Monday, January 24, 2005

Out of the Woodwork

Dennis Roddy has written an excellent piece on Jared Taylor, publisher of the white-supremacist rag American Renaissance, who was recently promoted as a "race-relations expert" on a number of radio and television stations.

What Taylor represents and how he got himself on no fewer than a half-dozen radio and television stations in large markets to denounce Martin Luther King illustrates the new tactics of white supremacy. Employing the dispassionate language of sociological and genetic studies, and under the veneer of academic inquiry, an assortment of highly educated people now push the theory that everything from unwed motherhood in Atlanta to economic collapse in Gambia can be explained by the genetic code imprinted on the races.
A lot of us made fun of the Religious Right in the Reagan years; few of us saw them gaining the power and influence they have today. I'd argue that Taylor's brand of white supremacy is on the verge of being similarly mainstreamed, and that one of the purposes of the Republican takeover of government was, in fact, to pave the way for a formal acceptance of white-supremacist pseudoscience as a respectable basis for public policy. Taylor himself has for years invoked the evils of "political correctness," claiming that it was stifling rational discussion of race and genetics; one has only to read a few articles in American Renaissance to see how profoundly its arguments have affected the discussion of racial issues on the right.

I really wonder what we intend to do about this.

3 comments:

echidne said...

There definitely is a new strategy among the white supremacists and the misogynists on how to sell their ideas. They clothe it in pseudoscience, and in the case of women, at least, they learned from Steven Pinker that if you repeat a thousand times that discrimination is wrong, you can then say anything you want without anyone making a fuss.

Phila said...

I'm afraid all that stuff about how "discrimination is wrong" is a bit similar to the disclaimers on hackers' sites that say "Whatever you do, don't use this information to cheat the phone company"...it's ass-covering that may or may not be disingenuous.

Going back to my earlier post about Darwin vs. Wallace, Darwin was scrupulous - and possibly even sincere - about saying that no matter how unnatural and dangerous and wrongheaded it was to vaccinate people against smallpox, we had to do it anyway, for the good of our souls. For a lot of people, that was not a compelling statement.

Anonymous said...

This is why I advocate a simplistic response that hides nothing under any sophisticate's veil. Such as dropping 'red state' from the vocabulary.

There are blue states and gray states. The gray seeks division, seeks to shirk its fair share of taxation and can only sustain itself by making someone their 'nigger' that they can own, oppress, dehumanize and destroy at will.

Except I don't have to say all that. I just say the gray states are opposed to a United States and equality and will kill to see the US destroyed. The rest can be left to the imagination. But it should be repeated 10,000 times, no matter how they shun the label. Keep them on the defensive and dare them to prove otherwise.


-Kevin
The American Street