University of Michigan Opens Whites Only Cafe as Anti-Racist Move

This shows just how extreme ideologies of diversity and affirmative can be taken so that they end up looking very much like the old racist institutions of apartheid and segregation they were supposed to combat. A few days ago I caught some of the Conservative sites on YouTube talking about the opening of a cafe for Whites only at the University Michigan. Amazingly, this seems to have been done by their Centre for Social Inclusion, which at least speaks the language of diversity, rather than old style White racial supremacists. The hosts of the American Conservatives YouTube news channel, Timscast, have put up a piece about it, in which they blame White liberal writers on race and racism for this development. Specifically Robin Di Angelo. Di Angelo’s the author of a bestselling book, White Fragility, and has said that she feels uncomfortable in the presence of Blacks. I think her book is supposed to be an expose of White racism and is a piece of polemic aimed at combating anti-Black racism. But the presenters of Timscast decided that she was a racist herself, who really wants Whites and Blacks to be segregated and the creation of such Whites only spaces.

This came just after Donald Trump passed a law banning the teaching of critical race theory in the police and other federal departments. They haven’t been proscribed at right. They can still be taught privately elsewhere. They just can’t be taught in the various organs of the federal state. Sargon of Gasbag, the Sage of Swindon, has put out his video hailing it as a true anti-racist measure. From what I gather, Critical Race Theory teaches that all Whites are racist, and that the American state and its institutions are therefore also racist.

Kimberle Crenshaw

In his video, the man who broke UKIP reads out excerpts from the introduction of Kimberle Crenshaw’s Critical Race Theory, published in 1996. This is an anthology of texts about the theory. It states that it had its origins in the 1970s amongst a group of White Marxist legal scholars, New Left and Counterculture activists in a Conference for Critical Law Studies. This brought together law professors, students and practicing lawyers, who were subsequently called ‘the Crits’. This led to the foundation of Critical Legal Studies. The focus on race and racism emerged following the departure of Derek Bell, a Black law professor, left Harvard. Bell’s students demanded he be replaced by another Black tutor. When the university refused to grant this, they set up an alternative course continuing Bell’s teaching. This was the first institutional use of Critical Race Theory. These Black activists also attacked Critical Legal Studies itself, most of whose members were White, as a site of hierarchy and power. These were the Critical Race Crits, who split from the Marxists on the issue of racism. They were dissatisfied with the Marxists’ explanation of racism as a function or creation of capitalism.

No, this is a Crite from the movie Critters. Not a Crit.

Critical Race Theory and its supporters reject the ideas of colour blindness, integration and assimilation and the mainstream Civil Rights movement, which they believe has been appropriated by liberal ideologies. This includes Martin Luther King’s dictum that a man should be judged on his character, rather than his colour. As part of this, they have also attacked the Supreme Court’s support for a colour-blind attitude to race. They instead turned to radical Black movements like the Black Panthers, advocating the development of Black racial consciousness to attack and undermine the existing racial order.

There’s a clip on YouTube, which has been used by a number of Conservative vloggers like Sargon’s Romanian friend, Vee, which clearly demonstrates the Critical Race Theorists’ own racism towards Whites. This is of a young Black American woman, Ashleigh Shackleford, telling a roomful of Whites that, as White people, they are all racist and nothing they can do will change it. She doesn’t mean to offend them, but they are all demons to her. This attitude isn’t just confined to her. My mother encountered a similar attitude amongst a group of anti-racism activists brought into her school to teach anti-racism following the race riots of 1981/2. They also made unwarranted assumptions based on class and Whiteness. One of them told Mum that she had to be racist, because she was White and middle class. Mum was naturally not impressed, not least because she grew up on a council estate in Bristol. She told the woman that she didn’t know her.

Sargon attacked the Critical Race Theorists’ advocacy of Black racial consciousness by arguing that it also legitimates White supremacy. White racists can use it to argue that, if Black racial consciousness is legitimate, then it must also be for Whites. In fact, the Critical Race Theorists strongly reject and attack any comparison between their attitude and White racism. But Sargon has a point, and it does seem supported by the opening of the Whites only café by Michigan University as a socially inclusive gesture.

