MUHAMMAD ALI ASCENDS, NEWARK SINKS -----By Hugh Murray

            I began reading Jack Cashill’s Sucker Punch: The Hard Left that Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream  in 2006 when it was published.  Half way through, I was offered a post in a different country, and my top priorities were suddenly packing, storing, flights, visas, etc.  Sucker Punch fell through the cracks.

            Upon my return to the US two years later, I was again overwhelmed with the everyday problems of finding a new residence and returning to my old job.  Sucker Punch remained boxed.

            In January 2013 after reading and reviewing FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944, I  had no new books I passionately wanted to read.   So, I browsed again some of my older books.  There was Sucker Punch, which I had remembered as an interesting work on race relations among the poor/middle class in Newark during the 1950s-70s.  I also recalled this being one of the few books that described an all-too-common phenomenon, the forced evacuation of whites from their old neighborhoods because of the race war.  This is a phenomenon, either ignored by the usual academedia complex or justified because of the racist attitudes exhibited by whites toward their new neighbors of color.  Sucker Punch provided a counter point to the prevailing liberal paradigm.

            I then went to amazon.com to read some of the reviews of the book and was surprised to see that the book was primarily about boxing.  Well, it was about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and his influence on race relations in the US, including the author’s own Newark neighborhood.

            I reread the first half and this time completed the book.  I disagree with Cashill on various issues.  For example, I still think that US involvement in the Vietnam war was wrong.  If there was a domino effect in Cambodia, it was because the US toppled the dominos, in 1970 overthrowing the “neutral” regime of Prince Sihanouk, and replacing him with a pro-American military group led by Lon Nol.  That group, in turn, was overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, the most Marxist, and the most murderous Communist regime ever to seize power (murderous NOT in the numbers it killed, but that the millions it slaughtered amounted to some 25% of the nation’s population).  However, that Khmer Rouge regime would soon be supported by both the People’s Republic of China AND the US.  It was finally invaded by communist Vietnam, and the massive killing fields – with the corpses of a quarter of the Cambodian population – were no longer moistened with fresh blood.  The Vietnamese communists halted the holocaust of the killing fields in Cambodia.  My purpose here is not to defend every action of the Vietnamese communist regime, or to indict every action by the Americans.  The war was brutal on both sides, and when the communists won, their treatment of opponents was sufficiently oppressive that many Vietnamese left their homes to become “boat people,” some of whom did not survive.  My point is that Cashill’s assessment of the Vietnamese war seems extremely one-sided.  Moreover, one’s interpretation of that war will affect the judgments made of other people portrayed in his book.  I still maintain it would have been better, for the US and for Vietnam, if the US had not intervened militarily in that nation in the early 1960s.

            Unlike Cashill, I was no fan of boxing.  But I was a fan of Ali.  To appreciate Cashill’s critique of Ali, an aside on sports in America may be necessary.

            In 1940 the most popular sports in America were horse racing, boxing, baseball, college football, and basketball, possibly in that order.  With the advent of widespread television ownership around 1950, and the need to fill schedules with inexpensive programming, wrestling and roller derby won fans.  Yet, the impression that wrestling was fixed and derby was for the gals placed them more in the entertainment than the sports category.

            The Civil Rights movement and the Left would modify American sports, even boxing.  Cashill discusses the Black heavy weight champion of the early decades of the 20^th century, Jack Johnson, and his romps with white women and fast living, which caused great relief when Johnson lost his crown to the white Jess Willard in 1915.  For over a decade white champs avoided fighting Blacks, in part, to prevent another Johnson scandal.  But in the 1930s Joe Louis gained the throne AND the enthusiastic support of much of white America, especially in his bouts with German opponent Max Schmeling and the Italian Primo Carnera.  Whether they wanted to or not, each fighter came to symbolize New Deal America, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy.  Louis retained his popularity (if not his wealth) into the 1940s and 50s, and he served in the armed services during WWII.  Much earlier in the era of WWI college football had been integrated enough for Paul Robeson to be declared an All American athlete; although very few whites and far fewer Blacks attended university in the first half of the 20^th century.  In the 1940s Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, and major league baseball would be integrated.  Even in minor sports, Althea Gibson was shown in the Movietone newsreels as she won major women’s tennis matches in the 1950s.  American sports, like America itself, was becoming more integrated.

            Cashill’s neighborhood in Newark was also integrated.  Even though his dad was a policeman, this did not prevent him from being robbed as an 11-year-old by two young Blacks.  Because his father was a policeman, however, they were able to bend the rules, enter a school, and apprehend the guilty thieves.

