“We are constantly told that racial diversity is a great source of strength. This is not true. Racial diversity is a source of conflict. When different groups inhabit the same land, what you have is, at best, a constant drain on limited resources to manage the conflict and, at worst, open war. People want to remain with people like themselves, and can only really extend the concept of common humanity, with the equivalent ethical obligations, to those like themselves. This means that human beings have real trouble extending the feelings of decency and kindness to those from another racial group – witness the appalling record of colonialism, of Apartheid, of American slavery and segregation. Who will seriously say that both white America and the black African would not have been far better if slavery had never happened, if black Africans had been left in their native lands? What is truly horrifying about these crimes is that they were committed by otherwise morally normal people. It is just human nature that different groups have trouble identifying with others in a morally sane way. And while you, dear reader, may have that ability, you are most likely in the top tenth of human intelligence. Try selling that to the remaining nine tenths.
Thus it is completely normal to find black and Hispanic attitudes on race that are parallel to those that whites held not so long ago. Racial groups organize for their own interests. There is a natural feeling of kinship among people of the same race, since race is ultimately the extended family to which people belong. Racial groups frown on intermixing, prefer the company of others like them, and want to run their own systems. The only thing that has changed is that whites feel ashamed a expressing views that all races hold. Black Americans are quite happy to be outraged at black women dating white men, white Americans feels the same way, they just do not dare say so.
If there is any hope for harmony it can only be if different races have their own societies which means different nations. Representative democracy can only work when people all discus different ideas and ways of approaching common problems; it cannot work work with different groups all clawing at each other with the motto of ‘My race, right or wrong’. And that means that all whites should stop repressing their racial identity, and organize for their own interest, pushing for a racially homogeneous society in the same way as literally all other groups on the planet organize for such a society.“
If I had Jared Taylor’s job, the above is the case that I would make. Expanded somewhat, it is an summary of his interesting little book White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century (though the man has a certain blind spot – reading the entire book, you would never know that white racial feeling has ever caused any problems for non-whites). The argument has a lot of surface strength, but falls apart when you look a little deeper.
It has to be acknowledged, he amasses an impressive amount of evidence in his book. Here we find the Cherokee tribe voting en mass to expel all of its black members. Here are blacks announcing that the worst black candidate as better than any white. Here are Los Angels textbooks, by and for Hispanics, that refer to the American flag as ‘the enemy flag’. Here are even American Asians forcing apologies from CNN when its anchors describe the Chinese autocracy as ‘thugs’.
All of these are case studies drawn from the United States, and are only relevant there. If Taylor really thinks that there is a natural bond between all whites, I invite him to move to a continental European country and see how well he fits in. As a bonus, I invite him to go and tell Vladimir Putin that he should lay off his fellow whites in the Ukraine. I’d be interested to see how that goes.
For that matter, I should very much like to see some of the black American racialists try the same experiment. Heather Green, a black Canadian, is quoted as follows “If I do anything short of vigilantly embracing my African identity … then I may be swept away”. I wonder what exactly she thinks the word ‘African’ means, and, again, would love to see her try to explain to the Sudanese government that, since they are all ‘Africans’, they should really knock it off with the whole slavery thing.
In fact, Taylor’s white nationalism, as well as the black and Hispanic nationalism he quotes, is wearily familiar to anyone from the old world. It’s why my Irish friends return from visting the US, completely baffled about the fuss made over St Patrick’s day, which dwarfs anything equivalent in Ireland. It is why I’ve heard German Americans saying how, on visiting Germany, they wanted to knock on the doors of people with similar surnames to them. It’s why V.S. Naipaul quotes the following reaction to black Americans from Harlem by citizens of Cote d’Ivoire:
“We get so many people like them from the United States. Black people who come here to convert the Africans. They are like everybody else who comes to do that. They bring their own psychic sickness to Africa. They should instead come to be converted by Africa. They are mad.’
A significant chunk of Americans, be they white Americans, black Americans, Hispanic Americans or whatever, seem prone to the delusion that just because their ancestors hailed from a certain place at some point in the past they have an intrinsic connection to that place in modern times. They do this without knowing the first thing about those places. Taylor mentions various black movements that have chosen to name themselves after Swahili words. Why Swahili? Why not Sesotho, Shank, Meru, Khoisan or Fur? Well, why do you think?