Way back in the 1990s, the Financial Times discussed the development of what it called liberal apartheid in a review of a book on the British Empire. The FT complained, if I remember aright, that while the book covered migration and the movement of peoples across the world during the Empire, it said nothing about the reverse colonisation that occurred afterwards. It used this term to mean the immigration to Britain of non-Whites from former colonies. And it used liberal apartheid to describe the various services that are available only to Blacks and other ethnic minorities. It considered these as one of the forces responsible for the increased separation of Whites and Blacks into different communities.

I’ve no doubt that pro-Black anti-racists would angrily reject terms like ‘reverse colonisation’ and ‘liberal apartheid’ because of the comparison they make between non-White immigration and affirmative action and White imperialism and colonisation. But liberal apartheid is a suitable description for some of these policies. For example, New York University has started building Blacks only student accommodation at the request of its Black students, who don’t want to room with Whites. One university somewhere also opened a student centre, that was exclusively for the use of non-Whites, including Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and indigenous Americans. There’s another clip on YouTube of a Black woman telling the Whites that were in there to leave. In Britain there are also Black only housing blocks, at least in London. I’ve no doubt these separate spaces and policies supporting ethnic minorities were set up in response to a genuine need. The Black housing blocks in London were set up because Blacks had trouble getting accommodation. But it is also itself a form of segregation.

And when this policy of creating separate spaces for ethnic groups, who feel marginalised and at risk, is applied to Whites, as now seems to have happened at the University of Michigan, the liberal apartheid of affirmative action looks very much like its old version designed to exclude and marginalise Blacks and people of colour.

And it also shows how bizarre extreme ideologies by Black anti-racists are, that Donald Trump, a racist himself, many of whose supporters are real racists and White supremacists, suddenly appears to be an anti-racist by banning them.

I’m not going to link to them, but here are the titles of the videos I’ve cited if you want to google them on YouTube.

Sargon’s video has the title ‘Major Win for Patriots: Trump Bans Critical Race Theory’.

Vee’s video is ‘What Is Critical Race Theory and Why Did Trump Ban It?’

The Timscast video is ‘Segregation Resurfaces as WHITES-ONLY Cafe Is Opened At a College in the Name of INCLUSION’.

Nigel Farage Has a Point About Racial Segregation at New York University

Heaven help me, I can’t believe I’m actually defending something tweeted by the Fuhrage. On Saturday Zelo Street put up an article about a series of tweets by the man 2000 AD’s ‘Judge Dredd’ satirised as the anti-immigrant politician, Bilious Barrage. These revealed just how racist Farage is.

The tweets themselves were the standard right-wing stuff going around at the moment. Attacks on the BBC and the Finnish conductor for not singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ because they’re all unpatriotic, woke leftists. Asylum seekers being put up in hotels and defended by lefty activist lawyers, Brexit and the demand that we should be able to control our borders and a rant hyping his piece for the Telegraph about ‘cultural Marxism’. A phrase which has very definite anti-Semitic overtones, coming as it does from the Nazis’ idea of Kulturbolschevismus – cultural Bolshevism – and their conviction that traditional European culture was under attack from within by Commie Jews, as part of the worldwide Jewish conspiracy for world domination.

I agree with Zelo Street’s general point. I think Nige is a racist, and at times his carefully crafted image of being an ordinary bloke fighting to preserve traditional British culture does slip to reveal real Fascism beneath. But in one of the tweets cited by Zelo Street, Nige does have a point.

This tweet linked to a report about New York University now building segregated student housing for Blacks only. Zelo Street followed this up with a quote from Gore Vidal about the leader of American Conservatism, William S. Buckley and his support for racial segregation: To borrow the words of Gore Vidal, Farage, like William F Buckley, would have been over at the Wallace headquarters stitching hoods.

I think this is a misreading and Farage is condemning it. And he’s right to do so.

If this is the same story I’m thinking of, then it’s been around for several months now. It started with a video that was widely shared by Conservative YouTubers of Black students at the uni making statements before the university authorities that they did not feel safe rooming with Whites, and demanding segregated accommodation reserved only for Blacks. This is segregation, even if it is coming from Blacks and is demanded for their benefit. The kids making these statements are clearly genuinely scared, but it is also an expression of anti-White prejudice. The Black students made these representations, I gather, after a series of threatening, anti-Black racist posters were put up around campus.

