Jared Taylor Interview

From Carol M. Swain, Editor, Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America, (Cambridge University Press, 2002); December 21, 1999

It is fitting to begin our interviews with Jared Taylor, the founder and chief editor of American Renaissance magazine. For Taylor, more than any other figure over the past decade and a half, has succeeded through his magazine and his periodic national conferences in creating an intellectual forum in which white rights advocacy, white nationalism, and white ethnic assertiveness could be shifted from the redneck margins of society to a position, if not of mainstream respectability, at least of cultured urbanity and general intellectual seriousness. Taylor is in many ways a most unlikely figure to have carried out this project. Raised in Japan by Christian missionary parents, Taylor attended Japanese schools throughout his childhood and adolescence where he learned to speak fluent Japanese. He went on to attend Yale University and later worked and traveled extensively in West Africa. He also studied in France, where he received a graduate degree in international economics from the Paris Institute of Political Studies. His cosmopolitan and peripatetic background, however, did not prevent him from moving gradually in the early 1980s to adopt a white-centered view of American nationality and to develop the conviction that cosmopolitan and multiethnic societies are much less successful than those consisting of a single dominant ethnic group. While viewed by many as a highbrow racist, Taylor himself strenuously rejects the racist label and claims that his views on race and nationality are moderate, commonsensical, and fully consistent with the views of most of the great statesmen and presidents of America’s past. All human beings are by nature tribal, Taylor contends, tribal in the sense that they all have a special affinity for — and a natural loyalty toward — the members of their own race. White people, he says, have their own legitimate racial interests, just as the members of all other racial and ethnic groups do, though white people, he adds, have been slow to realize this.

The interview of Jared Taylor on December 21, 1999, by Russell K. Nieli is printed with kind permission of the interviewee.

White people have allowed other groups to organize and defend their racial interests while doing nothing to defend their own. This situation, Taylor believes, is akin to unilateral disarmament. Like many of the other interviewees in this volume, Taylor believes that the high incidence of various social pathologies among non-Asian minorities in America is at least partially the result of differing genetic endowments, though he also believes that bad social policies and the reigning liberal agenda on race have made these problems much worse. Taylor offers no concrete vision for the future racial landscape of America, though it is clear from his remarks here that he vigorously opposes affirmative action policies that preference racial minorities, antidiscrimination laws that restrict private associational rights, and immigration policies that are shifting the racial demographics of America away from the previous white majority.

Interview with Jared Taylor

Interview: Could you explain the nature of American Renaissance magazine? What is its underlying philosophy, its stated mission, and the sorts of people who write for it?

Jared Taylor: The purpose of American Renaissance is to discuss issues that are of interest to whites. After all, every other racial group in the country has groups and media organs that speak for them, and the purpose of American Renaissance is to speak for whites. Its subsidiary purpose is to convince a larger number of whites that it is legitimate for an organization or for a publication to in fact speak for them. Most whites are not convinced that they have legitimate group interests, so another purpose of American Renaissance is to convince a larger number of whites that it’s entirely legitimate for them to have group interests that may sometimes be in conflict with the interests of other groups.

As far as American Renaissance’s philosophy is concerned, that’s a very long subject, and I think we might have to go about that in a somewhat more piecemeal manner. I think perhaps you could summarize it in the most economical terms by saying that the position of American Renaissance is that race is not a trivial matter of either individual or group identity, and that it is a mistake to try to build a society — as the United States has been trying for perhaps the last forty or fifty years — to build a society in which race can be made not to matter. I think that the architects of the civil rights movement, both white and black, those who were most enthusiastic about it in the 1950s and 1960s, would never have anticipated the end of the century in which race is still an extremely salient characteristic in the social life of the United States. I think they would be surprised because at that time they misread human nature. They seemed to be working on the assumption that race was in fact something that was ultimately trivial. The stylish way to look at it these days, of course, is to say that race is not biological, that it is merely a social construct. I don’t know anyone who was putting it in those terms at that time, but that was the thinking. What we find today is that people still do sort themselves out quite reliably on the basis of race. In elections, they very frequently vote for candidates of the same race. The United States is scarcely more integrated racially today than it was in the 1950s and the 1960s, and I think that’s because once again race is a salient and significant biological and social fact. I suppose you could say that that is the major assumption that underlies the positions American Renaissance takes — that race is important and race matters, and it’s folly to try to build a society on the assumption that it can be made not to matter.