            Why is Cashill’s book important?  In a few pages Cashill describes what academics and the media seek to avoid.  How often have we seen images in movies and on television of Jews anxious to leave Nazi occupied Europe.  They became refugees fleeing as best they could, and if they were lucky, make it to and then make it in America.  Yet, “The St. Louis,” showed another side of their plight, a ship that left Germany in 1939 with a Who’s Who of prominent Jews determined to begin again outside of Hitler’s regime and his reach.  The ship sailed to the New World, to the US, to Cuba, and beyond.  But no nation in the New World would take in even such accomplished Jews.  The ship returned to Europe, and most of the passengers would not survive the holocaust.  In another area, many Americans can recall images on TV of masses of South Vietnamese seeking to crack into the American embassy in Saigon to be evacuated before the Vietnamese Communists gained total control.  Some of those who could not make it to the helicopter evacuation, felt so threatened by the new government that they fled in the waters, becoming the “boat people.”  Some would be picked up by other ships; some would die in the water.

            My point is that refugees are usually shown as sympathetic figures, Jews desperately scrambling out of Hitler’s Europe, the boat people, those trying to get away from floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, storms, - all are sympathetically portrayed in the American media.  Yet, from the 1950s until today, one feature of American life receives little honest commentary: white flight from central cities.

            Not all media portray refugees sympathetically.  In the late 1930s Der Stuermer ran a p. 1 article on Jews leaving Germany for Cape Town, South Africa.  Even before Hitler won power in Germany, the law did not permit those leaving the country to take out more than a few hundred Reichsmarks.  The law was retained, though the economy improved under the Nazis.  Indeed, in the 1930s more Germans were leaving depression ridden America to return to the prosperous Third Reich, than going the other way.  The Stuermer noted that even though Jews were restricted in the amount of cash they could take to Cape Town, they were taking huge crates of furniture, paintings, and other costly objects.  The spin of Julius Streicher’s Nazi paper was clear, the parasitic Jews, even in their departure from Germany, were taking the “goods” that Germany had provided them.  They were taking the wealth of Germany with them.

            America’s academics have followed the Streicher approach – at least on one set of refugees.  White flight to the suburbs is depicted as 1) affluent whites, following WWII, who bought cars and left the overcrowded cities for the greenery of the burbs, often subsidized by government loans, FHA housing, veterans’ benefits, road construction and new infrastructure.  The rich whites thus drove away from the squalid cities to the scenic serenity of the suburbs.  Worse, the rich suburban whites refuse to pay their “fair share” of support for welfare and schools in the ever poorer cities.  White racism is the motivating factor, according to the Left and the academedia complex.  They view the move by whites as Streicher viewed the move by Jews.

            In addition, 2) there were poorer, more vicious, openly racist whites left in the cities.  When a few Blacks moved into their neighborhoods, these violent whites first sought to intimidate their courageous new neighbors.  When that failed, these whites fled rather than live beside the Blacks.  White racism was again the cause of this white flight.  Whites take their wealth with them, abandoning the inner cities to impoverished Blacks.  This is the view of white flight as seen by the academedia complex.  White racists fled the cities, leaving the metropolises empty of supermarkets, devoid of department stores and pleasant shopping, lacking decent schools, or even doctors.  A few alcohol shops, rehab agencies, and check cashing counters could not fill the empty factories.  By contrast, the burbs blossomed with magnificent shopping malls, high-ranking schools, new hospitals, even modern factories.  White racism has made the cities squalid.

            Cashill’s is one of the few books I know that challenges the liberal spin of this most important development in America during the past five decades – perhaps not as significant as the change in immigration policy, illegal immigration, and abortion, but it is certainly a major change in America’s topography over these decades.

            My point, as illustrated by Cashill’s personal history, is that whites were often forced from their old neighborhood – with insults, threats, and violence.  And like Jews in Nazi Germany, whites could no longer depend on authorities to defend their rights.  Big cities were  dominated by liberal Democrats or “reform liberal Republicans” like New York City’s John Lindsay.  Such Republicans were even more hostile to poor whites than the Democrats.  By the late 1960s liberals would go to any extent to excuse Black criminal behavior, and find some rationale to blame it on the whites – especially working class whites.  Cashill notes the hatred of poor whites in another area – culture.  Although its ratings were good, the network cancelled the Friday night boxing contests, because it had the wrong kind of audience – the poor and lower-classes.

            Cashill is a conservative, the son of a white Newark policeman.  Bettina Aptheker was a red-diaper baby, daughter of two prominent member of the Communist Party, USA.  Yet, there came a point where Black crime in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant threatened the lives of Bettina’s parents, and the Apthekers became Jewish refugees fleeing liberal Democratic Brooklyn (the Congressional district of Shirley Chisholm) to travel to California – as the Oakies and Arkies had done 40 years prior.  But while Steinbeck presented the Joad family refugees with enormous sympathy, the whites who flee big-city Blacks and the liberal political machines are shown as racists removing their wealth from the city to the rich burbs.  They are seen as Streicher saw the owners of huge crates being loaded for Cape Town.

