John Derbyshire will probably be fired no later than Monday from National Review Online (America’s Shittiest Website™). A lot of people are focusing on his (10a) to (10i) explanations for why his kids should avoid black people. Those are good, but I prefer (13).
(13) In that pool of forty million [black Americans], there are nonetheless many intelligent and well-socialized blacks. (I’ll use IWSB as an ad hoc abbreviation.) You should consciously seek opportunities to make friends with IWSBs. In addition to the ordinary pleasures of friendship, you will gain an amulet against potentially career-destroying accusations of prejudice.
Not only does this establish a new awesome acronym (IWSB- Intelligent and well-socialized blacks), but it also explains that the best reason to make friends with a black person is so you can say, “I am not a racist, I have a friend named Jamaal.” And the best part is that this so does not protect Mr. Derbyshire from “career-destroying accusations of prejudice.”
If Mr. Derbyshire has followed the wise advice that he provided for his teenage boys, he presumably has a black friend. Will that black friend become an amulet now? I think not.
Mr. Derbyshire will surely ask that we not reflexively attack him for daring to say something controversial but supported by the evidence. He’ll say that blacks really do commit more crimes and they really do score worse on IQ tests and he will appeal to studies (some valid, some discredited) to argue that he’s justified in warning his kids off black folks. He might be able to launch a semi-plausible defense of his tirade. We might be reduced to arguing about the rigor and credibility of his sources. Except he rather explicitly advises his kids that they can get away with being huge racists if they just befriend one or two intelligent and well-socialized blacks.
I’d say that that rather gives away the game. Derbyshire showed his ass.
Jonah can back away from it, as can the rest of their cohorts, but the comments speak for themselves. I read it before it “shit hit the fan” and there were only around 25-30 comments. All of them were high-fiving him with, “Sad but true,” or “Just because the black community is more fucked up than the white one doesn’t mean whites don’t have problems either.”
This is who they are. It’s what conservatism is these days. Some might say, it’s what it’s always been.
What it is. What it was. What it always will be.
Why will Derbs get fired? It’s not like anyone at NRO feels any different than he does?
But they all manage to give themselves just enough plausible deniability that they can pretend to oppose racism. This is actually something that’s very important to conservatives – to be able to deny that their racist agenda is actually racist.
If they fire Derb, it will be because he was “dumb enough to get caught.”
Just so – as the post says, “And the best part is that this so does not protect Mr. Derbyshire from “career-destroying accusations of prejudice.”
For some reason I keep thinking of Fight Club.
One of the bewildering strengths of the modern conservative movement has been that no behavior gets a true believer tossed from the fraternity. Only expressing reasoned quarrels with the most extreme views and policies of the movement will get you tossed. This was not the case in the past, but now people completely indistinguishable from Confederates and Birchers are accomidated in their community, as long as the offender retains the ability to spit on Obama/Pelosi/Reid et al.
So, I’m uncertain that John is gone, although Rich, Ramesh and Jonah sure are sprinting away from their racist friend. But, then again, they all lack fortitude, just like Assrocket, so who knows where their spindly spines and ability to rationalize tractor-trailers full of bullshit will leave them tomorrow.
The craziest thing is that he turned “the talk” into something so farcical. I’ve had the talk. It was nothing like this. It was more like don’t do anything stupid to give cops a reason to shoot you. It wasn’t stay away from white people because they might kill you.
It’s crazy that THIS is the only thing that can get you kicked out of the conservative club. Openly and brazenly saying black people are stupid, dangerous and basically animals. Yelling crime statistics at grieving parents of Trayvon Martin? No. Calling Obama’s call for national volunteer service slavery? No. Calling black activists race pimps and race hustlers? Not on your life. You have to actually be wearing a hood while writing your column for conservatives to actually say, hey, you know, that’s a little bit much.
Sigh. Fuck it. Let dude keep his job. He’s the only honest one of the lot. I believe him more than I do Rich Lowry. Like Lowry actually gives a fuck about black kids dying in the ghetto. Yeah. Whatever.