Interview: And the magazine is specifically geared towards white people and towards the interests of white people?

Jared Taylor: It’s not geared towards white people in that sense. We have a surprisingly large number of black subscribers.

Interview: What would interest a black subscriber in your magazine?

Jared Taylor: I think there are many black subscribers who share our view that race is a significant matter. In fact, when I talk to Americans about racial consciousness and about the legitimacy of racial consciousness, blacks understand this much more readily than whites because they themselves have racial consciousness, and they have group interests that they make no bones about expressing and advancing. It’s whites for whom the idea of racial consciousness has been turned into something that is, if not irrelevant, then even loathsome. Because blacks understand their own racial interests, they find it much more straightforward to imagine that whites can have racial interests, and I think that gives them an interest in what racially conscious whites may be thinking. For my own part, I find it interesting to read the black press — for example, The Final Call, Louis Farrakhan’s magazine, or the Amsterdam News.

The black press expresses black interests more explicitly than any other press, which is exactly what you would expect, and I think for anyone who has a consciousness of race and is conscious of the kinds of group conflicts that race can give rise to, it’s very interesting to see how other groups in their organs that are directed to their own group approach these same questions. And I think for that reason blacks would be interested in American Renaissance.

Interview: Besides your black readership, which, one would imagine, is only a small portion of the total readership, could you tell us something about your readership in terms of demographic categories. What sorts of people are attracted to the magazine and what are their reasons for wanting to read it?

Jared Taylor: We did a reader survey some years ago. My recollection is that, oh, something on the order of about 75 percent of the readers or subscribers were men, they tended to be of an average age of about forty to forty-five, they are overwhelmingly college educated, and they have above-average household income. Also, they tend to be conservative in their political views, and my recollection is that about half of them pronounce themselves to be Christians. The other half expressed no particular religious orientation.

Interview: Do you have any strategies for increasing your circulation?

Do you advertise, for instance, in like-minded magazines, in college newspapers, or over the Internet?

Jared Taylor: We have a web page on the Internet that sometimes brings in new readers. There are two primary ways we increase readership. One is through radio and television appearances by myself. Sometimes they bring in quite large numbers of new subscribers. The other is through direct mail, the way every publication tends to increase readership. I don’t doubt that you get solicitations in the mail all the time for various kinds of publications. We do the same thing. We rent mailing lists and we send pitch letters out to people who read other magazines that we think would suggest that they have a view of the world that would be compatible with ours.

Interview: Have you been successful in recent years in increasing your circulation?

Jared Taylor: Oh, no editor or publisher would ever tell you that he’s been successful ... never sufficiently successful ... but sure, it’s growing all the time. This is about our tenth year of publication, and we are growing steadily.

Interview: It’s a monthly magazine, now isn’t it?

Jared Taylor: Yes, it’s always been a monthly.

Interview: How many people read your magazine each month?

Jared Taylor: Well, this is a figure we release only to advertisers if you wish to advertise. I wish I could tell you that it was hundreds of thousands, but I can tell you only that it is thousands.

Interview: How would you characterize the current state of race relations in America?

