"Otherwise"?

     Since founder William F. Buckley Jr's death National Review has been like a prep school where the headmaster and staff all suddenly vanished and the kids are embarked on a production of Dead Poets' Society Meets Lord of the Flies.
     One of the head loons has been one John Derbyshire, who peddles opinions too outre' even for his own name at The Secular Right under the pseudonym Bradlaugh.
     Now, it seems, even NR has had enough of The Derb. As Amy Davidson reports:
          Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, announced over the weekend that he was ending the magazine’s association with John Derbyshire because of a post he published in Taki’s Magazine (an online publication that promises “Cocktails, Countesses & Mental Caviar”). Lowry said that the column, “The Talk: Non-Black Version,” was “nasty and indefensible.” Given its conceit—Derbyshire explaining to his children that black people are generally dumber than they are and dangerous and should, on the whole, be avoided—it might also be described as racist. (Josh Barro, at Forbes.com, called it “kind of unbelievably racist.”) In firing “Derb,” Lowry directed readers to his “delightful first novel” but said, in effect, that “Derb” had become bad for the NR brand:

We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation.

          Wasn’t Lowry at the party where Derbyshire “danced around the line”—hosting it, in fact? Lowry called the column “outlandish,” as if the ideas, as opposed to their expression, were foreign to the National Review. Derbyshire years ago called himself a “mild and tolerant” racist; “tolerated” seems like the right modifier. (See the various compendia that have been assembled in the past few days.) What was apparently important was not how mild he was but how mild-mannered he could present himself as being; the breach now, in terms of the National Review, may in the end be more one of politesse than politics. The column is a polyhedron of unpleasantness, with almost every angle except one that might give Lowry an out. There is the open mocking of attempts at some sort of dialogue in the wake of Trayvon Martin’s killing; the snide disparagement of black intelligence and accomplishment; and pieces of advice—“Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway”—that aspire to intellectual bluntness, but instead are brutal, crude, and, more than either of those, wrong.

          And there is an utterly degraded view not only of citizenship but of friendship. For Derbyshire, there is an us and them in America, and that divide is based on race. There is not even a pretense that some of his readers might be black. Addressing the column to his children doesn’t make this better, but worse; it is a look at the mechanics behind the persistence of a racial divide. (He notes, “Your own ancestry is mixed north-European and northeast-Asian, but blacks will take you to be white.” What he means by “take you to be white” is another minor puzzle.)
          Derbyshire tells his children that they will have “encounters with black Americans”—encounters, not relationships, or not uncompromised ones. There are caveats about noticing individual qualities, and then blanket injunctions like this:

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

     And it goes on. Remember, NR's the kind of place where they fired the founder's son for not being ideologically pure enough- four years ago. It says a lot that they kept on the racist spew of Derbyshire four more years- or, perhaps, until they found rattling the stick in that particular swill bucket just isn't the draw it once was.