RACE TO A WHITE MINORITY

Samuel Francis on the real meaning

of a prediction by, among others, Mr Clinton

Washington DC EVEN chauvinistic Americans admit that California is the weirdest state in the Union — perhaps the weirdest place in the world — and it is interesting that two British satires on America, Aldous Hux- ley's After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, are both set in that state. In the 20th century, California has produced Hollywood, Charles Manson, Madonna, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, American wine and occasional earthquakes, among other oddities. It seems to have an inherent genius for producing things and people not commonly associated with America, and then twisting them into living caricatures that could be nothing but American. A couple of weeks ago, California produced a white Southern Baptist president deliver- ing a speech on 'racial reconciliation'.

President Clinton's address, announced several weeks before its delivery at the graduation exercises at the University of California at San Diego, turned out to be rather less well received than he and his courtiers had expected. It is characteristic of the country's current political and ideo- logical sterility that both the Left and the Right seem to have agreed that 'racial rec- onciliation' would be a good thing, but that neither side believes that the concoction of clichés and platitudes unbosomed by the President accomplished it.

The Right, in the person of Newt Gin- grich, asserted that speeches about recon- ciliation achieve nothing, and the Speaker unveiled a ten-point programme that he avowed would achieve something. Most of his proposals involve measures such as school vouchers, abolishing affirmative action, and other items on the conservative Republican agenda that are unexception- able to the Right but which probably will have no effect whatsoever on race rela- tions.

The Left, if we take the Revd Jesse Jackson as representative of what remains of it, also had little praise for Mr Clinton's oration. The Left wants action, and its cru- saders are none too pleased with what they consider the inaction of the Clinton administration on more civil rights, more welfare, more aggressive egalitarianism. Speeches are all well and good, but where are the money and power that remain the holy grails of the leftist quest? Nevertheless, if you listened closely, Mr Clinton did say a few words that are signif- icant, though the egalitarian premises and guilt about race that both the Right and the Left seem to share nowadays probably prevent adherents of either side from hearing them.

One significant sentence uttered by the President lay in his acknowledgment, the first by a president, that within 50 years the United States will have ceased to be a white majority country for the first time in its history; 'A half-century from now,' he remarked, 'when your own grandchildren are in college, there will be no majority race in America.' That projection has been reported repeatedly by the US Census Bureau and has been the subject of cover stories in national news magazines and front-page stories in major newspapers, but its significance still has not sunk in.

Mr Clinton, of course, chose to express the projection in a more positive way, as though race will have ceased to exist by the time the transformation occurs, rather than saying that whites will no longer be in a position of political control. He also chose to assume that the transformation is inevitable, if not an accomplished fact. The truth is that the demographic change will take place only if immigration contin- ues at its present rate and in its present form (from non-white Third World coun- tries) andlf the fertility rates of whites and non-whites remain more or less what they are now. Halting immigration now, a posi- tion favoured by some 80 per cent or more of the American public, would significantly slow the transformation down or stop it altogether, but neither Mr Clinton nor any other major figure in American politics takes that position.

The other significant item that fell from the presidential lips in San Diego was Mr Clinton's sermon about 'bigotry'. It is sig- nificant only because it reveals an unspo- ken assumption of his speech, and indeed of most speeches and policies on the sub- ject of the races and the reconciliation thereof. 'We still see evidence of bigotry from the desecration of houses of worship, whether they be churches, synagogues or mosques, to demeaning talk in corporate suites,' he preached. 'There is still much work to be done by you, members of the class of 1997.'

Denunciations of bigotry, of course, are as commonplace as eulogies of mother- hood and Harry Truman, but from the examples the President offered in his rodomontade against racial hostility, we may ferret out the assumption he and many others make about it.

What is noticeable about these instances of bigotry is that they just happen to be examples of white racial sins. Last year, there was a vast hue and cry throughout the country when the media started report- ing on a series of acts of arson against black churches. It was widely reported and widely believed that there existed 'conspir- acy' of white racists who were going about the land burning down the houses of wor- ship. Mr Clinton publicly denounced the fires, and Congress immediately passed a law making any arson of any church a fed- eral offence.

Later reportage — by USA Today, vari- ous other newspapers, insurance compa- nies, and a federal task force appointed by Mr Clinton — failed utterly to discover any such 'conspiracy'. In some cases, black churches burned down because they hap- pened to be older and constructed of wood. There were some fires at white churches also, but no one seemed to pay much atten- tion to them. Nor was it clear that arson was the main cause of the fires or that racism was the motivation in the cases that were arson. Only a week before Mr Clin- ton's San Diego speech, his own federal task-force reported that white racists were responsible for fires at black churches in only a 'handful of cases'.

The other instance of 'bigotry' Mr Clin- ton adduced had to do with the now notori- ous Texaco discrimination case, in which some executives of Texaco in discussing personnel policy in their company allegedly made racially demeaning remarks about non-white employees. It remains indeter- minate whether the executives really meant to refer to racial minorities in a demeaning way in their chatter, but even if they did, it is not an incident on a par with burning down the local church.

The temptation is to remark that if these are the worst cases of 'bigotry' that Mr Clinton can come up with, it must not be much of a problem in race relations. Even if they were indisputably valid examples, they still would not register on the bigotry scale in the same way as the murder of civil rights workers in the 1960s.

