[Bret L]

Radical Clique:
From the Weather Underground to the White House
Christopher Donovan

Race Course: Against White Supremacy
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn
New York: Random House, 2009


"Is a revolutionary’s work ever done? Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn can rest easy: theirs is.

The aspiring black politician they hosted at their Hyde Park home,
Barack Obama, is now the president of the United States. The anti-
white invective that animated their terrorist acts in the 1960s is now
the stuff of staid school board pronouncements, ad campaigns of
Fortune 500 companies, and the musings of a Republican candidate for
president. Their locked-in-the-tissues conviction that the very
existence of white people is the primary explanation for human
suffering is widely accepted.

Today, the wily Ayers and his wife sit pretty atop American society:
he, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago
whose traveling lectures find him hailed in the press as an “anti-war
activist” rather than a terrorist, and who enjoys the fawning
attention of the New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon; she, an
adjunct professor at Northwestern, one of the most prestigious law
schools in the nation, and a former employee of white-shoe law firm
Sidley Austin — despite apparently having never been admitted to the
bar. (A hiring partner was friends with Bill Ayers’ father, Thomas
Ayers, once a CEO of Commonwealth Edison in Chicago. Sidley Austin
also employed Michelle Obama as an associate and Barack Obama as a
summer associate.)

Bill Ayers, in fact, has been lavished with praise by none other than
the Southern Poverty Law Center. In a 1998 edition of its magazine,
Teaching Tolerance, he is described as a “civil rights organizer,
radical anti-Vietnam War activist, teacher and author.” Ayers, the
SPLC tells us, “has developed a rich vision of teaching that
interweaves passion, responsibility and self-reflection.”

Talk about white privilege. Ayers and Dohrn — themselves white —
committed a slew of criminal acts on the way to persuading most of
America that whites are something worse than the devil, but escaped
unharmed. Only the occasional pesky journalist from Fox News bothers
them now, with Ayers responding by threatening to call the police
(apparently the racist pigs are sometimes useful).

In their co-written memoir-cum-screed, Race Course: Against White
Supremacy, they take a deep bow for their accomplishments, and lay out
for all to see just how shallow a revolution can be.

Publisher “Haki R. Madhubuti” of the Third World Press (born Don Lee)
tells readers in an introductory note that the book’s release was
delayed until after the presidential election for strategic reasons.
Would it have mattered? Obama fielded a question or two about Ayers,
but as VDare.com’s Steve Sailer observes, the press astoundingly never
bothered to read Obama’s own autobiography, Dreams From My Father: A
Story of Race and Inheritance. There’s no reason to think the
publication of this book would have invited much scrutiny from a press
corps determined to see him elected.

In any event, the book reveals nothing scandalous by today’s
standards. It’s peppered with aggressive quotes from Malcolm X (”. . .
the white man. He’s an enemy to all of us. I know some of you think
that some of them aren’t enemies. Time will tell.”) but describes the
bombings of the Weather Underground as more of creative writing
exercise for gifted suburban students than violent terrorism (”We
fought back, we dreamed out loud.”) Should we laugh or cry?


Anyone hoping for some juicy details about a young Bill Ayers sweating
out a bus ride through Chicago with a bomb under his jacket will be
disappointed (Ayers wrote a previous book called Fugitive Days about
his time on the run from the law, which was described by Slate writer
Timothy Noah as “self-indulgent and morally clueless . . . Ayers
periodically expresses mild regret for his crimes, in tones
reminiscent of a middle-aged insurance executive who wishes he hadn’t
gotten drunk quite so often at his college fraternity.”)

Ayers and Dohrn announce in the introduction to Race Course that their
project is part memoir, part defense of their actions, and partly “to
inflame the debate about white power and privilege . . . and to
participate in a flash course about some of the ways in which every
one of our current crises feeds on and intersects with racism.”

On this last front, they do not perform particularly well. They never
go beyond the standard approach of declaring “white racism”
responsible for America’s, and the world’s, ills, coupled with the
usual statistics. One of the advantages of being the victor in a
culture war is that you need not debate too vigorously. They’re
compelled at one point to include a denial of race as biological
reality: “The ’science of race’ is by now a thoroughly discredited
myth,” they say, and quote one Robert Pollack (described as a
dissenting colleague of the “racist” James Watson) as saying that “the
genes that regulate the amount of melanin beneath the skin are simply
not expressed in the brain. . . . The social responses to race are
real, race is not. . . . Race is a choice.” (Should someone have told
Frank Ricci?)


