Joe Sobran

Presumably only slave traders and slave owners were really “€œmonstrous,”€ but modern whites were being let off the hook, or so it seemed to Joe in 1977. But he also observes in the same piece that certain New York Times critics were attributing a uniquely evil form of bigotry to all whites:

To suggest that white men are unique in their residue of tribalism is to get everything backward. We are really distinguished by the extent to which we cherish the human capacity for transcendence.

His indulgent attitude changed by the time he wrote about a racial incident that occurred in Howard Beach, a white enclave in Queens, New York on December 20, 1986. Some drunken white teens assaulted three black youths who had entered the area, and one of the threatened blacks ran into traffic and was killed. The New York Times and the rest of the liberal media went ballistic and spoke of a wave of white violence against blacks that was sweeping the country. Joe noticed that those who viewed the Howard Beach event as an relatively isolated incident were being treated in the media as “€œbigots.”€ 

In this commentary Joe provides some of his later, best known observations:

Race may be noticed, but only for progressive purposes. You can even make invidious racial generalizations, as long as they”€™re about whites.

Moreover, although most people make sense of the world by operating through stereotypes, only sociologists and other authorized progressives are now allowed to speak about

…distinctive forms of group behavior….A “€˜bigot”€™ can be defined as a guy who gets caught practicing sociology without a license…the ideology of the taboo-monger posits bigotry everywhere…just beneath the surface…in all the lacunae of idiomatic speech, more or less the way the old physics posited the ether filling all the unexplored spaces in the universe. They think it must be there, so for them it’s always plausible to impute it. “€œCivil rights”€ is now based on the presumption of guilt”€”against whites. If you”€™re not in lockstep with Progressive Attitudes, you”€™re a bigot until proven otherwise.

Although modern readers may take these conclusions for granted, at the time they were still terra incognita in Joe’s mind. He was simply becoming impatient with the media’s prevalent anti-white, anti-Christian sentiment, and he had begun to complain about the outrageous double standard being applied to different groups. This complaint first comes to the fore in the matter of race relations, but soon Joe would wander off the reservation by bringing up the Jewish liberal and Zionist predominance in the media.

The rest, to make use of a cliché, would be history.