But the assumption that Mr Clinton revealed in the examples of bigotry he mentioned is more significant than whatev- er truth the examples may convey. That assumption is that racial bigotry is the exclusive monopoly of whites, and whatev- er the value of the two examples, that assumption is simply untrue.

One of the major reasons for racial polarisation in the United States today lies precisely in non-white bigotry against whites, and had Mr Clinton been serious about racial reconciliation he would have dared mention that truth. He might have taken the occasion of speaking in Califor- nia to reflect on the savage anti-white (and anti-Asian) violence that erupted in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, or he might have dwelled for a few moments on the anti- white sentiment that surfaced during and after the O.J. Simpson trial last year.

In the Simpson case, some 80 per cent of American blacks during the trial acknowl- edged believing that Mr Simpson was innocent of murdering his white ex-wife and her white friend, Ron Goldman, and about a year afterwards the percentage had dropped to a still rather overwhelming 60 per cent. Throughout the trial, Mr Simpson's defence team repeatedly exploited racial resentments, and from the remarks of a black juror after the verdict it appears that racial identity with the defendant played a major role in his acquittal.

But if Simpson is innocent, then it is impossible to explain his arrest and the bulk of the evidence against him in any way other than a conspiracy to frame him — certainly by the Los Angeles police, but probably by other major institutions also, including the state prosecutors and much of the news media — and probably a simi- lar conspiracy to murder Nicole Simpson and Mr Goldman as well. And such con- spiracy theories involving whites or institu- tions perceived as dominated by whites were indeed frequently advanced in the course of the trial and its aftermath, when blacks across the country rejoiced in the Simpson verdict of 'not guilty'.

Both the adulation of O.J. Simpson and the deeply held belief that he was the vic- tim of a white racist plot point to the exis- tence of a widespread racial animosity towards whites among blacks. That ani- mosity is openly espoused by the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and the black minister Al Sharpton, who never fails to dredge up dubious instances of anti-black racism to push himself into the limelight. It's quite true that neither Far- rakhan nor Sharpton is representative of most black Americans, but it is also true that no white racist leader who espouses analogous views of non-whites enjoys any- thing like their following, stature and influence. With the possible exception of David Duke, whose racial rhetoric is con- siderably tamer than that of Farrakhan or Sharpton, it is hard to think of any such white racist leader in the country today.

Anti-white racism is not confined to popular sentiment, however. It also acquires academic respectability from movements like 'critical race theory', a doctrine that is part of the 'multicultural- ist' phenomenon and argues that most American institutions and norms are so permeated with anti-black 'institutional racism' that blacks cannot obtain fair tri- als, gain entrance to universities, or climb up the corporate and professional ladders. Only a radical 'unmasking' or delegitimisa- tion of 'white institutions' will expose the racism latent in them and yield justice for their non-white victims. One of the more prominent proponents of these views today is the George Washington Universi- ty law professor Paul D. Butler, who has published an article in the Yale Law Review advocating that black jurors delib- erately acquit black drug defendants, despite evidence of their guilt.

`Haven't you seen an executive toy before?' All such ideas, whether at the level of academic maundering or of popular folk- lore, contain implicit anti-white assump- tions — that whites are bent on domination and exploitation of non-whites, that most of what is wrong with race relations and with blacks today derives from 'white racism' in one form or another, and that the institutions and values of American cul- ture were deliberately constructed for the purpose of keeping blacks down. Large percentages of blacks continue to express the belief that Aids was created by whites for the purpose of committing genocide on blacks, and that drugs are disseminated among blacks by the CIA in order to keep blacks in a crime-ridden and narcoticised condition.

In so far as ideas today contribute to racial polarisation, these notions are where you will find its roots — not in the myth of black church-burnings by nameless white racists or 'insensitivities' mouthed by cor- porate bureaucrats who can barely speak plain English. Most Americans simply ignore such assumptions and their implica- tions, but anyone who seriously seeks to address the disharmony of the races and work for their reconciliation needs to punc- ture these mythological balloons.

Given the projected racial transforma- tion of the nation to which President Clin- ton alluded, the balloons become somewhat more sinister in their meaning. Will the anti-white animosity contained in them persist beyond the transformation of the nation into a non-white majority coun- try, and if it does, what consequences might follow from whites being reduced to a minority? What would be the status of civil liberties for whites if the non-white majori- ty of the future remains convinced that whites were guilty of genocidal conspiracies against blacks? Will white defendants be able to obtain fair trials if their jurors are black and continue to harbour the beliefs that at least some of Mr Simpson's jurors did, and will there be any whites at all in the corporate boardrooms of the future?

Given the projections of a non-white majority in the United States, it is bigotry in its anti-white manifestations that the President and other public leaders need to confront, not the occasional and random violence against non-whites that crops up in news stories intent on substantiating the paranoia of the Left. But Mr Clinton never mentioned that sort of bigotry, and it's like- ly that he, like most whites, remains oblivi- ous of its existence, its power and its capacity for mischief in the future. Until he and other leaders do mention it and take steps to address its bizarre assumptions and implications, 'racial reconciliation' will remain little more than the oratorical cari- cature that Mr Clinton offered both races in California.

The author is a nationally syndicated colum- nist and editor of the Samuel Francis Letter, a monthly newsletter.