It isn’t hard to understand their fear, given the history of official racist violence in American culture. Jim Crow and segregations, lynchings and whatever threats these kids and their families may have suffered in their own personal histories. And there does seem a culture of pro-Black racial segregation already on some American campuses. Another video shared by right-wing YouTubers is of an angry Black woman, another student, telling White students to get out of a study area reserved for Blacks and people of colour. It’s more anti-White racism, and what the Financial Times has described as ‘liberal apartheid’. I don’t think we have that culture of liberal racist separatism in British academia here yet, but I’ve no doubt it’s coming. Sargon of Gasbag, the man who broke UKIP, put up a video a few weeks ago reporting that Britain’s first all-Black university has now opened. I don’t doubt that the people behind it are copying the Black American colleges and universities, which began in the 19th and early 20th century by the great founders of the Civil Rights movements to prepare Blacks for taking their rightful place as equal members of society. They appeared during segregation. We didn’t quite have this in Britain and don’t have these colleges. And at a time when academia is under pressure to give more places to Black and Asian students, and open up the profession to more women and ethnic minorities, the founding of such a university looks less anti-racist than simple anti-White racism. It’s segregation with a Black face, and no doubt a lot of verbiage about Black empowerment, diversity and inclusion.

Back to New York University, the demands for racially segregated accommodation would be angrily dismissed and the students making such demands expelled if it came from Whites. It would rightly be seen as racist, and the product of racist views that see Blacks as particularly degraded, animalistic, criminal and a threat to White culture and racial purity. You’d have mass demonstrations and protests by people proclaiming that these views have no place on campus.

But if the construction of such all-Black halls of residence are a response to White racist mischief making, then the White supremacists have won. They’ve played on Black prejudice and racial fears to destroy racial integration and reimpose a kind of apartheid.

If you look at the tweet Farage links to, there’s a piece at the bottom comparing it to the drinking fountains in Black schools during segregation with an ironic line about ‘separate but equal’. This old lie is graphically exposed in the ’80s film, Mississippi Burning, about two White FBI agents breaking up a Klan chapter after the murder of a group of civil rights activists. It’s a great film, but it was also widely criticised itself for racism by having as its heroes White FBI agents, who are shown rescuing powerless Blacks. It was also attacked on the grounds that, while based on a real incident, the FBI at the time under J. Edgar Hoover hated the Civil Rights movement. Hoover believed it was a Communist front, and did everything he could to spy on it and harass its members.

But it opens with a scene showing two children at a water fountain. One’s Black, the others White. The water fountain for Black child is dirty and stained with verdigris and mould. That for the White child is pristine clean. It’s a graphic statement that, whatever else Blacks were under segregation, they were definitely not equal.

Racism needs to be fought, no matter what colour it has or claims to be defending. And Farage, heaven help us! – is right to call it out in this tweet.

Not that it changes what Farage himself is. He’s wretched videos have been widely covered by right-wing radio host Alex Belfield, another one who claims not be racist but the ‘voice of reason’. Belfield has approvingly commented on and defended Farage turning up at hotels putting up asylum seekers. And some how I don’t think it’s an accident – do you? – that the anti-Muslim Fascist outfit Britain First rocked up at one of these hotels to protest.

Belfield claims not be racist. But he and Farage are certainly playing to a racist crowd. Go down the comments section on his videos about immigration, Black Lives Matter and so forth, and you’ll see that while some of them make perfectly reasonable comments and criticism from a mainstream anti-racist viewpoint, there are a sizable number who are bitterly racist, posting venom about immigration and ranting about the Kalergi Plan. This is another conspiracy theory that claims that there’s a secret globalist, proto-EU plan to import Blacks and other non-White immigrants in order to break up the White societies of Europe. And then there’s the related mythology of the ‘Great Replacement’, and its underlying anti-Semitism. This is all being done, according to these poisonous myths, by the Jews. It’s yet another continuation of Nazi ideology.

This is the crowd that Farage and Belfield are playing to. And it’s despicable. But Farage’s own criticism of segregated student housing at New York University is actually anti-racist. It’s just a pity that it comes from him.

