Ch. VII, Part 2

VII.D Discourse and Counter-Discourse 1: The ‘New Racism’

39. The following sections undertake to survey sets of ‘discourses and counter-discourses’ relating to precarious social issues. For showing what’s at stake, I relied mainly on voices selected for their value in clearly accentuating contested discursive positions that pit the well-being of the great majority against the greed for money and power of a tiny minority -- people power versus money power.

40. The Modifier in ‘New Racism’ sounds curious for an ideology which, for thousands of years, sustained and justified the ‘great empires’ and their slave trades and enabled Europe to build the monuments of its officially ‘superior civilisations’. Racist discourses published long ago in respected journals seem hardly dated:

[2116] These savages court slavery. […] They have no independence about them, generally speaking, but follow a master as a spaniel would. (Francis Galton, founder of ‘eugenics’, 1853)³⁵

[2117] Morality was a joke among Negro society. […] They are just as devoid of ethical sentiment or consciousness as the fly and the maggot. (T.S. Murrell, 1909)³⁶

Still, the emancipation from slavery and colonialism and the civil rights movements in the 20^th century sharply diminished the public acceptability of racist discourse, mainly where economies and labour markets were strongly expanding in the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet when recessions became endemic, wages stagnated or fell everywhere but at the very top, and jobs were massively wiped out by such practices as ‘downsizing’ and ‘privatising’, racism came oozing forth again.

41. The New Racism thus seems ‘new’ mainly in its aggressive re-emergence in public discourse for cynical moves of flakspeak and hatespeak, notably in the mass media [2118-19], and most nastily in anonymous postings in Internet chatsites [2120], where African Americans are now joined by Arabs as prime targets [2121].

[2118] We have in our nation, not hundreds or  thousands  but  millions  of  sub-humanoids — savages […] who for whatever reason have not become civilized. (Bob Grant on WABC)

[2119] I’d rather have a trained monkey working for me than a nigger. […] Hitler was good in the beginning (Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schot on Primetime Live)

[2120] Why can’t we just have the United States military fire bomb the ghettos and kill all  the niggers? Would our country really miss these porch monkeys? (‘ die niggers die’)^www

[2121] Why not just nuke the towelheads, ragheads, sandniggers, camelfuckers, bobble-heads, scraprats or whatever you want to call them? (‘Gator Hunter’)^www

42. Racism might resonate with ‘New Right’ spokespersons and their wealthy sponsorship for several reasons. They blame easily recognised scapegoats for the worsening social problems like poverty and crime actually aggravated by their own agenda to destroy the social safety net (cf. VII.1). Their hypocritical fraudspeak slinks to high moral ground to castigate ‘black vice’ in matters like abortion, illegitimate offspring, and drug use (VII.49). They tacitly woo voter blocks of closet racists, and have few black votes to lose anyway (8% in 2000) — even less after illegally denying so many their right to vote in Florida (cf. VII.19). And they vehemently oppose the immigration of ‘non-whites’ who might well vote against them too.

43. Using the beloved ‘pre-emptive defence strategy’ (VII.27), the far right inanely vow that ‘the real racists’ are their opponents: the ‘Black community’ [2122], ‘Democrats’ [2123], ‘black ‘Democrats’ (double jeopardy) [2124], ‘liberals’ [2125], or ‘multiculturalists’ [2126].

[2122] The Black community [has] taken away the rights of the White people and shown who the real ‘Racists’ are in America. (Racism in America)^www

[2123] The democrats are the real racists. They use African Americans and Hispanics for their own agenda, but have no respect for them, obviously. The media indeed goes along with them creating more hate, more division, and less understanding. (‘lady-in-red’ — ‘A Conservative News Forum’)^www

[2124] The real racists are the black Democrats who continue to stoke the fires of racial unrest to stay in the limelight and pander votes (Daniel H Duffy)^www

[2125] Liberals are the real racists; […] If a person chooses to be his own man rather than what the liberals think he should be then he is accused of being a traitor to his group. That is what the Nazis did. (Confederacy Project)^www

[2126] Multiculturalists are the real racists. […] I’m not a racist, only a culturist. I believe Western culture — rule of law, universal suffrage, etc. — is preferable to Arab culture. (Mark Steyn in the National Post)^www

The same ‘preventive’ strategy accuses the opponents with precisely the favoured moves of the far right, such as ‘creating more hate, more division’ [2123].