How the anti-white left juxtaposes “race does not exist” with a belief
that “racism” is the central explanation for human suffering has
always puzzled me, though obviously, anti-whitism at its core isn’t
conflicted on this point at all: there’s clearly a bad race, whites,
and they must be eliminated. But presented with the exhilarating
prospect of a burning a city to the ground, bombing the Pentagon or
clandestine meetings with the Black Panthers, most would-be radical
whites of the 1960s probably didn’t bother thinking that one all the
way through. They just knew mommy and daddy would sure be shocked.

It’s interesting to consider where Ayers and Dohrn fall on this
spectrum of awareness and sincerity (Dohrn, apparently, has a Jewish
father and white gentile mother, and her birth name was “Ohrnstein.”)
Ayers, meanwhile, tells readers that early on, as a “community
organizer” in Cleveland, “whites didn’t feel in any way like ‘my own
people.’” But not too interesting. Ayers and Dohrn basically come off
as pot-addled airheads, leaning heavily on abstract cries of “freedom”
and “liberation” and “justice” without much compelling narrative about
life experiences that transformed their thinking or why they connived
violence.

Ayers writes that after a short stint in jail for disrupting the draft
board in Ann Arbor, he went to work for a school that “stood against
racism and segregation, authoritarianism and cynicism, violence and
war, irrelevance and fatalism and violence.” No word on whether any of
the school’s children knew what “fatalism” was, or whether any of its
graduates have managed to stamp out “irrelevance.”

Ayers and Dohrn are world-class name-droppers, sounding at times as if
they’re trying to get the heads of a black congregation bobbing in
approval of their radical white selves. But we never hear of their own
interactions with these figures. As a memoir, they offer us only
newsreel-style descriptions of Jesse Jackson speeches, riots, the
Attica prison violence, and long lists of organization names like “The
People’s Center for Renewal” or “Resistance in Action.” The scenes
pass by, but Ayers and Dohrn aren’t in them. In a chapter titled “Born
Into War,” for instance, they tell us that “We were both born into
war, launched into life under the leaden shadow of Pearl Harbor, the
Holocaust, Dresden, Stalingrad, the Blitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Really? More than anyone else who happened to be living on the planet
at the time?

Ayers celebrates himself throughout the book, but rarely details
concrete accomplishments that would have advanced a left-wing agenda.
What might be his manipulation skills in person come through in his
writing: he sidesteps where he was likely influential (the violence)
and centers himself when he was likely a mere an observer (dissolving
white resistance). In the grand scheme of white dispossession, Ayers
and Dohrn might well be near-irrelevant little brats who amused
themselves with explosives while more serious anti-white figures did
the actual heavy lifting. Those memoirs, if ever written honestly,
might be more helpful to us.
Edward O'grady, killed by the Weather Underground in 1981

Edward O'Grady, killed by the Weather Underground in 1981

Ayers alternates chapters (with near-parody titles like “Freedom
Now!,” “Awake!,” and, no joke, “Emancipate Yourselves From Mental
Slavery”) with wife Dohrn, which in turn alternate with unsigned
chapters where the voice is apparently a “we.” The result is
disjointed and confusing. Given the bland tone of the book overall,
though, it probably doesn’t make much difference whether it’s Ayers,
Dohrn, or a mystical brain-meld of the two talking. At times, Ayers
and Dohrn are simply too absurd to read without laughing out loud -
how they decided to name their children, for instance.

But there are flashes of sincerity. The chapter on John Brown, the
violent abolitionist, stood out as one in which Ayers and Dohrn come
closest to justifying violence in the name of a cause. “We were fixed
by John Browns’ revolutionary blood feud with slavery,” they write.
“Self-defense was one thing, but carrying the war to the oppressor and
those who sided with them (pro-slavers are fair game) seemed both
unthinkable and inevitable. Brown refused to permit the physical risks
of resistance, the suffering and dying, to rest solely on the Black
community. We aspired to be like him.”

In a famous letter to the New York Times, coincidentally run on
September 11, 2001, Ayers wrote “I don’t regret setting bombs. . . . I
feel we didn’t do enough. . .” What else did he hope to accomplish?
FBI informant Larry Grathwohl described Ayers and Dohrn as the true
decision-makers of the Weather Underground. In a 1982 documentary
titled No Place to Hide, he described one conversation in which Ayers
contemplated the killing of 25 million “diehard capitalists” in a
Communist takeover of the United States.

This, apparently, is how the adjective “unrepentant” came to be
attached to Ayers’ name. I suppose any radical can appreciate the
willingness to actually do physical acts to further a cause (if not
the acts or the cause themselves), so Ayers and Dohrn deserve some
credit for steering hard away from apologies.

But what comes around goes around, as they say. Perhaps without
realizing it, Ayers and Dohrn played a part in creating an American
society where whites are coming to feel equal and opposite
revolutionary longings."

http://www.toqonline.com/2009/08/radical-clique/