Jared Taylor: I think race relations are essentially unchanged for the last forty or fifty years. I think that the greatest set of problems having to do with race is simply inherent to multiracialism. There has never been a multiracial society on the face of the earth in which there was not racial friction, and in fact the most stable multiethnic or multiethnic societies that I can think of have been ones in which there was some kind of quite firm hierarchy of different groups, whether it be in the United States — if you’re just speaking of blacks and whites, for example — or South Africa. Whatever one may think of apartheid, it was a stable situation, as was slavery, if you will. These things can continue for years whether one considers them just or unjust. In the past also, say in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, generally there was a group that was considered dominant ... when you have multiethnic groups, you have a kind of overclass and an underclass. You’ll find the same thing elsewhere. The Tutsis tended to be the aristocratic class and dominated the Hutu in Rwanda and Burundi. The Sinhalese and the Tamils in what is now Sri Lanka, they were in a hierarchical relationship at one time, too, but now once that hierarchical relationship disappears, you find them in conflict. This is a fairly reliable pattern that you see around the world.

Race, of course, isn’t the only source of group conflict. Probably language may be the most fertile source of conflict after that, but any kind of group identification, be it religion, language, race, culture, tribe, all of these things are sources of friction — far from being the kind of source of strength that we have been encouraged to take them to be. But as far as the United States is concerned, I think, well, there are many, many subsidiary aspects of this problem, but, as I say, the great source — the original problem, the original sin, if you will — is the attempt to try to construct a society of such disparate racial elements. Any society that attempts this will encounter the very problems we have always been wrestling with, and I think for that reason, race relations have always been America’s greatest challenge. And, in fact, you can describe them as America’s greatest failure, but I think that they are inevitably a failure, given the way human nature is.

If you want to be more specific about race problems and what causes them, that was an aspect that I think I explored pretty thoroughly in my book Paved with Good Intentions. At the heart of our race problems is the assumption in the United States today that when nonwhite groups — specifically blacks but also including Hispanics — when nonwhite groups are less successful in America, their differences in achievement when compared to whites must be attributed to white racism and white wickedness. I think that, by and large, this is a mistake. I think that the different racial groups are different biologically, and they differ on average in their intelligence, and that’s, of course, why we never have this problem with Asians. Wherever you look, Asians outperform whites academically and financially, and so you would suspect that this nonwhite group that is doing better than whites would somehow cause a little bit more widespread skepticism about the white-racism-as-the-cause-of-nonwhite-failure theory. We don’t find that this Asian anomaly is much of a reason to doubt the prevailing view that all the problems of nonwhites can be attributed to whites.

In any case, in my view the differences in achievement are largely due to differences in inherent ability, and it is the unwillingness of America at large to recognize these differences in ability that I think are the cause of a certain very specific set of problems you see in the United States today. I think that most people, for example, accept the fact that blacks are, for biological reasons, the better athletes, certainly in many sports.

And no one therefore assumes that the fact that the National Basketball Association is 80 percent black is a result of some kind of systematic antiwhite or anti-Asian or anti-Hispanic racism. On the other hand, if we discover that most of the mathematicians and physicists and research scientists in the United States are white or, in fact, Asian, then we insist on assuming that some kind of institutional racism is throwing up vicious barriers to advancement for blacks and Hispanics. I think the analogy is, whether one likes it or not, an almost perfect one, between basketball and, for example, nuclear physics. People who do nuclear physics do it because they’re good at it, and people who play professional basketball likewise do it because they’re good at it. To assume that we have to have some kind of perfect, mathematical-geometrical equality of representation in all these fields I think is to overlook the significance of race and the biological aspects of race.

