Only White People Can Be Racists

Canada, lacking a heritage of slavery, is not afflicted with institutional racism. That’s what Canadians have always believed, and that’s what has put them on the moral high ground vis-à-vis their southern neighbor.

Until very recently, since Canada had almost no ethnic minorities other than Native Canadians, this was an easy position to maintain. No ethnics, no racism, no problem!

However, for the last few decades, Canada’s new multicultural immigration policies have allowed it to acquire its fair share of fashionable ethnic groups. And now — surprise! — the new immigrants aren’t convinced of Canada’s lack of institutional racism. No matter how many diversity initiatives are launched, regardless of mulitcultural outreach and dialogue, despite the passage of “hate speech” laws that protect the new groups from even the most tenuous of insults, it’s not enough. Canadian minorities are moving resolutely down the path of “No Justice! No Peace!”

The latest skirmish in the ethnic culture wars came about because of a group called New Black Youth Taking Action, which decided to hold a rally in Queen’s Park in Toronto on May 15th.


New BYTA is no ordinary hands-across-the-world multi-culti mushmouth liberal anti-racist organization. These people mean business. Their demands include the “[i]mmediate establishment of K-12 black-focused schools; change in the current K-12 curriculum to establish truth; immediate diversion of the $250 million from Brampton (super) jail; and immediate repeal of Safe Schools Act”.

The Safe Schools Act was passed in an attempt to cut down the rising level of black-on-black violence in Canadian secondary schools. While I was in Toronto this past week there was a shooting at a local high school in which a 15-year-old African Canadian boy was killed. I gaped in disbelief as I watched the story on the local TV news — how could this happen in Canada? Everyone knows that Canada has banned guns!

But somehow, despite the ban, a gun made its way into C.W. Jefferys Collegiate Institute and killed a black kid. The Toronto police have identified a suspect and are reportedly close to an arrest, but since the police spokesman makes no mention of “racism” when referring to the crime, one has to assume that the prime suspect is also black.

This is exactly the kind of violence which the Safe Schools Act was trying to stop, but BYTA considers such initiatives to be inherently racist, and wants the act repealed.

Make no mistake: when BYTA calls for the “establishment of K-12 black-focused schools”, they mean blacks-only schools. The president of the group is Nkem Anizor, and she is a member of the Nation of Islam, whose separatist views are well known. If a white group called for separate schools for whites and blacks, he would immediately run afoul of Canada’s hate speech laws. But, as usual, the favored victim groups are exempt from such rules.

It was only natural that BYTA, in solidarity with its comrades to the south, decided to invite NOI leader Malik Zulu Shabazz to be their main speaker at the May 15 rally. That’s when the trouble started.

Mr. Shabazz, like many other Nation of Islam leaders, has a well-documented history of uttering inflammatory anti-Semitic remarks. According to the Anti-Defamation League:

During a protest in front of the B’nai B’rith building in Washington, D.C. (April 20, 2002), Shabazz led chants of:

“death to Israel,” “the white man is the devil,” and “Jihad.” Shabazz also said, “Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!”

Despite Mr. Shabazz’ impeccable credentials as a certified victim of American racism, this was to big a pill for even Canada to swallow. Canadian B’nai B’rith protested his visit, and the authorities discovered a previous misdemeanor arrest in Mr. Shabazz’ history, allowing them to bar him from the country on a technicality.

The rally went on without its celebrity star, but Ms. Anizor gained a huge new weapon with which to bludgeon the charge of “racism” into Canada’s obsequious élite opinion makers. Black voices in Canada were being silenced, and the sinister machinations of the Zionist lobby were to blame! According to The National Post:

Black youth activists in Toronto are blaming the “Jewish lobby” for the decision yesterday morning by border guards to deny entry into Canada to Malik Zulu Shabazz, a controversial black American lawyer and activist, who had been scheduled to address an afternoon protest rally at the Ontario legislature.

Nkem Anizor, president of the New Black Youth Taking Action, an activist network formed after a spree of gun violence in Toronto in 2005, told a morning news conference that she wanted to draw attention to the unfairness of the provincial Safe Schools Act toward black youth and the potential benefits of black-focused schools, and to denounce the construction of a superjail for youth in Brampton.

Instead, both her news conference and afternoon rally were sullied by vague accusations of Jewish meddling.

“The black community has no political maturity in Toronto, and our first weak little attempt to have a rally is being lambasted and blown apart because one group does not like who we chose,” said Ms. Anizor, 26, a human biology grad from the University of Toronto who now works full time as an activist.

[…]

“What’s to blame is the power of the Jewish lobby to influence politicians, to influence media, to influence whatever it took. Because it took one letter, one press release from B’nai Brith [a Jewish human rights group], and the firestorm began,” she said. “You guys [media] are all here because of what B’nai Brith told you…. They’ve injected themselves, trying to dictate who the black community can and cannot hear.”

BYTA is demanding that the Brampton superjail be closed because too many blacks are being imprisoned. It’s racist to prevent black-on-black crime; it’s racist to convict and imprison black criminals — so what options are left? You guessed it! A Jesse Jackson rhyme-time special: “Education not Incarceration”:
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Four key demands will include: the repealing of the Ontario Safe Schools Act; halting the construction of the $250 million dollar Greater Toronto Youth Centre (“Brampton Superjail”); funding to establish K-12 Black-focused schools throughout the GTA; and specific changes to the K-12 curriculum to include key contributions of Black people to the development of Western and world civilization.

And what does “truth” in the K-12 curriculum mean? The details about African contributions to Western Civilization can be found in this account from The Toronto Star:

But isn’t it divisive to be teaching black kids one thing and others something else, one reporter asked, maybe mischievously, as Anizor had said she wants the entire curriculum overhauled to reflect black achievement and history.

