of a stereotype. "The problem with American newsrooms is too little diversity, not too much. Blacks have always faced discrimination and maddening double standards in the newsroom, and they continue to do so. So do women, Latinos and many other groups that are not part of the traditional newsroom in-crowd. "So let's be real. Discrimination in the newsroom - in hiring, in the quality of assignments and in promotions - is a much more pervasive problem than Jayson Blair's aberrant behavior. A black reporter told me angrily last week, 'After hundreds of years in America, we are still on probation.' "I agree. And the correct response is not to grow fainthearted, or to internalize the views of those who wish you ill. The correct response is to strike back - as hard and as often as it takes." At the time, I wrote that I wondered if Herbert had confronted Raines, regarding the latter's "misrepresentation" of the Blair case. Of course, Raines is gone, and Herbert is still at the Times. The nasty subtext to Bob Herbert’s attack on whites is that there is something inherently wrong with blacks, and that they cannot function as journalists without handouts and deferential treatment. And there is “something inherently wrong with … the very idea of a commitment to diversity or affirmative action anywhere.” It’s racist, it’s unfair, it rewards incompetence while punishing excellence, and it politicizes all professional relations. In short, it is a moral outrage. Note that although racist black groups such as the National Association of Black Journalists have agitated to no end for race-based newsroom hiring, just as the civil rights movement initially rose primarily due to the Great White Fathers of the U.S. Supreme Court, who in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education voted to overturn the U.S. Constitution, the rise of black newsroom enforcers is due primarily to Great White Fathers such as Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. at the New York Times and Al Neuharth at Gannett. As William McGowan, the author of Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism, has observed, "The average news exec is a fiftysomething white guy who the last thing he wants in his basket is a problem on the race issue. So they let themselves get steamrolled again and again.” (Quote is via Julia Duin.) Note that McGowan was not talking about the Sulzbergers and Neuharths of the world, but of their underlings. For an example of a white editor rolling over, consider black alleged journalist Jill Nelson’s influence on the Washington Post when she worked there in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like many of her racist, black colleagues, Nelson felt a protectiveness toward Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, and a corresponding hatred toward white journalists who lacked such feelings. Such protectiveness from black alleged journalists was crucial in permitting the corrupt, drug-addled, black mayor to destroy a city whose books had been in good shape when he was first elected in 1978. In 1990, Barry was arrested in a drug sting that included a videotape of him smoking crack with an old girlfriend turned informant. Eventually, he was convicted and imprisoned for six months. But Barry would have been turned out of office or arrested years earlier, had black Washington journalists and editors who considered themselves Barry’s racial protectors not gone out of their way to cover for him, and to harass white colleagues, and sandbag and spike exposes the latter sought to publish on Barry. In her memoir of her days at the Washington Post, Volunteer Slavery, Nelson bragged of her success in manipulating an unflattering story on the mayor. A black woman had charged Barry with having raped her. Nelson got the word “rape” dropped from the story, in favor of “forced,” so that readers ultimately would not know what the woman had charged Barry with having done to her. “Woman Says Barry Forced Her Into Sex; Mayor Calls Testimony ‘Not Believable.’” Nelson later bragged, “Now that’s spin control.” Nelson is so screamingly racist, that in her memoir, she made a point of referring to old white men such as liberal, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, as “white boys.” Whereas, whites who expose black racism are routinely whitelisted from journalism, education, and academia, Nelson’s in-your-face racism has gotten her book contracts, speaking engagements, and a professorship at the once-great City College of New York. Unfortunately, as William McGowan has shown, what has been going on in the nation’s capital has been going on across the country. Affirmative action has caused reporting on racially-oriented stories to deteriorate, as minority reporters see themselves not as journalists, but as political representatives of their groups, and ceaselessly spin the news to their respective groups’ perceived advantage. Just a Drop’ll Do Ya Most American blacks tend to refer to anyone with any black blood in him as “black.” “It only takes one drop!” announced the middle-aged secretary to the executive director of a foster care agency where I worked, during the late 1980s. We were having a private conversation after hours, and though I probably raised my eyebrows, I didn’t argue with the lady. It was the first time I’d ever heard the claim, but more importantly, in an already obscenely racist business (which has since gotten worse), she liked and supported me. But the claim is biologically absurd, the stuff of racial supremacist fantasy. I could, with equal validity, say that one drop of white blood makes one white. I’ve heard numerous New York blacks say, triumphantly, “It was good enough in the past!” No, it wasn’t, and they don’t for one minute think it was. The “one-drop rule” was imposed by white supremacists that treated blacks worse than animals. But the blacks, who push the one-drop rule today, have no intention of returning to Jim Crow. If anything, they support “Jim Snow,” the system of black supremacy, with its own form of Nazi-style pseudo-biology, thanks to Frances Cress Welsing. Welsing, a Washington, D.C.