My avatar shows me smiling. Believe me, I am not. Last night I stumbled upon one of the entries in the TPM Book Club entitled "Race, Racists and Journamalism," by Aaron Schwartz. I stopped to read the story and was gobsmacked by one member of this week's discussion group (Mr. Schwartz) calling the another (Steve Sailer) a racist. Helpfully, Mr. Schwartz included a link to Mr. Sailer's Wikipedia biography and a "interesting" quote from him.

After reading Sailer's bio, and challenging him for the "context" he claimed was absent from Schwartz's assessment of him, I, too came away wholly convinced that yes, indeed, Mr. Sailer is a racist. (And never one to shy away, I told him so.)

But all day, what I first read about him and his covert participation at TPM was nagging at me for two reasons:

1. Is the Site Editor (Lila Shapiro) of the TPM Book Club that clueless as to who Mr. Sailer really is and views he espouses?

And also nagging at my conscience is a question festering over the last few weeks with her invitations to panelists to discuss other books which focused on more specifically race-related. The lack of prominent black voices to speak out on those books was disturbing enough. The participation of people with decidedly "conservative views" and their connections to very conservative think tanks, websites was questionable. Had there been adequate balance, their participation would not have been an issue, but there was little to counter-balance their comments. I tried to put that in perspective: perhaps invitations were sent, but people didn't respond in time, were busy, or as well may be the case, they just didn't give a damn.

But this week, with a book ostensibly about why people vote they way they do, I hardly would have expected a bona fide racist in our midst.

2. Did I have a greater responsibility to pull the lily-white sheet off of Sailer to expose him to the TPM community? After all, in the age of Obama, some of you believe we have trascended race and that the racism of old -- and its racists purveyors -- have disappeared from our midst.

Let me answer the second question first: YES! I do have that responsibility. First, as member of one of the groups Sailer assails on a regular basis, I think I know a genuine racist when I see one. Second, although we may want to debate what to level of bigotry must one rise to be classified as a racist, Sailer provides us with a clinician's opportunity to dissect and diagnose. Sailer defends himself classically: "I am not a racist," he claims. Yet the facts as you will see are otherwise.

And to question one, I will give Ms. Shapiro just the tiniest benefit of doubt -- this time. As you will see, I have found evidence that she is not the only one being fooled. That said, we all must hold Ms. Shapiro and TPM management -- top to bottom -- accountable for the persons they invite to participate in their forums. Balance of ideas and full disclosure of affiliations, beliefs and publications must now be demanded. "Free speech" is fine, but you deserve to know who you are reading.

Now to focus on the man I and many others have identified as a racist.

In introducing this week's book discussion, Ms. Shapiro wrote the following:

Joining Gelman in the discussion are co-author Jeronimo Cortina; Nathan Newman, Policy Director for the Progressive Legislative Action Network; Matt Yglesias, Fellow at the Center for American Progress; Will Wilkinson, Research Fellow at the Cato Institute; Aaron Swartz, activist, blogger, and board member of Change Congress; Eric Rauchway, Professor of History at the University of California-Davis; Steve Sailer, journalist and critic at The American Conservative; and Nolan McCarty, Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. [Boldface mine.]

Except that is not who Steve Sailer is.

This is what Media Matters for America had to say about Sailer following his participation in television special at CNN:

On July 22, as part of its "Black in America" project, CNN posted an article on its website headlined, "Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?" The article, by correspondent John Blake, quoted from a 2007 column by Steve Sailer, a writer CNN identified simply as "a columnist for The American Conservative magazine." But as the Southern Poverty Law Center reported on its Hatewatch blog, there is much more to Sailer's background, none of which CNN noted. In fact, in blog posts on VDARE.com and on his own website, [iSteve.com] Sailer routinely denigrates minorities. Nor did Blake note the origin of the quotes he included in his article: a January 2, 2007, VDARE.com article in which Sailer called Sen. Barack Obama a "wigger" and mocked him as "a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American."

