Rebranding Racism for Mass Consumption in Post-Race America

In post-race America, life can get confusing. Fox News anchor Glenn Beck, of all people, calls President Barack Obama a racist. Teabaggers are contemplating whether they should mimmick Black Americans and embrace the term much like Blacks have embraced the N-word. And the below anti-health care ad is running in the largely black Washington D.C. media area. [See the ad here. –AR News editor]

Racism, much like laundry detergents, is ripe for rebranding, repackaging, and re-entry into the mainstream. In fact, it works so well that Jared Taylor, the founder of the white supremacist website American Renaissance, was recently booked to debate immigration at a Midwestern college. The kids in charge of the speakers series invited an immigration lawyer to present the liberal stance and Taylor represent the conservative stance.

“Undoubtedly the greatest threat to whites today comes from immigration. Racial preferences, guilt-mongering, anti-Western education, even anti-white violence are manageable problems compared to a process that is displacing whites and reducing them to a minority,” said Taylor. “With a change in thinking at the right levels, anti-white policies and double standards could be done away with practically overnight, but that would still leave us with nearly 100 million non-whites living in the country.”

The college speaking tour was fairly recent. But it’s not the first time Taylor, one of the most vocal advocates of white supremacy doctrine, has reared his head in the mainstream.

Under the guise of being a race relations expert, he was booked repeatedly on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday by radio host who were unaware what he really was. Early that morning, he started at a Columbus, Ohio radio station. Within two hours, he was at another radio station in Orlando. An hour later, he was Huntingdon, W.VA. Each time, he was introduced as a race relations expert. During each presentation, he never once called King the N-word, instead he repeated the notion that King was a philanderer, a plagiarist and a drinker, that King’s legacy was racial division and resentment. And due to those reasons, he was not worthy of a national holiday.

Taylor, a Yale graduate, fluent in three languages, has no use for white sheets or para-military uniforms. He preaches racism through academia, pseudoscientific theories, genetic imprints and deliberately assassinating the character of any black person that ascends to greatness.

It’s not racism, it’s racialism, get it. He is not anti-Black, Latino, Jew or Gay, but pro-white Christian Americans concerned “their country” is heading in the wrong direction, worried about the rampant importation of poverty and crime via Mexico and South America, bewildered by crime and the apparent lack of morality in urban communities.

These folks have even adopted the grievance dynamic that minorities are more typically blamed for. They, in recruiting, say they are under seige. They are in danger. Their lives, way of living, daughters, and property are all at risk.

It’s very clever marketing and I fear will continue to be effective at needling its way into the dialogue of race, class and gender. His tactics are clearly already being mimmicked in the mainstream media and political discourse.

“Anyone who departs from racial orthodoxy will at some point have to contend with the charge of “racism.” “That’s a racist statement,” your opponent will say, in a tone that suggests he has just dropped a nuclear bomb, and for timid people–about 95 percent of whites–that ends the argument,” Taylor wrote in teaching other racists how to argue eloquently and deflect the racist label. “(It) is actually an advantage for us, because the people who make it have probably never seen it fail. You therefore have an opportunity to shock them by walking away from ground zero without a scratch. If you are in a radio debate, or some other forum in which you need to save time, deflect the “racism” charge in a light-hearted way by saying, “Come on, say something original.” No one ever expects that reply, and during the surprised pause that follows you can make a positive rather than defensive argument.”

It’s always good to know what your enemies are up to.