Her mother is in the medical field and her father worked for the New York City Transit Authority. Both are lifelong Democrats. The only instruction they ever gave Tracy in politics was that the Democratic Party was for the working people and the Republicans were for the rich. Tracy’s mother taught her never to be judgmental, and to love everyone the same, especially those less fortunate. She told Tracy that discrimination was wrong and that all people should be treated equally. This message was further amplified at the college where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in sociology. All of Tracy’s professors were white and very liberal. College was the first place where she ever heard race discussed seriously, and the message was constant: diversity was vitally important and whites were guilty. Her fellow students had been brought up just as she had been, so my professors had very fresh meat to feast on. Tracy graduated from college the perfect racial liberal.

Her first job was but a mere warmup of what was to come. She took a job in the daycare center of a domestic violence shelter on Staten Island, New York. It was part of a network of organizations run by a large charity called Safe Horizon. Her supervisors were black and Hispanic, and the clients were also black and Hispanic (she never saw a white woman come in). Tracy had this idealistic notion that if she could make them see her as a good person and not as a “white person�, she could help make the world a better place. She was convinced she had nothing to fear, and that her generosity would certainly be noticed and appreciated.

Wrong, wrong, wrong! The Hispanic mothers, who themselves hated blacks, were there mostly for free services, and were always looking for the next entitlement. They were intensely proud of their ethnicity, and would explode into anti-white, anti-American anger if they felt slighted in any way — this included being denied a service or being asked to pay for something they thought should be free. They were often inarticulate to the point of being unintelligible, but it was clear that they thought America owed them anything they needed. Even the more reasonable, friendly clients and staff constantly explained their failures by saying, “The white man keeps me down.� Tracy learned that many blacks and Hispanics sincerely believe this cliché, no matter what their salary or station in life. Although Tracy never complained, and did everything with zeal and professionalism, she was passed over for promotions and received scant appreciation from clients or staff. In that community, socializing seemed to be the key to popularity and promotions, and hard work seemed to be greeted with disdain.

After almost two years at the shelter, Tracy decided to find a different job, and switched to an administrative office in Manhattan. But then Tracy decided to jump back into the frying pan once again, getting a job at a different charity run by Safe Horizon called “The Streetwork Project.� This was a “drop-in� center in Harlem for “street-involved youth� up to age 24. The majority of the clients were local teenagers, most of whom did not work, and who had drug habits that kept them in a state of desperation. They tended to be gang members, prostitutes, and runaways. Streetwork offers shelter, counseling, food, showers, a music room, computer labs, basic medical attention, and even acupuncture and meditation. It also served as an unofficial safe haven for illegal aliens and other criminals hiding from the police.

How bad did the working conditions get? Let Tracy tell her own story, after the jump:

The Streetwork motto is “We are a non-judgmental environment.� Yet, every Wednesday all 75 staff members were required to meet in a circle and air their grievances. For eight to ten hours every Wednesday, these mandatory sessions would interrupt our mission to serve children in trouble and force us to play out our personal lives to a crowd of co-workers. More times than not, a black staffer—they were the vast majority—would vent his anger against a white staff member for no apparent reason. It seemed that it was an offense if white people were not sufficiently subservient or reverential to blacks.

The unintentionally offending white person would be made to grovel at the feet—yes, I have seen whites go on their knees before blacks—and apologize for slavery, white privilege, blacks in prison, the poor state of black neighborhoods, AIDS, drugs in their community, etc. Often the white worker was reduced to tears in a desperate attempt to appease the mass of angry black and brown faces. Finally, when the white employee was humiliated enough, and the cathartic cleansing had been achieved, a tentative truce would be called. The angry black employee would be praised and his anger encouraged, while the traumatized, cowering white worker would be put on probation and, through an act of supreme magnanimity, allowed to keep his job. These sessions were supposed to be run by social workers, but often just ran themselves while the social workers watched. I was required to attend these sessions, and sometimes the spotlight was turned on me. I was never fully and publicly brutalized, but the anti-white sentiment was clearly directed at me as well.

Racial politics were very strict. We were forbidden to observe Columbus Day because Columbus was a “genocidal racist.� Instead, I had to observe Martin Luther King Day and black history month. In fact, I was required to do unpaid, after-hours work on King day.

I saw the only white, heterosexual male employee fired for saying “black people are born to dance,� in a moment of self-deprecation at a bar after work with co-workers. Apparently, a white man didn’t have the right to say anything about race, even if it was flattering. This white man was framed for a robbery and fired. Everyone on the staff knew he was innocent of the robbery, but he was white and proved himself to be a racist by that remark, and to them, that was reason enough to fire him.

Sometimes we were forced to participate in diversity or sensitivity training, and often we were split into groups by sexual orientation. There were heterosexual, homosexual, bi-sexual, transgendered, and gender-non-specific groups. Gender-non-specifics are people who decide each day which sex they want to be, and they insist on being referred to as gender-neutral “ze� rather than he or she. On Monday, such a person is Brenda, but next month, Brenda may become Carlos. Then a week later, Carlos becomes Brenda again, and if you mistakenly call her Carlos, you are in danger of being fired for discrimination or at least sent to special “sensitivity classes.� We had about eight of these “ze� people, and it was an even split between biological men and women.

The view of the staff was that the country was overrun with white, Jesus-freak-bigot, heterosexual “breeders,� and that anything that undermined that order deserved support. The heterosexual, white world was bland, unintelligent, uncreative, unattractive, morally repugnant, and something that needed to be eliminated. Therefore there was intense pressure, which included psychological prodding, to try to convert a heterosexual into something else. When a middle-aged white, married woman with teenage children walked out of the heterosexual group to count herself amongst the bisexuals, there was tremendous applause and a daylong celebration in her honor.

{snip}

There was a heavy sexual atmosphere at work. I was always being sent X-rated email, and people would stop by my desk and make filthy comments about my body. After one foul remark, one man even said to me, “That would be sexual harassment anywhere else, but this is Streetwork.� Homosexuals would describe the previous night’s sexual exploits in graphic detail. Men were always exposing themselves to women on the job, and nobody complained or reported it.

When her boyfriend tried to get Tracy to quit, the Streetwork staff tried to “love-bomb” her into believing that he was a prospective abuser. But she caught herself in time and escaped. It was a lot like escaping from a religious cult. After the fact, Tracy learned that she had been doing the jobs of more than ten people who spent their days socializing, shirking work, and pilfering from the donation room.

By the way, her father, who worked for the Transit Authority, was also a victim of “diversity”. After 20 years, he was forced into retirement when a black man was elevated to one of the highest positions in the authority. Her father once heard him say to a meeting of chiefs, “There’s too much salt in here — now I’m gonna add some pepper.â€� Personnel policies changed drastically in favor of blacks. It became difficult for whites to get promotions, and the workplace became intolerable for her father.

This is not a fluke or an isolated incident. This is the norm for whites in every one of our mulitcultural cesspools we call “big cities”. Black looks out for black. Brown looks out for brown. Jew looks out for Jew. Queer looks out for queer. And who do too many whites look out for? Black, brown, Jew, and queer.

Time for White to start looking out for White again.

Expressed by continent. The great empires of recorded world history sprang almost exclusively from white and Asian nations:

– North America: The smartest nations are the whitest nations. On the opposite end of the scale, the North American nations with the largest Amerindian contingent are the dumbest nations; note the subtle distinction between Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua on the one hand vs. Costa Rica and Panama on the other hand.

– South America: The smartest nations are the more-white nations of Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. The dumbest nations are those with a high Amerindian population; namely, Paraguay, Peru and Colombia. The inclusion of Venezuela may also represent its higher percentage of people with an African blood admixture. Sticking out like a sore “green” thumb is French Guiana, which is not an independent nation but an overseas département of metropolitan France. Many French people live there, contributing to its perceptibly higher intelligence.

– Europe: Most of Europe aside from Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova is of relatively uniform intelligence, despite the subtle distinctions between the three European sub-groups of Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean. The Balkan nations of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Albania are the exception.

– Asia: East Asia shows the highest level of intelligence, followed by Southeast Asia, Southwest Asia, and South Asia. Also notice how Vietnam (French and American overlordship) and Malaysia (British overlordship) are perceptively smarter that their immediate neighbors in Southeast Asia. Prevailing religious beliefs play a role; the Islamic nations of Southwest Asia are perceptibly smarter than Hindu-dominated India.

– Africa: The North African Rim is the smartest part of Africa; proximity to Europe and the dominance of Islam are the two favorable factors. Note that throughout the remainder of Africa, those nations appearing more intelligent have been influenced by Islam and, to a lesser degree, Christianity, moreso than the dumber-than-dirt nations of central Africa and the Horn of Africa. Also note that the influence and presence of whites in South Africa no longer sets that nation apart from its neighbors; South Africa is now less than 10 percent white. African nations exposed to more thorough European colonialism tend to be perceptively smarter than others; Obamaland (Kenya) and Uganda enjoyed considerable British influence and attention. Many Brits even settled in Obamaland, although some were driven out during the Mau Mau uprising.

Those who are interested in more details about the relationship between race and intelligence and desire a more intellectual analysis should review Steve Sailer’s articles on the subject.

A culture is the achievement of a particular blood line.

As such, “culture wars” may be seen as ultimately blood wars between competing conceptions of race and identity.

The culture war in the university between those advocating a “culturally diverse” curriculum and those advocating a curriculum based on the “Great Books” is, for example, essentially a debate about the future of American nationhood – will it be “Western” (i.e., white) or will it be “culturally” (racially) inclusive.

In the West, these sorts of wars have raged for nearly two centuries now. Many still fought in the United States are, in fact, but continuations of ones begun long ago in the old country.

This seems especially the case with the culture wars of Victorian England – in which the “progressive” or “liberal” forces, allied with “low-church” Protestants, challenged the traditional authority of the Church of England.

Since its establishment in the sixteenth century, the Church of England had rested on the social prominence of the landed aristocracy and gentry, and, more generally, on the organization of rural society, all of which began to decay with the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. As the numbers and prominence of the Protestant dissenters (responsible for much of the invention and entrepreneurialism that made Britain the world’s dominant economic power) grew in the course of the nineteenth century, especially after the Second Reform Bill of 1867 made them a majority of the expanded electorate, they more and more challenged the religious and cultural hegemony of the landed interests – the “Old Corruption,” so-called.

The dissenters’ demands for religious disestablishment were frequently raised in reference to the United States, cited as a vibrant, successful nation without a state church,

It was in the context of this cultural war between the landed interests and “the rising bourgeoisie” that the poet and critic Matthew Arnold intervened to rebuff the anti-traditionalists.

He argued that “All America Hebraises” and that England risked becoming Hebraic if it should follow the dissenters council, separate church from state, and let themselves fall into the “anarchy” that would come with disestablishment.

Having a not insignificant impact on subsequent American developments (especially in the university),¹ Arnold’s argument speaks to us still in addressing the origins of our own culturally troubled age, particularly as it relates to our people’s cultural identity.

The Blood of the Isles

Arnold was steeped in the racial thought of his era, though his racialism tended toward the unsystematic and unorthodox. He had little patience with “rabbis,” men of a school or system who singlemindedly applied their fixed “truths” as if they were Holy Scripture.²

In his writings, particularly Culture and Anarchy (1869) and On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867) Arnold often framed his arguments about cultural developments in ethnological and racial terms.

All races, he believed, “have some one peculiar characteristic by which they are known.”

Race in this view denotes not just inherited physiological or genotypical differences but spiritual, psychological, and cultural ones that constitute “the soul of a race” and shape its history and civilization. A race’s soul or character is, then, just as fixed as its anatomic properties. Indeed, race so defined would serve in this period as a rough synonym for what we today call “culture.”

Arnold’s method, accordingly, was to ascertain the pre-eminent or representative characteristic of a race (or nation) and then seek evidence for it in fields where the race (or nation) exerted itself.

One representative example of his method is evident in his use of these lines from an old Irish verse.

For acuteness and valor, the Greeks;
For excessive pride, the Romans;
For dullness, the creeping Saxons;
For beauty and amorousness, the Gaels.

Despite the Irish boast is this, Arnold thought it captured a certain truth about his people’s character.

A morally earnest race, the English, he believed, lacked the lively, creative spirit of the Celts. This didn’t make them inferior, for dull as they allegedly were, the English were nevertheless the world’s foremost people: earnest, energetic, morally serious, and world-creating. Everything else, he held, rested on these “sterling” qualities.

But Arnold also believed the moral earnestness of the “Saxons,” especially in orienting them to money-making and individual salvation, had a tendency to make them one-dimensional – dull – and that this dullness was starting to take a toll on English national life.

Such reflections on national character were not atypical of his age. The third quarter of the nineteenth century (Arnold was 37 in 1859 when Darwin published his own On the Origin of Species) was a flourishing era of racial thought, particularly in its “Teutomania” (which, inspired by Tacitus’ flattering description of the early Germans, held that the most vital and regenerative elements in the West were Germanic in origin). Englishmen, Germans, Americans, and other North European peoples were all touched by it. (Manifest Destiny, Anglo-Saxonism, and Turner’s powerful frontier thesis were some of its more notable expressions in the US.)

Among Victorian England’s leading lights, it was everywhere assumed that the English were the purest of the Teutonic peoples, having been fathered by the Angle, Saxon, Jute, and Frisian invaders of the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries and later by the Vikings and their descendants in French Normandy, while the Germans (the people who bore the name) were a Mischvolk, a product of different European stocks, and thus less “Germanic” than the English.

The Celts, the Irish especially, were, by contrast, seen as the near antithesis of the Teutons, foreign “in blood, belief, and religion.” Arnold’s own father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, claimed the distance between the English and the Irish was greater than that between “any other race in the world.”³ The good doctor, like his (born of a Cornish mother), had, revealingly, a good deal of Irish blood in his veins. More typically, Benjamin Disraeli described the history of “this wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain, and superstitious race” as “an unbroken circle of bigotry and blood.”⁴ Such sentiments would lead Ralph Waldo Emerson to argue in English Traits that “race avails much” and “all Celts were Catholic and believers in authoritarian government, while all Saxons were Protestants and believers in the representative principle.⁵

Arnold’s methodology was analogous in describing peoples or nations as collective personalities defined by their dominant traits. But, unlike most of his contemporaries, he was critical of the reigning Teutomania and lacked the religious biases of his day (whose anti-Celticism was usually a surrogate anti-Catholicism).

He was also informed by the latest racial research and saw how culturally distorting these biases were.