Book on Vanished Jewish Communities of the Holocaust

Shmuel Spector, The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust, 3 vols. (New York University Press, 2001). 

I found this book in the latest Postscript catalogue for April 2020. The blurb for it goes

Profiling more than 6,500 Jewish communities, with over 600 photographs, 17 pages of maps, a chronology and glossary, these volumes are the product of three decades of work at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance Authority of Israel. The alphabetically arranged entries provide details of the history, people and customs of communities, large and small, that thrived throughout much of Europe, north Africa and the Middle East during the early part of the 20th century, but were changed irrevocably by the Holocaust.

The price is beyond most people’s pockets. It was £173.00, but Postscript are offering it at £75. It might, however, be available from an academic library.

I’ve absolutely no problem with this book whatsoever. The college where I did my undergraduate degree, the College of St. Paul and St. Mary, which became part of the University of Gloucestershire, hosted an exhibitions of photos of the shtetl Jewish communities of eastern Europe. There is, however, a moral problem with Yad Vashem. While it’s entirely correct to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, critics of the museum have complained that it acts to sanitise some of the world’s worst political leaders when they turn up on an official visit to make a deal. These have included real Nazis and anti-Semites, people responsible for horrific crimes against humanity, authoritarians with absolutely no regard for the value of human life. But these people suddenly become worthy friends of Israel and its people by the simple act of making a visit to Yad Vashem as part of their itinerary and laying a wreath or making some other gesture of mourning.

The activity of Yad Vashem in researching and documenting the Jewish communities destroyed by the Holocaust in Europe also has a counterpart among the Palestinians. They are also active doing the same for the Palestinian communities destroyed during the Nakba, the term they use for their violent ethnic cleansing at the foundation of Israel. In contrast to the victims of the Jewish genocide, I very much doubt that any western publisher will bring out a book on these lost communities.

Because if they did, the Israel lobby and someone like the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and the Board of Deputies of British Jews would almost certainly accuse them of anti-Semitism.

Chicago University Bans Alt-Lite Speaker for Incitement to Violence

There’s a grim piece by Simon Murdoch on Hope Not Hate’s site today, reporting that DePaul University in Chicago has cancelled an event by Gavin McInnes because of a speech McInnes gave at one of the unis in New York urging his supporters to use violence against left-wing protestors. The article also discusses the formation of a militant ‘Alt-Knight’ organisation by another member of the same far-right grouping, which also shows how the Alt-Right and its ‘soft’ counterpart, the Alt-Lite, are becoming just another form of the Klan.

McInnes is the co-founder of Vice and a host on Rebel Media, a far right platform. In his speech at New York University, McInnes told his audience

“We’re the only ones fighting these [protesters] and I want you to fight them, too […] When they go low, go lower. Mace them back, throw bricks at their head. Let’s destroy them.”

Last year, 2016, he also founded Proud Boys, a fraternal order for men, ‘who are unapologetic about creating the modern world.’ Initiation into the organisation consists of four stages, the last of which is a physically violence confrontation with the Left. McInnes told Metro that this means involvement in ‘a major fight for the cause’, saying “You get beat up, kinck [sic] the crap out of antifa”.

He also told Metro that “not only would [he] love to speak” with those who protest in disagreement of his views, but that he will also “get violent and beat the f–k out of everybody”.

Members of the Proud Boys were involved in the violence at Berkeley, which erupted when Anne Coulter was due to speak there. The order also has a more ‘militant’ wing, founded by Kyle Chapman, who goes by the name of ‘Based Stick Man’, with McInnes’ approval. This calls itself the ‘Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights’. Chapman himself was arrested after fighting a member of the public at a rally in Berkeley. Before that, he had also been arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon at a Trump rally.

http://hopenothate.org.uk/2017/05/18/rebel-media-hosts-speech-banned-statements-encouraging-violence/

It probably won’t surprise anyone to hear members of the far-right advocate violence against their opponents on the Left. It’s always been there, ever since Hitler founded the SA and then SS as the official paramilitary wings of the Nazi party, the squadristi of Fascist Italy, and the ‘Biff Boys’ of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Quite apart from the skinhead boot boys, who form the thuggish hard core of post-War Fascism in Britain, North America and Europe.

