Re: How Not to Handle a Genteel Racist (January 27, 2007)

Joseph Brean describes how Jared Taylor’s attempt to speak in Halifax was drowned out by protesters who banged on pots and ended up dragging Taylor himself bodily from the room he had rented at the Lord Nelson Hotel. What he doesn’t mention is that, in comments on the regional evening news, two Dalhousie Black Studies professors, Dr. David Divine and Isaac Saney, appeared to excuse the thugs for their behaviour. In an age when Nova Scotia authors (John MacLachlan Gray and George Eliot Clarke, in May, 2002) applaud the banning of books from Nova Scotia high schools, it perhaps ought to come as no surprise when Nova Scotia academics express a preference for hooliganism over argument.

According to Karen Mock (former executive director of the Canadian Race Relations Foundation), since open debate makes us vulnerable, liberal confidence in it is simply naïve. But if our commitment to “the big law” of liberal tolerance flags, we are left with what G.K. Chesterton called “the small laws,” the meddling of petty bureaucrats and the installation of regulators and their goon mascots to decide for us what we can stand, and what we can be trusted, to hear.

Which brings us to the Dalhousie Black Studies web site, where your readers will find an announcement for an upcoming conference on “the politics of inclusion.” Sponsored by the race-exclusive James R. Johnson Chair in Black Canadian Studies, and scheduled for April 11-12, 2007 in Ottawa, the announcement urges participants to question the value of inclusion, to explore its “costs and alleged benefits,” and to entertain the inviting prospects of black separateness. My guess is that the Canadian taxpayer will generously subsidize this bio-political frolic, and that professors Divine and Saney will utterly miss the irony. For their view, like Jared Taylor’s, is a strange brew of self-pity and self-romance, an expression of misguided petulance that accentuates blood and belonging at the expense of individual character and achievement. In the chests of the white separatist and the black separatist are two hearts, you might say, that bleat as one.