Jared Taylor’s White Identity: A Review

 

“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free; nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.”

Thomas Jefferson

 
Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, New Century Books, 2011, 342 pp.
Reviewed by Nicholas Stix
American Renaissance, June 2011

In 1990, computer journalist and Japan expert Jared Taylor, a man with a can’t-miss future, took complete leave of his senses, and founded a monthly devoted to scholarly and journalistic inquiry into race, thereby committing career suicide. That was this journal.

Soon thereafter, I first read about American Renaissance in the late New York Newsday, then New York’s most far-left daily, to which I was an occasional contributor. Then a liberal, I recall thinking what a vile person that Taylor fellow must be.

Two years later, he published one of the few important, honest books on race of the past generation, Paved with Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Modern America. That book, which was published by Caroll & Graf, a mainstream publishing house, could no longer be published today, and even then, the author had to forego the subject of race and IQ. The book dealt with the dogma of racial equality, and attempts to make blacks the equals of whites.

I picked up a copy in a Manhattan used-book store in 1998, I believe, after I had been thinking for at least nine years about race, and no longer considered myself a liberal. I learned a great deal from Paved, but what most impressed me was that although its author covered many incidents that I had also researched, I did not find a single case of misrepresentation. Race was already a topic on which credible writers were almost extinct.

After Paved with Good Intentions appeared, Mr. Taylor continued publishing the magazine that I have called the gold standard on race, while also sponsoring biennial conferences, debating racial liberals at universities and on the radio, reprinting classic works on race, giving speeches here and abroad, and over the past several years, working on a sequel to Paved with Good Intentions.

Three or four years ago, Mr. Taylor began having a new sort of experience: being shut down, sometimes violently. In Halifax, Canada in 2007, masked anarchists violently ended a lecture. In 2010, his American Renaissance conference, which had gone off eight times without a hitch, was shut down when anarchists and communists threatened hotels that planned to host it. When Mr. Taylor sought to hold another conference in February of this year, black Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon personally intervened, warning the hospitality industry not to host the conference.

Amid these tribulations, Mr. Taylor continued publishing American Renaissance and running its sponsoring organization, New Century Foundation, which has published state-of-the art reports on race and crime, as well as a carefully researched “statistical portrait” of Hispanics. This journal-foundation-website-research hub was a perfect platform for a follow-up to Paved with Good Intentions. Mr. Taylor’s agents, one for two years, another for one and a half, pitched the book to countless mainstream publishing houses, but all of them turned it down. White Identity, as the new book is called, had to be published by New Century Foundation.

This book is a chronicle of the revolutionary changes that have followed the disappearance of white consciousness. America was created by whites with a strong racial identity, but over the past 40-odd years they have lost that identity and have persuaded themselves they have no collective racial interests. Yet they encourage non-whites to cultivate a strong racial consciousness, and pursue their own racial interests.

For perhaps the past 20 years, Americans have been endlessly assured that “diversity is our greatest strength.” Mr. Taylor disputes this view. He notes that all the available evidence shows that racial diversity is a disaster; by no measure can it be shown to be a strength. He points out that not even diversity managers can name its strengths; they argue only that by “managing diversity,” we can limit its costs.

The author argues that people have been unsuccessful or unwilling to criticize “diversity,” because it would entail criticizing the civil rights movement, and thereby admitting that America’s commitment to civil rights ideals was misguided.

On a purely intellectual level, that is correct. However, in practice, I believe that people do not criticize diversity because of the power of anti-white race politics, and the terrible fate—losing one’s job, being assaulted at lectures, having one’s conferences shut down, etc.—that awaits any white willing to state the obvious.

Diversity is the inevitable consequence of integration, which was promoted by social scientists who believed that the white race was the black man’s burden. One of the most prominent was Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote in An American Dilemma (1944) that blacks’ problems grew out of a vicious circle, in which white oppression caused black pathologies, which in turn caused whites to see their prejudices as vindicated. Taylor writes that Myrdal hoped for a virtuous cycle:

“[I]f white attitudes could be reformed, oppression would ease, the status of blacks would rise, white attitudes would improve further, and blacks would find yet more opportunities for success.”

Meanwhile, according to social psychologist Gordon Allport’s “contact theory,” carefully supervised integration of white and black children would cure white children of “prejudice.” He and his fellow liberals believed that supervised mixing in schools was so important that, as Mr. Taylor notes, “the opposition of parents should be ignored. . . . Integrated education was the best way to reform ‘the malignant hearts and minds of racist white citizens.’”

Contact theory led to coercion, in violation of the freedom of association, and Mr. Taylor notes that even more than the black race riots of the 1960s, the forced busing that began in the 1970s drove whites to put as much distance as possible between themselves and blacks. Moving beyond school district boundaries was often the only way for whites to avoid going to school with disruptive, ghetto blacks.