44. Rent-A-Rant Horowitz denied the whole problem and blamed the victims:

[2127] The effects of racism in the black community are minimal, and have been blown way out of proportion by a cadre of power-hungry black leaders, who are meanwhile ignoring the moral and social failings that are the real reason blacks lag behind whites (quoted in Salon.com)^www

He also ran a paid rant in the Berkeley Daily Californian (which apologized), titled ‘Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea — And Racist Too’, and inanely proclaiming that slavery was self-inflicted by blacks.

45. Racist ‘media pundits’ are oddly ensconced in otherwise respectable outlets:

[2128] I would propose that no African-American use the terms ‘racism’ or ‘racist’. The words are a feckless indulgence, corrosive to blacks and whites alike. (Lance Morrow in Time).

[2129] On the sidewalk [at Times Square], we saw two ‘Mideastern-looking men’, […] looking like the guys who’d just a few days before blown up a landmark, […] silently videotaping the outside of St. Pat’s. […] I surveyed the street for a policeman or patrol car [and] thought: ‘Those guys are terrorists.’ (Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal)

[2130] There are thousands of Arabs in the United States at this moment on student and travel visas. They should all be asked, politely and without prejudice [sic], to go home. […] Every Middle-eastern-looking truck driver should be pulled over and questioned. (Mona Charen in Townhall)

Maybe these vitriolic ‘pundits’ owe their jobs to the intervention of right-wing corporate sponsors, and capture a shallow readership with no interest in the serious, researched reporting those outlets are better known to publish.

46. Certainly racist discourse could hardly have mushroomed without a steady influx of ‘grants’ and ‘funding’ from right-wing ‘think tanks’ like those cited in VII.29, also with bland-sounding names like the ‘Pioneer Fund’ or the ‘Manhattan Institute’ (and not, say, the Pious Sneer Fund’ or, the ‘Man-Hating Institute’). These sources also promote the academic accreditation of the New Racism in the universities.³⁷ ‘These academics’ ‘provide justification to people for their racist beliefs; if you have a Ph.D. after your name, you have a lot more clout’ (Heidi Beirich, at the Southern Poverty Law Center). They earn their ‘grants’ and ‘fellowships’ by singling out race as the cause of social ills like ‘murder’ and ‘promiscuity’ [2131], with a duplicitous appeal to Freudian sexual envy [2132-33].

[2131] The best predictor of murder rate across the 50 states of the U.S. is simply the proportion of the population that is Black. (Glayde Whitney, late Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Florida State University)^www

[2132] Blacks, according to [J. Philippe] Rushton [Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario], have larger genitals, making them more promiscuous, and smaller brains, making them less intelligent than whites. (Barry Mehler)³⁸

[2133] Rushton (who’s gotten more than $770,000 from the Pioneer Fund) has transformed the Victorian science of cranial measurement into a sexual fetish — measuring not only head and brain size, but also the size of breasts, buttocks and genitals. ‘It’s a trade-off: More brain or more penis. You can’t have everything’. Rushton was reprimanded by his school for accosting people in a local shopping mall and asking them how big their penises were and how far they could ejaculate. (reported in Rolling Stone ; posted by Jim Naureckas at Extra!)^www

If I stooped to flakspeak, I’d insinuate that hint Rushton himself needs a magnifying glass to urinate, and ejaculates, if at all, as far as his own shoelaces. But of course I won’t.

