December 6, 2017
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Can Blacks and Whites “Get Along” in an America Where Cultural Marxism Rules?
MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey
Can Blacks and Whites “Get Along” in an America Where Cultural Marxism Rules?
Friends,
On
November 19 MY CORNER took up the topic of race and racism, and the use of
those “devil terms” in American politics and culture as ideologically
weaponized concepts to advance a cultural Marxist agenda and basically silence and
exile any opposition to that agenda. Those comments came as something of a response
to a widely-reported op-ed published in The
New York Times by a black law professor, Ekow N. Yankah [Can My Children Be Friends With
White People?, November 11, 2017]. In that
essay Professor Yankah declared that when he instructed his children “on the
ways of the world,” he taught them that white people cannot be trusted and that
blacks cannot befriend whites. In short, white folks are evil, supremacist
oppressors, not just by their traditions and history, but by their very intrinsic
nature.
Then, just the other day, several items came my way that relate
how an editorial writer for the student newspaper at Texas State University at
San Marcos, one Rudy Martinez [a Latino], demanded that white people “die.”
“Your DNA is an abomination,” he wrote in the student newspaper, the University Star [See article,
“Whiteness: Your DNA is an Abomination,” November 29, 2017, [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5134429/Texas-student-paper-blasted-anti-white-article.html ]:
“You were not born white, you became
white…You have been estranged from yourself and, in that absence, have been
instilled with an allegiance to a country that was never great. One that has
continuously attempted to push non-whites into non-existence through crusades
that have been defended by the law.”
Martinez, who is a senior philosophy major [!], continued his garbled
screed by accusing white Europeans of unjustly possessing privilege and having
actively “built…an oppressive world.” “I
see white people as an aberration,” he wrote, and promised “a constant,
ideological struggle…to deconstruct whiteness.” Martinez declared that he and
his allies would “win” that struggle, and that “goodhearted liberals, apathetic
nihilists and right-wing extremists” should accept the “death of whiteness as
liberation for all.”
There was push
back, of course, from both the university administration and from the fearless
student body president, Connor Clegg, who condemned Martinez’s essay—but that
only got demands from groups such as the Pan African Action Committee [PAAC]and other powerful on campus
organizations that Clegg resign as student president because he was “openly
biased and racist.” [“Texas State Student President Will
Not Resign After Condemning Campus Newspaper Article Calling for ‘White Death’,”
Free Beacon, Dec. 5, 2017, http://freebeacon.com/culture/texas-state-will-not-resign-condemning-campus-newspaper-article-calling-white-death/]
It would be comforting to
think that incidents such as this one were rare and uncharacteristic of
American college campuses—and American higher education. But the facts are that
what occurred at Texas State University is far more representative of the
Marxist ideological veneer—or, better, the Marxist straightjacket—that
dominates and, in fact, throttles what passes for “education” these days. The
examples that can be cited are literally countless and would fill volumes.
And what is a singular
and salient characteristic of this situation is that it has as much to do with
the professoriate and academic over class as it has to do with the students.
The chilling fact is that since the late 1960s, the PhDs—the future professors,
teachers and university administrators—turned out by our colleges and
universities have—most of them—been imbued with a Marxist outlook and
philosophy that now pervades nearly all academic disciplines, but most
especially history, sociology, philosophy, English, anthropology, and political
science, in other words, the liberal arts.
As a Jefferson Fellow
grad student at the University of Virginia in the 1970s, I observed this
process metastasizing at a gallop. Virginia—UVa—was still a fairly conservative
school at that time. Indeed, when I was there we had a number of whom I would
call “refugee” grad students who had transferred to the university from places
like Columbia, Berkeley and Huntingdon College to escape from the early
outbreaks of Marxist violence and revolution on those campuses. Some were
outright “conservatives,” others just students who wished to avoid the
upheavals. We even captured control of The History Club….for a while.
Yet, many doctoral
candidates at UVa had already imbibed a Marxist vision and narrative. The
student body president, I recall, was a fellow named Tom Breslin. He had, if I
remember correctly, been a seminarian, but had been “converted” through his
reading of texts such as The Wretched of
the Earth, and Black Skin, White
Masks, by black French revolutionary and anti-colonialist writer Frantz
Fanon. Eventually, he made his way to Mao’s China, which he claimed was the
ultimate “peoples’ paradise” on earth, something to be emulated here in the
United States and in Europe.
What impressed me about
these Marxist students was not just their fanatical zeal and seriousness, but that
they were far more “radical” and revolutionary than any of those stodgy Soviet
Communists who then ruled Russia and who exercised control over Eastern Europe.
I had met some of those types as an exchange student in England a few years
earlier—they parroted the Moscow Communist “line,” but would not have been
caught dead advocating “sexual liberation” or same sex marriage, certainly not
like those I encountered at UVa in the 1970s, or that we encounter today.
This variant of Marxism
was and is a much more virulent strain, a zealously globalist brand that owes
far more to Leon Trotsky than to Josef Stalin, and that understands the value
of emphasizing “racial liberation” as well as “sexual liberation” in the
struggle against the West. The Christian West is to be undermined, not just
because of its “economic injustices” and its “oppressive Capitalist system,”
but because of its “white supremacy and colonialist oppression” of minorities
(mostly blacks) and its “sexual oppression and exploitation” of women.
Ironically, just as the
Soviet Communist system finally fell (August 1991) after seven decades of
totalitarian rule and Eastern Europe was being self-liberated from its
forty-five year yoke under Moscow’s boot, what Dr. Paul Gottfried has labeled
quite correctly “cultural Marxism” was triumphing in Western Europe and in the
United States. In fact, Marxism did not disappear with the exit of its octogenarian
Soviet commissars, but resurfaced in a significantly more dangerous and infectious
formulation, and largely domestic form here in America, soon dominating our
campuses, our entertainment industry, our pulpits, our media and now our
politics.