Sailer's column linked to a Wikipedia entry on the word "wigger," which, at the time, read: "Wigger (alternatively spelled wigga or whigger or whigga) is a slang term that refers to a white person who emulates mannerisms, slangs and fashions stereotypically associated with urban African Americans; especially in relation to hip hop culture."

From Blake's July 22 CNN.com article:

Steve Sailer, a columnist for The American Conservative magazine, wrote last year that some whites who support Obama aren't driven primarily by a desire for change.

They want something else Obama offers them: "White Guilt Repellent," he wrote.

"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. ... Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,'" Sailer wrote.

Sailer cited another reason why many whites want Obama as president:

"They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama -- and their problems will be over."

As Media Matters for America has noted, VDARE.com is a far-right anti-immigrant web magazine named for Virginia Dare, the first child of English descent born in the New World in the 16th century. In 2003, SPLC [Southern Poverty Law Center] added VDARE.com to its list of hate websites. Peter Brimelow, who operates VDARE.com through his nonprofit organization, the Center for American Unity, has insisted that "VDARE.COM is obviously not a 'White Supremacist' site, if for no other reason than that it publishes non-whites. We do publish writers who could fairly be described as 'white nationalists,' in that they explicitly defend the interests of American whites."

Media Matters has also noted that Sailer has written in defense of the Pioneer Fund, an organization designated a "hate group" by the SPLC for its support of the work of white supremacists, eugenicists, and others dedicated to proving the genetic superiority of certain races. Sailer additionally describes himself on his website as "founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute," which claims it "promotes the study of biological differences among humans and their impact on society."

After the Hurricane Katrina disaster, Sailer wrote in a September 3, 2005, VDARE.com column that the "unofficial state motto" of Louisiana, "Let the good times roll," is "an especially risky message for African-Americans." He continued: "The plain fact is that they [African-Americans] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society." Sailer then declared that "there was only minimal looting after the horrendous 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan -- because, when you get down to it, Japanese aren't blacks." Later, he stated: "Poor black people seldom cooperate well with each other because they don't trust other blacks much, for the perfectly rational reason that they commit large numbers of crimes against each other."

In a September 5, 2005, post on National Review Online's The Corner, New York Post columnist John Podhoretz condemned Sailer's "shockingly racist" column on Katrina as containing "the most disgusting sentence yet written about Katrina." Podhoretz added: "Nobody with the unspeakable gall and tastelessness to write such sentences should be suggesting that any other person on earth requires 'stricter moral guidance.' "

From Sailer's January 2, 2007, column, titled, "White Guilt, Obamania, And The Reality Of Race":

Obama is constantly compared to Tiger Woods. But he differs in two ways. First, his list of accomplishments in his chosen profession is a lot shorter than the golfer's. And, second, Woods rejected Nike's suggestion that he identify himself as solely black to maximize his marketability in America because he did not want to reject his mother and more distant non-black ancestors. Woods declared himself "Caublinasian," his childhood term for his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestry.

In contrast, like Oscar-winner Halle Berry, Obama identifies as black although that requires symbolically disowning his white mother and maternal grandparents -- despite the fact that they did far more for him than the Kenyan father who abandoned him when he was two.

[...]

The brutal truth: Obama is a "wigger". He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless. He has no ancestors who were slaves in the U.S. Moreover, his upbringing by his white mother and Indonesian stepfather in Indonesia and by his white grandparents in Hawaii, where mixed-race children are close to the norm, was almost wholly divorced from African-American life ... except for what he could see and aspire to on TV.

Even genetically, Obama, whose East African descent is apparent in his unusual features, has only a distant relationship to the West Africans who are the ancestors of almost all African-Americans. (Here are photos of Obama with Jesse Jackson and with the rapper Ludacris, both of whom have conventional West African features.)

But details like these just seem to make this nominal African-American that much more attractive to whites.

So why are so many whites, especially in the media, excited about promoting Obama for President in 2008?

[...]

