I was deeply disturbed most of yesterday afternoon and evening, although the day started out well enough. But then, as I was doing a little Internet research on Alexis Carrel, one of the pioneers of open heart surgery, a fervent proponent of eugenics, and author of Man, The Unknown, Carrel’s astounding racism, bigotry and white supremacy (all quite common at the time Man, the Unknown was published in 1935) led me to stumble across a site called American Renaissance.
I’m not going to link to this site. I refuse. It’s easy enough to find, if you want to find it. For myself, I vacillate between wishing I had never stumbled across it and telling myself knowledge is power.
The site purports to be a forum for intelligent, fair and balanced discussion about race—yet it undermines these claims and reveals its true intent by posting news stories on racial issues and opening them up for comments from every sort of despicable extremist you can imagine.
Last week, as I'm sure you heard, a Hmong immigrant from St. Paul, Minneosta killed six people in Wisconsin, during a hunting altercation. The minute it happened, I shuddered to think how this would immediately be grasped upon by racists as fuel for increased hatred. If one individual of another race snaps and harms a white American, extremists automatically blame the entire race. (When a white American harms other white Americans, then what do they do? They don’t post these sorts of news stories, of course, so I don’t know what they do, although I would imagine they’d blame the stress of having to live in a multi-cultural society.)
As I said, my mind was profoundly disturbed. I knew what some people were thinking, but to see it expressed so graphically still shook me to the core.
While I do feel all racial groups have the right to celebrate who they are and to feel proud of their heritage, traditions, customs, and values, extremists always manage to to work hatred and fear into the equation. In their case, I have to hope that what Pearl S. Buck says is true: that freedom of speech is just a safety valve, that as long as they can spew their venom anonymously on hate boards, from the comfort of their couches, they will not act.
One can never rest on the advances in human & civil rights made by past generations. Let your guard down for a minute and all the old evils want to creep back in. It has seemed, in my lifetime, almost taboo to speak of the subject of race, and yet, obviously, we cannot ignore it. I know that Teilhard de Chardin has said some interesting and valuable things about the subject—I just don’t know what those things are; now my curiosity is piqued and I will have to find out. So goes the reading.
9:53:47 AM 
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