The White Minority

One of the prospects we can all look forward to when whites inevitably become a minority (estimates are placed around 2050) is the ascendance and legitimization of men like Jared Taylor.

Many conservatives chide blacks and Hispanics for their tribalism and their ethnic centrism, believing it to be a dividing force in American society. I'm sure I've said similar things to that effect before. But I would just say that tight group cohesiveness is a natural response to being in a minority. It brings stability, comfort, and focus to a group.

To my liberal brethren: what are your thoughts on whites becoming a minority in the United States?

I thought whites already were a minority, especially with all those Irish-Americans and German-Americans flooding the population and de-anglisizing our culture with their St. Patrick's Day and their bratwurst. Or did our definition of "white" change again to serve modern prejudices?

Perhaps we can get some insight into how the whites will fare in the non-white society of the future by looking at how whites fare in those societies where they are minorities now.

Pessimistic variant: Zimbabwe.

Optimistic variant: Any of the Latin American countries where the majority of the population are indigenous Indians. Keep control of the military and security services, plus the privately-contracted Death Squads, live inside gated communities, and you have a pretty good chance of holding on to your property.

Or, we could turn everything over to the Chinese, who are so profoundly racist that they don't even know it, deeply civilized, and utterly unsentimental about dealing with those who disturb the Heavenly Harmony.

I think South Africa might be a more educational example than Zimbabwe. At least, it may become one in a couple of decades when things have settled down some more.

And since you mentioned the Chinese -- it may be useful to take a look at Hong Kong. The white minority seems to thrive there, and is reasonably well integrated.

Still, I can't think of any examples aside from former colonies, where the whites are the remnants of the colonial authority. Technically the USA is an ex-colony, but it's not really comparable.

South Africa -- we are all holding our breath. Zimbabwe was not too bad for the first decade or so.

And if the whites were a minority in a Chinese society, no problem. You don't mistreat your dogs.

Won't most of our descendents be more cafe au lait, than white or black? I recall reading (in a decades ago genetics class) that American blacks on average had 30% white ancestry. Intermarriage is now common, and so I would expect that trend to continue.

So maybe the countries to look to are those with a range of skin tones, like India and Brazil. Unfortunately, though, their class systems seem to over-value fair skin? Hopefully, we'll do better!

MargD: For a more tasteful expression of the wish expressed in the first sentence of your last paragraph, see the last sentence of Message #4, in this thread.

Hmm, maybe my mom expressed it more tastefully than either of us, when, years ago, she was bathing her adopted grandson. She held her wrinkled white hand next to his smooth brown skin all rosy and sudsy from his bath, asking rhetorically, I think, "Who could think that white skin was prettier?" Who, indeed?

In planning how best to survive or even thrive as members of a white minority in a future America (and may I say, of all the parlour games we play in this group, this is the most curious), I suggest, as a pale South African, that you do not oppress, marginalise, denigrate and otherwise thoroughly piss-off those of your compatriots not in "your" group.

They may not be quite so understanding next time.

Here's what seems to work in my country: Do the math, play nice, cross your fingers, calm down.

And try, even if it feels like a betrayal of the finer feelings of generations of homo sapiens sapiens, or too girly, to see beyond the melanin.

Actually, to be serious, you don't have to look to countries like mine for auguries: Even if your clan is one day in the minority, it's not as though there will only be two groupings -- your lot and one other huge, scary bunch.

There will be many minorities; there may even be so many, and of such relative strength, that you will need to form alliances, make concessions, meet one another halfway.

As a non-white, I don't find the prospect alarming at all. But I have wondered if it scares some of you. If so, I can imagine why.

Of course, any white in the US can try to get a glimpse of the possible future by wandering into a Black area. Do this after dark, if possible.

During the Rodney King riots, as I watched on TV whites being dragged out of their cars and beaten to death, I kept repeating ... we have deserved this, we have deserved this. It's only fair. And it's not as if it's really a race thing: they do far worse to each other in Africa.

Anyone who thinks that being a racial minority, white or any other color or type, should not be a matter for anxiety, regardless of the putative crimes of your ancestors, is required to address the situation of the Jews in pre-Hitler Germany, one of the most cultured and advanced nations in the world.

Familiarity with what happened to them, and with how improbable it was, will go a long way to explaining the very unJewish territorial fanaticism exhibited by many otherwise quite-reasonable people.

Human beings are very nasty animals, when you scrape off that thin layer of culture and social convention and also weaken the mechanisms of repression. But that brings us around to a different topic.

"we have deserved this, we have deserved this. It's only fair."

Surely you don't mean that the actual individuals who were killed literally deserved to be beaten to death?

Or that all whites deserve to be beaten to death because of the state of race relations in the U.S.?

I know this may be naive of me, but I'd like to think that there is a better way to reconcile past (or even current) oppression of one group than oppressing a new one.

In 1980 I lived in Germantown, Philadelphia, just a few blocks shy of North Philly. It was a Black neighborhood. Low income.

Every time I ventured out, I was "wandering into a Black area." Even at night. I not only survived, I was never troubled. It was the POLICE I had to watch out for.

Since 1981 I have always had African or African American neighbors. This was not something I tried it to do, it just happened. (Even here in Alaska I live next to African Americans, and have no complaints.) Never had I had any problems with these neighbors.

Well, either God looks after his Innocents, or you are making a general claim about which I am extremely dubious, but will not put to the test.

My wife's grandmother lived in South Central LA (a few blocks from Compton) for most of her adult life. If you ask my mother in law, she was hardly an Innocent. She did get mugged once.

I think that our outside perception of these places are not always very accurate. I have been through Harlem, the Bronx, and North Philly at different hours of the day and night. I have a friend who lived in Brixton for two years.