Another aspect of this problem is that by constantly blaming whites for the failures and shortcomings of nonwhites, our society is, despite I think the best intentions, teaching nonwhites to hate whites. After all, we are constantly telling blacks that it’s those racist bankers who won’t give you loans, it’s those racist policemen who arrest you despite your innocence, it’s those racist teachers who expect you to fail, it’s those racist television producers who portray you in a bad light — racist this, racist that, white society is just seething with racists. How can blacks help but grow up disliking or even hating whites? I think that if we have a real problem of outright, visceral racial hatred in this country today, it’s not a problem of whites hating blacks, it’s more a problem of blacks hating whites. And you find this in the overwhelmingly lop-sided crime statistics when it comes to the different races committing crimes against other races. You also find it, I think, in the kinds of statements that you see publicly made by blacks about whites, the equivalent of which would be very, very difficult to find in any kind of public figure ... public white figure speaking about blacks. So this notion that the failure of blacks specifically — and now Hispanics have been brought into this game to a large degree — this idea that the failures of blacks and Hispanics can be attributed directly to white racism, past or present, is first of all wrong. Second of all, it creates hostility toward whites in the minds of blacks and Hispanics, and I think it creates a whole set of unnecessary guilt-related problems for whites. So aside from the great racial problem that inevitably arises simply from having different races in the same territory, I would put this first and foremost in characterizing America’s current racial problem, namely, this assumption that the failures of blacks and Hispanics can be attributed to white maliciousness or white wickedness.

Interview: It seems as if your views on some of the underlying causes of racial problems have changed in recent years. Today you stress innate biological differences, but in your book, Paved with Good Intentions — which was published in 1992 — the main message seems to be that the real problem with blacks is that they don’t act enough like Asians, and that if they did, they would be able to integrate successfully into American society. Clearly, you want to suggest in your book that blacks need to become more responsible parents, that they have to stop blaming whites for all their problems, that they have to learn to work hard and save money, and it would seem as if your message is a hopeful one that looks forward to some kind of future integration of African Americans into American society. Yet now, in your more recent writings, you seem to have abandoned the integrationist vision for some kind of not-too-well-defined separationist one, and see black problems rooted not in bad habits which are correctable, but in bad genes which cannot be changed.

Could you explain the transition of your thinking on these matters?

Jared Taylor: I wouldn’t say that I have completely abandoned one point of view and adopted another. In Paved with Good Intentions, I simply made no attempt to expound on the biological point of view. I think it is certainly the case that blacks are likely to be psychologically handi-capped to some degree by the conviction that they live in a racist society full of racist white people. I think that if I were a racial minority in some other country and I were convinced that the majority was constantly sharpening its knives trying to think of new and exotic ways to skin me alive, if I were convinced that at every turn, there were racist people trying to block my progress, I think that I would find that very dispiriting and discouraging. I think that to the extent that blacks do believe that, I think that it can be a psychological obstacle for them. I think that blacks, instead of constantly blaming whites for their shortcomings, if they did try to take more individual responsibility for their success and their failure, I think there could be a not insignificant improvement in the circumstances of blacks. I think one of the most telling social statistics in the United States today is the fact that approximately 70 percent of black children are illegitimate. It is very, very difficult to argue that somehow white people are responsible for this, although many blacks and a number of whites have come up with Rube Goldberg-type explanations to try to pin this on racism. But just that one statistic alone, I think, is symptomatic of a whole terrible set of obstacles that blacks are setting up for themselves.

Now, this said, I think that the kind of improvement that dismantling psychological barriers would result in is nevertheless limited by differences in average intelligence. Ever since the First World War, we have this very, very well-established difference in average IQ of one standard deviation, and no one, no one has come up with some kind of environmental intervention that will narrow that gap. At the same time, we have a considerably less than one standard deviation difference between Asian IQ — North Asian IQ — and white IQ. I think that, too, is a result of genetics, and I think that that is what explains the dominance of Asians in certain fields, and their lower rates of illegitimacy compared to whites, their lower crime rates, their better achievement in school, their higher average incomes. I think that we are living in a time that has willfully blinded itself to biological differences that every previous generation took for granted. The differences between men and women, for heaven’s sake! Now it has become somewhat more possible to talk about the differences in the natures of men and women, but there was certainly a time a great many people would have agreed with the proposition that, for example, the sexual appetites of men and women were inherently no different from each other, and they would have explained the fact that there is a great deal of female prostitution and very little male prostitution as simply a result of social training.

Well, I think now most people would concede that these are the result of inherent biological differences. And so I see a certain amount of progress in recognizing biology in that respect, but the resistance to recognizing the reality of biology as far as race is concerned is still tremendous, and I think that this unwillingness to recognize it is going to hamper any kind of attempt to try to minimize differences, which, although attributed to environment, I believe are caused by genetics.

