III: Foundation-Funded Racism: Jeremiah Wright and Michelle 105will only disrupt a multicultural society and lead to backlash. However, special treatment can be
provided to those who have been exploited or denied opportunities if solutions are predicated on
class lines, precisely because all religious, ethnic, and religious groups have a depressed class who
would benefit.” The class-based strategy is one that would tend to unite all of the present
squabbling and contending oppressed groupings of American society in a united front against their
common oppressor, as in the Wall Street financier class and their minions. The Ford Foundation,
the left CIA, and the domestic counterinsurgency apparatus have always been mobilized to head off
precisely this possibility. Racial quotas were introduced by President Richard Nixon and his
secretary of labor George Schultz, who used a quota system called the Philadelphia plan to pit black
unemployed against white construction workers, to the detriment of both and to the greater glory of
the bosses. Support for racial quotas came from such black activists as Ford Foundation operative
Floyd McKissick of the Congress of Racial Equality, CIA provocateur Stokely Carmichael of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the famous FBI provocateur H. Rap Brown, and
James Forman. All of these figures performed the precious service of giving black nationalist
radical and left cover to what was inherently a divide-and-conquer strategy invented by the ruling
class for the purpose of playing one group in the population off against another. Racial preferences
and quotas boiled down to a system of somewhat enhanced tokenism, having as an additional
purpose the recruitment of the most active and intelligent elements of the oppressed groups as
privileged tools of the ruling class, whose characteristic outlook and methods they assimilate and
internalize to a large degree as their own.
AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IMPOSED BY NIXON AND SHULTZ
Most left liberals naively assume that affirmative action is the only conceivable approach to the
race problem, despite the fact that it has failed over 40 years to improve the poverty of the black
inner city. Most people do not know that affirmative action was born as a counterinsurgency
strategy devised by none other than Richard Milhous Nixon and his retainers, most notably the
current boss of the neocon establishment, George Shultz. Here are some considerations which I
advanced a decade ago in my Surviving the Cataclysm.
Michael Lind correctly notes that post-1968 multiculturalism represents a demagogic and
successful form of tokenism applied as a counterinsurgency strategy; for Lind, “identity politics
is merely America’s version of the oldest oligarchic trick in the book: divide and rule.” (Lind,
The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution, 141)
The atrophy of class analysis in modern America is partly the fault of the 1960s New Left, which
was much more interested in race and gender than in class. The New Left was interested in
community control for the black community, which happened to be the main domestic
counterinsurgency tactic of the Sargent Shriver Office of Economic Opportunity and the Ford
Foundation. This is the classic divide-and-conquer approach to ethnic groups which has been
assumed by imperial ruling classes from time immemorial, from the Ottoman milliyet-bachi (or
ethnark) system to the British Raj in India to the Soviet autonomous republics set up by Stalin.MARSHALL PLAN FOR THE CITIES, OR RACIAL QUOTAS?
The basic problems of black ghetto victims by 1970 (or 1997) were in reality largely economic —
jobs, wages, health care, education, mass transit, housing, and related issues. The same was true of
the black rural poor. To even begin to address these problems would have required a domestic
Marshall Plan, a second New Deal on a vast scale. The post-1957 stagnation of productive