Redneck Nation (10 page)

On this particular day, the ban on interracial dating was the topic du jour. I wasn’t particularly interested in the theology,
something to do with the Tower of Babel or the Mark of Cain or the Nut of Job, I forget. Shem, Ham, and Japheth, one of them
ignored God’s immutable commandments
regarding sunscreen or some such and received the dark-skinned mark of Satan, or something to that effect.

What I was interested in was the mechanics of the race-based dating policy. Sure, making a rule that white girls and black
guys can’t go to the multiplex together is dumb in principle. But try imagining how truly unpleasant it must be for a civilized
human being to put it into practice.

First, the university needs some formal, institutionalized method to determine the race of each Bob Jones student. As the
Michael Jackson example shows, you can’t always tell a person’s ethnicity (or gender, for that matter) from a mere casual
glance. So somewhere on staff, Bob Jones has to employ ethno-stenographers, carefully tracking the race and ethnicity via
some Bible-based formula determining official blackness and whiteness and Hispanicness, etc., along with some method of tracking
who was who. Or what. Or whatever. Frankly, just thinking about it gives me a headache.

Then the folks from BJU have to commit themselves to the idea that a student’s ethnicity mattered, that two of God’s creatures—one
black, one white—identical in every way save skin color, should be treated differently and be taught to treat each other differently
as well. This requires true, heartfelt commitment from the Jonesians: It’s easy enough to engage in such sloppy thinking in
conversation, but to behave in such an embarrassingly indefensible way in public takes raw courage. Or stupidity. Among fundamentalists,
the two are often indistinguishable.

And finally Bob Jones and Co. must craft an explanation as to how these irrational policies are in line with the dictates
of Holy Writ and also in the best interest of all
concerned. Setting aside the bumpkin Bible beating, BJU’s defense was one of public service: The customers are always right
and mostly white.

They argued that the ban on interracial dating was in place at the request of parents who sent their children to the bosom
of Bob Jones to suckle on the sweet milk of segregation. Bob Jones’s policies were well known; indeed they were trumpeted
across the land. If Mom and Dad believed race was all-important, if they had (just for the sake of argument, mind you) an
inappropriate concern with ethnicity and tribal purity, well, was it BJU’s duty to change their minds?

All of which resulted in this: As a matter of policy, an accredited American university had to pay faculty and staff to break
dates between teenagers because they were the wrong color. It’s humiliating. It’s disgraceful.

Oh, and by the way: It’s the official racial policy of the United States of America.

Everything America believes about race, dear Yankee, can be found in the practices and policies of Bob Jones and the old,
segregated South. Only now, those same policies and values are woven through the politics and principles of the two major
political parties, our federal, state, and local governments, our private businesses, our colleges and universities, thousands
of race-based clubs and organizations, and even TV game shows. In fact, one of the few places you will no longer find this
overt racial obsession is at BJU.

After the media scorching it endured in the 2000 presidential primary, Bob Jones University unceremoniously dumped its interracial
dating ban like a fat prom date. They claimed that the public pressure had nothing to do
with it. Then again, they also claim that their frequent references to the Roman Catholic Church as the Whore of Babylon are
meant in a nice way.

Don’t be misled into thinking this is a defense of Bob Jones. If anyone is defending the BJU ethos, it’s probably
you
. You, Kweisi Mfume, Hillary Rodham, Al Gore—the vast majority of my fellow Americans are allied with Bob Jones on behalf
of a worldview I totally and utterly reject—namely, the idea that race is determinant. That race matters. That when you know
my skin color or national origin, you know something significant about me. It is the one redneck notion that has truly taken
hold of the American psyche.

As long as the typical American, North and South, buys into this idea, we’re all on the Bob Jones team, sorting the black
marbles from the white ones. The only difference between you and the devoted followers of Herr Jones is the color of the marbles
you pick first.

Have you already forgotten your census form, your
U.S. government
census form? The one that dedicated three entire pages to questions about your racial and ethnic identity? If any document
devised by man could solve Bob Jones’s Mating Mystery of the Multihued Michael Jackson, this was the officially sanctioned
government document to do it. Start with the six—count ’em, six—categories for race: White, Black or African American, American
Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and Some Other Race. Then you were given eighteen
more “response categories” like Japanese, Samoan, Asian Indian, and Guamanian or Chamoro. Had enough? Ah, but there’s more.
Your U.S. government then asked if you are “Hispanic or Latino” or
not—God forbid we overlook the White/Hispanic/Guamanian, how would we live with ourselves?

When all the possible categories and subcategories were analyzed, we Americans divided ourselves and each other into 126 separate
ethnic or racial clans. In short, it was the kind of government document that only the Confederacy could love, sent to you
by your friendly federal government.

How can any honest citizen deny that the race-conscious ideology of the South has become our national policy? When a society
begins sorting the Chamoros from the Samoans, you’ve gone beyond casual interest. You’re like the southern sheriff from Act
I of
Show Boat
coming aboard to look for quadroons and octoroons.

So why is the government of the United States—the same U.S. that defeated slavery and promoted civil rights—using Bob Jones
University admissions forms as federal questionnaires? The same reason Bob Jones and the Old South did: to treat people differently
based on their race.

Oh, sure, the ethno-proctologists who designed the census will tell you it’s for research purposes only. They just want to
watch trends in health, life span, education, etc. You know, just research.

Then they promptly used the information to pick my next congressman. Yours, too.

The government uses this census data to decide where to spend money on roads and bridges, based in part on the racial makeup
of the community. They use it to decide who gets a new park or a new school. They use it to figure out what the skin color
or ethnicity should be of the new employee at the local work site.

When a black man showed up to meet a white girl for a date at BJU, the school determined that he was the “wrong color” and
sent the assistant dean for idiotic policies to shoo him away.

