How Whites Respond to Racial Realism - Sam Francis
|
Time
Text
Well, thanks very much for coming.
Great to see you all.
And we'd like to get started with our first speaker.
Our first speaker, of course, is Sam Francis, well-known to all of you for many excellent reasons.
His syndicated column is arguably the best in the country.
He is the book editor of the Occidental Quarterly, which has a table here up at the front.
He is also the editor of the Citizens Informer, which is the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens.
He's also the author of quite a large number of excellent books and monographs, the most recent of which are available for sale and, if you wish, a signature by the author here at one of the tables in the back.
In other words, it would be hard to find anyone in our movement who has worked harder and more effectively for the things that we all care about.
Nor would it be easy to find someone who has paid a higher price for the work he has done for us.
As many of you know, for many years, He was an editorial writer and then a staff columnist for the Washington Times.
And his very promising career in mainstream journalism, which had garnered him prizes for his work, was suddenly put to an end because of remarks he made at the first American Renaissance conference ten years ago.
That was a heavy price to pay, but Sam Francis is still with us, writing exactly what he thinks, and continuing to speak at AR conferences, and we're deeply grateful to him for that.
So please welcome Sam Francis for his sixth address to an AR conference.
Thank you so much,
Jared. Thank you.
I ought to start off...
Commenting on the obvious that I weigh a good deal less this year than I did in previous years.
Many of you have been kind enough to comment on it.
I told Jared some weeks ago that it actually has caused me to rethink my position on race because I now know what it's like to be three-fifths of a person.
Well, over the years, as most of you know, and as Jared commented, I've written a syndicated column that often deals with racial issues in what I think are a fairly frank way, perhaps too frank for my own good sometimes.
And like most columnists, I receive a good deal of response, reader response to these columns.
Most of my mail, most of it is emailed now, especially when it concerns racial issues, is positive.
And some of you have been kind enough to write nice things about what I've written.
But some of what I receive, I have to acknowledge, is not so positive, and some of it is actually vituperative.
But other readers are skeptical, what I would call skeptical or critical.
I'm often respectfully concerned about some of the things that I've written.
It occurred to me in the last year or so that many of these responses, I think, tend to reveal or suggest certain patterns in the white mind.
Most of the more courteous letters actually seem to come from whites.
And these letters actually disclose certain deeply seated
And to many whites, deeply troubling objections to the ideas that I'm trying to express.
Ideas such as that race is a natural as well as a social reality.
The idea that whites are the victims of an entrenched double standard.
That whites should actually be proud of who they are and of their racial and cultural heritage.
That whites are also victims in a more literal, physical sense of being victims of hate crimes by non-whites and of racially motivated violence and discrimination.
And that given the level of non-white immigration into this country and the lack of any white racial consciousness among whites, and coupled with the emergence of an increasingly powerful racial consciousness among non-whites,
That whites may be in serious trouble.
To point out these ideas to people who do not have the degree of racial consciousness that most of us at this conference have, and to people who have never thought very deeply about race,
or very much about race, and certainly not very unconventionally about race, to point these ideas out It is often deeply disturbing to white people and to some of them, to what?
It's actually terrifying.
And I think when they are confronted with the kinds of things that I say and that Jared says and that some of the other writers here say, they are deeply frightened by it.
It's frightening to them in part because it does appear to constitute what is now routinely denounced as hate speech.
That is simply any thought or expression that violates liberal canons about race.
Not really hate in any serious sense, but simply un-liberal discussion of race.
But also it's terrifying because it forces you to confront ideas and facts that you would much prefer were not...
There. We're not true.
What I have found is that an awful lot of white people do not want it to be true.
They do not want to think that race is real.
They do not want to think that whites are in trouble.
They do not want to think that racial consciousness is emerging among non-whites or that many, if not most non-whites, are anti-white or that racial consciousness is necessary or desirable for whites.
And above all, I have found Whites do not want to think that they will have to do anything out of the ordinary to protect themselves or their race or their civilization, to risk their reputations, their well-being, their money, their friends,
their social status, let alone their lives or their physical safety.
And as a result, they will grasp at any straw that is available to avoid confronting the realities of race that might imply that there is a serious problem.
What I'm going to do today is to read to you and discuss some of the reactions, mainly from whites, but also from some non-whites, some who say that they're non-whites and some who can safely be inferred that they're non-whites,
that I've received from readers in the last year or so about race.
And I do this not to try to refute them.
Or to show how clever I am or to toot my own horn about what I've written or to show how stupid they are.
Some of them, in fact, do strike me as being fairly stupid.
They're probably Republicans, actually, but by no means all.
And I very much appreciate all of them, even those who were abusive, taking the trouble to write to me at all.
