Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes Read Free Page B

are what matters and race is not a factor at all.
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    * Jim Sleeper, Liberal Racism (New York: Penguin, 1997); see also Shelby Steele, A Dream Deferred (New York: HarperCollins, 1998).
    † See Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, "Abolish the White Race By Any Means Necessary," in Race Traitor (New York: Routledge, 1996), 90-114.
    ‡ Ibid., 80.
    ** The Chronicle of Higher Education , April 5, 1999, reported that enrollment of blacks on all the University of California campuses was only twenty-seven fewer students than in 1997.

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GET WHITEY

 
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Racial Paranoia
     
    W HEN BILL AND CAMILLE COSBY'S SON, Ennis, was brutally murdered in 1997 during a robbery in Beverly Hills, the entire nation grieved with them. But a year later Camille Cosby unburdened herself in print with a diatribe against white Americans in a USA Today column entitled "America Taught My Son's Killer To Hate Blacks." The feelings expressed in this column could not be regarded simply as grief over her terrible loss. For such pain a mother could be forgiven almost any emotional excess. Written a year after the fact, however, the sentiments expressed in her USA Today column reflected long-held, carefully scrutinized, patiently-edited sentiments of hostility and rage against her native country and its white citizenry that could not be so easily excused. It was a form of race hatred that has become all too common among educated and successful African Americans.
    Unlike the mothers of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, who were destined to be disappointed by racially motivated "jury nullification," Camille Cosby saw swift justice rendered by the American system to the murderer of her son. The mainly white jury was not swayed to acquit the killer of Ennis Cosby be17 cause of his skin color, nor was there a racial constituency outside the courtroom hoping that he would "beat the system" and go free. Instead, the white prosecutor, judge and jurors worked to bring in a verdict of guilty with all deliberate speed. This was better justice than most Americans receive, white or black. Nonetheless, Camille Cosby was not satisfied; she believed that true justice had not been served. In her eyes, the killer himself was a victim-of America itself.
    By then, most of the sailent facts in the case had come to light. It was questionable that race had played any role at all in the killing of Ennis Cosby. The gunman, a Ukranian immigrant, was high on drugs at the time of the shooting and told police shortly after his capture that he regretted what he had done and that he had pulled the trigger because the young man "took too long" to remove his wallet. But none of these facts impressed Camille Cosby: "Presumably [the killer] did not learn to hate black people in his native country, the Ukraine, where the black population was near zero," she wrote. "Nor was he likely to see America's intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs about blacks, which were not shown in the Soviet Union before the killer and his family moved to America in the late 1980s." In Cosby's fevered view, America's "intolerable, stereotypical movies and television programs" were responsible for the death of her son.
    It is a logic that is as familiar as it is paranoid. The charge that white Hollywood portrays blacks in a stereotypically negative fashion is a standard protest heard from black spokesmen ranging from Louis Farrakhan to Jesse Jackson. But it has little basis in fact. Going back to the 1940s, white Hollywood has produced and directed an entire library of features about black Americans and their struggle for equality ( Home of the Brave, Pinky, Sergeant Rutledge, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Defiant Ones ), not to mention many of the principal epics of black liberation and pride, Roots and Makolm X (both produced by whites) and Amistad (written and directed by whites) to name three, and television sitcoms and series focusing on admirable black families ( Julia, The Jefersons, Good