Even when blacks and whites did go to school together, a funny thing happened. Contrary to academic dogma, according to which children are natural racial liberals who only learn “prejudice” from their parents, educators found that black and white school children did not voluntarily mingle. They also learned that another racial dogma is wrong. Mr. Taylor writes:

“An unwillingness to associate with blacks has long been considered a sign of lower-class closed-mindedness, but a 2006 study by Michael Emerson and David Sikkink of Rice University found that the more education white parents had, the more likely they were to rule out schools for their children simply because of the number of blacks. . . . “Our study arrived at a very sad and profound conclusion,” said Dr. Emerson. “More formal education is not the answer to racial segregation in this country.”

Not even pumping billions of tax dollars into luxurious “magnet schools” could lure whites into integrated public schools.

Mr. Taylor writes that when school integration was actually achieved, it did not have the expected effects:

“The larger purpose of school integration was to solve the American dilemma, but integration had three specific goals of its own: Lift black academic achievement, raise black self-esteem, and give black and white children better impressions of each other. There have now been hundreds of studies of the effects of school integration, and none of these goals has been achieved.”

When white children go to school with blacks and Hispanics it does not break down negative stereotypes; it is how whites acquire those stereotypes.

Mr. Taylor does not fail to point out the profound hypocrisy of our elites. He cites research on the living habits of 3,400 mainstream journalists that found that they seek out lily-white communities for their own homes. Chris Matthews and Ted Koppel, who are always complaining about white “racists,” were no different. Today, real racial integration seems to be mainly a punishment that upper-class whites inflict on poor whites.

Mr. Taylor writes that it is not only whites who prefer the company of their own race. No group wants to mix, and newcomers practice forms of discrimination the “experts” never anticipated. In Southern California there are Mexican landlords who refuse to rent to Mexicans who are not from their home state!

When the different races come into contact despite their preference for separation, there is trouble. Mr. Taylor notes that since blacks and Hispanics have no history of Jim Crow or segregation, according to diversity theory, they should integrate smoothly. “If anything, two groups that share common experiences as minorities should find contact especially rewarding,” he writes with dry humor. Instead, they are at each others’ throats, with some California schools locked down repeatedly because of race riots. In prison, as well, integration causes mayhem but the national media take as little interest in prison violence as in school violence.

Mr. Taylor devotes an entire chapter to scientific studies that suggest human beings have evolved a tribal sense that makes them suspicious of strangers, especially when they are of different races. Although I am not a Christian, neither am I a Darwinian, so I found this chapter the least persuasive. I believe racial conflict is political. While most whites simply want to be left alone by other races, a small number of altruists devote themselves to evangelism and humanitarian intervention among people different from themselves.

Things are not so simple for blacks and Hispanics. Blacks, especially, want exclusive neighborhoods and institutions, but also insist on the right to encroach upon whites. Wherever whites build something successful, blacks demand access. . . and claim they are being victimized.

Taylor devotes a thoroughly researched chapter each to the racial consciousness of blacks, Hispanic, and Asians, with an emphasis on their open rejection of “the civil-rights ideal of transcending race.” He quotes black poets and professors on their desire to murder whites, and Reconquista Hispanic academics who talk of white genocide. Asians, long considered the “model minority,” are increasingly shedding that role, as they see that it is more profitable to push racial interests than to assimilate.

Although this is a book of radical dissent, I believe Mr. Taylor sometimes gives liberals more credit than they deserve:

“The American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was based on the assumption that consciousness of race is a prejudice that is learned from a prejudiced society. The movement’s goal was to eliminate racial prejudice and even consciousness of race, and build a society in which race would not matter.”

I would say, rather, that the goal of the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was to increase black and communist power, but that it skillfully used racial idealism as a cover for its real aims.

Mr. Taylor argues that only whites took civil-rights ideals seriously:

“Up until the 1950s, most white Americans felt the same kind of racial identity that is common among non-whites. These sentiments have almost completely disappeared—certainly from public sight . . . . Across the political spectrum, Ameri¬cans assert that any form of white racial consciousness or solidarity is de¬spicable. Whites, therefore, have tried to keep their end of the civil rights bargain. They have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same.”

Mr. Taylor then backs up this assertion with an impressively researched account of the decline of white racial consciousness. He quotes not only one American president after another, from Thomas Jefferson to Harry Truman, who saw blacks as a burden whom they’d prefer to see repatriated to Africa, but even abolitionists, most of whom were working towards the same goal. Except for a few radical egalitarians such as William Lloyd Garrison, abolition was never about racial equality, and abolitionists opposed miscegenation.

