Picture This: September 11, Multiculturalism, and the War on White Male Heroes

By Nicholas Stix

April, 2002
Middle American News

(See also: “Giving Thomas Jefferson the Business: The Jefferson-Hemings Hoax.”)

In recent weeks, Americans have been dramatically reminded of a development that in fact has been institutionalized for over thirty years in America: The war on white male heroes. Fought under the pretext that too many white faces make blacks feel unwelcome, and that more black faces will raise black self-esteem and hence black achievement, the war on white male heroes has been a pillar of multiculturalism's (primarily Afrocentrism and feminism), anti-white race war.

Billions of people around the world saw the picture of three white New York City firemen -- Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and William Eisengrein -- raising the American flag at Ground Zero on September 11. That photograph was to be memorialized by a $180,000 bronze statue at Fire Department headquarters. However, Democratic Party fundraiser (and Clinton-crony) Bruce Ratner, who commissioned the statue, and FDNY honchos, decided there was a problem with the photograph: Too many white faces. The solution was to falsify the image, by turning one fireman into a black, and another into an Hispanic. As so often occurs in the war on white, male heroes, initially, the mainstream media refused even to report on the revisionist statue. On December 21, when New York City Fire Department officials announced the plan for the revisionist statue, NewsMax alone reported on it. Although a petition campaign totaling (for two petitions), at this writing, over 400,000 signatures, got the FDNY brass and Bruce Ratner to back down from their agitprop statue, for purely racial reasons, they do not plan on memorializing the three white firemen. (One on-line petition totaling 395,000 signatures as of this writing, has been started and maintained by Free Republic activist Jeff Head.)

Meanwhile, in January, Brooklyn, New York's new borough president, Marty Markowitz, decreed that portraits of too many "old white guys" with names like Washington and Jefferson, were hanging in Brooklyn's Borough Hall. Markowitz sought to remove the "offensive paintings," but later relented in the face of public outrage.

In education, white heroes have been edited out of school books since the 1970s. They have been replaced with black, female, Hispanic, Asian, American Indian and homosexual heroes. As Sandra Stotsky notes in her book, Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason, the few white, heterosexual, able-bodied, white males (WHAMs) portrayed are routinely demonized, e.g., as "monolingual louts." School children have been led to believe that America's leaders and inventors were virtually all blacks or women. Children do not learn about the Wright Brothers, and are instead led to believe that Amelia Earhart invented the airplane. And the only "George Washington" millions of students ever hear about, is George Washington Carver, the black inventor of the peanut. [Postscript, November 20, 2011: Since publishing this article, I learned that not only did George Washington Carver not invent the peanut—God took care of that—but it is not clear that Carver ever invented anything. See “How Legends are Created: The Counterfeit Glory of George Washington Carver: There was affirmative action long before it had a name.”]

Indeed, to the degree that the Founding Fathers are still mentioned, they are relentlessly attacked, including the hoax that claimed that "DNA evidence" showed "a strong likelihood" that Thomas Jefferson fathered at least one of the six children of his slave, Sally Hemings. While it is theoretically possible that Jefferson was the father of one or more children of Hemings, that is unlikely. All that is known for sure, is that one out of some sixteen males [correction: 25] on the Jefferson line, was the father. Such scientific scruples did not inhibit the editors at Nature magazine, where the hoax was first published, in 1998, much less the mainstream media outlets which relentlessly repeated the hoax. In 2000, a second tendentious "study," published by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Society, argued, without any evidence, that Jefferson may have been the father of all six of Hemings' children.

In "The Fable of Tom and Sally," published last year in Insight magazine, James P. Lucier reported that experts he'd interviewed said that the debacle over the Jefferson hoax was, "a battle for the interpretation of America's heritage and the way future generations view the founders of the nation." A group of top-flight scholars examined the claims and concluded, "We have found most of the arguments used to point suspicion toward Thomas Jefferson to be unpersuasive and often factually erroneous. Not a single member of our group, after an investigation lasting roughly one year, finds the case against Thomas Jefferson to be highly compelling, and the overwhelming majority of us believe it is very unlikely that he fathered any children by Sally Hemings."

While the Founding Fathers are constantly defamed and denigrated, famous blacks of flawed, and often of dubious character, are deified. Obsessive plagiarist, philanderer, and communist fellow-traveler Martin Luther King is presented as the greatest American who ever lived, while genocidal racists such as Marcus Garvey and Elijah Muhammad are memorialized in public museums and during Black History Month. Garvey has also had streets named after him, and been made a part of Afrocentric stealth curricula in many public schools. The January scandal in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, revealed that public school officials had posted the separatist "Black National Anthem," "Black Pledge of Allegiance," and Garvey's black separatist flag on the Millwood School District's official web site.