            I shall quote some from Cashill’s book on events in Newark.  Cashill had written a fine history interspersing boxing matches, Cassius Clay’s change of name and adoption of Islam, his anti-integration comments, his refusal to be inducted into the military draft, his struggles to maintain his championship against various boxing commissions upset by his refusal to become a soldier, his wives, his connections to Don King, his fights abroad, and his contrast with poor Black boxers.

            Unfortunately, lacking in this book is a simple chronology of heavy weight boxing champions and the major bouts described in this book.  The chronology should also contain all of Clay/Ali’s major fights.

            Cashill is good at not being politically correct and discussing the pro-Axis views of leaders of the Nation of Islam prior to and during WWII.  Yet, he might have connected those views to the earlier major Black nationalist movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, created by Marcus Garvey, - a movement extremely popular among Blacks in the 1920s.  Garvey not only made deals with the newly revived Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, he proclaimed of his UNIA, “We were the first fascists.”  The NoI continued in the ideological tradition pioneered by Garvey’s UNIA.

            The following are excerpts from Cashill’s book depicting the progression from Black threats, thieving, and crime against whites that caused first white fright and then white flight.

            (p. 37)(He writes about an event of 1959.)  “They roughed us up some for the hell of it but allowed me [to] keep the nickel.  I chose not to tell my father about the incident.  Roger told his.  Within a year, his family had beat it out of Newark and settled in a distant suburb, the closest one they could afford some fifty miles away.  Roger was the first of my friends to go.  Within five or six years, almost all of my friends would be gone.”

            (p.47)  “Despite some troubling signs, we had no reason to believe that the neighborhood would not always stay together.  Progress was in the air that gilded autumn of 1960.  Racial barriers were falling.  The income gap between blacks and whites was narrowing.  Crime rates were still low and seemed more or less stable.”

            (p.60)  “By 1964, our neighborhood had ‘turned.’  For several years, new families had been moving in, but these were a new kind of family, families without fathers…My mother,…,did not know the gyms and playgrounds as I did.  On the basketball courts, class had no meaning.  Here, all differences devolved down to race, and even the well meaning could sense the uneasy tectonics.  The plates were pulling apart, and the divide between black and white was growing.  We no longer made friends across it.”

            (p.73)(Again he is writing about 1964)  “Then, too, few in out neighborhood were any keener on integration than Muhammad Ali.  The concept no longer meant what it had when my family moved to our already integrated block ten years earlier.  Fairly or not, it now meant the collapse of property values, the implosion of community, the harassment of children.  Just months after we listened to the Liston fight together, Kenny was jumped in Branch Brook park and (74) had his front teeth knocked out.  That was enough for his parents.  They sent him to live with his aunt in a soulless, slapdash suburb sixty miles from Newark.  They followed him there a year later.  Raymond and his family moved away the same year.  My friends were not alone.  From 1950 to 1967, Newark lost 143,000 white residents, almost a third of its 1950 population of 438,000.”

            (p.85-86)  He describes the veiled threats he endures on the basketball court, and how his Black teammates prefer a loss to having him score.  His younger sister is taunted and her blond hair pulled by the girls at school.  The father was not dead, an older brothers left.  His mother was “forced to move” to a better public housing project in Newark.  “There would be no ‘white flight’ for her.  She had nowhere to flee to.”

            The weakness of Cashill’s interpretation of events is that he attributes much of the growing anti-white racism to Ali.  Ali may have contributed to this, but his joining the Muslims was as much an effect as a cause.  For example, look at the NoI’s Muhammad Speaks 1960-61.  There is a back-page story of Malcolm X addressing a student assembly at Howard University.  There is a photo of the audience.  In the picture one sees exuberant students literally jumping for joy at Malcolm’s message, and one student – not identified – is clearly the young Stokely Carmichael.  In 1966 during a march for civil rights in Mississippi, Carmichael would originate the slogan “Black Power,” which would quickly undermine and overwhelm the civil rights the Civil Rights movement.  I was one of the first members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in New Orleans in 1960.  By 1962 the NO CORE chapter had expelled all of its white members – it thus expelled some half its membership!.  Black nationalists then seized power of CORE chapters in other cities – Brooklyn and Detroit.  The same rejection of integration and civil rights was occurring in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  By 1966 CORE and SNCC were no longer integrated or civil rights organizations.  All whites had been purged from these organizations.  Black nationalists swept away integration; Black racism prevented discussion (only lecturing at best, insults and treats surfacing more frequently).  Crime, rioting, and violence shoved aside non-violence and trampled civil rights.  “Snick” provides and interesting transformation – from the “popular front/communist front” Southern Negro Youth Congress of the 1940s and 50s, to the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, to the Students National Coordinating  Committee of the Black Nationalists of the late 1960s.

