America's modern racists
By Charles A. Morse
web
posted February 5, 2001
The left used a racist smear in their failed attempt to destroy the nomination of Attorney General John Ashcroft. This action placed on notice any conservative who becomes too outspoken. Had Ashcroft ever expressed a dislike of people of African ancestry? Had he conspired to prevent a black person from getting a job because of his race? Such charges against Ashcroft would have been ludicrous, but this was exactly what the left was implying. They twisted the concept of racism to serve their agenda. This smear was an ugly attempt at character assassination and a high tech lynching of an uppity conservative.
The hate campaign against Ashcroft raises basic questions in terms of the degree in which racism is a problem in America today. My grandparents immigrated to this country around the turn of the century and quickly assimilated into the white dominated culture so I don't claim to know what it's like to be black in America. Blacks, no doubt, regularly deal with various and sundry slights, insults, and worse. I've had problems as a conservative amongst liberals, as a conservative Jew amongst liberal Jews, and as a Jew amongst conservative Christians. While these things are hurtful, nothing is as bad as being treated poorly because of race.
Since the 1950's, legally sanctioned racism, or Jim Crow, has been abolished, social mores have changed for the better, and racism, in the literal sense, no longer holds enough influence to prevent advancement. Racist attitudes represent a dark side of human nature and will never entirely disappear or, as Dwight D. Eisenhower said, "you can't legislate the human heart." In their utopian zeal, the left seeks to eradicate racism by using the gun-backed power of the state. History has demonstrated that the only thing eradicated by authoritarian schemes is freedom.
The civil rights movement was a moral, essentially Christian movement. Like most organic movements, it sought to free people from oppressive situations. Blacks demanded an end to government imposed Jim Crow and segregation. They sought greater participation in the free market system. The government was urged to remove racist laws. The left sought to invert the process with race identity propaganda and agitation for authoritarian solutions.
As the left has done with freedom movements throughout history, they harnessed the civil rights movement to serve their agenda of expanding government. They did this by infiltrating the movement with communists and fellow travelers, and by compromising the existing leadership with financial, media, and other favors. Rather than encouraging blacks to advance themselves, the left created the dialectic of hate by encouraging blacks to hate whites.
 Carmichael during a 1960s speech in Los Angeles |
By the mid to late 1960's, the movement was co-opted by communist radicals such as Stokeley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panthers, and a plethora of others who espoused Marxist ideas of violence, hate, and revolution. They were quietly controlled by the predominantly white left operating from the comfortable confines of foundations, the media, academia, and the government itself. The radicals were supplied with money, media attention, and favors. They instigated riots, looting, burning of cities, and a level of violence and misery that continues to this day.
The establishment left responded to the manufactured crisis by increasing the size of government with the "war on poverty" and welfare. These racist programs fostered a permanent and institutionalized poverty. They accelerated the destruction of the black family resulting in a myriad of self-perpetuating social ills. The introduction of drugs brought things to the boiling point.
The left is the primary force of racism in America and the only form of racism that stands in the way of genuine progress for blacks. Their government run schools teach racist propaganda such as Multiculturalism, which, rather than fostering a self-sufficient individual, teach identification with an arbitrary bundle of cultural precepts. Schools have caused the tripling of illiteracy within the black population since the 1950's with their asinine whole language method of teaching the phonetic English language. The vast majority of the black prison population today is illiterate and this is no accident.
The left seeks to suppress economic opportunity by advocating more taxes
and a government run "social security" retirement plan that
pays no interest on the workingman's dollar and leaves nothing to beneficiaries.
Rather than removing racist legal barriers, the left seeks the re implementation
of quotas under the banner of affirmative action. Encouraging accomplishment,
talent, and the use of private pressure in genuinely racist situations
would lead to empowerment instead of dependency. The criminalizing of
racist expression, however hurtful that expression may be, is a tyrannical
intrusion. If racism were a crime in America, our prisons would be filled
with leftists. 
Chuck Morse is the author of Thunder out of Boston.
Other related articles: (open in a new window)
- Racism rears its ugly (potato) head by Mark Trapp (October 2, 2000)
- Fanning the flames of racism by Charles A. Morse (March 6, 2000)