The mere fact that some people do bother to write And often do so at considerable length, suggest that something that I have written has bothered them, and not simply as something that they find offensive or wicked.
My point is rather that these responses seem to indicate that whites are really afraid of racial realities, and that that fear, much more than any rational or empirical argument, or any lack of information, It's what really keeps whites from dealing with racial issues more realistically than they do.
But the fears are bolstered by a vast panoply of flawed arguments, misinformation, misconceptions, and unexamined and false assumptions that are routinely invoked to avoid confronting the reality of race.
My purpose in exploring all these responses and their meaning is that if we are really going to make any real progress in developing white racial consciousness, we need to know not just what the scientific arguments and the social arguments about race are, but also what are the pseudo-arguments and what are the irrational and emotional fixations that lie behind the pseudo-arguments and how they can be dealt with and laid to rest in the white mind.
Last spring, many of you may have seen a three-part series on the public broadcasting system about race that was devoted to trying to prove that race does not really exist and is simply a social construct.
That claim, of course, has been an increasingly common response to the hereditarian argument about IQ since at least the publication of The Bell Curve and goes back at least as far as Franz Boas, who made something of a similar argument.
In recent years, far more than the scientific challenge to the IQ argument, it seems to me, the race as just a social construct argument has prevailed, especially because the Human Genome Project and its director, Craig Venter, more or less have endorsed it.
The PBS series regurgitated that point of view.
And I would commend to you, if you haven't seen it, the excellent article dissecting that series in the June 2003 issue of American Renaissance by biologist Michael Rienzi.
But I also dissected the series and indeed the argument over the last few years.
I've written several columns about the race as a social construct concept.
And I dealt with the series in a column of May 30th.
Sometime after my column was published, I received this response to it from someone identified as Dish.
Let me say I don't know these individuals.
I don't think I know them, but I hope I don't know some of them.
I hope they're not here today.
Maybe they are.
Dish wrote, I have not seen the PBS show.
However, I read your rebuttal to it.
We can agree that the concept of race has historically served as an impediment to social progress.
We don't.
I'll get to that in a moment.
More recently, the concept of affirmative action is a perfect example.
Who is to say who is white and who is black?
What is the litmus test?
Is it based on the darkness of skin, the degree of curliness in your hair?
If you met me, you would say that I am white.
But I would argue that thousands of years ago, my ancestors roamed Africa.
And it is only due to their migration northward that you would call me white.
And if you want to go back more in time, all of our ancestors likely roamed Africa or what is now China.
I don't know.
It's not just biology.
He needs to learn about geography.
And earlier still, swam in the oceans.
So despite arguments about mitochondrial DNA, people who wish to divide us have to arbitrarily decide how far back in time they want to go as to when somebody's ancestors left Africa to go to Europe.
That makes me wonder if so-called Native Americans should be called Asians since their ancestors came from Asia via the land bridge in the Bering Sea.
Somebody better alert Washington on that.
The point is that there are those who wish to divide us and some who realize that the merit of somebody should be based on their individual qualities.
The concept of the country was to abolish the need for hyphens in your nationality.
If you have confidence in yourself, you don't need the crutch of ethnocentrism.
That's all.
Well, as I said, my purpose is not to refute these responses, but I can't help but make several remarks about some of them.
First, we do not agree that the concept of race has served as an impediment to social progress.
I never said anything like that in the column or anywhere else.
The concept of race is, in fact, an immense step forward in human progress, and its denial and rejection in the last century is what has been an impediment.
Secondly, the question the writer raises of who is to say who is white and who is black, what is the litmus test?
Is it based on skin color or the curliness of hair?
Race, of course, is based on a number of different criteria, among which hair texture and skin color are two.
It is a common misconception among anti-racists, as they like to call themselves, that skin color is the main or the only criterion of And the only one that racial realists talk about, although anyone who's read any serious scientific work on race knows that's not true.
Thirdly, there's sort of the central claim of this writer that if you met me, you would say that I'm white, but I would argue that thousands of years ago my ancestors roamed Africa, and it is only due to their migration northward that you call me white.
No, actually, I would not.
I wouldn't call Jesse Jackson white because his ancestors came out of Africa.
I would call him black because based on several different biological criteria, that's what he is, just as Africans like Muammar Gaddafi or F.W. de Klerk are not black.
Geographical location and migration have nothing to do with race or biological traits.
Obviously, the geographical environment will affect selection and eventually determine or influence the racial traits that survive and are passed on, but migration by itself has nothing to do with this.
I find this idea commonly expressed in people who claim that race is not real, that race is a social construct.
And finally, there is no reason to go back more in time to China or to the ocean because we're talking about present-day racial differences, not how or when they evolved exactly.