Supporting Obama for President, like supporting Powell a decade ago, is seen by many whites as the ultimate in White Guilt Repellent.

It's important to understand, however, that White Guilt is very different from, say, Catholic Guilt, which consists of straightforward feelings of personal moral failure.

In comparison, I don't recall ever meeting any white person who personally felt guilty for the troubles of African-Americans. But I've known many whites who want to loudly blame other whites for black difficulties.

Some whites at least heap guilt upon their own ancestors, but many who publicly proclaim the reality of White Guilt aren't averse to noting that their own forefathers arrived at Ellis Island long after slavery was over.

In other words, White Guilt is just another ploy in the Great American White Status Struggle. Minorities are merely props for asserting moral superiority over other whites.

Finding and punishing Guilty Whites has become a national obsession. One notorious current example: the framing of the Duke lacrosse players by Durham district attorney Mike Nifong (with the enthusiastic assistance of the New York Times) in the endless hunt for what Tom Wolfe called "the Great White Defendant."

So, many whites want to be able to say, "I'm not one of them, those bad whites, like that guy on Seinfeld. Hey, I voted for a black guy for President!"

Plus, I suspect there's an even more hidden reason many whites wish Obama is elected President: They hope that when a black finally moves into the White House, it will prove to African-Americans, once and for all, that white animus isn't the cause of their troubles. All blacks have to do is to act like President Obama -- and their problems will be over!

--M.B.

 

Please note the CNN fell for the brief bio of Sailer, too. And since Media Matters pointed us to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, it's only fair to include what the SPLC had to say:

As part of its ongoing "Black in America" project, CNN posted a story to its website earlier this week titled "Could an Obama presidency hurt black Americans?" Credited to CNN correspondent John Blake, the piece quotes the wit and wisdom of Steve Sailer, identified only as "a columnist for The American Conservative magazine."

Specifically, the CNN story quotes a column by Sailer first published last year in which he opined that Obama offers voters "White guilt repellent."

"So many whites want to be able to say, 'I'm not one of them, those bad whites. ... Hey, I voted for a black guy for president,'" Sailer wrote.

What the CNN article fails to note is that in addition to writing columns and movie reviews for The American Conservative, Sailer is the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute, a neo-eugenics online discussion forum where right-wing journalists and race scientists have promoted selective breeding of the human species. He also writes frequently for the anti-immigrant hate site Vdare.com, named for the first white child born in America, and runs a website, isteve.com.

Sailer's website is rife with primitive stereotypes. On it, Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for having well-developed muscles and claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look "less masculine" than other men.

Last January, on the hate site vdare.com, Sailer labeled Obama a "wigger."

"He's a remarkably exotic variety of the faux African-American, but a wigger nonetheless," Sailer wrote. "Even genetically, Obama, whose East African descent is apparent in his unusual features, has only a distant relationship to the West Africans who are the ancestors of almost all African-Americans." To illustrate his point, Sailer used photos of Obama side-by-side with Jesse Jackson and the rapper Ludacris, "both of whom have conventional West African features."

Assessing the tragic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, Sailer wrote, "The plain fact is that they [black Americans] tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups. Thus they need stricter moral guidance from society."

Now blacks are not the only target of Sailer's venom. He is, as both the SPLC and Media Matters note, the founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute. How about his support for "Queer Science," by J. Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, as the SPLC reports:

Queer Science

On a book tour last spring and summer, Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey gave his audiences a sampling of recent scientific thinking about sexual and gender identity.

After playing audio recordings of four men's voices, Bailey asked: Which is gay? The crowds inevitably picked out the voice with exact articulation and lispy "S" sounds. Precisely! Bailey cheered.

His point: Determining somebody's sexual orientation is just that easy, just that obvious.

Needless to say, Bailey's brand of "queer science" has not met with cheers from GLBT (gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender) activists -- nor from many fellow scholars, who see his studies as attempts to lend scientific credence to age-old stereotypes.

But Bailey does have company. Many of those who praised his recent book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, belong to a private cyber-discussion group of a neo-eugenics outfit, the Human Biodiversity Institute (HBI).