47. Even more amazingly, such lunatic fringe academics have not been at all ostracised. Rushton himself has, on the contrary,

[2134] been embraced by the scientific mainstream, having been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American, British, and Canadian Psychological Associations (David Lethbridge)^www

In January 2003, he fittingly became the well-heeled director of his long-time patron, the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 to ‘conduct research and study into the problems of race betterment’ (Certificate of Incorporation) — what is commonly called eugenics.³⁹ Its ‘first president, Harry Laughlin, was an influential advocate of sterilization for those he considered genetically unfit’, and ‘testified before Congress that 83 percent of Jewish immigrants were innately feeble-minded’ (reported in Rolling Stone), drawing on tests at Ellis Island by H.H. Goddard in 1910, who found Jews testing as ‘morons’ (a term he invented) just because they didn’t understand English. Guess who famously took up this same advocacy:

[2135] The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason and if systematically executed represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as whole. (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf)

48. Meanwhile, the academic market has been strangely receptive to books that cite race to discourage or discredit government programs for the disadvantaged. An influential one was Losing Ground by Charles Murray [2136-37]. who once burned a cross in his home town of Newton, Iowa. Actually, the success of the book was ensured by the ‘conservative’ Cash-For-Bash and Rent-A-Rant schemes [2138].

[2136] This year’s budget-cutters’ bible seems to be Losing Ground among movers and shakers in the federal executive branch. […] In agency after agency, officials cite the Murray book as a philosophical base for proposals to slash social expenditure. (New York Times)

[2137] Murray argues that welfare programs, instead of providing a helping hand for those in temporary need, actually created the problem. […] By making it more economically feasible for single mothers to remain unmarried, he argues, welfare increased the incidence of out-of-wedlock births, thus hastening the decline of black communities and creating a parasitic underclass (quoted on Salon.com)^www

[2138] The Heritage Institute raised $125,000 to promote Murray’s book; […] it sent 700 free copies to academics, journalists, and public officials worldwide, sponsored seminars on the book, and funded a nationwide speaking tour for Murray.⁴⁰

However, welfare should create a ‘parasitic underclass’ not just blacks but also of whites, whom Murray in fact patronised in Losing Ground as ‘white trash’ ‘sitting at home in their undershirts drinking’, and ‘not really caring anyway’  — which blurs the issue of race.

49. Cash-For-Bash ‘intellectuals’ soon refocused on race with books so hefty you could literally use them to bash poor people senseless. The portentous tome (724 pages) titled The End of Racism was authored by the founder and first editor of the Dartmouth Review (VII.31) while it ran a vicious parody of African Americans:

[2139] Dese boys be sayin’ that we be comin’ here to Dartmut an’ not takin’ the classics. You know, Homa, Shakesphere; but I hea’ dey all be co’d in da ground, six feet unda, and whatchu be askin’ us to learn from dem? [etc.] (Keeney Jones, later speechwriter for Secretary of ‘Education’ William Bennett)

He is one Dinesh D’Souza, a grateful immigrant from Bombay, India, and one more Rent-A-Rant protégé of the Heritage Institute. The book title signifies the complacent prediction that ‘racism will end’ when society goes colour-blind (and blacks cease to feel discriminated, or else!) because all public support and protection of African Americans has been abolished, though private citizens will be free to discriminate as they see fit. Here, we find an academic variety of flakspeak in a more strenuous style but no less pejorative, with apocalyptic visions of ‘barbarism’ [2140] (a term I find laughably quaint), ‘catastrophic cultural change’ [2141], and a ‘breakdown of civilization’ [2142], all blamed on ‘blacks’ (but not Hispanics and certainly not Asians).

