Tribal Dad
September 26, 2011
THE PSEUDONYMOUS writer CWNY often argues that the white man has replaced faith in Christ with worship of the black man. CWNY’s argument is more subtle than that. He says rationalism ate away at the heart of the white Christian, who then turned in his lifelessness to the primitivism of the Negro. The liberal Christian sought to recover the elemental and fend off spiritual death.
If CWNY’s argument seems hard to grasp, here is a music video made by members of an Evangelical church that just about sums it up, though with much less elegance.
It’s worth noting that no one has forced these men to appear this way. They like it. This is how they view themselves, as pale, robotic imitators of black thugs.
— Comments —
Brandon B. writes from Colorado:
I find CWNY to be a frustrating blogger. I am fascinated by his writings and have consumed them at a voracious rate, finding them to challenge some of my deepest assumptions about the Christian faith. He got me thinking about rationalism and its corrupting influence on Christianity and the church. Also, his appreciation for classic literary figures and their Christian ethos has led me to delve into the works of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and others. But, he makes sweeping generalizations about colored people and seems to be obsessed with black people in general. He cannot seem to make a post without referencing what he calls “negro worship” and “the black barbarians.” While I am in agreement that liberalism possesses a particular animus toward white people, I have trouble accepting his beliefs because I know from personal experience that not all black people are hideous monsters. Many are quite decent. Yet, I don’t know how many times I’ve run across in CWNY’s writings words about how “its in the nature of the black barbarians to rape and murder.” It’s aggravating to me to read how such an intelligent writer could possess such a distorted worldview. Too bad he does allow for comments or contact. I would very much like to pose many questions to him.
Laura writes:
He speaks in harsh generalizations. Is there a need to hear that blacks are often very good? Isn’t that assumption pervasive?
One of the points he makes, and I agree with him, is that the liberal does not have genuine love for blacks or see them as fully human. After all, if the liberal did have genuine respect for blacks, he would accord them minimal free will. He writes:
The liberal doesn’t love his black god; he loves the gratification he gets from worshipping at the shrine of a god who permits every self-indulgence, so long as the devotee fulfills his sacrificial obligations. And such sacrificial offerings are easy for the liberal because he always sacrifices other whites, never his own sacred, self-indulgent person.
At his best, CWNY condemns the worship of the black man. The only way to counteract the glorification of something is to speak of its imperfections.
Clem writes:
Brandon B. makes the argument that all liberals and Marxist make. The argument that seeks to disarm and in fact makes us weak. What is the practical distinction that he tries to make that it is not all? What is the affect to protect ourselves from such an argument? Is that not what has been used for over 50 years to dismantle the West? To destroy our race and culture? To hide general black pathologies and anti-white behaviors while at the same time magnifying and hammering on whites? That we must not protect ourselves from ‘blacks’ but rather from random violence and ‘youth’. The fact is that blacks and black culture is generally violent, is generally ethnocentric and is generally very distinct and different from White Western culture. In what way does it make a difference that not 100% of blacks are any of these things? Since the 1950s in particular but even before then broad generalizations against evil whites and the suppression of black characteristics have been used as a weapon against us. That is, in part, the Negro worship that CWNY’s writes about. BRA is very real. If we can not stand up to factually state that these things are true and are very detrimental to ourselves and our posterity we have no hope of ever defending ourselves, our families or our communities. The fact that there are decent, non white hating, hard working blacks and black families is beside the point. If we do not attack that which is used to destroy us then we will be destroyed.
Brandon writes:
I can’t say that there is anything that Clem says in his post that I disagree with, but it was far from my intention to make a Marxist or liberal argument.
In fact, it was much simpler, in that I find it at odds with my Christian faith to confine all members of all colored races to one grotesque “barbarian” cariacature. Doing this plays against my conscience because I have been shown kindness in my life from black people and other races as well as being treated very poorly by members of my own white ethnicity. CWNY often talks about the “humanity” of Christ and against abstraction, but it appears to me that focusing so much on a black bad/white good dichotomy is doing nothing but turning actual human beings into abstractions. That said, I am no fan of black thug culture and I understand our need to stand up against the systematic hatred being leveled at white people from those who rule our country.
