Our Racism Debate

Dinesh D’Souza replies: Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance is a viciously anti-black, anti-immigrant publication whose content is best captured by quoting a few items from recent issues. “An acceptance of racial difference might be good for blacks. . . . [In the past] the assumption of inferiority made it easier to accept meager circumstances.” “American slaves had surprisingly positive things to say about slavery. . . . In some cases would slavery not be better than the squalor and barbarism that so many blacks have brought upon themselves?” “In June, the Chicago Bulls won its third straight professional basketball championship, and blacks celebrated in what has come to be their usual style—they looted and rioted. ...” Not surprisingly, I saw David Duke and his representatives at the 1994 conference, although Duke told me that Taylor had asked him not to show up at meetings because it might blow Taylor’s cover and undermine his credibility. The syndicated columnists Taylor refers to are Joseph Sobran, who has been denounced by Jewish groups as an anti-Semite, and Samuel Francis, who was fired from his position at the Washington Times when the editor read my account of his racist views. The academics Taylor has in mind are extremists like Michael Levin, who argues that blacks not only have lower IQs but also lower moral capacity than whites, and who has called for a revival of certain forms of segregation. What upsets Taylor is not that I described his conference unfairly. Upon reading the galleys of The End of Racism , he was able to identify two minor errors of wording, which The Free Press promptly agreed to correct, and did before the book was published and distributed. Taylor’s panic arises because I have exposed him and his white supremacist allies with their own words, which they themselves have taped and which rival the worst rantings of Louis Farrakhan. Consequently, Taylor, who was previously considered a respectable voice on the right and whose articles have appeared in National Review and even some black publications, must now account for his propaganda of mean-spiritedness and bigotry or else stay away from respectable and decent society.