I shouldn’t be too hard on Taylor’s white nationalism, since I belong to a white nationalist organisation myself. It’s called the European Union. If you ask any European who supports the EU, they will always give the same reason why they do – that there has not been a continental war in seventy years.
Similarly, there is no such thing as an ‘African’ unity, much less a black unity. Taylor quotes the black American writer Anthony Williams: “Blackness … is a state of common spiritual idealism that serves to unite the group for the purpose of survival … [T]here is not one person of colour who can separate himself or herself from the rest of the people of colour.”
This is the kind of drivel that you need many years of elite education to believe (Williams is an alumnus of Harvard and Yale). Back in the real world, both Europe and Africa have been torn with the most terrible wars for almost all of their history. The conquests of Shaka and Dingane are still remembered by those who were on the receiving end, and not only were African slaves captured and sold by African slavers, the British Empire found fierce opposition to abolitionism from these African slavers. Why? Well, because these slavers did not see themselves as enslaving fellow Africans, but as enslaving members of rival tribes.
Taylor tries to argue that racial nationalism is innate. That is, that human beings will automatically feel an identity based on which racial group they belong to. This is simply not so. All human beings are inherently tribal, it is true, but any sense of identity beyond that of the small tribe is a matter of artificial construct. In Before the Dawn, Nicholas Wade discusses the original people, the first human populations that were founded on pure kinship. These had a functional limit of a hundred and fifty people – once the tribe grew beyond that, it would split, and the new tribes would face each other with animosity.
The book even contains evidence on the artificial nature of these identities. Taylor mentions tribal conflict within Kenya. But why should such conflict appear under his reading, when Kenya is a monoracial society? Likewise he includes Indians with Chinese and Phillipinos under the heading of ‘Asian’. In fact, these are three distinct racial groups: the Caucasians, the Pacific Islanders, and the East Asians.
Errors like this infest the book, and this manifests in Taylor’s cavalier handling of his sources. Discussing America’s founders and heroes, he dwells much on their explicitly racist and white supremacist statements. Yet always, this picture is incomplete. Lincoln did indeed begin with views that blacks could never be republican citizens. He later abandoned this view when presented with the courage and decency of freed black slave troops. Similarly, Taylor claims Kipling as a white racial supremacist. Yet Kipling’s ‘lesser breeds without the law’ were in fact the Germans, whose complete lack of restraint and cruelty towards the Herero people appalled a man who called on his fellow Britons to treat with Indians ‘not by looking on ‘em as ‘excitable masses of barbarism’[…] or the ‘down trodden millions of Ind groaning under the heel of an alien and unsympathetic despotism,’ but as men with a language of their own which it is your business to understand’.
I can’t resist another Kipling point. As one would expect, The White Man’s Burden is cited. Except that Taylor misses the real point of that poem. Craig Raine points out that the real sting of the poem is is in the in the final lines. First comes the repetitive exhortation:
“By all ye cry and whisper
By all ye leave or do
The silent, sullen peoples
Shall weigh your Gods and you.
Take up the White Man’s burden,
Have done with childish days –
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.’
And then comes the real sting
‘Comes now to, search your manhood
Through all the thankless years
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgement of your peers!’
Kipling’s capacity for irony is oft missed. The ‘peers’ at the end of the poem can only refer to the native, colonized peoples – and what appears as a paen to racial supremacism is rather a warning to the colonizers, that the judgement they will face from the colonized will be the judgement of equals.
This sort of cavalier handling of his source material makes Taylor’s work suspect. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t make some good points, in particular about the spread of racialism among black America. One whistles at some of the quotes he has marshaled – LeRoi Jones’ poetry advocating the rape of white girls, James Baldwin saying that ‘no Negro […] has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day’, Leonard Jeffries wanting ‘a world in which there aren’t any white people’. It’s certainly chiling stuff, or is at least intended to be.
For where Taylor goes wrong is that rather than menace, these quotes project a cringing, pitiable weakness. Let me make a basic observation: genuine anti-system dissidents aren’t usually tenured Professors at mainstream institutions (Jeffries), nor widely celebrated authors (Baldwin). You don’t usually exalt people who promise to kill you – unless you are absolutely sure that they pose no threat whatsoever.
I think that this is what underlies white America’s indulgence of black racists. The attitude isn’t one of conciliation but condescension. When Spike Lee speaks about how he sends ‘hate looks’ at all mixed race couples and despises them, the attitude is seems to be closer to ‘So cute! Toss him a few treats and see what trick he comes up with next’. Its worth remembering that when Warner Brothers gave Mr Lee forty million dollars to do a biopic about Malcolm X, Lee duly cut out all the hard political questions, and earned glowing reviews from such organs as The National Review. I’m reasonably fond of the National Review but it is not where I expect an anti-system dissident to show up.
