SPLC Attacks Black Vanderbilt professor for backing film that calls Racism a Myth

[bobbyw24]

Check out the Prof's site at:

http://www.carolmswain.com/



By Janell Ross
THE TENNESSEAN

An organization that tracks hate-group activity in the U.S. is accusing Vanderbilt University professor "Carol Swain, a black scholar known for her conservative stances on race and immigration, of being an apologist for white supremacists.

The incident started last week when the Alabama-based http://www.splcenter.org/">Southern Poverty Law Center posted a blog item critiquing the documentary http://www.aconversationaboutrace.com/">A Conversation About Race, mentioning that positive comments by Swain lent the film an air of legitimacy.

Swain fired back, making her case against the advocacy group in a blog submitted to the news site The Huffington Post and in a string of messages she sent to followers on her Twitter account.

"There aren't enough new hate groups 2 keep the #SPLC busy, so they target individuals & conservative organizations 2 raise money," Swain wrote in a Twitter update Thursday.

Swain, a professor of law and political science, said in an interview with The Tennessean that she feels as if she has "been attacked" by the group.

Mark Potock, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, responded, "If that is what she believes, she is suffering from some sort of low-grade megalomania."

Potock said the goal of the Hatewatch blog posts about the film was to "spare (Swain) the embarrassment of continuing to endorse the work of a man who has referred to black people — including the president — as monkeys."

The film in question, A Conversation About Race, opens with a clip of then-Sen. Barack Obama's http://www.aconversationaboutrace.com/trailer_order.asp campaign speech on race followed by words from the filmmaker, Craig Bodeker.

"I agree with Senator Obama. … I can't think of another issue facing our country that is more timely or more important today than the issue of racism," Bodeker says in the film. "I also can't think of another issue that is more artificial, manufactured and manipulated. … It's used too often as a tool of intimidation like a hammer against Caucasian whites. "

The Hatewatch blog post described the film as a "a hit among white supremacists looking for a smart-sounding defense of their beliefs. Contrary to its title, A Conversation about Race … (is) a slick 58-minute documentary devoted to proving the thesis that racism is a bogus concept invented to oppress whites."


SNIP

For her part, Swain contends that the documentary is a valuable tool that could be used in classrooms to initiate a conversation on race that includes the perspective of what may be a growing number of white people.

"I just think that if we do not discuss these things … you are creating the conditions for ethnic violence and unrest," Swain said.

But Potock said the film's premise, that racism is a myth, is ridiculous in a country that practiced chattel slavery for 200 years and allowed Jim Crow laws to stand for 100 years thereafter. The idea that white people are oppressed by conversations about racism or allegations of racism is insidious, Potock said.

Swain's endorsement of such ideas, he said, is shocking. "What it made clear is that Carol Swain is an apologist for white supremacists," said Potock, adding that her endorsement represents a kind of cover that can funnel extremist ideas into reputable publications and ordinary people's conversations.

SNIP

"The new white nationalism that I fear that I see … is not about groups," Swain said. "It's about white people, individuals, thinking that they are under threat and that they have to ban together to protect themselves. My fear is that unless we create forums for people to safely and openly express themselves, then you are going to drive more young people into these extreme groups."

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091017/NEWS01/910170341

 

[catdd]

Unless the SPLC and ADL can stir up racial tension by creating problems, they will be out of a job.
It's that simple.

 

[bobbyw24]

Prof Swain's Latest Tweet about the SPLC

@cmswain Urging U 2 take a closer look @ the #SPLC. It's difficult 4 individuals 2 protect themselves once targeted: it's a partisan tool.

http://www.twitter.com/cmswain

 

[BlackTerrel]

Potock said the goal of the Hatewatch blog posts about the film was to "spare (Swain) the embarrassment of continuing to endorse the work of a man who has referred to black people — including the president — as monkeys."

I don't know anything about this movie and have never heard of it. But if this is true I don't think this professor should be praising it.

Do you know anything about this movie before posting on this?

 

[RM918]

I don't know anything about this movie and have never heard of it. But if this is true I don't think this professor should be praising it.

Do you know anything about this movie before posting on this?

I've read her explanations of it, and she says it doesn't really seem to be influenced in that way in particular. She also said that calling her an apologist for white supremacists would be akin to calling anyone who likes Polanski movies an apologist for pedophiles. I'd tend to agree with that, this sounds like unhinged guilt-by-association.

 

[BlackTerrel]

I've read her explanations of it, and she says it doesn't really seem to be influenced in that way in particular. She also said that calling her an apologist for white supremacists would be akin to calling anyone who likes Polanski movies an apologist for pedophiles. I'd tend to agree with that, this sounds like unhinged guilt-by-association.

It would be similar if Polanski made a movie about NAMBLA. This guy called black people monkeys and then made a movie about race (if what they say is true - I don't know for sure that it is).

 

[jfriedman]

It would be similar if Polanski made a movie about NAMBLA. This guy called black people monkeys and then made a movie about race (if what they say is true - I don't know for sure that it is).

lol makes sense. Polanski + NAMBLA = Swain + Conservative Values

You don't know a single thing about Carol Swain, so you immediately go on the discredit-bent.

