Will an Obama presidency lead to a white awakening, or to the final white surrender?

In response to my post, “The silver lining of an Obama presidency,” Elizabeth Wright, the individualist black conservative, writes:

You wrote:

“Here is evidence, copied from Lucianne.com, that an Obama presidency would be, as I have said many times, a four-year long white consciousness-raising session about the agenda of blacks and the left.”

Whites don’t want their “consciousness” raised. Currently, most of them seem to be in thrall to the notion that they are helping to “make history.” In an especially incisive response to a post on Stuff White People Like, a commenter caught the spirit of today’s whites, when he declared that whites have no desire to learn the truth about the horrors inflicted by coloreds over the centuries, or any facts that prove that the white race is not unique in its treatment of others. After citing one false popular belief after another generally held by whites, the commenter ended his assessment of the white mentality with, “They don’t want to hear it!”

Whites just don’t want to hear anything that would suggest a negative take on blacks. Over all these years, they have willingly dumped one constitutional principle after another, as well as cultural norms, in order to make nice-nice with blacks. What makes you think that these next four years will not simply seal the deal as far as white acceptance of liberal absolutes is concerned?

If whites were to “awaken,” what on earth would they do about the societal transformations that they have allowed to take place? An awakening might mean that they would be expected to act, to do something. Whites don’t even seem to understand the number that has been played on their heads over these recent decades. So, where would any “consciousness” come from?

There are blacks who question the direction taken by those 1960s civil rights leaders, but just try to find a white person who would admit that there were some wrong turns made. Instead, they run for cover at the thought of giving an opinion contrary to the Civil Rights Bible.

Where are these whites whose “consciousness” will be raised by four or eight more years of ceaseless inundation of P.C. anti-white and anti-Western propaganda?

LA replies:

You ask:

“What makes you think that these next four years will not simply seal the deal as far as white acceptance of liberal absolutes is concerned?”

I’m not saying that white liberals will have the reaction I hope for. I’m talking about white conservatives. They are the ones who need to awaken, and who could, very possibly, awaken. In this connection, I’ve often spoken of the almost-awakening that took place in white America when black America did a collective sack dance over the acquittal of OJ Simpson, a man everyone knew was a savage murderer of two white people. Whites were shocked, stunned at the black joy. In order to suppress that white reaction, the media went into overdrive, presenting innumerable programs with the “black,” anti-police, point of view counterpoised to, and presented as equally valid as, the “white” point of view, and sending out the message that whites can’t really understand blacks’ hostility to police because of blacks’ history of oppression by racist cops. This successfully tamped down that moment of awakening among whites about the reality of how blacks feel about America.

But an Obama election (I state this as a reasonable guess, not a certainty) would be like an OJ Simpson acquittal to the nth power. All the latent hostilities, grievances, demands, would come to the fore and remain at the fore of our national consciousness for the next four years. Instead of a brief, aborted moment of white awakening concerning blacks’ hostility to America, it would be a sustained period in which there is a disruption in the complacent white consciousness through which new, forbidden truth about race and the liberal claims about race could enter.

Consider also how, in 1997, 50 years after the hiring of Jackie Robinson by the Brooklyn Dodgers, the absence of blacks in the Major Leagues BEFORE 1947 began to be portrayed as some inconceivably disgusting sin that made us sick just to think about it. The point is that (perhaps I should call this Auster’s Second Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society) the more minorities advance in America, and the further we get from actual discrimination against minorities in America, the MORE GUILTY America seems to be for ever having had ANY discrimination against minorities. Again: the MORE minorities advance, the MORE, not LESS, guilty America becomes in its own eyes. Therefore the election of a half-black, talented president, far from being the wonderful moment of racial healing many naïve whites expect, will turn out to be a Walpurgisnacht of white racism bashing.

Now Obama is cagey, and may take steps to prevent this from happening, at least in the early stages of his presidency. But it’s a fair guess that the sheer exultation of the moment will lead him and his followers to forget all restraints and to reveal their true feelings. Remember his messianic view of himself, how it keeps popping out.

