Moreover, regardless of how professional tough-lover Juan Williams, a Caribbean American like Orlando Patterson, rates Hispanic behavior above that of blacks, there is a larger drug problem among Hispanics both in terms of addiction and distribution, and Blow and Gates, Jr. might want to know that there are more cases of unmarried motherhood among Hispanics, per thousand, than among blacks, yet President Obama, who uses personal responsibility as code words, told the council of La Raza that he shared the values of the Hispanics. This was a week after the president appeared before a black audience and read the required tough-love speech to black fathers for which he was congratulated by white divorced fathers like Joe Scarborough.
If he’d done the same before a Hispanic audience he would have lost the Hispanic vote. Hispanics are the country’s largest minority, yet the social pathologies of this group and of other ethnic groups are ignored by the media and the black tough-love entrepreneurs like Gates, Jr., Williams, Patterson, Michelle Bernard, CNN’s Tara Wall, who works for Rev. Moon’s far right The Washington Times, and President Obama, yet these people are promoted as those who place race in the background. As an example of The Washington Times’ attitude toward Obama, on November 17, 2009, an opinion written by Wesley Pruden, editor emeritus, drew shock for its coarseness and hostility. Not only do Pruden and others desire to control the reproductive rights of American women, but whom they should date. “It’s no fault of the president that he has no natural instinct or blood impulse for what the America of ‘the 57 states’ is about. He was sired by a Kenyan father, born to a mother attracted to men of the Third World and reared by grandparents in Hawaii, a paradise far from the American mainstream.” (Don’t expect Tara Wall, Brian DeBose, Walter Williams, Tom Sowell and other Washington Times black columnists and reporters to object to such distasteful comments.)
In the language of recovery, don’t the objects of tough love get some positive behavior points or some positive reinforcement when they do something right? And if these commentators are truly beyond race why not extend their tough love to other ethnic communities. I once told Gates that some of the white men who sponsor him for his tough-love views have a worse record of treating women of their ethnic group than the brothers. He wasn’t aware. Marty Peretz, then editor of The New Republic, where a surrogate was hired to call me a misogynist, said that black women were “culturally deficient.” When FAIR asked Tabloid Tina Brown to condemn him the way that one of her surrogates did a hit job on Minister Louis Farrakhan, she refused. You won’t find a discussion of tensions between Jewish women and Jewish men in The New Republic, which are so strained that Katha Politt of The Nation accused Jewish men of having “anti-Semitic attitudes” toward Jewish women. Maybe Charles Blow should come up with a graph about this situation. David Simon, a television series. Steven Spielberg, a movie.
Though Gates, Jr., who views himself as the leader of the Black Intelligentsia (essentially people clustered around a few colleges and universities located in the Northeast), is pessimistic about Obama’s election leading to a reduction of drug addiction among blacks, out here in California white suburban women do more dope than blacks and Latinos. Why no tough love for these women? The Gates piece, published at TheRoot, was congratulated by white subscribers for whom he had given their required superiority injection by commenting on the moral degeneracy of blacks, which, according to him, wouldn’t improve even if you had a Clintonite black president in the White House. These underclass blacks are obviously incorrigible and will never drink white wine at the Harvard Club.
Professional critics of African Americans also viewed it ironic that blacks would vote for a black president yet vote for Proposition 8, the California initiative that opposed gay marriage. Latinos (sixty-one percent) and Asian Americans also voted for the proposition and the money that got the measure over came from the coffers of the Mormon Church. As a sign of how members of other ethnic groups are cashing in on the market of boosting white esteem by dissing blacks, the writer hired by the San Francisco Chronicle to comment on the black vote for Proposition 8 was a Latino. Predictably, The New York Times, that casts blacks as the key players in social pathologies including crime, anti-Semitism, homophobia, etc., ran an article blaming the success of Proposition 8, the referendum on gay marriage, on blacks, though most of the hate crimes against gays are perpetrated by white men — the group the media has seen as its target audience since the 1800s — two white journalists were hired to explain black attitudes toward gays to the Times readers. One was Benjamin Schwarz, who once wrote that black men in the South who were lynched probably deserved it, and Caitlin Flanagan. (Schwarz now writes for The Atlantic Monthly, which was among the first magazines to excerpt Scots Irish writer Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which carries stereotypes aimed at his ethnic group over to blacks. The joke is that because of incest, Charles Murray’s Scots Irish are feeble minded. This is why Vice President Cheney got into trouble for his remark, “I have Cheneys on each side of the family and I’m not even from West Virginia.” He was talking about the incest stereotype applied to Charles Murray’s people.) I guess we can’t get Ms. Flanagan to write about how Irish Catholics voted. On the Sunday that their Times piece appeared, December 7, 2008, the BBC reported that the Vatican had opposed a measure that France and The Netherlands sponsored, a declaration that would de-criminalize homosexual relationships. Maybe Ms. Flanagan was too busy blaming homophobia on blacks and explaining black homophobia to the readers of the Times to notice this BBC report. The response of segments of the Catholic Church to Obama’s election was bizarre. One headline read: “Vatican Cardinal calls Obama Apocalyptic.” In the article, His Eminence James Francis Cardinal Stafford criticized President-elect Barack Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic.”
“For the next few years,” Stafford went on to say, “Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden,” comparing America’s future with Obama as president to “Jesus’ agony in the garden.” “On November 4, 2008, America suffered a cultural earthquake,” said Cardinal Stafford, adding that Catholics must deal with the “hot, angry tears of betrayal” by beginning a new sentiment where one is “with Jesus, sick because of love.”