Race And The American Prospect: An Introduction
[Vdare.com Note: The late Sam Francis was editing this collection before his untimely death. His views on race may be considered unfashionable, but are actually milder than those of every President of the United States, (not excluding Abraham Lincoln) up until the John F. Kennedy Administration. See Steve Sailer`s review of this book for even more irenic views. And Sam`s advocacy of what is here called “white racial consciousness” is still about ten times less strident than anything said by Julian Bond of the NAACP or Raul Lowery Contreras. This is the last Sam Francis piece we will be able to run—there isn`t any more, although we have a five year archive, and more of his work is available at Samfrancis.net.]
The following essay is Sam Francis`s introduction to Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time, a newly published collection of essays edited by Dr. Francis. The book is available from Amazon or directly from The Occidental Press (P.O. Box 695, Mt. Airy, Maryland 21771; 301-829-2995;) $34.95 (hbk); $19.95 (pbk). This unique collection of essays, from fourteen cutting-edge experts on race, offers an incisive alternative to the politically correct dogmas of racial egalitarianism. The table of contents can be found here.
If an analogy between the Victorian sex taboo and the contemporary race taboo were to be drawn, the essays in this book are logically the analogue of pornography, or what conventional Victorians regarded as pornography. Every one of these essays deals with race in a way that the dominant culture of the present day rejects, forbids, and indeed punishes by one means or another. Every one of them deals with aspects of race—its reality as a part of the biological and psychological nature of man and its importance as a social and historical force—that contemporary culture is at best reluctant to discuss at all and absolutely refuses to acknowledge as true. At the same time, in contradiction to the stereotype promoted by “anti-racist” forces, not one of these essays or their authors expresses here or anywhere else any desire to harm, exploit, dominate, or deny the legitimate rights of other races. This book is not a tract promoting “white supremacy” or the restoration of forced segregation.
All contributors to this volume are white, well educated, and articulate; several are or have been academics or professional journalists and authors, and what unites and drives them as a group is a common concern that their race today faces a crisis that within the coming century and in the United States and Europe could easily lead to either its physical extinction, its subordination to and persecution by other races, or the destruction of its civilization.
Most readers who continue to believe what the dominant culture tells them about the meaning and significance of race will find this concern bizarre. Even if race does exist as a biological reality, it certainly has no meaning for behavior, culture, intelligence, or other traits that influence and shape social institutions. Moreover, any effort to take race more seriously is either a deliberate and covert attempt to justify racial hatred or injustice, or is at best a misguided enterprise that is all too likely to lead to hatred, injustice, and even genocide, as it has in the past. This is the conventional attitude toward race that the dominant culture in the West today promotes and enforces, and it is precisely from that attitude that the authors of these essays dissent.
The commonly held beliefs about race mentioned above—that it does not exist or is not important and that serious concern about race and racial identity leads to negative and undesirable consequences—are wrong. Yet it is precisely those beliefs that make it impossible for whites who accept them to preserve themselves as a race and the civilization and political institutions their race has created. As black historian Shelby Steele acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal ( November 13, 2003), “Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say `I`m white and I`m proud` and you are a Nazi.”. Indeed, he made use of the widely shared (by non-whites as well as whites) demonic view of whites to reject and deny any white claim to their own racial identity:
No group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites. This race illustrated for all time—through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism—the extraordinary human evil that follows when great power is joined to an atavistic sense of superiority and destiny.
Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, as well as Hispanic leaders Cruz Bustamante and Mario Obledo, have no problem exulting in their own racial identity and the political power they expect such solidarity to yield. They exult in language that is explicitly anti-white, in the most primitive and threatening terms. Yet they are seldom called to account for it. When Mr. Obledo, proclaimed a few years ago, “California is going to be a Mexican state, we are going to control all the institutions. If people don`t like it they should leave—go back to Europe,” he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton soon afterward. It is not very likely that a white leader today who said, as Senator Stephen Douglas in a debate with Abraham Lincoln in 1858 did say, “I believe this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever” would be awarded anything. Douglas`s comment (and many similar ones) expressed a sentiment more or less parallel to Mr. Obledo`s, though Douglas did not go so far as to invite non-whites to leave the country (it was Lincoln himself who did that). Douglas in fact won the election and was the Democrat`s national candidate for president two years later.
