White Identity, a Book Review

When we wrote about the fact that the Japanese didn't loot each other after the recent tsunami, one reader chalked it up to class.  This person pointed out that the major difference between Japan, with no looting, and New Orleans, where looting was rampant, was that New Orleans has an extremely generous welfare system which leads people to believe that they're entitled to whatever they can grab.

We argued that race might have something to do with it.  For thousands of years, Japanese had to get along well because any village that didn't cooperate would starve when the rice crop failed.  This went on so long that anyone who wouldn't cooperate was bred out of the gene pool.

In saying that Japanese have been selectively bred not to loot, we were gently floated the explosive concept that there may be (gasp!) fundamental differences between races!

Perennial Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson used to say,

Given a choice between agreeable fantasy and disagreeable fact, Americans will go for the agreeable fantasy every time.

Our article about Japanese non-looters tiptoed toward criticizing the American fantasy that racial differences are unimportant and will disappear if enough people take enough sensitivity training.

Monster-Mashing Through the Tulips

In the book White Identity, author Jared Taylor does no tiptoeing; he stomps boldly with hobnailed boots.  The book is three hundred pages demonstrating that race is fundamental to human relationships, that the different races don't want anything to do with each other, and that forcing races together leads only to violence and hatred.

In spite of all the liberal protestations that racial consciousness will go away if people are forced together, Mr. Taylor's indisputable facts argue that race is of such profound import to human nature that no amount of social engineering or do-goodery can make it disappear.

Nothing could be a starker contrast with the most fervently-stated beliefs of 99% of white Americans, their political views being entirely irrelevant to their unanimous condemnation of racism or discrimination of all sorts.  As Mr. Taylor amply demonstrates, this "post racial" ideal is an impossibly Utopian fantasy.

In puncturing this agreeable fantasy with disagreeable reality, Mr. Taylor has set himself up for criticism of the most infuriated and condemnatory sort.  Googling "Jared Taylor" produces any number of attacks on his morality, character, intellect, and manner of life.

Oddly, though, there are essentially no substantive factual criticisms of his ideas, despite their being disliked on every side.  Why not?

Because his ideas are based on disagreeable facts which are available to anyone with an Internet connection.  Arguing against verifiable fact makes his critics look silly.  Since his critics can't attack his facts, they in effect concede the argument by attacking him as a person.

Regardless of your personal views on the subject of race, it would benefit you to examine Mr. Taylor's evidence on its factual merits, even if only to seek out a logically consistent means of debating it.

Forced Integration

Generations of research have shown that the vast majority of people prefer to associate with people of like race because of our tribal past.  As tribes wandered around, individuals who identified with their close kin and helped each other passed on their genes more effectively than those who lacked strong kinship identity.  We were thus bred for racial consciousness.

Racial awareness starts very early in life no matter what parents do.  Mr. Taylor cites dozens of studies all of which came to the same conclusion - humans are strongly selected to be racially aware.  The desire to deny natural selection and proclaim the end of racial prejudice by forcing people to integrate was another of those unrealistic ideas like the fantasy that Islam is a religion of peace that our ruling elites keep trying to shove off on the rest of us:

Many believed that integration for children was so important that the opposition of parents should be ignored. James S. Liebman of Columbia law school wrote that in order to protect children from the “tyranny” of their parents they should be required to attend “schools that are not entirely controlled by parents,” where they could be exposed to “a broader range of . . . value options than their parents could hope to provide.” Integrated education was the best way to reform “the malignant hearts and minds of racist white citizens.”

Jennifer Hochschild of Princeton agreed that the stakes were so great they justified limiting the will of the public. Because a majority of Americans did not understand the benefits of integration, democracy should be set aside and Americans “must permit elites to make their choices for them.” She believed parents should be banned from sending children to private schools. The assumptions of the 1950s were that white adults might not integrate willingly, but their children who went to school with blacks would grow up with enlightened views, and the racial problem would be solved.  [emphasis added]

 - White Identity p 24

At that time, the elites were quite open about their desire to set democracy aside and force lesser beings to do right regardless of their wishes.   Hillary Clinton had learned to be more subtle in It Takes A Village when she argued that the government had to help parents raise children to government standards, but the liberal desire to run roughshod over parental opposition was there for anyone to see.

The contrary view was stated eloquently by Friederich Hayek:

"The basis [of the conservative argument] is that nobody can know who knows best and that the only way by which we can find out is through a social process in which everybody is allowed to try and see what he can do.

