REJECTING BLACK RACISM AND WHITE GUILT

Most of such racists as remain in America are black. 

This is because black racism is tolerated, even — in certain quarters — encouraged, while white racists receive the scorn and contempt they deserve.  As Jack Kemp said in another connection, "you get more of what you subsidize, less of what you tax."

Black racism will fester and grow as long as racists like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright are treated more gently than racists like David Duke.

Mr. Duke, a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, has been excoriated by every major political figure, liberal and conservative. But Jeremiah Wright has many defenders — both among white liberals and his fellow black clergy — for his views, which he has expressed in more inflammatory language than Mr. Duke employs.

Why the double standard?  The reason, liberals say, is the guilt white Americans are supposed to feel for slavery and segregation.

Blacks are angry, we are told, because their ancestors were brought to this country in chains.  But the misfortune of their ancestors has in most instances been a blessing for their descendants, who enjoy in America today a far freer and much more prosperous life than that of the typical African.

(The Rev. Wright, for instance, who drives a Porsche, is about to move into a $1.6 million mansion in a gated community that is 98 percent white.  There is, apparently, a good deal of money to be made preaching about oppression.)

Blacks feel uniquely aggrieved by slavery.  They shouldn't.  Slavery has existed in every culture since the dawn of time.  The word "slave" comes from "Slav," the peoples most frequently enslaved in Roman times.  Slavs were not black – they were (and are) white. 

What is unique about the English and the Americans is not that they, for a time, practiced slavery, but that they ended the practice, and forced most of the rest of the world to follow suit.

Blacks were first enslaved by other blacks.  The first non-blacks to enslave blacks were Arabs.  The Arab slave trade began some seven centuries before the first European slave traders came to Africa, and continues yet today. 

It's ironic that some black radicals, in a protest against slavery in America, have adopted the religion of their first oppressors:  Islam.

The conditions of servitude here weren't as harsh as in Arabia (though more so than in Latin America).  What made slavery here so galling was the hypocrisy.  The United States of America was the first nation in the history of the world founded on the basis of the rights of man.  To permit some men to own others was a glaring repudiation of the words of the Declaration of Independence.

Patriotic Americans of all colors should feel a sense of shame at that hypocrisy — what Condoleeza Rice has called our "national birth defect" — but not guilt. 

I reject absolutely the concept of historical guilt.  People should be judged on the basis of what they say or do, not on what their grandparents might have said or done.

Rev. Wright and others like him say the current generation of whites should be made to pay for the crimes of some of their ancestors.  But it would be perverse to punish those who have done no wrong to benefit those who have suffered no injury.  No black living today was ever a slave, and no black born after 1964 has suffered from segregation.

The white guilt meme is both racist, and widely at variance from the facts.  The truth is that most white Americans are descended either from people who opposed slavery when it was being practiced, or who came here after slavery was abolished.  Blacks are free today not because of their own efforts, but because of those of Abraham Lincoln and a million white Union soldiers.

Segregation existed for a century after the Civil War.  But segregation was restricted primarily to the old Confederacy.  Most states — and the most populous states — never permitted it.  Dr. Martin Luther King is a national hero for staging the civil rights demonstrations that pricked the consciences of whites. 

But it was chiefly Sens. Hubert Humphrey, Democrat of Minnesota and Everett Dirksen, Republican of Illinois who put an end to segregation. 

The battle against slavery and segregation was not one between blacks and whites, but one between the majority of whites, and a retromingent minority, and more white blood than black was spilled to win that battle.

Dr. Martin Luther King longed for the day when blacks would be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin.  For all but a handful of pariahs like Mr. Duke, that day has long since come. 

Today, it is black bigots like Jeremiah Wright who fuel the fires of racism.  I wonder what Dr. King would have thought of the Rev. Wright,  and of those who make excuses for him?
 

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.