I don't think it would occur to anyone to say that another human being is a fish because our ancestors came out of the ocean sometime.
The writer also harbors an unexamined assumption that is closely related to the neoconservative and liberal belief that the United States is a proposition country, based on the Declaration of Independence and the Equality Clause.
As he says, the concept of this country was to abolish the need for hyphens in your nationality.
I don't know where he gets this.
I found as I was writing about this piece in the speech, I kept referring to the writer as she.
I have no evidence, internal evidence, from the text that the writer is a lady, but I just have the overwhelming impression that the writer is female for some reason.
But that's an unscientific and probably chauvinist reaction.
In any case, she doesn't argue for this belief that That the concept of the country was to abolish the idea of nationality.
She just assumes it and asserts it and assumes also that I probably and everyone else share it.
To her, it's an uncontroversial idea and a basic assumption.
In fact, it is a very dubious and very hotly contested belief among conservative thinkers.
Finally, there is the writer's conclusion that her point is that we should evaluate each other as individuals.
A point that I don't believe I ever questioned, and I really don't question that.
And that if you have confidence in yourself, you don't need the crutch of ethnocentrism.
Again, I did not say in the column that we do need ethnocentrism, although in fact I believe ethnocentrism is a perfectly legitimate and important trait.
But rather, I concluded with a point to which she did not respond at all.
Probably because she quite missed it.
And what I actually wrote in the last paragraph of the column is this.
PBS's lies about race are worth exposing, not only because it's not true that we're all mongrels, but also because those lies help perpetuate the anti-white claims that whites and their whole civilization are inherently racist and based on the repression and exploitation of other races.
Showing that it's the anti-white crusaders who are doing the lying and perpetrating the pseudoscience and who just possibly might like to do a bit of repressing and exploiting themselves tells us a few truths, not only about race itself, but also about how Americans of all races are being deceived about it.
I think the reason this writer missed my point is because she was so worried about the danger of having to adopt the ethnocentrism that she thought my column implied.
And she was probably correct that it does imply ethnocentrism, that she was frightened by the whole specter of legitimizing ethnocentrism and the concept of race.
She was so frightened by this that the threat to whites, to which I alluded in the column, simply did not occur to her.
It did not register in her mind.
Again, I find that this is a common response from people.
They tend to miss the point about the threat to whites that I'm mentioning, and they concentrate on the threat of ethnocentrism or the threat of racism or the threat of what I'm saying.
And as I suggested in the beginning of my speech, I think this tells us something about the white mind today and what has been done to it and what it has done to itself.
I also received another response to the column from a person I think is probably black.
Calling himself Thousands.
He writes, It's too bad you don't know more about DNA and racial heritage markers in DNA.
The fact that such markers exist does not mean that they are consistent or even always significant.
For example, an African marker has been found in the DNA of a South Pacific Islander.
Conclusion? Possibly migration, but not necessarily.
It could also be a spontaneous mutation of the DNA at that point.
Much the same as the one that created the same marker in African populations.
The DNA in all races on Earth is remarkably similar.
What science says is that there are no significant differences between the races when looking at DNA.
That means that there is no significant difference between a white person and a black person, genetically speaking.
That is what it means that race is a social construct.
Is this clear now, you stupid cracker?
Ah.
The silliness of this argument ought to be clear.
First, Negro DNA did not spontaneously evolve or mutate in the South Pacific, and if the story is true at all, interracial breeding is a far more likely explanation.
But secondly, it's true that the DNA in all races on Earth is remarkably similar, which is why all human races are classified as belonging to the same species.
But the DNA of chimpanzees is 98.9% the same as that of humans.
So the point is not really very meaningful, and it definitely doesn't mean that there is no significant difference between a white person and a black person, genetically speaking, or that race is a social construct.
But what I found interesting about the response is that after invoking inaccurate science and weak reasoning to bolster his preachy opening about how it's too bad I don't know more about DNA, the writer simply loses it and winds up hurling names,
betraying that it's not science at all that drives his rejection, but resentment of some kind.
That motivation is entirely clear in several other...
Responses that I received from other readers who acknowledged being black.
One from last October, for example, with the slug response to hate article, namely my column, said, you really don't know what you're talking about.
Blacks, men, women, and children have been murdered and raped by white racists for hundreds of years, and little or nothing has been done about it statistically.
Statistically, more blacks are incarcerated than whites.
As a minority, does that mean fewer whites commit crimes, being the majority of the population in the United States?
Well, he goes on in this vein for a full page, and he winds up with this sentiment.
Whites call themselves Christians, but they don't forgive and wonder why Every race in the world hates them.
You should take a look through someone else's eyes before you form an opinion like that, because to tell you the white man's biggest problem is his arrogance, and that's why he will always be the hated.