As for the Alt-Knights, the Hope Not Hate article states that it refers back to the ‘Alt-Lite’ movement of which McInnes and Chapman are members. Well, perhaps. But it also seems to be a nod to a much older, violently racist organisation: the KKK. The Klan’s full title, or at least one of them, was ‘The Invisible Empire of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’.

The Alt-Right has been described as the Klan with keyboards. Now it seems that the similarities with the KKK are becoming ever stronger and more blatant every day. The other day The Young Turks commented on a torchlight vigil organised by supporters of the Confederacy to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee by the town council of Charlottesville, Virginia. Among those protesting was Richard Spencer, the White nationalist, anti-Semitic founder of the Alt-Right. The protestors chanted ‘You will not replace us’, ‘Russia is our friend’, and ‘Blood and Soil’.

The presenters of the video, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian, state that the comments by the protestors that it wasn’t a racist issue, is contradicted by Spencer’s presence. They also demolish attempts by the supporters of Confederacy, who have tried arguing instead that the American Civil War wasn’t about slavery. They point out that instead of northern liberals not understanding history, it’s really southern Conservatives, as if you look at everything the leaders and defenders of the Confederacy wrote, they made it clear that it was about defending slavery.

This is a sharp refutation of some of the propaganda coming out of organisations like the Von Mises Institute, named after another Austrian free trade economist, who scarpered to America to escape the Nazis, while sharing their hostility to socialism and the organised working class. This outfit has also tried to argue that the Civil War was really about trade tariffs between the South and the rest of the US.

What they don’t comment on, but which makes the racist overtones of the protest very clear, is one of the slogans the crowd chanted. ‘Blood and soil’, or ‘Blut und Boden’ in German, was one of the watchwords of the Nazi party. It was based on the pseudoscientific doctrine that national characteristics were determined by the environment and landscape of a people’s racial homeland.

Observers of Trump’s rise last year remarked on the Fascistic violence that broke out against people of colour and left-wing protestors at the Orange Generalissimo’s rallies. Trump himself in one speech actually urged his supporters to beat his opponents, promising to pay their legal bills if they did.
This development shows just how deeply rooted is violence in the far-right organisations that back him. And they also show how close these organisations are to the older traditions of violent racism in Nazi and Fascist paramilitary organisations and the weird regalia and ritual of the KKK.

The Young Turks: NY University Analyses ‘Molly’ Drug, Finds It’s Cut with ‘Bath Salts’

Okay, this isn’t anything to do with politics, but it is very important. In this video from The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian discuss the finding of New York University that about 40 per cent, or nearly half of the ‘Molly’ ingested by students in a study sample of 48, was not pure, as its advocates boasted, but was cut with a range of substances, including ‘Bath Salts’.

Now for the rest of us not au fait with contemporary drug culture, Uygur and Kasparian explain that ‘Molly’ is the word for a rebranded version of MDMA, or Ecstasy. That drug that all the ravers were on back in the 1990s, and which caused a hoo-ha in the media. This is supposed to be a pure form, so that its users don’t get all the nasty side-effects of the original. Remember the mad cycle courier in the 1990s comedy series, Spaced, written by Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson? The joke there was that he’d had a few tabs too many, and so suffered from terrible unpredictable mood swings, and was likely to go off raving (as in dancing to rave music, not shouting madly) at the slightest impulse. At the end of one episode they show the character stuck on a zebra crossing, dancing to the rhythm of the traffic lights.

Unfortunately, ‘molly’ isn’t pure. It’s cut with ‘Bath Salts’. This is the very nasty legal high that resulted in a horrible case. One guy in America got high on it and literally ate another man’s face. It sounds unbelievable, but it’s true. You can look it up. The Turks state that a lot of people say they don’t trust corporations, because they’re out to make a profit, but then say that their dealer wouldn’t do anything like that. ‘Says the stupidest person alive’, as Uygur comments. Dealers are out to make a profit, and they will cut it with whatever they can to make it cheap. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who takes it will become a cannibal and ‘eat somebody’s face off under a bridge in Florida’, but it does mean there’s a severe health risk.

In other words, don’t take it. You don’t know what’s in it.

