It’s should come as no surprise, given that the Southern Poverty Law Center has long since slid beyond its original mission, much as it ousted its founder, Morris Dees, who got old and didn’t change with the times. But it’s still quite jarring to learn that the SPLC has decided that it’s not even going to pretend to be a resource on hate groups, but only the “bad” hate groups.
In pursuit of a more accurate and more just hate map, the Intelligence Project (IP) has committed to collapsing the Black Separatist listing. We will still monitor these groups, but we will be transferring them to hate ideologies, including antisemitism, that better describe the harm their rhetoric inflicts.
Huh?
The Black Separatist listing created a color line bias, separating hate and extremism by race and granting the appearance of a false equivalency of equal hate on both sides. But the hate is not equal. Black separatism was born out of valid anger against very real historical and systemic oppression.
My boldface, because this may be the most astoundingly idiotic thing possible, even from the SPLC. Black hate is good hate. Black hate is valid hate. The SPLC has now made it official (as far as they’re concerned): Hate is fine if it’s the right hate. What makes it good hate?
SPLC was founded to fight against institutionalized racism. Part of that fight is doing the internal work of anti-racism. While these groups can be virulently anti-white, this prejudice does not represent the same threat as white supremacy in America. By making this distinction, IP is hoping to help dispel any misinterpretations of our understanding of how racism functions in American society. In our endeavor for racial justice and equity, it is imperative that we adopt an understanding of racism grounded in nuance and the realities of racial power dynamics. Racism in America is historical, systemic and structural.
Some might be of the view that “virulently anti-white” is still virulently racist, because it’s virulently racist, but not the SPLC. To anyone who rejects racism as a matter of principle, this might make no sense, but then, you weren’t schooled in the ideology of critical race theory, which explains why racism by the historically oppressed permeates every aspect of existence and is justifiable racism, such that it isn’t even racism even though it may be virulently racist.
If you don’t understand this, you’re just not woke enough.
That some organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center has lost the tune of its mission and allowed itself to be “reinvented” by the unduly passionate is, in itself, of no consequence. If it wants to frolic in the muck of CRT, so what? It’s allowed. It’s entitled to believe any damn thing it wants to believe, irrational or not.
But like other organizations that have been taken over by their most progressive minds, and rewarded by oodles of money from their fellow travelers for doing so, the SPLC stands atop a hard fought legacy of legitimacy. It may not be an official resource for hate groups and individuals, but years of effort have made it the “go-to” source for the media and government to ascertain who is hateful and evil. It joins other groups, like the ACLU and the ABA, who inexplicably maintain credibility based on things they did decades, generations, ago, and have since forfeited.
Like the ACLU, whom journalists turn to in order to report on the “civil liberties take,” or the ABA to whom they call when they want an official take on law, the SPLC provides attained credibility to its pronouncements. If they call a group or person hateful, it’s gospel. At the same time, if they say a “virulently racist” group isn’t hateful, then poof, it’s cleansed of sin as far as pretty much any mainstream journalist in America. That’s the role the SPLC has played over the years and will continue to play, even though it’s no longer the SPLC that earned its credibility, and has instead morphed into an SPLC that will abused its hard-earned cred to wield as a weapon for, or against, those who further its ideology.
Every time the ACLU, the ABA, and now the SPLC, is proffered as a credible, perhaps even unimpeachable, source in the media, it reinforces the legacy belief that these are organizations that can be trusted and whose word, whose conclusions, are beyond dispute in the minds of the public. The people running these shows are no doubt aware of this, and use it to their benefit. Unlike the ACLU and SPLC, the ABA suffers a different problem, since its members, lawyers, have fled it in droves and only non-lawyers believe it’s anything but a bankrupt joke. But then, of the three, the ABA is the least influential, only involved in law school accreditation, model rules and federal judicial qualifications, and not even Joe Biden cares what they have to say about his nominees.
The SPLC has not been without controversy over the past few years, demonstrating its clear ideological tilt, devolving to calling people Nazis when it became the hip descriptor for anyone to the right of Mother Teresa and basically concluding that anyone or group that failed to share its bent was hateful and discriminatory. Are there issues or problems with a particular identitarian position? Reasonable people might think so, and the SPLC might conclude you’re a hatemonger if it prefers the identity you question over yours.
To call on reporters to stop using the SPLC as a credible source for hate groups based upon its express decision to forfeit credibility for the cause is too much to expect. Reporters don’t know any better, don’t have the time or will to find out and, frankly, are likely to share the SPLC’s ideological bias. And, of course, the public only knows that it’s told. While the SPLC should never have been accepted as the indisputable arbiter of good and evil groups, as its determinations never reflected more than its own views, it at least demonstrated some degree of ideological humility in the past. That legacy is now dead, yet the SPLC will continue to feed off it and use its reputation to further its cause rather than be an honest broker.
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