Now I ain't stupid. I don't go into blind alleys, flash expensive jewelry or wear a t-shirt saying "White Power." But, given certain levels of common sense, the fear is greater than the threat.

There ARE some places I would not go. I am not saying the world is a safe place. But "black neighborhood" does not say anything to me about the relative safety of a place.

Good point, Arctic. For example, I have African-Americans living in my house. At first I was a little leery because I'm pretty sure they're armed and, after dark, they sure do like their wine. But after awhile I noticed that they had subscriptions to American Rifleman and Vanity Fair and hardly ever did drug deals at home, so I'm pretty relaxed now.

Anecdotal evidence is useful, and sometimes the exceptions to the rule are more interesting than the more typical experiences. Our minds focus on these lucky exceptions. Las Vegas would be a ghost town if people were rational about risk.

But me, I just go by the figures.

If a racial group makes up 12% of the population but members of it commit 50% of the murders and 55% of the robberies, I stay away, when possible, from areas containing large numbers of that racial group.

And when I visit Las Vegas, I never gamble.

What percentage of that 12% is commiting murder and robbery?

Edited to Add: I don't gamble either. I don't even go to Las Vegas. That sounds more dangerous than the Bronx.

It doesn't matter if all 50% are being committed by just one person. I will avoid areas where he is likely to live.

Well we have certainly narrowed things down in the last few posts...from Of course, any white in the US can try to get a glimpse of the possible future by wandering into a Black area. Do this after dark, if possible.

to: staying away from one neighborhood.

I don't gamble because the odds are overwhelmingly against me. I walk in various places because the 50 percent of the 12 percent ends up being a statistically signficant, but small number. (By the way, churches I have served have been the target of several crimes. One was broken into seven times in one year. They were all in White neighborhoods. Since we did not catch the perps, I have no idea what race they were.

The only time I was attacked was by a white person in a white neighborhood. (Fishtown in Philly.) The safest I EVER felt was in Haiti. (Someone actually did steal a camera from someone in our group, but another Haitian saw it, told us to wait, and came back with the camera.)

I know this is anecdotal, (and Haiti is a much different place today...this was under Baby Doc).

"whites" are a minority in the world, so this won't be an entirely new development.

#1 i don't know that "whites" in america, as a "majority", are less prone to "tribalism" than are minority groups. after all, "whites" fled urban neighborhoods for the suburbs in the 1960s and 1970s as middle class "blacks" moved in.

>19 Doug1943: Doug

(I guess I am picking on you today.)
If a racial group makes up 12% of the population but members of it commit 50% of the murders and 55% of the robberies, I stay away, when possible, from areas containing large numbers of that racial group.

See, that’s another one of them thar statistical thingies, which you have already stated you don’t understand all that well. Are you absolutely sure that the unnamed group representing 12% of the population actually commits 50% of the murders and 55% of the robberies, or (more likely) would it be accurate to say that 50% of murder and 55% of robbery prosecutions are against that 12% group? My one experience with jury duty, in which I was called up and endured voir dire for several trials before actually being selected for one, was a real eye opener to the racism inherent in our judicial system.

The Innocence Project and other groups have demonstrated that the rate of wrongful convictions is unacceptably high. The reliable use of DNA evidence is a fairly recent phenomenon. Many jurisdictions throw out DNA evidence after some designated period of time, and/or impose time restraints on the filing of appeals. Still, a small group of law students, focusing on death penalty and life sentence cases, has managed to clear 208 cases since 1992. What rate of wrongful conviction would we find if someone had the resources to go after a broader variety of cases?

Re the Rodney King riots, and whether anyone “deserved” anything:
I grew up in a rural area (northern end of Appalachia) where the population was all white and overwhelmingly poor. I literally never saw an actual live black person until I went to college. I was quite young during the Civil Rights era, and I had great difficulty understanding the whole thing. Did they really forbid people from drinking at a water fountain, or riding on the bus, or eating at a lunch counter? Why was everyone screaming at those black kids? And what was with all those police attacking people? It all looked like madness to me, so I asked my Dad to explain it. His explanation? “Well, just consider what would happen if we made all those people equal, and they decided to get even for the way they have been treated all this time. Things would be pretty bad for us, now wouldn’t they?”

If middle-class blacks had entered these neighborhoods and replaced middle-class whites as you suggest, then the term "white flight" would not be associated with "urban decay."

There would be a demographic replacement of one race with another. Socioeconomic status within those neighborhoods would remain the same.

But that's generally not the case.

as i understand it, the point i raised wasn't about urban decay. it was about tribalism among the white majority. on that front, 'white flight' is exactly the point i raised.

Whites fly because they fear crime and social disorder and they are right to do so. Middle class Blacks fly from lower class Blacks for the same reason. It is utterly justified and should be celebrated as an example of the human will to improve one's conditions through one's own efforts, not sneered at.

I'm not sure how meaningful it is for whites to be in the minority when they (we) still hold so much of the money, power, etc. It's one thing to be a member of a minority group most of whose members are poor and powerless, and quite another to be a member of a minority group many of whose members are poor and powerless, but a few of whose members hold the vast majority of the money and power. Now if everybody voted, whites being a minority could become more meaningful.

Well, we had that very experiment in Zimbabwe. (I know, I know, the current situation is the White Man's Fault.)

Although the "many poor and powerless" whites were even more of a myth there than they are in the US.

#28 there are different ways to define 'minority.' if minority status is defined demographically, this could imply the notion of subjection but this is not necessarily the case. demographic minorities have often held privileged positions with respect to money and power (e.g., whites in s. africa during apartheid; aristocrats in the feudal system, etc.). what is an interesting question is how groups that lack 'numbers' are able to hold such positions against the majority of 'others.' i supposed the question implied by this thread is whether there is a concern that when whites are a 'demographic minority' in the USA, this will eventually lead to a shift in the distribution of power and resources.

