Salon.com > Charles Murray

Is the right really breaking up with its racists?

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:45:00 +0000

The National Review this month is having one of its semi-regular "purges," in which formerly welcome members of the conservative establishment are declared distasteful and relegated to the "fringes." It began when self-declared racist and longtime National Review contributor John Derbyshire wrote a piece (not for the NR but for "Taki's Mag," an online magazine devoted to lighthearted racism) that went well beyond the bounds of "acceptable" race-baiting. He was canned. Shortly thereafter, another National Review contributor, Robert Weissberg, was fired for having given a presentation at a conference devoted to white supremacy last month.

These two were not fired for suddenly revealing some hitherto unknown and successfully buried racist attitude -- these were not out-of-left field outbursts, like Michael Richards' onstage meltdown -- but for beliefs they had always had and had always expressed. This is what makes it a purge -- a decision that this sort of modern "racialism" is no longer considered an acceptable mainstream Conservative attitude.

My debate with Charles Murray

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:07:00 +0000

I debated Charles Murray today on WBUR's "On Point" with Tom Ashbrook. You can listen to it here.

I shouldn't admit this, but I almost didn't review Murray's "Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 to 2010." I told my editors it was just a mashup of his two most infamous books, "Losing Ground" and "The Bell Curve:" Welfare programs make poverty worse, not better, and social support can't help the poor and struggling rise up, anyway, because they're low-IQ losers. Only in this book, Murray confined his analysis to poor and struggling white people, to defuse charges of racism that greeted his two earlier bestsellers. I decided to write about the book anyway, but I thought it would be of little interest except to wonky people like me.

Charles Murray does it again

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Hey, white people – they're talking about you again!

I argued a few weeks ago that Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum might be able to believe they're not singling out black people, or "blah" people, when they rail against food stamps and government "dependency" on the campaign trail. Yes, Republicans have long used not just dog whistles but foghorns to tell white working- and middle-class voters that welfare programs only support lazy, undeserving African-Americans. Ronald Reagan gave us those iconic Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "young bucks" using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks. Gingrich is certainly playing on that long history with his remarks. (It's funny how our first "food stamp president" also happens to be black.)