Is that kind of like saying they should befriend a black person who is “a credit to his race”?
I see.
So that conversation on race people keep saying they want to have in America is apt to be a little one-sided, then?
RE Derbyshire, I’ll use WAA as an ad hoc abbreviation for What An Asshole. I would advise my kids to avoid the WAA types at any expense, because prolonged exposure to the WAA is detrimental to one’s intellect and general well-being.
Try to imagine Harry Reid referring to Obama as an IWSB during the 2008 primary season.
Didn’t he say something about “articulate”?
Or was that Joe Biden?
(Or Hillary?)
Do you understand the difference between bad word choice and arguing, at some length, for the inferiority of black people and the wisdom of keeping the races separate?
Your last two comments don’t fill me with confidence that you do.
Do you understand the differences among these?
(1) Believing racial differences exist (racism on one of the definitions of that word) making some races inferior to others.
(2) Racial hatred (another definition).
(3) Intentionally harmful or damaging racial discrimination or exclusion (yet another).
Any one or two of the three can occur without the other(s), though that has not been the way of things in most of American history.
The second is probably the most widespread and likely everyone in the US of any race is a racist in this sense, if we allow any degree of animosity or mistrust short of actual hatred to count.
In that less narrow sense, for example, it is a safe bet both Zimmerman and Martin were racists, as are all their friends and relatives.
However, at the present time, the first is probably the majority view among American whites while the second is much less common and a preference for the last pretty rare.
Note that (1) is not merely the belief that differences exists.
Differences of skin color, after all, are the chief characteristics in terms of which the races are defined and no one doubts such differences actually exist.
(1) is the belief that differences exist among races that are of the sort that lead us to speak, when we are inconsiderate, of one person being inferior to another.
One person can be generally smarter than another, or better at basketball, or a better piano player, for instance.
Derbyshire’s article referred to alleged evidence of that kind of difference, specifically in regard to intelligence, occurring among races, with whites as a group more intelligent than blacks as a group.
Exactly that belief, I think, is widespread among whites in America, and perhaps elsewhere, today.
It would be interesting to polls (could there be honest polls?), but I think this could be their majority view.
Aristotle was regularly quoted in the Old South as claiming mental inferiority justified slavery.
In modern times, Nietzsche was cited almost as soon as his works appeared in defense of white supremacy on much the same basis, and was used by the Nazis to defend both rule by a Nazi aristocracy in Germany and rule over an empire of Slav helots by Aryan Germany.
I don’t recall for sure, but it is likely the Catholic dominated National Review rejected Nietzsche and was too discreet to defend slavery at all, but appealed to the idea that actual racial, and perhaps also individual, inferiority justified the allegedly harmless racial discrimination and exclusion (remember “separate but equal”?) of Jim Crow.
Some of it or all of it, I would guess.
That was long ago, however.
Nowadays conservatives who are openly racist only in sense (1) claim racial disparities in wealth, education, political representation in office, various forms of power, etc. are just if they result from color-blind competition and insist pretty much all competition in the US is that.
As for me, I don’t believe the competition is actually color-blind.
Nor am I at all convinced it should be.
straight up racist
but, not really a shock
I thought you were wrong but Rich Lowry has already run for it.
Interesting.
That magazine’s founder defended South African Apartheid and segregation in the South, back in the day.
Now that was racism of the Woolly Mammoth type.
It is odd that he – Bill Buckley, I mean – is still celebrated as a conservative hero, given Lowry’s reaction to Derbyshire’s relatively mild piece.
Derb is safe at Taki’s Magazine, though.
So far as I can see it has no reason to exist but to provide an outlet for conservative racism.
Doesn’t seem ever to address much else.
Bigger question, is this IWSB Thomas Sowell?
Is Clarence Thomas an IWSB or just an affirmative action conservative?
I’ve seen a R Lowry post saying that Derb is gone. Good. That post was entirely terrible.
… and won’t be finding it anytime soon.