By Ian Jobling • 3/20/08
Last summer, The Inverted World published America Awakes, which explored how the illegal immigration debate had altered Americans’ understanding of race. The sight of illegal aliens desecrating the flag during their teeming rallies, as well as the publicity given to Hispanic social dysfunction, caused whites to question the multiculturalist dogma that diversity was a strength. There were signs that whites were becoming racially conscious: that is, they were beginning to realize that they had a distinctive racial identity that was threatened by mass immigration. It looks as though the Jeremiah Wright affair is having the same effect. The notoriously dispirited GOP base is suddenly showing signs of life again.
If Michelle Obama’s gaffe caused some ripples in the right-wing pond, the Wright videos have detonated the equivalent of a daisy cutter on the conservative landscape, awakening an otherwise dispirited party base.
“I usually get three or four emails a week on Obama,” said Michigan Republican chairman Saul Anuzis Monday. “Today I received more than 10, all of them on his minister.”
It seems that this presidential election will be similar to the last one. In 2004, what put Republicans over the top was not tax cuts or social security or even Iraq, but whites’ revulsion against slanders upon their race and nation. The Swift Boat Veterans publicized John Kerry’s baseless 1971 allegations before the Senate that American soldiers had committed atrocities against the Vietnamese because they “put a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.” We see again today that nothing riles the conservative base up like the stench of the “whites as cancer” myth.
The Wright affair has given the term “antiwhite” unprecedented currency. A search on this previously arcane term in Google News generates 225 hits. The newfound popularity of this concept is very important, as it inculcates in whites a sense that their race is under attack, which is an essential component of racial consciousness.
I believe Wright’s rantings will strengthen white racial consciousness in another way as well. While they revealed black culture’s hostility to whites, perhaps even more importantly, they also showed how deeply alien the values of black culture are to the American spirit. As I argued in What is the West? Part II, one of the key traits of Western culture is its respect for the truth. This respect is the source of our unique traditions of scientific discovery, self-criticism, and impartial justice. The sight of a black church, one of whose members was a US senator, going into ecstatic transports listening to Wright’s outrageous assertions seared on our brains how little blacks share our respect for truth.