When Judgment Day arrives, God will judge the white man for his crimes against humanity, and who was first will be last.
I hope that you have enjoyed this email as much as I have enjoyed writing it.
I'll pray that God blesses you one day with the sight to truly see what's right in front of you and not to do your will but his.
What I found interesting in this letter is its invocation of religion to justify what the writer acknowledges is hatred of the white man.
He is licking his chops over the prospect of getting back at whites even as he prays for me.
Who is first will be last.
He can't wait for the day.
This, again, is a common theme in the responses I've received from blacks.
A somewhat similar but less gloating message said, if America was to finally pay us for the free labor of our ancestors, all could be forgiven.
But many whites feel as though it was okay for us to be enslaved for some barbaric reason.
This is the same country that gave the Japanese 20,000 for being locked up in internment camps during World War II, and they was the enemy for crying out loud.
But we get enslaved for 236-some-odd years, and not even an apology, much less reparations.
And the people here call themselves Christians.
What a cruel joke that is.
As I said, my point is not to refute these arguments so much as to try to show what arguments whites rely on in resolving and resisting racial consciousness.
But even though these reactions came from blacks, I think they invoke These religious themes because they anticipate or are found by experience that a great many whites are affected by such appeals, and these appeals are often invoked by whites themselves.
Almost literally every time that I have debated publicly about race in a public forum, especially on talk radio or television programs, I get a response from whites, usually white conservatives,
Of quoting the Bible verse of Galatians 3.28.
I'm sure most of you have heard it if you don't know it.
The verse is, There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
From Paul's letter to the Galatians 3.28.
This verse apparently has become the basic text for Christian universalism and Christian race denial.
Even though, number one, it says nothing about race per se.
St. Paul never says there's neither black nor white, you will notice.
But if you were interpreted as literally as the people who invoke it do, it would also deny the existence of sexual differences between men and women, which is a conclusion that I would think would appear to gut the Christian argument against gay marriage.
And it would also, because it denies the existence of Jews and Greeks, Jews and Gentiles, quite destroy any basis for the state of Israel.
That's another issue.
But the whole case for reparations and affirmative action depends on this presumption of white guilt that Christianity, as interpreted commonly today by both liberals and conservatives, tends to bolster.
Personally, I'm very skeptical that many whites do actually feel guilt But it is true that whites seem to have a very difficult time dealing with the appeal to guilt.
Understandably, they do not want to defend slavery, but they are also unable even to rely on a sort of historical argument that slavery, even though it may be bad and was evil, was really a widely accepted and widely practiced institution in the United States and throughout world history.
Nor is it easy for most whites to argue that whites have done many things in the past that would not be approved of today.
Persecuting witches, for example, was wrong.
But no one argues today that whites or Europeans owe reparations to women because they burned witches for a couple of hundred years in Europe.
The Inquisition, religious intolerance, religious persecution, Protestants do not generally claim that the Catholic Church owes them reparations or has any debt of guilt because of religious persecution, nor do Catholics argue that about Protestants,
to my knowledge.
But these kinds of problems have They don't seem to cause any problem.
These kinds of questions don't cause any problems for most whites.
It's only race that causes a problem because that seems to be the drum that is always beaten.
Slavery and racial exploitation are exceptions that most whites simply are unable to deal with objectively or adequately.
Last November, I wrote a column in response to an op-ed by The black nationalist Shelby Steele that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on November 13th.
Steele acknowledged that white racial consciousness was not permitted in Western society today in contrast to the racial consciousness of non-whites that is permitted and even encouraged.
And the reason for that double standard, he wrote, was that no group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites.
This race illustrated for all time through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism, the extraordinary human evil that follows when great power is joined to an atavistic sense of superiority and destiny.
This is why today's whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity.
In my column, I did point out that this claim was simply untrue, that non-whites up until fairly recently in world history have probably committed far more violence and aggression against whites than whites had against them, given the Arab and Mongol invasions of the Middle Ages and indeed the Muslim conquest of white-controlled areas in Asia and Africa.
But refuting Steele's case in that respect was not really my major point.
Which was to argue that whites themselves deny themselves racial consciousness for some of the reasons I'm trying to explore today.
Frankly, I'm largely indifferent to Steele's argument about who has committed more violence against whom.
I think it's fairly clear that you can kill a lot more people with a machine gun than you can with spears.
So it may be true that whites, for all I know, have actually killed numerically more non-whites than they've killed of us.
I'm unimpressed with that.
But that point was exactly what most of those who responded to my column wanted to talk about.
That is to dwell on white evil and on white guilt.
This is an important point to them.
Thus, in a response to my column, a reader whose race I'm unable to tell for certain wrote, objectively speaking, Steele is right.