In contrast to Mr. Obledo, when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in December 2002 remarked that the country would have been better off had Strom Thurmond won the 1948 presidential election, he was denounced from both the political right and left and hounded into resigning his leadership position in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Lott had said nothing about race, and there was no evidence he was even thinking about that aspect of the campaign; but he was obliged to engage in protracted and repeated retractions, anyway—all to no avail.
One main reason for the obvious double standard is that non-whites are easily inflamed and mobilized by the slightest appearance of white identity, and their mobilization can have disastrous consequences for institutions—the Republican Party—that seek or depend on non-white votes or market patronage. Yet these are by no means the only reasons why whites “cannot openly have a racial identity.”
The truth is that whites deny themselves a racial identity. Mr. Steele can utter sweeping generalizations about “the extraordinary human evil” (ignoring the long and brutal history of slavery, conquest, genocide, and repression by nonwhites in Africa and Asia that persists to this day) in a major newspaper owned and managed by whites because most of the white elite will not question this kind of anti-white opinion. White tolerance of such anti-white sentiment is due to the guilt that is injected into white minds.
The consequences of this denial and demonization of whites and the civilization they have created and ruled for the last several centuries are what concern the contributors to this collection of essays. The processes by which those consequences may come about are already apparent.
White leaders no doubt assume that the multiracial future of the country will not threaten whites or the country because all races accept or are coming to reject race in the same ways they do. This assumption is demonstrably wrong. Like most revolutions, the one led by non-whites like Martin Luther King, Jr. moved from a moderate phase demanding merely equal treatment and the end of legal racial discrimination to a far more radical stage demanding outright racial privileges for non-whites. It is this radical phase that established now that threatens to become even more radical.
“Color blindness” denies a biological reality that is obviated in two ways. First, scientifically: The work of scientists like Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, J. Philippe Rushton, H. J. Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Richard Herrnstein, and a number of others established that race exists and is a significant factor in human mental traits. There is little doubt about this today and fewer and fewer scientists dispute it, though few also are willing to risk their careers by talking or writing about it. As long ago as 1981, Arthur Jensen itemized a host of such differences:
Different races have evolved in somewhat different ways, making for many differences among them. A few of the many physical characteristics found to display genetic variation between different races are body size and proportions, hair form and distribution, head shape and facial features, cranial capacity and brain formation, blood types, number of vertebrae, size of genitalia, bone density, fingerprints, basic metabolic rate, body temperature, blood pressure, heat and cold tolerance, number and distribution of sweat glands, odor, consistency of ear wax, number of teeth, age at eruption of permanent teeth, fissural patterns on the surfaces of the teeth, length of gestation period, frequency of twin births, male-female birth ratio, physical maturity at birth, rate of infant development of alpha brain waves, colorblindness, visual and auditory acuity, intolerance of milk, galvanic skin resistance, chronic diseases, susceptibility to infectious diseases, genetic diseases (e.g., Tay-Sachs, sickle cell anemia), and pigmentation of the skin, hair, and eyes.
As Kevin Lamb shows in his essay for this book, the scientific evidence for the natural reality and social significance of race is now overwhelming. As Richard Lynn shows in his essay, racial differences in intelligence and behavior patterns significantly affect such societal differences as levels of technological achievement, political stability and freedom, criminal violence, and standards of living. What kind of society and how much civilization a people creates, is clearly related to their race. Race by itself is certainly not sufficient to create civilization, but it is necessary to creating it. Non-whites may indeed create a different civilization of their own, but it will not be the same as the one we as whites created and live in, and most of us would not want to live in it.
