By Mike Gray
Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal — America’s Racial Obsession
by Erik Rush
WND Books
2010
Hardcover: 212 pages
ISBN 978-193507182-2
Available on Amazon.com
Despite common sense, despite everyday experience, despite the findings of biological science, and despite Biblical revelation to the contrary, racism has been all too common in America, a nation that because of its nominally “Christian” character should, of all countries, know better.
In his book, Erik Rush identifies an important factor contributing to America’s divisions over race: Negrophilia. And what’s that?
For decades now, Americans have been sold a bill of goods regarding those of us of African (or mixed) descent, other ethnic minorities, and race relations in general. That bill, tragically, contains the worst kind of intellectual excrement. White guilt is still encouraged, despite unprecedented opportunities for blacks in America. Black multimillionaires assert in the press that we live in a racist nation in which blacks are still oppressed—and millions nod mutely in agreement. Arguments for reparations to black people for slavery—a logical travesty as well as a horribly inequitable proposition—are still proffered with regularity and seriously considered by many Americans.
As life has increasingly imitated art—here I refer to the portrayal of blacks and trends in the entertainment media—the perception of blacks on the part of non-black Americans has become increasingly tainted by the aforementioned media, propaganda of the establishment press, activists, and politicians. While this may have led to a coexistence of inquisitiveness, it has also imparted a pernicious, counterfeit understanding of blacks on the part of non-black people as well as an inordinate deference toward blacks, particularly among whites. Black people themselves continue to suffer from this phenomenon because it discourages social and intellectual accountability on their part.
Why do these conditions exist, how did they come about, and what—if anything—can be done to neutralize them? That is what this book will answer.
You’d think that the election of America’s first black president would have resolved conflicts that have simmered for centuries. While Rush emphasizes what’s wrong with the Chief Executive on the political level, he also points out:
Appearances to the contrary, however, this is not an anti-Obama treatise. Barack Obama’s election is only an extreme example of this phenomenon [of negrophilia]. Indeed, Obama’s very election is one of the strongest single arguments for there being something drastically wrong with Americans’ perceptions of race relations and the role ethnicity plays in our culture. It is one of the strongest single arguments for the existence of negrophilia.
A delirious concoction of political correctness, socialist agitprop in the media-entertainment complex, historical ignorance engendered and sustained through decades of indoctrination in state-run schools, political opportunism by whites, and personal enrichment of so-called “black activists” whose primary aim is to keep the pot boiling, negrophilia prevails in American culture at all levels, Rush argues. The pendulum that characterizes the direction of the culture has swung away from the racial stereotypes that harmed blacks in times past, and now harms blacks in a different way, Rush observes:
Prodded by guilt and reprogrammed by press propaganda, whites succumb to negrophilia when, believing that people of color are somehow more benevolent and less corruptible than themselves, they develop an undue affinity for them.
Blacks suffer worse when they embrace this base patronization. They’re denied accountability for their own actions. They’re shackled by their acceptance of the nobility—no matter how lacking—of all “black leaders.” They’re ripe for the “rescue” of predatory, opportunistic members of the black community . . . .
The myth of the “noble savage” has been transposed onto blacks to such an extent that more harm than good comes of it, he argues. There never has been any ethnic group that can lay exclusive claim to virtue.
Of necessity Rush writes very critically in illuminating the deleterious effects of negrophilia—the “Reverends” Jackson and Sharpton, ACORN, a phlegmatic and increasingly irrelevant NAACP, the “Jena Six” flap, the Duke lacrosse travesty, Al and Tawana, Reverend Wright and Black Liberation Theology, and this by no means exhausts the topics he covers—but he also thinks there’s a possible solution if those of good will want to try it:
What would be desirable . . . would be a lateral move in the area of civil rights and race relations, in which advancement occurred, but the perversion of politics and personal agendas were prevented from taking a toll. Such an accomplishment could also be a stride toward pulling down America’s accursed secular-socialist framework.
—but getting people to behave themselves and act more altruistically? That’s going to be a problem, I think . . . .