Overtaken by Events

...But in tacking her argument for a new approach to racial issues onto the specter of white nationalism, I'm afraid she has drawn all the right conclusions for all the wrong reasons...

...Please don't call these polished and educated ultra-Right extremists white supremacists...

...Many of the contentious issues it raises, to be sure, remain with us—affirmative action, to name just one—but I don't think a significant number of white Americans will be driven into the arms of David Duke if they don't get relief...

...She brings a fresh and vital perspective to any discussion of race relations...

...Crack cocaine had brought its own brand of hell to many urban areas...

...Along the way, they have exacerbated feelings of white alienation...

...But I wish she had focused less on white nationalists and white frustrations and more on new ways to keep the dream of integration alive...

...In this provocative but ultimately misguided book, Swain insists that a toxic blend of contemporary social, demographic and economic trends has created the risk of a "large-scale racial conflict unprecedented in our nation's history...

...Today's blow-dried, grammatically correct, coat-and-tie racebaiters soundandlooksafely middle class...

...Don Black, founder of Stormfront...

...In cities like New York well-heeled, educated whites were almost stampeding for the exits, and unassimilated immigrants waited in the wings to replace them...

...While we are on the subject, what does the author mean by white Americans...

...Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday" Remember the angry white male...

...She adds to this ugly mix a growing white impatience with race-based affirmative action schemes...

...This bunch is going to lead a movement that will end our commitment to integration...

...Because few legitimate arenas exist for white Americans to discuss openly their genuine fears on such racial issues as black-on-white crime, their impending minority status, and the continued existence of racial preference programs, white nationalists have stepped to the forefront and are encouraging a divisive form of white identity politics that has ominous implications for the future...

...Too many American politicians have treasonously betrayed the American people by blindly supporting the leading terrorist nation on Earth: Israel...

...A decade after his heyday in the media he's still around...

...Are our racial tensions now any greater than usual...

...In a recent piece on his Web site, Duke says this about September 11: "The real reason we have suffered the terrorism of the WTC attack is shockingly simple...

...Maybe they would like to split off into a separate state...

...But hardly anything is the same now...

...Given the human propensity for selfinterested action, it is likely that whites will increasingly tend to frame their demands around a shared group identity," Swain believes...

...Leaders in old industrial cities had not yet figured out ways to recoup from the decline of the factory economy...

...Or maybe not...

...Herein, I believe, lies a real danger for the future of American race relations...

...Swain wants honest talk about race, less emphasis on affirmative action and a practical approach to the problems that divide American whites and blacks...

...Who knows...

...And please forget about the gas-station kleagles and backyard fascists you may have seen on television in generations past...

...So native-born whites are likely to feel more embattled and more conscious of their own identity as they approach minority status in the American population...

...However these organizations want to describe themselves, it's all about scapegoating—still...

...As racial tensions have risen, she points out, many of them have kept an unconscionable silence about self-destructive black behavior...

...In a very general sense, she is correct...

...Like someone learning to hold his breath under water, too, they have taught themselves to sound sane long enough to hook new recruits...

...Thirty-six per cent of Asian men born in the United States marry white women, and 45 per cent of Americanbom Asian women marry whites...

...Instead, they have fixed on ephemeral issues...

...Notwithstanding its plainly being headed for minority status sometime soon, the white race has done a great deal, cheerfully and voluntarily, to blur its own identity...

...A quick foray through their literature makes it clear that they and their followers essentially want to do what most American white supremacists have wanted to do for generations now: assign the blame for America's problems to blacks or Jews or immigrants—or maybe to all three groups at once...

...Riots in Los Angeles and the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn made America's urban future look profoundly troubled...

...But few have noticed...

...They have wasted time in endless fights to save dubious affirmative-action programs...

...Meanwhile, she argues, high crime rates, lagging academic achievement and disproportionate out-of-wedlock births ensure that blacks—as a group—will remain stigmatized, impoverished and easy targets for racists...

...This trouble is related to race, and we ignore it at our peril...

...The fact is, today almost one-third of American-born Hispanics between the ages of 25 and 34 marry non-Hispanic whites...

...In 1970 3 per cent of African-Americans married whites...

...They take care in their introductory material not to appear too radical, know how to build a competent Web site and are not obsessed with violence...

...The innovations of the white nationalists have more to do with techniques than with their message...

...In short, I'm not sure we have come a great distance from the days of Gerald L.K...

...Granted the great melting pot does not seem to be working as dramatically when it comes to relations between blacks and whites...

...After that, their aims get a little fuzzy...

...They have become proficient at trolling the Internet for converts among the resentful, the alienated, the young, and the credulous...

...In fact, says Carol Swain, white Americans in general are feeling hopelessly besieged and more susceptible than ever to racist ideology...

...Swain also scores abull's-eye when she excoriates political correctness: "Current discussions of controversial issues often take place in an atmosphere where political correctness dictates that people either remain silent about their true convictions or engage in dissimulation or subterfuge...

...Swain thinks the hammer that could deliver the decisive blow to racial comity may be found in the hands of a new generation of techno-sawy "white nationalists...

...The welfare rolls were intensely swollen...

...What about the agitators who worry Swain so much—David Duke...

...The America that comes through in her pages is a place where no one is happy, a place where white sulkers are itching to run and hide, a place where our fragile commitment to racial integration is at risk of blowing apart...

...She dropped out of school in the eighth grade, later got a degree from Virginia Western Community College and ultimately graduated from Yale Law School...

...Or they have waged huge battles to make legislatures remove the Confederate stars and bars from state flags...

...Smith, the anti-Semitic firebrand of the 1950s, to the days of David Duke, the former Louisiana legislator who now presides over an outfit known as the European-American Unity and Rights Organization...

...Although Swain emphasizes the modern persona of this crowd, if you pull up their Web sites (helpfully cited in her footnotes), these folks gradually start to sound familiar—like unpleasant voices from the mists of history...

...Yet even there we see progress...

...But at the same time, I wonder: Is America really in such terrible shape at the grass-roots level...

...In a memorable act of bravery, Swain administers a major scolding to mainstream African-American leaders...

...Indeed, it appears that events overtook this volume as it was being written...

...She is a black professor of political science at Vanderbilt University who was, as she tells it, "born in rural Virginia into an abusive and impoverished farm household of 12 children with many different fathers...

...Different leaders have different notions...

...Immigrants with impossible expectations keep flowing in over our borders...

...Crime took an astonishing plunge in the 1990s, welfare rolls have been sharply reduced, and in major urban areas, despite the end of the economic boom, property values are continuing to go up...

...Ten years ago Swain's argument might have been an easier sell...

...Come on...

...Swain has little to say about intermarriage, but whatever criticism one might level at white Americans, they do not seem highly susceptible to separatist arguments based on race and ethnicity...

...Carol Swain is a phenomenon and an iconoclast...

...What we need to do is refashion a collective identity that can transcend race and therefore thwart our increasing drift toward tribalism...

...By 1993 that number had climbed to 12 per cent (according to the latest statistics available...

...I can't imagine that they will be leading America anywhere anytime soon...

...Hers is a remarkably grim view: Globalization is gnawing away at our job base...

...Crime rates continued to climb, with no relief in sight...

...AMERICA is in trouble at the grassroots level," Swain warns...

...Maybe the Pacific Northwest would make a nice nation...

...I find her agenda compelling...

...They would preferto ease their distress with modern America by simply withdrawing from a government that—to their minds—has failed to pay adequate attention to white interests...

...Reno Wolfe, head of the National Association for the Advancement of White People...