Given she's a poster at Huffington Post, perhaps a bit of researching is necessary---unless we are just going to dump all Black Conservatives into the hating/racist bucket.

Be careful shooting from the hip, friend.

 

[literatim]

The documentary.

A Conversation About Race

 

[Oyate]

Racism is a myth? Wow. What a shame that all those lynch mob victims died of hanging from a myth.

 

[sofia]

Racism is a myth? Wow. What a shame that all those lynch mob victims died of hanging from a myth.

Lynching victims were usually rapists and murderers. I bet your High School teacher never taught you that.

 

[Trigonx]

I just watched this Documentary. His questioning reminds me of Frank Luntz. However, it was very interesting and worth the watch imo.

 

[brandon]

An organization that tracks hate-group activity in the U.S. is accusing Vanderbilt University professor "Carol Swain, a black scholar known for her conservative stances on race and immigration, of being an apologist for white supremacists.

So I guess this is the new politically correct term for "uncle tom".

These anti-racists are the real racists.

Orwell's becoming more prophetic every day

 

[bobbyw24]

I don't know anything about this movie and have never heard of it. But if this is true I don't think this professor should be praising it.

Do you know anything about this movie before posting on this?

No-don't know anything about the movie, but I have read both of Professor Swain's books on White Nationalism and she knows the topic quite well and is very fair.

 

[bobbyw24]

Prof Swain on the SPLC

Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.

In case you missed the story, last November 4th a polling precinct in Philadelphia, PA was patrolled by an organization called the New Black Panther Party, a Marxist group that in 2000, was listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a racial hate group. Video footage shot in 2008, show Black Panther precinct workers intimidating white voters. This was covered by the news organizations, and resulted in charges being filed by the Bush Department of Justice, whose job it is to defend and protect the voting rights of all Americans.

What should have been an open and shut case has become something more troubling, after the Eric Holder-led Justice Department dropped charges against the Black Panthers, who supported President Obama. Currently, this decision to drop the charges, is being challenged by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, (an organization with which I am affiliated).

Now this is the part where things really get interesting.

The SPLC has been mum on the issue, despite the fact that in 2000, it included the New Black Panther Party among its annual list of hate groups. In fact, what is most shocking is that the SPLC has spent far more resources hounding conservative organizations, such as the Center for Immigration Studies, and prominent citizens like CNN's award-winning anchor Lou Dobbs, than it has protecting the civil rights of American voters, which includes white people as well as black. The unrelenting attacks on Mr. Dobbs and others are shameless. The once venerable organization wages war against conservative individuals, principles, and organizations. How unfortunate for America. How unfortunate for the organization's founders.

There is a name for what has happened. It is called "mission creep." Mission creep occurs when an organization strays beyond its original purpose and engages in actions antithetical to its goals. Rather than monitoring hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center has become one.

Follow Carol M. Swain on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CMSwain



Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carol-m-swain/mission-creep-and-the-sou_b_255029.html

 

[bobbyw24]

To; BlackTerrel

Had Prof. Swain said that Racial Discrimination is a myth, I would think she is retarded. No one can deny that it exists. However, she said that Racism is a myth--Racism is the theory that one race in inherently superior to another race and that thought is a retarded myth.

 

[bobbyw24]

