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Are Americans
Racists?
By Paul Craig
Roberts
January 23,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- “Racist” is the favorite epithet of the left. Every
white person (except leftists) is a racist by
definition. As we are defined as racists based on our
skin color, I am puzzled why we are called racists a
second, third, and fourth time due to specific acts,
such as favoring the enforcement of immigration laws.
For example, President Donald Trump says he is going to
enforce the immigration laws. For the left this is proof
that Trump has put on the White Sheet and joined the KKK.
The left
doesn’t say what a president is who does not enforce the
laws on the books. But let’s look at this from the
standpoint of the immigration laws themselves. In 1965 a
bill passed by the “racist” Congress and signed by the
“racist” President Lyndon Johnson completely changed the
racial composition of US legal immigration.
In 1960 75% of
US legal immigration was European, 5% was Asian, and 19%
was from Americas (Mexico, Central and South America and
Caribbean Islands).
In 2013
10% of legal immigrants were European, 30% were Asian,
55% were from Americas, and 5% from Africa.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/fifty-years-1965-immigration-and-nationality-act-continues-reshape-united-states
The 1965
Immigration and Nationality Act is a very strange law
for racists to have enacted. Would racists pass a law,
which has been on the books for 52 years, that
fundamentally transformed the racial profile of the US
by limiting white immigration, thereby ultimately
consigning whites to minority status?
We could say
the racists did not know what they were doing, or
thought they were doing something else. However, the
results have been obvious at least since 1980, and the
law is still on the books.
We live during
a time when there is an abundance of information, but
facts seldom seem to inform opinions. The left delights
in branding the Founding Fathers racists. The left was
ecstatic when a 1998 DNA study concluded that Thomas
Jefferson was one of eight possible ancestors of Eston
Hemings, a descent of Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings.
The left seized on the implied sexual relationship as
proof of Thomas Jefferson’s racism.
Let’s assume
Jefferson had a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings.
Does this prove he was a racist, or does it prove the
opposite? Why is it a sign of racism for a white to have
sex with a black? Does this prove that James Bond was a
racist in the film “Die Another Day”? Do we really want
to define racially mixed marriages as racist, as a white
conquest over a black, Asian, or Hispanic?
The left has
declared the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution to be racist documents and, therefore,
proof that the US was founded on racism. The left is
particularly incensed that the Constitution counts
enslaved blacks as three-fifths of a white person. Is
the three-fifths clause a sign or racism, or was it a
compromise to get an agreement on representation in the
House of Representatives?
It was the
latter. Indeed southerners, such as James Madison and
Edmund Randolph, wanted blacks to be counted one to one
with whites. It was northerners, such as Gouverneur
Morris of Pennsylvania, who wanted blacks to count as
fractions of a person. Why was this?
The issue was
whether the North or the South would have majority
representation in the House. The country already had
different economic interests which came to conflict in
the War of Southern Secession, which is mischaracterized
as a civil war. (A civil war is when two sides fight for
control of the government. The Confederacy was not
fighting for control of the government in Washington.
The South was fighting to secede from the union in order
to avoid economic exploitation.)
The
southern states were agricultural, and from early
colonial times long before there was a United States or
a Confederate States of America the absence of a work
force meant that the agricultural labor force was
imported as slaves. For the South slavery was an
inherited institution, and from the South’s standpoint,
if blacks were not included in the population on which
US representation in Congress would be based, the South
would have a minority voice in Congress and would not
agree to the Constitution. The three-fifths clause was a
compromise in order to move the Constitution toward
agreement. It had nothing to do with racism. It was
about achieving balance in regional representation in
Congress.
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/three-fifths-clause-united-states-constitution-1787
The Southern
Secession resulted from divergent economic interests and
was not fought over slavery. In former times when the
left had real intellects, such as Charles A. Beard, a
historian who stressed class conflict and a founder of
the New School for Social Research and president of both
the American Political Science Association and the
American Historical Association, the left understood the
divergence of interests between northern industry and
southern agriculture. Those who think Lincoln invaded
the South in order to free slaves need to read Thomas
DiLorenzo’s books on Lincoln. DiLorenzo establishes
beyond all doubt that Lincoln invaded the Confederacy in
order to preserve the Union, that is, the American
Empire, which has continued its growth into the 21st
century.
The
preponderance of war correspondence on both sides shows
that no one was fighting for or against slavery.