The recognition of the significance of race does not imply or lead to “hate” or domination of one race by another, but racial differentiation does imply social differentiation. The existence of significant biological differences between groups of human beings means there will be social differences between them: differences in educational and economic achievement, personal and political behavior, and social and cultural institutions. And if there is social differentiation between races, then competition and conflict between them is also likely, especially if they occupy the same territory. “Hatred,” domination, and racial antagonism may therefore result, not as relationships to be desired or advocated, but as the consequence of the natural reality of racial differences and the effort to ignore or deny such differences.
The second way in which race has been rediscovered is as a socio-political force, the racial consciousness and solidarity discussed above that in the last century has swept through the non-white populations of the United States and the world. This rediscovery constitutes what Lothrop Stoddard in the frank language of the 1920s called “The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy“ and is identical to what the late Robert Nisbet termed the “racial revolution.” The “single fact…that stands out” is “that racial revolution as an aspiration is becoming increasingly separate from other philosophies or strategies of revolution.”
What has occurred in the last century, then, consists of two processes—first, the evisceration of white racial consciousness and identity, and second, the development, around the same time, of the non-white and anti-white racial consciousness that animates the emerging national non-white majority. The scientific rediscovery of race as a socially and historically significant reality of nature is part of a reaction against the “racial revolution” and can be expected to assist in the revival and relegitimization of white racial identity, but remains largely an academic abstraction understood by only a handful of scientists and scholars.
There are three general reasons why a revival of white racial consciousness and identity is needed.
- First, we now know enough about the biologically grounded cognitive and behavioral differences between the races to be able to say with confidence that race deeply affects and shapes cultural life. Races with a lower level of cognitive capacity could have produced neither the modern West, with its scientific and technological achievements, nor the ancient West, with its vast political organization and sophisticated artistic and philosophical legacies. Nor is the inclinations of white Westerners to innovate, explore, expand, and conquer apparent among most non-white races, even if their cognitive capacities are greater than those of whites.
- Second, whites, like any race, should wish to survive and flourish simply for their own sake whatever their merits or flaws. Even this minimal rationale for racial survival is denied to whites today because of their constant demonization.
- And third, white racial consciousness is necessary simply as a means of self-protection. It is an integral component of the historic identity of America as a culture and a nation. As Jared Taylor notes in his essay in this volume, explicit white racial consciousness has been a commonplace and important feature of American history, a belief that has shaped the events, leaders, institutions, and norms that have defined us as a people and a nation throughout our past and in all regions.
You cannot have it both ways: either you define the American nation as the product of its past and learn to live with the reality of race of the racial particularism that in part defines our national history, or you reject race as meaningful and demand that anyone who believes that race means anything more than that be demonized. If you reject race, then you reject America as it has really existed throughout its history, and whatever you mean by “America” has to come from something other than its real past.
Even more dangerously, the absence of racial consciousness among whites disarms them as a group in confrontation with races that possess such a consciousness. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-white racial and ethnic groups are able to act and react in highly unified patterns, political and cultural. They protect what their leaders perceive as their racial interests and, in particular, to resist, denounce, and attack any manifestation of white racial solidarity.
Whites may be more or less unified with respect to objective material characteristics—income, education, residence, voting behavior, etc.—but they are not unified and indeed barely even exist with respect to racial consciousness and identity. At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as Robert Mugabe has threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are “Americans” or “Christians” or “conservatives” or “liberals,” but because we are white.
Given the intensity of non-white racial consciousness, the emergence of a counterbalancing white consciousness may well lead to violent conflict between the races. There is in fact an immense level of violent conflict against whites going on right now through interracial crime and terrorism; by mass immigration, legal and illegal; and by the deliberate refusal of ruling white elites to enforce their own laws and protect their own people.
The restoration of white racial supremacy in the United States today is not desirable or probably even possible. As Sam G. Dickson notes in his essay in this volume on race and the South, the core of Robert E. Lee`s personal objection to Southern slavery was that it encouraged the corruption of the whites, a corruption that cripples and weakens whites in creating free social orders and high civilizations. A race that dominates needs to establish what is essentially an authoritarian system of political and social control that inhibits the dominant race almost as much as it restrains the subject race.