Oregon: Re. Post #24, pick away, pick away. I need to do penitance for various sins past, present and contemplated, so you are doing me a favor.

I know I said I didn't understand them there statistical thingies but I suppose I was being a bit economical with the actualite. I tutor young people in, among other things, statistics, although just basic stats: nothing more complicated than how to calculate Pearson's product moment correlation coefficient, and when we would want to use it, as opposed to Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. (If you are not a statistician this may sound scary but is in fact elementary.) For the more complicated stuff, like Poisson distributions and cluster analysis, I am lucky enough to be able to call on the aid of a really intelligent ex-wife who knows all about these things and is still on speakers with me.

So we can ask: are the appalling crime Black vs white crime statistics biassed? Are the police and courts just picking on Blacks?

No doubt there is some truth in this. I have read various statistical studies, usually involving length of sentences awarded by juries to Blacks and whites convicted of the same crime, which would make me doubt that the system is 100% fair.

And I still have the memory of being escorted into a police precinct station on New York's Lower East Side, having just tried to serve an injunction on a landlord and having been assaulted by him, and then detained by the police, with the officer bringing me in telling the desk sergeant that I had just tried to rob the gentleman in question. And I was a white college boy.

But... there have also been studies which question victims about the race of their attacker. And these correlate pretty well with the arrest and imprisonment records. Of course, I know you can say, the victims were such racists that they were lying. But at some point we have to stop playing the apologetics game and get real.

If Blacks make up 12% of the population, and the system charges them with committing 13%, or 15%, or 18% of the murders, you might plausibly cry "bias". But not 50%.

Your best argument would be to counter that the overwhelming majority of these murders are of other Blacks. That would help relieve white anxieties a bit.

And then, of course, there is that old "legacy of slavery and racism" excuse, which I suppose we will be hearing at the next Millenium. (I wonder why it has not been used by the rest of us. After all, slavery was very common in the Ancient world, and elsewhere, so all of us probably have lots of slaves in our ancestry. Not to mention those whose ancestors "were slaves in Egypt".) It is meaningless, and those who put it forward never bother to examine just what it might mean. It is, as I say, an excuse, not a genuine explanation.

I too grew up in the segregated South and saw lots of its evils. I know whereof your Dad spoke. But his vision was a bit limited, when it came to who did what to whom.

I also know that you would have wanted to be a Black in the American South, rather than a Black in Africa from the wrong tribe when another tribe of Blacks is on the rampage there.

And I know that American Indians were fiendishly cruel to other Indians they captured in battle. That what whites did to Blacks in the South had nothing to what white Germans did to white Jews, or what French Roman Catholics did to French Cathars.

The examples could be multiplied endlessly. This is how human beings treat each other. If all were treated according to their deserts, who should 'scape whipping?

Thank God, the West, and the West alone, began to change all this, and American Blacks have been the beneficiary. They should be grateful, not resentful.

oregon in message 24 included this: “Well, just consider what would happen if we made all those people equal, and they decided to get even for the way they have been treated all this time. Things would be pretty bad for us, now wouldn’t they?”

Surely you're not saying this is a valid reason for oppressing anyone ...

#29 doug1943, I know, I know, the current (Zimbabwe) situation is the White Man's Fault.

Just FYI. I was surprised to learn from a colleague, who was reared on a Zimbabwe farm (back when it was Rhodesia), that the white farmers actually were relieved when Mugabe first won election over a chubby, tribal opponent (forget his name). After all, Mugabe was educated in the west. But now it's those western ideas, rather than tribalism, that's behind the redistribution of land and failure of the economy over there, isn't it?

(My friend, who had slept with a firearm added, "There's a reason they call it terrorism 'coz that's what you feel--terror." )

It is meaningless, and those who put it forward never bother to examine just what it might mean. It is, as I say, an excuse, not a genuine explanation.

Please tell me how you know this.

Thank God, the West, and the West alone, began to change all this, and American Blacks have been the beneficiary. They should be grateful, not resentful.

Um. Wow. I think I'll just highlight that one and let it stand on its own. Wow.

>32 KromesTomes:

Absolutely not! That was the explanation my Dad gave, for why the Civil Rights movement should not be allowed to succeed. And we probably didn't have a black person living within 50 miles of us, so what was he afraid of?

MargD I well remember how relieved the whites were when Mugabe took over. He said all the right things. The more fool they.

What is happening ub Zimbabwe is not, I think, the result of bad Western ideas.

Now it is true that you could put a lot of the Third World's agonies in the post-Colonial era down to the malign Western idea of socialism, in its several variants. I don't think that is the whole explanation, by any means, but there is no doubt that the West's advisors -- not just the Leftists but the mainstream economists -- played a big role in holding back the development of indigenous capitalism in the Third World by promoting various schemes of statist intervention and protectionism which had even worse effects, in the Third World, than they had in Europe.

I don't think, however, this is what is happening in Zimbabwe. This is not a case of private farms being turned into socialist collectives according to some utopian dogma, but simple theft.

We have here simply a people too primitive to rule themselves, ruled by a gang of thieving incompetents who are destroying the economy in pursuit of their own selfish ends. Pretty much the story in most of Africa, in fact.

White man abdicates his responsibilities and just walks off, the vacuum filled by an incompetent Black kleptocracy, and things fall apart. Of course, the ideology of state control is highly convenient to people who want to to loot the economy, but it is not taken seriously. No mystery about it at all.

It is a great tragedy. The colonial empires should have been replaced by some form of UN rule, with a gradual plan for self-government, and boundaries that did not trap rival ethnic groups within the same "nation". Government should have supervised by honest Swedes or someone like that, with Blacks being educated and promoted into the state bureaucracy.

