Last week was quite the time for old, seemingly White men to make racial comments about Blacks.
We first had Cliven Bundy discuss the problems of the Negro. The media unsurprisingly convulsed in anger in response. It wasn’t anything you wouldn’t have heard on an average day on Fox or Rush Limbaugh – it was just expressed in a way that made it easier fodder for The Daily Show to mock and made it harder for the conservative media to stand by him.
Then we had the leaked tape of the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers disparaging his girlfriend for associating with blacks (even though she is a mulatto herself). That led to many calling for Sterling to lose his ownership and prompted sponsors to flee from his team.
Both the controversy surrounding Cliven Bundy and that of Donald Sterling present an interesting study of prevalent attitudes towards race by different elements of American society. I would like to call these two views: “the colorblind negro” and “the high-status instagram.”
Bundy represents red state America—the tea party demographic to be more precise. As a cattle rancher living out in rural Nevada, he’s a natural voter for the Republican Party and makes the stereotypical consumer of conservative talking points. He became a cause célèbre of the Right because he withstood the federal government’s entrenchment on his private property and transformed it into the excesses of big government versus the constitutional rights of citizens.
It was somewhat of a farce to begin with and seemed like a situation that could’ve only been dreamed up by Rand Paul’s campaign staff—if it hadn’t actually happened. A rancher symbolizing the entirety of Middle America took on the government to protect the (technically illegal) grazing area of his cows and spit on the regulations aimed to protect an endangered turtle. While an inspiring act to stand up to the guns of the Bureau of Land Management, it’s ultimately an act over cows—nothing more.
But since it had nothing to do with race and was largely an economic issue, the right turned Bundy into a folk hero and made his fight righteous in the eyes of the GOP’s demographic.
Then he used the word “Negro” and compared welfare to slavery. That went over the conservative movement’s red line on acceptable race-baiting and they quickly moved to denounce him. What he said wasn’t even racist and if put in a different context, as Peter Brimelow has pointed out, would’ve been the basis of a Paul Ryan speech on inner city outreach:
“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.
“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
Gregory Hood has correctly pointed out that this is just the all-too familiar conservative line about the dreaded “liberal plantation,” meaning the welfare state that keeps blacks enslaved to dependency.
But we all know that blacks choose to be on welfare because it is better than working at dead-end jobs and blacks instinctively know that as a group, they will never succeed or move up in America’s economy.
Government subsidies sound a whole lot more enticing than a shitty job as a janitor. Speaking of janitors… Bundy kinda likes these Hispanics who are replacing blacks at the low-skilled jobs they used to hold:
“Now let me talk about the Spanish people. Now I understand that they come over here against our Constitution and cross our borders. But they’re here, and they’re people. And I’ve worked beside a lot of them. Don’t tell me they don’t work, and don’t tell me they don’t pay taxes. And don’t tell me they don’t have better family structures than most of us white people. When you see those Mexican families, they’re together, they picnic together, they’re spending their time together. And I’ll tell you, in my way of thinking, they’re awful nice people. And we need to have those people going to be with us – not not coming to our party.”
Once again, Cliven Bundy sounds more like Paul Ryan than Jared Taylor.
And his vision is the same: a colorblind America where every person who works hard, respects the Constitution and goes to a megachurch on Sunday is welcome here.
That vision is a fantasy that is unfortunately shared by far too many whites in this country, but believed by hardly any non-whites. As our country continues to balkanize along racial lines, many conservative whites will keep dreaming that one day non-whites will accept their colorblind vision and finally assimilate into the America of their youth.
That won’t happen – but the idea continues to lie at the heart of the conservative multiracialism that Bundy embraces.
That won’t save him though, and no matter how much he says that Martin Luther King would be on his side or how many irrelevant black conservatives they find to defend him, Bundy is a lost cause.
Even though he could stand up to the assault rifles of federal agents, he couldn’t stand up to the charges of racism.
The case of Donald Sterling, on the other hand, presents a more interesting and less covered view of race.