How do you explain the fact that whites are approximately 20% of the world's population yet occupy about 65% of its land service?
The Americas fell to the whites because they slaughtered at least 80 million people who occupied the vast spaces here.
Canada to Tierra del Fuego.
Then they slaughtered the indigenous Australians, Tasmanians, and New Zealanders to occupy those territories.
They invaded Africa and slaughtered Africans in order to occupy those parts where they found the climate tolerable.
And he goes on in that vein.
For two pages, actually.
As I said, I'm more or less indifferent to this claim, but the apparent importance that he attaches to this, as well as the importance that Steele himself attached to it, suggests that they see it as critical in the case against whites and the legitimacy of white consciousness,
and that in turn suggests that perhaps whites themselves are just as vulnerable to that argument as they are to the appeal to guilt over slavery.
But as I remarked, I'm not at all convinced that real feelings of guilt are especially powerful among most whites.
But what is apparently very powerful among them is not so much real guilt feelings as simply an inability to answer these kinds of accusations against whites or to resist the argument that because these accusations are true, whites should not be allowed to distinct white racial consciousness or identity.
That attitude is one that AR readers and racially conscious whites should consider addressing a lot more than I think we have.
In addition to an inability or unwillingness to deal with the argument from accusation, whites also seem inclined simply to deny arbitrarily even the social meaning of whiteness.
In one response to my column on the Steele article, A reader wanted to take me to task for talking about the white vote.
Actually, it was Steele himself who had written that it is quite acceptable for either party to explicitly go after the black, Hispanic, or even the Jewish vote.
In fact, both parties gain an indispensable moral authority by doing so.
But it is absolutely verboten for either party or any white candidate to appeal to whites as a racial identity group.
Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world.
I think he's perfectly correct.
My reader challenged the very existence of a white vote, and in a perfectly friendly letter he wrote, Hi, Mr. Francis.
I just finished reading your article, and I understand your view on the apparent double standard.
I have pondered the issue for quite a while, and I would like to give you an alternative view you may not have thought of.
I bet I have thought of it, actually.
What exactly is the white vote?
I know what Jewish is, I know what black is, descendants of Africans, and I know what Mexican is, descendants from Mexico.
Aside from making the incredible logical jump that everyone in these categories votes the same, they are discernible categories.
I do not think people who have pride being Irish, German, Italian, Swedish, etc.
are painted with the same Nazism brush.
How can you be proud you are a color?
That doesn't, to me, make any sense.
I can fully understand being proud of your heritage, your ancestors, your family name, but I don't think all white people fall into a category with any other banding than they all share a lighter pigmentation.
From what I have seen, a German household tends to have different priorities than an Italian one, for example.
I think if a politician said he was going after the Irish vote or the Swedish vote, it would be taken differently than the white vote.
I understand your point in the article I have seen and do see the preferred categories in our society, affirmative action,
I'm not sure being proud you are white is necessarily a good thing either.
Cheers, Rob.
I think the reader actually has a point here, though it really doesn't challenge anything that either I or Shelby Steele said.
And it's also clear to me that he has no understanding really at all of what race means.
He assumes, again, that race simply means color.
How can you be proud of being a color?
That doesn't to me make any sense.
I can fully understand being proud of your heritage, your ancestors, your family name.
He never grasped that those cultural legacies are closely related to racial identity.
And that racial identity involves more than skin color.
But his valid point is that non-racial white groups, like Swedes and Italians and et cetera, are allowed to have distinct identities, at least as voting blocs and to some extent as cultural groups.
But the larger point remains that while other racial groups have distinct identities, even beyond political behavior or cultural identity, Whites as a racial group are not.
Moreover, he sees nothing wrong with this.
I would suggest precisely because he cannot make himself believe that being white is in itself meaningful or real or important.
This is not quite the same belief as the idea that race is a social construct.
It's closely related to it, at least psychologically, it seems.
And there's the uncertainty at the end of his letter.
That he is not sure being proud you're white is a good thing.
That points to a more deeply seated fear of racial identity.
Note that nowhere does he say that being proud you're black, also a color, or some other non-white racial identity is not a good thing.
Only white identity is what alarms him.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had years ago with a young conservative colleague of mine about racial differences, long before the bell curve was published, and these arguments became fairly common.
I suggested to him that there was evidence for hereditary differences between the races in IQ, and his immediate response, not unfriendly, was that I would be concerned where that argument could lead.
I didn't pursue where he thought it might lead, partly because it was obvious enough, not to the abolition of affirmative action, not to the end of a great deal of egalitarian nonsense and social policy, but it would lead to slavery, to Jim Crow,
to lynchings, to Auschwitz.