The British role in the Caribbean provides a model. There a native Black educated middle class was nurtured fairly early on, so that the hand-over to self-rule was been accomplished smoothly and these people could take up the job of running their own countries with already-developed legal institutions. The Caribbean shows that anarchy and chaos and famine are not inevitable under Black rule. There are problems but nothing like the problems in Africa, where a people not ready for self rule were suddenly given it.

Doug, just to be clear. And please do answer these. They are genuine questions (they all are, actually); I like to know who and what I am dealing with (as much as is possible on the internet, but you seem rather forthcoming):

Are you of the view that white people, Europeans and descendants, are morally and intellectually superior to those of other races and cultures, particularly Africans and their descendants?

Are white people responsible for those of other races, in the sense that if whites did not act, the other races would self-destruct, particularly Africans and their descendants?

Dear god, I hope the answers to these questions are in the negative, but if not...is that racism? If not, how is it not?

Doug, If you would like to have a little fun, then don't answer the questions. Make your intellectual opponents guess your motivations.

For instance, I never let on the fact that I'm not technically "white." So when I engage in discussion about race and IQ, I get a tremendous kick out of people assuming I am just another vanilla face fighting for the White Race (tm).

Wait....

CityGirl: May I suggest the following book, which in fact might be a good one for the next group read (paired with a Leftist one on the same topic, of course): No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning .

I think "legacy of slavery" is meaningless. There is a cultural problem within a large part of America's Black community, no question. And it would be odd indeed if the particular and specific history of American Blacks did not affect their current culture. But this is a commonplace.

The "legacy of slavery" or "past and present racism" are just excuses used by those who want Blacks to remain an alienated minority so that they may be mobilized for political purposes.

Let me present some anecdotal evidence: I have friends who could not have children. They adopted a little girl from India. She had dark skin, and was accepted by the Black students in her public school, when she got to that age, as one of them. But her problem was, she was very bright. Brighter than the white kids, in fact. And when this started to reveal itself in class, she came under intense pressure from her Black friends not to "act white".

Absolutely toxic.

More anecdotes: I used to be the admissions tutor in the Mathematics Department of a University of London college in south London, which has a large Black population. We had few Black students applying to do a mathematics degree, but we did have some. In my ten years there, I think we had about five, and of that five, four of them were adherents of one or another Christian fundamentalist sect. I do not believe this was coincidental.

I believe the personal discipline and genuine feeling of self-worth that these churches gave these young people is what helped them achieve the rather remarkable deed they accomplished: getting a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics from the University of London. No drugs, no sex before marriage, no blaming someone else for your problems ... and remember God loves you and wants you to work hard and succeed.

And they did. (And, by the way, when I read some of the statements on the abstinence thread, all from comfortable middle class intellectuals, I suspect, I have to bite my tongue -- such attitudes would have been lethal for these kids.)

Another example is Malcolm X: in prison he underwent a change of inner culture and became a free man, aided by a religion of self-denial and self-help (although not Christianity).

So I think the key for the emancipation of America's Black poor is a Cultural Revolution, only not the socially-destructive one urged by the liberal middle-class hedonists.

Rather, if it happens, it will probably be a religous one -- maybe not Christian -- and will of course be opposed by the worthless mocking skeptics and nihilists of the Cultural Left.

It will emphasize self-denial, discipline, and the genuine self-esteem to be obtained by hard work. It will provide a rigid moral framework, and will surround the individual with others who continually reinforce the message. It will be highly authoritarian and hierarchical. (A term of military service in the Marines can have the same effect on young men, and for the same reasons.)

Of course any cultural renewal like that will be opposed by the Left because it will oppose every value they hold. Speed the day!

And it will be their own - it will need to be their own - cultural revolution.

So the answers to CityGirl's questions are No and No.

CodyEd:I am not averse to some teasing at times, but to every thing there is a season and this is a time to get serious. (By the way, I too am technically not pure white either, being 1/16 or 1/32 or some proportion Choctaw Indian. Even the pure whites, as DNA tests are starting to show, are not always pure white -- the Roman Army occupied both Europe and North Africa for centuries and they were an equal opportunity employer and sent the legions back and forth around the empire, leaving babies and pining mothers in their wake.)

CityGirl: I will answer your questions.

However, I don't understand what it would even mean for a whole people to be "morally and intellectually superior" to another. So I will try to give you my views on races and nations and tribes and individuals and hope that this answers your question.

(1) Individuals are individuals. There are plenty of Europeans who are scum, and ought to be recycled as quickly as possible.

In my little village in southern England all the scum are white, products of a welfare state on steroids and the liberal culture of non-judgementalism. We have a few Africans and Indians and Chinese and Muslims, all of them hard-working and moral, so far as I know, and some of them very intelligent indeed: in my wife's church there is a woman from Kenya whose son I used to tutor -- he taught himself C++ at 15 (the full whack, objects and all) -- the brightest young programmer I have ever known and I have taught the subject for thirty years.

(2)I think there may be significant cognitive differences among the various human geographic population groups which have genetic roots. But we don't know yet. So we need to keep studying the question. If it turns out that there are, so what? We are going to be choosing our descendants' genes before this century is over. Our great great grandchildren will all have bits of Chinese and Jewish IQ genes, if it turns out that the genetic theory of IQ is correct.

I actually hope it is true, because if "culture" is the explanation for the wide variability in human achievements, the problem of uplifting those on the bottom is more difficult. We don't know much about society and our attempts to engineer it are crude, crude, crude.

But that is just "IQ" which is a relatively narrow quality.

What about "culture" and all that?

I believe that there is progress in human history. I believe we are "better" than the Romans, with their cruel treatment of prisoners, for example. I think we are "better" than the Southern slavocracy. I think we are better than the Yamomani Indians, with their incessant warfare and treatment of women.

