http://www.tomgpalmer.com/archives/042381.php

billyjoeallen 

Try, for just a minute, to imagine the following scenario. The New Republic, or some other stronghold of neocondom, has just discovered the website of the church Ron Paul has been attending for the last 20 years. At the very top of the site's home page is the following statement:

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly White and Unapologetically Christian...Our roots in the White religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are a European people, and remain "true to our native land", the mother continent, the cradle of civilization...We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a White worship service and ministries which address the White Community.
It doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess what would follow. The story would be on all the evening newscasts, the neocon and Beltway libertarian talking heads would be all over the cable news channels expressing their disgust, and even the paleolibertarians would jump ship. No explanation he could offer would be acceptable. Ron Paul's campaign would be dead.

But if you just change "White" to "Black" and "European" to "African" you'll have the exact words that appear at the top of the home page of the website of the Trinity United Church of Christ, the Chicago church that Barack Obama has been attending faithfully for the past 20 years. Yet, so far the media — with the exception of a few conservative columnists — have given Obama a pass on his connection with this church.


BillyJoeAllen: re the motto of Obama's church, for most of America's history blacks were treated, *by law*, as inferior. Whites never were. If blacks say "hey we're not inferior after all, in fact we're proud of being black, black is good" it is in reaction to decades of persecution and prosecution. It might be technically defined as racism, but to do so really makes no sense. "Hey, the fact that we're black doesn't mean we're inferior. In fact, black is good," is a life-affirming statement in this context. I'm all for it.

OTOH, when I hear whites talk about "white pride," it almost always degenerates into discussions of the inferiority of non-whites (and Jews, for some obscure pseudo-reason). Bleeccchhh!

Your racism vs. statism thought experiment doesn't make sense, in that statism needn't be collectivist, and racism needn't be reflected in gov't policy. But if Ron Paul is going to promote liberty effectively, he needs to promote it for everyone. And selling out to racists makes that impossible. He ought to denounce the Rockwellians.

Posted by: Charles N. Steele at January 15, 2008 11:39 PM