“Carol Swain is an apologist for white supremacists.” That was the jarring headline of a front-page article that greeted Dr. Swain in her local paper on October 17, 2009. The headline was a quote from Mark Potok, a top spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, the self-anointed “watchdog” that presumes to be the preeminent monitor of “hate groups and racial extremists throughout the United States.”Undoubtedly, Professor Swain was not the only one shocked by the SPLC allegation; many of her academic peers and students, as well as the many fans of her books and published columns, would have considered her to be one of the last persons to fall under such loathsome accusations. In fact, on the surface, she would appear to be a natural ally of the SPLC, since she is a certified academic expert on the subject of white nationalism and racism in the United States. Her two books on the subject — The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration (2004) and Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America (2003), both published by Cambridge University Press — were critically acclaimed.
Dr. Carol M. Swain is a professor of political science and law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2007, she was appointed to the Tennessee Advisory Committee of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. In 2008, the U.S. Senate confirmed her nomination to the National Council on the Humanities, which is the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Swain also happens to be black, which, in itself, makes her an odd choice, to say the least, for Potok’s claim of being “an apologist for white supremacists.”
In fact, Carol Swain would seem to be the perfect poster child for the kind of racial harmony and tolerance the SPLC claims to be aiming at. Moreover, her life is a “bootstrap” success story that serves as inspiration to many aspiring black scholars. Dr. Swain relates this biographical information:
I am one of 12 children raised in rural poverty by parents who had little education. Our poverty was so great that one by one all 12 of us dropped out of school at around the 8th or 9th grade. Three of us earned high school equivalencies. I dropped out of school after completing the 8th grade, married at 16, and had three children before becoming the first in my family to reach college.
She not only “reached” college, she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, while also making the National Dean’s List and membership in the Phi Beta Kappa and Alpha Chi national academic honor societies. She went on to receive her master’s degree in political science at Virginia Polytechnical, her Ph.D. in poli-sci from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a master’s degree in law from Yale Law School.Her childhood, curriculum vita, professional oeuvre, and ethnicity certainly don’t fit the profile of the typical “apologist for white supremacy.” What is going on here?
Derided for Dissenting
According to Professor Swain, it’s fairly simple: She is being smeared as “payback” for her beliefs regarding immigration and illegal aliens, as well as her criticism of the SPLC’s methods, especially its virulent attacks on former CNN news anchor Lou Dobbs, which she describes as shameless vilification.
In a March 2010 panel discussion entitled “Immigration and the SPLC” at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), Swain stated her belief that Potok’s attack on her “was really about immigration.”
“I had edited a book in 2007 called Debating Immigration, in which I tried to bring diverse voices into the conversation,” she explained. One of those was the voice of Peter Brimelow, a British-American immigrant, former financial writer for Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal, and currently the editor of Vdare.com, a website that opposes our ongoing open-borders policies and amnesty for illegal aliens. For advocating enforcement of our immigration laws, Brimelow and Vdare were added to the SPLC’s list of “haters,” alongside Ku Kluxers and Aryan skinheads. Swain says she also wanted to include in her book “the voice of Christians that were not open-borders Christians, that believe that the state has a right to enforce the laws of the land, and that we can expect immigrants — people who come here illegally — to obey the laws — and [that we] are a nation of laws and not a nation of just total chaos.”
“Well, because of that book, which has been well received, I think they wanted to shut my voice down on the immigration issue,” said Swain.
But it was not only her immigration views that stirred the SPLC’s wrath. She noted at the CIS panel discussion at the National Press Club:
The Southern Poverty Law Center tries to silence people on a range of issues. It’s not just immigration. It’s also people that are pro-life; it’s people that are concerned about racial preferences, people that are concerned about same-sex marriages, gun control, immigration and patriots.
She made the same point in her response to the Tennessean article that launched the SPLC smear. “Today, conservatives and Christians (of which I am both) are targeted by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center that regularly seek to discredit us,” she wrote. “What is happening is a bold attack on free speech and the inner workings of the Democratic process. We must not let this continue.”Do her charges hold? Is the SPLC “shutting down free speech in a very dangerous way,” specifically targeting “conservatives and Christians” and maliciously smearing them with the “racist,” “bigot,” “extremist,” “hater,” “anti-Semite” — and even “terrorist” — labels? These charges are fairly easy to verify; simply go to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s website (www.splcenter.org), pick up one of its Intelligence Reports, or catch one of its spokespersons on CNN, NPR, CBS, or MSNBC. One will discover that Dr. Swain is far from being the only unlikely suspect to be viciously traduced with one or more of the SPLC’s hate labels.
Crucifying Christians
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