And the "we" here is not just European civilization, but all current civilizations, including that of our Islamic adversaries. The current situation in Iran is an enormous step up from the lives of primitive peoples.

So: I support civilization over barbarism. (And barbarism over primitive savagery, come to it.) At this point Jesse is going to ask me what I mean by "civilization" but I shall just leave it as an undefined term. You know it when you see it, with the caveat that civilization in the hands of savages, a la Nazi Germany or Pol Pot's Cambodia is a terrible thing indeed. But in the long term, such a combination is an anomaly. Jet engines and chemistry laboratories lead to human rights and equality before the law. In the long term.

Now, is there anything special about European Civilization (as opposed to Islamic, Indian, Chinese, and so on.)

Yes.

(To be continued.)

I appreciate the responses. I must resort to a numbered list to keep my thoughts straight.

1) If not already apparent, I am a member of the American black middle-class (professional class?) and always have been. My parents were the first in their families to attend college. That's not because they were the first smart ones to come along. I can tell you unequivocally that they had to be smarter and more competent than their competition in all things at all times. They were not welcomed. Now the white people report to them and they report to no one (except maybe the IRS). We are from the south originally, which means of course that I am not 100% of African descent, not by a long shot. For all of these reasons and others I have a perspective that many of you may find unique.

2) I am not so unsophisticated as to equate a disagreement with affirmative action policies with racism. I am well aware of the argument that affirmative action is condescending and counterproductive. I'm not clear on my own views except that I believe that affirmative action is far more useful in education than in employment.

3) I agree that it is not in black America's best interest to wait for the government or the Establishment or white people in general to "help." This is something we must do on our own terms. That said, I am sensitive to remarks about what "Blacks should" do and feel. It's incredibly condescending.

4) Let us not forget that one of the legacies of slavery is that this country (US) and its economy was built on the backs of involuntary and uncompensated labor for hundreds of years. One of the many legacies of slavery is the wealth of landowners. Another is my existence. I am well aware that slavery has existed in many forms as long as civilization has. The US is a unique experiment, yes? I would not minimize the damage to Jews and Native Americans either. Psychic scars are the hardest to live with.

5) Doug, you may be surprised to find that I agree with you, to some extent, about the positive and organizing effect of religion in distressed populations. I am very familiar with Malcolm X's story and with that of the Black Muslims. And, while I have, I don't have to get all of my information on those two subjects from books. Bean pie, anyone?

6) codyed, I have no assumptions about anyone's race until they say something to give me a clue. I will say this: there's a reason blacks generally don't vote Republican and it's not because we don't know what's good for us.

I'll probably have to edit this later. Cheers, everyone.

CityGirl Thank you for your thoughtful reply.

I recall reading, many years ago, something by James Baldwin, on how it felt to look at, say, the Empire State Building, and to know that, whoever had made it, his people had not made it. And in the latest issue (the latest I have, which is a month old) of National Review there is a book review, by Shelby Steele, of Clarence Thomas' recently-published autobiography, which makes a similar point: whites have always known dominance and triumph; Blacks have always had the insecurity of being a minority in a white-ruled society. He says it more elegantly than I have paraphrased it here.

Later I will post my argument on what is special about European Civilization, as opposed to the other great civilizations, which have in the past surpassed it in various ways, and why all mankind must (and will, it is unstoppable) adopt it. But without speculating on why the Europeans got there first.

On psychic scars: they are indeed the worst.

And the best place to see them (and also to see a powerful example which undermines the "genes-make-culture" idea) is to look at the Indians of Central America.

Unlike my Choctaw ancestors, these people, the Mayans and related groups, were in the process of building a great civilization. Great public buildings, extensive social organization, mathematics, a calendar, a written language...

Given a few thousand years of isolation, and their ships would have been landing in Europe.

But they didn't get time. The Spaniards got to them first. Destroyed their culture as far as they could, burnt all their books (except for two or three which accidentally escaped, all we have of their writings), practiced the usual barbarities.

And the result: a broken people. Travel through the villages of Guatemala and Southern Mexico. It is so sad. Inert. Destroyed.

The same genes that learned how to predict eclipses now inhabit the bodies of people who still appear to be in shell-shock.

We see this pattern many times, in both directions.

Arabs built a great civilization, surpassing Europe, discovering the ancient Greek thinkers first, and extending a tolerance to Jews and Christians that was not practiced by the Christians towards Jews and Muslims. Then something happened, and they went to sleep.

The Greeks were just a collection of tribes on the Mediterranean, nothing special, then about 600BC Fire from Heaven fell on their heads, they invented Western civilization over the next couple of centuries, and then went back to sleep.

The Danes were fierce warriors, spreading terror around the coasts of England. Now they are the nicest people in the world.

The Jews were merchants and doctors and scholars. The phrase "a Jewish army" outside the context of the Bible, would have been a joke. Until a few decades ago, when this meek and scholarly people turned themselves into ferocious and effective warriors.

So we know cultural transformation can be done, and genes have nothing to do with it, because all of these peoples who have undergone such remarkable shifts in their characters, have essentially the same genes in each of their manifestations.

But the problem is: we do not know how to simply induce such cultural shifts.

They seem to happen, in some cases, spontaneously, even though that seems improbable.

Theories abound. But no one knows.

Now what American Blacks "need" to have happen to them is the sort of profound cultural leap that happened to the Greeks, Danes, Jews, etc.

I doubt that it can be induced from the "outside". However, I also believe that "outside" influences -- academics, journalists, politicians, and so on -- can help hold such a transformation back, and have been doing so.

>44 Doug1943:

"So we know cultural transformation can be done..." -Doug

Doug, there is no need for a "profound cultural leap." Middle class black Americans are no different from the two of us. That might be hard for some conservatives to accept, but it is true.