This was particularly evident, he thought, in the disproportionate way the English treated Irishmen and Jews. The latter, he pointed out, especially after Puritanism, “seemed a thousand times nearer than the Celt to us.” As a result, “a steady, middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Enud’s cousin than Ossian’s.”⁶ The English, in other words, were more inclined to identify with alien Semites than with their closest blood cousins, the Irish.

What especially set Arnold apart from the classically trained Englishmen of his day was his familiarity with French and German thought, especially the pioneering Indo-European and Celtic studies that Ernst Renan and Amedee Thierry were carrying out in France.

From their studies, Arnold had learned that Saxons and Celts were closely related Indo-European peoples and that much of the existing archaeological and historical evidence contradicted the prevailing belief that the earlier Germanic invaders had other exterminated the indigenous Celtic Britons or else driven them to the island’s mountainous extremities in the west and north. He thus suspected that: “The Englishman who thinks himself sprung from the Saxons or the Normans is often in reality the descendant of the Britons” (i.e., the Celts).⁷

Indeed, Arnold believed it was the Celts’ gift for style – and “their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact” – that had saved England from “the Philistine vulgarity” he found offensive in North Germany.⁸

He thus celebrated the kinship of blood and spirit that had never before imagined to exist between Celt and Saxon, courageously doing so in a period when Fenian political violence had aroused a good deal of anti-Irish sentiment in Britain.⁹

“Hebraism” Versus Hellenism

In this context, Arnold coined the term “Hebraism” to characterize the moralizing tendency of various “Teutonic” peoples influenced by Calvinism’s strict biblical standards.

Following Renan, who was instrumental in presenting Judaism as the counter-phenomenon of “Aryanism,” Arnold believed Indo-European peoples had been responsible for the world’s great intellectual, political, and cultural movements, while the Semitic race was responsible for the great religious movements of monotheism.

Yet, if the Hebrews glory was their elevated morality, outside religion, their achievement, it seemed, was largely negative.

Englishmen Hebraised in an evangelical Protestantism may therefore have been morally resistant to the reputed “lubricity” of Continentals, something every earnest Victorian prized, but they were olso, Arnold saw, “narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive.” In his view, the prevailing coarseness and vulgarity of the evangelicals reflected, moreover, a deeper ailment associated with Jewish self-righteousness: “Der Englander,” as Goethe put it, “ist eigentlich ohne Intelligenz.”¹⁰

“Unintelligence” here denotes not “stupidity,” but rather the inability to grasp a thing’s relation to its larger context or value because a cramped conviction closed off a broader, more accurate view. As a result, Arnold argued that the Jews’ biblical “unintelligence” tended to make nonconformists Philistine, “vulgar on the side of beauty and grace, coarse on the side of mind, spirit, and intelligence.”¹¹

As such, the nonconformists (”Quakers, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Baptists”) treated biblical moral standards as if they were the unum necessarium (the one thing needful) and, worse, were satisfied with a “very crude conception” of what these moral standards implied.

Given that non unum necessarium frees human beings from the obligation of thinking what to do in life’s multiple realms, this “one thing needful” was wont to justify the “vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence” of its deformed spirit.¹² To see things as they are, on the other hand, requires a larger conception of human nature – a conception of which those of the unum necessarium felt little need.

For Arnold, then, “to Hebraise” meant to sacrifice “all sides of our being to the religious side” – at the expense not only of a fuller understanding, but of a more balanced or complete life.¹³

As embodied in the Puritan middle class, the morally earnest Hebrew was responsible for what Arnold called the increasingly “humdrum, plain, ugly, and ignoble” character of English national life.¹⁴

The growing influence of this “stiff-necked and perverse” stratum, Arnold feared, meant that industrializing England risked a terrible deculturation, if the materialism and individualism of this class should become hegemonic and if the old traditions and established creeds, with their emphasis on beauty, harmony, and balance, were forced to retreat before a market-based culture in which all that mattered was commerce and industry.

Like the Continental bourgeoisie, the English middle class had tended to stand apart from the main currents of European society, for both Ancient and Medieval civilizations held the merchant in low repute. When this class assumed greater social weight in the industrial nineteenth century, it quite naturally retained something of its hostility to the traditional order, rebuking not just its political tenets, but its larger heritage. In practical terms, Arnold feared this was leading to the loss of English unity, of community, of a common system of value and belief, and, ultimately, of a shared sense of meaning and beauty.

Arnold was no enemy of the nonconformists and always stressed that they had contributed much of what was “strongest and most serious” in the English nation. He may have been unusually evenhanded as a Victorian in dealing with Catholicism, but he was decisively on the Protestant side, for the latter’s individual conscience allegedly made Protestants more religiously serious than Catholics and thus less prone to the “dissolute” life.¹⁵ For all his love of the Hellenic cultural tradition, Arnold still felt, as one critic put it, “the powerful appeal of the Old Testament conception of righteousness.¹⁶

He nevertheless criticized nonconformists for having “not enough added to their care for walking staunchly by the best light they have … [for developing] one side of their humanity at the expense of all others, and [for becoming] incomplete and mutilated men in consequence.” ¹⁷

The victory of “bourgeois civilization” in England and the development of a market society based on Hebraic principles may have made England a rich, powerful country, but, Arnold warned, it also threatened the older traditions of beauty, knowledge, and purpose, without which a people lacks a sense of direction or meaning.¹⁸

Given its narrow horizons and “mechanical” mental habits, the dissenting middle class seemed, then, to be divesting itself of the heritage native Indo-European peoples, cutting itself off from “the best which has been thought and said in the world.”

More immediately, this Hebraic tendency to dismiss every criterion but economic and individualistic ones, the nationalist-minded Arnold feared, meant that Continental peoples, with less energy than the English, but greater intelligence, would soon encroach on their supremacy – a rather bold and prescient idea in this age of British world supremacy.

Worse still, he feared that low-church Philistinism would make the English complacent about the factories and slums, the iconoclastic chapels and gin palaces, which were changing the nation’s character.

Against the Philistines and the spiritual impoverishment they served, Arnold took up the cause of “culture” and what he called “Hellenism.” For if the Puritan Reformation had, in Christopher Dawson’s phrase, “rebuilt the Jewish temple,” recasting Englishmen in a Hebraic mold, the Renaissance, against which the Reformation revolted, had “replanted the groves of Academus.”¹⁹

The Renaissance awakening of the larger Greco-European heritage that Arnold called “Hellenism” had the potential, he thought, to return “humanity to nature and to seeing things as they are,” unsmudged by the soot and smoke of a petty Hebraic conscience.²⁰ (In this spirit, the Renaissance Pope, Leo X, had professed a greater love of Plato than of Christ.)

As the antithesis of Hebraism, Hellenism meant comprehending “things in their essence and beauty.” Arnold thought that Hellenism might even further the moral designs of Hebraism, for its Puritan distillation had made a great caricature of grace, faith, election, and righteousness. “No man, who knows nothing else,” Arnold professed, “knows even his Bible.”²¹

In awakening the creative impulse of its repressed Celtic heritage and imbuing its middle class with the “sweetness and light” of Europe’s Hellenic tradition, Arnold hoped to turn “the practical, utilitarian mentality” of the middle class toward higher, more noble aspirations.

Arnold’s Concept of Culture

When members of our racially conscious community hear the word “culture,” many react in the way Hermann Goering allegedly did – by reaching for their holster.²²

No concept, in fact, has so often been used in the twentieth century to deny racial differences and relativize the white man’s values as the anthropological notion of culture – a notion, I nevertheless hold, that is of foremost relevance to the white-nationalist project.

When Arnold took up the cause of “culture” as a remedy to the threat of “anarchy,” the term did not quite mean what it currently does. In Keywords, Raymond Williams points out that “culture” is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language, with a long, complex etymology.²³ It was originally used to define that which undergoes a process of tending or cultivation – like a crop of domesticated herds – and was thus initially associated with agriculture. During the eighteenth century, the French began to use the term as a synonym for “civilization,” but the early Romantic reaction to the Revolution of 1789 (particularly in German-speaking lands) associated Kultur with the spiritual heritage of a material civilization – and thus with the process of becoming civilized, specifically as it relates to human development (i.e., as Bildung or éducation).

In the late 1860s, when Arnold took up the cause of “culture,” it lacked the anthropological definition it would acquire in the twentieth century. Nor was the term widely used in English. Among those Englishmen conversant with it, the term was associated with the “frivolous and unedifying curiosity” of self-occupied Frenchmen and Germans and thus used disapprovingly.²⁴

Only with the publication of E.B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871 was the way opened for the word’s subsequent evolution into an anthropological term to denote “socially patterned human thought and behavior” – though it ought to be added that Tylor, like Arnold and like the viewpoint expressed herein, associated culture with race.²⁵

For Arnold culture is:

the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits.²⁶

Culture in this is self-culture: that is, the self-cultivation of man’s being through a formation in the finest achievements of his civilization. Hence, the definition found in older editions of the OED: “The training, development, refinement of mind, tastes, and manners.”

For Arnold the striving to improve and enhance oneself (”perfection”) was the ideal state of the mind, just as health was the ideal state of the body.

Culture here is more a state of mind than a body of knowledge. For the mind’s love of perfection implies a process of becoming rather than of obtaining, designating an inward condition higher or greater than outward materialism. In submitting to “the sweetness and light” (the beauty and intelligence) of the great poetry and literature of the Western heritage, the individual imbues his mind with a balance, clarity, and fullness of thought, which Hebraisim – in its stern reaction to the moral indifference of Renaissance Hellenism – closes off.

As such, culture preserves an openness as it strives for the best, fostering in the process “human wholeness” and “social health.”

“Culture,” then, is essentially two things for Arnold: primarily, it’s a general process of “intellectual, spiritual, and artistic development” in the individual, and, secondly, it’s a body of works and practices representing the best in European artistic and intellectual achievement.

This notion of culture as the harmonious development of human nature through the individual’s cultivation of his mind has been subject to numerous criticisms. For example, it has been criticized for being too individualist and too bookish, for favoring “high” culture over folk culture, for being too abstract and having no reality in contemporary society, and nowadays for being exclusive and exclusionary, etc.

Whatever the justice of these criticisms, Arnold’s notion of culture (which is, admittedly, dated) must ultimately be valued not as an unconcealing truth, but as a valiant rearguard defense of the Western tradition – waged in an age when the West had begun to war on its own culture. (The white man, to be sure, didn’t have to await the Jews’ “culture of critique” to start assailing his heritage. It had already started in Arnold’s day, having grown out of the liberal modernist impulses of industrial society.)²⁷

Arnold’s conception of “culture” may no longer be defensible, but his concern for the larger heritage and his notion of culture’s intimate relationship to national behavior, I think, retain a certain relevance.

The Rise of “Culturalism”

The Arnoldian concept of culture is held by few today. By the Cultural Revolution of the Sixties, the anthropological nation of culture that began supplanting the Arnoldian notion in the late nineteenth century had almost everywhere became dominant.

As early as 1949, T.S. Eliot, who succeeded Arnold as the foremost Anglophone defender of the European tradition, had accepted the anthropological concept that defines “culture” as a particular people’s way of life, encompassing all the genres and modes of a people’s experience. In a famous sentence, Eliot stressed the wide compass culture embraces:

It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelve of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wenley-dale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches, and the music of Elgar.²⁸

All these things added up not to culture, however, only its multiple elements.

“Just as man is more than the sum of his body parts, culture is more than the assemblage of its arts, customs, and religious beliefs. All these parts act on one another and to fully understood one you have to understand them all.”²⁹

Culture for Eliot is evidently not the cultivation of the individual mind, or even the canon of its great achievements, as Arnold held, but a common way of life embodied in social institutions, involving moral standards and practices with a tradition behind them.

His notion of culture is nevertheless something more than the anthropologist’s “way of life” – because it’s something entirely its own, something which Eliot associated with the religious incarnation of a people’s particular spirit.³⁰

The strictly anthropological concept, by contrast, sever all ties between human biology and culture, seeing the latter as an artificial creation of generalized men in generalized circumstances, as if men were “blank tablets on which the environment inscribes culture.”

Beginning in the late 1880s, when Franz Boas “embarked on his life-long assault on the idea that race was the primary source of the differences in mental or societal capacities of different human groups,” he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and he premised his argument on the supposition that all peoples and races are mentally equal.³¹ He extended, in effect, the democratic principle from politics to culture and then from culture to race.

From this allegedly impartial perspective, different peoples, different societies, different forms of social organization, belief, and value are seen as the product of different histories, different experiences, different circumstances, different stages of development, but not the achievement of specific blood lines and races. In a word, group differences were reconceived as cultural rather than biological.

In Max Weber’s eloquent formulation, man is an animal suspended in webs of significance [i.e., culture] which he himself has spun.³² This makes culture sui generis – explainable solely in terms of itself.

Hence, Boas’ contention that cultural and social factors alone, rather than biological or innate ones, explain differences in human behavior. Hence also the anarchistic tendency inherent in the ensuing relativism, where no standard is allowed to judge human behavior except cultural ones, which are self-referential and thus self-legitimating. Hence, finally, the tendency to consider all cultures as inherently equal, as if the “culture” of New Guinea headhunters is comparable to that of the higher civilized cultures, which are products of history and the complex intertwined social worlds they create. Perversely, not a few twentieth-century anthropologists (Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict preeminently) have used their select knowledge of primitive peoples to highlight the failures of modern society and to challenge conservative moral standards – not for the sake of their own culture, but for that of liberal reform and the nonwhites of whom they are so enamored.

The larger point here is that the anthropological concept of culture, as the historian Carl Degler puts it, “made the idea of a hierarchy of human societies based on innate differences . . . no longer tenable; human nature was now a unity, however diverse its expressions.”³³

Boas’s concept, which soon spread to other social science disciplines, was, of course, arrived at not through a disinterested, scientific inquiry, but through a belief in liberalism’s blank-slate ideology (which emphasizes the primacy of learning and environment).

It would be naive, though, to assume that this Jewish anthropologist (however dishonest and conniving) somehow single-handedly undermined the racial foundations of American life. Boas’s culturalist assault on the then existing racial hierarchy was waged in the spirit of liberal modernity and of the American political tradition. Boas’s efforts were indeed linked with the “new social sciences,” the Social Gospel, and Progressivism. For integral to the country’s pragmatic spirit (especially after the War of Secession) was a will to reform society, expand opportunity, and create a more rational social order based on individual achievement rather than on natural ascriptions.³⁴ This was inherent in the liberal creedal principles of individualism and equality undergirding Lincoln’s new constitutional order – an order which Jews and other new immigrants were especially active in combating the country’s equally powerful national heritage.

