What words do we use to support and defend the white race?

In a recent entry that began with a brief essay by a ten year old girl from the Midwest that her mother had sent to VFR, Terry Morris had written, complimenting the girl: “she loves her country, she loves her race.” I didn’t feel right about the expression, “she loves her race,” so before posting the comment I changed it to, “she cares about her race.”

It’s a subtle but important difference, and touches on the difficult issue of how to talk about race. In order to defend the white race and Western civilization, we don’t need to make it sound as though race in itself is the highest value or an object of love or worship. We simply need to recognize that whiteness is an indispensable facet of what white people and Western society are and have been. While race is important, it needs to be embedded within a cultural and moral context, so that our identification with it is a restrained feeling, not an unrestrained feeling, just as Samuel Francis once said, in a phrase I loved, that America was about “restrained individualism,” not unrestrained individualism. But expressions such as “I love my race” would inevitably tend to lead to the unrestrained feeling that whiteness is an ethical principle in itself, that white people are good simply by virtue of being white.

As I said in my 1994 speech, “Multiculturalism and the War against White America:

These propositions have nothing to do with any notions of race-hatred of the other, or of race-worship of one’s own. White people are just as sinful and imperfect as any other people. Unlike ideologies such as Afrocentrism and Nazism, which are based on the deification of one’s own people and the demonization of others, this new politics is based on a Christian recognition of our human limitations, namely that we do not possess the godlike power to create a perfect world where everyone is equal, and where differences don’t matter….

[W]hen whites begin to assert their own civilizational and racial identity and their desire to preserve it, not in a hateful way but in a calm, intelligent and firm way, then nonwhites will begin to see whites, not as the “oppressors” of left-liberal demonology, but as human beings who have the same basic interests and concerns for their people and culture that the minorities have for theirs.

Through all of American history until the mid 20th century, the leaders of our society frankly believed in the white race, they took it for granted that America was a white man’s country and should remain so, but they did not say such things as, “I love my race.” A person could say, “I love my religion, I love my country,” without sounding as though he is putting down other religions or other countries. But race is inherently a trickier and more problematic concept and requires greater care in discussing it. To make the case for the preservation of the white race and white civilization plausible, it must be justified within a moral framework. When race is treated as a value in itself, it inevitably declines into cruder forms of racialism that are wrong and that will be automatically rejected. Defenders of the white West must have a moral argument, not just, “I love my race.”

Also, our ten-year-old essayist did not express love for the white race. She said that white people are often attacked as whites and that she doesn’t like that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 07, 2009 01:49 PM | Send