            Much of this was occurring before Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.  Ali is NOT the cause.  His conversion to Islam was symbolic of the change already occurring in Black America.

            Was Ali cheered by the white Left?  You bet.  Ali refused to fight in what the Left deemed an unjust war.  Cashill’s view is simple: boxers like Joe Louis fought for American values; Ali fought for the racism of the Nation of Islam.  But Ali also refused to fight in what many Americans, including myself, concluded was an unjust war.  In that sense, Ali boxed not only for Black racism, but for international morality.

            Could Ali have saved Newark?  If he had rejected Black racism and pushed for integration and treating all people equally, could he have changed events in America’s big cities?  If he had been drafted, if he had carried the American flag, could Cassius Clay have saved Newark?  Even as Muhammad Ali, he could not even save boxing!  The tectonic plates of American sport were also spinning around: now professional football, basketball, then college football, baseball, hockey, soccer, then perhaps boxing, and further down, horse racing.

            The 1960s in America were a time of a cultural revolution.  In addition to the growth of the hippie movement, the flower children, the peace people, the women’s movement grew in power.  To all of these new elements, boxing was just too violent.  Yes, they all wanted to cheer, and they would love to cheer on Blacks, but boxing was not the venue in which to do it.  Indeed, boxing with its Black champs only reinforced the wrong stereotypes, that Blacks were violent animals.  Basketball, by contrast, was graceful, with tall men floating to the hoops.  Many of the newer players were Black, and they were good at the game.  They were worthy of cheers, not because they were affirmative action quota hires, but because they were good, often the best.  More Blacks engaged in college football and universities integrated and expanded, and professional football soon had Blacks as the major group of players.  The Left could then cheer Blacks in basketball and football; they could ignore the animalistic sport of boxing.

            Black racism is a powerful ingredient in American society, one that cannot be studied in academia, because academics allege that, by definition, it cannot exist.  It is hard to get funding to study what the Left and the academedia complex declares to be non-existent.  And if you question that definition, you may be expelled from the scholarly community.  However, the required blindness on the issue of Black racism will eventually render most sociological studies on racism to be worthless.  Muhammad Ali was not the cause, but merely an example of Black racism.  In addition, I would contend, he provided a moral example by refusing to participate in an unjust war.

            I know too little about boxing to criticize much of Cahill’s well written book on that particular topic.  I can say his book is a good read.  His criticism of the Nation of Islam is valid.  His assessment of the Vietnam war is one-sided.  His reminiscences of Newark, a challenge to the silence and distortions of the academy.  Overall, Cashill has written an excellent book.        

ON ORDERS - by Hugh Murray

ON ORDERS  -  by Hugh Murray

Over the weekend I watched a Netflix disc movie, "Your Unknown Brother," made in 1982 in German.  It was about an anti-Nazi German during the 1930s.  He had been sent to prison for his political activities, but once released in 1936, decided to continue his activities, despite his fear.  I found the movie slow and boring.  In some ways it was more like a theater production than a film with some of the actors’ movements utterly unrealistic, choreographed  like dance.