Despite the previous existence of slavery and the persistence of rigid racial hierarchy, biological or Darwinian determinism jeopardized the environmental principles of America’s postbellum liberal enterprise. For if pathological behavior, poverty, and ignorance were due solely to racial or hereditarian factors, then there could be no hope for reform and progress: you simply could not change the unchangeable.

But if it’s culture and heredity – nurture and nature – that is the source of human difference, then race is incidental to existing social inequities.³⁵ Reform and change are thus possible, which makes modification of educational and environmental factors the key to social development.

Culturalism, as such, rejects race theory on the basis of an unproven assumption: that mental processes are roughly equal in all people and therefore that the body is not a factor affected the mind. But if culturalism assumes that there is no relationship between mind and body, its materialistic mirror image, racial/biological determinism, assumes that the mind is simply another facet of the body, with the body determining the mind (not just in shaping its capacity but also its substance).

Philosophical Anthropology

Though there is more evidence for racial/biological determinism, it is no less disputable, especially in that man in that man is a composite not merely of biological matter, but also of those nebulously named non-bodily substances like intellect, reason, mind, and soul.³⁶

A plant or animal may thus be understood simply in terms of animated matter and instinct (i.e., biologically), but in human beings matter is linked with sentiment and intelligence, and, though in ways not often clear, it is the latter more than the body that plays the leading role – at least to the degree that the body possesses a vitality whose spirit achieves a certain sovereignty.³⁷ The biological or “scientific” idea of race, by reducing man’s spirit to his animal nature (in the sense of making culture not merely dependent on, but synonymous with the disposition for intelligence and creativity bequeathed by genetics),³⁸ is arguably objectionable in the same way that Marxism’s reduction of society and religion to the “superstructure” of the economic “base” is objectionable.³⁹

Biological determinists and cultural anthropologists are quite alike, then, in being equally unqualified to speak on the relationship between culture and race, or on what might be called a variant of the historic mind-body question.

But through natural science in inadequate to the study of this relationship, it doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent. The thinkers most qualified to examine this relationship, which has occupied Western philosophical thought in one form or another since Aristotle, are those belonging to that rarefied, mainly German, discipline known as “philosophical anthropology” – a discipline which aims at bridging the different realms of physical, cultural, and theoretical anthropology in order to develop “a coherent idea of human being.”⁴⁰

From the perspective of philosophical anthropology, it is scientifically legitimate to classify man into “anatomical characteristics regularly and constantly produced by hereditary” (i.e., racial genotypes), but it itself this discloses nothing (or nothing substantial) about the mind’s relationship to its animal body.

The greatest of the philosophical anthropologist to speak to this relationship, Arnold Gehlen, spent much of his career investigating culture’s complex physiological sources and the way the body is linked to the cultural expressions of the mind. This is not the place to repeat what I have said of Gehlen’s work elsewhere.⁴¹ Suffice to mention that Gehlen did not reduce mind to body, but instead saw culture (mind’s spiritual compendium) as a means of compensating for man’s “instinctual deficiency.”

Animals, Gehlen argued, have no need to think of plan how to build a nest, fly south for the winter, or ruffle their feathers to woo a mate. The “not yet determined animal” man, on the other hand, lacks such instincts and head, under the unsheltered sky 40,000 years ago, to rely on his culture – on the learned responses and principles that came from his past, that were continually modified in his encounter with world, and that ultimately took institutional form and became “quasi-automatic habits of thought, feeling, judgment and action” – to cope with the stimulations, impressions, and challenges coming from his environment.⁴²

Culture arose and developed in Gehlen’s view as man’s “second nature” – as something to compensate for his instinctual deficiency and his lack of “environmental specialization.” And somewhat like his genetic heritage, culture, as a “shaping template” of behavior, is transmittable to the next generation, so that the achievements of one era can be passed on to the next. This makes culture a community of thought and achievement, a community of history and tradition, and a community of blood and kin. All these “communities” go into the formulation of a culture, and to stress just one, say body or thought, is reductionist.

Culture, in this view, is bound up with man’s physical nature, but is nevertheless “world open,” able to evolve and adapt and become self-conscious. It is this second nature that enables man “to anticipate himself, fall back upon himself, adjust and reverse his movements, plan – all in order to enhance his survivability.”⁴³ As such, man’s being is caught in an endless exchange between interior forces (intelligence, will, imagination, etc.) and exterior ones (the environment), as the exterior is assimilated into the interior and the interior is manifested in the exterior. Mind – and the culture its creates – are not, then, mere reflections of the body, though they are inseparable from it.

It is thus through mind (and culture) that a specific genotype responds to and influences its larger environment.

Race, in this way, gives rise to a culture that can be seen, to use a term that Gehlen didn’t, as “an extended phenotype.” For if a spider’s web is the extended phenotype of the spider’s genotype, culture in a similar way can be seen as the extended phenotype of a specific human life form. In Louis R. Browning’s formulation: “The ability of persons to deal with, and manipulate, their environments, their interactions with other people, their schooling, their career: all such capabilities that can influence the fitness of a person can be considered part of the individual’s [extended] phenotype.”⁴⁴

Racial behavior in this perspective needs to be seen in terms of tendencies that enhance “fitness,” not fixed inevitabilities, like instincts, for the different cultures that different races create do not actually dictate behavior per se, so much as they provide an orientation that shapes its contours and does so across history’s longue duree, as the generations of the dead impose their hard-won truths on the living. Ultimately, this works to enhance a people’s survivability, as well as its vitality.

In this vein, one of our great anti-liberal historians defines a healthy culture as one which recovers the sources of life. “Why,” he asks,” is a stockbroker less beautiful than a Homeric warrior . . .? Because he is less incorporated with life, he is not inevitable, but accidental, almost parasitic. When a culture has proved its real needs, and organized its vital functions, every office becomes beautiful.”⁴⁵

What then is the relationship between race and culture? Arnold’s notion that every people or race has a distinct personality that can be grasped through a few designated characteristics is probably too simplistic to be of more than literary value. Indeed, every great people (from a historicist rather than a relativist perspective) is probably best viewed in terms of its own standards rather than those of another. Arnold, however, got the most important thing right: that people and culture, blood and heritage, are ultimately one. He thus posited a distinct relationship between race and culture, just as he suspected that the impairment of one would have a negative impact on the other.

This, I think, is key to understanding the relationship between race and culture. But it’s not until we get to Gehlen that we see how culture entails not just all those things that are tied up in a way of life, but also in life itself – in the form of man’s animal body. This relationship is not the simple one-way process that nineteenth-century racialists or contemporary sociobiologists assume – but it nevertheless accepts that a specific genotype (race) gives rise to a corresponding extended phenotype (culture).

Because culture is the second – the spiritual – nature of man, it no more determines the behavior of man’s animal body than the body controls a people’s culture. Rather than “determine,” the word should probably be “express” – for man’s second nature is unlike instinct in being “world open.”

Think of the cultural diversity among peoples of the same stock. Though there are profound similarities between, say, Irish Catholics and Scots-Irish Presbyterians (such as their profoundly conservative morality, the “epigrammatic concision” of their speech, or the intransigence of their nationalism), the sharp differences dividing these long-warring communities, despite their virtually identical DNA, demonstrate that culture is not a mere organic offshoot of the body. History, circumstance, and experience are evidently crucial factors in its production.

Culture and biology, though, are irreparably linked, as Gehlen indicates, and linked in ways that almost alway sustain one another. A white man born into Chinese culture may conceivably become Chinese in language, behavior, even spirit – which means he ceases to be a white man in any way except genotypically – but at the same time he can never become Chinese in blood, which is not the case of Irish Catholics and Presbyterians vis-a-vis each other’s cultures.⁴⁶ The spirit of a Chinese-enculturated white man would consequently always he at odds with the body, and this would inevitably distort his place in the world. Said differently, his genotype acquires an “unfit” or incongruent extended phenotype.

Behavior, if follows, cannot replace biology; culture cannot be separated from its racial source; one cannot become what one is not.

The link between race and culture may therefore be a supple one, but in the last instance it cannot be eliminated without risking a mongrelizing adulteration – based on a callous disregard of man’s specific nature. For though blood inheritance is a paramount importance in determining man’s nature, the spirit that guides his nature, even with the help of contemporary behavioral genetics, cannot be understood outside the culture that situates it.⁴⁷

The body that forms a community or a nation is not, then, the body of biology, the animal body, but rather the mind-perfected body of closely related cultural beings.

When a community or nation defines itself in bodily or racial terms, even its idea of the body is shaped by the mind and its specific culture. For if an individual or a community is essentially grounded in a body, this body-idea shares in the given social or political reality (as the idea of dynasty, blood lineage, enthnonation, or race) and, as such, is always the product of a particular cultural heritage rather than an unmediated reflection of the body. (At the same time, the opposite also holds, for man is never a completely self-enclosed, autonomous individual, either physically or culturally: hereditary capabilities develop only in certain environments, just as their development depends on a genetic predisposition.) Man, in other words, is neither totally a product of race nor of culture, but a biocultural organism whose blood and spirit are inextricably bound.

It seems no accident that the starting point of most systems of human racial classification begin not with the “natural” or “pure” races found in primitive societies, but with “historical races” – entities pertaining as much to mind (history) as to nature. Instead, then, of being understood as distinct groupings based exclusively on physical traits, human races must also be seen, given that man is a composite, in terms of his unity of being – in terms, that is, of the inner principle that pervades his component parts.⁴⁸

From this perspective it can be claimed that races come into existence and develop not according to strict biological laws, but under the influence of the mind.⁴⁹ This is not to say that mind determines genotype, but rather that the mind’s social-cultural exteriorization affects a people’s racial istory and identity – and thus determines if a particular genotype will arise or not. There is, as a result, no distinct racial or national type without a correspondingly distinct cultural type.

I am not proposing a “culturalist” notion of race. The race I defend is the European race based on a specific gene pool, genetic cluster, breeding population, stock, or whatever term you want to use to speak of race in the zoological sense. Our genetic heritage is primary and cannot be compromised. But race as a biological category applied to human beings refers only to man’s animal nature, not his whole being. His animal nature may provide the disposition or capacity for specific European life forms and therefore cannot be dispensed with, but the European’s distinct heritage is only a facet of life, inseparable from everything else that contributes to it. Thus, however much race in the biological sense is requisite to everything else, in itself it has little explanatory power – because man’s being, even in the physical sense, is above all affected by the mind.

To take one’s stand simply in the animal sphere, then, not only confuses the part with the whole, it leaves us defenseless in all those higher realms where our life is manifested and sustained. A purely “scientific” (better said, “scientistic”) notion of race cannot, as a result, but leave all the other ramparts supporting our specific expression of human life undefended – and it is at these other ramparts (call them culture, society, religion, etc.) where the enemy has been most successful in destroying the basis of white life. For once the white man’s culture is destroyed, then the significance and purpose of white life is also destroyed – first ontologically, then physically. It’s imperative for this reason to take our stand not in natural science alone, but in all the multiple realms of human being.

There are several roots to the idea I’m suggesting here. The deepest, perhaps, is Friedrich von Schelling’s idea that a people emerges from its myths insofar as the “community of consciousness” forged by a shared myth is what grounds and unites a people as a people.⁵⁰ Every understanding of the ethnogenetic process that creates races and nations starts from this idea.

Race, Culture, and America

The American case is the preeminent example of this conception of the connection between race and culture. When transplanted Englishmen in seventeenth-century Virginia began identifying themselves as “white,” in opposition to their black slaves – who were seen as more beast than man – they made “white skin” the basis of what later became the core of the American’s national identity. “White” here wasn’t just a biological marker that put whites at the high end of the human chain of being. It also implied all those things associated with their racial kinsmen in Europe (such as their cultural heritage, religious beliefs, standards of beauty, etc.) Other European whites (Scots-Irish, Dutchmen, Swedes, Germans, French, etc.) would consequently be accepted as Americans on the basis of their cultural and biological kinship with the larger European family of nations. Entry into American society was based thus largely on ethnic invisibility and racial origin – which made white skin color “the most important single determinant in their human relations.”

With the arrival of the Irish in the 1830s and ’40s, the religious (Protestant) and social (bourgeois) components of America’s white identity were culturally challenged by the Catholic, tribal character “the mud-splattered, shillelagh-wielding salpeen” with the imputed simian features.”⁵¹ In time, though, as the Irish were acculturated and Americans became more religiously indifferent, they were gradually accepted as Americans on the basis of their racial kinship wit the native Anglo-Protestants. But it should be added that Irish-Americans, however loyal to their new homeland, “had no intention of abandoning their religion, disguising their ancestry, or detaching themselves from the struggles of their native land.”⁵² Indeed, it was from their fierce devotion to Mother Eire that came their equally unyielding devotion to America. The Irish, as such, were acculturated into American culture, which they also helped to shape – they were not “melted” into a mongrel mass.

The “assimilation” of Irish and other Europeans ethnics, however, could never happen with blacks, for implicit in the American way of life was the understanding that race – not just white skin, but all that was associated with their Old World origins – was primary. Their European origins, in fact, were requisite to everything that made the American an American. The assumption here was not just that black skin belonged to another physical type of man than those with white skin, but that the black spirit – culture, soul, essence – was a different order of spirit than the white man’s. These differences were not accomodatable because they were fundamentally alien to one another, as alien as the drum-beating percussions of the African jungle were to the counterpoint of Bach’s Kunst der Fuge. An Irishman could change his religion, lose his brogue, or embrace American norms, but nothing could turn black into white.

Then as now, blue-nose reformers would insist that race was no more an obstacle to assimilation than religion, social rank, or national origin. But no matter how deficient Americans may have been in their high cultural accomplishment, they nevertheless retained their identity as Europeans – as whites – whose singularity was defined in opposition to non-Europeans. Cultural assimilation, in a word, was based on and conditioned by racial criteria.⁵³

Only after 1945, under assault from the new National Security State and a largely Jewish-controlled “culture industry,” would the racial basis of American identity (and hence culture) be subverted and refounded on the basis of purely creedal/ideological criteria. Accordingly, the new nonracial identity of the postwar era led directly to a multiracial atomization destructive of the American’s former racial identity – as his expanded phenotype more and more diverged from his genotype, to the point where the former is now, arguably, no longer an extension but adulteration of the latter.