This exclusive group of academics, race scientists and right-wing journalists -- along with a reported handful of liberals -- exchanges thoughts about "differences in race, sex and sexual orientation" for a chilling purpose: promoting and studying "artificial [genetic] selection."

Among some of Bailey's reported HBI cohorts, that racist science of old is still just as alive and well as their current sex research. The Institute's main activity appears to be an "invitation-only" online discussion list for "a small, elite and eclectic mix of experts."

According to a list posted on HBI's Web site until last summer, this "elite" includes:

Jean-Phillippe Rushton, a prominent researcher on black genetic inferiority who is president of a pro-eugenics hate group, the Pioneer Fund;

Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, which purported to show black and Latino intellectual inferiority;

Kevin MacDonald, a professor at California State University at Long Beach who has written several books about supposed Jewish strategies to subvert "Euro-American" culture; and

Gregory Cochrane, a physicist who has suggested the existence of a genetic "gay germ."

These ideas about race and sex have not been limited to the world of academia. The HBI also includes several right-wing journalists who help popularize their theories -- and promote their books.

The most prominent cheerleader for Bailey and the other HBI researchers is the man who started the HBI: Steve Sailer, a United Press International reporter and frequent contributor to the anti-immigration Web site, VDARE.com. [Emphasis mine.] 

Like Bailey, Sailer refused to respond to questions, telling the Intelligence Report "tough noogies." Also like Bailey, he has pushed the idea that there's a genetic basis for homosexuality -- making it a "disease" that could eventually be eradicated.

"It's radically unfashionable to call homosexuality a disease," Sailer noted this August on VDARE.com (see Keeping America White). But that doesn't stop Sailer, who fashions himself a bold thinker willing to confront taboo subjects.

The personal Web site maintained by the man behind the Human Biodiversity Institute, www.isteve.com, provides a different window into Sailer's way of thinking.

The site is dominated by crude racial and gender stereotypes as Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for her muscles, claims that Asian men have a hard time finding dates because they look "less masculine" than other men.

Sailer also invokes the spirit of his friend Bailey when he claims to have found the real reason Al Gore lost the 2000 presidential election. He chalks it all up to a lisp that makes the former vice president "sound prim, even homosexual."

Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (www.fair.org) weighs as well, noting that the racists among us have found more "stealthy" ways to worm themselves into mainstream media where their full credentials are not always checked or challenged. (Lila Shapiro is not alone in being fooled.)

''If the black man wins,'' warned a New York Times editorial on the eve of the historic 1910 fight between Jack Johnson and ''Great White Hope'' Jim Jeffries, ''thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbors'' (New York Times, 7/3/1910--as cited on PBS's Unforgivable Blackness, 1/17/05). In an earlier editorial (11/1/1909), the editors worried over the fight while revealing what passed for discretion at the Times of nearly a hundred years ago: ''[We] will wait in open anxiety at the news that he has licked the--well, since it must be in print, let us say the Negro, even though it is not the first word that comes to the tongue's tip.''

Of course, great strides have been made by American media and society since that editorial, and many others like it, were published. But progress seems to come in fits and starts. It doesn't help that journalists often fail to recognize and challenge racism, even when--or perhaps especially when--it involves their own institutions.

Racism, in fact, may be gaining a firmer foothold in American media institutions as its promoters adopt more stealthy and sophisticated ways of presenting it. Consider two recent episodes in which David Brooks and John Tierney, both conservative New York Times writers, touted the work of Steve Sailer, a well-known promoter of racist and anti-immigrant theories.

''Ghetto hellions''

Following the November elections, David Brooks used his column (12/7/04) to celebrate something he called the ''natalist'' movement. Natalists, said Brooks, defy Western trends toward declining birth rates by having lots of children and leaving behind the ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' of cities to move to ''clean, orderly'' suburban and exurban settings where they can ''protect their children from bad influences.'' According to Brooks, natalists are more churchgoing and conservative than their less wholesome neighbors in more liberal urban areas, and are an increasingly important political force.

