It’s always amusing, and ironic, to see Pandagon’s Jesse Taylor project his Uncle Tommery on Black men who embrace classical liberal values like the sovereignty of the individual, the necessity to limit state power and the essential dignity of all people. Taylor’s most recent target is rugged individualist and Bi-racial Conservative Shelby Steele who wrote an essay in the Wall Street Journal explaining why Republicans (and Conservatism) have a hard time wooing modern Black voters away from the White leftist “activist” ideology which gives many minorities the feeling of being powerful and self-fulfilled in exchange for continuing to be subservient to a White-dominated society filled with racists (like Amanda Marcotte) who will gleefully wear Che t-shirts in front of Blacks even though they all know Che said this about people of color:
“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have conserved their racial purity by a lack of affinity with washing, have seen their patch invaded by a different kind of slave: The Portugese…. the black is indolent and fanciful, he spends his money on frivolity and drink; the European comes from a tradition of working and saving which follows him to this corner of America and drives him to get ahead.”
But before we go on, we need to understand what Pandagon is, who Jesse Taylor is and why both are examples of true modern day house negrodom despite how often he may try to divert your attention to some other Black man in an effort to pretend he has any dignity at all. Pandagon is considered some sort of gold standard of feminist blogs, but in actuality, Pandagon is simply a plot by Taylor to have sex with White women who have low self-esteem and drinking problems.
Taylor tells White liberals what they want to hear, period. I defy you to search through Pandagon and find anything Taylor, who worked for known White devil Ted Strickland, said that hasn’t been said first by a White college adjunct in a social science program. Jesse Taylor makes a living basking in the phony largesse of White liberals who throw him crumbs from their table every time he regurgitates talking points designed to keep the African-American community in the continued state of decline it is in.
This is why when confronted with Steele’s assertion of the primacy of the individual, Jesse Taylor (who I am hopefully not related to) resorts to the old White liberal stand-by of defining Conservatism as de facto racism even though Conservatism, like Libertarianism and Republicanism, is neutral on race. As an intelligent man Taylor knows this and could argue against Steele’s points without resorting to the petulant pseudo-arguments of Humanities undergraduates but he dares not lest his White readers be led to believe he thinks differently from them. In the heart of any Black liberal activist is always the fear that a slight deviation from Leftist orthodoxy, no matter how minor, will be grounds for their excommunication from the left which in that small and mean world carries with it the very real possibility of social alienation.
So instead Taylor pulls various quotes and, not even bothering to cleverly put the words out of context, assigns them different meanings based largely on his White “friends'” disdain for the individual. For example, he takes this quote from Steele’s piece:
The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity. I always secretly loved Malcolm X more than Martin Luther King Jr. because Malcolm wanted a fuller human dignity for blacks—one independent of white moral wrestling. In a liberalism that wants to redeem the nation of its past, minorities can only be ciphers in white struggles of conscience.
The last sentence is exactly what most Black Americans admire about Malcolm X, and exactly what people like Jesse Taylor despise about Malcolm X, Shelby Steele and every person with a drop of African blood that doesn’t check in with a leftist salon to see what opinions are acceptable for us to have as Taylor does. His interpretation of this section of Steele is painfully puerile and predictable:
This is a prime example of conservative racial denialism as equality: the important factor for conservatives is not that we are all equal, but instead that the discourse on race not involve them in any way, shape or form. Conservatism absolves white people of responsibility and burdens minorities with a white/conservative-approved delusion: I am a full human being because I am willing to blame other minorities for the history of their skin color. The only reason that Steele believes that liberalism is a form of “white supremacy†is because of his inherent belief that whites are, in fact, superior, and the only way to avoid such a terrible specter is to avoid provoking or involving white people altogether. It’s better to be “free†than pursue actual freedom.
No rational person could have taken that meaning form Steele so I assume Taylor is simply being disingenuous, secure in the knowledge that his White readers will simply skim, see the block quote, and not bother to read it, skipping ahead to their Negro Interpreter who will sum up what Shelby Steele says which coincidentally is exactly what they want to think he’s saying and helps prop up their belief in the superiority of their own capriciousness and vacuousness.