A backhanded affirmation of the inherent link between race and culture is particularly evident today in the ideology of multiculturalism. At the root of this liberal pluralistic dogma is the “anti-racist” contention that the biological entities once commonly referred to as “races” do not exist – but are rather mere “social constructs.” This makes “race” a totally subjective category based on an allegedly flawed, bigoted, or self-interested perception. But if race as a biological fact is a matter of perception, and if perception of biological (racial) differences is an expression of racism, as multiculturalists hold, this doesn’t mean that the socially constructed fact of race is to be ignored, for it has supposedly become pivotal to the dominant system of social control. Thus, no sooner do anti-racists deny race as a biological essence than they turn around and call for measures favoring the so-called nonwhite “social construct” – and, just as contradictory, they advocate not assimilation into the larger (white) American culture but a recognition and validation of their nonwhite cultures.

As one egalitarian critic of multiculturalism explains: “Treating race as a social fact amounts to nothing more than acknowledging that we were mistaken to think of it as a biological fact and then insisting that we ought to keep making the mistake.⁵⁴

Culture in this multiculturalist optic becomes a surrogate for the biological notion of race, and the celebration of cultural differences (”diversity”) becomes a celebration of racial differences. Multiculturalism serves in this way as the proxy of multiculturalism. This doesn’t mean, of course, that race and culture are equivalent terms – only that among anti-racists there is a certain assumption about the inherent relationship between race and culture.

And on this one point I think these enemies of our people get it right.

Culture and Post-American Anarchy

In Arnold’s most famous poem, “Dover Beach” (1867), he depicted England’s troubled culture in all its deep-seated spiritual anarchy:

… for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams …
[Is but] a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This is the England of Culture and Anarchy, whose disordering chaos lay not just in increased incidents of social violence and political agitation, but in the country’s

hideous sprawling industrial cities, its loud-voice assertion of personal liberty, its dismal, stuffy, and cantankerous forms of Christianity, its worship of size and numbers and wealth and machinery generally, its state-blindness, and its belief in collision (collision of parties, of sects, of firms) as the only way to salvation.⁵⁵

Arnold thought the root of this growing anarchy was cultural. As a child of the Reformation, England had been home to that “Dissidence of Dissent and [that] Protestantism of the Protestant religion” called Puritanism.⁵⁶ Puritanism, Arnold granted, may have been necessary to develop “the moral fiber of the English race . . . to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination over men’s minds, and to prepare the way for freedom of thought.”⁵⁷ But its notion of moral perfection had nothing to do with spiritual perfection, and its narrow, individualistic spirit was a threat to the nation’s unity.

Given that the chief bearer of Puritan dissent was the English middle class and that this class was dominant not only in the economy, but increasingly in society, Arnold feared its Hebraising effects would rend the nation’s communal fabric. For the Puritan’s highly developed individual conscience posited that every man was on his own in matters of religion, as well as in matters of business and personal conduct. The norms embodied in the established church were thus ignored, as was the cultural heritage that once animated the English people. Like Jacobinism, utilitarianism, and liberalism, Puritanism had no patience with the legacy of the past and was disposed to radical schemes subversive of established hierarchies. In its opposition to the Church of England, it proposed, for example, “placing all good men alike in a condition of religious equality.” Arnold called this the solution of the “tailless foxes,” who advocated that all foxed cut off their tails.⁵⁸ The endless cycles of sectarian strife that isolated their mitotic churches in “holes and corners,” further fragmenting the nation. By rejecting any corporate or collective authority that might compromise their conscience and insisting that every Englishman had the right to do whatever he pleased, the dissenters’ individualism, Arnold feared, was leading, quite literally, to anarchy.

This is why he championed the cause of culture, which he called “the most resolute enemy of anarchy.”⁵⁹ If the whole nation would learn self-discipline through a unified culture of “right reason, ideas, and light,” it might be possible “to cure the narrowness of Puritanism” and bring it “into the main current of national life.” A man reared in the “totality” of the established church had no need, he claimed, to struggle to find a private form of self-expression: imbued with “a sense of the historical life of the human spirit, outside and beyond [his[ own fancies laving himself free to develop his other sides. A national culture centered in an established church thus offered innumerably more avenues for self-development and realization, suggesting "new sides and sympathies for our own forms of religion, gives us the leisure and calm to steady out our view of religion itself."⁶⁰

"In a serious people, where everyone has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his [whole] mind.”⁶¹ Relatedly, all the great works of art, literature, and science “came not from nonconformists, but from men of the Establishment – or at least men trained by the Establishment.” The greatest Puritans – Milton, Baxter, Wesley – had, accordingly, been formed within the Establishment’s pale. “A generation or two outside the Establishment and Puritanism produces men of national mark no more.”⁶² Against the Puritans’ deforming morality, Arnold defended the sweetness and light that came from the Anglo-European heritage.

Arnold’s cultural antidote to the centrifugal forces of modern liberal society pertained, though, not just to Victorian England, but to the Anglo-Protestant culture of the United States.

The America Arnold knew was very different from the America that began to emerge at the end of the nineteenth century, just as the latter qualitatively would differ from the America of the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, much of what he said about this new country retains its significance in illuminating the country’s subsequent cultural trajectory. Basic to his view is the contention that America was essentially “a province of England,” with roughly the same admixture of Saxons and Celts. Yet unlike England, America had a small reading class, few men of letters, no intellectual center, and a people oriented more to material than cultural matters. Also, unlike England, America lacked both an aristocracy and a peasantry, which meant it was almost entirely a middle-class country, affected by the same Philistine and Hebraising tendencies he criticized in the English middle class.⁶³

Influenced by the sectarianism of its evangelical Protestantism (”without great men and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity”),⁶⁴ American energy was funneled into money-making or, when it took spiritual form, into doctrines of moral uplift, such as those promoted by the reforming mania of the Social Gospel.

In Arnold’s view, the “unintelligence” of English nonconformists almost totally dominated the United States. He rhetorically asked in one of his articles:

Do not tell me only … of the magnitude of your industry and commerce; of the beneficence of your institutions, your freedom, your equality … tell me also if your civilization – which is the grand name you give to all this development – tell me if your civilization is interesting.⁶⁵

And he answered himself in the negative, for America in his eyes lacked distinction, having, despite its vast economic achievement, failed to develop “the power of intellect and knowledge, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners, as well as the great power of conduct and religion.”⁶⁶

Like many European critics of America’s plebian civilization, Arnold was overly quick in applying his European standards to American life, failing to grasp many of its defining features (such as the cult of republicanism and producerism inscribed in the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Populist tradition, which in some ways served as a national “church,” or the personal trust and mutual interest that bound these ostensibly atomized individuals to one another.) The result is a picture not quite as balanced as it should have been. Arnold also didn’t fully understand that a totally middle-class country, based on an idea of “personal aggrandizement” and having no Church, nobility, or army to anchor its established values, was a country dominated not just by individualist market principles, but by state and social structures indifferent, if not hostile to nation and culture.

Nevertheless, his basic point – that America’s Philistine, middle-class culture, with its materialist and individualist slant, was corrosive of community and thus a force of anarchy – retains, I think, a certain pertinence, even if he failed to see what it implied in terms of larger structural or institutional developments.

More generally, the postbellum America Arnold knew was in the process of succumbing to forces that exacerbated the atomistic tendencies of its middle-class culture, as the country fell into the hands of a rapacious plutocracy indifferent to its diverse population and incapable of developing a national culture around which to assimilate its different European stocks.

The divisive, potentially anarchistic tendencies that have since colonized its culture with the prerogatives of the market have not merely continued into the present, but have been accelerated by other, more centrifugal forces.

In the late nineteenth century the country’s massive industrialization began to overwhelm the small-town, rural character of American life, replacing it with sprawling, smoke-stacked metropolises that radically transformed the social-scape, as the earlier agrarian America gave way to a new business civilization dominated by giant corporate entities.⁶⁷ The peasant masses from Eastern and Southern Europe who came to fill the new factories helped undermine the largely British/North-European character of the population. Linguistic, cultural, and ethnic identities became more complex and conflicted, just as local and regional cultures surrendered its urbanizing, commercial, and technological forces.

America’s increasingly deracinated masses were drawn into a “culture industry” based on newspapers, vaudeville, touring theater companies, and then, in the twentieth century, on automobiles, urban night life, professional sports, movies, radio, TV, and other mass entertainments lacking the “sweetness and light” characteristic of traditional European culture. Worse, this consumer-driven, commercial culture, instead of rejecting the outward materialism, fully succumbed to it. Not the best that had been thought and said, this mass culture appealed to what Henry James called “the new, the simple, the common, the commercial, the immediate, and, all too often, the ugly.”⁶⁸

The late twentieth century then introduced forces that were qualitatively more anarchistic. The most radical of these, of course, was Third World immigration, which is changing not just the ethnic but the racial character of the population, breaking down the country’s last remaining European remnant.

It seems hardly fortuitous that America’s present Affenkultur is tied to the racially alien forces of hip-hop and Hollywood – and to a spirit, institutionalized in Marxisant cultural studies departments, which treats all forms of discrimination, taste, and value judgment as illegitimate.

This cultural process of ethnoracial dissolution has been compounded by a communication and digital revolution, whose programmed images create a “virtual reality” unmoored from the realities it represents and whose representations are both medium and message;⁶⁹ by a globalization of economic exchanges in which national imperatives give way to world market interests and those of the global “superclass”;⁷⁰ by a “new class” elite increasingly nonwhite, “counter-cultural,” and indifferent to all former standards of social distinction and taste;⁷¹ by “entertainment values” and visual media that corrupt the way we think;⁷² and by an educational system, which has produced what is arguably the dumbest and most infantile generation of students in American history.⁷³

Behind these developments that have become integral parts of America’s consumer society that seek to turn Americans into a faceless mass of coffee-colored consumers lies the destruction of all that connects genotype and extended phenotype, as the organic ties linking America’s European race and its nativist variant of the larger European culture are severed.

As long, then, as white American identity is not defined by the symbols, beliefs, and destiny dictated by our past and by our regulative tradition, but by the programmed contrivances of an alien culture industry, we cease to exist as a people. For without the memories and myths that make a people a people, white Americans are only “so many politically bound” people.⁷⁴

Conclusion

To the extent that the white-nationalist project endeavors to raise the consciousness of the country’s European-descended population, it is largely a cultural project to heighten white identity by anchoring it in a body of beliefs and practices – a culture – whose consciousness defies the racial anarchy presently threatening whites. It thus consciously or unconsciously accepts that culture is neither the democratic smorgasbord for all tastes that multiculturalists claim nor is it something fixed in an academic canon for all time, as our Jewish-trained conservatives would have it. Rather, as suggested above, it is the spirit engendered by the blood that created the European life world and the people who inhabit it – it is the extended phenotype of the white genotype.

Culture as such is an organic growth, inseparable from the people who live it and make it grow. At the highest level it is indistinguishable from race and nation, being the spiritual manifestation of a people’s distinct life form. To separate race and culture – not just through the introduction of Hebraising practices, but through a concerted assault on the institutional relationship between whites and their heritage – is to destroy, then, both race and culture, for one cannot exist without the other.

Michael O’Meara, Ph.D., studied social theory at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1st Books, 2004).