Though the movement sounds a bit like the post-World War II demographic trend dubbed ''white flight,'' Brooks makes no reference to ethnicity until halfway through the column, when he cites Sailer on white fertility:

As Steve Sailer pointed out in the American Conservative, George Bush carried the 19 states with the highest white fertility rates, and 25 of the top 26. John Kerry won the 16 states with the lowest rates.

Brooks is well-known for lightly documented demographic analysis (Philadelphia, 4/04), but he never explains why he believes white fertility is more important than that of other groups.

Did Brooks understand his source's views? A look at the American Conservative article (12/20/04) that Brooks presumably read, since he cited it, ought to have raised the suspicions of an engaged columnist. In it, Sailer describes the undesirable urban traits he says white people are trying to escape: ''illegal immigrants and other poor minorities,'' ''ghetto hellions'' and ''public schools.'' Are these the things Brooks meant when he alluded to ''disorder, vulgarity and danger'' and ''bad influences'' in his Times column?

As American Prospect Online found (12/7/04), a little research reveals Sailer as a leading promoter of racist pseudoscience. As a principal columnist on the white nationalist website VDare.com, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the ''New World,'' Sailer (e.g., 2/23/03; 12/12/01) extols the work of academic racists who say Africans as a group are innately less intelligent than whites or Asians. He is also a staunch defender of the Pioneer Fund, a primary funder for such racist research (as well as of VDare.com).

On the rare occasion Sailer gives race a rest, it's usually to make some other mock-Darwinian argument, as when he ruled out the possibility of a gay gene, suggesting instead that homosexuality is a disease, possibly caused by a germ (VDare.com, 8/17/03): ''An infectious disease itself could cause homosexuality. It's probably not a venereal germ, but maybe an intestinal or respiratory germ.''

A New York Daily News column (12/13/04) rebuked Brooks for plugging Sailer, suggesting that the Times columnist ''might want to do a background check on the next 'expert' he quotes,'' pointing out that "Sailer also writes for VDare.com, which the KKK-fighting Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled a 'hate group.''' According to the News, the Times failed to respond to inquiries about the matter. No other mainstream outlets seem to have commented on the affair.

Conservative "bona fides"

In addition to writing for VDare.com and American Conservative, Sailer has contributed to the National Review and National Review Online. He also maintains a private email discussion group called the ''Human Biodiversity Group'' that includes many leading white supremacist intellectuals and ''scientific'' racists.

Sailer's job as a national correspondent for United Press International (UPI) may seem surprising to those unaware the old mainstream wire service has drifted far rightward since its purchase by Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church in 2000.

A lucid writer with an accessible style, Sailer is a smooth propagandist operating in a community of increasingly sophisticated nativists and racists. Neither a researcher nor a scientist, Sailer's value to the movement is as a popularizer of its ideas and theories.

Weeks before the Brooks column, Times reporter John Tierney (10/24/04) quoted Sailer, describing him as ''a conservative columnist at the Web magazine VDare.com and a veteran student of presidential IQs.'' Tierney cited Sailer's claim that George W. Bush's IQ was likely greater than John Kerry's, information Sailer extrapolated from the results of different tests the two had taken--tests that were not intended to measure IQ.

Were Brooks and Tierney aware of Sailer's racist work? Were they sucked in by Sailer's sophistication, his academic sounding arguments? Or was it his bona fides with ''mainstream'' conservative outfits like the National Review and American Conservative?

''Civilized standards''

American Conservative was co-founded by Pat Buchanan, Peter ''Taki'' Theodoracopulos and Scott McConnell, who serves as editor. When McConnell was a New York Post columnist in the mid-'90s he suggested a brand of apartheid might be the solution to U.S. race problems (10/11/95):

I do believe that American race relations would not be the worse for acknowledging that blacks and whites have between them the power to develop alternatives to living together. Indeed, it seems to me possible that the very act of considering seriously such alternatives would, in and of itself, bring a rapid halt to some of the more flamboyant rhetorical and behavioral excesses now flourishing in the black community.

