Does race matter?
A reader says it doesn’t matter, and I reply.
Karl J. writes:
Hello, and thank you for what you’ve been doing for America and Western civilization. Keep up the good work!
I’ve been following your comments on race, Jews, and Hispanics with particular interest, and would like to put in my two cents worth.
Your views on race are subtle and nuanced. You place more emphasis on it than I would; but still, you are leagues apart from both racists and anti-racists, and you’re a voice of sanity amidst a clangor of monomaniacal insanity.
My own view on race is, frankly, based on my view of women. To me, the thought that any woman could be more or less attractive, based merely on the color of her eyes, hair, or skin, is bizarre.
On the other hand, I realize that this view is rare, and perhaps entirely peculiar to myself. I realize that many people, white and otherwise, ascribe enormous importance to color, for whatever reason. That is not a pleasant fact to face; but rational people face unpleasant facts, and try to figure out how to deal with them.
As for the Jews, I have long considered that they fall into three classes: Jews who are loyal to the Jewish people as such—i.e., Zionists—whom I respect and support; Jews who abandon their loyalty to the Jewish people, and assimilate to the West, whom I also respect and support; and Jews who abandon their loyalty to the Jewish people, and bend all their efforts towards the destruction of the West—whom I would, given the power, load onto airplanes and dump into the middle of the Atlantic.
As for the Hispanics: On p.7 of the abridged edition on Toynbee’s Study of History, he describes Western civilization as “confined to the countries occupied by Catholic and Protestant peoples in Western Europe, America, and the South Seas.” I read that as including all Catholic Latin Americans as Westerners, though the ones who still speak Indian languages may be considered as fossils of the Inca and Aztec civilizations. Be that as it may, I really don’t care very much, personally, whether the foreigners invading my country are Westerners or not.
Best wishes,
LA replies:
Race is much more than color. That is the silly, liberal, reductive view of race, which seeks to make race utterly insignificant. Do you believe that the only physical difference between whites and blacks is skin color?
On Toynbee’s views of whether Latin America is part of the West, I just recently went through all the mentions of Latin America in the abridged edition of Toynbee vols. I-VI. There is precious little, and it’s highly ambiguous and contradictory. His basis for calling Latin America Western is that it was taken over by Spain and Portugal, but he doesn’t go into any details about whether it’s actually Western or not, and in other passages he suggests it may be Western in a political sense but not a cultural sense. Well, then, how can he say it’s Western?
In the abridged edition there is not enough there to reach any useful or defensible conclusion on this issue. But we can say definitively that he does not make any affirmative case that it is Western.
Huntington definitively puts Latin America either outside the West or on its margin.
Karl replies:
Yes, race is more than color; it’s also physiognomy. That still seems fairly trivial to me.
Look—I’m bugged by the fact that the foreigners overrunning our country are visibly different from us. That adds insult to injury. But I get the same irritation from seeing white-skinned ragheads. And I would still be p****ed off if we were being overrun by Krauts or Rooskies.
What it comes down to is that I’m a nativist, not a racist. I really see no reason to drag race differences into the immigration issue—and considering how squeamish so many Americans are about that, every reason not to.
I, personally, am not going to scream like a girl just because somebody brings up the issue of race; I’m just going to shake my head and sigh, because it seems to me that race only matters as much as people believe that it does.
The knotty problem to face is that native blacks mostly hate their own country. And their subculture is vile and, to put it politely, dysfunctional. I live and work in the DC area, so I often see the poor black trash at their worst. I also see enough gorgeous black chicks to remind me constantly of the absurdity of racism. My solution: take anyone who calls himself an “African American” and deport him to Africa.
Ain’t gonna happen, sad to say. But have you read “Out of America” by Keith Richburg? Awesome book.
LA replies:
Why does race matter? Because whether you care about race or not, it is a primary factor in what is happening.
Why are the Mexicans so aggressive in their anti-Americans campaign? Because they are conscious of themselves as a people—a racially defined Mestizo people—pushing aside the once dominant but now deferential white gringos.
Why are we helpless before the third-world masses? Because they’re nonwhite. We have white guilt toward them. We don’t have that guilt toward other whites.
Why are people afraid to oppose immigration? Because the immigrants are nonwhite. We wouldn’t have a fraction of the same hangup if they were Scandinavians. Why do we have guilt toward the Other? Because we’re white. The very existence of Western countries as historically white majority societies is objectionable to the current mindset.
Why do the open borders proponents push it so hard? Why are the elites at this moment taking the side of illegal alien invaders of America, in a “Camp of the Saints” moment unprecedented in our history? Because they are seeking to push aside white America. This is the way the liberals and the promoters of a globalized humanity fulfill themselves. In order to create a single humanity of equal individuals, they must destroy the dominant distinct groups of humanity. The white race as the historic people of Western civilization, and white Americans as the historic majority people of America, are the dominant group in today’s world, and so their dominance and power must be destroyed (just as, in another front of the culture wars, the authority and influence of Christianity must be destroyed.) As long as white America is large enough and has enough effective cohesiveness to resist the borderless agenda, it stands in the path of the egalitarians and globalists. Also, liberals consciously want their own white dominance to be undone, because, as long as they exist as dominant whites, they are implicitly racist. The only way for liberal whites to rid themselves of the burden of racism is to lose all numerical and cultural dominance.
