Luther King, we have not had leaders
who talk about integration as an inherent value.”
And so today, you have segregated dorm rooms at prominent Ivy League universities like Cornell and Dartmouth, not because
white students refuse to shower naked with persons of color, but because segregated dorms are demanded by black and Hispanic
students. After fifty years of struggle for integration, this renewed segregation is viewed as a positive.
What do the minority students say when you point out they’ve created the same kind of college campus George Wallace faced
off against federal agents to create? “They call it separatism when a bunch of minority students decide to live together,”
one black senior at the University of Massachusetts told a reporter. “But I have lots of white friends who come here and hang
out with us.”
Hey, you’ve got a lot of white friends! That’s great. And let me guess: You’d let your sister date a white guy, too. That
Rocky Graziano—what a fighter!
Erran Matthews from a segregated dorm at Cornell didn’t stoop to the “I have a [fill in ethnic blank] friend” argument, but
he echoed another old southern platitude when he said segregation was about wanting “a place to feel at home. Everybody wants
to go ‘home’ sometimes.”
If you’re a believer in what would have once been considered northern-style integration, it gets worse: The Reverend Raymond
Hammond, president of the Ten-Point Coalition, an umbrella organization of Boston ministers, says that while he and his organization
don’t want a “
legally
mandated separate-but-equal society” (emphasis added), he believes “a community works best economically, educationally, and
socially if it stays together.”
Ah, yes: another all-black, racially segregated community for integration.
It should be obvious to all concerned that this is warmed-over Jim Crow served from the other side of the plate. Can anyone
argue that the rejection of integration and acceptance of segregation (the “good” kind) is a triumph of 1960s northern, liberal
values? No, this is Confederate theology swallowed whole and spit up again, twice as ugly.
I say it’s uglier because, quite frankly, we ought to know better. My grandmother, who was born in 1912 and lived her whole
life sharecropping in rural South Carolina, used the word “nigger” nearly every day, sometimes with malice and sometimes without.
But she didn’t grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn’t benefit from forty years of
intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession.
You and I have. We’ve had Selma and Greensboro and the Boston bus riots and the Skokie Nazis and a thousandreal-life parables to instruct us. If there was one idea of the solid South upon which a family-sized can of whoop-ass had
been dumped, if there was one form of southern stupidity that should have been reduced to rubble in the struggle, it was the
southern approach to race. And yet it is the one idea that is most clearly triumphant across the land.
The triumph of racism is the supreme accomplishment of the Redneck Nation.
The defense of our new love of racism is inevitably some version of “fighting fire with fire.” The timid counterargument from
supporters of segregation and racial quotas is that we need Chocolate City or Hispanic Haven or Indigenous People’s Island
because our entire society is an oppressive, white, European pressure cooker. Black, brown, and citizens of various hues must
escape this dominant culture to protect themselves from the debilitating forces always present.
It cannot be said too often that, yes, racism is alive in America. And there is another inescapable truth, which is that it
is harder in America today to be black than it is to be white. But adopting the war aims of your enemy means that the bad
guys are always going to win, regardless of the outcome. This is
who talk about integration as an inherent value.”
And so today, you have segregated dorm rooms at prominent Ivy League universities like Cornell and Dartmouth, not because
white students refuse to shower naked with persons of color, but because segregated dorms are demanded by black and Hispanic
students. After fifty years of struggle for integration, this renewed segregation is viewed as a positive.
What do the minority students say when you point out they’ve created the same kind of college campus George Wallace faced
off against federal agents to create? “They call it separatism when a bunch of minority students decide to live together,”
one black senior at the University of Massachusetts told a reporter. “But I have lots of white friends who come here and hang
out with us.”
Hey, you’ve got a lot of white friends! That’s great. And let me guess: You’d let your sister date a white guy, too. That
Rocky Graziano—what a fighter!
Erran Matthews from a segregated dorm at Cornell didn’t stoop to the “I have a [fill in ethnic blank] friend” argument, but
he echoed another old southern platitude when he said segregation was about wanting “a place to feel at home. Everybody wants
to go ‘home’ sometimes.”
If you’re a believer in what would have once been considered northern-style integration, it gets worse: The Reverend Raymond
Hammond, president of the Ten-Point Coalition, an umbrella organization of Boston ministers, says that while he and his organization
don’t want a “
legally
mandated separate-but-equal society” (emphasis added), he believes “a community works best economically, educationally, and
socially if it stays together.”
Ah, yes: another all-black, racially segregated community for integration.
It should be obvious to all concerned that this is warmed-over Jim Crow served from the other side of the plate. Can anyone
argue that the rejection of integration and acceptance of segregation (the “good” kind) is a triumph of 1960s northern, liberal
values? No, this is Confederate theology swallowed whole and spit up again, twice as ugly.
I say it’s uglier because, quite frankly, we ought to know better. My grandmother, who was born in 1912 and lived her whole
life sharecropping in rural South Carolina, used the word “nigger” nearly every day, sometimes with malice and sometimes without.
But she didn’t grow up with the memory of a martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., and she couldn’t benefit from forty years of
intense public struggle over the ridiculousness of racial obsession.
You and I have. We’ve had Selma and Greensboro and the Boston bus riots and the Skokie Nazis and a thousandreal-life parables to instruct us. If there was one idea of the solid South upon which a family-sized can of whoop-ass had
been dumped, if there was one form of southern stupidity that should have been reduced to rubble in the struggle, it was the
southern approach to race. And yet it is the one idea that is most clearly triumphant across the land.
The triumph of racism is the supreme accomplishment of the Redneck Nation.
The defense of our new love of racism is inevitably some version of “fighting fire with fire.” The timid counterargument from
supporters of segregation and racial quotas is that we need Chocolate City or Hispanic Haven or Indigenous People’s Island
because our entire society is an oppressive, white, European pressure cooker. Black, brown, and citizens of various hues must
escape this dominant culture to protect themselves from the debilitating forces always present.
It cannot be said too often that, yes, racism is alive in America. And there is another inescapable truth, which is that it
is harder in America today to be black than it is to be white. But adopting the war aims of your enemy means that the bad
guys are always going to win, regardless of the outcome. This is
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