Laura writes:
Again, CWNY is generalizing and simplifying. These are rhetorical weapons against false generalizations and simplifications, particularly the idea that whites are responsible through deliberate greed and ruthlessness for any failings of blacks. You don’t object to the harsh, condemning things he says about liberal whites. He describes them as cowardly, stupid and evil. These are obvious simplifications too. If blacks as a group were held morally accountable for their actions, there would be no need to talk in the harsh terms he uses.
This kind of thing can be taken too far and become dehumanizing. I agree, but we also need to speak in broad generalizations. Black culture today is barbaric. Liberal whites have made it even more so – and they have encouraged whites to live and act like barbarians too. I was talking to a father recently who was perplexed by his son’s mimicking of black style: you know, with the underwear showing and ghetto speak. It’s no wonder. Blacks are held up as a model of virility, as this Evangelical video demonstrates.
Laura adds:
A reader asks, in a non-posted e-mail: How can CWNY apply his convictions without denying the “humanity” of blacks?
In the same way generations of white people did: by recognizing the limitations of blacks and adopting a paternalistic attitude toward them. CWNY has written about the relationship between blacks and whites as being like the relationship between a man and his less capable younger brother.
If you know a person who is impulsive and reckless, do you deny that person’s humanity by recognizing that he is impulsive and reckless. I don’t think so. To the contrary, I think you reckon with his humanity.
When this reader and Brandon speak of the “humanity” of blacks, I sense that they are using the word incorrectly. To be human is not necessarily to be saintly. To be human is quite often to be barbaric.
Jesse Powell writes:
Some quotes from CWNY in the latest post of his being linked to:
“In the French Revolution of America, the Civil War, the white people of the South became victims of the brave new doctrine of abstracted humanity. White Southerners became non-persons and the negro was declared a demigod and invested with all the humanity that the evil, white Southerner was said to be devoid of.”
“He (Pope John XXIII) spit on his own people, who were tortured and mutilated by bestial black savages, by lovingly forgiving the black barbarians who gleefully tortured and murdered white Christians. And every black atrocity since that loving forgiveness was extended by John XXIII has been praised and excused by the abstracted inhuman creatures that have come to be called liberals.”
So, CWNY is comparing the American Civil War to the French Revolution; I think with the North in America and the triumphant tyrannical French radicals in the French Revolution being analogous to each other. What is the “brave new doctrine of abstracted humanity” that white Southerners supposedly became victim to? I think he’s referring to the “all men are created equal” idea. Did white Southerners become non-persons and blacks become demigods after the Civil War? I don’t think so. Did white Southerners treat blacks as non-persons during the slavery they fought to preserve during the Civil War? That to me seems a much more reasonable assertion.
CWNY also manages to refer to blacks as “bestial black savages” who “gleefully tortured and murdered white Christians.” Modern day liberals, presumably mostly white, also get attacked as being “abstracted inhuman creatures.”
Am I supposed to seriously believe that CWNY’s racist rantings are merely intended to point out that blacks are not perfect? I don’t think CWNY can be excused on the basis that he is simply counteracting too much praise for blacks in the popular culture, what CWNY says needs to be considered on its own merits.
If the point of someone’s writing is to hold blacks morally accountable for their own actions or to criticize whites when they avoid mentioning unpleasant truths about blacks’ behavior, what they say would be totally different from how CWNY presents himself. The point of CWNY’s writing is exactly as it appears; to demonize blacks and whites who are sympathetic to blacks and to heap praise and a false sense of victimhood on the whites who fought to preserve slavery during the Civil War.
Laura writes:
“Bestial black savages” is an entirely fitting phrase for the human beings who, out of all proportion to their actual numbers in the population, viciously assault and murder both blacks and whites in this country. What do you expect someone who is filled with righteous anger over this murder and mayhem to say? “Tsk, tsk , tsk?”
Greg Jinkerson writes:
With all due respect to Mr. Powell, I believe that CWNY’s comparison between the behavior of the French radicals in 1789 and that of the American Republicans in 1861-1865 is an apt one. There are many parallels between the actions and declarations of Robespierre’s gang and those of Lincoln’s gang. Both regimes propounded a diseased and delusional program of radical egalitarianism. Just as the French radicals were viciously resentful of the Ancien Régime which permitted customary power and local rule to exist in provincial, agrarian forms throughout France, the radical Republicans under Lincoln were incurably jealous of the stubborn independence of the flourishing farm culture of the South. In both of those historical moments, a group of busybody radical statists recognized that so long as power was distributed along the lines of subsidiarity, with extremely limited and defined powers for the central government, then it would be impossible for liberal programs to progress to the desired levels of growth and entrenchment.
