The Origin Of The Double Standard
By Michael P. Tremoglie (11/11/03)
In 1996, I was treated to a text developed by the Anti-Defamation League called Understanding Racism. It was a lesson plan for high school students to teach about racism. The text was given to me by the chairman of the Social Studies Department at Central High School in Philadelphia – who had rejected the proposal to include it as part of the curriculum.
The lesson plan was the standard blame Europeans and European – Americans for all the ills of the world. One item was particularly remarkable. It concerned the concept that a white person experiencing racism was not seriously affected by it. However, a black person or other minority would be. My response to this was that a white person shot dead by a black person because “whites shouldn’t be walking through black neighborhoods,” as occurred in Philadelphia, experiences just as much suffering as a black person shot dead by a white for racist reasons.
Since then, I have often heard liberals’ state that blacks cannot be racist because they have no power. Again, my response is that maybe among the white, Americaphobic, limo liberal, Penthouse Bolsheviks, blacks do not have power. However, for whites who attend schools in districts in which blacks are the majority, or for whites whose supervisors are black, or who work for black owned companies- blacks (and for that matter other minorities and women) certainly do have power.
I learned that the origin of this – only whites can be racist - philosophy is the socialist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse was a German – Jewish immigrant who came to the United States in 1934. He taught at Columbia University and Brandeis University among others. His teachings were quite the fad at one time.
Marcuse was very dogmatic. A fanatical classist, racist, sexist, and politicist, he once said, “If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.”
Marcuse proffered a similar concept about free speech. He felt that free speech only served to reinforce the status quo since the Establishment had better access to the media then progressive groups. For this reason Marcuse believed that whites in America should not have the same rights of free speech as minorities because that would just ensure the maintenance of the status quo.
There was no satisfying Marcuse. Economic parity, even if undeserved, was not a benefit to society. As far as Marcuse was concerned it just confirmed the hegemony of the Establishment. He was someone who was obsessed with power. Just as Marxists believe that economics drives people’s behavior, Marcuse seems to believe that political power is the determinant.
This philosophy of Marcuse has now evolved among academics so that free speech should be denied those who speak of things that “ethical people” would hate. As the intellectual rationale for this tyranny, liberals state three tenets. The first is that government neutrality in speech is a myth since hate speech and pornography endorse racism and sexism. Second, politically powerful groups are granted exceptions to free speech such as copyright laws. Third, resources are unequally allocated so only the powerful are heard.
There are several fallacies here. First, copyright laws have nothing to do with political discourse. They concern protecting the theft of intellectual property in order to foster creativity. Second, the First Amendment restricts the government’s activities, not those of private citizens. Therefore pornography and hate speech are neither endorsed nor prohibited by the government. Third, the only inequality is that the mainstream media is biased in favor of people like Marcuse.
In Marcuse’s ideas one can notice the origin of the modern double standard that exists in the media about conservative speech. The claim of hate speech directed against conservative speakers has nothing to do with hate per se. It does have to do with the fact that conservative speech may represent the views of the majority. Liberals believe this perspective should not be permitted to be expressed. That is why liberals can be allowed their diatribes accusing conservatives of horrible things and that is not considered hate speech. Yet if a conservative criticizes – even mildly – a liberal it is hate speech.
This is the essence of modern American liberalism. A doctrine that states that only liberals are capable of judging what is good and what is bad. The rest of us are just wandering in a moral wilderness. Therefore only liberals should be heard.
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