[2140] For many whites the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization. (527)

[2141] The conspicuous pathologies of blacks are the product of catastrophic cultural change that poses a threat both to the African-American community and to society as a whole. (478)

[2142] A breakdown of civilization within the African-American community [has brought] high rates of criminal activity, by the normalization of illegitimacy, by the predominance of single-parent families, by high levels of addiction to alcohol and drugs, by a parasitic reliance on government provision, by a hostility to academic achievement, and by a scarcity of independent enterprises. (477)

The true cause, namely the social and economic discrimination that fosters ‘crime’ and ‘addiction’ and places ‘academic achievement’ out of reach, is arrantly ignored so as to place the blame on the  ideology of ‘Afrocentrism’ (which in reality encourages African Americans to reflect on their heritage):

[2143] it offers young blacks nothing in the way of knowledge and skills that are required by modern life [but] a fortified chauvinism, a hardened conspiratorial mindset, and a robotic dedication to ideologies of blackness, […] evident in the hardened gleam in many Afrocentric eyes, [and] a virtually cultic pattern of lockstep behavior. (381)

Thus, the ‘blacks’ are at fault for ‘severing the bonds of empathy and under-standing that are the basis for coexistence and cooperation in a multiracial society’ (381). I see little ‘empathy and understanding’ in today’s racist discourses, but D’Souza sees them in ‘segregation’ (of all places), which he vowed (in the New York Times) was created by Southern whites ‘to protect blacks’. If I stooped to flak-speak. I’d hint he’s yearning to be certified an Honorary Honkey, but again I won’t.

50. The most bloated tome of academic racism so far is the even more portentous tome titled The Bell Curve of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein — 552 pages of text, 110 pages of ‘appendices’, 168 pages of ‘notes’ and a 57 page ‘bibliography’ — which drew a blitz of media attention [2144], as always courtesy of the ‘conservative’ Cash-For-Bash machine (while ‘working on the book, Murray got more than $500,000 from the Bradley Foundation' – Los Angeles Times):

[2144] The book and its dubious claims set the agenda for discussions on such public affairs programs as Nightline, the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, PrimeTime Live, and All Things Considered. It occupied a full issue of the New Republic, made the covers of Newsweek and the New York Times Magazine, took up nearly a full op-ed page in the Wall Street Journal and garnered a near-rave review from the New York Times Book Review. (Extra!)^www

After linking with Herrnstein, who had written that ‘the tendency to be unemployed may run in the genes of a family about as certainly as bad teeth’ (Atlantic Monthly), Murray shifted the blame for social ills from ‘welfare dependency’ (in Losing Ground) over to the biological and genetic differences between races. Significantly, ‘researchers’ cited to support claims about race and IQ were paid by (surprise!) the Pioneer Fund. Besides lauding the ‘convincing empirical reports’ of the pioneering penisographer-cum-ejaculometer Rushton (11 mentions in the bibliography, plus a two-page mention in an appendix), the authors avow having ‘benefited especially from the advice’ of Richard Lynn, a professor of psychology at the University of Ulster and ‘a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences’, who has written

[2145] What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the population of incompetent cultures. But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples. […] Evolutionary progress means the extinction of the less competent. To think otherwise is mere sentimentality. (Newsday)

51. The central question of the book is posed in the plainest style: ‘if you have to choose, is it better to be born smart or rich?’ (127), the preferred answer being ‘smart’. This seemingly innocent question tricks you into presupposing that IQ (‘smartness’) is indeed determined by genetics (‘at birth’) (in Curvespeak: ‘it is beyond significant technical dispute that cognitive ability is substantially heritable’, 105). If you start out smart and want to get rich too, just wait for your justly earned ‘membership’ in the ‘cognitive elite’, ‘gained by high IQ’ (510):

[2146] Among other things, they will come to run much of the country’s business. In the private sector, the cognitive elite dominates the ranks of CEO’s and the top echelon of corporate executives (510).

So when you queue up to be born, tick the ‘smart’ box on your entry permit. And tell your parents and grandparents to do the same retroactively and ASAP.

