"Blacks", Progressive Whites, And John Derbyshire | Blog Posts

"Blacks", Progressive Whites, And John Derbyshire

05/19/2012

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I found this tweet, retweeted by Alex Pareene, whom John Derbyshire called out in column entitled Facing Down the Thugs, February 6th, 2012, extremely amusing:

John Derbyshire thinks most "blacks" agree with him that white supremacy is just awesome. http://t.co/MfiE25pl— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) May 17, 2012

It's the "Quotation Marks" that "Alex" puts around blacks. Very 21st century of him. The implication is that everyone says "African-American" and so Derbyshire should have, too.

What "Alex" doesn't realize is that not all blacks are American. For example, Derbyshire is from Britain, where blacks tend to be from Jamaica, and his general point about blacks, saying that "Revealed Preference" shows that blacks prefer white-ruled Western societies to black-ruled Third World ones, applies to blacks worldwide, including places like Jamaica, Haiti, and Africa.

There's a lot of traffic between Jamaica, Haiti, and Africa and the United States. It's all one way, from Africa and the Caribbean to the US.

Alex Seitz-Wald's scare quotes around the word "black" remind me of an antique controversy from the last century, about Missouri Governor John Ashcroft, and an interview he gave to the Southern Partisan. Writing in a Missouri alternative paper, a journalist named Ray Hartman, now retired, wrote

So it's grossly unfair to say the senator is biased strictly against African-Americans.What poor Ashcroft needs is someone to tell his racial story fairly. You know, like the quarterly magazine Southern Partisan, where blacks are known as 'Negroes' and where a man can still read about the virtues of the Confederacy without worrying about political correctness.

[Is John Ashcroft A Racist, Or Does He Just Play One On TV? By Ray Hartmann,St. Louis Riverfront Times, October 13, 1999]

Surely Hartman should have realized first that most of the Southern Partisan's writings about blacks would have been historical, and second, for that for Neo-Confederates to be using the term "Negroes" actually represents a triumph of racial reconciliation since the days of George Wallace.

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