“Don’t think for a second that black people did not give education to the world. We civilized the entire planet,” she said, from the Greeks to the Romans, thanks to the Egyptian civilization that predates Europe. “So if anybody knows how to teach it’s us.”

Every advance in the history of the world is a result of black people?

“Absolutely. Yeah. We were here first. Doesn’t mean you haven’t used technology and developed yourself. Want to challenge me, go head, knock yourself out. But if you were confident of the truth you would not have deleted it from the history books,” she said.

Instead, the image that’s propagated is the doctrine of white supremacy: “We did it all. We got you all in the jungle. Thank God, play ball and dance.”

Sounds like a conspiracy, one reporter said.

“Right. Right, Right. When one group is in control, and the other is not, they can write the story. His-story. Not ours. Is that so strange? What, we don’t have any history of this? Groups subjecting another group and rewriting the history to suit their purposes; or taking scripture to suit what they want to do?

This is an example of a perfect closed logical system: an assertion accompanied by rules which make it impossible to falsify. Any attempt to falsify it is prima facie evidence of a racist conspiracy, and is thereby rejected. We have no choice: we simply must accept it.

If this kind of balderdash were uttered by Anglo-Canadians, or French-Canadians, or Polish-Canadians, or Italian-Canadians, it would be considered racism of the most egregious type, and punished accordingly. The perpetrators would wind up paying fines, doing community service, and maybe spending time in the Brampton superjail (assuming that it hadn’t already been demolished).

But blacks and other protected groups are exempt from these rules. They can’t be racists. It’s impossible for a victim of a historically oppressed minority to practice racism.

I’m giving Dymphna a special guest-slot here to describe her personal experience with this peculiar Orwellian institution:

Before they kicked honkies out, I used to be a member of the NAACP. “Welcome aboard,” they said.

Years later, they slung me off the poop deck.

Back when I worked at a battered women’s shelter, I found a flyer announcing a workshop on racism. It was going to be held on a weekend, starting on Friday night, at the black Baptist church on Fifth Street in Charlottesville. I remember asking the director of the women’s shelter to pay whatever fees were involved. We both figured that if I picked up some good information it might be helpful in resolving conflicts in the residents’ quarters upstairs.

I think of it now as my first “Dip into Delusion.”

When I arrived, there were about thirty people. I was late (as usual, some crisis or other at the shelter). Everyone was seated; I looked around and noticed I was one of two white people. The other one had a beard and wore sandals… not a good sign, I thought. This is going to be preaching to the choir, plus two whiteys.

The speakers — two men — were from New Orleans. They did the usual boilerplate about the history of racism in America. Then the leader of the two proclaimed something startling. He said that only white people could be racists. Black people, because of their place in our culture as a persecuted minority, were not capable of being racists.

I was struck dumb, at least momentarily. I thought of all the names I’d been called by angry black residents, and those were definitely racist slurs they were slinging. When white residents were angry, they didn’t refer to my race but to my ancestry, usually something involving my mother’s morals.

As they went on in this vein, I had to raise my hand. “Excuse me, but I have experienced racist behavior from black people. I’ve been called all the variations of honky names, excluded from conversations because I’m white, told that I couldn’t understand some finer point of suffering because of my skin color. To me that’s racism.”

Hostile silence from the two leaders. Then one said, “No, you’re wrong. That’s not racism, that’s just the result of hundreds of years of oppression. As I said, black people can’t be racist. Only whites can.”

I listened to their claptrap for a little while longer and realized that I was experiencing some severe cognitive dissonance here. I also realized very quickly that these two had nothing to teach me.

Now I wish I’d had some cogent Larry Elder quotes to use in response to their obvious insanity.

But I didn’t know about Larry Elder then, and even though we were sitting in a church, I couldn’t think of one verse of scripture to quote that they would be able to hear. Obviously 1 Corinthians 13 wouldn’t cut it with these guys. So I simply got out of my chair, waved goodbye, and drove home.

As I was coming off the bridge across the James River, I was pulled over for speeding. It was late by then, so the police officer no doubt thought I was a Friday night drinker. She told me I’d been doing 36 in a 25 mph zone. My mind was still back in that church, stuck on those haters and their bilious beliefs. Sometimes when I’m mad I drive too fast.

I apologized for being careless and said I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was. She asked me if I’d been at work and I told her I had been. “Well, pay more attention next time,” she said. And then she waved me on. No ticket.

That night has stayed fresh in my mind. I figured those two dudes from out of town, city guys just pissing poison, were simply the advance troops for a lot more just like them.

As it turned out, I was right.

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So where does this end?

There’s no denying a history of white racism. There’s also no denying a history of black racism, Chinese racism, Arab racism, etc., etc. Heck, there are probably even Hottentot racists — Those stupid Bantus! How many Bantus does it take to put in a light bulb? How do you tell the bride at a Bantu wedding?

But where does it end? When the last white racist either dies or repents of his evil ways, will all the black non-racist anti-Caucasians change their tune?

When current demographic trends play out, and whites become a persecuted minority in a country, will the black people in the same country automatically become racists? Will their white victims automatically have the “racist” stigma removed from their collective character?

What does it profit the black grievance industry to peddle this kind of nonsense? Does their vitriol persuade even a single white person to change his beliefs, and accept blacks as equals? Or — more likely — do their angry accusations generate “racist” feelings where none existed previously?

The ugly fact is that racial grievance-mongers do not serve their own ethnic group well, nor do they reduce anybody’s “racist” sentiments.

As Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have amply demonstrated, race-baiting is simply a ticket to a lucrative career. It’s the shakedown to end all shakedowns.


Hat tip: flyboy.