52. By neatly circular logic, success in getting wealth and power is taken as proof of membership in the cognitive elite, which would certify (brace yourself) Bush Jr (or Dick Cheney, or Karl Rove) as the smartest men in the USA just now. But

[2147] many of the world’s most intelligent people have chosen challenging and intrinsically rewarding professions that offer no hope of wealth, prestige or power, [which can after all be] attained by those who are devious and seek material gain without regard to principles of ethics or conscience, instead of by those who are intelligent or socially gifted. [Is] a crooked lawyer who makes $200,000 a year held in higher esteem by society than a social worker who works for little or no money to help rebuild the slums of the inner-city? (John C. Culbertson)⁴¹

Murray would have to say ‘higher esteem’, no, but higher IQ, yes, which entitles gabillionaire CEOs like, erm, Ken Lay. Conversely, my own IQ is falling right now by giving away this book instead of making money out of it.

53. However implausible, genetic accounts for ‘racial inferiority’ do better than social accounts like ‘welfare dependency’ and ‘culture of poverty’ in totally freeing society from blame for discrimination and from all responsibility to work for social change and progress toward equality. Within the book’s discursive theme, IQ is genetically determined and is thus inherited; success or failure throughout your life is in turn determined by IQ more than (or rather than?) ‘socio-economic status’. Moral: if you’re dumb (‘cognitively challenged’ in Curvespeak), you’ll probably be poor; and if you’re poor, you’re probably dumb (and your parents too, so curse them, and not society, for not having married smarter spouses).

54. For shock effect, the vilified ‘welfare edifice’ is foreseen mutating into a cushy concentration camp for genetic ninnies, namely

[2148] a high-tech and more lavish version of the Indian reservation for some substantial minority of the nation’s population, while the rest of America tries to go about its business.  (526).

To avert this nightmare, Murray pompously counseled the US, on ABC’s This Week,  to ‘get rid of the whole welfare system, period, lock, stock and barrel’.

55. To look ‘scientific’ and intimidate critics, the book bristles with statistics, tables, graphs and ‘multiple regression equations’, but all these are biased from the outset — and some manipulated and misinterpreted too (VII.61) — by at least three fundamental category errors: that IQ and socio-economic status are ‘independent variables’; that correlations between them prove causalities; and that education can be simply omitted as a determining factor. Far more plausibly, differences in achievement and manifestations of intelligence (however measured) are the consequences, not the causes, of social inequality. Schooling views the cognitive and the social factors as independent to evade the blame for reinforcing inequalities in ‘socio-economic status’ (cf. I.49). And society is happy to concur by hailing the same view in the Bell Curve, without ploughing through its blizzard of ‘equations’.

56. Even if the ‘intelligence tests’ marketed in psychometrics yield meaningful measures, they need not be measuring any ‘independent’ genetic endowment. They are imbued with cultural knowledge, and your access depends on your socio-economic status, family history, ecology, environment, and so on.⁴² Whatever the design, the texts cannot done in a cultural vacuum that effectively isolates purely genetic skills. Moreover, genetic skills might well be far more equal than cultural skills and thus hold insignificant predictive value if we could measure them.

57. The vagaries of IQ testing probably motivated replacing ‘intelligence’ (because of ‘undue affect and political baggage’) with ‘the more neutral term “cognitive ability”’ (22), invoked as the ‘the decisive dividing force’ (25) within society. It is ‘more important than parental SES [socio-economic status] in determining poverty’; it ‘still has a major effect on poverty even within groups with identical education’ (137); and it ‘affects social behavior without regard to race and ethnicity’ (135). Unexpectedly, some welfare (though not money!) is foreseen:

[2149] it will become broadly accepted by the cognitive elite [that] the underclass are in that condition through no fault of their own but because of inherent shortcomings about which little can be done. [Since they] cannot be trusted to use cash wisely, […] policy will consist of greater benefits  primarily in the form of services rather than cash (523).