            Not until the end of the film did I realize it was a DEFA (East German) film.  The main characters portrayed were members of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), seeking to discredit and overthrow Hitler by placing a red flag atop a factory smokestack, distributing leaflets, and other activities to let others know that there still existed an opposition to the Nazi dictatorship.  The Communists in the film seem to be aware of their ineffectiveness following  three years of Hitler’s domination in Germany.  One of the members of the KPD has even informed to the Gestapo.  The film’s mood shows it was made in the last decade of the DDR, for an earlier film would have depicted the ever correct policy of the Party, and how it sparks some success in persuading Germans to reject Hitler.  By the 1980s, one senses, that the Party was aware that it was not always correct.
            More interesting than the film were the features on the same disc.  One in particular, interviewed a woman who had joined the KPD in the 1920s.  She relates the story of some of her activities.  She lived in a neighborhood in which the Nazis were popular even before Hitler achieved power.  Beginning in the late 1920s, the KPD asked her if some people might stay in her apartment from time to time.  She said yes.  She did not know who the visitors were, and the conversations with them were minimal.  She noted that sometimes they did not even speak German.  But the Party ordered her to do this, so she did.
            In 1933 she was visiting her mother, who asked if she had read the day’s newspaper.  No, not yet.  Her mother showed her, - several Bulgarians had been arrested in connection with the Reichstag fire, treason, (the burning of the German Parliament building led to emergency security measures that soon would transform Hitler from mere Chancellor to dictator).  The woman looked at the newspaper photos of the Bulgarians on page 1.  (One, Georgi Dimitrov, would later head the Comintern).  She told her mother she recognized them as those who were staying at her apartment.  Decades later she peers into the camera to explain – she had no idea who the men were, but the Party ordered me to do it, so I did it.  She may not have known who they were, and it is still disputed as to who fired the Reichstag building, but she was simply following orders.  Party orders.
            After WWII various Germans were tried for war crimes.  Their main excuse was simple – I was simply following orders.  Orders not of a Party, but of the nation and its elected leaders.  Also after WWII there was a famous psychological experiment conducted in the US.  At Yale University students were to use a devise to administer electric shocks to others at the command of a “scientist.”  The student could see the reaction of the human guinea pig, their contorted face, even if they might not hear the shouts of pain.  In reality, the victims were also students pretending to be shocked.  The devises controlled by the student did not sent electricity to the victim area.  On the other side of the glass, the actors only pretended to be victims.  Yet, most students were quite willing to administer what they assumed to be shocks, very painful ones by the expressions of the “victims.”  In liberal, democratic America, enlightened university students (at a time when relatively few attended university), were willing to inflict pain on command of a minor authority figure.
            The results of the Milgram experiment were so disturbing to liberals (who seem to prefer the assumption that only Germans could follow brutal orders to such extremities) that they pressured to psychological association to enact “ethical” rules which would in future prohibit another Milgram experiment.  That is often the liberal approach to science, by the way, when they disapprove of the results of scientific research: forbid the test – be it IQ exams, police promotion exams, firefighters tests, and even future Milgram experiments.  Interestingly, the New York Times published an article on the 50^th anniversary of the Milgram experiment and its importance, and I commented on line that had the “ethical” procedures of today been in effect 50 years prior, there would have been no Milgram experiment, and no New York Times article assessing its importance.  Indeed, had the liberals had the present “ethical” procedures in place decades ago, mankind would have been deprived of the important results of those experiments.  The liberals and their “ethical” concerns are determined to prevent mankind from learning the truth about humanity.
            I did it because I was ordered to – says the Nazi war criminal; says the woman Communist who harbored Dimitrov in Berlin in 1933, perhaps says an American Communist who simply delivered a sealed suitcase containing papers from one apartment to a hotel room (a suitcase that may have contained atomic secrets).  I did it because I was ordered to do so, said many of the American students in the Milgram situation.
            Yet, a child does something because mommy said to do it, no questions asked.  Just do it.  Do like your daddy says.
            We all have done things because we are ordered to do so. We do it to please mom and because we love her and trust her.  We do it for dad for the same reasons.  Should we do things in the same manner for Stalin?  For Hitler?  We may have extremes, with Hitler and Stalin on one side, and parents on the other.
            What about teachers?  Scientific authorities?  (Or seeming scientists, as in the Milgram experiment.  Or even the American TV ad of previous decades, “I’m not a medical doctor, but I play one on television;” he then urges the audience to purchase a brand of headache tablets.
            We cannot survive as total skeptics.  We need to trust.  The question is, whom do we trust?  In what areas of life:  How far should we go:  Should we prepare to execute our child because God has commanded it as He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis?  As a test?  Or should we refuse such a command?  Which commands accept?  Which refuse?  And how much should we calculate the cost of refusing to obey?
            I do not want to excuse, but surely it is “understandable” how a good Communist might seek to rid the earth of Ukrainian kulak vermin; how a good Nazi might seek to purify the earth by eliminating Jewish vermin; how Ruandan Hutus might seek to destroy the Tutsi cockroaches, how in Bosnia…But if they perform such tortures, such executions, such murders, such mass murders, one hopes they are made to pay the price for such atrocities.
            I did it because I was ordered to do so!  Did you approve of the order?  Disapprove?  Neutral?  If you disapproved, did you resist, in part, in full?  What might be the consequences of your failure to perform your duty?  To you?  To your family?  Friends?
            Some of us have been fortunate to have had basically good parents, basically good friends, and to have lived in a nation that is essentially fair and just.  But just view the terrific 2011 South Korean film “My Way” for a glimpse of the horrible choices afforded two talented men born in the 1920s.  One was forced to fight inside two armies in which he did not believe.  The other had to fight in three.  By contrast, we in the West are most fortunate.  And to retain these basically good choices granted to us, we may even have to struggles against those who have been corrupted, distorted, crippled, by their family, friends, party, ideology, or nation.  Sometimes we must join or act alone to insure that right does make might.

WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE? by Hugh Murray

     This week in Milwaukee the Milw. Public Schools is sponsoring a class on white male privilege.  If one completes it, he will receive college credit for the course.  The class will be held at the Unitarian Church on the East Side.  I went to one of the services at that same church over a decade ago, but believed that, because I am not a liberal, I would soon be in constant conflict if I joined.  I had been quite active in the Unitarian Church in New Orleans in the 1950s and 60s, even teaching in the Sunday School.
     Although the theme of the class is white male privilege, and although I wrote an article "White Male Privilege: A Social Construct for Political Oppression," and although I reside in Milwaukee, no one attempted to contact me.  My article was published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1999, and has been on google's p 1 of p 2 of the subject ever since.  If you read my article, you will soon discover why I am not invited to this class, or to the many university conferences meant to prove that white men have a privilege based on their sex and race.
     Below is part of my article.  The full article may be read on line simply by googling "white male privilege." As education departments and the general academedia complex assumes that white male privilege exists, and  white men should be penalized as a consequence, I urge everyone to read the article in full.  Here it is in part:
      WHITE MALE PRIVILEGE? A SOCIAL

CONSTRUCT FOR POLITICAL OPPRESSION

Hugh Murray

     Each day in America, white males face government-sponsored discrimination. If in high school, the white male may be denied a chance to apply for special programs because he is not a preferred minority, or in some cases, a female. There are scholarships available, but many cannot be awarded to white males. In applying for university, admissions will admit “basically qualified” minorities, but reject better qualified whites. When applying for a job, the same type of discrimination occurs. If the teen finally succeeds in finding employment, special on-the-job training may be denied him in order to guarantee slots for minorities, even if they be lesser qualified, even if they have been on the job for a shorter time. At the firm, he may be subjected to the racial and sexual harassment rituals called “diversity training,” whereby he is supposed to confess guilt to crimes committed before his birth. Yet, at the same time, he must deny his own experience; he must utter not a word about the discrimination he has encountered because he is a white male. His is the discrimination that dare not speak its name; were he to mention it, he would immediately be labeled “racist,” disruptive, and a possible threat to the firm’s good graces with the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and its commissars in his employer’s personnel office. If he tires of such oppression, or if he is fired, or wins a lottery, or somehow scrapes together enough money to begin his own firm, he will be denied even the opportunity to bid on many government contracts simply because he is a white male—those contracts are set-aside for minority or female companies.

     And how is this discrimination justified by our courts, our media, our academia? First, it is ignored. When occasionally the issue surfaces, it is dismissed as an aberration. But on another level, liberals proclaim that in the name of “equal opportunity,” equal opportunity must be denied white males. Before her appointment as Chair of the Civil Rights Commission during President Clinton’s first term, Mary Francis Berry, a black woman, had announced that civil rights do not apply to whites.

     The way liberals interpret and enforce the law, equal opportunity and civil rights are granted to some but denied to others.  Moreover, discrimination against white men is to be encouraged because it is the discrimination to end discrimination; government takes race into account so in future we will not have to take race into account. Such is the sophistry of liberal Supreme Court Justices and Civil Rights bureaucrats! To our governmental, corporate, and academedic elite, the white man deserves to be discriminated against because he is privileged. How did this system come to prevail throughout America?

     It is clear that the answer cannot readily be found in the media, with its liberal bias on race. Just ponder how what I described above has been purposely avoided on the nightly TV news.

Sociological journals have so neglected white male victims of affirmative action that Frederick R. Lynch titled his book on the subject Invisible Victims: White Males and the Crisis of Affirmative Action.1   Historians have distorted the history of the civil rights movement so as to pretend that this racial discrimination IS civil rights.

     In monster movies of the 1950s, scientists combed the countryside with Geiger counters measuring radioactivity; today “civil rights” proponents investigate every institution in America with their “proportional” counters. If blacks, or women, or Asians, or “Native Americans,” or Hispanics do not have their proportional share of jobs, promotions, managers, scholarships, etc., there is an immediate outcry in the media of “racism”; the EEOC, Justice Department, and other agencies swoop in to punish culprits and set quotas under the euphemism “establishing goals and timetables.”

     To understand the incredible injustice of affirmative action, and the cover up of this injustice by the liberal elite, we must look more closely at this policy and the arguments presented to justify it.  How do liberals justify such discrimination? Their theory is based on a number of assumptions. First, all peoples are equally talented in all fields. Liberals modify the Jeffersonian “all men are created equal,” acknowledging differences in intelligence, athletic ability, character, between and among individuals.