Sterling is a multi-millionaire who lives in Los Angeles and owns a professional basketball team in arguably America’s most multicultural city. He also happens to be Jewish (he was born Donald Tokowitz), has a mulatto girlfriend, earned a lifetime achievement award from the NAACP for the millions of dollars he’s given them, and the only political candidates he has donated to have been Democrats.
Did I also mention that his sport of choice is the blackest sport, both culturally and proportionally, in America? Even President Obama admitted the fact when he ritually condemned Sterling for his racist comments
In the end, Sterling doesn’t cut the model for who the media would normally deem a bigot – but that doesn’t mean they haven’t noticed his racial views in the past.
Sterling made his millions as a real-estate mogul in Los Angeles. He owes a significant amount of his success to discriminatory practices that barred blacks and Hispanics from renting apartments from his business. He preferred Koreans and whites who he felt were better tenants. His opinions on blacks is that they “smell and attract vermin” and that Hispanics “smoke, drink and just hang around the building.”
He ran his business with common sense racial views that blacks and Hispanics would drive away potential renters and lower the value of the properties he was leasing.
Even how he runs his basketball team reflects that he has a certain understanding of racial differences. In a lawsuit filed by a former player, it was alleged that Sterling wanted a team stocked full of poor blacks from the South with a stern, white head coach managing them. You could say it was like a plantation system, and the left has even appropriated the conservative movement’s terminology to attack Sterling’s management style.
What ultimately did him in was his criticism of his mulatto girlfriend for associating with blacks. It focused solely on how it looks low-class and trashy – he doesn’t mind his paramour fucking them of course, he just doesn’t want pictures of her with them on “the instagram.” The idea is that attractive females (in his opinion, she’s not attractive at all in mine) shouldn’t be seen with black men, no matter how successful they are, because it lowers their status.
Sterling’s take on race is further outside of what mainstream society would tolerate than Bundy’s. As a more cynical and crass version of John Derbyshire’s “The Talk,” Sterling has admitted that blacks generate poor living environments, require the leadership of whites to do anything and should not be associated with publicly if you desire respectability. While Derbyshire’s talk was centered on protecting yourself and your kin from potential threats, Sterling’s views are solely about accumulating wealth and status.
In other words, he’s still a vile human being. Not because he’s an alleged racist, but because he cynically utilizes these views to eke out a luxurious existence and entertain himself through the blackest sport in America. He cares nothing about improving society or living by higher ideals, he only cares about himself.
While his views on race are far more realistic than Bundy’s naiveté, Bundy is the far more respectable character when compared with the odious personality of Sterling.
But both of their views on race are completely wrong. Bundy thinks that if we just stop seeing race and judge people on their “content of their character,” that “the negro” will finally assimilate into American society. Sterling, on the other hand, knows that this is a false notion and non-whites will never assimilate to the status of whites, Jews and Asians – and that’s why he doesn’t want pictures with them on “the instagram.”
Bundy represents an antiquated notion of America that no longer exists (and that’s proven by his ignorance at knowing the term Negro is now considered offensive), while Sterling represents a view that is becoming more prevalent as the upper class attempts to safely navigate a multiracial America and still preserve established notions of prestige (and that’s why he cares so much about his mistress preserving a high-status instagram).
Identitarians should reject both notions. Neither will preserve white identity and both are mental aberrations. Blacks will never embrace the delusion of economic freedom and treating blacks like plantation chattel is utterly vile. The view of Bundy will die soon, but it is possible that the views of Sterling will become more prevalent as more of the meritocracy drop their racial illusions to ensure their own personal security.
But it won’t save them when the non-white hordes they’ve manipulated for years decide to whip out the machetes.
Both views are a result of America’s twilight and reflect the decline in our society. We have to embrace racial views that always place our people’s interest first and never seeks to make our existence as atomized individuals the priority. We have to view ourselves as a collective and attempting to just make our individual lives more comfortable will no longer work. That is the Donald Sterling view of race.
Ethnocentrism is what we should strive for and is an viewpoint that will ensure our people’s survival – not the “colorblind negro” or the “high-status instagram.”