As Mr. Taylor notes: Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, expressed the majority view: “Do your duty first to the colored people here; educate them Christianize them, and then colonize them.”

Now, of course, we must condemn pre-1960 white consciousness as Nazi-like. “Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler,” writes Mr. Taylor, “and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Me¬morial “stone by stone.”

He continues: “It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washing¬ton owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history.”

Mr. Taylor forces the reader to conclude that either America’s greatest men were racist monsters, or that something has gone terribly wrong in our approach to race, and that hard-won wisdom has been spurned. Far from embracing diversity, the Founding Fathers were suspicious even of white foreigners’ loyalties: “They must cast off the European skin, never to resume it,” wrote John Quincy Adams.

Today, the leading white voices in the media and academia preach anti-white hatred, and encourage the same in blacks and Hispanics. In effect, they promote the death of the white race through miscegenation, sub-replacement fertility, and displacement by non-white immigrants. Even neoconservatives like Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom say that the “crumbling of the taboo on sexual relations between the two races [black and white]” is “good news,” because it will improve race relations by making it impossible to draw racial distinctions. Mr. Taylor is indignant:

“For most of American history, miscegenation was the ultimate nightmare for whites. That whites should now see it as the ultimate solution to racial conflict is a sign not only of how radically our thinking has changed but also of how stubborn racial conflict turned out to be. Civil rights laws were supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. To propose now that the only solution to racial enmity is to eliminate race itself through intermarriage is to admit that different races cannot live together in peace.

“Of course, widespread miscegenation would not eliminate race; it would eliminate whites. . . . No one is proposing large-scale intermarriage for Africa or Asia. Nor would mixing eliminate discrimination. Blacks, South Americans, and Asians dis¬criminate among themselves on the basis of skin tone even when they are the same race.”

In the final chapter, Mr. Taylor counts the harrowing costs of an increasingly non-white America: increasing educational failure, illegitimacy, crime, welfare dependency, domestic violence, child abuse, health care costs, poverty and corruption. He leaves no doubt that a nation of Third-World people can only be a Third-World nation. Those who displace whites will live off them as long as they can, and cut them off when they cannot. Young generations of blacks and Hispanics will certainly not tax themselves to support largely white retirees.

The author warns whites that the only way to forestall this grim future is to redevelop the racial consciousness and identity which all other groups take for granted, end diversity propaganda, rekindle pride in their accomplishments, and take the only steps that can possibly save them from oblivion: end immigration, and take back the right to freedom of association.

This is the best book on race of its generation. A work of staggering learning, it is scholarly yet readable, and though it supports its positions with hundreds of examples, is marvelously succinct. It is written in a dispassionate tone, yet every page is explosive.

However, this book does have two shortcomings: It mentions race and IQ only in a footnote, and does not include an investigation of genocidal black supremacist ideologies. A sinking average national IQ will make it impossible to maintain a Western economy or a liberal democracy. At the same time, genocidal black ideologies are pervasive and institutionally anchored at all economic levels of the black community, contributing to all black pathologies, including the savage crimes so many blacks perpetrate against whites.
 

Schweitzer’s warning

When I was a young boy, my uncle, who had become a college librarian after seeing combat in World War II and Korea, gave me a book about the world’s greatest living humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), who was a medical missionary in Africa. What the book did not say, and my liberal uncle surely did not know, was what Schweitzer thought of the people he was helping. Mr. Taylor quotes him:

“They have neither the mental or emotional abilities to equate or share equally with White men in any functions of our civilization. I have given my life to try to bring unto them the advantages which our civilization must offer, but I have become well aware that we must retain this status: White the superior, and they the inferior.

“For whenever a White man seeks to live among them as their equals, they will destroy and devour him, and they will destroy all his work. . . .

“Never fraternize with them as equals. Never accept them as your social equals or they will devour you. They will destroy you.”

For a more dispassionate judgment, Mr. Taylor quotes Jefferson from an inscription on the wall of the memorial in Washington:

“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these peo¬ple [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.”

For more contemporary language, the author quotes the eminent American biologist E. Raymond Hall who:

“stated as a biological law that, ‘two subspecies of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area.’ Prof. Hall explains that human races are biological subspecies, and that the law applied to them, too: ‘To imagine one subspecies of man living together on equal terms for long with another subspecies is but wishful thinking and leads only to disaster and oblivion for one or the other.’”

[Addendum: I also believe that where issues such as that raised by E. Raymond Hall are concerned, one can come to the issue as a matter of political, rather than biological theory, and reach the same conclusion. Thus, I would posit a complementary political law.]

Mr. Taylor’s entire book is evidence that Prof. Hall was right. For whites, it is only a matter of time, rekindle a collective will to live, or face oblivion.