https://www.unz.com/article/william-pierce-and-me-on-racism/

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Pierce sees the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and ‘60s as another important element in the development of the “whites-as-bad-guys” perception that has taken hold. During those years, the media showed us images of inoffensive blacks marching and protesting amid what looked to be white hooligans who were screaming at them, assaulting them, and in some instances killing them. After scores of television clips, news stories, and commentaries that painted this picture, resistance to what the civil rights activists wanted became equated in most people’s minds with KKK types and beefy Southern sheriffs and their German shepherds and water hoses. It is understandable that most white people came to sympathize strongly with the dignified demonstrators and their cause and to be repulsed by their boorish and brutal white attackers and what we were told they represented.

Indeed, there were white working-class people who saw their way of life threatened and acted in an undignified and intemperate and violent way. The media were quick to record it and place it in a context—within a story line—that appealed to what Pierce calls the innate white sense of propriety and fairness. The media transmitted these carefully selected scenes of white resistance to racial integration along with particular interpretations of what was happening over and over and over again. The white people who saw on their television screens and read about what their own people were doing were embarrassed by it and felt guilty over it. The media made the whole idea of resistance to racial integration shame- and guilt-inducing to most white people.

The media paired up names, labels, for what whites were seeing and hearing and reading and feeling during the civil rights revolution: racism, and racist. The media associated racism with white resistance to the civil rights organizations. Again and again and again, they paired up white resistance to a single idea/explanation—racism. Again and again and again, the media paired the image of the roughneck white opponent of civil rights being portrayed on the screen or in print with the label/identity of racist.

After a time, the words themselves—“racism,” “racist”—came to evoke pangs of revulsion and guilt on their own, just as the sound of a dinner bell resulted in Pavlov’s dogs salivating. The media had created a conditioned response to the word racism. Now, all anybody has to do to get whites to turn pale, become apologetic, and give in is call them racist. People don’t have to argue the facts with whites; all they have to do is push the right emotional button. If they ring the “racist bell,” whites—even the most rugged and proudest of whites—will bow their heads and put their tails between their legs and let people have their way with them.

The media could have worked the conditioning the opposite way if they had wanted to by associating different things with white resistance to the civil rights movement. They could have presented interviews with middle-class whites—professional people, academics, artists and writers, philosophers—who believed in racial and cultural integrity and pointed out the negative impact on countries like Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Portugal when the races were mixed together. The media could have shown what happened to white schools and neighborhoods after an infusion of blacks—the decay and disorder and crime. They could have interviewed white women raped by blacks. They could have presented case studies of white girls who mated with black boys they met in school and shown us their mixed-race children and let us see how we really felt about that. But they didn’t do that. That wasn’t consistent with the program.

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In a Free Speech [a periodical Pierce published] article entitled “The Importance of Courage,” Pierce relates how he has dealt with his own fears around being called a racist.

I’m sorry to say that I’ve seen that same sort of timidity in myself. When interviewers have asked me whether or not I am a racist, I have responded by asking, “Well, what do you mean by the word ‘racist’?” I’ve tried to wriggle out of giving a direct answer to the question. I have resolved not to try to wriggle away from saying exactly what I believe when someone asks me whether or not I am a racist because it’s pretty clear what the interviewers have in mind when they ask me whether or not I am a racist. These days anyone is a racist who refuses to deny the abundantly clear evidence that there are inherited differences in behavior, intelligence, and attitudes. A racist is any white person who prefers to live among other whites instead of among non-whites and prefers to send his children to white schools. A racist is any white person who feels a sense of identity with, a sense of belonging to, his own tribe, his own people, his own race, and who shows an interest in his race’s history, heroes, culture, and folkways. A racist is a white person who finds the members of his own race more attractive physically than members of other races and who is instinctively repulsed by the idea of racial intermarriage or by the sight of a white person intimately involved with a non-white. A racist is a white person who is disgusted with the multiracial cesspool that America is becoming. . . . Yes, I’m a racist.