Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read Online Free PDF

film, American History X , features (for the umpteenth time) white neo-Nazis as the villains of a homily about racial bigotry. The idea is that race hatred is synonymous with "skin-heads" who are white. But a few years ago a sensational mass murder trial in Miami spotlighted a black cult leader named Yahweh Ben Yahweh, who required his cult members to kill whites and bring back their ears as proof of the deed. One of his recruits was a star football player. Seven people were murdered. But there was no Hollywood scramble for the rights to the Yahweh cult story, as there would have been if the colors were reversed or everyone had been white. As a result, few Americans are even aware that these murders ever took place.
    In the fall of 1998, a German tourist was shot to death in Santa Monica, California, in front of his wife and children. The catalyst for the killing seems to have been his failure to understand the English commands of his attackers. The crime was committed by two African-American men and one African-American woman, though one would never know this from reading the Los Angeles Times or Associated Press accounts. (I had to verify their racial identities by calling the Santa Monica police department directly.) The word "hate crime" never surfaced in connection with the deed, either in the press accounts or in editorial commentaries that followed. But suppose that three whites had gone to a Hispanic neighborhood to rob inhabitants and had murdered an Hispanic immigrant because he could not speak English. Does anyone imagine that the press accounts would hide the identity of the attackers or that the question of whether it might be a hate crime would never come up?
    According to Department of Justice figures, 85 percent of the crimes of interracial violence nationwide are committed by blacks against whites. Not surprisingly, the first hate-crime conviction to be appealed to the Supreme Court involved a black perpetrator and a white victim. Of course, the social redeemers who are in favor of hate-crinie legislation rarely reflect on the practical consequences of the reforms they enact. It is enough if the thought behind the legislation feels moral and right.
    How many of the interracial crimes of violence committed by blacks and other minorities are actually the result of black racism, and therefore hate crimes? There is no real way to tell. There is, however, plenty of anecdotal evidence that suggests the problem is not negligible. A recent spate of brutal and random murders in a single Los Angeles district, for example, was explained by one black inhabitant to a Los Angeles Times reporter as retaliation for the "fact" that "whites had taken all the black jobs."
    Of course, the leftist academy has a ready answer for every question about black racism: Only whites can be racist . The alleged reasoning behind this assertion is that in our society only whites have power. This is the kind of absurdity that only an intellectual could think up. Forget the thousands of public officials great and small, police chiefs, judges, administrators, and members of congress, petty bureaucrats, corporate executives, and military officers now drawn from the ranks of minorities, who wield social power in a variety of forms. At the most elemental level, a black outlaw with a gun — and there are many — has the power of life and death over an unarmed law-abiding citizen of any race or color.
    The doctrine that only whites can be racist is, in fact, itself an instigation to hate crimes. It is a doctrine that has already spread to the secondary schools. The week after the Shepard killing, a Seattle father called a national radio talk show on which I was a guest and told the audience that his son's class in junior high school had been discussing the hate crime concept because of the killing. During the discussion, the teacher informed the class that only heterosexual whites could be racists. The caller's son was unconvinced and brought up