Thomas Sowell on Race and Culture

RACE, CULTURE, AND EQUALITY
by Thomas Sowell


During the 15 years that I spent researching and writing my recently completed trilogy on racial and cultural issues,2 I was struck again and again with how common huge disparities in income and wealth have been for centuries, in countries around the world-- and yet how each country regards its own particular disparities as unusual, if not unique. Some of these disparities have been among racial or ethnic groups, some among nations, and some among regions, continents, or whole civilizations.
In the nineteenth century, real per capita income in the Balkans was about one-third that in Britain. That dwarfs intergroup disparities that many in the United States today regard as not merely strange but sinister. Singapore has a median per capita income that is literally hundreds of times greater than that in Burma.
During the rioting in Indonesia last year, much of it directed against the ethnic Chinese in that country, some commentators found it strange that the Chinese minority, which is just 5 percent of the Indonesian population, owned an estimated four-fifths of the capital in the country. But it is not strange. Such disparities have long been common in other countries in Southeast Asia, where Chinese immigrants typically entered poor and then prospered, creating whole industries in the process. People from India did the same in much of East Africa and in Fiji.
Occupations have been similarly unequal.
In the early 1920s, Jews were just 6 percent of the population of Hungary and 11 percent of the population of Poland, but they were more than half of all the physicians in both countries, as well as being vastly over-represented in commerce and other fields.3 In the early twentieth century, all of the firms in all of the industries producing the following products in Brazil's state of Rio Grande do Sul were owned by people of German ancestry: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap, glass, watches, beer, confections and carriages.4
In the middle of the nineteenth century, just three countries produced most of the manufactured goods in the world-- Britain, Germany, and the United States. By the late twentieth century, it was estimated that 17 percent of the people in the world produce four-fifths of the total output on the planet.
Such examples could be multiplied longer than you would have the patience to listen.5
Why are there such disparities? In some cases, we can trace the reasons, but in other cases we cannot. A more fundamental question, however, is: Why should anyone have ever expected equality in the first place?
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that not only every racial or ethnic group, but even every single individual in the entire world, has identical genetic potential. If it is possible to be even more extreme, let us assume that we all behave like saints toward one another. Would that produce equality of results?
Of course not. Real income consists of output and output depends on inputs. These inputs are almost never equal-- or even close to being equal.
During the decade of the 1960s, for example, the Chinese minority in Malaysia earned more than a hundred times as many engineering degrees as the Malay majority. Halfway around the world at the same time, the majority of the population of Nigeria, living in its northern provinces, were just 9 percent of the students attending that country's University of Ibadan and just 2 percent of the much larger number of Nigerian students studying abroad in foreign institutions of higher learning. In the Austrian Empire in 1900, the illiteracy rate among Polish adults was 40 percent and among Serbo-Croatians 75 percent-- but only 6 percent among the Germans.
Given similar educational disparities among other groups in other countries-- disparities in both the quantity and quality of education, as well as in fields of specialization-- why should anyone expect equal outcomes in incomes or occupations?
Educational differences are just one source of economic disparities. Even at the level of craft skills, groups have differed enormously, as they have in urbanization. During the Middle Ages, and in some places long beyond, most of the population of the cities in Slavic Eastern Europe were not Slavs. Germans, Jews, and other non-Slavic peoples were the majority populations in these cities for centuries, while the Slavs were predominantly peasants in the surrounding countrysides. Prior to the year 1312, the official records of the city of Cracow were kept in German-- and the transition that year was to Latin. Only decades later did Poles become a majority of the population of Cracow. Only over a period of centuries did the other cities of Slavic Eastern Europe acquire predominantly Slavic populations. As late as 1918, 97 percent of the people living in the cities of Byelorussia were not Byelorussians.
Until this long transition to urban living took place among the Slavs, how could the wide range of skills typically found in cities be expected to exist in populations that lived overwhelmingly in the countryside? Not only did they not have such skills in Eastern Europe, they did not have them when they immigrated to the United States, to Australia, or to other countries, where they typically worked in low-level occupations and earned correspondingly low incomes. In the early years of the twentieth century, for example, immigrants to the United States from Eastern and Southern Europe earned just 15 percent of the income of immigrants from Norway, Holland, Sweden, and Britain.
Groups also differ demographically. It is not uncommon to find some groups with median ages a decade younger than the median ages of other groups, and differences of two decades are not unknown. During the era of the Soviet Union, for example, Central Asians had far more children than Russians or the peoples of the Baltic republics, and so had much younger median ages. At one time, the median age of Jews in the United States was 20 years older than the median age of Puerto Ricans. If Jews and Puerto Ricans had been absolutely identical in every other respect, including their cultures and histories, they would still not have been equally represented in jobs requiring long years of experience, or in retirement homes, or in activities associated with youth, such as sports or crime.
Nothing so intractably conflicts with our desires for equality as geography. The physical settings in which races, nations, and civilizations have evolved have had major impacts on the cultures developed within those settings. Those settings vary enormously-- as do their cultural consequences. How could Scandinavians or Polynesians know as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara? And how could the Bedouins know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians? The peoples of the Himalayas have certainly not had an equal opportunity to acquire seafaring skills. Nor have Eskimos had an equal opportunity to acquire knowledge and experience in growing pineapples or other tropical crops. Ability in the abstract is one thing, but specific capabilities of doing specific things is what matters economically.
Too often the influence of geography on wealth is thought of narrowly, in terms of natural resources that directly translate into wealth, such as oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. But, important as such differences in natural wealth are, geography influences even more profound cultural differences among the people themselves.
Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on small islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures of those people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically, is their technological advancement. While the rest of the world exchanges goods, knowledge, and innovations from a vast cultural universe, isolated peoples have been largely limited to what they alone have been able to develop.
Few, if any, of the great advances in human civilization have come from isolated peoples. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel put it, the mountains almost always lag behind the plains-- even if the races in the two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language both reached the Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands. Islam reached North Africa's Rif mountains long after the people in the plains had become Moslems.
When the Spaniards invaded the Canary Islands in

Continue:

http://www.tsowell.com/spracecu.html

 

[squarepusher]

The documentary.

A Conversation About Race

wow interesting video

 

[constituent]

Called

an "Uncle Tom?"


Thems fightin' wurds.

 

[catdd]

Watch Vanderbilt University dump her to avoid bad publicity and a possible lawsuit.
I hope not though, Im so sick of things going down that way.

 

[Flash]

Racism is a myth? Wow. What a shame that all those lynch mob victims died of hanging from a myth.

What lynch mobs? When did this happen? 2 or 3 years ago? Nope. But every month there's cases of Black-on-white crime. Infact according to the Department of Justice blacks are 4 times more likely to commit a crime against whites.