And its major ideological
weapons of choice are: the imposition of a race-based narrative culturally and
politically, and the demand for sexual liberation, specifically concerning the
role of women in society.
A couple of weeks ago the
local PBS station (WUNC-TV) featured a program they called “Focus,” featuring a
discussion of historic monuments honoring Confederate veterans and “what should
be done about them.” Of the approximately seventeen participants in this on-camera
“dialogue,” only two represented what
I would term the opposition to taking down those monuments. Of the supporters
for removal, one young black woman gave away the whole narrative and plan:
American history, she explained, was totally infected, based in and on,
“racism” (as well as “sexism”). Thus, that history needed to be “cleansed” and
purified, and that must be begun with the removal of those
obviously “racist” reminders of the Southern Confederacy, since, as “we all
know,” the “war was about slavery…and that was why the South was fighting.”
This
was, now fully blown, the excited but jejune theorization I had first heard
forty-five years ago in graduate seminars at the University of Virginia, then spouted
by young doctoral students who would in a few decades’ time occupy the endowed
chairs in history, philosophy, English, and other subjects at our major
universities. This was the narrative that also had infected the thinking of
university administrators and basically turned our academic institutions into
Marxist “communes” dedicated to the indoctrination of those students sent off,
at exorbitant tuition expense, by parents who believed the “myth” that all you
had to do in life to succeed was get a college education.
It
was and is a dogmatic standard, a new canon of faith, that indicts white
(read=European) Christians, mostly (but not always) males, making them the
culprits and responsible parties for the near entirety of the defined (by
Marxist theory) “ills of the world.”
Into our vocabulary have some such terms as “white supremacy,” “white
racism” (there is no other kind), “white oppression,” “white privilege,” and
the “need to deconstruct ‘whiteness’.” And as dogma it must be imposed, no
questions asked…with so-called traditional “academic freedom” discarded by the
wayside if it stands in the way.
The
most prominent group in the violent tearing down of the Confederate veterans’
monument in Durham a couple of months ago was a Marxist organization
self-denominated the Workers World Party (www.workers.org) whose
essential platform includes the following points: “Abolish Capitalism – Disarm
the Police & ICE Agents – Fight for Socialist Revolution – Support Black
Lives Matter.” And their overarching
template is: “Smash White Supremacy.”
There
have always been such fringe groups on the far Left, but what gives the Workers
World Party and groups such as Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and others like them
more cache’ and prominence in America in 2017 is that one of the nation’s two
major political parties, the Democratic Party, basically buys into their
narrative, at least politically, and the opposition, the Republican Party—most
of its leadership—is deathly afraid of entering any type of negative discussion involving “race,” for fear of being
accused of that dreadfully unforgivable and
inexpungeable “sin” of racism—by far the worst offense that any politician or
public figure can be guilty of in our modern society.
Creating
a standard and unquestionable narrative on race (and also on sexual issues) has
been undoubtedly the most successful strategy of cultural Marxist theory and
its theoreticians. It first captured the academy, from which it was able to
dictate the education of several generations of Americans. It has shaped and
limited debate, defined parameters, which always continue to evolve, and always
toward additional “deconstruction” and “liberation,” which, in fact, means the
continued marginalization and destruction of our historic European and
Christian civilization.
It
should have been clear decades ago what was occurring—there were visible signs
and markers. We had seen the disastrous experiences of “de-colonization” in
Africa and revolution in Latin America (e.g., Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, etc.),
inspired largely by Marxist-dominated religious thought. In the United States a
few farsighted conservative critics of the “civil rights movement” understood
that its implications could be just as severe and revolutionary. But those
voices were soon muted, by the 1980s as the self-denominated “Neoconservatives”
forcibly seized control of the “conservative movement” and soon served as the
intellectual brain trust for GOP politicians. As the Neocons shared in the same
philosophical origins—Trotskyite globalism—as the “farther Left” cultural
Marxists, their intellectual parameters and ability to argue fundamentals was
severely curtailed.
Until
the Marxist template of “race and oppressive racism” as the critical factor
underlying all of American history
and the necessary imperative to erase, correct and make reparations for racist
“injustice”—“white guilt”—are overturned and rejected—until our very language
of communication on this topic is recaptured and reformed—we shall continue to
be at the mercy of this cultural “gestalt” that despoils our heritage, perverts
our history, and infects and deforms our very existence.
Dr.
Paul Gottfried’s impressive study, Multiculturalism
and the Politics of Guilt, stands out as an incomparable examination of
this condition. And more recently, Ilana
Mercer’s volume on what has happened in South Africa, Into the Cannibal's Pot: Lessons
for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa is a chilling story of what transpired
in that once-prosperous society after “de-colonization” and what lessons there
are for the United States.
In
addition to the two items on what took place at Texas State (with links above),
let me highlight another column written by Ilana on recent occurrences in
Zimbabwe—another case of historic Western cowardice in the face of a triumphant
- and disastrous - Marxist template. [https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/11/30/why-all-three-southafrican-presidents-supported-robert-mugabe-n2416210
]
It’s excellent background reading—and a
warning.
Lastly,
our friend John Derbyshire wrote something about five years that serves as an
excellent counter-piece to Professor Yankah’s editorial. It is well worth
retrieving and reading, perhaps not pleasantly so, but then the truth is not
always comforting. It can be accessed at this link: https://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/the-talk-nonblack-version/
Dr. Boyd D. Cathey
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