     However, they assume that all large groups of people are equally talented in all fields. Women are just as intelligent, and given a chance to prove themselves, just as strong as men (though to maintain this some liberals will redefine strength to emphasize endurance or areas where women may outperform men.) Blacks have already proven themselves on the athletic fields, but given a fair chance, they can be seen as just as intelligent as whites (again, some liberals redefine intelligence to include emotional intelligence or artistic ability to emphasize areas wherein blacks may outperform whites). And so the assumption is made for all large groups—Hispanics, Asians, Amerindians, etc. If all groups are equally talented, then why are white men so dominant in business as CEOs, in government, and in academia? The reason is prejudice, past and present. Because blacks were enslaved, and then denied equal educational and other opportunities during the era of segregation, they could not rise to their proper place in government, medicine, business. Women, too, were oppressed, even being denied the right to vote for President until 1920, and denied equal rights in other areas until quite recently.

     And so with other groups. They lag behind in America today because of their history of oppression—racism, sexism, ethnocentrism. The beneficiaries of this oppression were and are white men. Today, the imperative of justice is to break the historic chain of injustice by ending the historic advantage inherited by white men.  Since all peoples are equal, it follows that in a just society, all peoples, equally talented in all fields, will each have their proportional share of lawyers, doctors, fire chiefs, criminals. But as this is clearly not the case in America today, the aim of justice is to strive for such in society. Thus, it is necessary, and fair, to give preferences to groups that have been excluded or underrepresented in various fields. So if a white teen has a higher score than a black teen from the same high school on an SAT for a scholarship, it is not really discrimination to deny the white that award and give it to the black. It only seems like discrimination; in reality, it is fair and just. 

     After all, why is the black teenager not performing as well as the white on the test? His father may be in jail; his mother on drugs; he may not have been encouraged enough toward academic pursuits. His cultural milieu is the heritage of slavery and segregation. The SAT test, far from measuring the intelligence or academic abilities of the two teens, merely measures the privileges inherited by the white. And so the SAT, the LSAT, the medical exams, nursing exams, teachers exams, and all other objective exams are objective only in highlighting the degree of prejudice experienced by blacks, women, and other minorities.

     Such “objective” exams are thus objectively racist and sexist.  Similarly, police and firefighters exams, even if minorities help construct the tests. Even drug exams are racist because it is natural that more oppressed minorities might be more prone to use illegal substances. Clearly then, seemingly color-blind objective exams are racist; sex-blind objective exams are sexist. The only test, the only exam that should be used is proportionality. Only when the same proportion of women and blacks and Hispanics do as well as whites on an exam is that examination truly free of immediate bias and the effects of past bias. The proportionality exam thus provides the test for discovering bias, the measure of discovering the degree of bias, and the method of overcoming such bias. The proportionality test is the test that tests all other tests. Thus, the white teen and his successor should be denied the scholarship until the black teen, and his successor, have a proportional number attending college, teaching in college, and as CEOs.

     This is the theory that underlies affirmative action (hereafter AA). For example, Barbara Bergmann, an economist, in her widely-publicized,  In Defense of Affirmative Action, presents her case. To her, AA is a matter of conscience, “planning and acting to end the absence of certain kinds of people . . . from certain jobs and schools.” The purposes of AA are to end discrimination, promote integration, and reduce poverty of minority groups. “The heart of an AA plan is its numerical hiring goals, based on an assessment of the availability of qualified minority people and women for each kind of job.” Bergmann acknowledges that AA programs “ do have quota-like aspects,” but she contends that this is the only method to get qualified women and minorities into jobs, for without AA they would be rejected.

     One of her points is that not only is AA necessary to redress the wrongs of slavery and segregation in the past, but that in today’s job market there is considerable racist and sexist discrimination proved by her charts showing continued racial and sexual segregation in employment. Furthermore, the wage gap continues to exist between white men and black men, white men and women.  Because “a majority of Americans desire to live in a country that is fair,”  the only method to overcome such discrimination is by continuing and intensifying affirmative action. Bergmann does consider alternatives to AA, such as a program based on economic need rather than race, but as most of the poor are whites, they might overwhelm such programs unless there were quotas and set-asides established for poor blacks. So Bergmann concludes, the present system is the best.

     Bergmann opens her book by commending President Clinton for his desire to choose a Cabinet “that looks like America,” shortly after his first election. But, which group was most overrepresented in the Cabinet by the end of Clinton’s first term? Is it the privileged white males, villains of Bergmann’s book and liberal ideology? Of the 14 members of his Cabinet in the summer and fall of 1996, eight were white men. As whites are about 76% of the national population, those eight white men and two white women compose approximately the “fair share” Bergmann would allot to whites. But white men are 57% of the Cabinet, far more than their 38% of the population. Again, just looking at the Cabinet, one can encounter white male privilege! Bergmann seems correct. But look closer. Four of those white males are Jewish. So white male gentiles, who compose about 37% of the population, form only 28% of the Cabinet—they are underrepresented. Yet, Jewish males, some 1% of the population, compose another 28% of the cabinet. And, because Jews are so vastly overrepresented, the underrepresented white male gentiles are branded by liberal Jews as the “privileged” group!

