Racism and the Left

Historian Jonathan Bean has a great post at Liberty & Power chastising Rush Limbaugh for playing defense against false charges of racism instead of going on the offense against liberal fairy tales:

Here is the offense: those "angels of history" on the Left—labor unions, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and LBJ—committed some of the worst racist actions in our history. The Left ignores (or "contextualizes") Wilson's segregation of the federal government, LBJ's declaration that an anti-lynching bill was worse than lynching itself, or FDR's defense of quotas to keep Jews from overwhelming Harvard (where he sat on the Board of Trustees). FDR also wrote that interracial "mingling" (marriage) produced "horrific results." As president, FDR blocked Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and interned Japanese Americans during World War II. Not surprising.

It is time for so-called liberals to give up the race hustle and learn their history. In so doing, they may discover some heroes of the classic liberal sort—neither Left nor Right—but committed to racial freedom and equality.

Read the whole thing here. I discuss Bean's superb book Race & Liberty in America here and the left's history of racist violence here.