THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

It seems about every week or two Charlotte, North Carolina, is signing a new agreement on how they are going to "desegregate" their schools. This has been going on steadily since they first took care of the whole problem by hurrying to integrate some schools in 1955.

We are constantly asked how the Confederacy would handle "the race question." My response is to ask how the United States handles the race question.

If anybody thinks they know, he has not studied it. I used to think there was such a thing as nonracial public policy, even in a society which contains different races, but I found out different when I got to Capitol Hill. My job there required me to go into desegregation law in extreme detail.

In fact, I wrote some of it.

I was surprised at first at how complicated the whole question was. After all, can't you just ignore race?

Well, not really.

How do you know when a school system is really dedicated to nonracism? Remember that we are after unconscious discrimination, too, so you can't believe a person even when he thinks he is being honest.

There are thousands of school districts in this country, and I can find a good argument in one that another is not doing what it should be doing. There is no objective school to be cited. All cases differ. All school histories differ.

In order to make sure everybody is ignoring race you have to get into his or her mind. Is someone discriminating because of race, or are they discriminating because of what race MEANS?

If you are looking for illegal immigrants on the Mexican border, you will save a lot of money if you ignore blond people with Germanic accents. But the official position of the NAACP and other groups is that you must look just as hard at blond people as at swarthy people, or you are discriminating.

They are perfectly correct. You ARE discriminating.

When a young black man is shadowed by police in a rich white neighborhood, he gets mad at the police, at the establishment, and at absolutely everybody but the people who are responsible for the fact that he is being tailed.

He is being tailed because of all the young black people who commit crimes. The police are reflecting reality. They are not discriminating because of race per se. They are discriminating on the basis of what race obviously MEANS.

But they ARE discriminating.

The police who have so much trouble with blacks are not going to like blacks in general. They are going to have had so many bad experiences with blacks who fool them by acting innocent that they will find it hard to believe that a really innocent black man is really innocent.

Are we discriminating yet?

What about the real problem that a lot of blacks won't try to get jobs with some employers because they assume prejudice? When a black person comes into a job interview, exactly what is a nondiscriminatory attitude?

So you use affirmative action. Affirmative action says, in plain English: you can discriminate in favor of black people, but not against whites.

It is impossible to discriminate FOR someone without discriminating AGAINST someone. But this self-contradictory policy is written into the law, into the United States' "solution to the racial problem."

You think all this is complicated? Wait until you get into trying to figure out whether SCHOOLS are truly desegregated or not!

It is complicated for a very good reason. Race is real, and everybody thinks in terms of race. Nobody thinks more about race and in more purely racial terms than the professional antiracist. Black leaders think of little else BUT race.

The so-called American Solution of ignoring race is completely oxymoronic. You cannot concentrate on eliminating racism without thinking in terms of race. Like all professional antiracists, you soon find it impossible to believe that anyone else does not have a racial motive, too.

Take someone who dedicates himself to nondiscrimination.

The first thing he will do in any group is to count the black and white faces. He is trying to enforce something he cannot do himself.

The so-called American policy on race consists of chasing our tails.

So the North Carolina papers that Charlotte has just signed off on are another desegregation plan that will take care of the problem of white flight.

Again.

And nobody says this is ridiculous.

The nice thing about taking the liberal position is that when it turns out you were being silly, which is always the case, nobody is going to bring it up.

I remember reading the Charlotte Observer in the 1950s, and seeing them announce, again and again, that they had accepted some integration in their schools so their problems were over. They specifically made fun of our South Carolina contention that the integrationists would never, in all history, be satisfied.

They made fun of South Carolina for not following their lead into the final solution to the integration problem. Actually, the only reason they were not having more problems was because of South Carolina and Mississippi and other holdouts.

In 1963, the 101st Airborne Division introduced Social Progress to the University of Mississippi campus.

So, in 1964, with the Deep South finally crushed, racial busing started all over America. Charlotte was all for it.

That was thirty-five years ago. We now have another major program for chasing down whitey in North Carolina.

To me, this program and the Berlin Wall represent the same old leftist phenomenon. Everything the leftist "intellectuals" come up with is a total, absurd failure in the real world, but no one will say that. So they build walls in Marxist countries to force people to keep trying their nonsense, and they keep setting up programs to chase down whitey here.

And the respectable conservative say these are highly intellectual policy failures, not screaming nonsense that should be laughed out of existence.

In the meantime, liberals and the Jack Kemps and George Bush, Juniors, on the respectable right support hiring policies that discriminate against whites.

But these will end as soon as the integrationists are satisfied.

And it goes on, and on and on and on...

Let's secede.