You clearly choose to view black Americans as if they were all working class or impoverished. If you were to do the same thing with working class and impoverished whites, well, you would probably be calling for a "profound cultural leap" for them too.

Finally, the examples you gave were all of homogeneous tribal groups. I don't see how these "profound cultural leaps" which you would like to see take place can be equated with the historical experience of a large minority in a multi-ethnic society.

>45 oakes:

If you don't know, Oakes... We're sure as hell not going to tell you. I'm going to let you in on a secret: we're counting on the right to continue to refuse to change its social views.

>47 oakes:

I know, I just couldn't help myself.

It was the hair talking.

BGP: It is not middle-class Blacks, or working class Blacks, that we are talking about. It is that very large section of the "Black community" who are lumpens.

There are indeed problems with some middle class Blacks -- including a strong tendency to excuse the self-destructive behavior of the lumpen wing -- and we could have a good argument about "Afro-centrism" and the ridiculous mythologizing and falsification of Black history by certain Black academics, and in particular the contribution of trendy white radicals and gutless liberals to stand up for truth against it.

But that is not the main problem. The main problem is that the Black masses are not following the path of almost every other ethnic group which has come to America and pulling themselves out of poverty (YES, YES, I KNOW what is different about Black history! The problem is what to do about it.)

As for Oakesspaldings' question, which, like BGP, I feel free to comment on, despite not having long (or much of any) hair, and not being a hippy.

It is an interesting fact that there are arguably slightly more American Blacks who think of themselves as conservatives, than who think of themselves as liberals.

But their conservative cultural values are not enough to overcome what they see as their material interests, which weigh most heavily in the balance when it comes time to vote.

This behavior is not at all untypical -- I believe mid-West farmers vote, or used to vote, Republican in order to get their hands on those juicy farm subsidies, despite the fact that their underlying ideology was one of rugged individualism and self-reliance -- for auto workers and dockers and seamen.

It is of course one of the malign results of making the government a serious repository of wealth to be redistributed, which various groups in society then struggle to get their hands on instead of generating their own.

So while we are on this nuclear but unavoidable subject, I am going to, in the Political Conservatives Group, submit an information thread with about fifty websites maintained by and books written by Black conservatives, among whose number are some very interesting people -- and I am not mainly talking about the usual stars like Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele.

>47 oakes:

Yes, and your comment was on a public thread. LT has perfectly functional mechanisms for 'private' communciation, which we will be quite happy to 'butt out' of. If you don't want comments, don't post.

Oops, lost my temper there. Must have something to do with my hirsute volubility, also.

Good morning, gentlemen.

I'll take you on good faith, oakesspalding, that it was a serious question. I'm tempted to be cheeky, like BGP, and coy tantalizing you with the secret. But the funny thing is, the answer is right in front of the Republicans, and they just don't get it, so what's the harm in telling? Maybe it will help.

I've come up with two main reasons. But first, a few prefatory remarks.

I hope I will not be the only one to speak on this subject, because lord knows black Americans don't participate in groupthink, so these are my thoughts and observations, nothing further.

Doug, on black conservatism: a) black conservatives do write books and some may even have some good ideas; and b) many black voters have some very conservative ideas about God, abortion, gays, the military, welfare and so on, (an anecdote: my grandfather -- a delightful and shrewd southern businessman who goes by the nickname "Bubba" and also has, at any given time, two or more cars in various states of repair, but all running, parked in his front yard in case anyone comes by and wants to buy a car --my grandfather, when I told him I was moving to the San Francisco area, asked me, "Aren't you going to be uncomfortable around all those homosexuals? It's not right, the way they are."). Both of these facts are irrelevant to the fact that Republicans are not going to get the black vote, especially these Republicans. Here's why:

1) The Republicans represent The System. (Please take me on my word on this for now; I don't want write a book on this subject today.) We don't like The System. The System is connected to feelings of deep distrust. If you do not understand why, please see any or all of the following: Roots, Black Boy and Native Son, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Women of Brewster Place, Brothers and Sisters and anything Maya Angelou has written (you should check her out anyway, fascinating woman). And too many more to name, but I'm sure you know where to find them.

Before you formulate your counter-arguments, please consider this: in the US, blacks have studied whites as a matter of survival for hundreds of years. Studied. And the result is a well-honed capacity to distill one's observations and thoughts and thereby discern what is and is not relevant to one's immediate existence. E.g., the African-American population is far less likely to care about what happened under Bill Clinton's desk. It's bulls***.

2) The second reason is close to what BGP wrote about the cultural leap. The representatives of conservative thought and action view blacks as "other," alien, something really apart from themselves. The Republicans don't give a damn and it's obvious. Case in point: Katrina. Another: Bill O'Reilly's reaction to a recent visit to a black-owned and -patronized restaurant. (BTW, we weren't surprised.) If you don't see what I mean, try a little experiment. I have provided a link to a recent Political Conservatives thread on Latino voters. Except when you go through it this time, imagine that all references to Latinos are about you, your family, your friends, your home. How does it make you feel? Are these the people you want to hand your power and your voice to? Your interests will always come second to theirs. And as to those black conservatives, the conservatives will only let you into the club (not the ballot box, there's a difference) if you act like them. Contrast that to the Democratic Party.

Some of you may be mystified by black voters' allegiance to Bill Clinton. This is why. He gets us. We can forgive him his foibles. And I'd bet you real money that's part of the reason why Hillary has so much support from black voters and politicians. Because of Bill. We f***ing love that man. We really do. I'll remind you here that Maya Angelou called him our first black president.

If none of this makes any sense to you, well, the secret is safe ;-)

Oh, and some long-haired boys are quite lovely.