58. More deviously, ‘low cognitive ability’ is also blamed for the ‘difficulty in figuring out why marriage is a good thing’ (544), and thus for ‘bearing children out of wedlock, being on welfare and having poor parenting skills’ (John C. Culbertson), expressed elsewhere in more brutal terms:

[2150] Murray [has been] obsessed with attacking single mothers on welfare, calling out of wedlock births ‘the single most important social problem of our time’ [what happened to crime? violence?]; the US government should end all welfare support; […] fathers should refuse to make child support payments to unwed mothers — as a form of punishment. […] Unlike earlier eugenicists, Murray and Herrnstein say they oppose forced sterilisation. Instead they would make poor families go hungry and homeless, by cutting off all welfare, food stamps and subsidised housing to the poor. (Sharon Smith)⁴³

[2151] Charles Murray [on CBS] suggested that welfare for single mothers be […] flat-out eliminated. [It] would be painful, but would provide a powerful incentive to reduce pregnancies, and help turn around the trend toward single-parent families. […] Young, unwed mothers would have to work, get support from family and friends, or starve! [Besides], welfare […] promotes breeding of intellectually inferior humans. (Conservative Manifesto)^www

So you might favour abolishing welfare as a substitute for ‘eugenic’ sterilisation, if you were obtuse enough to imagine (as Murray asks you to do) that unwed pregnancies arise from deliberate and cynical economic calculations.

59. The category of race (or ‘ethnicity’ in Curvespeak) is legitimised as a category of common sense, not of science:

[2152] Races  are  by definition groups of people who differ  in  characteristic  ways. […] The  rule  we follow is to classify people according to the way they classify themselves. (271f).

This sleight-of-hand ‘rule’ is not ‘followed’ when deciding who’s smart or dumb; nor are IQ scores declared valid just because tested people think so. Instead, the authors flatly ‘claim that black IQs are 15 points lower than whites, citing R. Travis Osborne, who ‘took almost $400,000 from Pioneer for “research” into black genetic inferiority’ to support ‘restoring school segregation’ (Newsday). Amusingly, they also aver that ‘Jews, specifically, Ashkenazi Jews of European origins, test higher than any other ethnic group’ (275) — an unwitting affront to the first president of Pioneer, who testified that ‘Jewish immigrants are innately feeble-minded’ (VII.47).

 60. Now, since race is incontestably determined by genetics, asserting that IQ is too creates the link the whole book was planned to forge: African Americans are ‘cognitively challenged’ (and hence poor) because nature has decreed them so. If Losing Ground  told ‘well meaning whites fearing that they are closet racists’ that ‘they are not’ and ‘made them feel better’, then Bell Curve’s genetic proof that ‘blacks’ are inferior exonerates white people (and non-white Bombay Indians) who thought so all long and converts them from racists to realists or even armchair scientists.

61. Yet tainted ‘research’ money eventually lost its miracle powers when the counter-discourse of ‘experts in the fields of psychometrics, dysgenics, and genetics began to weigh in’:⁴⁴

[2153] Scholarly examination repeatedly demonstrated that the statements that form the very core of The Bell Curve’s arguments were either highly questionable or demonstrably false. […] Experts in the field found they could not reproduce its results. […] ‘Several of the numbers are simply wrong. There are no fewer than five copying or multiplication errors in age- and test-specific entries in the body of a single table.’⁴⁵ […] Rerunning the data with a more accurate standard deviation [yielded] a significantly higher black-white IQ convergence. (Eric Alterman)⁴⁴

[2154] Scientists found countless other incidents of the authors either ignoring data that conflicted with that which they cited or unaccountably failing to include or address important studies that would throw a monkey wrench into their reasoning. As a result of the above, more than a few members of the expert community denounced the book as a kind of scholarly swindle (same)

[2155] This book is a fraud, and its authors must have known it was a fraud when they were writing it. By ‘fraud’ I mean a deliberate, self-conscious misrepresentation of the evidence. (Michael Nunley, Professor of Anthropology, University of Oklahoma)⁴⁶

I’d say it’s clear by now for whose ‘intelligence’ the Bell Curve tolls.

Click here to go to Chapter VII, Part 3