Mr. Powell asks, “Did white Southerners become non-persons and blacks become demigods after the Civil War?” The answer to that question is an emphatic yes. Politically speaking, what the radical Republicans imposed upon the South after 1865 was a deliberate upheaval of the political pecking order. They set out to disenfranchise Southern whites and to enfranchise blacks, and they accomplished both of these goals to the hilt, at gunpoint. It matters little how one wishes to define the issue of personhood or enfranchisement in this context. If you want to define the issue along the lines of simple voting, the power to vote in both local and national elections after the war was yanked from whites and foisted upon blacks. Appomattox was not the end of Northern aggression; military occupation by Federal armies in the South continued until 1877. Troops only withdrew after Republicans felt that they had maximized the political capital available to them in the wake of their military triumph, and the Republicans were not willing to relax martial law in the South until they had manipulated the election of 1876 to assure that their candidate Rutherford Hayes was awarded the presidency. Until that time, whites in the South were for all practical purposes barred from having any meaningful participation in politics or government, because of the vast and well-known rigging of elections to the advantage of Northern Republicans.
This conspiracy to extend the consequences of total war upon the South was enabled by the newly freed blacks (and who can blame them for cooperating with their avuncular Yankee enablers in reaping the benefits of political graft?) and also by the willing janissary of opportunistic white Southerners, who are the prototypes of today’s self-loathing white liberals. Or if you wish to define white personhood and black personhood at that time along the lines of much more traditional definitions, like homeownership, property rights, and economic independence, the result of the survey is the same. Whereas blacks were thrust into unsolicited positions of privilege and power such as the ‘right to vote’ and the ‘right to get an education’, whites were subjected to atrocious war crimes, both during and after official wartime, crimes too well-documented to belabor here. Suffice it to say that the damage done by white Northern marauders against other Americans is never likely to be accurately assessed, and included vast rapine and pillory not only of the blacks who were allegedly being emancipated but also of their fellow whites.
Mr. Powell believes that the whites who ‘fought to preserve slavery during the Civil War’ cannot be honestly viewed as victims of anything, and certainly not victims of radical liberalism during the Civil War. Presumably for Mr. Powell, folks like CWNY are also misguided in imagining that there is any link between, say, John Brown and Charles Sumner of the 19th century, and the Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi of the 21st. Actually the latter pair are hyper-developed specimen of the same type of ideology that drove the abolitionists to declare war against Southern whites. What all of these thinkers have in common is an unshakeable belief in their own sterling moral vision, a vision which cannot be bothered with historical or cultural considerations. Abraham Lincoln, who was of course a typical white supremacist of the 19th century, did not have one iota of faith in either Christianity or abolitionism, but he found the self-righteous rhetoric of radical Unitarian Universalism to be a very convenient cover for his plan to funnel Southern treasure into Federal coffers. It worked to a tee, and we continue to live with the ever-deepening consequences.
Laura writes:
For a heated discussion over whether the Civil War was started by Northern radicals or aggression by the South, see this post.
John E. writes:
CWNY makes more sense in light of your defenses of his writing. Still, overall, his writing seems to be distorted. As relating to race, it seems to take on the flavor of the extreme and bitter MRA’s as they castigate women generally, only seeing the evil women are capable of while ignoring the good, justifying their distortions of women by claiming the stranglehold feminists have had on society has distorted society’s view of men. It grows quickly wearisome with the MRA’s in relation to women, and I find it wearisome in CWNY in relation to blacks, Hispanics, etc. If liberal society has thrust an intolerable distortion upon us, the correction for this is not an opposite distortion. I agree that our liberal society has demonized the white man, but the correction to this is not to demonize the black man.
Laura writes:
I don’t see the comparison with MRA’s at all.
MRA’s deny the transcendent and are thoroughgoing egalitarians. CWNY speaks of Christ as the foundation of life. Either he is a liar or he accepts the morality of Christ. Either he is a convincing liar or he believes in the possibility of eternal damnation. Now, you may find his language strong and too angry, or that he is too persistent with his theme (and I should add, I don’t agree with everything he says), but he does not advocate revenge or violence. If CWNY’s rhetoric was everywhere, if that was all whites knew of blacks, it would be dangerous. Most blacks are not savages (most blacks also do not denounce the savagery in their midst or recognize it as black savagery in the way whites view slavery as a white sin.) But, again, CWNY is writing in the context of widespread glorification of blacks.