As with most conservatives in recent years, all you need to do is ring the bell and they salivate the way the left has trained them.
I could continue with these kinds of reactions to my efforts to write about white racial problems and consciousness for some time, but the point would be the same.
Many whites, and while I can't prove it, I think the kind of responses I've received are fairly typical of what most American whites today believe and how they think about race and about being white.
Many whites are deeply terrified by the very concept of race as it applies to whites.
Their reaction to any frank discussion of the subject It's what I have called before escape and evasion.
On an intellectual level, but also on a deeper psychological level.
To deny that race is real.
To assert that even if it's real, it's not important.
To assert that even if it's real and important, it's wrong.
To assert that even if it's real and important and not wrong in itself, it could lead to terrible wrongs.
And to share, consciously perhaps, but even more commonly, unconsciously, the assumption that whites, even though there is no such thing as whites, have done great evil throughout their history.
And that that history forbids them from any positive white racial identity or consciousness or even existence as a group.
I'm reminded constantly in these replies and others of what James Burnham wrote in his book Suicide of the West in 1964, a book that was directed mainly at that time toward what Burnham identified as liberal responses to the erosion of Western Meaning American and European power throughout the world.
As the European empires ebbed in the 1950s and 1960s and communist and anti-Western power expanded, Burnham wrote, the liberal reaction was one of accommodation, though the flexed liberal response was not confined to foreign dangers.
Toward the end of the book, in a passage that would deeply shock and offend most self-proclaimed conservatives today, Burnham offered this illustration of liberal rationalization of Western decline.
At the beginning of September 1963, at a moment when the nation's constitutional and social fabric was being torn by generalized racial conflict that was posing issues impossible to settle and therefore certain to become graver and more dangerous over the coming years,
the American Psychological Foundation held a large conference in Philadelphia.
The New York Times singles out for a report the address in which Professor Gordon W. Alport of Harvard explained that the racial demonstrations in America are basically a sign of good national emotional health.
On the whole, it is a wholesome and healthy movement.
The Negroes, Professor Alport elaborated further, are running for home, a term he adapted from a goal gradient theory.
Derived from the observation that an experimental subject speeds up when approaching the goal presented in a psychological test.
It is easy to imagine, Burnham commented dryly, Professor Alport in late Roman days explaining how the animals in the Colosseum are generally a playful lot, especially when running for home.
Burnham concluded his book with an analogy that keeps coming to mind when discussing not the liberal responses to foreign communist conquests and western decline, but the white responses to the realities, natural and social, of race.
It is as if a man, struck with a mortal disease, were able to say and to believe, as the flesh of the fever spread over his face, ah, the glow of health returning.
As his flesh wasted away, At least I am able to trim down that punch the doctor always warned me about.
As a finger dropped off with gangrene or leprosy, now I won't have that bothersome job of trimming those nails every week.
Liberalism, Burnham concluded, permits Western civilization to be reconciled to dissolution, and this function, its formulas, will enable it to serve right through to the very end, if matters turn out that way.
For even if Western civilization is wholly vanquished, or altogether collapses, We or our children will be able to see that ending by the light of the principles of liberalism, not as a final defeat, but as the transition to a new and higher order in which mankind as a whole joins in a universal civilization that has risen above the parochial distinctions and discriminations of the past.
My purpose today is not to dissect the ideological and psychological construct that Burnham labels liberalism, but to emphasize that whatever its label, What he was talking about is with us yet, a mentality now far more pervasive among whites than 1960s liberalism ever was,
that reconciles the white race to dissolution and eventual extinction.
It is, I want to emphasize, also much more a psychological phenomenon than an intellectual or philosophical one, although it makes use of intellectual and philosophical concepts to rationalize itself, concepts that often betray their irrational motivations.
Simply by their transparent absurdity and incoherence.
And because it is essentially psychological and indeed a form of neurosis, it is a problem that we, by whom I mean people like us who read and even write for American Renaissance and similar publications, that we cannot adequately deal with on a rational and intellectual level.
In other words, all the scientific arguments about IQ and DNA, all the facts about the reality of race as a force of nature or as a social and political force, all the statistics about black crime, black educational failures, black poverty, and the absence of significant black accomplishments over history,
all that will avail us nothing.
Because those are rational and intellectual appeals and are easily ignored or deflected by those who are unconsciously terrified by the realities to which they relentlessly point.
I'm reminded of the children's poem about the little man upon the stair.
The little man upon the stair.
The little man who was not there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish to hell he'd go away.
Whites today spend an enormous amount of intellectual energy trying to persuade themselves that the little man of grace that lurks upon the stair is not really there and wishing that he would just go away.