Probably the most desirable and mutually satisfactory (if not the most likely) resolution of the escalating racial conflict would be the voluntary separation of races into distinct nations. There are obvious problems with such a division of the national territory—who would get which part, what would happen to those of one race who refused to leave the areas assigned to another race, who would be counted as part of a race and why, how would the separation be authorized, how would each section be governed, etc. Moreover, most white Americans would recoil from endorsing an actual territorial division of the nation for whatever reason. Racial separatism, far more than “white supremacy,” is today favored by most whites advocating white racial consciousness, but there appears to be little prospect of the larger white population embracing it in the near future. Nor is “racial federalism,” under which local communities or even whole states determine their own racial arrangements, laws, and policies, likely. The insistence by nationally dominant elites that race and immigration policies that are effectively anti-white be determined entirely by the centralized state under their own control means that localism and federalism are no more probable in race relations than in most other areas of American public life.
Nevertheless, if whites cannot expect a total, permanent, and mutually satisfactory resolution of the racial conflict through separation or federalism, they can at least work to achieve results that would protect or guarantee their own survival and that of their civilization. The political, legal, and cultural agenda on which whites should insist includes a permanent moratorium on all legal immigration into the United States, the expulsion of illegal aliens, the rigorous enforcement of laws against illegal immigration, and the removal of incentives to further illegal immigration (e.g., availability of welfare, education, and affirmative action for illegal aliens and of automatic birthright citizenship for their children); the end of all “affirmative action” programs and policies and of all “civil rights” laws that discriminate against whites and circumscribe their constitutional
rights of association; the repeal of all “hate crime” laws and “Politically Correct” policies and regulations that penalize the peaceful expression of white racial consciousness and identity; and the abolition of all multiculturalist curricula, “sensitivity training,” and similar experiments in brainwashing in schools, universities, businesses, and government. At the same time whites must seek to rebuild their own institutions—schools, businesses, churches, media, etc.—in which their own heritage and identity as whites can be preserved, honored, and transmitted to their descendants, and they must encourage measures that will help raise their own birth rates to at least replacement levels. Even these policies, however, would pit racially conscious whites against the dominant elites that continue to demand white racial dispossession and their non-white allies. Moreover, none of these measures will be adopted unless and until white racial consciousness is far more developed than it is today. Neither conventional conservative nor liberal ideologues show any serious interest in these particular measures or the racial identity they reflect, nor do either of the major political parties.
Non-white and non-Western holidays are observed in schools, by businesses and some local governments, and national leaders (including President George W. Bush). In San Jose, California, a proposal to construct a public statue to Col. Thomas Fallon, who captured the city for the Americans in the Mexican-American War, was rejected, and a statue to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl approved instead. Mexican-Americans at a soccer match in Los Angeles in 1998 booed and jeered the playing of the American national anthem before the game. “Hate crimes” against non-whites are front-page national news for weeks, and national leaders descend upon the local community to show their solidarity with the victim. Yet even more brutal massacres of whites, like the rape, torture, kidnapping, and murder of four white men and women by two black criminals in Wichita, Kansas, in 2000, are seldom mentioned in the national news and excite no commentary whatsoever. O. J. Simpson, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt in the murders of his white ex-wife and her friend, is acquitted when black jurors reject incriminating evidence as “racist.”
It is perhaps significant that Shelby Steele wrote that whites today “cannot openly have a racial identity.” If white racial consciousness is forbidden and does not exist, there is certainly a powerful racial subconscious among whites, as evidenced by patterns of school attendance, housing, church membership, marriage, and even voting. The “color blindness” about which conservatives like to chirp does not exist wherever races are free to choose their own associations. Whites, of course, will often avoid explaining or defending their preferences in racial terms. They move to the suburbs because tax rates and crime rates are lower; they send their children to mainly white schools because these schools are better; they attend the churches they do because those are the churches of their parents and their friends. But all such explanations—lower taxes and less crime, better schools, the habits of one`s parents and friends—have obvious racial dimensions.
