I Will Not Genuflect to This Church of Antiracism
John Derbyshire • June 6, 2020
Earlier: Police Racism: A Manufactured Crisis, by Jared Taylor
When I first came to these shores in August of 1973, I lived down on New York’s Lower East Side, with some Chinese friends from Hong Kong. They were fairly recent immigrants themselves, and keen to show me the sights.
One
evening they took me to Macy’s in Herald Square. I’d been in department
stores before, of course; but I had to admit, Macy’s was pretty darn
impressive. I can still recall riding up those
escalators.
Monday this week a mob of looters broke in to Macy’s [Nightmare on 34th St.: Videos capture scene as rioters kick their way inside Macy’s flagship store in Midtown, by Catherina Gioino and Larry McShane, NY Daily New, June 2, 2020]. The store had boarded up its windows two days before; and the break-in happened at night, when there was supposed to be a curfew in place.
And they looted Macy’s.
Which was a further metastasizing of the disturbances I reported last week, over a black guy dying in Minneapolis while under arrest.
Yes: This is yet another Emmett Till! These things are happening faster than I can keep up. The last one—that black guy out jogging with his tuxedo on, remember that?—was only four weeks ago. Now here’s another.
This
one concerns George Floyd, a black man who died while under arrest in
Minneapolis a week ago this past Monday. Floyd had tried to pass a
counterfeit bill at a convenience store. Store employees called the
cops, who struggled with Floyd both before and after handcuffing him. He seems to have put up a lot of resistance. Floyd was a very large heavy guy, either 6’6″ or 6’7″, depending which report you read.
The
fracas ended with one cop, Derek Chauvin, kneeling over the perp with a
knee on his neck. It’s not clear how much weight was on the knee, or the
degree—if any—to which this style of restraint led to Floyd’s death. He
had high levels of illegal drugs in his system, as well as being seriously unhealthy The convenience store employees he’d interacted with thought he was drunk. [Autopsy report: George Floyd died from cardiopulmonary arrest, was positive for COVID-19 , by Charlie Wiese, KTSP, June 3, 2020 ]
It’s also not clear to me how unorthodox this knee-on-the-neck style o f restraint is. Our own correspondent who posts as “Federale” here at VDARE.com, and who is a law-enforcement professional, says it’s pretty routine:
Kneeling on the head or neck is quite common and useful physical control technique. It is also used daily in hundreds of arrests.
Federale supplies a supporting video
from an arrest in New York City; and at least one law-enforcement
website has said that Officer Chauvin was “compliant with existing
policy.” [Neck Hold Used By Minneapolis Officer Was Approved By Department Policy, LawOfficer.com, May 29, 2020]
On
the famous video clip, Officer Chauvin plainly knows he’s being filmed;
yet he doesn’t have the look of someone aware that he’s doing anything
wrong.
It’s difficult for a lay person to know how to judge this. One of the great truths about human nature is that power corrupts.
For a police force to be effective at all, the cops have to have power
over civilians; so it’s not a surprise that some cops get corrupted.
Looking
back over my own interactions with the guys in blue, across several
decades and many jurisdictions in half a dozen countries, what surprises
me is how few cops go bad. In a broad and general way, I’m pro-cop.
This past few days we’ve been hearing calls to defund the police [Movement to defund police gains ‘unprecedented’ support across US, by Sam Levin, Guardian, June 2, 2020]. The people calling the loudest are of course rich celebrity types living in gated communities, but there seems to be some broader support too.
Speaking as the inhabitant of a quiet middle-middle-class white suburb, I’m not totally unsympathetic. If there was no organized police force, myself and my neighbors, many of us armed, could keep order among ourselves with no trouble. Community self-sufficiency is a fine old American ideal.
The problems would arise, of course, when underclass black s from some nearby ghetto came in to steal our stuff and rape our women.
We’d end up shooting a couple, and then we’d quickly be where Officer
Chauvin and his colleagues are now, where the three guys in Brunswick,
Georgia are, looking at four hundred years porridge on federal “civil rights” and “hate crime” charges.
And that’s only to speak of the civilized part of town. Removing police from the ghetto itself would lead to real mayhem. The black-on-black homicide rate would go from the current seven or eight times the white-on-white rate to seventy or eighty times. I wouldn’t rule out cannibalism.
And it would all, of course, be white people’s fault.
You may say: “OK, but George Zimmerman was doing neighborhood watch, and he was acquitted at trial.”
That’s true; but what George Zimmerman went through is not an advertisement
for community self-policing. In any case, that was before the Great
Awokening really got under way. Nowadays the Ruling Class would move
heaven and earth to get a conviction.
Derek Chauvin’s jury will be stacked with 70-IQ Somalis; and Minnesota’s state Attorney General, a black Muslim Bernie Sanders supporter, will rig the prosecution nine ways to Sunday … or nine ways to Friday, whatever the Muslim equivalent is.
So
forget about self-policing communities. We need professional cops, with
their occasional obnoxiousness, powerful unions, and extravagant
benefits.
Guess what: It’s an imperfect world.
And a crazy world. Listen to this.
