Vanderbilt Professor Carol Swain
Monday's edition of National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation, titled "Is Right-Wing Extremism on the Rise?," featured a segment with Carol Swain, a professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University. Swain was the subject of "A Woman Apart," a 2008 Scene cover story by P.J. Tobia that explored her unusual journey from growing up poor and black to becoming a respected academic and a conservative pundit. In her 2002 book The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration, Swain argues that affirmative action did little to help blacks, and more importantly, helped to swell the ranks of white nationalism groups. For a woman who has no doubt felt the sting of racism from many angles, she is surprisingly sympathetic to the sentiments of white people who fear becoming the minority. In fact, in her interview with Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan, she almost excuses the nut cases responsible for the shooting at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and the murder of abortion doctor George Tiller, and seems to imply that they are revolutionaries of a sort. And who's to blame? Why the left, of course!
CONAN: And when we see a series of incidents, the murder of Dr. Tiller in Wichita, the shootings last week at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, obviously unconnected with each other, are they products of the same phenomenon? Ms. SWAIN: Well, we've always had individuals in this country that were revolutionaries. We look at how the nation was founded. And so, there are people out there that take action. And I believe that there are grievances in this country that many white Americans are fearful about the future. They don't know, you know, what the future holds for them. They've always been in the majority. I believe the demographic changes, the concerns about immigration, the perceived unfairness of affirmative action, fears about minority crime, all of these things feed into that language of identity politics that comes from...pretty much from the left. It also feeds and fuels the right and...it justifies and gives a language for white people to organize. And part of what I discuss in my book The New White Nationalism in America, is how the white nationalists, the ones that I fear that could make inroads into the mainstream population, they don't talk overtly about violence. They use social science statistics to make their case that white people...have something to fear from people of color, that white people need to organize, that the government is not protecting the rights of white people.
After the jump, see how Prof. Swain's musings on "The New White Nationalism" seem to defend and justify the movement's intolerant, xenophobic leanings, while at times assuming a rather passive-aggressive tone toward Barack Obama:
