June 08, 2004

Jared Taylor’s Racial Heresies And The “New White Nationalism”

[Peter Brimelow writes: VDARE.COM was awarded the proud title of Hate Group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, the notorious Treason Group, partly because of our publishing articles by Jared Taylor, Editor of the American Renaissance newsletter. We don’t want to disappoint SPLC, so here’s more on Taylor, by one of the authors of California’s anti-affirmative action Proposition 209. For our take on Taylor, click here.]

By Glynn Custred

[Also by Glynn Custred: Alien Crossings and White Plight: Sam Francis On Ethnopolitics]

Demographer William Frey has said that the last census is like “a snapshot” showing the “old America and the new America at the same time.” The old America is white, middle-class and graying. The growing minority population represents “a new kind of globalized America.” [Whites' years as US majority numbered, March 19, 2004 Sydney Morning Herald, (Australia)]

The two Americas together, he says, are creating a “racial generation gap." By 2050 old America will no longer be the majority but will become instead a diminishing minority in the country it once dominated—if this trend continues.

Which is to say: if current immigration policy continues.

The rapidity of this demographic shift is astonishing and its social and cultural implications profound.

The Left welcomes massive immigration as a means of diluting a nation towards which it has felt animosity for so long. The equally dogmatic libertarian right also celebrates it because the emerging “universal nation” emerging will gloriously transcend the parochial nation-state of our history. Corporate managers welcome what they think is the triumph of global markets. 

Only a few so far have showed concern. Some, like Harvard economist George Borjas are concerned about the economic impact of the mass importation of low skilled workers, especially on the lowest wage earners. Others, such as Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington warn of the threat to the American national identity. Still others, such as the recent Sierra Club insurgents, are worried about America’s population growth and its effect on the environment.

A much smaller group of observers, contributors to Jared Taylor’s monthly newsletter American Renaissance, are concerned about the impact of mass migration—along with multiculturalism and racial and ethnic preferences—on whites as a group. This concern, needless to say, is taboo in polite society. But Taylor and his circle are not in the least bothered. In fact, they view themselves as heretics, thus the subtitle of their recent collection of AR articles: A Race against Time: Racial Heresies for the Twenty-First Century.  [Table of Contents, PDF]

Even though it is heretical, A Race against Time is worth reading. Its analysis of multiculturalism and racial and ethnic quotas is accurate and revealing. And another, more dramatic reason to read the book is this: As the elites of this country reduce whites to a dwindling minority in a balkanized America, the kind of data and arguments presented in this collection may well provide the intellectual foundation for the rise of a new identity politics in the United States—to which one academic observer, Carol Swain, has already given a name: “the new white nationalism.”

In the first chapter, “A Racial Revolution,” [AR, May 1999] Taylor tells us that over the last fifty years the way Americans have thought about race since Colonial times has been completely rejected. Not only have those earlier ideas on race become outmoded, but today they are considered immoral. As Taylor puts it: “Only revolutions bring such sweeping, back-to-front moral changes.”

Today whites are made to pretend that there are no meaningful racial differences; that whites have no legitimate group aspirations; that slavery is a sin for which today’s whites must pay eternal retribution; that the only acceptable statements whites can make about race are apologies; and that “diversity” is good for whites since it liberates them from the pathology of racism, etc. etc.

This is not Taylor’s caricature of multiculturalism, but a sober summary. The fact is that this contemporary ideology is shallow and self-contradictory. Race must be held meaningless only by whites, while non-whites are incessantly told that their race is the pivotal point in their lives, the key to their individual and group identity and to their success. But if whites were to assert such a claim for themselves, they would be (and are) loudly condemned as “racists.” For example, only whites must integrate their private clubs and other associations, while blacks and others are not required to do so. A Race against Time does a good job of exposing the fraud of “multiculturalism” and revealing its intellectual flaws.

The enforcement arm of multiculturalism is political correctness. This term originated in Stalinist Russia in the 1930s as a description of the way the Communist state enforced Marxist doctrine, as Frank Ellis, a professor of Russian history, reminds us in his contribution.  [Multiculturalism and Marxism, November 1999]

In another article, [White Might, Black Fright , AR, February 1994] Thomas Jackson shows how political correctness damages blacks by inciting paranoia. Wild rumors assert that white racist groups are colluding with the government to eradicate blacks by spreading disease and drug addiction among them. Jackson notes that “if today’s blacks think their government is trying to kill them or that the KKK can tell the FDA what to put in a report, they will believe anything.”

Again the double standard stands out sharply. For if whites were to respond to a social problem by blaming blacks as a racial group, all hell would break loose.

Drug addiction is indeed higher in the black population than among whites. So are rates of disease and incarceration, as well as the percentage of children born out of wedlock. At the same time, academic success remains persistently lower among blacks than among whites. Several articles in Race against Time, using readily available data, carefully document those differences. The real heresy of A Race against Time is that its contributors explain those differences not in terms of social factors, but rather in terms of inherited genetic differences between the races.

This, the authors claim, accounts not only for the persistent gap in academic success between the races, but for the differential in their moral behavior as well. Thus Richard Lynn argues that lower intelligence, based on genetic differences, lies at the heart of the social pathology we see in black communities. [Race and Psychopathic Personality, July 2002]

And philosopher Michael Levin makes a scientific and philosophical argument for genetically-based superiority of whites. [Is There a Superior Race? AR, February, 1999]

The data used to draw such heretical conclusions are not fantasy; they are drawn from a body of sound scientific resource. But fear of the withering attacks on Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray has made race and cognitive abilities a no-research zone in academe. Only a small obscure group of cognitive psychologists and specialists in psychometrics (the measurement of achievement and abilities) are now quietly working along these lines.

One exception is one of the pioneers of molecular anthropology, Vince Sarich, professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley, and Frank Miele, an editor from the Skeptic Magazine, who have together recently published Race: The Reality of Human Differences, discussing the biological reality of race.

It will be interesting to see how this book is received—and what happens to the authors’ reputations.

Personally, I accept the possibility that there is a genetic component to some aspects of group behavior. But I strongly suspect that the claims made by the contributors to A Race Against Time are overstated and ideological. My own training in cultural and social anthropology has also made me acutely aware of the importance of the many shifting variables, rising and falling in degrees of intensity over time, that affect the behavior of people in the aggregate; from the physical environment, through economic and social configurations, to the patterns of belief and custom that shape our response to the world we live in.

I feel unable to evaluate psychometric data and thus the claims made in Race Against Time.  But even if there is a genetic factor in the equation, I would suspect that it is less potent than the authors claim.

However, I don’t know this. And the reluctance of investigators in the scientific community to examine race and behavior leave me only guessing as to what the answer may be. I am thus able to assert nothing more than my preference for social and cultural explanations, rather than address in a more effective manner the claims made by principled racialists such as those at American Renaissance.

I also wonder if it is just political correctness that discourages serious research in this field. Perhaps there is also fear of discovering unwelcome truths—in the form of biological constraints to the pursuit of equality and social improvement by government.

Whatever the reason, there is a very real danger in this stubborn refusal to engage race-realist arguments, and the suggestive data on which their claims are based.

When young whites have become a minority in a society where an assertion of ethnic and racial differences has a pay-off, more and more of them will catch on to how the game is played. Eventually someone will come along to exploit that awareness, preaching a combination of racial superiority and victimization that could become a force in the balkanized politics of the future.

Of course, we do not know what the future will bring. Maybe we will all learn to get along in the diverse mosaic of different peoples happily pursuing their distinctive ethnic identities at public expense that the elites are preparing for us.

But, given what we know about the nature of ethnic identity and its mobilizing potential in times of stress, I for one wouldn’t bet on it.

Race against Time should be read with that scenario in mind.