By Jared Taylor
01/04/2011
For details of American Renaissance’s ninth conference, Feb. 4-6, 2011, click here
[The conference was cancelled — see First, They Came For American Renaissance. Next, For Establishment Conservatives —But They Deserve It. By Alexander Hart]
One of the most widely accepted double standards in the United States — in the entire Western world, for that matter — is this: Non-Whites have legitimate racial interests but Whites do not.
Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, for example, may band together and push for collective advantage but Whites may not.
In Europe, it is Third-World immigrants who set up race-based pressure groups, whereas Whites may not.
The double standard is so entrenched Americans hardly notice it. No one disputes the Congressional Black Caucus's right to view legislation from one perspective only: "What’s in it for black people?" The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has the same parochial perspective, as do thousands of race-based groups for members of every profession.
Occasionally, some naive White kid tries to set up a White Students Association — after all, every other groups has one, so why no Whites? — but quickly learns that to do so would be "hate". As the black columnist William Raspberry once put it, "It’s always illegitimate for White men to organize as White men. [Dubiously Exclusive, Washington Post, Nov. 24, 1995] I would add: Good luck to any White women who try to organize.
Black essayist Shelby Steele put it more elegantly: "[B]eyond an identity that apologizes for White supremacy, absolutely no White identity is permissible. In fact, if there is a White racial identity today it would have to be White guilt — a shared, even unifying, lack of racial moral authority." [White Guilt: How Black and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Right Era, by Shelby Steele]
Science writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman write that research shows racial pride is an important element of self-esteem for non-Whites, but they draw the line at Whites: "It’s horrifying to imagine kids being 'proud to be White'."
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) agrees. In 2005, it refused to grant a trademark on the phrase "White Pride Country Wide", explaining that "the 'White pride' element of the proposed mark is considered offensive and therefore scandalous". The USPTO has nevertheless trademarked Black Power and Black Supremacy. And apparently it finds nothing scandalous in African Pride, Native Pride! Asian Pride, Black Pride, Orgullo Hispano [Hispanic Pride], Mexican Pride, and African Man Pride, all of which have been trademarked.
What makes the prohibition against what we could call White consciousness especially perplexing is that non-Whites so often couch their interests explicitly in terms of racial dispossession. Kent Wong, who teaches Asian-American studies at UCLA, recently gave a speech to a student group in support of the DREAM Act. "You will go on to become lawyers, teachers, doctors and members of the U.S. Congress to replace those old White men", he shouted, as his largely Hispanic audience clapped and cheered.
"We are everywhere, and there is no occupation or activity in this country that escapes our influence", writes Jorge Ramos, anchorman for the Spanish-language TV network Univision. "This century is ours."
In 2007, Ron Gochez, who teaches history at Santee High School in Los Angeles, referred to Hispanics as "40 million potential revolutionaries north of the border inside the belly of the beast" who will rise up against "frail, racist White people."[Video]
And then there is the oft-quoted University of Texas professor Jose Angel Gutierrez [email him]who got La Raza’s Chicano of the Year award in 1994: "We have got to eliminate the Gringo, and what I mean by that is that if the worse comes to the worst, we have got to kill him."
Professor Gutierrez thinks extermination probably won’t be necessary, however: "We have an aging White America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It’s a matter of time … . Se estan cagando cabrones de miedo! (They [Whites] are s — — g in their pants with fear.) I love it!"[Audio]
Retired CNN anchorman Bernard Shaw received a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists in 2007. In his acceptance speech, he said:
"Beyond this ballroom tonight, White males wake up. Globally, you are an island speck in an ocean of color. The reins of power will weaken and so will your grip — if you do not faithfully support our nation’s greatest strength: diversity."
Is it a gross misinterpretation to rephrase Shaw’s remarks as: "Go quietly, before you are pushed"?
Non-Whites in all White countries feel the demographic wind in their sails. Immigration has sent the Muslim population of Spain soaring from just 100,000 in 1990 to 1.5 million in 2010. A Moroccan imam named Noureddine Ziani now based in Barcelona says it is time for Europeans to stop calling their heritage Judeo-Christian and call it what it really is: Islamo-Christian. He has also persuaded the Barcelona city fathers to use public money to build a gigantic mosque by explaining to them that extremism takes root only in small mosques.
I confess I am baffled by the prohibition on any expression of White group interests. I have sometimes put it to liberals this way: Every census shows Hispanics gaining in numbers and influence, and the news is always met with whoops and cheering by Hispanics themselves. Why is it a sign of healthy ethnic pride when Hispanics celebrate their gains at the expense of the majority, whereas it would be "hate" for Whites to resist those gains?
I once asked this question to Roberto Suro, now of University of Southern California. All I got was a glare that looked like, well, hate to me.