_________________________

¹ “No other foreign critics, and perhaps few native ones, have acquired such a reputation and exercised such palpable influence on American culture.” John Henry Raleigh, Matthew Arnold and American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 1.
² Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J.D. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge: University Press, 1960), 68
³ O.D. Edwards, “Matthew Arnold’s Fight for Ireland,” in R. Giddings, ed., Matthew Arnold: Between Two Worlds (London: Vision Press, 1986)
⁴ Quoated in Robert A. Hutterback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Colored Immigrants in the British Self-Governing Colonies 1830-1910 (Illinois: Cornell University Press, 1976), 17.
⁵ Frederic E. Faverty, Matthew Arnold the Ethnologist (Evanston: Northwest University Press, 1951), 18. (This is the key work on Arnold’s “racialism,” and my essay is much indebted to it.) The Celts, like the Teutons, were a “North European” people. To see either as a distinct race is misleading, as they are perhaps best viewed as different cultural-linguistic offshoots of the same racial stock. E. Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland: Habit, Heritage and History (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992), 43-45
⁶ Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (Sioux Falls, S.D.: NuVision Publications, 2008), 22.
⁷ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 53. On English superstitions about the Celt, see G.B. Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island (1904) (various editions). Although the English saw themselves as descendants of the Angle and Saxon invaders, they are actually, in the vast majority – as a long tradition from Thomas Huxley to Sir Arthur Keith to Brian Sykes has scientifically demonstrated – descended from the old Britons – Celts! English Cymric (or Cumbri) Celts had their language and institutions Germanized by the Anglo-Saxon and later Norman invaders, while Ireland’s Gaelic Celts managed to naturalize the Germanizing influences of its Viking, Norman, and Anglo-Irish invaders. Despite the successive waves of invaders, there has, in fact, been no significant genetic variation in the population of the British Isles over the last several thousand years. See Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland (New York: Norton, 2006); more generally, John Morris, The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973).
⁸ Edwards, “Matthew Arnold’s Fight for Ireland.”
⁹ This is the subject of George Meredith’s 1910 novel, Celt and Saxon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922)
¹⁰ Matthew Arnold, “Ecce, Convertium ad Gentes,” in Irish Essays and Other Essays (New York: AMS Press, 1970). Ernst Renan made a similar observation about the lack of “general intelligence” in the US, which he referred to as la dure inintelligence des Américains du Nord. Intelligence, however, is different from character, and the latter is arguably the greater force for change and action.
¹¹ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 11.
¹² Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 150.
¹³ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 14.
¹⁴ Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 53.
¹⁵ The oppression, dispossession, and garrison state that were the basis of English rule in Ireland didn’t exactly convince the Irish of English morality. The notion of “perfidious Albion” is similarly embedded in Continental culture. This suggests not only how subjective Arnold’s method was, but how subjective all such ethnoracial characterizations are. Gustav Le Bon’s Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Paris, 1894) [English trans., The Psychology of Peoples], which represents one of the best treatments of what might be called the characterological analysis of race, drew – revealingly – the exact opposition conclusion, with Le Bon seeing the English and Americans as sturdy, self-reliant, enterprising peoples and the “Latin” races, despite their greater intellectual and artistic gifts, as being inherently “subservient” – i.e., dependent more on the central state than themselves.
¹⁶ A. O. T. Cockshut, “Matthew Arnold, Conservative Revolutionary,” in D.J. Laura, ed., Matthew Arnold: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1973).
¹⁷ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 11.
¹⁸ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 102.
¹⁹ Christopher Dawson, The Historic Reality of Christian Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1960, 106.
²⁰ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 141.
²¹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 154.
²² It was actually the German playwright Hanns Johst who said: “When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.”
²³ Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 76-82.
²⁴ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 43.
²⁵ The emergence of the modern notion of culture in this period was both representative of the great changes then transforming Europe and of the changing consciousness of European peoples. In the following potent sentence, Martin Heidegger captures something of the essence of this new consciousness: “The connection of the concept of culture with the idea of historicality – the formation of culture as a historical process – makes intelligible the conceptual domination of the concept of culture at the end of the nineteenth century, [for] only where historical consciousness is awake can the idea of culture as a process of formation and formative aim of human creative life penetrate into reflective consciousness.” Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (London: Continuum, 2008), 101.
²⁶ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 6.
²⁷ Kevin MacDonald, “American Transcedentalism: An Indigenous Culture of Critique,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol.8, no.1 (Spring 2008).
²⁸ T.S. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 104.
²⁹ Eliot, “The Unity of European Culture,” in Christianity and Culture.
³⁰ Eliot, Notes toward the Definition of Culture,” 100.
³¹ Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 6.
³² Clifford Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
³³ Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 104.
³⁴ According to Julius Evola, the vision of man that stands behinds the American concept of individualism is one in which “everyone can become whatever he wants to, within the limits of the technological means at his disposal . . . if he knows how to train himself.” “American Civilization” (1945), http://feastofhateandfear.com/archives/jevola3.html.
³⁵ A variation of the anthropological concept of culture is the economic concept of “human capital,” seen in terms of the requirements for economic life – e.g., specific skills, work habits, attitudes to education, enterprise, etc. See Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
³⁶ In saying this, let it be clear that the supposition here is that man’s blood inheritance is of paramount importance and that man’s mental and social achievements are premised on what his specific genotype bequeaths.
³⁷ Michael O’Meara, “Freedom’s Racial Imperative: A Heideggerian Argument for the Self-Assertion of Peoples of European Descent,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 6, no.3 (Fall 2006).
³⁸ For example, Mark Graubard, “The Biological Foundation of Culture,” in Alan McGregor, ed., Race, Evolution, Creative Intelligence, and Inter-Group Competition (Washington D.C.: Mankind Quarterly Monograph, n.d.).
³⁹ The conceptually lax Arnold sometimes saw racial traits as constant and sometimes as alterable by culture. The point here is that man is both mind and body. A strictly idealist, like a strictly materialist, understanding confuses a fact of man’s being with his entirety.
⁴⁰ Max Scheler, Man’s Place in Nature, trans. H. Meyerhoff (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961).
⁴¹ Michael O’Meara, “World Openness and Will to Power,” http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/archive/20070/07/16/world-openness-and-and-will-to-power.html.
⁴² Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. C. McMillan and K. Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 70-73.
⁴³ Gehlen, Man, 55.
⁴⁴ The notion of culture as a phenotype is developed in Louis R. Browning, “Bioculture: A New Paradigm for the Evolution of Western Populations,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol.4, no.1 (Spring 2004). The strictly biological notion of the “extended phenotype” comes from Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
⁴⁵ Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History, ed. J.J. Mulloy (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2002), 69.
⁴⁶ Donald A. Akenson, Small Differences: Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1988).
⁴⁷ Argued in different terms, this is the point Sam Francis makes in “Why Race Matters” (1994), Essential Writings on Race, Jared Taylor, ed. (Oakton Va: New Century Foundation, 2007).
⁴⁸ Even Darwin held that “race was outside [biological] evolution.” Nancy Stephen, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 54-55.
⁴⁹ Sir Arthur Keith: “No matter what racial mixtures have entered into the composition of a people, that mixture is welded into a new race under the working of a common national spirit.” Ethnos (London: Keagan Paul, 1931), 37. Though Keith (probably the most nationalist/racialist of modern evolutionary anthropologists) saw national formation as part of a group evolutionary process and treated mind and spirit as instruments of nature’s evolutionary impetus, it was, however, man’s mind that either abetted or hindered nature and determined the way men organize themselves in the world. He thus argued, especially in reference to the Jews, that “the primary marks of race are psychological” – an argument premised on purely Darwinian postulates that led to conclusions not unlike Arnold’s “characterological” notion of race. Arthur Keith, A New Theory of Evolution (1947) (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1968), 377.
⁵⁰ Friedrich von Schelling, Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth (1842), trans. M. Richey (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007).
⁵¹ Elite aversion to Irish Catholics (especially before the “Hungry Forties”) wasn’t much different from its aversion to Scots-Irish Protestants. Catholic or Protestant, both were called simply “Irish”; Andrew Jackson was thus “the Irish President.” More than the usual ethnocentrism, this aversion stemmed from long-standing class antagonisms, with the dispossessed “Irish” occupying the radical wing of popular democracy. See Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitutions to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), 335.
⁵² Peter Quinn Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2007), 226.
⁵³ It’s the denial of this concept that animates the various imperialist ventures of America’s transnational ruling class, for it assumes that the particularlistic distillation of America’s market culture can be universally imposed on the rest of the world.
⁵⁴ Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 39.
⁵⁵ J.D. Wilson, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy.
⁵⁶ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 57-58.
⁵⁷ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 61.
⁵⁸ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 32.
⁵⁹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 204.
⁶⁰ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 20-21.
⁶¹ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 20-21.
⁶² Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 13.
⁶³ Mathew Arnold, “A Word About America” (1882), in R.H. Super, ed., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974), vol. X.
⁶⁴ Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 22.
⁶⁵ Quoted in L. Mazzeno and A. Lefcowitz, “Arnold and Bryce: The Problem of American Democracy and Culture,” in Machann and Burts, eds., Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours.
⁶⁶ Arnold, “A Word About America.”
⁶⁷ Richard Weaver, “Orbis Americarum” (1948), In Defense of Tradition: Collected Shorter Writings of Richard M. Weaver, 1929-1965, ed. Ted J. Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2000).
⁶⁸ Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 173.
⁶⁹ Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss et. al. (New York: Semiotext[e], 2000).
⁷⁰ David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).
⁷¹ Avrom Fleishman, New Class Culture: How an Emergent Class in Transforming American Culture (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002).
⁷² Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985.)
⁷³ Mark Baurelein, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (New York: Tarcher, 2008); Diana West, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007).
⁷⁴ Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 2.

There are several ways to examine the claim that race is a social construct. A method popular in our community is to prove by genetics or biology that racial differences are real or immutable; this research has been carried out by numerous scholars whose work is well-known and whose names need not be repeated here. They oppose the theories of Ashley Montagu, Margaret Mead, and other inheritors of Franz Boas’s legacy. Yet there is another strain of social construction theory that has not been so thoroughly addressed by those in our community. The academic left, much of it whose power resides not in the sciences but in the humanities, propagates a parallel “race is a social construct” thesis from departments of English, philosophy, history, communication, and allied fields. These arguments, which stand largely unopposed, have less to do with human evolution than with language, stereotypes, and social interaction.

Regardless of what evidence exists for race’s biological reality, “race,” because it is a linguistic phenomenon – a word, an utterance – becomes a social construct when it enters the world of discourse, which it must do, of course, in order for us to communicate about it. I hope to show that understanding how language functions socially is vital when developing a robust, meaningful, and comprehensive argument for the reality and importance of race.

To illustrate, I would like to analyze two texts that defend this strange position. Ian F. Haney Lopez, Professor of Law at UC Berkeley, has written extensively on racism and racial constructs in the American legal system. His classic essay, “The Social Construction of Race,” argues that race “must be viewed as a social construction. Human interaction rather than natural differentiation must be seen as the source and the continued basis for racial categorization.” ¹ In other words, to that author race is a social construction because we, as social beings, interact about it and therefore constantly construct its abstract significance. To Haney Lopez, because race’s definition has varied widely over time, and because it continues to evolve today at both the individual and societal levels, one should not consider “race” to be a meaningful category by which to classify people.²

Haney Lopez proceeds anecdotally, recounting his experience growing up biracial, the son of an Irish father and a Salvadoran mother. (Though, as one might expect, he explicitly writes this chapter “as a Latino.”³) While Haney Lopez’s brother identified more closely with his father’s white family, leading him to understand and present himself as “unraced,” Haney Lopez himself identified more closely with his mother’s family and considered himself a Latino. From this, he concludes that, “in my experience race reveals itself as plastic, inconstant, and to some extent volitional.”⁴ Haney Lopez, of course, proves very little with his quaint tale, but Critical Race Studies has never required much in the way of academic rigor: its democratic orientation lends itself to evidence based upon feelings and personal convictions. Nevertheless, Haney Lopez’s point is well taken: though he and his brother were born of the same parents and can claim the same genetic heritage, they have constructed their racial identities differently. Hence he concludes that race is not biological; it is a set of behavioral expectations chosen and performed by its bearer. It is a social construction.

Obviously, Haney Lopez’s biological biraciality, though it is of primary importance to his own refutation of race, is of no consequence to us: the existence of the Labradoodle does not refute the existence of the Labrador. But perhaps this issue of biracial identity does complicate our discussion of race. Haney Lopez’s story introduces the important point that a person can “choose” – or construct – his racial identity not only on a census form, but also, more notably, in the wardrobe, in the classroom, and on the streets of American cities. And, as we all known, biracial individuals are not the only ones who must construct their race in this way: a black man must perform whiteness when interviewing for a corporate job, for example, just a white kid in an urban public school must perform blackness when changing in the locker room for gym class.

I think the issue of performable racial identity is vital to explore, for it establishes that there are two forms of useful racial classifications: one that is biological and one that is social – one we are born with and one that is “volitional” (inasmuch as social behaviors can be described as volitional). This second category, the one that is socially dependent, is, according to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s influential Racial Formation in the United States, “a matter of both social structure and cultural representation.” They protest that

Too often, the attempt is made to understand race simply or primarily in terms of only one of these two analytic dimensions. For example, efforts to explain racial inequality as a purely social phenomenon are unable to account for the origins, patterning, and transformation of racial difference. Conversely, many examinations of racial difference – understood as a matter of cultural attributes, a la ethnicity theory, or a society-wide signification system, a la some post structuralist accounts – cannot comprehend such structural phenomenon as racial stratification in the labor market or patterns of racial segregation.

⁵

Here the authors identify and hope to synthesize two distinct, popular understandings of race based upon social constructionism: one that centers upon the oppression of biased social systems, and another which maintains and marginalizes various race-specific behavior patterns through institutionalized discourse structures. My intent is, like that of Omi and Winant, to synthesize disparate concepts within race theory in order to suggest a more suitable and realistic concept of race – one that seeks to make use of both biological and social race, which, together, comprise our identity as a people.

Hilton and MacDonald’s Social Constructionism

In this regard, there is much to say about Anthony Hilton and Kevin MacDonald’s Occidental Observer article “Race as a Social Construct? No – and Yes!” The authors admit to “a modest role for social constructs” in the race debate. However this concession is less generous than it might at first seem, because it allows for only a very limited and weak social constructionism – one in which our unconscious minds are influenced by “images of black criminality and poor academic performance,” while our conscious minds are molded by what “the mainstream media like the New York Times tell us we should believe.” Seemingly inherent in this proposed duality is an omnipresent empirical reality, one in which we all directly observe and “unconsciously” internalize images of black criminality and substandard performance. In addition to this “implicit” comprehension of race and racial differences there exists and “explicit” conditioning by the mainstream media that persuades us to consciously accept the socially constructed party line. Then not only do we accept the product of our explicit conditioning, but many of us also participate, sometimes enthusiastically, in its maintenance at the societal level.⁶

First, I submit that very few whites actually internalize, consciously or unconsciously, unmediated black criminality. For the most part, we might see blacks “act black” and perform poorly in school, and we might even occasionally see blacks commit various petty crimes, but very rarely do we personally experience the widespread lack of civilization which characterizes our individual understandings of black performance in Western societies. In lieu of personal observation, which we must have in order to directly internalize images of black criminality, this understanding comes to us through published statistics, interpersonal communications, and various media (including motion pictures, newscasts, novels, the New York Times, and articles written by writers like Professor Hilton and MacDonald). These media, of course, contribute to a socially constructed notion of how race functions in our culture. The simple fact that most of us derive our racial biases, prejudices, and stereotypes largely, though not exclusively, via mediation, rather than via isolated personal experience (which, I argue, would still leave significant room for social construction), indicates that our individual conception of race are, at their root, socially constructed.

I want to commend Hilton and MacDonald for addressing the relationship between race and social construction within our discourse community for it is a topic we should seriously explore. Yet I would like to go a step further than Hilton and MacDonald and argue that race is a social construct in vastly more ways than they recognize in their article. In order to make my argument, I want to briefly explore the roots of social constructionism and suggest a few ways in which its application might be of use to us as race theorists.

Social Constructionism As Theory

Of course, social construction theory did not begin with Haney Lopez or Omi and Winant; they are only a few of the most widely cited scholars who have related that theory to race. The notion of a socially negotiated reality, as constructed through discourse, dates back to classical antiquity. Cratylus, Socrates, and Hermogenes debate the matter in Plato’s Cratyles. Socrates concludes the dialogue by stating

Nor can we reasonably say, Cratylus, that this is knowledge at all, if everything is in a state of transition and there is nothing abiding; for knowledge too cannot continue to be knowledge unless continuing always to abide and exist. But if the very nature of knowledge changes, at the time when the chance occurs there will be no knowledge, and, according to this view, there will be no one to know and nothing to be known: but if that which knows and that which is known exists ever, and the beautiful and the good and every other thing also exist, then I do not think that they can resemble a process or flux, as we were just now supposing. Whether there is this eternal nature in things, or whether the truth is what Heracleitus and his followers and many others say, is a question hard to determine; and no man of sense will like to put himself or the education of his mind in the power of names: neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality.

⁷

The participants in this dialogue attempt to find a correlation between words and the concepts they signify; Hermogenes finds the relationship to be essentially arbitrary, while Cratylus maintains that words and names naturally reflect the essence of that for which they stand.⁸ As can be seen above, Socrates concludes the matter ambiguously; the matters of transitory knowledge and arbitrary signifiers are a bit of a mystery even to him. But his verdict is clear: one who relies upon a thing’s name (i.e., one who relies upon something as socially contingent as a mere word) to establish transcendent meaning or stable essence might find himself in an “unhealthy state of reality.”

Countless philosophers, linguists, and language theorists have continued this debate since the stalemate between Socrates, Cratylus, and Hermogenes in the fifth century B.C. Yet because of nineteenth- and twentieth-century breakthroughs in structuralist and poststructuralist linguistics, the “conventionalists” – those who find the relationship between signifier and signified to be conventional and arbitrary – seem to have taken the prize. So for our purposes, the implications of their position are worth revisiting: if a word (or other signifier) does not flawlessly and directly communicate the concept it signifies – in other words, if there is not an inherent relationship between signifiers and their referents – at least a certain degree of social construction of meaning must take place between a communicator and his audience. Naturally, this is true even when the conversation is about race or other matters that have a certain empirical basis.