Please excuse any typos. It's a lot.

citygirl: I'm half Mexican. I grew up poor in a small central Texas town that had a sizable Hispanic population, so the arguments I put forward in the Hispanic voters thread were not made from the point of ignorance but from experience and backed up with statistics.

The major difference between you and me is that I don't blind myself to the cold, brutal reality facing our respective communities. And I certainly don't like to be pandered to by some scummy politician.

EDIT: One more thing: I was the only one defending the position that there was a break down in the Hispanic family and that Hispanics will continue to vote Democrat for years to come. My opponents--both conservative and liberal--gave me no quarter.

Thank you, codyed, for the opportunity to clarify my use of the Latino voting thread. I'm not making judgments on all of the comments or posters, nor the substantive points made. I don't know why Latinos vote the way they do or what they're going to do next. I'm attempting to call attention to the tone, the attitudes and perspectives revealed.

I don't know where you got the idea that I'm blind to the realities of my community. I've given you some information about myself and experiences, not enough to make that call. I'll give you a little more info: my extended family has to deal with drug addiction, premature motherhood, incarcerated boys, HIV, fatherless children, unfit and addicted mothers, mental illness, the effects of sexual abuse, etc. If I were blind to these things I'd be a sociopath.

And I'm sure your last point was not intended to imply that black voters are too dumb to know when they're being pandered to.

oakesspalding, of course people are just people. I'm here, aren't I?

Race is a touchy subject, and should be discussed, by whomever, wherever. And doing so will get us all in trouble sometimes. The potential for misunderstanding is huge. To be clear, I do not object to the existence of the thread nor to the use of the terms Latino and Hispanic. That's nowhere near the point I was trying to make. As to this question, sure, I painted in broad strokes, but the subject is far too complex to do justice in few paragraphs. I think I got out the nuggets. I hope as you come to know me better you will realize that nothing I say is intended to apply to all, but it takes too much time and space to qualify every comment, and I trust the readers can do that for themselves.

Again, I have no position on Latino voting nor your particular views on the subject. I do have a distinct view on how the Republican party, in general, views the Other. I do realize that my little proposed experiment was bound to raise hackles. What you do or do not get from it is completely up to you. My point is that, at times, it sounded like colonialists discussing the savages. (To anyone who posted there, whether you take that to apply to your posts is completely subjective. That was kind of the point.) It's nothing personal and I didn't think all of the posters sounded like white people abstracting in their armchairs (your image). If I didn't think you guys were worth discussing these things with, I wouldn't. Believe me, there are plenty of people with whom I refuse to engage.

As to the political nature of my "screed," I'm not really sure what your objection is. I'm not asking you to adopt my politics and I wouldn't expect you to.

If my message didn't come through to you, that's unfortunate, but hardly serious. We can try again another time, or not.

ETA: BTW, I agree, that sweeping demagogic statements are irritating, especially when you don't agree with them, and they are made in this group frequently, by nearly everyone. It's one of the ways in which we communicate our views. And, as to poking you -- not my intention. When you get poked by me we'll both know it ;-)

Codyed's post >1 codyed: above skewed the discussion of this topic in an unfruitful direction from the get-go.

In my view the following things will be true when those of predominantly white ancestry are no longer a majority of the residents of the U.S.A:

1) There will be no majority racial or ethnic group in the country. In and of itself that will be neither a bad nor a good thing.

2) Those of predominantly white ancestry will be the largest racial or ethnic group in the counry. In and of itself that will be neither a bad nor a good thing.

3) Those of partly white ancestry -- which includes most who identify as black and nearly all of those who identify as hispanic, as well as all of those of predominantly white ancestry -- will continue to be a majority of the residents of the country. In and of itself that will be neither a bad nor a good thing.

4) Jared Taylor's racist views will not become ascendant or legitimized. That will be a good thing.

What is wrong with Jared Taylor, of whom I believe it is incorrect to use the unmodified term "racist", is that his political outlook is a utopian one.

It may sound grotesque to use the word "utopian" in this context, but then when we attempt to create utopias the results are always grotesque.

He wants to see the races separated. This is logically independent of his beliefs about their various comparative qualities. (I believe that he thinks whites inferior to Japanese, for example.)

Now, no sane person who knows anything about the world can believe, if we were starting from scratch, that we would set up nations which incorporated within the same boundary large numbers of people from very different ethnic groups. Diversity in this context would be, and is, an evil.

But we are not starting from scratch. We are all here in one country and we have to live together and hope for the best.

The only way that the ethnic separation hoped for by some racial nationalists (white and Black) could come about in the US is the only way it has ever come about: by large scale social upheaval usually accompanied by mass slaughter.

Minorities which are small enough and wealthy enough can sometimes flee to safety, if they have a country willing to receive them. This wouldn't be the case for American Blacks. Nor would the "Five Southern States" fantasy of some Black nationalists have any chance at all of succeeding.

So racial separation is a pernicious fantasy, a barely-concealed proposal for genocide. I don't think that is the intention of Jared Taylor personally, whom I found to be a nice and reasonable man when I bought him a beer in London a few years ago. But that would be the outcome of racial separation.

No matter what the facts are about Black IQ and crime rates, no matter what the facts are about the inevitabilty of white racist viciousness, our destiny is a common one, like it or not.

Even if I were to withhold my bias against racist-sounding statements, Jared Taylor still comes across as a pretty contrived and self-contradicting editorialist who forms his argument by being selective with evidence. In one breath he'll be on the side of evolution and use it as an explanation for functional differences, and next thing you know he's discounting the value of diversity (although he calls is "status diversity," with which he is too quick as dismissing as non-functional). Embracing evolution while denouncing diversity is a major self-contradiction. You can't have evolution without diversity. He's just picking and choosing ideas he likes and putting them together to promote the argument he wishes to accomplish to match the conclusion he is motivated for. I don't know what that motivation for using selective evidence might be, but if it's not a racial motivation, then what can it be? If he's asked about his opinion of the Holocaust and answers that he has no opinion on whether it was 6 million Jews he died and equates it to his not having an opinion on American WW2 deaths (which is a figure nowhere near as familiar as figures of the Holocaust) how does he get away with having no opinion without meriting a racist attribution?

