Soccer Dad - or perhaps his frequent guest blogger Daled Amos, a little ambiguous - has a post up about Jonah Goldberg's recently published Liberal Fascism now out at bookstores. My point here is not to review the book but to react to some Goldberg's quotes cited by Soccer Dad/Daled Amos.

The "money quote":

The white male is the Jew of liberal fascism. The “key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race,” writes the whiteness studies scholar and historian Noel Ignatiev. Whiteness studies is a cutting-edge academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture explains, “There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of color . . . We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today . . . which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it.” The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated “to serve as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.” Now, this is not a genocidal movement; no one is suggesting that white people be rounded up and put in camps. But the principles, passions, and argumentation have troubling echoes.

I agree with Ignatief that we need to abolish the "white race" as a concept, and attended a Race Traitor conference in New York in the mid-1990s. Goldberg mischaracterizes, too conveniently by half, Ignatief's argument and the whole point of Race Traitor. My argument is, essentially, Race Traitor's argument, though I don't follow Race Traitor's proposed method of fighting the political damage of the "white race." No matter how much Goldberg gets the vapors at "troubling echoes," Race Traitor is an anti-fascist, anti-racist movement designed to get rid of a problematic idea. White nationalists are the only ones who should be offended at the idea of retiring white nationalism or the concept of the so-called "white race."

It is the existence of a concept of a "white race" that has fueled European fascism and violence today. The concept of the "white race" is ultimately a political one, one carrying political privilege, social prestige but ultimately no distinguishing cultural, let along biological, content. It is a political tool that has served not to uplift mankind but to crush people under the heel of oppression. In the name of the "white race," "white America," great injustices have been committed.

Let us be blunt: what do an Orthodox Jewish dad in Baltimore, a Scotch-Irish Southern farmer in Tennessee, an Italian-American grandmother in Cleveland, a so-called "honky" i.e. Hungarian-American coal miner in Pennsylvania and a surfer dude in California of Welsh extraction have in common, other than the perverse privileges of whiteness and maybe - MAYBE - skin complexion?

Let me put it another way - can you order "white food"? "White music"? "White heroes"? "White dialect"? The political damage inflicted by the concept of the "white race" must be remedied; given that there is essentially no cultural or even biological content to the set "white race", it is better abolished than reformed.

Perhaps some purely personal background may make my vehemence a little easier to understand on this and related topics on which I have written. When my German-American ancestors arrived here in Maryland in the 1890s, they learned to give up their identity as Germans, more precisely Swabians from Baden-Wurttemberg, and became "white." They were white by law here, in time white by socialization; while their German-American son would later be insulted during World War II (just as they had been during WWI) for his ethnicity, when push came to shove they all got the privileges of white people under American apartheid.

My grandfather was able to set up a masonry company in Annapolis, and was noted for seating his white and black masons at the same table when his wife would feed them lunch on break, this in segregated Annapolis. His daughter, my aunt, was a bit less enlightened; she refused arrogantly to shake the hand of the most prominent black citizen in Annapolis at the time, Senator and physician Aris T. Allen, a Black Republican when the Democratic Party was the party of racist revanchism (and my people were then Democrats.) Her refusal was simple; he was a "nigger" [sic] and she was a white woman. Her refusal caused my mother, then a teenaged candy striper on Anne Arundel Hospital's "Colored Floor," immense personal embarrassment.

My aunt's husband would later be a major player in keeping the largest fraternal lodge in Annapolis all-white, supporting the B.P.O. Elks' Lodge move outside the City limits to protect its political position as a shining light of white racism and VERY well priced drinks. In fairness, the Elks' Lodge does allow Black Americans to scrub pots for a modest wage in the kitchen.

A long way from Swabia, indeed. Too bad that these people, my people, meaning my family and my nation, valued the white race so. Too bad the concept had not been killed in the crib. Had the country adopted basic values of universal human rights, and rejected white racism from the jump, how much better a nation we would be. Instead of America honoring Martin Luther King for his achievements, maybe the planet would be honoring the USA for its achievement as a people.

In reality, of course, we are not that good a people. A better people would not entertain revanchist racism as a political force after centuries and centuries of bloodshed. "Southern strategies" would refer not to stoking local pride in local racist political heritages, but rather something more benign, maybe a way to market pork barbecue or sweet tea. "State's rights" would exist not as a code for the toleration or embrace of local racist practices but for what the Catholic Church calls "subsidiarity" - the prudence of solving problems (as opposed to inflicting problems) at the smallest useful unit of administration.

We remain a great people, a great empire, as were Byzantium, Babylon and Persia in their time. Too bad we are not a particularly good one.