Some modern theorists of social constructionism have latched upon the ambiguous relationship between words and concepts and have then attempted to induce from it a vision of the world in which reality exists only via mediation and construction. This “strong” social constructionism, which gained popularity after the Second World War and which was particularly influential in the 1960s and 1970s, can be exemplified by Richard Vatz, who claims that

Fortunately or unfortunately meaning is not intrinsic in events, facts, people, or “situations,” nor are facts “publicly observable.” Except for those situations which directly confront our own empirical reality, we learn of facts and events through someone’s communicating them to us. This involves a two-part process. First, there is a choice of events to communicate . . . The second step in communicating “situations” is the translation of the chosen information into meaning.

⁹

Readers of The Occidental Quarterly can likely appreciate Vatz’s recognition that reality is frequently crafted for individuals by mediating forces; in fact, this journal exists only as a response to popularly propagated myths which obfuscate or invent (socially construct) “truths” about race and other related issues. If these myths were not “the truth” to the masses of the American public, we in the TOQ community would have little to discuss. Yet Vatz goes further in his theory of social construction, deferentially quoting American political scientist Murray Edelman: “language does not mirror an objective ‘reality’ but rather creates it by organizing meaningful perceptions abstracted from a complex, bewildering world.”¹⁰ This dismissal of any “objective reality” is the core of strong social construction theory.

In quoting, Edelman, Vatz aligns himself with an entire tradition of postmodern thinkers from this era – Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty are among the most notable – who endorse a position of more or less total social construction: they posit a view of the world – or, more accurately, a view of six and a half billion worlds – that exist only in the minds of their beholders. According to them, a person’s linguistic experience constructs for him an unstable and indescribable reality that will inevitably differ from that of all other individuals, each of whom possess his own little symbolic reality. According to this postmodernists, we are therefore only able to use language as a system of symbols that problematically communicate the concepts between our quite incompatible individuals worlds. So to them and their twenty-first century acolytes, race, as an utterance, is meaningless, insomuch as “meaning” implies a social negotiation of fluid, faultless understanding. This extreme brand of social constructionism departs notably from the one suggested by Hermogenes in the Cratylus, and it is one which, in my opinion, fails to realistically address the complex relationship between material reality and social interaction.

Today many others also find this “strong” social constructionism untenable. In the introduction to his The Construction of Social Reality, philosopher John Searle addresses the theories of the “strong” constructionists: “We live in exactly one world, not two or three or seventeen … But the existence of phenomena which are not in any obvious way physical or chemical gives rise to puzzlement.”¹¹ To Searle, language does prevent people from living on the same planet. There is room within social construction theory for a realist vision of a shared world, and though language complicates the matter, it does not totally imprison us isolated within its grasp.

Searle distinguishes between things that can be considered socially constructed and those that cannot. He explains that there is a difference between those two types of reality: first, there is the reality in which the value of a $5 bill is socially constructed, and second and there is the reality that hydrogen atoms have one electron.¹² Our society has constructed a system of exchange in which $5 bills, despite their intrinsic worthlessness, are accepted as legal tender and are differentiated from lesser and greater bills only by the ink patterns printed upon them (to Searle, an “institutional” or “social” fact¹³). On the other hand, that hydrogen atoms have one electron is an empirical fact (or a “brute” fact) that would still exist without human observation or agreement.¹⁴

After exploring the significance of these differences, Searle commends many twentieth-century sociologists for attempting to solve the problems of social construction, but suggests that their research perspective was restricted; as scientists, they were unequipped to tackle the problems posed by language and negotiated, contextually constructed meaning. Their tradition of inquiry, while certainly intertwined with that of the humanities, was not accustomed to exploring the relationship between words, signification, and producers of discourse. While they could theorize about the nature of truth and the effects of individual constructs, their disciplinary research narratives did not include Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and the other western philosophers who have contributed over the centuries to our understanding of reality. And if we, as modern day race theorists, are truly interested in understanding the social construction of race, we would be remiss to ignore such a rich tradition.

To constructionists of the above “soft” variety, truth is largely social: often it can only be discovered through discourse, through interaction with other people. For example: we learned that Barack Obama was elected president not by counting votes ourselves, but by watching post-election television coverage. We “know” we has elected only in a very indirect and trusting way; i.e., we “know” it because other people told us so. It is the exact same process by which our peers come to “know” that Nobel Laurete Menachim Begin was a man of peace and that, without George Washington Carver, we certainly wouldn’t have peanut butter today. These “truths” are socially derived, and, according to social constructionists, this process by which we negotiate truth can be applied not only to mass mediated reality, but also to local and more individualized realms of discourse: when we talk with friends, listen to lectures, and read novels, articles, and poetry. They argue that in every social situation there is, to a certain degree, an amount of social construction and negotiation of meaning and reality.

Conclusion

So how does all of this help us, as theorists of race? We can agree, I argue, that to a certain degree race is a social construct. If we accept Searle’s distinction, we can consider race both a brute and a social fact. On at least one level, it is a set of social conventions, including fashion, art, dialects, mannerisms, and even occupations and pastimes. It can be performed in certain cases, such as the one cited by Haney Lopez. (And I have to point out that we’ve all bemoaned the sight of those sixteen-year-old white kids at the mall who “talk,” “dress,” or “act black,” not to mention the respectable blacks among us who, as we insist, “act white.”) In addition, I posit it will benefit us to develop a more critical understanding of how society does in fact construct race in cultural artifacts, political discourse, and news reporting, for our people are frequently the victims of a vicious perpetuation of negative stereotypes – what some might call the social construction of the white race.

Moreover, we must recognize that, even among ourselves – even as a community with common goals and values – we will disagree about the boundaries of race and the definition of whiteness. We as individuals do not scientifically test people we meet in order to judge whether or not they are white. We make that decision based upon how we individually define whiteness, and that definition doesn’t come from some universally understood essence or an acknowledged set of criteria. It comes from our social interactions with other humans, from our contrastive experiences with whites and non-whites, which have led us to our own subjective and socially constructed definitions of whiteness.

Let us remember that, when Searle and other modern proponents of social construction developed their theories, they were standing on the shoulders of giants – the giants, in fact, of the entire western tradition. So regardless of what I might think of the excesses of strong social constructionism and its lingering, though dissipating, impact upon humanistic thought today, I believe it will be beneficial for our community to consider the traditions from which these theories evolved. I believe it will be beneficial for us to adopt a rational and well-defined theory of socially constructed race, alongside our traditional theories of biological race, in order to come to a comprehensive definition of who we are, what we stand for, and what we want to preserve.

The appropriate way to rebut Haney Lopez and his humanist colleagues is not to compare skull sizes, establish ancestral migration patterns, or cite criminal statistics (regardless of whatever undeniable merit these projects do possess). Instead, we should consider (1) how certain institutions have manipulated negative social constructs in their attempts to marginalize entire classes of academic research and pathologize certain behaviors and concepts among our people; (2) how revisiting our people’s traditional mores, ideals, and worldviews can help us reconstruct an ideal of who we are and what we want as a people; and, perhaps most importantly, (3) how our circles’ traditional aversion to modern theories of social construction impedes our ability to participate in these reasonable discussions of the issue which we, as readers of and contributors to The Occidental Quarterly, find most essential: race.

John Howard is the pen name of an American author and critic.

_______________________

¹ Ian F. Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Del Gado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000(, 163-75.
² To put it crassly: the use of the word “race” has different connotations in the bleachers at the Daytona 500 than it does in Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981), though most TOQ readers will likely find both uses to be of equal intellectual consequence. Simply put, the term “race” derives its significance from the context in which it is written, spoken, read, or heard, and from its relationship to the chain of signifiers that precede and follow it. See Kenneth Burke’s discussion of “contextual definition” in A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 24-26.
³ Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” 165.
⁴ Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race,” 166
⁵ Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56.
⁶ Anthony Hilton and Kevin MacDonald, Race as a social construct – No – and Yes!” The Occidental Observer, December, 9, 2008.
⁷ Plato, “Cratylus,” The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 474.
^8
9 Richard E. Vatz, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 156-57.
¹⁰ Murray Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action (Chicago: Markham, 1971), 33-34.
¹¹ John Searle, The Social Construction of Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), xi.
¹² Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 2.
¹³ John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 50-53.
¹⁴ Searle, The Social Construction of Reality, 190-94.

Crowds hurled bottles and other objects at police, smashed marquees, jumped on vehicles, broke windows, and set rubbish dumpsters and vehicles on fire along Figueroa Street north of Staples Center and on Flower Street. Police fired non-lethal rounds to disperse the crowd at Figueroa and Venice Boulevard after several small fires were set, as well as at 11th and Hope streets. At 7th and Flower, a car believed to be a taxicab was engulfed in flames. In all, there were multiple injuries but no loss of life, officials said. One police officer suffered a broken nose. As the night wore on, fire crews responded to many rubbish fires and some vehicle fires, according to the Los Angeles Fire Department.

Hundreds of officers in patrol cars, on foot and on horseback moved in to clear streets and break up the crowds. At least 12 people were arrested for crimes including public drunkenness, vandalism and inciting a riot. One person was arrested for assault on a police officer. The LAPD reported that things seemed to be calming down after 11 P.M.

In 2000, the LAPD was criticized after mayhem erupted following the Lakers’ championship victory. Roaming mobs torched vehicles and looted and vandalized businesses near Staples Center with seeming impunity. The department fared better after last year’s championship but still needed a few hours to gain control of rowdy fans. And again in 2009, seconds after the final buzzer, Lakers fans spilled into the streets near the Staples Center, setting fires, vandalizing buses, tearing down trees, breaking police car windows, hurling rocks and bottles and looting and pillaging some $100,000 in shoes and more. Then-LAPD Chief William Bratton famously referred to the hooligans as “knuckleheads” “thugs” and “known gang members.”

Hispanics or Latinos (the terms are somewhat interchangeable) tend to be either Mestizos or Sambos. The term “Mestizo” refers to Hispanics of the particular racial mixture of Amerindian and European (mainly Spanish) who comprise much of the population of continental Latin America. They tend to be short, squat, brown, and have straight jet-black hair. Unlike the English and others who settled the United States and Canada, who brought their wives with them, the Spaniards who first settled Latin America did not bring their wives. So they intermarried with the Amerindians to produce a whole new race.

The term “Sambo” refers to Hispanics of primarily African and Amerindian admixture, although they may have some White blood. They tend to have kinky hair and fleshy lips, although they can be short or tall. Most Sambos come from the Caribbean and Brazil, where Negro slaves were brought in large numbers.

According to a detailed story published by the Marysville Globe-Reporter on June 8th, 2010, Michael Kundu sent an e-mail to fellow board member Chris Nation and Kyle Kinoshita, executive director of teaching and learning for the Marysville School District which cited the work of John Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, as evidence that certain ethnic groups possess biological advantages and disadvantages compared to others, in areas including brain sizes and intelligence levels.

“I think what is safe to draw from this is that there is a definitive factor played by racial genetics in intellectual achievement, but we, as a society, are striving to offset that foundation by increasing educational and social opportunities to ‘offset’ the racial achievement gap,” Kundu wrote in the e-mail, whose subject line was “race and achievement (please circulate).” You can read the e-mail on the story page, or directly access it HERE.

Well, Katie bar the door, because that lit the fuse. The local NAACP led a psychological lynch mob which showed up at a marathon 4 1/2 hour school board meeting on June 7th to eviscerate Kundu. Lillian Ortiz-Self, chair of the state Commission on Hispanic Affairs, started it off by claiming that Rushton’s study was not only discriminatory but resembled white supremacist ideology that takes us back to the time of segregation. Janice Greene, president of the Snohomish County branch of the NAACP, followed by characterizing Kundu’s remarks as offensive, not in accord with the mainstream of modern U.S. society, and certainly not in the equitable interest of all Marysville School District students. Greene further declared that Rushton “is a known white supremacist and that his pseudo-scientific theory has been effectively and consistently debunked by well-regarded scientists”.

Other NAACP wankers sounded off. Oscar Eason Jr., state conference president of the NAACP, opined that “Messages like this are damaging to youth because they place in the minds of teachers the idea that these kids are incapable of learning, so they just keep getting passed on to the next grade, because they’re never expected to succeed.” Bill Reed, another NAACP member who touted his 20 years of involvement in the local community and its education, agreed with Eason that expectations can play a significant role in minority achievement. “What cuts across all people of color is that we’re not expected to amount to much, whereas my white friends were all expected to be successful,” Reed said. “Even when we do attain success, we’re still seen as ‘less than.’ I’m accomplished. I’ve worked my butt off. But at least once a week, I still get a look from someone that says, ‘Why are you here?’”

Ben Young read a letter written by Kinuko Noborikawa, chair of the Communities of Color Coalition, who could not attend the Board meeting. Noborikawa’s letter likewise expressed grave concern regarding Kundu’s citations of Rushton and quoted the conclusions of 2002 Washington State School Director’s Association President Connie Fletcher, who argued that allocations of resources should be based not on equal measurements, but on the degree of need of each student.

Two board members attempted to defend Kundu. Darci Becker and Cindy Erickson objected to the guest speakers’ focus on race, with Erickson expressing concerns that students who didn’t fall into certain categories could fall through the cracks, while Becker noted that her own child faces learning difficulties in spite of being white and economically comfortable.

Michael Kundu defended his actions, emphasizing that he doesn’t consider biology to be the only cause of the achievement gap, but even as he acknowledged Rushton’s racism, he defended genetics as one of a number of possible influences, along with a student’s family dynamics and relative economic prosperity. “We don’t know what’s behind the achievement gap,” Kundu said. “If we did, every school district would be making significant progress in correcting it. No one has the formula for it. A lot of people have elements of the formula, but this achievement gap has been around for decades. I’m saying almost precisely the same things as a lot of you.”

But after Board President Sherri Crenshaw repeatedly criticized him and allowed the witch hunt to continue, Kundu finally had enough and left before the end of the meeting after accusing Crenshaw of “mischaracterizing” his e-mails. Darci Becker quickly followed after describing Crenshaw’s remarks as personal attacks against Kundu.

John Philippe Rushton is also the president of the Pioneer Fund, characterized as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He has spoken on eugenics several times at American Renaissance conferences, and has also published a number of general articles in AR. Rushton has also written articles for VDARE; his complete archive of VDARE articles is available HERE.