When a black child shows up at a magnet elementary school that has all the opportunity his family wants for him, but the school
is already “too black,” the public school administration shoos him away.

When a white family from the suburbs starts looking at fixer-uppers in a downtown neighborhood, the city’s “anti-gentrification”
representatives shoo them away.

When an Asian student shows up at a state college looking for admission, or for financial aid, the state education system
takes a look at her features and shoos her away.

These are just a few of the thousands of examples of formal public policies treating people differently because of their race.
And every one of these policies is defended more proudly by mainstream Northerners than Bob Jones ever was by the South.

This isn’t just my opinion, by the way. When the 2000 census forms were being planned, mixed-race couples lobbied to have
a Mixed Race box on the form so children wouldn’t have to choose between the racial identity of their mothers and fathers.
This certainly sounds as reasonable as the rest of the census, so who opposed it?

The NAACP, of course. They, along with La Raza and other race-obsessed organizations, fought against an accurate census questionnaire
and urged instead an advantageous one—advantageous to their perceived interests of having as many folks as possible check
their racial boxes. More checks in the Mixed Race box meant fewer checks
in the Black or Hispanic box. These racial interest groups had more political clout, so their less accurate approach prevailed.

If you have any remaining doubt that the purpose of government policy is segregation, I refer to the painfully liberal governor
of the excruciatingly liberal state of Maryland, Parris Glendening. When Maryland finished its post-2000 census redistricting
of legislative seats, several black lawmakers were outraged that there weren’t more black-majority districts to “give black
voters an opportunity to participate in the process,” as one former NAACP leader put it (you know, because in that racist
enclave of Maryland, black candidates aren’t allowed to participate without special permission…).

Then-governor Glendening defended himself from charges of racial insensitivity by bemoaning the problems created by that most
terrible of social trends, integration. The governor wanted the state to create more legislative districts with black, Hispanic,
and other racial majorities, but, as his spokesman told the
Washington Post
, “it’s difficult… where minority populations are not concentrated in any single area.”

See the problem? White folks, black folks, Asian folks, all living among each other, shopping together, going to school together.
This is a problem, a “difficulty” as the governor put it. What this good liberal wants are more black and Hispanic “areas
of concentration.”

The Maryland governor’s idea is not a new one, of course. Across the pre-civil rights South, there were all-white and all-black
communities. “Citizens’ councils” were formed to maintain segregation, and homeowners signed restrictive covenants to keep
black citizens in the appropriate
“areas of concentration.” Perhaps Governor Glendening would like to try that idea?

Another liberal Democrat, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, went even further in creating “areas of concentration” for
members of America’s Japanese minority. A few barracks, some barbed wire, one or two confiscated pieces of property, and…
violà! And think of how easy it would have been for those interned Japanese Americans to elect a congressman of Japanese descent.

That’s a cheap shot, obvious and unnecessary. Then again, so is the racism of the Maryland state government. (I should add
here that the Maryland GOP also supported racially segregated voter districts.) The governor’s gripe about the ill effects
of integration didn’t garner so much as a raised eyebrow from the
Baltimore Sun
or
Washington Post
, by the way, yet another indicator that integration—once the core principle of northern ideology—is all but abandoned.

Let me stop here and disabuse you of the idea that I am preaching the “poor white man” message of reverse discrimination.
There are few things as nauseating as watching some redneck high school dropout standing on his front porch in his wife-beater
T-shirt, holding a beer, rubbing his belly, and complaining that “them niggers took all the good jobs. You can’t get a job
if you’re a white man.”

Right, Virgil. I’m sure the fact that you’re forty-two and still living in your mom’s trailer has nothing to do with flunking
out of the sixth grade, your continued illiteracy, or the half dozen arrests for public drunkenness. No, no, no, I’m with
you, buddy. Why, the earning potential for a lazy, gap-toothed clod who can’t operate a pencil sharpener
without trained supervision must be enormous! It is only through constant thwarting of your superior Anglo-Saxon genetics
by a vast conspiracy of “niggers” (probably with the help of their friends the Jews) that you’ve been prevented from moving
up to
assistant
night manager at the Wal-Mart.

If you’re a liberal racist gerrymandering congressional districts, you want to argue about racial discrimination and its historic
legacy. If you’re a conservative racist, you want to argue about reverse discrimination and the plantation mentality of America’s
black leaders.

Either way, you are a racist. You are clinging to the fundamentally southern worldview that race is determinant, relevant,
an inescapable part of the human experience. You divide the world by race, as when you draw voting lines or school districts.
You treat people differently by race, through so-called hate-crime laws or racial-profiling police tactics. You view your
neighbors, coworkers, and fellow citizens, not as individuals, but as representative members of a larger, ethnic gang.

“All black people should get a reparations check for slavery, regardless of their circumstances, and all white people should
pick up the tab.” Or: “All black people are bad students in school, disruptive and incompetent; and good white children shouldn’t
have to go to class with them.” There is no different in the philosophy behind either of these statements. They are the ravings
of a race-obsessed redneck, and I reject them both.

I reject the premise of reverse discrimination (“The only people you can be prejudiced against are white Christian males!”)
for the same reason I reject the premise that underlies affirmative action (“Whitey is keeping me
down!”). They both start from the same premise as Bob Jones: Race matters.

Which is what makes the constant battering we Southerners take from Northerners on the issue of race so unbearably annoying.
I have actually had Northerners who support government-funded, racially segregated, blacks-only public schools accuse me of
racism for supporting school choice!

The tendency among the typical (racist) American is to dismiss my rejection of race as Pollyannaish. “Of course, race matters,
Michael,” I have been told hundreds of times. “You can pretend it doesn’t, but it does. Are you saying America isn’t racist?”