Attack on Conservative Group as 'Racist' Is a Smear

By Samuel Francis, Syndicated Columnist
Tuesday, February 2, 1999

The onslaught against the Council of Conservative Citizens marches right along, with regular installments of misinformation in The Washington Post, Newsweek, some 70 other newspapers around the country and -- most recently -- allegedly conservative columnist Arianna Huffington. It's bad enough when the official organs of the left denounce you but when those who are supposed to be conservatives do the left's work for them, that's about as low as you can crawl.

Mrs. Huffington started whining about the CCC last week with a column that merely repeated the accusations she had already read in the above-named publications. What she had read, of course, was that the CCC is "racist" because it or various of its members have (a) opposed interracial marriage, (b) denounced Martin Luther King for various moral and political sins, and (c) said that blacks have lower intelligence than whites.

Some have also used rhetoric about these matters that some people find offensive, caling King a "depraved miscreant" and warning of the "slimy brown mass of glop" into which the U.S. population will devolve if race-mixing continues. The question before the public is: Does any of this constitute what can seriously be termed "racism"?

I maintain it does not. The word "racism," if it means anything real, ought to mean a desire to harm, oppress, or exploit another race.

I can think of one instance of racism in this sense immediately. Last summer, USA Today published a column by Camille Cosby, comedian Bill Cosby's wife, who proceeded to accuse the entire nation of responsibility for the murder of her son. "I believe America taught our son's killer to hate African-Americans," she wrote. "There was not then, nor is there now, a single American institution which is not a racist institution. Yes, racism and prejudice are omnipresent and eternalized in America's institutions, media and myriad entities."

What she meant, of course, was white America -- that white Americans are all racists who hate black people and that all of them are murderous. I really don't have to explain it; the meaning is obvious enough.

I could also dredge up a number of similar sentiments expressed by Louis Farrakhan, several of his lieutenants, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Sister Souljah, and many others. Soon after publication of Mrs. Cosby's column, the NAACP's Julian Bond stated that he "wholeheartedly believed" what she said about this country and the white people who live here. What she and Mr. Bond and a good many other non-white leaders regularly say and "wholeheartedly believe" is just a bit more racist than anything I have ever heard anyone in the Council of Conservative Citizens say -- a good deal more so than fulminating about America becoming a "slimy brown mass of glop."

As far as I know, no one in the CCC has denounced Martin Luther King because he was black, but for flaws everyone condemns, nor as far as I know has anyone said or written anything that accuses all or most blacks of murderous intentions toward whites or holds up blacks for ridicule or advocates or even hints that blacks should be oppressed or exploited. Nor has any critic produced any such passage from anyone in the CCC.

As for lower intelligence levels, quite frankly there are lots and lots of books and studies by real scientists that argue that, and no one doubts that blacks do not perform as well on IQ tests as whites (the controversy is over whether the difference is hereditary or not). Indeed, the same people in the CCC who have mentioned these facts have also pointed out that Asians perform better on the same IQ tests than whites do, so why aren't they "yellow supremacists" for saying so?

In short, when the CCC is accused of being "racist," I for one just don't see it, and if it really were "racist," I wouldn't be a member of it or serve on its Board of Directors, as I have for several years. The group does acknowledge that it is "pro-white," and so am I. I see nothing wrong and everything right in defending the group to which you belong, and I don't see why doing so means you are "against" other groups. Most Americans are "pro-American," but no one thinks that means they are "against" other nations.

The attack on the CCC is mainly an effort by the left to silence dissent on racial issues and smear anyone who tries to discuss them from any perspective but that of the left itself. It's clear enough why the left wants to preserve its monopoly on what we're supposed to think and say about race, but what's not clear is why people who call themselves conservatives not only buy the left's pitch but try to sell it themselves.