According to the 1860 US census, slave owners were a
small fraction of the Southern population.
http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html The
Confederate Army consisted almost entirely of non-slave
owners who fought because they were invaded by Union
armies.
As for Thomas
Jefferson, he was opposed to slavery, but he understood
that the agricultural South was trapped in slavery. The
“discovery” of the New World provided lands for
exploitation but no labor force. The first slaves were
white prisoners, but whites could not survive the
malaria. Native Indians were tried, but they were not
only as susceptible to malaria as whites but also used
their native knowledge of the terrain to resist those
who would enslave them. Blacks became the work force of
choice because of genetic superiority in resistance to
malaria. As Charles C. Mann reports in his book,
1493, “About 97 percent of the people in West and
Central Africa are Duffy negative, and hence immune to
vivax malaria.”
Thus, the real
“racist” reason that blacks became the labor force was
their survivability rate due to genetic superiority from
their immunity to malaria, not white racists determined
to oppress blacks for racial reasons.
The myth has
taken hold that black slavery originated in white
attitudes of racial superiority. In fact, as a large
numbers of historians have documented, including Charles
C. Mann and the socialist economic historian Karl
Polanyi, brother of my Oxford University professor, the
physical chemist and philosopher Michael Polanyi, black
slavery originated and flourished in Africa where tribes
fought one another for slaves. The victorious would
market their captives to Arabs and eventually as time
passed to Europeans for transport to the new world to
fill the vacuum of a missing labor force. (See for
example, Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade.)
It is a mystery
how the myth of Thomas Jefferson’s alleged racism and
love for slavery survives his drafts of the Declaration
of Independence. One of Jefferson’s drafts that was
abandoned in compromise over the document includes this
in Jefferson’s list of King George’s offenses:
“he has waged cruel war against human nature itself,
violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty
in the persons of a distant people who never
offended him, captivating & carrying them into
slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable
death in their transportation thither. this
piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers,
is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great
Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN
should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his
negative for suppressing every legislative attempt
to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce:
and that this assemblage of horrors might want no
fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those
very people to rise in arms among us, and to
purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them,
& murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded
them; thus paying off former crimes committed
against the liberties of one people, with crimes
which he urges them to commit against the lives of
another.”
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/declara/ruffdrft.html
Jefferson’s
attack on King George sounds like the left’s racist
attack on Jefferson.
It is amazing
how proud some Americans are of their ignorance and how
quick they are to hate based on their ignorance. In
America the level of public discourse is so far below
the gutter level that a person who ventures forth to
tell the truth can expect to be met with violent hatred
and every epithet in the book. Criticize ever so
slightly the Israeli government’s theft of Palestine,
and the Israel Lobby will immediately brand you an
“anti-semite,” that is, a hater of Jews who wants to
send them to the gas chamber. If you don’t denounce
whites, especially Southern whites, as racists, you are
not only a racist but also a member of the KKK who wants
to lynch blacks.
Yes, I know. It
works also in the other direction. If you don’t hate the
left, you are one of them. Because I criticized the
George W. Bush regime for its war crimes, conservatives
branded me a “pinko-liberal-commie” and ceased to
publish my columns.
Hardly anyone,
even southerners, understands that racism in the South
originated in the horrors that were inflicted on the
South during the Reconstruction era that followed the
military defeat of the Confederacy. The North inflicted
blacks on southerners in ways that harmed prospects for
relations between the races and gave rise to the KKK as
a resistance movement. As Reconstruction faded, so did
the KKK. It was later revived as a shadow of its former
self by poor whites who were ambitious for personal
power.
The question
remains: How can President Trump or anyone unite a
country in which historical understanding is buried in
myths, lies, and the teaching of hate?
Try to imagine
the expressions of hatred and the denunciations that
this factual article will bring to me.
If we care
about humanity and the creatures on Earth, our task is
to find and to speak the truth. That is what I endeavor
to do.
When the left
abandoned Marxism and the working class, the left died.
It has no doctrine to sustain itself, just hatreds based
on historical ignorance and misunderstanding of the
limits within which life is lived. Humans are not
superheros or magicians who can reconstruct humanity by
waving a wand or smashing evil. Everyone lives within
limitations, and the many submit more than do the few.
It is the few
who fight against the limits to whom we owe the defense
of our humanity.
It is the
haters who are the barriers to moral and social
progress.
Dr. Paul Craig
Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week,
Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He
has had many university appointments. His internet
columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of
Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the
West,
How America Was
Lost,
and
The
Neoconservative Threat to World Order.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