So, considering all the above,

Imagine, in the wake of Obama’s election, the media declaring that, far from Obama’s election showing that America is no longer racist, it represents no more than a first step to achieving true racial justice in this country.

Imagine the media shouting that the fact that it took 220 years to elect the first colored president shows what a racist country America has always been.

Imagine four years of blacks for the first time expressing what they really believe, really want, and really think they deserve from white America.

Imagine four years of black intellectuals saying (they’ve been saying it for a long time, but white America has never paid attention, now they will) that white America has never done ANYTHING for blacks. The Civil War, Emancipation, the Civil Rights movement, America turning itself on its head and spending trillions of dollars to fix the black problem, all that has been NOTHING. And WHY is it nothing? Because blacks are STILL BEHIND WHITES. Which brings us to:

Imagine four years of Jeremiah Wright-type statements about how all the problems of blacks are due to greedy white people.

Imagine four years of Barack Obama saying (as he said in his race speech, but no one heard it) that the only way to end Jeremiah Wright-type anger is for whites to take action to end all racial inequality.

Imagine four years of Obama, blacks, and Democrats saying that ending all racial inequality requires major redistribution of wealth from whites to blacks, to be achieved by special taxation and slavery reparations.

Imagine four years of a tremendous spike in black on white violence, with black thugs triumphantly declaring over the bodies of their white victims (quoting Thurgood Marshall), “It’s our turn now.”

If this scenario played out, it could result in a further scenario: the beginning of the realization among white conservatives and some white liberals that blacks as an organized community (not all blacks as individuals) are irredeemably hostile to America, and that if America is to be preserved, the black agenda for America must be stopped and disempowered. This could lead in the direction of the reawakening and at least the attempted restoration of the majority culture in America which was abandoned in the 1960s. This would involve not just white resistance to the black agenda, which, if there were white unity, would not be that difficult, but, far more difficult and dangerous, white resistance to the white liberal agenda, a resistance that might involve something like a civil war against the liberal whites who, along with their nonwhite allies and clients, openly seek to destroy the non-liberal whites and everything America has been.

I don’t know that any this will happen. The opposite of the things I predict may happen. Perhaps the Obama election will signal the final surrender of the American majority and the death of America. But if such a vast event is in the cards, then anything I or you say about it is besides the point, isn’t it?

In any case, what will be will be. If Obama is elected, as seems very likely, we will soon find out.

- end of initial entry -

Kilroy M. writes from Australia:

I’ve just read your entry and exchange with Elizabeth Wright on whether an Obama Presidency will lead to a White revival or surrender.

I wish I shared your optimism, and even though your description of what may happen would be theoretically necessary as a step in the right direction to Euro-Western re-assertion in Euro-Western America, it seems there will be a great deal more damage caused to us culturally as well as physically, before any “reconstruction.”

However, all this reads a little like speculating what would be necessary to happen in Europe for the Europeans to reawaken too. I fear that there really isn’t anything bad enough to get whites to “wake up.” Liberalism is premised on the endless effort to appease and be “nice” to everything and anything no matter what the cost; this requires complete and cultural constant self-denial. I can’t imagine leftists looking at the disintegration of their community and blaming the agents of that disintegration; instead they will just blame the “history of repression” that those agents “suffered” in an effort to rationalise and legitimise the demise of America.

London’s public transport system was bombed 7 times in one day back in 2005—that’s no so long ago—and when I was there last, people seem to have forgotten about it. They were all too busy watching Sex in the City to think about their future of their own streets. Besides, I doubt that Obama will be blatant with his war against the US—it will be a subtle assault just as it has been for the last 50 years, only this time that assault will have a very powerful “trickle down” effect from the nation’s highest office.

Hey, I feel for you guys. I’m writing from Australia, a country where our Prime Minister nurtures his connections with China with more care than those with his own Reserve Bank. He even has a Chinese name (Lu Kewen). Not only is that embarrassing for a national leader, but also highly dangerous when one considers that the national leader’s first objective is to champion the culture and institutions of his people, not some abstract globalist multi-culti elite, and not another people with whom he shares greater affinity.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 30, 2008 11:29 AM | Send