John Derbyshire On Jim Goad’s New Book: A Banquet of Anti-Anti-Whiteness!

By John Derbyshire

04/25/2019

See, earlier: Vance’s HILLBILLY ELEGY: A Dissent From Personal Experience, by Jim Goad

When, in the Winter 1967 issue of Partisan Review, Susan Sontag told us that "The white race is the cancer of human history," she had lit such a candle as, it seems 52 years later, will never be put out.

Anti-whiteness is now a sturdy pillar of state ideology throughout the Anglosphere. Solemn conferences are convened at which scholars discuss the evils of whiteness. (This year’s White Privilege Conference, held in Cedar Rapids, Iowa last month, was the 20th in its series. More than a thousand people attended). A Google search on the phrase "unbearable whiteness" returned nearly 60,000 hits, most of them non-ironic.

The fundamentals of anti-whiteness are now taught to third-graders. Our universities hold no-whites-allowed meetings for faculty and staff to promote "inclusivity." "Offense archeologists" trawl through social-media archives seeking violations of anti-white orthodoxy; violators are promptly punished by dismissal and ostracism.

Today the field of anti-whiteness is large enough to have developed a distinct taxonomy. The two main phyla are nonwhite anti-whiteness, and white anti-whiteness. (The latter phylum is often referred to as "white ethnomasochism"; but the qualifying "white" there is hardly necessary, as other races don’t exhibit racial self-hatred to any significant degree.)

Nonwhite anti-whiteness has a long pedigree — a phylogeny, in fact, to go along with the taxonomy. Milestone events in the nineteenth century were the 1900 Boxer Rebellion in China, the 1857 Indian Mutiny, and the 1804 massacres in Haiti.

In the Anglosphere today, those primordial manifestations of anti-whiteness have matured into distinct species. East Asian anti-whiteness sits on The New York Times editorial board, brazen and proud, in the person of Sarah Jeong. South Asian anti-whiteness is well represented in the pages of that newspaper and elsewhere in our mass media. The foolish 1899 annexation of Puerto Rico to the Union, followed, from the late 20th century on, by decades of an open southern border, have brought us Indio-mestizo anti-whiteness. Black anti-whiteness … Well, where does one start?

(I was amused to see, when I went looking for my own name on the Southern Poverty Law Center website, that the words of mine that stirred the greatest indignation among those champions of the downtrodden were these: "A small cohort of blacks — in my experience, around five percent — is ferociously hostile to whites and will go to great lengths to inconvenience or harm us." You might of course quibble with my five percent estimate; but does anybody think the correct percentage is zero? Anybody? Really?)

White anti-whiteness is less speciose, although it contains a distinctive strain of Jewish anti-whiteness — an evolved version, I suppose, of ancestral loathing for the dumb, drunken, persecuting goy. (Susan Sontag was Jewish). The origins of white-gentile anti-whiteness are not so clear — not to me, at any rate — but seem to lie in the late-19th-century insurrection against WASP ascendancy by social reformers like Jane Addams.

Hostility to anti-whiteness has not yet been criminalized in the U.S.A. as it has in Britain, but critics of anti-whiteness are firmly excluded from official culture here. Schools will not employ them; TV Talking Heads will not interview them; politicians shun them; mainstream publishers will not take on their books.

Dissenters from anti-whiteness can still use the internet, of course, for a little while longer; and writers can still self-publish, though big online booksellers like Amazon.com are getting better at identifying and excluding anti-anti-white material.

So I’m glad to see that Jim Goad’s book Whiteness: The Original Sin has not yet been stuffed down the Amazon Memory Hole. I've been reading it on and off for the past few weeks. It’s the kind of book that lends itself to on-and-off reading, consisting as it does of fifty short essays, average seven pages each, all written in the past decade, mocking different aspects of the anti-whiteness cult.

Anti-whiteness is absurdly easy to mock. The ideology is fundamentally stupid, and addled with contradictions. As Goad writes in essay #32, "Softly Wiping the Chalk from the Blackboard", surveying attendees at the 15th White Privilege Conference:

Assuming they have brains, how do they keep them from exploding?

The notion, for example, that white-majority countries are hellholes of oppression and misery for nonwhite inhabitants is not borne out by any actual facts. Of the top thirty nations listed by the U.N. Human Development Index, all but four are majority-white. Two of the four exceptions are former white colonies (Hong Kong, Singapore); the other two are Japan and South Korea. The first majority-black nation on the list, Bahamas, is ranked 54th.

