Why does race matter?

(Note: In addition to the below, read this brief article where I offer a traditionalist conservative defense of race, by including race among the particularities that make us what we are.)

A reader asks me one of most important and difficult questions anyone can ask today:

Dear Mr. Auster:

I don’t consider myself a liberal. I tend to take the conservative position on most every issue. I want our borders to be secured, even if it means building a wall, and am in favor of getting tough on illegal immigration in various ways. I am in favor of decreasing the level of third world immigration to whatever level will allow for steady assimilation. However, if our traditional Euro-American, Western culture could be preserved (or even strengthened), then intellectually I cannot see what would be wrong with white people one day ceasing to be the majority in the U.S.

I know you consider this view suicidal, but I say this doesn’t bother me intellectually. The idea of this happening does not at all feel right, however, and so I am trying to figure out why exactly race matters, if it indeed does. If there is a serious reason it matters, then it should change my thinking intellectually. I very much want to learn about any such serious reasons, especially inasmuch as you say the following concerning those who think it is racist to consider race important: “We are standing against the most fundamental moral conviction of our time, the belief that any notion that race matters is the ultimate evil.” If you are so certain that race matters, please explain exactly why. If you have a good reason, I suppose I will have to see if it is reason enough for me to abandon my one liberal position, namely that race is (or when it isn’t, it ought to be) a relatively unimportant aspect of a person.

I suppose while in college I was practically the only conservative I knew, and because I had to defend myself frequently against charges of racism, I always made sure to profess myself to be against racism, claiming, like lots of other conservatives, to be “color-blind” with respect to my own and others race. And I do take people as they come, and try to treat people as I would want to be treated, regardless of others’ race. So, this kind of “color-blindness” has never seemed to me particularly pernicious, and I certainly never thought of it as suicidal.

At the time, before I had ever heard of Lawrence Auster or read VFR, I don’t recall that I had ever come across anyone who claimed that race matters who wasn’t also either some kind of leftist (“Race Matters” is the title of one of Cornel West’s books) or some kind of obvious hate-monger. You are not a hate-monger, and if racists are bigots and hate-mongers, you are certainly not a racist. Your reasons for thinking that race matters can’t, therefore, be the same as those of Cornel West or Neo-Nazis. Please tell me, why does race matter? My own thoughts have been developing on this, but I would like to hear yours before I start sifting through what I have been thinking. Please respond if you can.

Thank you.

I thanked the reader for his eloquent letter and told him that I’ve been dealing with this issue in one way or another in virtually everything I’ve written about immigration from the start. I gave him links to some of my writings going back to The Path to National Suicide. However, there is at VFR a short blog entry conveniently entitled, “Why Race matters,” and I encouraged him to read that first.

His letter also makes me realize once again the importance of there being people on the scene who say that race matters, and who are rational people and not haters or anti-Semites.

And thus the importance of the recent confrontation with American Renaissance. The survival of our civilization, of everything we are, depends on the rediscovery by white people of a normal degree of racial consciousness, such as existed up to the mid 20th century. Such a rediscovery and recovery become impossible so long as race consciousness is exclusively linked with anti-Semites and Nazis, and with people who have no problem with anti-Semites and Nazis.

The reader replies:

I read everything that you pointed out to me. Thank you. I’ll have to keep thinking, but it seems to me that your answer is that race matters because races carry particular cultures with them. That is, race matters because of culture, not in and of itself.

LA writes:

I think that’s an artificial way of putting it. If I asked you why your body matters, would you say, “My body only matters because it carries my particular personality, memories, feelings. My body doesn’t matter in and of itself.”

This is artificial, not true to human experience. Our identity and being has many parts, body, mind, consciousness, personality, but it all adds up to one thing, one “whole.” Remove our bodies, and we don’t exist, at least as far as our experience in this world is concerned.

Your body is not just a “carrier,” as though it were merely functional, as though it were an automobile you were riding in. It’s an integral part of one, living, whole organism, which is you.

Were the physical bodies of, say, the ancient Greeks, merely the “carriers” of the ancient Greek spirit and culture? Their physical beings were part of what they were, and of what they expressed through their myth, art, athletic games, and so on. It could be argued that we have the very concept of beauty and the well-made human form that we have because the ancient Greeks were themselves beautiful, and so they projected gods and heroes who were projections of that beauty.

