By The Realist • 9/15/07
The last column on The Inverted World, “Prospects for Activism,” generated much impassioned commentary, and, because this is an issue of such urgent interest, I want to respond to at least some of the comments in a full-length column. Commenters had a variety of suggestions for pro-white activism, including starting lobbying and legal defense groups, creating videos for YouTube, and writing Wikipedia articles on race. People also suggested that I expand this website by adding forum or a blog.
I am willing to consider all of these ideas, but I cannot accomplish any of them alone. We will move forward only when all of you who read websites like this recognize that the future of this movement depends on you. As I have said, I do not currently have time to do anything more than write my articles. There are only two ways in which any of these projects will come to fruition. First, you can do the work yourself. If you want me to add a forum, offer to create and administer it. If you want a blog, send some sample entries in for me to consider or get other writers to do so. If you want videos for YouTube, make some.
The other way is for you to make a pledge to support me if I decide to quit my day job and start an activist group. Let me make clear that I am not asking for money right now. As I said last time, I agree to set up the group and run it for one year. I am only asking that you help me to continue the group if you think my effort has merit. When you make your pledge, you can tell me what you would like to see done and what your criteria for success are, and you can judge for yourself if I meet them.
Six of you have already written in to make pledges, and I thank you for it. I will only seriously consider quitting my job when I have at least 50 pledges, however.
So please contact me here with any pledges of support or other offers of assistance.
The commenter Guessedworker made a crucial point: realists do not yet agree on the basic goals and strategy of pro-white activism, and it is useless to begin lobbying before we know what we are lobbying for and how we want to achieve it.1 I agree with him that we need to establish a philosophical basis for our activism before we begin. Some other commenters suggested the form such a philosophy might take. Here I will evaluate their thoughts and give my own opinion on the matter.
One popular suggestion is that our activism should be founded on opposition racial discrimination against whites, particularly “affirmative action,” while avoiding the subject of racial differences or other controversial matters. The reasoning is that, since our culture opposes racial discrimination, such a group would be more palatable to the public than one founded on straightforward race realism.
The problem with this philosophy is that it would attack anti-white discrimination without attacking the ideas on which such discrimination is based. Affirmative action makes perfect sense if you accept the orthodoxies of our age: the races are the same by nature, and experiencing racial diversity makes us better people. If you don’t challenge these ideas, complaining about discrimination against whites won’t do any good, because liberals will be able to argue convincingly that this discrimination is justified and beneficial.
Even worse, protesting racial discrimination will work against us in the long run. The single most crucial task of any pro-white activism is to establish that some types of racial discrimination are natural and right. It is this idea alone that will make possible the major transformations that must occur if white cultures are to be saved. A sane immigration policy, for example, depends on the premise that we should discriminate in favor of white immigrants and against non-white ones. In starting a group that called racial discrimination evil, we would be strengthening the anti-discrimination orthodoxy that is destroying us.
Finally, political movements based on opposition to discrimination against whites already exist. Ward Connerly’s successful campaigns to get affirmative action overturned in California and Michigan, for example, were founded on this idea. If you genuinely believe that the abolition of racial discrimination will solve our problems, there are already plenty of established organizations that you can support, not only Connerly’s campaigns, but also the Center for Equal Opportunity, which is chaired by Linda Chavez. Of course, if you contribute to this group, some of your money will be used to promote amnesty, which is another of Chavez’s major causes. However, this shouldn’t bother you too much, as support of amnesty is perfectly consistent with a philosophy of non-discrimination.
One comment suggested that we make opposition to discrimination merely the public face of our movement, while covertly inculcating a spirit of racial partisanship. However, how many would be fooled? As Wikitopian pointed out, the National Association for the Advancement of White People, one of David Duke’s many failures, took the anti-discrimination line, but no one fell for it.
Another philosophy for pro-white activism is that of racial interests. According to this line of thinking, all races have an interest in prospering and multiplying. Other races seek to advance their racial interests through activism, so whites are justified in doing so too.
This is a common argument on the racial right, often expressed in American Renaissance, as in its euphoric review of Frank Salter’s On Genetic Interests.
Essentially, this “racial interests” philosophy is just a variant of the anti-discrimination one in that the key idea is that whites should be allowed to behave in the same way as other races. Hence, it falls prey to all of the criticisms above.
There is something else wrong with this philosophy. When I’ve spoken about my beliefs to people who do not share them, I have sometimes used the argument that living things have a natural interest in perpetuating their own kind. I’ve found, however, that this argument has no resonance with people at all; indeed, they find it bizarre and creepy. Why, they wonder, should they want to perpetuate the white race just for the sake of doing so? This tack puts the matter on such an airy, metaphysical plane that it does not connect with people’s real concerns.
If neither an appeal to non-discrimination nor to abstract racial interests will work, what will? The prospect of cultural change. To thrive, people need a culture that supports them as much as a fish needs water. Our key task, therefore, must be to convince whites that increasing diversity will denature this vital element and turn it into something hostile, like the poisoning of a lake.
Making this argument requires us to attack racial orthodoxy directly rather than distorting our message to conform to it. We would have to expose the behavioral differences between whites and non-whites, the ways in which diversity degrades life, and the groundlessness of the “whites as cancer” myth.
Moreover, we need to attack the motives behind racial orthodoxy. I agree with the commenters who stated that we should not be gratuitously harsh towards non-whites even as we criticize their influence on our culture. But I do think it’s legitimate to be harsh to the anti-ethnocentric white elites who have profited from the “whites as cancer” myth at the expense of their own people.
These is a broad outline of a philosophy, but the details are largely unclear. The current race realist movement has been very good at exposing two differences between whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other: IQ and crime rates. Naturally, these differences would be essential to making our case that diversity will change our culture in ways that are contrary to white interests. However, of themselves, they are not complete. Because of the enormous drops in the crime rate since the early 1990s, most white Americans do not live in imminent danger of crime, so publicizing black and Hispanic crime rates may not persuade people. Moreover, most people associate high IQ with asocial nerdiness, not understanding the effects of a population’s average IQ level on its culture.
Also, Asians have higher IQs and lower crime-rates than whites, so these attributes cannot fully justify pro-white activism. Besides, if someone asks you why you love America, does “Because we’re so law-abiding” or “Because we’re so smart” seem like an adequate answer?
The fact is that there are untheorized, or poorly theorized, aspects of the white personality that cause us to build unique cultures. The effects of these personality traits are relatively easy to understand: no cultures have been as innovative as those of whites; it was white cultures that invented representative government and abolished slavery. Whatever is the source of these phenomena is our racial essence, and it is that which is precious to us. The success of our cause depends on defining this essence and explaining to people that it is the biological basis of the culture that we love.
Whatever the essence is, it undoubtedly has something to do with freedom. White societies place a unique value on the right of all humans to think, speak, and live according to the dictates of their own consciences. We see this in the Western invention of the concept of human rights in the Enlightenment. We see it again in the Anglo-American campaign to abolish slavery in the 19th century. We see it in President Roosevelt’s 1941 declaration that American foreign policy would be based on fostering the “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. This defense of freedom has dictated American foreign policy ever since, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. One can love the spirit that motivated these efforts even if one finds some of them misguided.
In my opinion, we need to attack racial orthodoxy straightforwardly rather than trying to placate it and define what it is about the white race that makes it precious to us. We must, in short, refine our great truth and then utter it without apology. Of course, doing so will expose us to furious resistance, and perhaps even outright persecution. But the lesson of history is that great truths, once they have matured, can never be suppressed and that any orthodoxy that opposes them, no matter how powerful, will fall.