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Harvard University Press Defames American Renaissance
New book is riddled with falsehoods.
Salon.com has just published an article called “America’s virulent racists: The sick ideas and perverted “science” of the American Renaissance Foundation.” It is an excerpt from a book called The Myth of Race, written by Professor Robert Sussman of Washington University and published this year by Harvard University Press. It is also the most sloppy, tendentious, deceitful piece of writing I have seen in a long time. The language alone should raise doubts about the author’s objectivity. He describes me, my work, and associates as “shockingly ugly,” “hateful, dangerous, ancient, and outdated,” “virulently racist,” not to mention “neo-Nazi” and “white supremacist.”
This kind of hysterical name-calling is one thing; outright fabrication is another. People who want to call AR “shockingly ugly” or “virulently racist” find that what it actually says doesn’t come anywhere near justifying their breathless talk, so they start twisting and fabricating. Prof. Sussman is following directly in the footsteps of Dinesh D’Souza.
Some of Professor Sussman’s nonsense is easily exposed. However, the Salon excerpt gives no sources, so even though the entire body of work of American Renaissance is archived online, it is hard to track down exactly what I might have written that could be the basis for this claim, for example: “He [Taylor] complains that civil rights laws prohibiting racial discrimination have turned ‘common sense’ into a ‘crime.’ ” One- or two-word “quotations” are always suspect.
We will alert Salon.com and Harvard University Press to Prof. Sussman’s reckless disregard for the truth and ask for a retraction and an apology–short of which we will consider legal action.
I have gone through Prof. Sussman’s article and have highlighted–in order of appearance–only the most prominent outright errors, falsehoods, and distortions, as follows ...
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