Imagine that you discovered the following facts about a stranger.

First, for roughly two decades, he not only attended a church, but donated thousands and thousands of dollars to it. 

Second, this stranger’s church is presided over by a pastor who the stranger regards as his “spiritual mentor,” the person who he credits with leading him to salvation.  It is this pastor who married him to his wife and baptized his children.

Third, this pastor is an unapologetic, unabashed supporter of a racially themed theology.  From this perspective, unless God is a being who aids whites in their campaign to subvert all things black, he is nothing but the worst of ideological fictions by which blacks have sought to manipulate whites into conceding to their own dispossession.  On at least one occasion, during a particularly fiery sermon, he boiled this theology down into one succinct exclamatory line: “God DAMN ‘Black America!” 

Fourth, the stranger’s beloved pastor once granted a “lifetime achievement award” to a man who has repeatedly derided Christianity as “the Black Man’s religion” and a “slave morality.”  This same person believes, or at least claims to believe, that the black race is the creation of an evil white scientist. He further believes that all blacks are “devils.” 

Fifth, the stranger has authored a memoir that he himself characterizes as “a story of race.”  Even though he is biracial—half black and half white—and even though he was raised by his black family after his white father abandoned him at the age of two, the stranger identifies himself as white only.  In it, the stranger relays the hardships that blacks inflicted upon him throughout his life.  The stranger is biracial, but he admits that by the time he was 13 or so, from the fear of appearing that he was trying to “ingratiate” himself to blacks, he quit referring to his Negroid ancestry. 

The stranger’s memoir is chockfull of one indignity after the other that he claims to have suffered at the hands of blacks—including those blacks in his immediate family, like his grandparents, who sacrificed all to make for him a life that was as materially comfortable as it was emotionally supportive.  For instance, once, upon being harassed by an unusually aggressive white panhandler while waiting for the bus that she would regularly ride to work, the stranger’s grandmother indicated a fearfulness that she had never exhibited prior to this episode.  This fear, the stranger wasted no time in concluding, stemmed not from any danger posed by this specific panhandler.  The fear, he remains convinced, stemmed from his black grandmother’s bigotry toward whites.

Yet it isn’t just his irrational, racist old grandmother who hurt him so.  His black high school friends dished out their share of pain as well.  After he took his friends to an overwhelmingly white party, the stranger’s one black friend made an expression of empathy with him.  The young black man explained to the stranger that he now has a better appreciation for the self-consciousness that the stranger experiences being a minority amongst a mostly black population.  This, the stranger says, induced in him a nearly irresistible urge to punch his black friend in the face. 

The stranger’s memoir is replete with other stories of black insensitivity and white suffering. 

Sixth, the stranger does not refuse to associate with all blacks. There are some blacks for whom he feels considerable affection.  But they are blacks who share his conviction that Black America is a bastion of racial oppression that needs to be “fundamentally transformed.”  A couple of these blacks are terrorists who have actually bombed black institutions.  Years later, they openly lamented not having detonated more black institutions.

Seventh, the stranger is friends with several high profile white academics who have routinely, tirelessly, written and spoken of the systemic and systematic abuses to which whites have been subjected by blacks.  In fact, he isn’t only friends with them; they were his own mentors during his time in college.  One of them has even gone so far as to say that he lives “to harass black people.” 

Now, suppose you know all of this about this stranger.  The stranger becomes the President of theUnited States.  If, per impossible, Rip Van Winkle-like, you were to fall into a long, deep sleep, upon awakening years later, what do you think you would discover about the manner in which President Stranger governed?  Consider the following scenarios.

In the first scenario, President Stranger does his best to encourage the elimination of all policies that dispense upon whites preferential treatment so as to insure a race-neutral legal system that treated all citizens impartially.

In the second scenario, President Stranger not only furthers the system in place, but expands it.  He promotes policies that disadvantage blacks at the cost of privileging whites; refers to blacks as “our enemies” while addressing white crowds; and appoints a white man to preside over his Department of Justice who orders his attorneys to prosecute only those potential civil rights violators who are black. 

Given what you know of the stranger, there is no doubt that it is the second scenario that will resonate most with you.  The first will have no resonance at all. 

The reason for this is obvious: it is by now clear to you that, at a bare minimum, the stranger is a white person who has no small measure of animosity toward blacks.

But if any fool can deduce this about this hypothetical stranger, why is it that when we switch the races around, we refuse to recognize that it is our own President who has—again, at a bare minimum—an animus toward whiteAmerica?

Think about it.

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.