I don’t agree with the Turks’ libertarian attitude. They’d like to see drugs legalised, and then regulated, so that if you did take the drug, you’d know what you were getting. People, who take this drug genuinely believe that they’re taking a legal high that won’t damage them, when the truth is, it will. But with that caveat, I’m reblogging this as we do have a problem with legal highs in Bristol. People have died after taking the ‘Plant food’, which is the name under which some of these are sold.

So, if you are into this kind of stuff, be warned: it’s potentially dangerous. Be safe and avoid.

Women’s Lack of Freedom in ISIS

In this video, The Young Turks comment on the unofficial manifesto for women under ISIS issued by the all-female Al-Kansa brigade. Although women do fight in the Islamic state, they are only supposed to do so when there is a lack of available men. The role envisaged for women is extremely limited and strictly traditional. The manifesto declares that they should be married by nine years of age. Men should be married by twenty. They also, according to ISIS, should confine themselves to the home – the manifesto even describes it as ‘the cell of the home’. They are only to be allowed to leave the house in order to fight for the jihad, study religion, or to serve as doctors and nurses.

ISIS claims that despite these restrictions on women’s freedom, they do not stand for ‘illiteracy, ignorance or backwardness’. They do allow science to be studied, but it’s the basics only. So, as The Young Turks say, they do stand for ‘ignorance and backwardness’.

An increasingly restrictive attitude towards women has been a feature of the modern Islamic revival. In some very traditional Middle Eastern societies, women are not allowed out of the house except in the company of a close male relative. This is essentially the situation envisaged by ISIS in the manifesto issued by the al-Kansa brigade. Ethnographers researching contemporary Middle Eastern cultures have also observed and described the increasing lack of freedom granted to women. Lila Abu-Lughod, an associate professor of Anthropology at New York University, lived with a Bedouin matriarch, Migdim, between 1978 and 1980 for her research on the traditional nomadic tribes of Egypt and the changes their society was undergoing as Egypt modernised. This Bedouin lady was scandalised by the apparent lack of modesty of modern women. She and the other Bedouin women also complained of the lack of freedom they were given by their menfolk, and what they saw as the decline in the proper celebration of Arabic weddings. In traditional Bedouin society these lasted for a week, and the sexes weren’t segregated. Lila Abu-Lughod writes

When she [Migdim] gets together with other women, she often rails against the younger men of the community for being so strict about the movements and behaviour of their young sisters, cousins, and wives. “The boys are terrible now,” she began one such conversation. Her daughter agreed. “The boys are terrible. I swear by my father we have one son who’s black in word and deed. And he’s so young.” A visitor added, “Why, when we were yhoung, remember, we used to go off to herd the goats on our own. Not any more!” Migdim’s daughter continued, “Yes, that’s how things were, may God have mercy on past generations. They weren’t like this new generation … The men now are awful.”….

Yet the world she remembers is one in which behaviour that would now be considered scandalous was perfectly accepted. For example, Migdim things wedding celebrations have lost their appeal. She tells her newest daughter-in-law that they used to celebrate weddings for a week with evenings of singing and dancing. “Weddings now are like a shrunken old man,” she comments. At weddings in the past, young women, including her husband’s sisters and nieces, had danced veiled, in front of semi-circles of young men who serenaded them. Young men and women had always exchanged love songs at these weddings: “Stuff that couldn’t happen now!” they agree, thinking of the sex-segregated affairs that weddings have become since they settled into houses.

Lila Abu-Lughod, ‘Migdim: Egyptian Bedouin Matriarch’, in Edmund Burke III, ed. Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris 1993) 271-289 (284,285).

There have been cases of western women, who married Muslim and went with them to live in their country. They then found themselves subject to the same traditional restrictions as virtually prisoners in their own homes. The three British Muslim girls, who ran away from their homes to become Jihadi brides for ISIS clearly enjoyed a great deal of personal freedom in this country. Their parents seem to have allowed them to spent a lot of time away from them, including travelling unaccompanied to London, trusting in their own common sense to ensure their safety.

It was unfortunately misplaced. And it’s also clear that, no matter what the girls thought awaited them when they joined ISIS, they’re going to get a real shock when they find that freedom of movement taken away.