The Multi-Cultural Scam and the Victimology Racket

by Samuel Hux (July 2016)

Consider the facts surrounding the following “poem” as a kind of evocative metaphor.

In Memory of Radio

 

Who has stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?

The rest of you probably had on WCBS and Kate Smith,

Or something equally unattractive.)

 

What can I say?

It is better to have loved and lost

Than to put linoleum in your living rooms?

 

Am I a sage or something?

Mandrake’s hypnotic gesture of the week?

(Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts.  .  .

I cannot even order you to gaschamber satori like Hitler or Goody Knight

Turn it backwards / see, what I mean?

Who understands it?

I certainly wouldn’t like to go out on that kind of limb.

 

 

What was it he used to say (after the transformation, when he was safe

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?  The Shadow knows.”

 

O, yes he does

O, yes he does.

An evil word it is,

This Love.

 

Does the reader like it? I hope not, I hope he or she is not that insensitive. Perhaps it is amusing (although it never cracked my smiler)—but as a “poem” it is a lousy piece of work. I think one should resist the temptation to give benefit of doubt and remember instead what it was that as a child one loved about nursery rhymes and simple poems (assuming one did). Only in the last stanza does it even approach poetry: I exclude line 6 which of course is Tennyson, and line 22 which The Shadow knows because he said it. Nonetheless, “In Memory of Radio” is canonized by inclusion in The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Norton has a lot of sins to pay for, it seems to me—including its exclusion of the author of the following poem.

 

Randall, My Son

 

Randall, my son, before you came just now

I saw the lean vine fingering at the latch,

And through the rain I heard the poplar bough

Thresh at the blinds it never used to touch,

And I was old and troubled overmuch,

And called in the deep night, but there was none

To comfort me or answer, Randall, my son.

 

But mount the stair and lay you down till morn.

The bed is made—the lamp is burning low.

Within the changeless room where you were born

I wait the changing day when you must go.

I am unreconciled to what I know,

And I am old with questions never done

That will not let me slumber, Randall, my son.

 

Randall, my son, I cannot hear the cries

That lure beyond familiar fields, or see

The glitter of the world that draws your eyes.

Cold is the mistress that beckons you from me.

I wish her sleek hunting might never come to be—

For in our woods where deer and fox still run

An old horn blows at daybreak, Randall, my son.

 

And tell me then, will you some day bequeath

To your own son not born or yet begotten,

The lustre of a sword that sticks in sheath,

A house that crumbles and a fence that’s rotten?

Hear, what I hear, in a far chase new begun

An old horn’s husky music, Randall, my son.

 

Need the reader extend benefit of doubt here? (That’s a rhetorical question.) Is it a great poem? Probably not—but no doubt it is a poem, not only because of the careful form but because it reminds us of deep familiar truths as it both questions and celebrates them, and because it is evident that the poet respects the art he practices and its traditions, whether the reader recalls the border ballad “Lord Randal”—a very distant relation—or not. Or applying the same test: does this or does this not remind one of the music that hooked one as a youth on poetry in the first place (assuming one was hooked).

“In Memory of Radio” was written by Leroi Jones before he became Amiri Baraka. Never much of a poet, the kind who thinks that writing poetry is pouring out your mouth whatever pops into your mind, Jones-Baraka is what Al Sharpton would have been had he tried the poet’s trade instead of the reverend-hustler’s. He is also an anti-Semite who asserted in a “poem” that the Jews of course knew about 9/11 beforehand. None of this seems to have affected his position in literary history.

In short, it would never occur, now, to anyone possessing “correct” opinions that Jones-Baraka’s mental vileness should be held against him, except modestly as a kind of unpleasant-crankiness-but-who-are-we-to-say?—but not to the point of a career- or reputation-altering demotion—for after all (the following we may recognize but do not actually announce) the whiners have won a double standard.

 

********************

 

For the longest time in American history racism and race-obsession were kept alive by white people. That is no longer the case. When even the South is no longer a white-supremacist bastion it is pointless to intone “We are, after all, a racist society.” Race-obsession and racism are now kept alive primarily by black people. No, of course not by all black people, but by the black intellectuals and the Sharptons. And the obsession is kept robust by my place of employment, I am sorry to say, the university (encouraged by governmental public policy). Why, for instance, should my college, like most I suppose, bend itself out of shape trying to get more black kids into the hard sciences? Would it go into conniptions over how many white kids are majoring in whichever or whatnot? This is one more instance of liberalism’s inability to differentiate between social justice and social engineering and its assumption that the latter is the former. Those who want to go into the sciences will go—unless, that is, the very conniptionistic efforts to get them there signal to them that the sciences are too demanding for the likes of them.   

And why do I need to know the relative IQs of racial and ethnic groups? Oh of course social scientists are curious, but why should public agencies act upon the findings of the professionally curious? As in the despicable practice of race-norming, for instance. So Jews, say, score on average higher than African Americans on intelligence tests. So what? How is that useful information for a teacher to have? Am I going to race-norm the black students up and/or the Jewish students down? I’m going to do neither. I am going to consider the individual alone and solely.

I would be delighted were it governmental practice from local to federal to make no statistical recognition of racial identification. If the obsession will not die easily, at least do nothing to keep it breathing. Laissez faire. None of this means I long for a society where no one knows what he is and where he came from: a homogenized mass. Let me make that very clear. And, a caveat:  let no one think that what follows is a brief for multi-culturalism. That misnamed phenomenon, meant to sound oh so open-armed and inclusionary, is radically exclusionary instead, the privileging of practically any ethno-cultural identity so long as it’s not the
“Western” one that includes me . . . and my Jewish better half.

Race-obsession is not racial pride. If one is proud of what one is one does not have be so touchy and defensive near the point of paranoia. “What do you mean by that? How dare you call me niggardly!” I know people who think the aide in D.C. was justly punished for using that word back in 1999, because after all it is only natural that a black person hearing the word would think it was the N-word. (That this is tantamount to impugning blacks as ignorant of diction seems not to have occurred to these people.) This is like advising someone not to use the expression “juiced up” in front of Jews. If one is proud of what one is one simply enjoys it. Private enjoyment of one’s roots is not inconsistent with being a part of a larger multi-ethnic entity. That is, private enjoyment is absolutely unrelated to the multi-cultural ideology, which is the insistence that Americans not be a people.

Samuel Hux is Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at York College of the City University of New York. He has published in Dissent, The New Republic, Saturday Review, Moment, Antioch Review, Commonweal, New Oxford Review, Midstream, Commentary, Modern Age, Worldview, The New Criterion and many others.

 

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