Related to that is the revealed preference of people everywhere, of all races, to live in majority-white countries. As Goad says in essay #8, "The White Man’s Unbearable Burden":

What puts the lie to this notion that "whiteness" is unbearable is the fact that global immigration patterns show nonwhites desperately trying to get into white countries, whereas an inverse phenomenon — say, whites moving to Swaziland in droves — doesn’t exist AT ALL in the real world.

Goad’s book is a handy reminder of some of the racial craziness of these past few years. Remember how much of the hostility to Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination was based on his being a white man? Goad supplies twenty-nine illustrative quotes from the media. Remember Paula Deen? Rachel Dolezal? Anthony Cumia?

He takes shots at some of the fish in the anti-whiteness barrel: stereotype threat, Egyptians were black, race is a social construct. In essay #17, "The Greatest Anti-White Boxer of All Time," he exposes the ignorance and illiteracy of black anti-whiteness:

The original Cassius Marcellus Clay — after whom the boxer was named — was a white anti-slavery crusader who fought with the Union in the Civil War, whereas Muhammad Ali of Egypt was a warlord whose army enslaved the Sudanese.

However, it is white-gentile anti-whiteness that is most in need of explaining. What does explain it? Why do so many white gentiles not merely bow their heads in submission when their own race, their own ancestors are belittled and insulted, but actually join in the hate-whitey chanting with gusto?

In essay #13 Jim Goad, slyly invoking the Torah, postulates something he calls Passover Syndrome:

Passover Syndrome’s most prominent behavioral feature consistes of whites projecting historical blame onto other whites and hoping that nonwhites will see them as not-so-white for doing so. Just as the ancient Israelites smeared sacrificial lamb’s blood over their doorways in order to escape the Angel of God’s vengeance, these delusional Caucasians smear bright red anti-racist graffiti — or, in extreme cases, the literal blood of "rednecks" and any "right-wing white" who refuses to get with the program — over their doorways in the hope that when the Dark Angels finally come en masseseeking "justice," they won’t accidentally notice that the people with the bright red anti-racist paint over their doorways also happen to be white.

As a psychological theory, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. It seems to me there is more going on than simple fear of nonwhites. Goad’s hypothesis does usefully remind us, though, that in the matter of race, the only attitudes it is acceptable for Americans to hold are drawn from a primitive, fetid swamp of superstition and magical thinking.

Jim Goad’s book is a treat — a banquet of anti-anti-whiteness. The only problem with it is, that such a comprehensive survey of anti-white theory and practice, with most of its examples taken from the white phylum of anti-whiteness, leaves one wondering what the hell is wrong with white people. It leaves one, in fact, in a mood of anti-whiteness!

Jim notes this himself in the book’s last essay, #50, "Biting the Hand That Holds Out the Olive Branch":

I sure as hell hate white people these days — they are by far my least favorite racial group — but not because they're innately worth hating. It’s because they already hate themselves far too much, and they don’t wear it well. I have far more respect for all other groups because they respect themselves, whether it’s deserved or not …

Look with disgust upon these squirming white worms with their endlessly tacky public displays of self-flagellation, exulting in the idea of their own wickedness, trying to drown their historical sins in a cleansing wave of softly genocidal immigration.

I have sometimes succumbed to the same ethnomasochistic frame of mind. Indeed, I once wrote an opinion piece with the title "White People are Pussies."

Whether the current state of affairs is stable — whether, that is, white pussification can continue to coexist alongside nonwhite racial self-assertion — we shall find out. Jim Goad is not hopeful. Summoning up a hypothetical Martian observer in essay #6, "The Difference Between White People and Black People," he writes:

Since you are a highly rational Martian, you would … be led to the inexorable conclusion that the current situation, whether by accident or design, cannot possibly lead to racial harmony. Instead, it almost seems purposely engineered to result in escalating levels of conflict.

John Derbyshire writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.

For years he’s been podcasting at Radio Derb, now available at VDARE.com for no charge. His writings are archived at JohnDerbyshire.com.

Readers who wish to donate (tax deductible) funds specifically earmarked for John Derbyshire’s writings at VDARE.com can do so here.

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