Does James O’Keefe Have A Race Problem?

Posted by | February 3, 2010 14:34 | Filed under: Top Stories


Max Blumenthal at Salon is reporting that James O’Keefe, accused of illegally entering federal property in the Landrieu matter, has an unsavory history when it comes to race. One People’s Project, which monitors hate groups, has a photo of O’Keefe at a 2006 conference on “Race and Conservatism” that featured white nationalists.  O’Keefe’s former backer, the Leadership Institute, withdrew support of the conference.

According to One People’s Project founder Daryle Jenkins, O’Keefe was manning the literature table at the gathering that brought together anti-Semites, professional racists and proponents of Aryanism. OPP covered the event at the time, sending a freelance photographer to document the gathering. Jenkins told me the table was filled with tracts from the white supremacist right, including two pseudo-academic publications that have called blacks and Latinos genetically inferior to whites: American Renaissance and the Occidental Quarterly. The leading speaker was Jared Taylor, founder of the white nationalist group American Renaissance. “We can say for certain that James O’Keefe was at the 2006 meeting with Jared Taylor. He has absolutely no way of denying that,” Jenkins said. O’Keefe’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment on his client’s role in the conference.

O’Keefe’s history isn’t free of racial strife.

By O’Keefe’s own account, his racial troubles became acute when he entered the multicultural atmosphere of Rutgers University’s dormitory system. In an online diary that has since been scrubbed from the Web (but not before being captured on Daily Kos), he wrote that he was forced to live on an all-black dormitory floor after refusing to live with the gay roommate he was initially assigned. O’Keefe claimed his next roommate was “an Indian midget … who smelled like shit.” The roommate left, however, and was replaced by “a greek kid.” The new roommate complained to a residential administrator that O’Keefe had called his neighbors “niggers,” prompting the school to expel him from the dorm. He rejected the accusation as a “complete lie,” writing, “I was lead out of the room crying and screaming at him and my situation, no friends, no one one [sic] to talk to, forced to go in front of a black man, Dean Tolbert, to defend myself and help explain that I did not call anyone any names.”

Click here for reuse options!
Copyright 2010 Liberaland
By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.

Leave a Reply