The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The Anti-‘Anti-Racist’ Professor

Posted on | November 27, 2020 | Comments Off on The Anti-‘Anti-Racist’ Professor

Donald Douglas has been a professor of history and political science at California’s Long Beach City College for 20 years, and for the past decade or so he has been besieged by leftist trolls because he is a conservative who blogs at American Power. Under the terms of identity politics, Professor Douglas counts toward his campus’s “diversity” calculus as a POC (“person of color”), and he also contributes to the kind of diversity that colleges really need — intellectual diversity. If he is not the only Republican on the LBCC faculty, he is certainly the most outspoken, and this has made him the object of hassles with LBCC’s administration.

Like all good Americans, Professor Douglas hates Communists, which certainly makes him a rarity in academia nowadays. Professor Douglas has agreed to participate in a campus discussion about Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist, and suggests that his point of view will be how to be an anti-“anti-racist.” I think an interesting point to bring up in this discussion would be the ironic fact that Kendi is an alumnus of Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Virginia.

That is to say, having made a career railing against “white supremacy,” Kendi nonetheless owes his education to institutions historically associated with a social order he wishes to destroy. Furthermore, Kendi got his undergraduate degree at Florida A&M University, a historically black institution whose existence originated in Jim Crow segregation.

Adapting to the conditions of an integrated society, where racial equality has been mandated by federal law since 1964, has been one of the greatest challenges in American history. Every citizen has a duty to maintain the peace and prosperity of our country, and nothing would be so fatal to this peace and prosperity as the kind of ethnic hostility that tore apart the former Yugoslavia, and produced genocide in Rwanda.

Last month, before the election, I wrote an American Spectator column entitled, “Are Americans Tired of Being Called ‘Racist’ Yet?” My belief is that spurious accusations of racism — “RAAAAACISM” with five A’s — tend to increase racial hostility, rather than to reduce it.

On the one hand, such accusations encourage a sense of paranoia among racial minorities, while on the other hand, these accusations are taking by white people as insults: “How dare you accuse me of unfairness?” When Americans hear the word “equality,” they always think of it in terms of basic fairness — treating others impartially, according to the Golden Rule. To accuse someone of racism is, in this sense, to accuse them of breaking the basic moral norms of our society. The frequency with which accusations of racism are flung around nowadays — more than half a century after the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, at a time when minorities enjoy greater opportunities in America than at any previous time in our history — is counter-productive, to say the least.

Let’s hope that Professor Douglas is able to get his academic colleagues to listen to the voice of reason, before it’s too late.




 

Category: American Power, Education, Intellectuals, Racism

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