American Renaissance Racists or Diagnosticians? by Fred Reed

Fred Reed

Racism is in bad odor among the virtuous. I wonder why. At least, I wonder why any discussion of race is thought to be racism. The United States faces grave racial problems—more accurately, has them but doesn’t face them. Refusal to acknowledge their existence is not productive: Few problems are solved by forbidding their mention. The question should not be whether views are racist, but whether they are wrong.

The American Renaissance, run by Jared Taylor, is quite racist in the poorly thought out and sniffish sense prevalent today. AmRen (as it is generally known) has recently gotten much bad press because it holds all manner of views whose mention results in pack attack by our arbiters of What Can Be Discussed: For example, that blacks commit violent crime at far higher rates than do whites, that massive immigration from Latin America offers no advantages to the United States but a great many evils, that affirmative action lowers the competence of government, the universities, and schools in general—and so on.

These ideas are no doubt racist, yes. Unpleasant, yes. But—are they wrong?

I would prefer to think so. It gives me no pleasure and little hope to hear that black schools regularly produce functional illiterates, that the schools of Detroit and of the nation’s capital and for that matter of wherever blacks predominate are disasters, that savage beatings of whites by gangs of blacks are common and hidden by the media. That these things happen is of no advantage to me. I would be delighted to see blacks and Hispanics excelling academically. I would like to walk the streets of American cities without carefully noting pigmentation, which we all do and pretend we don’t. While I like Jared personally, I would like to tell him that his racial ideas were all wrong.

But are they?

On AmRen’s web site you find news stories, taken chiefly from the respectable publications, that in aggregate paint a grim picture of things racial in America. Can you show these to be in error, isolated instances, not representative of a larger reality? I hope so. But I can’t. Almost everything I read at AmRen well describes reality as I have seen it. And also as all cops have seen it, though telling what they know is a firing offense.

Source:
American Renaissance Racists or Diagnosticians?
fredoneverything.net