Daniel J. Flynn on America's Racist Left

Daniel Flynn has a brilliant article over at National Review, America's Racist LeftInstead of merely ignoring the problems of African Americans, socialists and progressives actively contributed to them.

“There can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race,” Victor Berger, long the Socialist Party’s lone congressman, contended. “You know that capitalism never examines the color of the skin when it buys labor power,” the party’s national committeeman from Texas complained. When socialists acknowledged racial discrimination, they paternalistically counseled black Americans to abandon their selfish “personal” struggle for the “universal” struggle of the class war, which, when won, would magically solve all problems.


Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger spoke at a 1926 Ku Klux Klan rally, used the “n” word in reference to blacks, and deemed Aboriginal Australians “the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development.” “The Jewish people and Italian families,” she testified to the New York legislature, “who are filling the insane asylums, who are filling the hospitals and filling our feeble-minded institutions, these are the ones the tax payers have to pay for the upkeep of, and they are increasing the budget of the State, the enormous expense of the State is increasing because of the multiplication of the unfit in this country and in the State.”