Audio Player
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That was a rally the other day in Bethesda, Maryland. All I have of it is a video clip and soundtrack.
It’s an open-air scene in some kind of parking lot or plaza outside a
library, in what looks like a spacious middle-class suburb a lot like my
own. There are several hundred people present; so far as I can see, all
of them are white—males and females both, with I think a slight
preponderance of females.
The liturgical quality of their responses illustrates plainly—more plainly than anything I have seen or heard in a long time—John McWhorter’s thesis that antiracism is a religion. [Antiracism: Our Flawed New Religion“, Daily Beast, July 272015]
I can’t get much of a handle on the appeal of antiracism to Goodwhites, though I see it obviously has great appeal to these Bethesda congregants.
Also to leaders of the big old established religions. This week the Pope declared that racism is a sin. [Pope Francis Prays For George Floyd, Decries ‘The Sin Of Racism’, NPR, June 3, 2020] The Archbishop of Canterbury, not to be out-pontiffed, said that racism is “an affront to God.” [Racism is an affront to God’ – Church leaders lament death of George Floyd, Anglican Mainstream, June 3, 2020]
At
the risk of having my door kicked down by outraged elderly gents in
clerical robes, I’ll admit I don’t mind racism, if it is defined as
thinking some races are better than others. It’s a common enough
opinion—a well-nigh universal one until about fifty years ago—and harmless in itself.
Racism has of course a lunatic fringe of people who want to rob, persecute, or kill other races.
A lot of ideas have lunatic fringes, though. There are, however,
well-established laws against robbing, persecuting, and killing other
people for any reason, and I whole-heartedly support those laws.
If
we are going to judge opinions by the lunatic fringe of those who hold
them, the zone of acceptable ideas will be awfully small.
Which,
of course, where true believers are concerned, is the whole idea. In
the pure world of universal enlightenment, there will be only one
permitted opinion on any topic.
For a
person like me with a more open frame of mind, the appeal of antiracism
is as incomprehensible as the religious observances of Australian Aborigines. I can only watch and wonder as antiracists wave their arms, chant in unison, and shriek in horror at unbelievers.
And genuflect. That seems to be a big thing with antiracist believers. If you don’t know the word, “genuflect” is defined at Dictionary.com as:
(1) to bend the knee or touch one knee to the floor in reverence or worship.
(2) to express a servile attitude.
People
have been genuflecting all over this past few days in displays of
antiracist reverence and to express a servile attitude. Michelle Malkin
wrote a fine spirited article about it:
America, straighten your spines. Unbow your heads. No home or nation was ever saved by kowtowing to invaders or ransackers. Unless you are praying to God, get up off your knees.
I entirely agree. But for GoodWhites, it’s time to, in the words of Tom Lehrer, to “Genuflect! Genuflect! Genuflect! …”.
Genuflecting with tears: Here’s the memorial service for the Holy Blessed Martyr Floyd, conducted (incredibly) by Rev. Al Sharpton. Note the Mayor of Minneapolis, a 14-year-old white girl eccentrically named Jacob Frey, sobbing uncontrollably while reverently touching Floyd’s gold casket.
A gold casket! I’m sure it’s not solid gold, presumably just gilt, but it sure does look grand and holy.
Any
lingering doubts that antiracism really is the religion of Goodwhites
like Ms. Frey were dispelled by that image of her kneeling, and of the
casket she was kneeling at, which looked like the kind of object that, a
thousand years ago, would have had a basilica built over it.
And, come to think of it, by the time George Floyd’s family are through collecting on the Ghetto Lottery, they probably will be able to afford a casket in solid gold. Last time I looked, their GoFundMe page was up over thirteen million dollars.
How
many family members are there, though? We’re told that Floyd had six
siblings, is father to five children, and was living with a lady he met
three years ago. [From North Carolina to Minnesota: A look back at George Floyd’s life, by Alex
Jokich, KSTP, June 4, 2020] We don’t know much about the baby-mommas of
Floyd’s children, but the youngest child we’ve heard about is six years
old, so I guess she’s not from the lady he met three years ago.
I do
hope there isn’t any unseemly squabbling among siblings, children, and
baby-mommas over the division of that thirteen million dollars, or
however much it ends up as.
There’s plenty there for everyone—easily enough to buy each of them a house in a nice white neighborhood.
So a
feral mob is looting Macy’s. The police can’t cope and the Governor
won’t call in the National Guard for fear the Church of Antiracism will
excommunicate him. Why not bring in the troops? Surely we could spare a
few hundred from the, oh, the four thousand we have stationed in
Bahrain, wherever the hell that is?
Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas made the case in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday. Sample quote:
It’s past time to support local law enforcement with federal authority. Some governors have mobilized the National Guard, yet others refuse, and in some cases the rioters still outnumber the police and Guard combined. In these circumstances, the Insurrection Act authorizes the president to employ the military “or any other means” in “cases of insurrection, or obstruction to the laws.”[Send In the Troops, June 3, 2020]
That ignited a civil war in the Times itself, with staffers tweeting their displeasure that the newspaper had published the piece.
