The problem with
intellectually insecure whites

Kevin MacDonald

January 19, 2009

From: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/

America will soon have a white minority. This is a much desired state of affairs for the hostile elites who hold political power and shape public opinion. But it certainly creates some management issues — at least in the long run. After all, it’s difficult to come up with an historical example of a nation with a solid ethnic majority (90% white in 1950) that has voluntarily decided to cede political and cultural power. Such transformations are typically accomplished by military invasions, great battles, and untold suffering. 

And it’s not as if everyone is doing it. Only Western nations view their own demographic and cultural eclipse as a moral imperative. Indeed, as I have noted previously, it is striking that racial nationalism has triumphed in Israel at the same time that the Jewish intellectual and political movements and the organized Jewish community have been the most active and effective force for a non-white America. Indeed, a poll in 2008 found that Avigdor Lieberman was the second most popular politician in Israel. Lieberman has advocated expulsion of Arabs from Israel and has declared himself a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leading pioneer of racial Zionism. The most popular politician in the poll was Benjamin Netanyahu — another admirer of Jabotinsky. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni are also Jabotinskyists.

The racial Zionists are now carrying out yet another orgy of mass murder after a starvation-inducing blockade and the usual triggering assault designed to provoke Palestinian retaliation — which then becomes the cover for claims that Israel is merely defending itself against terrorism. This monstrosity was approved by overwhelming majorities of both Houses of Congress. The craven Bush administration did its part by abstaining from a UN resolution designed by the US Secretary of State as a result of a personal appeal by the Israeli Prime Minister. This is yet another accomplishment of the Israel Lobby, but one they would rather not have discussed in public. People might get the impression that the Lobby really does dictate US foreign policy in the Mideast. Obviously, such thoughts are only entertained by anti-Semites.

But I digress.

In managing the eclipse of white America, one strategy of the mainstream media is to simply ignore the issue. Christopher Donovan  (“For the media, the less whites think about their coming minority status, the better”) has noted that the media, and in particular, the New York Times, are quite uninterested in doing stories that discuss what white people think about this state of affairs.

It’s not surprising that the New York Times — the Jewish-owned flagship of anti-white, pro-multicultural media — ignores the issue. The issue is also missing from so-called conservative media even though one would think that conservatives would find the eclipse of white America to be an important issue. Certainly, their audiences would find it interesting.

Now we have an article “The End of White America” written by Hua Hsu, an Assistant Professor of English at Vassar College. The article is a rather depressing display of what passes for intellectual discourse on the most important question confronting white people in America.

Hsu begins by quoting a passage in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in which a character, Tom Buchanan, states: “Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?” … Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

Buchanan’s comment is a thinly veiled reference to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color which Hsu describes as “rationalized hatred” presented in a scholarly, gentlemanly, and scientific tone. (This wording that will certainly help him when he comes up for tenure.) As Hsu notes, Stoddard had a doctorate from Harvard and was a member of many academic associations. His book was published by a major publisher. It was therefore “precisely the kind of book that a 1920s man of Buchanan’s profile — wealthy, Ivy League–educated, at once pretentious and intellectually insecure — might have been expected to bring up in casual conversation.”

Let’s ponder that a bit. The simple reality is that in the year 2009 an Ivy League-educated person, "at once pretentious and intellectually insecure,"  would just as glibly assert the same sort of nonsense as Hsu. To wit:

The coming white minority does not mean that the racial hierarchy of American culture will suddenly become inverted, as in 1995’s White Man’s Burden, an awful thought experiment of a film, starring John Travolta, that envisions an upside-down world in which whites are subjugated to their high-class black oppressors. There will be dislocations and resentments along the way, but the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.

The fact is that no one can say for certain what multicultural America without a white majority will be like. There is no scientific or historical basis for claims like “the demographic shifts of the next 40 years are likely to reduce the power of racial hierarchies over everyone’s lives, producing a culture that’s more likely than any before to treat its inhabitants as individuals, rather than members of a caste or identity group.”

Indeed, there is no evidence at all that we are proceeding to a color blind future. The election results continue to show that white people are coalescing in the Republican Party, while the Democrats are increasingly the party of a non-white soon-to-be majority. 

Is it so hard to believe that when this coalition achieves a majority that it will further compromise the interests of whites far beyond contemporary concerns such as immigration policy and affirmative action? Hsu anticipates a colorblind world, but affirmative action means that blacks and other minorities are certainly not treated as individuals. And it means that whites — especially white males — are losing out on opportunities they would have had without these policies and without the massive non-white immigration of the last few decades.