To deny that our body is part of what we are is to deny our humanity. And that is the evil of the anti-racist liberal ideology that has taken over the Western world.

Mark J. writes:

In one of your posts today you quote Robert Locke: “This utter lack of thinking about elemental strategy coheres perfectly with AmRen’s long history of endless intellectual noodling and practical uselessness.”

It’s true that AmRen seems to advocate no sort of practical strategy—except perhaps a very long term strategy of winning the ideological battle for the minds of a critical mass of white Westerners, which is crucial. But I’d very much like to be involved with some practical efforts NOW.

So I thought, what we really need is an organization for people who feel as we do—people of European heritage, committed to the traditional America, realistic about race, but not anti-Semitic. An organization we can join that would put us in touch with others who feel the same way, and which could build eventually into an active political party while meanwhile providing a way for like-minded people to make social and business contacts and networks and to discuss strategies and take action where appropriate. To some extent, this is why, I think, people go to the AmRen conferences—to meet others like themselves for these purposes.

And then I realized the problem with the idea. As you say, to say outloud that race matters is to commit the prime moral sin of our age. And to attend the meetings of an organization such as I described would be to open oneself to being the victim of a witch hunt, as was the case with that prosecutor who was fired for attending the AmRen conference a couple months ago. People who don’t want to lose their jobs can’t, in many cases, afford to take a public stand or even publicly be seen to associate with those taking a stand on these matters. I know I could not risk it until I was financially independent.

There are many people who feel like I do, and would like to be able to join with and meet others who feel the same way, but we’d be so demonized for doing so that the idea is presently unworkable. The question is: when and how does the idea become feasible?

LA replies:

I also believe that such an organization is needed.

On the problem of being persecuted for joining such an organization, it seems to me that that is where the purely “opinion-shaping” aspect which you reject, as distinct from the movement/organizational aspect would come into play. If we can establish that there is such a thing as rational and moral race consciousness, and get race consciousness simply accepted as a normal part of the American debate, then such an organization could exist.

Jake writes:

Your correspondent asked “Why does race matter?” I still want to know, What is “race”?

The analogy with the body is interesting, but I’m not sure that it illuminates the issue in a way that I can understand.

The body that I have now is neither the one that I started off with nor even the one I had just a few short years ago. Every cell in it has changed multiple times over. My hair has been longer or shorter; my skin has been pale, ruddy, and tan. When I served in the Marines I was in excellent physical shape, and my intellectual effort was spent on understanding tactics and the basics of family; now I’m getting pudgier and more philosophical. In all cases, however, I’m still me. It would take something horrific to make me “not me” anymore—even a serious accident could leave me radically changed, but still myself.

I’d be very interested in pinning down what “race” means.

LA replies:

Don’t make it too complicated and intellectual. Start with commonsense experience.

Look at black Africans. Look at Chinese. Look at Anglo-Saxons. Look at Southern Italians (different from Anglo-Saxons, but still much more similar to them than Chinese or Africans, which suggests that there are “sub-racial” groups within the main races, thus the Irish are racially different from the English).

The non-white races are deeply different from the white in their bodily structure, appearance, mentality, personality, and other qualities. A Chinese person as an individual can adopt British culture, but will still have differences from the British, though, as an individual, or a few individuals, that would not affect the British society. If millions of Chinese came into Britain and even “assimilated,” their physical differences from the British, combined their mental differences, combined with their renewed sense of themselves as people brought on by their numbers, will make them stand out and challenge the norms and identity of the British.

Race and culture cannot be entirely separated.

It is the loss of this commonsense grasp of the reality of race, something that has only happened among whites, that dooms the white West. We put ourselves out of existence as a people, while welcoming, in the name of universal sameness, the nonwhite groups who are (or will soon be, when they get a footing here) aggressively asserting themselves as peoples, as we see with the Mexicans. And even if they did not assert themselves as peoples, the anomic mix of different peoples and cultures inevitably brings about the deconstruction and displacement of our culture.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 25, 2006 10:11 PM | Send