Racism, in Black and white

Recently, I finished reading a 900-page biography of William F Buckley by Sam Tannenhaus, and this was a labour of love.

Not so much for the book, although it’s good enough, but for its subject. I feel indebted to Buckley and his magazine, National Review.

When I found myself in the US in 1973, I was a callow ignoramus. My reading in Russia, where good books were rarely available, had been sporadic. My instincts were conservative, but I had no idea how to relate them to any coherent philosophy. I knew exactly what I hated, communist tyranny, but had a hazy notion of what I loved.

National Review, with its staff of the brightest conservative writers in the West, pointed me in the right direction. Thanks to Buckley and his friends, I found out what I should read, what I should think about, what conservatism really meant. At least, as they saw it.

Years have passed, I’ve struck out on my own, written my own books and developed my own take on conservatism. In many ways, I’ve outgrown Buckley and National Review, but not the feeling of gratitude for the guidance they unwittingly offered a young lad trying to find his own feet.  

Hence, reading Tannenhaus’s book was a bit like repaying a debt of honour. Truth to tell, I doubt I would have finished the book had it been about anyone else. It was a case of what youngsters today call ‘TMI’, too much information. Everything I found of interest could have been told in half the number of pages, but I soldiered on dutifully.

As I said, the book is still good enough, and other readers may find all that profusion of everyday details fascinating. But one thing was jarring, and it had to do not with content but with orthography.

Whenever the subject of race came up, which was often, considering that the book was about an American conservative with Southern roots, the author spelled ‘Black’ with an upper-case initial and ‘white’ with a lower case one.

That struck me as eccentric and inexplicably inconsistent. After all, both races should receive equal treatment – it’s initial cap for both or neither. In fact, I’ve always spelled both ‘black’ and ‘white’ in the lower case, unlike such technical terms as ‘Negroid’, ‘Caucasian’ or ‘Mongoloid’.  

I mentioned this oddity to my American friends, and they treated me in a frankly condescending way, like an alien from a faraway planet who has a lot to learn about the Earthlings and their mores.

It turned out that this incongruous spelling is mandated by all publishers and news agencies. They are driven by higher concerns than grammar and orthography: an urgent desire to establish their woke credentials. This is a kind of password granting admission to the inner sanctum of wokery, like Kipling’s Mowgli and his four-legged friends saying to one another: “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

Well, as Americans like to say, different strokes for different folks. If this is what the publishing powers that be get off on, who am I to take issue? However, I do wonder if they realise that this orthographic anomaly betokens a worse kind of racism than the inspiration for the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

This is a curious modern phenomenon: in the past, those who mauled the English language were illiterate folk who didn’t know better. These days, it’s chaps with advanced university degrees who don’t want to know better. They just want to score points in the wokery stakes.

Yet in the process they admit for all intents and purposes that they regard blacks as culturally, intellectually and psychologically inferior. Blacks are simpletons who need to be thrown sops from their superiors’ table lest they may be traumatised.

Only a single-cell humanoid would be offended by traditional, and correct, spelling. Hence, assuming that blacks en masse would riot in the streets if their race didn’t rate a capital ‘B’ is tantamount to denying blacks the status of full humanity. This is the most flagrant racism one could imagine – the sort of thing that was widespread in the South when Buckley was growing up, but not since then, certainly not to the same extent.

I’m not proposing to delve into the entire complexity of race relations in the US. My concern is the survival of our civilisation, of which language is, if you will, the binding agent. When educated people are prepared to destroy their language, they thereby signal not their virtue but their anomie, alienation from a civilisation they hate.

In God’s eyes, erecting “a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven” with the subsequent disintegration of language was severe punishment: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”

What’s happening now is even worse: those language destroyers understand one another’s speech perfectly well, but it’s no longer speech. It’s a desemanticised semiotic system signalling the triumph of evil.

I wonder whether Thomas Sowell, one of the best living thinkers, would throw his toys out of the pram if he saw his race spelled with a lower-case ‘b’. Something tells me he wouldn’t, and he probably feels about this abomination the same way I do.

He grew up in an impoverished black family that knew old-style racism at its worst. Many of their neighbours probably regarded them as less than human, or at least as inferior humans. But he must cringe at the sight of woke racism, where white folk make all the same assumptions but translate them into condescending superciliousness, camouflaged as virtue.

It pains me to see signs of that in a book about one of the foremost conservative figures of the 20^th century. Buckley himself would be scathing about this racism masquerading as namby-pamby wokery.

Writers should rebel against this orthographic vandalism. Joining forces, they should tell publishers and editors that they would refuse to have their books, articles or essays published with such affronts to cultural and intellectual decency.

People who take pen to paper or put fingers on computer keys have the duty of acting as guardians of our language, and hence of our civilisation. “Vandalism shall not pass” ought to be written on all manuscripts, not just those submitted by conservative writers.

Any writer who acquiesces to grammatical and orthographic vandalism becomes its accomplice. He should be drummed out of the profession and, if he treats ‘black’ and ‘white’ differently, charged with fomenting racial hatred.