February 19, 2002

White Americans: Second-Class Citizens

Florence King’s column is the best reason for reading National Review. Her “Misanthrope’s Corner,” placed on the magazine’s last page, makes National Review a publication that is read from back to front.

[Peter Brimelow interjects: Ah, happy memories! John O’Sullivan invited Florence King to NR because I’d showed him my copy of her brilliant book on America’s Founding Ethnicity Wasp, Where Is Thy Sting?. This, of course, was before Buckley abandoned immigration reform and purged us from the magazine. Come to think of it, I never got my commission.]

In her latest (Feb. 25), Miss King relates the relief expressed by her driving instructor when he discovered she was Miss King and not Miss Ling: “Last slant I had put us both in the hospital.”

The driving school’s secretary had hit “L” instead of “K” on the typewriter key, sending the instructor into a fit of panic and hypertension. Relieved from the fear instilled by a typo, the instructor gave Miss King his views on why Asians should not be permitted to operate motor vehicles.

This incident occurred, of course, in the distant past—1974. That was a year when Americans still had freedom of speech, the exercise of which had not yet been turned into a hate crime by what Miss King lampoons as “the MultiCulties.”

Nowadays, writes Miss King, “my instructor would automatically assume that the white stranger beside him was an avenging angel of diversity tuned to a perpetual frequency of High Snitch. He would know that one little "hate speech" is all it would take to get fired, sued, and condemned to wander through the secular purgatory of community service while the talk shows debated his status as Satan Incarnate.”

Miss King’s observations were still in mind when I read reports of the arrest this month of 10 black males for a series of racial attacks on white University of Virginia students in Charlottesville over the past six months. According to police, the attacks were not a town-gown conflict, nor were the assaults motivated by rape or robbery. The students were simply beaten for being white.

The national media are too politically correct to report black-on-white hate crimes, which leaves Americans ignorant of the growing incidence of such crimes. Local newspapers sometimes report these crimes if they occur within the city limits. Otherwise, there are only the police reports.

The politically correct Charlottesville mayor, Blake Caravati, is busily at work denying the facts. In Mayor Caravati’s MultiCulti-speak, [You can send him mail.] the crimes have become “incidents.” Charlottesville's political leader also dismissed the description, given by the police and the assailants themselves, of the physical assaults as “race-based.” Whether the beatings were racially motivated, says His Honor, is “yet to be determined by the Commonwealth’s Attorney.”

The mayor went on to express his sympathy for the assailants and their families, who, unlike the victims, are local residents and voters.

The white students were lucky they were set upon and beaten before they had time to open their mouths. If the black assailants had been smarter, they could have given the whites a jail term instead of a beating.

If instead of delivering blows, the black assailants had informed the whites of what they thought of their girl friends and mothers, they might have stirred enough anger to elicit verbal responses, perhaps even the n-word, that would qualify as hate speech. Maybe a white student would even have—heaven forbid—struck a black tormentor.

Goaded into committing hate crimes, the arrested whites would be national news, and mayor Caravati would not be making apologies for them.

Miss King is correct that her driving instructor can no longer express his views on Asian driving students. This same inhibition means that no white can respond in kind to verbal assaults from a “protected minority” without being arrested for a hate crime.

Racial privilege is a fact of U.S. law. Recently, in Idaho a white husband was arrested by white police, prosecuted by a white prosecutor, convicted by a white jury, and sentenced to jail by a white judge for coming to the defense of his white wife who was physically assaulted by a black male. You can read all about it on www.vdare.com.

The black’s physical assault on the wife was minor, but the husband’s verbal assault was not. The enraged husband used the n-word.

White males had best give up any idea of defending their women or themselves, and women should not confuse their men’s aversion to jail with cowardice. America has returned to the feudal age when legally-privileged nobles could assault commoners at will, but woe to any commoner who returned the compliment.

This extraordinary inequality is what we owe to the Civil Rights movement, white male presidents, white legislators, and white attorney generals.

Paul Craig Roberts is the author of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.