     Bergmann and the other liberals distort the picture of America through their misuse of statistics. Thus, gentile white males are called “overrepresented” and deemed worthy of being discriminated against, when they may indeed be underrepresented and, by the liberals’ own standards, “deserving of affirmative action.” But white male gentiles are denied any aid because liberals consciously ignore them in their statistics by including with them the overwhelming overrepresentation of Jews! Liberals seek to camouflage the overrepresentation of Jews by pointing the finger at alleged “white male privilege.” But what is true in Clinton’s Cabinet is true in medical schools and law schools and other elite areas. No wonder, Bergmann can declare, “we no longer have a ‘Jewish seat’ on the Supreme Court because it is no longer needed.”  Of course not! The reason: of the nine justices, two are now Jews. So representatives of 2% of the population compose 22% of the highest court of the land. Bergmann does not complain about this “unfair” proportion. (Since this article was published, Jews now have yet another seat on the Supreme Court, so that 2% of the population has 33% of the High Court.)  Similarly, when Mrs. Bergmann complains about so few women and minorities in the United States Senate as an illustration of discrimination, she neglects to mention Wisconsin, where both Senators are Jewish men. Thus, less than 1% of the state’s population provides 100% of its Senators. True, Bergmann might complain, but only because it is an all-male delegation. Then, consider California’s Senators—two female Jews. No complaint from Mrs. Bergmann. She is from the most privileged, the most over-represented group in America. Yet, she diverts attention by decrying the overrepresentation of white males, even declaring white male waiters in restaurants privileged, though they serve her!

     Mrs. Bergmann’s statistics are aimed at obfuscating and distorting. She seeks to portray all white men as privileged because some are overrepresented in profitable enterprises. And because of this “privilege,” preferences must be granted to all those who are not white men. But the group most overrepresented is NOT white men, it is Jews. Even economically, the gap between whites and blacks is NOT as great as that between Jews and gentiles.

     So, if Bergmann is accurate that the purpose of AA is to narrow the economic gap between blacks and whites, how much greater the necessity for AA on behalf of gentiles to narrow the ever wider economic gap between Jews and gentiles? If Bergmann were to reply that this is beyond the scope of the Civil Rights Act, she is wrong. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on religion as well as any based on race, sex, or ethnic origin. Bergmann, the EEOC, and the civil rights lobby all stress that the individual is less important than the statistical aggregate in exposing “discrimination”; that statistics are the method of revealing what is wrong in the work place, and, with, AA (quotas) goals, and timetables, providing the best means of overcoming the discrimination proved by the numbers. Then, by her own system of determining discrimination, it is clear that Jews are the most overrepresented group in the most lucrative positions in the nation. Furthermore, the average income of Jews is sufficiently higher than gentiles to exhibit a massive economic gap. Why does not Mrs. Bergmann include this among her statistics? After all, she is an economist.

     Bluntly, the proportional test, the liberals’ test of all tests, when applied to the religious clause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, shows Jews to be the most privileged and oppressive people in America. The favorite test of liberals reveals white men to be less privileged than Jews. Why does not the New York Times, the EEOC, the television networks, report that statistic? The media is silent on Jewish privilege. But if the media began to expose “Jewish privilege” and demanded preferences for gentiles until they had received their “fair share” of important posts, there would be immediate denunciations of the media’s bigotry.

     However, the media and government are even more bigoted when they denounce white male privilege and demand preferences for women and minorities. Yet, few denounce this bigotry. 

     Either the liberals’ proportionality test is valid, in which case Jews are the most privileged and oppressive people in America, or the proportionality test is flawed, providing bizarre results, and should not be used to allege white male privilege. Nor should that test be used to undermine the SAT, the LSAT, the medical tests, the police exams.

     Concisely, here is the liberals’ dilemma—either white male privilege is a myth and AA, erected upon the myth, should be demolished; or, if white men are privileged, then Jews are even more so. And if, because of white male privilege, AA is essential to aid underrepresented minorities and women (the majority) until they have achieved their “fair share” (quota) of lucrative rewards in society, then because of Jewish privilege, all the more reason to institute AA to aid underrepresented gentiles (again, the majority) until they have achieved their “fair share” of lucrative rewards in society.

For the full article and the footnotes, you can read it on line by googling my name and “white male privilege.