We heard from, for example, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black female reporter who just won a Pulitzer Prize for her “1619 Project” arguing that blackety blackety blackety-black-black-black. Tweeted she, tweet:
As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.
Jazmine Hughes, an editor of the New York Times Magazine, agreed. Tweet from him, her, or xer:
As if it weren’t already hard enough to be a black employee of the New York Times
Poor thing! You can just imagine the hardships they endure, those black employees at the Times,
cowering in fear that the white overseers might at any time bring out
the whips and cudgels, waiting in line deferentially in the lunch
cafeteria until all the white people have been served first. Our hearts
go out, Jazmine.
A common opinion was that, to quote one much re-tweeted tweet, tweet:
Running this puts Black @nytimes staffers in danger.
Because,
you know: First thing the GIs are going to do, once they’ve landed in
Manhattan, is head up to 41st and Eighth to shoot up the New York Times building.
Late
Thursday the newspaper’s management caved, telling the world that Tom
Cotton’s op-ed was the result of a “rushed editorial process” and “did
not meet our standards.”[Sources: New York Times not telling the truth about Tom Cotton op-ed, by Dominic Green, Spectator USA, June 5, 2020]
All
this confirms my view stated above: that in the Brave New World of
wokeness, there will be only one permitted opinion on any topic.
Disagreement will be treason.
It confirms something else, too, something I’ve been hearing for quite a while: That the older staff members at the Times—and
some similar institutions—people with the traditional, somewhat open,
gentry style of East Coast liberalism, these older staffers have been
increasingly at odds with the younger, more “woke” cohort, who have a
less tolerant, more totalitarian mindset.
Not just at odds, in fact: Some of what I’ve been hearing is that the grown-ups are scared of the young radicals. The way the paper caved over Tom Cotton’s op-ed suggests this is indeed the case. The grown-ups are scared.
You’ve probably heard that saying—it dates from the French Revolution—that “A revolution eats its children.”
To judge from these events at the New York Times this week, what’s happening over there is more a case of the children eating the adults.
But where are the unbelievers? Where is the other side in the Cold Civil War?
There
have been one or two signs of resistance. A small group of Antifa
communists tried to demonstrate in the town of Yucaipa, in Southern
California, but the locals, who look to be well-armed, chased them out
without so much as a token genuflect. [Antifa ‘Invades The Suburbs’ in Yucaipa, Calif… It Does Not End Well For Them, bu Chris Menahan, Information Liberation, June 3, 2020]
Here
in my neck of the woods, which is to say on Long Island, residents of
Merrick, in the county adjacent to mine, protested a march through their
town by the Antifa-looter coalition. The townsfolk were shouting at the
marchers: “Go west!” meaning, to the next town over, which is more …
diverse.
Cops
negotiated some kind of compromise, and the march went through; but at
least the Badwhites of Merrick put up a fight. Thanks, guys! [Merrick Residents Try To Block Anti-Police Brutality Protesters, by Timothy Bolger, Long Island Press, June 3, 2020]
Here
in my own bosky town a few miles further out on the island, a
restaurateur scandalized the local faithful by referring on Facebook to
the town’s small mob of protestors as “punks,” “little animals,” and
“savages.” He further claimed that
They came in and they came out, they saw a bunch of us with a bunch of watermelons we were going to throw at them.
This
gentleman, may his name live in honor, is Luigi Petrone, proprietor of
Tutto Pazzo restaurant, where I have eaten many times. The food is
excellent.
Tutto Pazzo has been closed recently as part of the coronavirus lockdown. Presumably they will re-open at some point.
I’d like to tell you that I shall be going there to eat as soon as they do. However, it seems that Luigi Petrone is only the co-owner with his brother Joey; and Joey is a true believer in the Church of Antiracism. From Joey via his attorney:
Mr. Petrone wants to express his DEEPEST APOLOGY for the reprehensible comments made by his brother Luigi …Huntington restaurant owner under fire over racist remarks, by Deborah S. Morris, New York Newsday, June 2, 2020
See,
it’s just like a real civil war: brother against brother. Until the
Petrones have come to some kind of terms, I shall withhold my patronage
of their restaurant.
So
yes, there have been some small scattered signs of resistance. It’s not
much, though; and of course all the real centers of power are all
genuflecting to the terrorists and looters.
That
includes the Republican side of the Uniparty, whose Senators and
Congressmen have been declaring their devotion to the Holy Blessed
Martyr Floyd just as loud as they can squeal.
Our
useless, ineffectual President has been mostly not present, other than
when tweeting pathetically about how he’s reduced black unemployment.
This is part of a subtle scheme cooked up by his son-in-law, Jared
Kushner, to win this November’s election by raising the eight percent of
the black vote Trump got in 2016 to eight and a half—maybe
nine!—percent.
That Kushner guy is a real political genius, isn’t he?
So I
may have to revise my model of a Cold Civil War. Right now, we look
more like an occupied nation, dominated by this bizarre cult of
anti-white totalitarianism, dissenters from which have no organization,
no leadership, and almost no public voice.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.
(Republished from VDare by permission of author or representative)
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