McConnell would later be named the Post's editorial page editor, before being fired in 1997 for writing a series of anti-Puerto Rican columns--but only because they reportedly threatened Post owner Rupert Murdoch's business prospects (New York Daily News, 9/17/97). Sailer is just one of the racist writers McConnell has published in American Conservative (see, e.g., Robert Stacy McCain, 5/19/03; Sam Francis, 6/7/04).

The National Review's support for racism traces back to its founding in the mid-'50s. A 1957 editorial titled ''Why the South Must Prevail'' (8/24/57) asked ''whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically?'' Citing the ''cultural superiority of white over Negro'' and ''civilized standards'' National Review editors answered, ''Yes--the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.''

Similarly, the magazine supported apartheid South Africa's white minority rule (4/23/60): ''The whites are entitled, we believe, to preeminence in South Africa.'' When Nelson Mandela and other ANC leaders were sentenced to life in prison in South Africa, National Review editors mocked critics of the verdicts (6/30/64): ''The South African courts have sentenced a batch of admitted terrorists to life in the penitentiary, and you would think the court had just finished barbecuing St. Joan, to hear the howls from the liberal press.''

Over the years many leading eugenicists and ''scientific'' racists have been warmly received by National Review. In a positive review of Race, Evolution, and Behavior, a 1994 book by Philippe Rushton, the current Pioneer Fund president, reviewer Mark Snyderman eagerly recounted the book's ''ambitious'' and ''fearless'' thesis (9/12/94): ''Orientals are more intelligent, have larger brains for their body size, have smaller genitalia, have less sex drive, are less fecund, work harder and are more readily socialized than Caucasians; and Caucasians on average bear the same relationship to blacks.'' (To be fair, this kooky book also got a thumbs-up from New York Times science writer Malcolm Browne--10/16/94. See Extra! Update, 12/94).

National Review tapped Rushton to write a review of a new edition of The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould's critique of eugenics--resulting in a predictable pan (9/15/97). And when Gould died in 2002, the magazine called on Steve Sailer (5/22/02) to do some grave-spitting.

''War against the white race''

Until his death on February 15, the award-winning writer Sam Francis was another member of this tightly knit circle of sophisticated racists. Francis had come far since his 1995 firing by the Unification Church-owned Washington Times for a speech he gave at the white supremacist American Renaissance conference.* Francis (Washington Post, 9/24/95) had told the gathering that a ''war against the white race'' was underway, and insisted that fellow whites "reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites . . . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

Francis was also a contributor to VDare.com, and since 1999 he had been the editor of the Citizens Informer, the publication of the Council of Conservative Citizens, the racist offspring of the old white citizens' councils of the Jim Crow era.

Francis also wrote a twice-weekly column for the mainstream Creators Syndicate. According to Creators, the column was distributed to 22 of its newspaper clients. The column also ran on right-wing and racist websites such as Townhall.com and Amren.com.

I have quoted at length from a few highly respected sources to make my point. Better to go to any of Sailer's other websites, publications or blogs to read the man in his own unadulterated language. There you will get his highly prized "context."

If you needed to know what a contemporary racist, anti-immigrant, misogynist, homophobe, looks like and sounds like, here you have it. Sailer does not walk the streets of his hometown in a sheet and pointed hat. Wait, I cannot say that for a fact as I do not know what he wears in the "halls" of the "cyber-institute" of Human Biodiversity or when he's just strolling through his local mall. I don't know if he prefers a flaming cross or a regular old bonfire.

But what you do need to know is that they, Sailer and his friends, pretend to be something that they are not, reasonable, thinking human beings. He attempts to hide his racist ways by claiming to be "defending" blacks in New Orleans, or using "science" to reveal "truths" about minorities, women, gays, immigrants and anyone else he hates.

Steve Sailer is a racist. Make no mistake about that.