A recent study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, the Washington Post reports, shows that today “schools are almost as segregated as they were when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.” [U.S. School Segregation Now at `69 Level By Michael Dobbs, January 18, 2004] The segregation is due not to legally enforced discrimination but to the voluntary residence and attendance preferences of whites, who simply abandon communities and schools when non-whites arrive. For much the same reason, Christian churches also remain racially exclusive. “Just 8 percent of Christian churches in the United States are multiracial, defined as one ethnic group making up no more than 80 percent of the membership, according to a 2002 study.”
Voting behavior shows the same racial patterns. In 2000, 54 percent of whites voted for the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, while only 42 percent voted for Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat. Bush received only 8 percent of the black vote and some 31 percent of Hispanic votes, while Gore won 90 percent of blacks and 67 percent of Hispanics. Nearly 20 percent of Gore`s total vote came from blacks. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote since 1968, at the latest.
Moreover, as non-white immigrants occupy more and more of the national territory, “white flight” extends not just from city to suburb and suburb to countryside but from region to region. As University of Michigan demographer William H. Frey and reporter Jonathan Tilove wrote in The New York Times Magazine (August 20, 1995):
For every immigrant who arrives [in large metropolitan areas], a white person leaves. Look collectively at the New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and Boston metropolitan areas—5 of the top 11 immigration destinations. In the last half of the 80`s, for every 10 immigrants who arrived, 9 residents left for points elsewhere. And most of those leaving were non-Hispanic whites…. The places that whites were leaving for were metro areas like Tampa-St. Petersburg, Seattle, Phoenix, Atlanta and Las Vegas, all of which attract relatively few immigrants. [“Immigrants In, Native Whites Out,“ not online.]
Whites are leaving entire metropolitan areas and states—whole regions—for white destinations. And new census estimates indicate that this pattern of flight from big immigration destinations has become even more pronounced in the 90`s.
And, in marriages, the overwhelming fact, despite constant acclamation by racial liberals of increases in interracial unions, is that whites continue to cross marry less than any other race, and they do so in negligible numbers. The 2000 Census reports that only 3.5 percent of whites marry non-whites. Given the ending of legal barriers to interracial marriages nearly forty years ago and the immense increase of the nation`s non-white population since that time, this persistent preference of whites for marriage partners of their own race is strong evidence of their enduring racial identity as whites.
The clear existence of a white racial subconscious means that the problem for whites is mainly to bring what it contains into consciousness. They need to learn that race, as much as sex, is part of human nature and the human condition, that it can no more be expelled or denied or excluded than any other important fact or force of nature. Whites need to learn also that racial consciousness is no more a license for repression, exploitation, hatred, and violence than recognition of the reality and importance of sex is a license for rape, seduction, and debauchery. Obviously there are criminal and pathological elements that will use sex and race for criminal and pathological ends, but their existence does nothing to diminish the legitimacy and urgency of what those who demand their recognition for healthy purposes are seeking.
Finally, whites need to form their racial consciousness in conformity not only with what we now know about the scientific reality of race but also with the moral and political traditions of Western Man—White Man. The purpose of white racial consciousness and identity is not simply to serve as a balance against the aggression and domination of other races but also to preserve, protect, and help revitalize the legacy of the civilization that our own ancestors created and handed down to us, for its own sake, because it is ours, and because, by the standards of the values and ideals we as a race and a civilization have articulated, it is better. After generations of denial and distortion, what we have permitted to be expelled and repressed now returns, and we now know again, as our ancestors once knew also, that in the absence of the race that created that legacy, it would never have existed at all. If the legacy is to pass on to our own descendants, it will be because we as white men and women understood who we were, what it was we created, how it came to exist, and how it will endure. The essays collected here are a first step toward that goal.
Sam Francis, who died February 15, 2005, was published on VDARE.com for the last five years of his life.
