Angry in the Great White North

From an interview with Ward Churchill:

The same holds true for the audience to which the "news" stories and op-ed pieces are pitched, and with whom they resonate. How do I know? Well, I've got a pile of about 4,000 pieces of hate mail at this point, and maybe 50 of them appear to be from people of color. The trend holds when you look at the scores of letters to the editor reviling me in the Denver area press during February and March. Every one of them was written by a white guy or gal. Such letters by people of color as were actually printed -- and there weren't many -- were entirely supportive.

Callers on the radio talk shows? Same thing. I've got a random sample of tapes and CDs people recorded for me over a 60-day period. I've not yet done a precise computation, but my preliminary estimate is that, no matter whose program or what time of day, well over 90% of all call-in "guests" were white, and that although not all white callers were hostile to me, all hostile callers -- and that's about 85% of the total sample -- were. Of the relatively few people of color who actually made it on the air, all were supportive, or tried to be; they were routinely shouted down or simply disconnected by the Three Stooges of Clear Channel -- Caplis, Silverman and Peter Boyles -- flaming white guys, one and all.

How can he tell the colour of the person who wrote the letter or is on the phone? I mean, I don't start my letters with "Hi, I'm a white guy".

I've called in to CFRB on several occassions, and not once was my race ever brought into question.

The sound of their voice? People with good diction are white, people with accents and who say "aks" instead of "ask" are coloured? Does the same go for grammar in written letters?

Or maybe it boil down to this: by Ward Churchill's reckoning, only white people, the little Eichmanns, have any reason to hate him. People of colour would, by default, support him. Why? Because all white people think the same way, and all coloured people think a different way. What he says irritates white people and supports people of colour. The rest is simple logic for a man with a PhD master's degree.

Good thing Ward Churchill is here to stand up to racist thinking!