His differentiation between "functional diversity" and "status diversity" is an interesting one. But he ignores the possibility that diveristy in perspective arises from such status diversity. Different ways of thinking. Different approaches to solving problems that contribute towards a more adaptable society in which how you use information is becoming ever more critical for success. Like how Japan's crowded society fosters a culture favoring miniturization, allowing them to capitalize upon such inventions as the transistor. Or like how America has a culture of innovation, or Germany a culture of craftsmanship. Jared Taylor wants to segregate and homogenize all of that. He wants us to be weak.

>Codyed's post >1 codyed: above skewed the discussion of this topic in an unfruitful direction from the get-go.

Not to mention the fact that it posits a white "race".

I think the "Diversity is just wonderful stuff" is usually just a lot of well-meaning pieties, in which disconfirming evidence is not allowed to be considered.

It doesn't matter a bit if America would be stronger, or weaker, as an all-white, or all-Black, nation.

We are as we are. We have to make it work.

I think that the only interesting question here is one we have already yelled at each other about: is the Central Dogma of Multiculturalism true?

Can any mixture of any numbers of any ethnic groups be put together in a single area, and everything be sweetness and light?

Are Americans immune from the hatreds that have rival ethnic groups at each other's throats in so many other parts of the world?

#62 your questions assume that 'ethnic groups' are primordial. the scholarly debate is not settled on this issue (at least with respect to the literature on nationalism). primordialists assume some fixity among groups; constructivists, on the other hand, argue that ethnic groups are "imagined communities". if one follows the second line of argument, there's no reason to assume either 'sweetness or light' or an eternal ethnic war of all against all. it would depend on whether political and social arrangements promote or hinder 'tribalism.'

constructivism:

Imagined Communities
Multicultural Citizenship
Ethnic Groups and Boundaries

primordialism:

The Ethnic Origins of Nations
Nationalism and Modernism

Well, I am a constructivist myself. But it would have been cold consolation to a German Jew to know that his guards at Buchenwald were not "essentially" different from him.

One of the things I was always struck by, when seeing the TV coverage of the latest Israel-vs-Arabs war, was how similar the soldiers of both sides looked. Same for Greeks and Turks, Irish Protestants and Catholics, Sunnis and Shi'as.

But the problem is, the people in conflict tend to take an "essentialist" approach to each other, making the distinction which academics like to make .... well, academic.

Yes. Every time Quebec has a referendum on whether to remain in Canada, I pray they will. After all, if Canada can't make it, is there hope elsewhere for other multi-ethnic countries?

(I am English-Canadian in origin, actually Scottish-English-Irish-French. My best friend over there is French-Canadian. I offend her on occasion. She disses the Queen. But we remain friends. )

Well, Canada could lose Quebec, without too much upheaval. The non-French inhabitants of Quebec would find themselves in a bit of a fix, but nothing near as bad as other minorities have been. Then the next question would be: will the Indians -- and I believe there are some in Quebec -- be content with their status, or would they too want to leave? I hope it does not happen.

Where you get your real stomach-turning zoological behavior among people is where the various ethnic groups are inter-mixed, geographically.

Where it was just a case of chasing out the colonialists, things could be solved realitively easily: the settlers went home and left the natives to show how well they could do under self-rule. But all those easy questions have been solved, with one or two exceptions (Tibet, Chechnaya).

We are left with the hard cases, where the peoples are significantly inter-mingled.

And this is the case in many places, and it is what multi-culturalists want to see happen in the US. I think any sane person would want to at least think about the desirability of doing this as if it were unproblematic.

French and English are pretty intermingled in Canada--my friend, a descendent of a Quebec Premier, is from nickel-mining Sudbury in n. Ontario and now lives near Toronto. The 3rd largest French-Canadian community is St. Boniface, near Winnipeg, Manitoba. A set of my cousins, who work in French, live in Montreal. My sister learned French well enough to take a bilingual position in Toronto (although I am certifiably hopeless in the language...) But your point is taken. Mine, too, I hope--if Canada can't pull it off, what hope elsewhere?

Doug: Well, Canada could lose Quebec, without too much upheaval.

Sure, but maybe a tad more than you might think. The US treaties about the St. Lawrence Seaway are with Canada.

The story I've heard from friends up in that part of the world is that the Army's 10th Mountain Division was based in Watertown as a signal to Quebec that the US was willing to seize control of the Seaway, if separation should occur. Just to make sure that the new treaties were negotiated 'properly'.

(Of course, today, the 10th is tied up in other adventures elsewhere, but it's certainly an interesting scenario.)

War with Canada??? It sounds like a South Park joke.

Well, if that ever happens we really will have lost all our friends in the world. I suppose the only consolation would be seeing how Mark Steyn deals with it.

But then I hear from some of my colleagues on the Right that the Trilateral Commission and the Illuminati and George Soros are planning to merge Mexico, the US, and Canada into one huge North American Collosus anyway.

As for those rebellious Quebecois who want to break away and set up their own country: Mes Amis, before you do anything rash, study what happened to my ancestors when we tried to do the same thing.

Minorities in the United States will eventually be represented in the upper reaches of the economy in proportion to their population any day now, so situations like this happening right now in Bolivia would never occur here.

All snippiness aside, Amy Chua wrote a good book about this very phenomenon called World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.

Brave new world indeed.