Does racial solidarity lead to anything good in black America? The evidence seems rather to the contrary. Seventy-two percent of black Americans are born out of wedlock. The murder rate of the black community is eight times that of the white, and the overwhelming majority of victims are other blacks. A lot of noise aside, the single most dangerous thing to the average young black man in America is another young black man with a gun.
The important thing about the pathologies of black America isn’t that they are a disgrace compared with white America, but that they would disgrace just about all of black Africa. Not just places like Nairobi or Cape Town; American towns like Detroit and New Orleans have been found to be more violent than Mogadishu.
But surely racial solidarity among black Americans lets them stand up to oppression from other racial groups? I would not be so sure. Have either President Obama or his attorney general Eric Holder said a word about the death penalty that predominantly strikes the poor and dark skinned? Have either said anything about the case of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown – two African Americans railroaded to jail and only released through DNA evidence after spending more time incarcerated than Nelson Mandela? Or anything about the numerous similar cases? But they are capable of finding some hapless sod of a Latino Obama voter and making him the face of white American racism.
This wasn’t always the case. Dr King transformed American society, while being able to simultaneously oppose America’s war in Vietnam at the same time. Like them or loathe them, men like Malcolm X commanded seriousness and respect. Their modern successors can barely rouse a velleity of interest without the help of a dedicated white racialist like Jared Taylor.
I suspect white American racism didn’t merely oppress blacks, but succeeded in transmitting its poison to them. As with all such prejudices, an important question to ask is: Qui bono? Who really stands to benefit from black racism? The answer is easy: the black American ruling class. If one considers the hopelessly venal Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans, under whose eye the levees failed and the evacuaton was botched and the police stole and looted, he must find it awfully convenient to direct blame elsewhere. I imagine his successor will do so the next time the levees fail, and impotent hatred will do exactly nothing to stop the floods.
Yet it isn’t even black American leaders who cash in on this. If one considers the Clintons, Bill began his political campaign with racist pandering of the lowest kind, ably seconded by his wife, who insisted on the hiring of Dick Morris, author of racist political ads for Jesse Helms. Then, finding himself in danger of impeachment, he reversed course and found able support from men like Jesse Jackson and those like Toni Morrison who insisted Clinton was America’s ‘first black president’ since he was sexually rapacious, unsure who his father was and had a severe taste for drink. When Hillary was running against the genuine first black President (a man who, whatever his foibles, is miles above such squalor), the race card was flipped around again, and the most poisonous whispering, carefully ‘deniable’ no doubt, resulted. When Mrs Clinton makes her bid for the Oval Office, you may bet your last penny that the card will be reversed one more time and she will explain how she is the lone, stalwart defender of the black and the brown against tyranny. Black America will be the chumps of the planet if they let her get away with it.
On the other hand… if there is hope, it lies in the proles. My red roots start to show when I write like this, but I have a suspicion that most black Americans are not complete fools and are increasingly tired of being treated as such. If one considers the ‘Tea Party’ protests in America – despite a lot of misrepresentation,these are essentially populist working class revolts. They also happen to be 6% black American (compared with 11% in the general society) and two of the Tea Party’s favorite politicians are Herman McCain, and Allen West, both African Americans. There are also an increasing number of black American intellectuals who are fed to the teeth with the current status quo.
Perhaps the best known is Bill Cosby’s furious denunciation of the failures and flaws of black American leadership. That speech in turn inspired Juan Williams’ book Enough, in which he draws on a powerful tradition in black America – a tradition of social conservatism, hard work, community values and individual initiative. The most famous example is Malcolm X who understood that such virtues were not a matter of taste, but an essential precondition for power, the power of an oppressed community to assert itself.
That is a peculiar virtue of Williams’ book – he doesn’t pretend that white American racism has completely vanished. Rather, he argues that, if black Americans want to wait until a completely non-racial America has arrived before improving their circumstances, then they will be waiting a long time indeed.
Instead, the path to self improvement lies along a way that racial racketeers of all colors, whether they be credentialed and overpaid frauds like Eric Dyson, or for that matter Jared Taylor, say that they are incapable of. I very much look forward to that success.