Curiously, many Whites whoop along with the Hispanics. New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote this about Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings:
"[T]his particular wise Latina, with the richness of her experiences, would far more often than not reach a better [judicial] conclusion than the individual White males she faced in that Senate hearing room. Even those viewers who watched the Sotomayor show for only a few minutes could see that her America is our future and theirs is the rapidly receding past." [They Got Some ’splainin' to Do, New York Times, July 19, 2009.]
I cannot imagine Mr. Rich writing happily about the displacement of Tibetans and Tibetan culture by Han Chinese. I’m sure he would splutter with fury if Whites were taking over the power structure in Miss Sotomayor’s ancestral Puerto Rico.
Why, therefore, is it wrong for Whites — and only Whites — to resist displacement by people unlike themselves? Why is it "hate" for them to want to preserve the culture and way of life of their ancestors?
Some Whites apparently despise their own race and think it should disappear. Susan Sontag wrote famously that "the White race is the cancer of human history". [Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57(not online)] Christine Sleeter, President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, once explained what Whiteness means: "ravenous materialism, competitive individualism, and a way of living characterized by putting acquisition of possessions above humanity"."White Silence, White Solidarity," Race Traitor, 1996,
Robin Morgan, a former child actress and feminist, has written: "My White skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony". [The demon lover: the roots of terrorism, p. 224]
Some of us, however, rather like being White, and would like for our children and grandchildren to be White, too. The self-haters are welcome to go extinct if that is what they want. But what would be wrong in wanting a country — even a small country — where Whites are the majority and intend to keep it that way?
Mexicans, Japanese, Israelis, Nigerians — they would never let themselves become minorities in their own countries. Why are only Whites required to look upon the prospect of dispossession as an exciting exercise in "diversity"?
I know of only one person who has ever tried, even half seriously, to explain why Whites must never join together for any collective purpose and must never have a racial identity. Shelby Steele, whom I quoted earlier, explains as follows:
"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." [Yo, Howard! Why did Dean have to embrace the Confederate flag? November 13, 2003]
Dr. Steele is hopeless wrong, but hats off to him anyway. At least he seems to recognize there should be some reason for the double standard. He doesn’t just shout "Hate! Hate! Hate!" the way most "anti-racists" do.
First, let me point out that it is because Whites do not have a racial identity that they are being pushed aside by people who do. If this keeps up, even the Whites in Britain will be a minority by 2066, just in time to celebrate the 1,000th anniversary of the last successful invasion of their islands.
By denying us an identity, Mr. Steele is denying us the right to take even the most obvious and benign measures to maintain our existence as a people.
He is also spreading the blame awfully widely. What role did the Scandinavians or the Argentines or the East Europeans or the Russians play in any of the "extraordinary human evil" Mr. Steele blames on Whites? None; but they are consigned to oblivion, too.
And slavery? It was Whites who abolished slavery, which was taken for granted just about everywhere in the world. Africans, who happily enslaved and sold each other to Whites and Arabs, still practice it today.
So are we all to be consigned to oblivion because of Nazism — even the Whites who fought the Nazis? Whites certainly used to throw their weight around, but they made a big dent in history because of their technology, not because of their nature. Over the course of about 100 days in 1994, Tutsi and Hutu killed about 800,000 of each other — 800,000 — mostly with machetes. Just think what they could have done with a few Panzer divisions.
And what about the Mongols, or the Arab conquerors of North Africa and Spain, or the Turks before the gates of Vienna? With a little mustard gas they could have gone all the way to Spitsbergen.
Which occupation would Mr. Steele prefer: the one former-slave-owning and kin-to-the-Nazis Americans imposed on Japan or the one the rapists of Nanking would have imposed on us?
Let us not forget that the overwhelming majority of the people Whites killed in the 20th century were each other, not the virtuous non-Whites to whom Dr. Steele permits racial identities.
Indeed, one could argue that, historically, Whites have shown considerable forbearance to other races. In the 20th century they had the power to enslave the entire world. Instead, they freed their colonies.
No, whatever reasons Dr. Steele may have for denying us an identity everyone else is entitled to, his history is buncombe.
Fortunately, more and more Whites see through this nonsense. They recognize a double standard when they see one, and they know this one has lethal consequences.
Many of these people will be meeting over the first weekend of February in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the 9th biennial American Renaissance conference.
I encourage all VDARE.COM readers to join us. We will have what I think is the best program ever, with speakers from Britain, the continent, South Africa, and the United States.
There is nothing like the experience of sharing a weekend with several hundred people, all of whom understand.
Full details and registration information are available here.
I look forward to seeing you.
Jared Taylor (email him) is editor of American Renaissance and the author of Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. (For Peter Brimelow’s review, click here.) The long-awaited sequel, White Identity: Racial Consciousness In The 21st Century, will be published this year. You can follow him on Parler and Gab.
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