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[1] go [Here] and scroll 7/8 down the page to “Census Bureau”

The Roots of Biohistory

The intellectual roots of biohistory go back to the development of evolutionary biology in the late nineteenth century. Its antecedents can be found in human geography, the Annales School, environmental history, and sociobiology. Traditional nineteenth-century historiography was concerned chiefly with the doings of kings, popes, and generals. But by the early twentieth century, evolutionary theory was influencing the work of many historians, geographers, and social scientists. In 1901 the president of the American Historical Association, Charles Francis Adams (brother of Henry who also served as president of the AHA), declared that knowledge of Darwin’s theory “was the dividing line between us [contemporary historians] and the historians of the old school.”² Geographers such as Ellsworth Huntington developed ideas on racial and environmental determinism that were later dismissed but never disproved.³ A year after Huntington published Civilization and Climate, Madison Grant came out with his racial history of Europe.⁴ Yet, in the following years the nascent field of biohistory was strangled in the cradle by Boasian anthropology and other intellectual and political forces such as the Frankfurt School.⁵

One anti-liberal counterforce was the Annales School, developed in France during the interwar years. Led by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, the Annalistes sought to write what they termed  ”total history.”⁶ To accomplish this they adopted an interdisciplinary approach that incorporated geography and the social and physical sciences into their work. This was especially true for Fernand Braudel, a student of Febvre, who led the second generation of Annalistes after the war. Braudel believed it was necessary for historians to consider humans as living organisms, and not to lose sight of “the biological reality of man.”⁷

Beginning in the 1970s and 80s environmental history grew into a major subfield within the discipline. This helped place historical man within the context of the natural world, and established the environment, both natural and man-made, as an agent of history. At first glance it might appear that environmental historians would likely fall on the environmental side of the environment versus heredity debate. Some have, such as Jared Diamond discussed below. But because the environment is one large factor in the evolutionary equation, it is logical for environmental historians to be receptive to Darwinian theory. As Alfred Crosby, the dean of American environmental historians puts it, “The ideology of environmental history is, at its root, biological.”⁸ Still, many historians worry about the dreaded label of “biological determinism.” In January, 2001 Edward O. Wilson, founder of sociobiology, addressed the 115th annual conference of the American Historical Association in Boston. He caused quite a stir when he predicted that the next generation of historians would use biological science to answer many of history’s most important questions.⁹

Exactly 100 years (1901-2001) separate the pronouncements of Adams and Wilson, both predicted that biology would revolutionize the study of history. Yet progress has been slow. It will come as no surprise to readers of this journal that the reluctance of historians to challenge the ideological orthodoxy of egalitarianism has been an obstacle to integrating biology, especially the study of human variation, into historiography.

Biohistory Without Race

Most of the historians who have incorporated biology into their work have also striven to separate the concept of race from the idea of humans as biological entities. One such contortionist is Robert McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsap College.¹⁰ According to McElvaine, “biohistory seeks to illuminate aspects of history through a better understanding of human nature – the fundamental traits and predispositions that all humans share and that make us alike.”¹¹ McElvaine limits his consideration to characteristics that all people share. But are not differences at least as interesting and relevant as similarities? If a historian wrote an economic history of the world he might begin by noting characteristics that all economic systems share, but surely this would only serve as a point of departure for a study of how the systems differentiate themselves.

Another truncated version of biohistory can be seen in the work of Jared Diamond. Diamond, a Jewish academic non-historian, writes about historic agency and is critical of academic historiography. His criticism is justified to the extent that many academic historians neglect causation in their research.  In Guns, Germs, and Steel Diamond sets out an egalitarian explanation for Western ascendancy based on environmental determinism.¹² He is concerned that the racist theories that explain Western dominance, though officially discredited, retain their hold of the popular imagination, so that “Westerners continue to accept racist explanations, privately or subconsciously.”¹³ Diamond finds such explanations “loathsome,” but in the past he was unable to offer a satisfactory rebuttal. “Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad patterns of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.”¹⁴ Having presented his arguments, Diamond concludes Guns, Germs, and Steel with a suggestion for a major change in historiographic methodology. He calls for the development of “human history as a science, on par with acknowledged historical sciences such as astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology.”¹⁵

Privately, many academic historians bristle at Diamond’s criticism that their discipline lacks scientific rigor; others dismiss his comments as those of a dilettante who does not understand their field. He is, however, not so easily ignored. His two most recent books on environmental biohistory have become bestsellers. They are advertised in historical journals and sold at history conferences. He is now a public intellectual interviewed on NPR and the like. Ironically, the science that Diamond urges historians to embrace could end up undermining his race-denying ideology.

In his second book, Collapse,¹⁶ Diamond devotes several chapters to the rise and fall of the Greenland Norse, Scandinavians who colonized the island in the late tenth century. For half a millennium they eked out a living on that remote outpost of Western civilization. By the time of Columbus’s voyages the Greenland Norse had vanished. There is no written record of what happened to them, but historians and archaeologists agree that the Little Ice Age (circa 1300-1750) played a role in their demise. Greenland was settled during the Medieval Warm Period (800-1250). The Norse built an economy based on herding, hunting, and trade principally with Iceland and Norway. Once the climate grew colder, raising livestock was no longer possible, and ice choked the shipping lanes, hampering trade. The Norse settlements slowly died out and were replaced by Inuit people (Eskimos). Diamond writes that if the Norse had been flexible enough to adopt the culture of the Inuit, including a diet of fish plus sea mammals, they could have survived. More than anything else, it was the stubborn refusal of the Norse to abandon herding that led to their downfall. If the Norse had integrated physically and culturally with the Inuit, as Diamond proposed, they would have, of course, ceased to be Norse. Apart from this obvious fact, there are strong doubts that such a path was open to them.

The Relevance of Race

Environmental historians now realize that the demographic expansions and contractions of peoples throughout history have often been shaped by biological and environmental factors.¹⁷ If Diamond had consulted Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism before writing Collapse he might have come to a different conclusion about the Greenland Norse. Crosby coins the term neo-Europeans to describe European-descended peoples who settled outside their Old World homelands. He suggests that neo-Europeans could not demographically dominate new territory unless and until they were able to modify the physical environment to meet their bio-cultural requirements. To thrive, neo-Europeans needed to establish a mixed agricultural regime. To survive, they needed to at least provide for their domesticated animals. Crosby writes: “Neo-Europeans were descendants, culturally and often genetically, of Indo-Europeans . . . a people who were practicing mixed farming with a heavy emphasis on herding 4500 years before Columbus.¹⁸ From the beginning Indo-European societies have been pastoral. It is probable that after 2000 generations, European societies could not meet their nutritional needs without their domestic animals.¹⁹ In an earlier book, Crosby noted that even impoverished Irish peasant needed “a bit of milk,” in addition to potatoes, “to keep a family hearty.”²⁰

Crosby’s contention that Europeans needed their animals to survive is in line with the discovery of the lactose tolerance mutation that permits most Europeans to digest milk as adults, unlike most Asians, Africans, and Amerindians. The mutation arose at approximately the same time that Indo-European culture began on the steppes of southeastern Europe. This is an example of what sociobiologists call gene/culture co-evolution. The availability of dairy products coupled with limited alternative sources of nutrition evolved into the ability to digest milk throughout life. Given the lack of variety in the Greenland Norse diet, dairy products might have become a nutritional imperative. By not even considering the possibility that the Norse could not meet their nutritional requirements without domestic animals, Diamond reveals an analytical blind spot produced by his rigidly egalitarian ideology. Only by ignoring genetic differences between ethnies could Diamond have advocated that the Norse adopt the Inuit’s dairy-free diet.

So what became of the Greenland Norse? It is unlikely that they simply starved to death. It is probable that as conditions deteriorated, the younger and more energetic Norse emigrated back to Iceland and Norway, and the last of the old and decrepit remnant population died out. About 200 years after they abandoned the island, the Norse returned in the form of Danish colonizers. Thus the lesson of the Greenland Norse is not the one Diamond would have us learn (i.e., the benefits of racial/cultural assimilation), but rather that in times of extreme social stress a strategic retreat and in-gathering could be the best course for survival.²¹

Race and Slavery in the Americas

Alfred Crosby’s work is one example of how genetically-linked biohistory has, over the last several decades, trickled into mainstream historiography. There are other examples.  Immunity and resistance to diseases have also been a major topic in biohistory. These played a large role in the establishment of African slavery in America. Historians have been particularly interested in how chattel slavery became established in the British colonies many centuries after the institution had died out in the home isles.

During the early seventeenth century the English began colonizing the Caribbean and southern North American mainland. Initially the planters used English and Irish indentured labor on their estates. These laborers were not free, but neither were they chattel slaves. For example, during the 1630s pioneer planter Sir Henry Colt used English laborers to establish his plantations in St. Christopher (now St. Kitts). In 1631 he wrote home requesting “forty more servants” to expand his fields.²² Presumably, if he wanted more English laborers, the ones already present were at least adequate to the task of clearing tropical forests for planting – heavy labor in broiling heat. Yet within fifty years of Colt’s letter, the labor force of St. Christopher had been transformed from white to black. In part this was due to a relative scarcity of white labor and the availability of black slaves.²³ There were also, however, biological factors involved in this change.

When Europeans conquered and settled the New World, they found lands rich in resources with relatively low population densities.²⁴ Great wealth could be produced if labor could be found. In tropical and subtropical regions, the laborers were often African slaves. Explanations for this choice have changed over time. In the seventeenth century, Europeans considered Negroes as heathen savages in need of Christian civilization and especially suited for menial labor. By the twentieth century, Marxist historians saw Europeans as particularly bigoted and greedy people who exploited vulnerable Africans. This view was implicit in Kenneth Stampp’s The Peculiar Institution, a history of American slavery written at the height of the “race is only skin-deep” mindset. According to Stamp, “Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less.”²⁵ Less than a decade after Stampp’s Peculiar Institution historian Philip Curtain documented that epidemiological factors were involved in selection of African slave labor.²⁶ By the 1980s at least some historians recognized that the physiological, epidemiological, and nutritional characteristics of blacks from West Africa gave them an adaptive advantage as laborers in the tropics. In a considerable shift from Stampp’s pronouncement African American historian Kenneth Kiple argued that, “Blacks and whites in fact do differ innately in many important respects,” and that scientifically, “race continues to be a viable concept.”²⁷

It is now widely accepted that physical characteristics such as dark skin, large numbers of sweat glands, and other “Negroid traits” are adaptations for physical activity in hot, humid, and sunny environments.²⁸ In addition, disease inexorably selected the black for labor in the tropics.”²⁹ The two main pathogens peculiar to the Old South were yellow fever and falciparum malaria. Two lesser afflictions were yaws and hookworms. These infections are of African origin and disproportionately affected Europeans and Amerindians.³⁰ Thus, once African slaves and African diseases had been introduced into the Americas, the latter reinforced the decision to use the former.

Another racial factor that favored the use of African slaves was their lower nutritional requirements. Domestic livestock usually does not thrive in the tropics. This is particularly true for dairy cattle.³¹ This is of little consequence for people of West African descent because after childhood they lack the ability to digest milk due to lactose intolerance.³² In fact, West Africans have traditionally subsisted on a diet very low in protein. Thus, “even the miserable diet of slaves in the Americas was superior to (or at least more protein ladden  than) that of their African cousins.”³³ The Africans’ ability to survive on a low-protein diet devoid of dairy products helped them to subsist where indentured white laborers could not. In time, “plantation America became an extension of Africa’s disease and nutritional environments.”³⁴ Because West Africa is “the home of man’s most dangerous diseases and one of the world’s most nutritionally impoverished areas,” West Africans had the physical adaptations to survive the searing heat along with the “nutritional and epidemiological rigors awaiting them” on American plantations.³⁵

In summary, the process that established African slavery in English-American colonies began with a shortage of white labor that led some planters to import African slaves. These slaves brought with them African diseases that had a disproportionate impact on whites and Indians who had not been previously exposed to them. The West African labor was also able to subsist with less food and clothing than white laborers. In addition, white laborers were loath to toil alongside black slaves. Whites became rebellious and unproductive in mixed labor gangs. Thus, once some planters made the decision to import black labor, environmental, genetic, cultural, and economic factors led to the replacement of whites with blacks as field laborers on English colonial plantations.

Prospects for Biohistory

The agency of genetically based epidemiological, nutritional, and other physiological characteristics of ethnies has long been at least partially, though reluctantly, accepted by mainstream historiography. But what about psychological characteristics, including intelligence? In Understanding Human History Michael Hart interprets the past in terms of just these characteristics.³⁶ His work has not yet attracted much attention, much less acceptance, from academic historians. But though academic historians have avoided the issue of average group intelligence, a recent book by Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms, suggests that differences in genetically-based behavior can explain the Industrial Revolution that helped increase the knowledge, wealth, and power of the West.³⁷

For Clark, a Scottish-born professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, the Industrial Revolution was the watershed event in human history. All pre-industrial societies were caught in a Malthusian trap in which any gain in productive capacity led to an increase in population that negated the increase in wealth. So while the human population increased, the standard of living for the majority, measured by such indicators as the number of calories consumed, did not rise. With the coming of industrialization, productivity rose much faster than population, thus raising the standard of living for nearly everyone in society. Interestingly, in his preface Clark compares his book to Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Both are big histories that seek to explain the ascendancy of the West (referred to by Clark and others as the “Great Divergence”). While asking somewhat similar questions, Clark and Diamond arrive at very different answers. In contrast to Diamond’s environmental/geographical explanation, Clark brings social Darwinism into the twenty-first century with the use of cliometrics.³⁸

Historians have long questioned why the Industrial Revolution began when and where it did: late eighteenth- and early nineteenth century England. Clark believes that centuries of economic and political stability as well as slow population growth coupled whit “the extraordinary fecundity of the rich and economically successful” led to “the embedding of bourgeois values into the culture and perhaps even the genetics of England.”³⁹ In relatively stable and peacefully pre-industrial England the hardworking and educated tended to prosper and have large families. Economic opportunities, however, were so limited that most children of the wealthy were downwardly mobile. As a result they extended their cultural and genetic traits into the lower classes. The establishment of a bourgeois society in England is another example of gene/culture co-evolution. In Early Modern England the “characteristics of the population were changing through Darwinian selection.” The result was that “middle-class culture spread throughout society through biological mechanisms.”⁴⁰ While Clark does not claim that the English were more intelligent than other peoples, he does not believe that genetically-based values and behaviors were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution and Western ascendancy. In the popular mind evolution is something that occurred in the distant past, took millennia to complete, and was accomplished by the forces of nature. Clark’s research points out that human evolution has continued to occur during historic times, that significant change can take centuries rather than eons, and evolution can be driven by the cultural as well as the natural environment.