-based psychiatrist and author of the The Isis Papers, claims that there are “black” and “white” genes, and that in cases of mixed race sexual reproduction, the “black” genes are always “dominant.” She also maintains that the white and black (she says “non-white,” but since she believes that one drop of black blood makes one black, we can safely ignore the phony qualification.) races are pitted against each other in a war of annihilation. In fact, there are no such things as “black” and “white” genes. Welsing’s ideas have been promoted most effectively through Chicago-based black supremacist Jawanza Kunjufu, the author of the pamphlet series, Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, whose four parts were later fused into book form. Kunjufu, who has pocketed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of taxpayer dollars as a motivational speaker at black-dominated public schools, has even been a guest on Oprah. Through the first 60 or so years of the 20th century, there was a schism between American “civil rights” activists and “black nationalists,” though the same person, such as NAACP co-founder W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963), might land in different camps at different times. Civil rights leaders emphasized integration and legal action, while black nationalists (aka black supremacists aka black power advocates aka community control activists aka Afrocentrists) emphasized racial separatism, violence, and genocide. The schism between the civil rights and black supremacy movements was originally based on distinctions of skin color, social class, urbanization and philosophy. The first black supremacist to develop a national following was Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey (1887-1940), the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the “Back-to-Africa” movement. Garvey preached black self-help, supremacy, and genocide. (Unlike today’s black supremacists, Garvey did not demand handouts from whites.) He preached not only against the white man, but the dark-skinned Garvey railed against the light-skinned, civil rights elite. While some of Garvey’s followers tended to be darker-skinned than the civil rights activists, what more commonly bound them was that they were uneducated blacks who had sought a better life in the Northern cities during and immediately after the First World War, but had found only grinding poverty as bad or worse in the North than in the South, but without the social supports they had left behind in the rural South. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, and deported in 1927. Not only had the federal government sought for some time to deport Garvey, but it was joined by the agitations of the civil rights establishment, which felt threatened by him. The Harlem-based Garvey had founded the most popular black movement ever seen in America. Considering that Garvey was a black man, an immigrant, and a racist agitator who left a string of corpses and fleeced investors in his wake, it is remarkable that the supposedly racist U.S. the government permitted him to operate in America for six years (1916-1922), before prosecuting him. Over the past forty years, civil rights types and black supremacists have increasingly mended their fences, as black Americans have tossed aside various intraracial divides, in the interest of a homogenized, unified, anti-white racism. The supremacists increasingly manipulate the legal system (indeed, Garvey had called on them to do so), while the civil rights types, including Bob Herbert, increasingly rationalize black violence. The point at which the black supremacist-civil rights cooperation is most dramatic, is in the demands for new reparations of as much as $1 million to be paid to every black man, woman, and child residing in these United States. (Trillions of dollars have already been paid to blacks through social programs, beginning in circa 1965, which were explicitly conceived of as racial reparations.) Things have come to a point where, theoretical differences notwithstanding, in practice, there isn’t a dime’s difference between a “civil rights man” like Bob Herbert defining a biracial or partly black person as black, and Frances Cress Welsing and her minions’ biology of black genetic “dominance.” Reading Herbert, I didn’t learn anything of substance about Barack Obama, and I’d already known everything I needed to know about Bob Herbert. New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix has written for Toogood Reports, Middle American News, the New York Post, Daily News, American Enterprise, Insight, Chronicles, Newsday and many other publications. His recent work is collected at www.geocities.com/nstix and http://www.thecriticalcritic.blogspot.com. |
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