The End of Racism



The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society is a 1995 highly racist book by conservative commentator Dinesh D'Souza where he analyzes racial relations in the United States and, in the process, basically comes to the conclusion that racism is over, African Americans are complaining about nothing, and we should all just pretend that race doesn't exist and it will magically go away.

Slavery Apologetics
At one point, D'Souza declares, "The American slave was treated like property, which is to say, pretty well." However, this was after several pages of apologetics for slavery on D'Souza's part, both as an institution and on a personal level.

D'Souza, by his own admission, based many of his conclusions off of Robert Fogel's and Stanley Engerman's 1974 book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Even ignoring the fact that said work is considered "at least to be severely flawed and possibly not even worth further attention by serious scholars" according to one article in The New York Review of Books the following year, D'Souza still badly mangles the already contentious book into something unrecognizable. To give just one example, D'Souza claims the book proves that "whippings were infrequent," but the section of Time on the Cross regarding whipping specifically begins by noting "Reliable data on the frequency of whipping is extremely sparse" before noting that one plantation with two hundred slaves saw "a total of 160 whippings." In fact, the book makes the point that whippings as a punishment were actually fairly mundane during that time, writing that "It must be remembered that through the centuries whipping was considered a fully acceptable form of punishment, not merely for criminals but also for honest men or women who in some way shirked their duties."

D'Souza wrote that "Reading Time on the Cross by itself, slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Fredrick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape it." (Notice his mention of runaways, in spite of him dismissing the idea that slaves were attempting to escape from bondage one paragraph before.) However, one has to wonder if he has read this book, given that he goes on to portray slaves as lazy, writing about how slaves would engage in "a series of measures to avoid, postpone, and minimize work." Meanwhile, the book he cites specifically notes as one of its main conclusions that "The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart."

D'Souza goes on to write about the "widely different personalities [slaves developed] on the plantations: the playful Sambo, the sullen 'field nigger,' the dependable Mammy, the sly and inscrutable trickster."

How D'Souza Had Legal Action Taken Against Him For Lying About A Racist
Just before the publication of this book, an article in The Washington Post by D'Souza adapted one of its chapters where he criticized certain conservatives whom he viewed as racist, specifically including incredibly racist quotes from Samuel Francis, which led to Francis being fired from The Washington Times. However, those who were actually at the conference say that D'Souza consistently lied about what had occurred. Lawrence Auster said that D'Souza lied about hearing racial slurs in causal conversations, used David Duke showing up against the wishes of the convention as evidence of an alliance between the two, and used racist slogans from organizations that have nothing to do with American Renaissance as evidence of the racism of the group.

When Jared Taylor, the white nationalist writer for American Renaissance, threatened legal action against both Free Press and D'Souza for making several dishonest statements against him, Free Press was forced to remove much of the chapter and trash the entire first printing along with it.