In The 10,000 Year Explosion, University of Utah anthropologists Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending have adapted some of Clark’s ideas to a global context, and a timeline that spans the entire history of Homo sapiens.⁴¹ The authors find that various population groups have evolved genetic differences during historical time. Some of these genetic differences have given competitive advantages to the groups that possess them. Thus human “biological change has been a key factor driving history.”⁴² Perhaps Cochran and Harpending’s most interesting thesis is that rather than ending human evolution, modern civilization has actually quickened its pace.

Concepts such as “social Darwinism” and “biological determinism” have been used to censure those who have applied biological theories to history and the social sciences. For decades hostility from the Left has discouraged, obstructed, or obscured scholarly inquiry into what we now call biohistory. Yet with the work of scholars such as Clark, Cochran, and Harpending we may finally be seeing the advances in historiography predicted by Adams and Wilson. It is becoming increasingly clear that the path to greater understanding of our past and present must include the study of human biological diversity.

Eric Paulson holds a doctorate in history. He writes from the upper Midwest.

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¹ A more formal definition of biohistory is: “An approach to human ecology which stresses the interplay between biophysical and cultural processes. Its starting point is the study of the history of life on earth; and the basic principles of evolution, ecology, and physiology, and the sensitivities of humans, the emergence of the human aptitude for culture, and its biological significance. It is particularly concerned with the interplay between cultural processes and biophysical systems such as ecosystems and human populations.” Susan Mayhew, “Biohistory,” A Dictionary of Geography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56.

² Charles Francis Adams, “The Sifted Grain and the Grain Sifters,” American Historical Review 6 (1901), 199.

³ Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915). One of Huntington’s theories was that over time tropical and subtropical climes have an enervating effect on those he called “Teutons.”

⁴ Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916).

⁵ “The triumph of the Boasian school of anthropology over Darwinism in the early years of the 20th century was a watershed event in intellectual history of the West – in effect more or less obliterating what had been a thriving Darwinian intellectual milieu.” Kevin MacDonald, “Ben Stein’s Expelled: Was Darwinism a Necessary Condition for the Holocaust?,” The Occidental Observer, December 1, 2008, http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-BenStein.html.

⁶ Bloch was a Jew who many have had ambivalent feelings about his co-religionists. Many considered him a French patriot. Bloch fled to Vichy territory in 1940 where, as a noted scholar, he continued to teach unmolested. He and his family had opportunities to relocate both to the United States and the French West Indies. He decided to stay in France and in 1943 joined the underground. In 1944 he was captured by the Germans and shot.

⁷ Fernand Braudel, On History, trans. Sarah Matthews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 105-6. Braudel also participated in World War II. With the fall of France in 1940 Braudel, then a French army officer, became a prisoner of war and spent five years in German captivity. During this time, without notes or reference materials, he wrote his dissertation on the Mediterranean region.

⁸ Alfred W. Crosby, “The Past and Present of Environmental History,” American Historical Review 100 (1995), 1189.

⁹ Gareth Cook, “Wilson Rattles Historians with ‘Bio-History’ Theories,” Boston Globe, January 16, 2001, F3.

¹⁰ McElvaine’s major contribution to biohistory is Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History (New York: McGraw Hill, 2001), a world history from a feminist perspective.

¹¹ Robert S. McElvaine, “The Relevance of Biohistory,” The Chronicle of Higher Education 49, October 18, 2002, B11.

¹² Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies (New York: Norton, 1997).

¹³ Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 19.

¹⁴ Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 25.

¹⁵ Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 408.

¹⁶ Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking-Penguin, 2005).

¹⁷ For a global study see Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986). For a case study of the same phenomenon in New England see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

¹⁸ Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 172.

¹⁹ Ward H. Goodenough, “The Evolution of Pastoralism and Indo-European Origins,” George Cardona, Henry Hoenigswald, and Alfred Senn, eds., Indo-Europeans and Indo-European Origins (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 252-65.

²⁰ Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 183.

²¹ Diamond’s conclusions about the Greenland Norse echo the arguments of Thomas McGovern who wrote, “We can criticize the Norse for maintaining a conservative, stratified, Eurocentric outlook . . . . [that chose] the preservation of ethnic purity at the expense of survival.” “The Demise of Norse Greenland,” in William Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga) Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 338.

²² Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 9. Although he does not emphasize biological factors, Dunn documents the switch from white laborers to black slaves in the English Caribbean.

²³ The agricultural areas of West Africa had a slave-based economy and an extensive slave trade that predated European exploration. Beginning in the fifteenth century, Europeans plugged into this African slave trade. See John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

²⁴ The number of pre-contact Amerindians is in dispute. Whatever that number, the population was greatly reduced by the introduction of Old World diseases into the Americas.

²⁵ Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), vii.

²⁶ Philip D. Curtin, “Epidemiology and the Slave Trade,” Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967): 190-216. For centuries it was known that blacks were less susceptible to certain diseases than whites. The reason for this could not be explained until the advent of modern medicine and genetics.

²⁷ Kenneth F. Kiple and Virginia Himmelsteib King, Another Dimension to the Black Diaspora: Diet Disease, and Racism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), xii, xiv.

²⁸ Kiple, Another Dimension, 5.

²⁹ Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge University Press, 1984), 4.

³⁰ Albert E. Cowdrey, This Land, The South: An Environmental History, rev. ed. (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1996), 83. Kiple, Caribbean Slave, 7.

³¹ Cowdrey, This Land, This South, 77.

³² “[A] high frequency of lactose intolerance . . . characterizes West Africans and their descendants, leaving them unable to consume much milk” – Kiple, Another Dimension, 11.

³³ Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 23.

³⁴ Kenneth Kiple, “A Survey of Recent Literature on the Biological Past of the Black,” in Kenneth Kiple, ed., The African Exchange: Toward a Biological History of Black People (Durham: Duke University Press, 1988), 8.

³⁵ Kiple, The Caribbean Slave, 5.

³⁶ Michael Hart, Understanding Human History: An Analysis Including the Effects of Geography and Differential Evolution (Augusta, GA.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2007) was reviewed in TOQ vol.7, no.4.

³⁷ Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

³⁸ After making a passing criticism of social Darwinism, Clark goes on to write that “Darwin’s insight that as long as population was regulated by Malthusian mechanisms, mankind would be subject to natural selection was profoundly correct” (A Farewell to Alms, 122). Cliometrics, broadly defined, is the use of statistics in historical research.

³⁹ Clark, A Farewell to Alms, 11.

⁴⁰ Clark, A Farewell to Alms, 259.

⁴¹ Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009). Among other findings, Cochran and Harpending supply evidence supporting Crosby’s belief, expressed 25 years earlier, that domestic livestock especially dairying, playing an integral role in Indo-European expansion.

⁴² Cochran and Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion, 67.

Catherine Ariemma (pictured at left), a five-year veteran with Lumpkin County High School, teaches an advanced placement history class. Her students were preparing to do a film on the history of racism in the United States, and were filming reenactments of various historical periods. Four of the students donned Klan outfits. Students from other classrooms saw them as they walked through a hallway on Thursday May 20th, 2010 while wearing the costumes to an outdoor shoot. The parents of an Black child complained; WSB offers more details.

“I was sitting in the lunchroom and my little cousin taps me on the shoulder — he’s also African-American — and he was scared,” student Cody Rider told WSB-TV’s Ryan Young. “There was fear in his eyes. I was like, ‘What is it? I looked up and they just walked through the lunchroom in white sheets. So, I mean me, I got mad and stood up and I tried to go handle it.” Although teachers quickly calmed things down in the lunchroom, but what they said offered little comfort to Rider. “They came up to me and said it was for a class project,” he said. “I was like, ‘Why would a class project involve them walking through the hallway in white sheets?’ I mean, I just don’t understand.” According to AccessNorthGa, the students did not come to school wearing the robes, but donned them prior to heading to the filming area. But in so doing, the students needed to walk through the school’s public areas.

Lumpkin County School Superintendent Dewey Moye, who is white, found out about it and promptly launched a witch hunt against Ariemma, despite the fact that he admits Ariemma’s record is “outstanding”. But Moye said he could not ignore what she did, claiming that Ariemma “used extremely poor judgment”, and said he found it personally offensive. So he placed her on leave with pay pending the outcome of an investigation, while the school system’s attorney will interview the children involved to determine exactly what happened.

A white boss oppressing a White employee for sinning against political correctness. Although we in the White Nationalist community have legitimate issues with non-Whites and Jews, John Taylor Bowles recently suggested that we need to clean up our own house as well, perhaps first. Dewey Moye may be an example of the housecleaning we must consider.

Those who would like to express their disappointment directly to Dewey Moye can find contact information HERE.

Those who would like to express encouragement directly to Catherine Ariemma can find contact information HERE.

MY PERSONAL STORY OF LIVING UNDER THE TERROR OF BLACK PEOPLE

I think it is useful to let the facts come out about us Whites that have endured the terror of Blacks. we aren’t allowed to talk about it publicly but it’s a story that needs to be told. I was born in 1965 during the height of the civil rights movement. I grew up in Southern Connecticut. Out of Lyndon Johnson’s policies many Low income housing projects were built. At first there were a fair number of poor whites living in them but by 1970 they were predominantly Black. I lived in a working lower class white neighborhood that was deteriorating. My father an alcoholic and gambler made good money but because of his habits we lived in that crappy neighborhood. Within a few blocks poor Blacks were encroaching into our neighborhood. There was low income housing project about a 1/4 of a mile away and blacks were quickly overtaking it. Groups of young black kids would drift into our street and they would attack my sister and I if we were alone. They were fucking brutal. None of the White kids were like this. They would humiliate and intimidate us. Threatening us with violence if we didn’t do push-ups or jumping jacks. We were totally unprepared for this.

By the age of 10/11 my family was able to move into a better neighborhood. No Blacks for at least a 2 miles. They had this great neighborhood elementary school. Unfortunately 3 buses would arrive from the SouthEnd. Every kid that got off these buses was Black. I was in 6th grade and we got stuck with this loudmouth, nasty looking Black Bitch in our class. She intimidated the White females because she was much larger, louder and obnoxious than the other girls. I have a feeling she was held back a year or two. She should have been put back bus and sent home but some judge whose kids would never have to endure the effects of busing forced April the Black Bitch into our lives.

Middle School/Junior High it gets worse. You come to school to learn but instead you are bullied, humiliated, and in intimidated. The Black kids are the most ruthless. They incessantly pick on the weaker White kids. For some reason Black people seem to be more aggressive. In the insect world you have European Honey Bees and you have super-aggressive African Bees. It seems to be the same with people. What is worse is that the White Kids in order to survive imitate the Black kids the best they can. We all do it. We do it today. Look at what we’ve become. Those damned teachers stood by and mouths agape as the Black kids took over the classroom. I remember one White Female teacher asking this Black kid why do you call him that. He retorts “he’s lucky I don’t call him ______” This is a 13 yr old kid talking to a grown woman..!!! What kind of upbringing produces this obnoxious behavior. Everyday, every hour Black kids disrupt the teaching process. The wasted minutes add up to hours. The hours add up to days. This is the main reason America has fallen behind in education. it is the constant and incessant unruly behavior that is a direct result of desegregation. It is the Africanized Bees mixing with the Honey Bees. Well the honey production has fallen……HASN’T IT?

Now I remember, ROOTS came out when I was eleven. Everyone watched it but me. Then I got to go see the Author Alex Hailey speak. He was awesome. Acted more like a White Man than a Black Man. He was articulate and didn’t speak in ebonics. They aired Roots again when I was 13 and i still refuse to watch that shit. no one is going to make me feel sorry for these mutherfuckers that make life miserable everyday. Everyday Blacks threaten and intimidate you if you are alone. They destroyed our Middle School. Teachers were constantly having to stop and scold these idiots for their outbursts and antics. One day as we were walking home from school their were these Black Bitches yelling ROOTS..ROOTS. Getting up in White People’s faces. One Black Bitch took a snowball and smashed it this grown White Woman’s face. The lady could have knocked the shit out of her but stood there with white Guilt and blurted “Why did you do that”.. The Black Girl started yelling ROOTS….ROOTS.

It looks like this individual may post more in this thread; if so, I will cross-post his accounts here. Argue With Everyone seems to permit relatively uninhibited discussion about race and the Jewish Question. But it just shows that everywhere Blacks move in, problems arise. Zimbabwe, South Africa, Detroit, Philadelphia, London…the list goes on and on. Separation is the only answer.

A direct link to the book (.pdf format): [Here].

Of course, Wiseman doesn’t say he rejected Tomlinson because she is White. Instead, he claims it’s because he wants the school board to be “representative of the community”. The old diversity excuse once again. “The Starkville Board of Aldermen has the power to appoint four of the five members of the Starkville School Board,” Wiseman said. “As such, the Board of Aldermen bears the responsibility to ensure not only that appointees are qualified to serve, but also that the School Board is representative of the diverse community it serves. Diversity of representation should be considered as an important but not controlling factor in the process of appointing a school board member.”

Wiseman then added, “The Board of Aldermen did an excellent job discerning the qualifications of the applicants through the interview process, and there were a number of candidates that proved well qualified. Ultimately, I disagree with the level of attention that the Board of Aldermen gave to the importance of diversity of representation in evaluating the candidates for the position.”

So, in other words, Wiseman rejected Tomlinson because she is White. There is no way to spin around that fact. Worse yet, Wiseman is white; additional background on his life available HERE. And to no one’s surprise, Wiseman is a Democrat, having won his most recent election with just under 60 percent of the vote. The Starkville School District is 64 percent Black, 32 percent White, 2 percent Asian, 1 percent American Indian, and 1 percent Hispanic. If Tomlinson had been seated on the school board, the board would have become 80 percent White and 20 percent Black. Aldermen have the power to override the mayoral veto, but it would take five of the seven aldermen to do it.

Nope, we ain’t post-racial…not by a long shot. And as long as Whites are politically discriminated against, I’m going to work like hell to make sure we don’t become post-racial. For a White American, racism hasn’t merely become honorable…it’s also become vital, particularly when whites like Parker Wiseman take the lead in sticking it to us.

A number of other scribes have expressed unhappiness about the decision, to include MajorityInMs, Starkville-Now, and American Renaissance. A Stormfront poster looked at Wiseman’s named and speculated that he might be a Jew, but I could find no documentation supporting that contention. I use the Alex Linder Rule on this blog – I don’t refer to someone as a Jew unless it is already common knowledge or I can find verification.