What we need to do is to explore more fully what it is that lies at the root of that delusion and of the mental block that prevents today's whites from confronting these realities to discover why it is there and how it got there.
And to find out how that block can be dissolved before the realities it hides destroys us.
Thank you.
you--
Speak to us about the white-Asian difference.
I mean, the Northeast Asians, the intelligent ones.
I see the blending of these high IQ whites and high IQ Northeast Asians as being a much more significant problem than the blending down in the bottom.
Too many racialists talk about IQ differences, but I'm interested in these other differences and how we can raise some consciousness about that.
It's a good question.
I think the, no pun intended, but the IQ differences is sort of the no-brainer of the racial issue.
That's the easiest thing to argue, and to prove that's what most of the research has been done on.
The Asian differences, I believe it was Lothrop Stoddard who talked about the danger of North Asians and Chinese in the long run over a long span of history, which I believe is a much greater racial danger to whites than Negroes.
I think you're correct about that, not only for interbreeding but simply for demographic takeover, for absorption of the rest of the world.
I think if you wanted to make a pessimistic projection, 500 years from now the human race will be Chinese or will look more like the Chinese than they do most of the people here.
Do you think we should take a more positive attitude, that we should be proud of the fact that the That we are the inheritors of the white Western Christian civilization, which was the first one in 6,000
years to abolish slavery.
Yes, although that's...
Yes, I definitely think we should be proud of our civilizational heritage, and it is true that we were the first to abolish slavery.
I suppose that is something to be proud of, although it's not...
The evolution of democracy, it's not the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about the achievements of Western civilization.
The first thing that comes to my mind are things that came out of ancient Greece or the Renaissance or medieval civilization, the science, the literature, the philosophy, the art, all that sort of thing.
not what 19th century liberals and religious nuts like the abolitionists wanted to do.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Sam, I think this fits into a much broader category.
As we go through history, it's utopianism and race just happens to be the utopianism for the past 50 years and it's latched on and it keeps It keeps pulling us down as we go forward.
We go back to the French Revolution, the baking of children in ovens, all these horrible things that if you do research on many of these areas, they come at.
And these people constantly forgive themselves after they make excuses.
When socialists...
We went through the Ukraine and talked to Stalin and talked to other communist leaders.
Nothing was going on.
Everything was wonderful.
The peasants looked well-fed.
7 million people exterminated and another 7 million, use of that word technically, another 7 million genocide through killing specific Ukrainians and peoples related to them.
And then making the excuses that this, you know, everything's fine.
Everything's wonderful.
There's one or two people.
One Brit at the time and a couple other people that made arguments with somebody in the New York Times about whether this was really going on or not.
In the end, you had too many people dead, and the person that was making the arguments against the New York Times or the individual in the New York Times by the name of Durante, by the time they won, these people were dead.
Do you want to comment on that?
Yeah, well, I think what you're saying is perfectly true, that the...
The history of egalitarianism is far more bloodthirsty than the history of anti-egalitarianism.
I think, as I recall, both Phil Rushton in his book on race, evolution, and behavior and the bell curve made similar points.
And when I reviewed those books in Chronicles in 1995, I made a similar point.
All the bloodshed you're talking about, from the French Revolution to Stalin to the Bolshevik Revolution to China to Cambodia, all of this is based on egalitarianism.
When my friend said, when I mentioned the possibility that blacks have inherently lower IQs, when he said, well, I'm worried about where that could lead, he needs to worry about where egalitarianism could lead.
And also, my friend was a born-again Christian who said that.
And that's exactly the same argument they used against the Ten Commandments.
You know, where is this going to lead?
This is going to lead to the Inquisition, to religious persecution and intolerance if we post the Ten Commandments.
My friend would reject that argument as absurd, and it is an absurd argument.
But he doesn't apply that standard to something like IQ and race.
So there's a disconnection here with race when you're thinking that.
Yes, sir.
I'm glad you quoted Burnham and the Suicide of the West.
It's a book still worth reading.
It is.
And I know it's one of Joe Silberman's favorites as well.
You might try reading my book on Burnham, actually.
I think in the book he significantly decried the Lysenkoist, the absurd Lysenkoist idea of the in situ perfectibility.
Yeah. Of man.
It is just a preposterous proposal.
And I'd like to get your comments on the Gould-Wilson conflict in academia, where the bad behavior of these egalitarians has just manifested itself in quasi-criminal action.
Yes. Well, you're right.
I mean, I have nothing original to say about that.
It's terrible.
You know, egalitarians act like...
You usually say Nazis, but they act like communists, actually.
It's an odd thing.
A lot of white people, even myself, who was not even born here, are of mixed ethnic ancestry.
My friend who I quoted, who was arguing against white doesn't mean anything.
It's being Swedish or Italian or whatever.