Taylor asserts that Steele is making the opposite point that his words themselves make. Steele extols the virtue of Conservative color blindness in its ability to allow every person, of every race, to be judged as an individual and to have worth separate from any group. This is where Conservatism and Republicanism traditionally intersect. Taylor claims that “absolves” Whites of responsibility and burdens Blacks with a delusion. The delusion I take it is that we’re equally responsible for the country, equally able to succeed and equally deserving of respect, dignity and freedom. It is telling that a man who runs a successful website, worked for Gov. Strickland and has White groupies fighting over his online attention should imply that he’s not quite free yet.
And is it really Steele who is afraid of provoking White people? I would suggest that Black Conservatives are on the receiving end of much more venom than a Black “man” who gladly participates in Internet lynchings of Blacks who disagree with White liberals.
As for “involving White people” in the quest for Black liberation I’d ask Taylor how that worked out for everyone? 50% of Black and Latino students in the Bronx dropped out of high school when I worked teen programs there, while the White run teacher’s union allowed sex offenders to continue having access to those children. Teachers with criminal histories are more important than Black children to White liberals.
Pandagon said nothing about this.
The nihilistic Black culture that produced Chris Brown and the 46% of high school students who think his vicious beating of his girlfriend is acceptable was pushed on us by White liberals in the music industry that spent two decades giving preferential treatment to gansta’ rap acts (whose biggest audience is suburban Whites) while burying Black acts that performed “White” music. Jesse Taylor will never complain about that.
When I was young, bands like Bad Brains, Fish Bone, Goddess, Xavier and others played metal, punk, ska and every kind of music and they were popular with people of every race. Then gangsta rap was marketed to Blacks as authentic Black experience by Whites who couldn’t accept individuality and diversity among Black Americans. The Black community has suffered immensely for having allowed what is essentially a White Supremacist view of Blacks as nothing more than criminals and sex crazed potential rapists infect our children and their sense of what it means to be Black.
It’s no small irony that M.O.P.‘s Ante Up, the pinnacle of gansta rap where two thugs brag about committing strong arm robberies and murder to an infectious beat that sweetens the sour medicine of this celebration of criminality, includes this lyric:
 Brownsville, home of the brave
Put in work in the street like a slave
Keep rugged dress code
Always in this stress mode
(That shit will send you to your grave) So?
You think I don’t know that? (BLOW!)
Nigga hold that! (BLOW!) Nigga hold that! (BLOW!) Nigga holdthat!
From the street cousin, you know the drill
I’m 900 and 99 thou short of a mill
Notice that like Taylor, Billy Danze accepts the White liberal view of the Black experience, and the hopelessness of Black men’s lives. He accepts the mantle of slave proudly, like Taylor does. I assume Billy Danze would agree with Jesse Taylor’s criticism of Steele while Taylor’s White liberal friends cooed orgasmicly at the “authenticity” of Billy versus that “sell out” Steele.
But what would Malcolm X say?
Malcom X would say that gangsta rap music, like Jesse Taylor’s Pandagon, was reinforcing White Supremacist control over the Black community by taking away Black dignity and pride and replacing it with the thuggery and uneducated ignominy White liberals think is the natural state of Black people, just as their hero Che did.
The hard truth for the Jesse Taylors of the world is that they have sold their souls to White progressives, sacrificing their identities as individuals separate from all others and eschewing pride in their personal accomplishments for the condescending head pats of the progressive establishment. That’s why he reacts so predictably to Steele and his desire to be a his own man first and a Black man second. Taylor could never live that sort of life.
Black progressives are no different than White Nationalists in this way. They see the personal accomplishment as unworthy and the accomplishment of the group a true source of pride. And as in the case of White Nationalists this emphasis on the achievement of the group leads to the moral, intellectual and spiritual stagnation of the individual. Just look at Jesse Taylor, or his counterpart in neo-Nazism Yankee James. Both hate Shelby Steele, Conservatism and the idea that an individual should live his or her life on their own terms without caring about the approval of others.
It is beyond a betrayal of the Black community to support so personally destructive a view of individuality as the embrace of racism. It tacitly implies that Blacks who disagree with White liberals, or Black rappers, are working against Black interests. What other purpose would this belief have than to keep Blacks from achieving? What other effect can this have but to produce thousands of Chris Browns? This is depravity dressed up as political opinion and Jesse Taylor knows it.
He knows it but he’ll never say it. He doesn’t want to get called a “Nigger” by his friends.