Given the intractability of changing intelligence and other traits required for success in the contemporary economy, it is unlikely that 40 more years of affirmative action will attain the outcomes desired by the minority lobbies. Indeed, in Obama's America, blacks are rioting in Oakland over perceived racial injustices, and from 2002–2007, black juvenile homicide victims increased 31%, while black juvenile homicide perpetrators increased 43%. Hence,  the reasonable outlook is for a continuing need for affirmative action and for racial activism in these groups, even after whites become a minority. 

Whites will also lose out because of large-scale importation of relatively talented immigrants from East Asia. Indeed, as I noted over a decade ago, "The United States is well on the road to being dominated by an Asian technocratic elite and a Jewish business, professional, and media elite."

Hsu shows that there already is considerable anxiety among whites about the future. An advertizing executive says, “I think white people feel like they’re under siege right now — like it’s not okay to be white right now, especially if you’re a white male. ... People are stressed out about it. ‘We used to be in control! We’re losing control’” Another says, "There’s a lot of fear and a lot of resentment."

It's hard to see why these feelings won't increase in the future.

A huge problem for white people is lack of intellectual and cultural confidence. Hsu quotes Christian (Stuff White People Like) Lander saying, "I get it: as a straight white male, I’m the worst thing on Earth." A professor comments that for his students "to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture … They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized."

This lack of cultural confidence is no accident. For nearly 100 years whites have been subjected to a culture of critique emanating from the most prestigious academic and media institutions. And, as Hsu points out, the most vibrant and influential aspect of American popular culture is hip-hop—a product of the African American urban culture.

The only significant group of white people with any cultural confidence centers itself around country music, NASCAR, and the small town values of traditional white America. For this group of whites — and only this group — there is  "a racial pride that dares not speak its name, and that defines itself through cultural cues instead—a suspicion of intellectual elites and city dwellers, a preference for folksiness and plainness of speech (whether real or feigned), and the association of a working-class white minority with 'the real America.'”

This is what I term implicit whiteness — implicit because explicit assertions of white identity have been banned by the anti-white elites that dominate our politics and culture. It is a culture that, as Hsu notes, "cannot speak its name."

But that implies that the submerged white identity of the white working class and the lack of cultural confidence exhibited by the rest of white America are imposed from outside. Although there may well be characteristics of whites that facilitate this process, this suppression of white identity and interests is certainly not the natural outcome of modernization or any other force internal to whites as a people. In my opinion, it is the result of the successful erection of a culture of critique in the West dominated by Jewish intellectual and political movements.

The result is that educated, intellectually insecure white people these days are far more likely to believe in the utopian future described by Hsu than in hard and cautious thinking about what the future might have in store for them.

It's worth dwelling a bit on the intellectual insecurity of the whites who mindlessly utter the mantras of multiculturalism that they have soaked up from the school system and from the media. Most people do not have much confidence in their intellectual ability and look to elite opinion to shape their beliefs. As I noted elsewhere,

A critical component of the success of the culture of critique is that it achieved control of the most prestigious and influential institutions of the West, and it became a consensus among the elites, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Once this happened, it is not surprising that this culture became widely accepted among people of very different levels of education and among people of different social classes.

Most people are quite insecure about their intellectual ability. But they know that the professors at Harvard, and the editorial page of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and even conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are all on page when it comes to racial and ethnic issues. This is a formidable array, to the point that you almost have to be a crank to dissent from this consensus.

I think one of the greatest triumphs of the left has been to get people to believe that people who assert white identity and interests or who make unflattering portrayals of organized Jewish movements are morally degenerate, stupid, and perhaps psychiatrically disturbed. Obviously, all of these adjectives designate low status. 

The reality is that the multicultural emperor has no clothes and, because of its support for racial Zionism and the racialism of ethnic minorities in America, it is massively hypocritical to boot. The New York Times, the academic left, and the faux conservatives that dominate elite discourse on race and ethnicity are intellectually bankrupt and can only remain in power by ruthlessly suppressing or ignoring the scientific findings.

This is particularly a problem for college-educated whites. Like Fitzgerald's Tom Buchanan, such people have a strong need to feel that their ideas are respectable and part of the mainstream. But the respectable mainstream gives them absolutely nothing with which to validate themselves except perhaps the idea that the world will be a better place when people like them no longer have power. Hsu quotes the pathetic Christian Lander: "“Like, I’m aware of all the horrible crimes that my demographic has done in the world. ... And there’s a bunch of white people who are desperate — desperate — to say, ‘You know what? My skin’s white, but I’m not one of the white people who’s destroying the world.’”

As a zombie leftist during the 1960s and 1970s, I know what that feeling of desperation is like — what it's like to be a self-hating white. We must get to the point where college-educated whites proudly and confidently say they are white and that they do not want to become a minority in America.