Precisely!  Our founders gave us a federal system in which different states could try different solutions to problems of every sort - economic, environmental, political, and certainly societal.  At the beginning, these differences were profound indeed.

Unfortunately, as the Southern states tried to use the Supreme Court to force the Northern states not only tolerate but to uphold and support slavery via the Dredd Scott decision, and as the Northern states in response used force of arms to eradicate that "peculiar institution," our liberal elites have used federal power to demand that all American institutions be integrated everywhere.  It's reasonable to demand that public hotels be integrated.  As Senator Rand Paul recently pointed out, however, there are no Constitutional grounds for forcing private individuals to rent property to someone they abhor, and arguments for Federal control of local schools are tenuous at best.

For the past half-century, anti-federalist arguments have prevailed.  Based on Keyes v. Denver in 1973, schools were integrated via forced busing even if the school district had never practiced discrimination.  The Court ruled that forced integration was to be implemented nationwide regardless of parental wishes or state laws.

Another Failure of Liberal Ideas

The result was resounding, universal failure.  In 1969, the average black Boston student attended a school that was 32% white; in 2003, Boston schools averaged 11% white, and 61% of black students attended schools that were at least 90% non-white.  That same year, 60% of black students in New York State attended schools that were at least 90% black.  Decades of legally-enforced integration led to greater segregation at great cost.

Mr. Taylor shows that billions of dollars spent to force integration by forced busing or by constructing magnet schools failed, not just because whites didn't want it, but blacks didn't want integration either:

Middle-class blacks have enough money to choose from many different majority-white neighborhoods but many would rather live among blacks. In the Atlanta area, blacks cluster in suburbs southwest of the city in DeKalb County. “It’s not a separatist thing,” says sociologist Robert Bullard of Clark Atlanta University. “It’s a choice to be whole.” Eddie Long, bishop of New Birth Missionary Church in southeast DeKalb County, said his congregation thinks of the black suburbs as the “promised land,” explaining that many members “wanted their children to grow up in a nurturing black community.”

A black journalist wrote about a backyard gathering in an affluent, black Atlanta suburb. The party suddenly went silent when a realtor’s car, bearing a white couple, cruised slowly down the street. “I hope they don’t find anything they like,” said one of the guests; “otherwise, there goes the neighborhood.” ...

Jeff Johnson, a personality on Black Entertainment Television, is tired of integrationist pretense: “This whole notion of a post-racial society is ridiculous, we need to stop saying it, we need to stop even talking about it. Let’s be honest about the fact that many of us from all races are racist. . . . We’ve lied about progress.”  [emphasis added]

 - White Identity, p 42, 43

Mr. Taylor demonstrates that 40 years of strenuous efforts by liberals to eliminate racism have increased racial hatreds instead of racism withering away.  The dangers of forcing unwanted integration are illustrated most strongly in prisons where convicts have no choice with respect to dorm mates.  Fights between Mexican and black inmates don't make national news because that would upset the pleasant, politically-correct fiction that integration cures racism, but ex-cons report that prison violence makes them more racially conscious than before:

I read one commentator’s opinion in which he expressed disappointment that ex-cons could come out of prison with unresolved racial problems “despite the racial integration of the prisons.” Despite? Buddy, do I have news for you! How about because of racial integration? [emphasis in the original]

- White Identity, p 74

For 60 years, we have wished and legislated in vain. In so doing, by opening the United States to peoples from every corner of the world, we have created agonizing problems for future generations. As surely as the Communists were mistaken in their hopes of remaking human nature, so have been the proponents of diversity and multi-culturalism.

 - White Identity, p 292

Having demonstrated the utter failure of decades of our liberal elites enforcing integration on people who don't want it, Mr. Taylor goes on to discuss black, Hispanic, Asian, and white racial consciousness.  This background makes it possible for him to predict where our ever-increasing racial tensions will take our society.

This is one of the saddest, most depressing books about American politics and society we've ever read.  Unfortunately, disagreeable truths don't go away when politicians insist that everyone accept agreeable fantasies.  What's worse, enforcing this particular agreeable fantasy on the slowly-boiling ethnic stew that America has become has raised pressure and brought about dangerous levels of conflict between groups.

You won't like Mr. Taylor's predictions any more than you'll like his conclusions, but you'd be foolish to ignore them.  The book is not always stocked on Amazon but it can be found here, on Jared Taylor's website.