Anger is sometimes necessary and good.
Last week, a young white couple in Tulsa, Oklahoma was murdered by two young, feral blacks. (“Feral” is not too strong of a word, especially given that one of the murderers returned to the crime scene later and answered questions from a TV interviewer with a smirk on his face, without ever letting on that he was one of the murderers.) The devastated mothers of the victims said a few days later that they were not angry at the murderers. Now this was either a lie or something vital inside of both of these mothers has died. They should be angry. They shouldn’t be consumed with anger for the rest of their lives, but they should be angry now. The black preacher I mentioned in this post is still smoldering with anger because his church was burnt down in 2008 and people accept that he has a right to anger because he has lost something important. I don’t think anyone says to this preacher even now, “Get over it. It’s wrong to be angry. Why are you making such a big deal of it?”
You seem to be saying that CWNY is making too big of a deal of the worship of blacks. I disagree. Too much injustice has been done. Too many lives have been lost. When these crimes are recognized for what they are then we can say that it is no longer time to be angry.
One other thing. These racial injustices will either be publicly recognized by Christians, and Christians will articulate the proper response to them, or neo-pagans will rule this sphere. These grave crimes and the swaggering arrogance of modern black consciousness will not continue to be endured. The Christian who withdraws from the issue of race because he considers it too sordid or too low will have no grounds to complain when neo-pagan revenge takes hold. His silence will have been a form of complicity.
John responds:
You’re right, and I agree, that Christians in particular need to take a stand against what is aptly described as the worship of blacks. I simply do not see CWNY’s approach as a good one, even if it should somehow prove to be effective. It seems that you have gleaned an insight into his approach that I have not been able to, though I’ve read much from his blog (perhaps I have not read enough). He is a Christian, and he shows keen insight with clear-headed thinking on certain Christian themes; yet I don’t see what is particularly Christian about his approach to matters of race, the topic which is central to this discussion. A zealous and discriminating love for kith and kin is not an exclusively Christian idea, and predates Christianity in pagan cultures, though the idea is certainly consonant with Christianity, and perhaps even necessary for Christianity to survive. Where I suppose I depart from you is that I perceive he does not simply show love and zeal for his own, but the same zeal apparently to show only privation in those who are not of his own, such as blacks, and it reads as a sort of hopelessness or despair, which would be, of course, not Christian. Let me first say that I recognize clear privations in regard to Christianity which are characteristically found among black people, many of which are documented well by CWNY. But telling against his approach, I have often seen expressions of Christianity to which black people seem predisposed, expressions of simple and childlike faith, though not naive. All Christians are called to such a childlike faith, but I see it expressed with a particular ease among black people, not nearly so easily among white people. Without Europeans, Christianity would almost certainly have disappeared off the face of the earth well before the Middle Ages (and then there would have been no Middle Ages, of course). Still, I see that Christianity is expressed through the black race also in an indispensable way, even if it can be said that it is not so indispensable as how it has been expressed through the white race.
Regarding CWNY’s approach, I can’t say that I know how to articulate the better approach, or even what a better approach would be; and I also understand and appreciate the courage it takes to stick one’s neck out as you have done. Thanks for your willingness to discuss this.
Laura writes:
You make an important point. The black Christian is able to express a dimension of Christ’s love that whites cannot. There is a childlike warmth and dignity to his faith.
But, mainstream black culture is overwhelmingly pagan. Otherwise it would reject its victimhood status. Otherwise it would accept that the black man too is fallen. Notice the absence of forgiveness toward whites. Notice the lack of charity. Notice the pervasive immorality.
Black Christianity won’t thrive within the hollow effeminacy of liberal white Christianity, which is just a religious-sounding social club. The Christian West, which sustains black Christianity, can’t thrive if whites reject the idea that there even is such a thing as the white race. If the black man has a distinctive approach to Christ, the white man does too. And he must love that. As CWNY writes:
The European does not love in the abstract. He loves his own particular nation, his own particular race, his own particular family, because God ordained that he love them over all. Such love – particular, intense, and personal – enables us to understand and respond to His love, which is particular, intense, and personal.