It means something.
There are very few people who are pure Swedes.
Of pure Italians, you know.
So, what do you call them?
One thing you call them is white.
Yeah, that's why I said whoever wrote that letter you read earlier doesn't make any sense.
I noticed that.
Thank you.
I just wanted to mention that something has happened since my youth.
We've now got the opposition of the government.
And the capitalist system that punished people extremely for expressing a racial view.
Al Campanis, Jimmy the Greek, the people who have been fired from jobs.
Rush Limbaugh lately, even, that said something about a black quarterback who was punished.
There were people who were fired even before that.
This, this, this.
Thank you.
I just, well.
Do you not think that the public condemnation of these people has something to do with how individuals themselves behave?
Yes, it does, because it serves to create the fear that if you think about race the way we do, and then you're going to have to talk about it or do something about it, then you'll be ruined,
and you can be.
I wasn't ruined.
I've been very fortunate.
But I have the honor, actually, to be the founder of an organization, a fictitious organization, that I call the Association of Fired Journalists.
And George Sobran is an honorary chairman.
Peter Brumelow and John O'Sullivan are members.
Scott McConnell, the American Conservative, is a member.
Unfortunately, we now have to make Arsh Lombau a member to tell the truth.
But in any case, all right.
Thank you.
Are there any presidential candidates or parties that you want to basically advocate or support at the moment or put out there for white identity?
No, not even like the Constitution Party, any particular party?
I would vote for Howard Phillips.
Howard Phillips is a good guy and a friend.
I don't agree with his emphasis on a lot of different things, but he is, at least in principle, against immigration, and he is a serious...
conservative and a principled man.
I don't think Howard is going to run on that ticket this year.
I just don't know.
I think there's somebody else running.
I don't know who that is.
I might vote for them, but I'm not going to vote for George Bush.
I'm proud to say that I have not voted for a Republican nominee.
Since 1988, and I'm deeply embarrassed that I voted for one then.
But I think this year, well, I'm just, no, I'm not going to vote for Bush.
We need to do something that's within the area that's possible now.
The first thing we need to do is to build white consciousness, white racial consciousness.
We cannot do anything until we do that.
And once we have done that, once whites begin to think of themselves as being white, and as other things, as Americans or as Christians or as whatever they are, I don't mean that race is the only identity they should have, but once they begin to think of themselves as white and that they should be white and that their children should be white and they have something to preserve as whites,
then we can talk about the political and the social.
Structures and policies that we want to develop.
But until we do that, we're not going to go anywhere.
Jamie Kelso of Santa Monica, California.
You said that we've developed a neurosis as a white race.
In which we can't think about race.
Because if we think about it, we might have to do something about it.
And if we do something about it, we're going to get fired.
Or ruined.
Well, you might be, depending on what you say and who's doing the firing.
Wouldn't it be good to go in the direction of forming social institutions built on the philosophy or the psychology of brotherhood rather than being an individual capitalist who can be fired,
but instead being part of a brotherhood where you can't be fired, you can't be left to twist in the wind as an individual.
But that when these elements of – that you will then have a backup from your brotherhood of race.
Thanks, and thank you for a wonderful address.
Thank you.
Now, I agree entirely with that.
The conservative concept of community is basically what you're talking about.
I would not say that we're individuals today.
I would say that we are proletarians.
We have been dispossessed, not only racially, but economically.
Because now, I mean, in Thomas Jefferson's day, yeoman farmers who own their own farm or own their own store or whatever, you really couldn't do anything to them.
Today, you work for a corporation.
You work for a member of a union.
You work for a newspaper.
The media or something like that, universities, you're in deep trouble if you violate not just race, but a lot of these.
And you're all alone.
You're left alone.
Just you, your family, your kids.
Nobody is there to back you up, to defend you as a group.
I will tell you that I've got to go in a minute, but as you know, I belong to the Council of Conservative Citizens, which is a, I'd say, racially conscious.
One of the great virtues of the Council is that it is made up largely of middle class and working class white people who are more or less independent.
And they don't have that much to fear from small independent businessmen.
They don't have that much to fear from expressing their viewpoints.
You can't get corporate types Corporate executives to join the council or to say anything because they're going to lose their jobs and careers if they say anything.
Right. But if we had brotherhoods, if we as a race had institutions built on the concept of brotherhood and sisterhood, we could fall back on those.
You could say, okay, you can fire me, but I've got an order of brotherhood and sisterhood that will form around me.
I agree.
Well, that would be a great thing.
Thank you.
Thank you all.
Thank you.
I think this notion of supporting whites, supporting themselves, is an excellent idea, worth developing.
But we're going to try to stick to our schedule here, and we're going to take a half-hour coffee break now.