For black authority figures, whether teachers, principals, professors, police officers, or parents, the war on white heroes is not merely about history. These black authority figures teach black children to hate and disrespect all white male authority in the here and now. The theory behind the teaching of anti-white-male hatred, is that if blacks focus all of their hatred and violence on white men, they can then somehow save all of their love for fellow blacks. The most influential proponent of this position is Amos Wilson, the author of Black-on-Black Violence: The Psychodynamics of Black Self-Annihilation in Service of White Domination.

Afrocentric racists have enjoyed tremendous support from influential white socialists, such as Queens College political scientist, Andrew Hacker. Hacker, whose publisher, Ballantine Books, claims he is "the foremost expert on race in America," is the author of Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal, which is mandatory reading in college social science courses across the U.S. In Two Nations, Hacker claims that a conspiracy of white police and prosecutors are responsible for the high arrest rates among young black men. Hacker then calls on those same, "racist" authorities to turn a blind eye to the violent crimes of black predators, notwithstanding that such crime supposedly does not exist. Meanwhile, arguing that every violent black-on-white crime is a form of racial reparations, Hacker suggests to black men that they commit MORE violent crimes, provided they follow affirmative action guidelines, restricting themselves to white men, and leaving white women alone. Logic and morality are obviously not Andrew Hacker's strong suits.

The strategy of encouraging black hatred has been a miserable failure. Rather than leading to black self-respect, educational success, and reduced black crime, the war on white male heroes has resulted in institutionalized black racism, black illegitimacy, black educational failure and spiraling black crime. Seventy percent of black children are today born out of wedlock, over four times the 1950 rate. And while a 1990 study by the leftwing Washington, D.C. Sentencing Project, determined that 25 percent of all American black men between the ages of 20 and 29 were either in prison, on parole, or on probation, a mere five years later, the number had risen to 33 percent. Blacks have sought to explain away spiraling black crime via the hoax of "racial profiling," but the truth is staring them in the mirror.

Oddly, Afrocentrism's staunchest allies in the war against white males have been white feminists. Odd, because Afrocentrists hate white women no less than they do white men, and because feminists fear black men much more than they do white men. No matter. While sympathizing with black male predators, feminism paints white, heterosexual males as the source of all of history's evil. Feminists dominate the public schools, teacher education programs, and children's textbook publishing. Feminists have even conscripted God in their fight. Led by theorists such as Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sallie McFague, and Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza, and deeply influenced by atheist male-hater, Mary Daly, feminist theology seeks to draft new, female prophets to make up for Biblical "gender imbalance," re-interpret the Bible in feminist terms, and even to recast God, variously as a hermaproditic deity, or as a woman.

Feminism lacks any sense of heroism; indeed it undermines the machismo necessary to look death in the eye. And feminists lack not only the courage, but the physical ability to save lives, when only strong men will do. While feminists have succeed at pressuring, through frivolous lawsuits, fire departments across the nation into watering down essential physical strength tests, and getting female "fire fighters" hired, such affirmative action hires are for "show-no" jobs; they show up, but do no work. For if firewomen were sent into action, they would perish, and cause the deaths of firemen trying to save them, not to mention the civilians the fire fighters were supposed to save. That would result in scandals, and in multimillion-dollar negligence suits against fire departments for using incompetent "fire fighters," instead of real firemen, to fight blazes. Thus, it is no surprise that of the 343 New York City "fire fighters" who perished on September 11, every single one was a man. And 319 of the 343, were white men. Feminists' response has been to complain about the lack of portrayals of heroic women on September 11.

A lone voice of sanity has been that of Pres. George W. Bush, who bypassed traditional U.S. Postal Service procedures, which commmemorate only the dead, and only depict paintings on stamps. The President directed that the actual picture of firemen Dan McWilliams, George Johnson and William Eisengrein, taken by newspaper photographer Thomas E. Franklin, of the The Record in Bergen County, N.J., be turned into a postage stamp. On March 11, the stamp was unveiled as a 45 cent, "semi-postal" stamp, which will go into circulation in the late spring. Each stamp counts for 34-cents, first class postage; the other eleven cents go to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to be disbursed to survivors of emergency service personnel killed saving people in the Twin Towers on September 11.