Those are some of the forces and factors and motivations driving the destruction of the West. How can we oppose them, if we don’t even acknowledge their existence? How can we fight anti-racism, unless we recognize that it is aimed solely at disempowering and destroying whites? How can we fight the cult of the Other, until we recognize that it exists primarily for the sake of nonwhites, the supposed victims of whites? How can we defend our civilization, unless we understand that our civilization for thousands of years until a few decades ago was completely white, and that the left seeks to destroy it by destroying its historic majority people?
I’m not saying race is the only factor, but it is a very major factor, and if you don’t include it in your picture of what’s happening, you’re not going to be seeing reality accurately, and you’re going to be badly handicapped in defending the West from its enemies.
And, again, the fact that you personally don’t notice or care about race doesn’t change the importance of any of the above.
Also, in case it seems I’m focusing too much on race and not on other types of differences, let me add that we have an inability to discriminate against any groups, including whites, that are different from us. However, in accordance with Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society, the more different from us and the more unassimilable to us the other group is, the more guilty we will feel toward it, and the more likely it becomes that we will surrender and accommodate ourselves to it. Since racial differences between whites and nonwhites are more conspicuous and significant than the differences between, say, white Americans and people from the Balkans, we will have a much greater inhibition against closing the doors on a nonwhite group than on a Balkan group.
Maureen writes:
Karl reduces race to color and thinks that race means he gets to look at cute black chicks in addition to cute white chicks! No mention of the thoughts and principles that each culture/race/religion package brings with it.
He really needs to be dropped into Darfur or Kosovo for a quick, close-up and personal lesson on race and religion. Words cannot affect people like this; they need to feel a live situation on their backs to begin the conceptualization process.
He reminds me of most fellow Americans I meet—for them, race means only that they’ll have the chance of eating at a Somali or Pakistani restaurant someday.
A reader writes:
An axiom: People who do not believe race is important will be replaced by other people who do.
There seems to me to be a correlation between the fact that it is only the whites of America, Europe, Australia, and Canada who have convinced themselves that race is not important, and these happen to be the same people who are demographically threatened by mass alien immigration.
Steve Sailer reasonably describes race as like an extended family, with ties of ancestry, not as Karl does with the color nonsense. Sailer is correct, as members of the same population group share more recent common ancestors with each other than with members of other groups. This is immediately obvious when one considers “newer” groups like Icelanders, but it generally holds true for most other groups as well…. Even groups as closely related as Chinese and Japanese can be distinguished with about 99% accuracy; this has already been done with a group of nearly 600 persons of Chinese and Japanese ancestry.
Therefore, carrying the family analogy further, we may ask some questions. Do parents love and care for their children because the children happen to be good-looking or smart? Do parents care for their children because the children happen to look very similar to them—would it be expected that a parent would abandon their own child in favor of a stranger’s child if the stranger’s child happened to look more similar to the person in question?
No. Parents love and care for their children precisely because they are THEIR children, of their own blood, their family. Parents that neglect their children are not only viewed with scorn and disgust, but are punished under law.
How should we then view people who abandon their race with the attitude “who cares?” Do you think that Chinese, Mexicans, or Africans have the attitude of “who cares?’’
If someone requires a more academic study
But, should that really be necessary? Only a people that are grossly abnormal need to be held by the hand and explained to why they should care about their own survival. Unfortunately, whites are so abnormal; therefore, the effort is needed.
A reader writes:
In response to the reader who claims to be attracted to women of all colors:
I believe the majority of white men are NOT attracted to black women. I myself used to feel guilty about this when I was more of a liberal, and I knew several men who admitted the same thing. There are exceptions, of course, but that the trend exists is, I think, unquestionable.
There are definitely asymmetrical patterns in cross-racial attraction. E.g. white women are often attracted to black men, white men often attracted to Asian/Indian women, white women less attracted to Asian men. Overriding this all is that people overwhelmingly choose to marry people of the same race.
I doubt that one can determine objectively the reasons for these patterns, but I do think people should honor their own instincts on this matter. This seems a good illustration of where liberalism fails to account for racial realities. People have to ask themselves whether the abstract idea of equality they hold applies to who they would marry or want to make part of their families. In this arena, racial, national, and religious differences are key factors and discrimination is absolutely essential. In my view cross-cultural or interracial marriages essentially require that one side or the other abandon his allegiance to his own group.
“Edward the Great” writes:
I was reading the exchange you had with one of your readers, and thought he sounded remarkably similar to the viewpoints expressed at a website about American nationalism , which I had visited quite a few times over the last few years. When I read the original letter again, I noticed the name of the writer was Karl J., who is almost certainly the author of that website. It’s quite enjoyable, and provides a much more intellectual basis for politics on the Right. One of the things I did disagree with him about was race, however.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 04, 2006 11:34 PM | Send