Steve Sailer writes:
In Griffith’s retelling of 1865, the assassination of the merciful Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth unleashes the most vengeful elements among the Northern Republicans who attempt to control the South using illiterate black voters. Political power encourages black sexual self-confidence. In the single most hated scene in Birth of a Nation, an ardent freedman chases a beautiful white woman up a mountain until she leaps to her death.
This is almost universally denounced as embodying the myth of the black rapist. In researching this article, I didn’t find a single source who dared to imagine that allegations of interracial rape during Reconstruction weren’t wholly made up. You might think that somebody would cite the Law of Large Numbers as suggesting that it’s not entirely impossible there was some bit of factual basis to all this, but that would be dangerously heretical today. (…)
The civil rights era triumphantly followed, but then something unexpected happened: an outburst of black rapine straight out of Birth of a Nation. Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver summed up his racial motivations in the 1968 bestseller Soul on Ice, which was on the required reading list at my high school in the mid-1970s…
ALSO over at Taki’s, my column making fun of Protestants now has over 500 comments.