Interview: Is this a recent conviction on your part, or was this also a view that you held when you wrote Paved with Good Intentions, but for whatever reason, didn’t emphasize or mention at the time of writing it?

Jared Taylor: My views were similar to those I hold today, but they weren’t as well elaborated. I wasn’t as well informed about the research on IQ as I am today, but generally I had those same views. One of the reasons I didn’t write about IQ differences in Paved With Good Intentions is because it probably would have been impossible to get the book published if it had made a point of trying to explain these racial differences in terms of inherent abilities. It’s still very much a radioactive subject and was probably, if anything, even more radioactive then than it is now. I thought I had a great many things to say about race that were worth considering aside from that, and if I had to, if I had to keep that in the background, or suggest it only by implication in order for these other ideas to be considered ... I didn’t like doing it, but there was kind of a compromise there.

Interview: Paved with Good Intentions devotes two whole chapters and part of a third to criticizing our current policies of racial preferences. For a book that’s only eight chapters long, this is a considerable emphasis. Could you explain the function of current racial preference policy in the evolution of your views on black/white relations?

Jared Taylor: You mean whether or not my views are affected by the existence of these policies?

Interview: Yes.

Jared Taylor: Not a great deal. Of course, preference policies are based on this assumption that it’s white racism that keeps blacks and Hispanics from achieving at the white level. The idea seems to be that, oh, evaluation methods for job applicants, for applicants for university places, all of these are somehow biased. By weighting the scales in favor of these disadvantaged groups, we can somehow get them into environments where their real abilities will flower and that they will eventually find themselves achieving at the levels of whites, and perhaps of Asians. I think it’s a well-intentioned policy, but it results in the kind of discrimination which, if practiced to the benefit of whites and to the detriment of blacks, would be instantly denounced as unconscionable racism. I think affirmative action racial policies of this kind are an inevitable outgrowth of this will to universal equality, be it the male — female, be it racial, be it social classes, this tremendous desire that everything and everyone be equal, coupled with a willful blindness towards the biological effects of race.

In a way, although I would never have guessed it at the time, I think that racial preference policies are an inevitable result once you pass a law like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law forbids racial discrimination in employment, for example, and in a number of other things as well, but the only way that you can demonstrate lack of discrimination satisfactorily to those who will suspect you of it is to show that you have people of all different races equally represented in every level in every function. In order to achieve this, you’re going to have to have racial preference policies. In other words, you have to engage in racial discrimination in order to convince a suspicious third party that you are not engaging in racial discrimination. We have an absolutely absurd situation in the United States, and anyway things are changing now, and I foresee the eventual demise of official racial preferences of this kind, but for the past couple of decades, we had a situation in which whites who were opposed to racial discrimination directed at themselves were, of course, accused of racism. It’s really a topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland state of affairs, but once again, I think it derives almost inevitably from this overwhelming desire for equality of outcome, coupled with an absolute unwillingness to investigate biology. But if you’re asking whether I was ever a victim of racial preferences of this kind and that this somehow fueled my interest in this, the answer is no. I may have been a victim of some kind, but I’ve never been particularly conscious of it.

Interview: How did you get interested in black/white issues? A number of years ago you wrote a book about Japanese culture but didn’t indicate at that time that you had any special interest in American racial issues. How did your interest in this area come about?

Jared Taylor: Well, that’s a good question, and I don’t have a satisfactory answer for it. I was born in Japan. I lived there until I was sixteen years old. I was for that reason a racial minority, I suppose. I attended all-Japanese schools, and children are very conscious of differences. To some degree, I was picked on because I was different, but, believe it or not — and most people refuse to believe this — I say it with as much conviction as I can muster, I don’t think that experience had any effect whatsoever on my current racial views. When I left Japan at age sixteen to come to the United States to go to college, I was very much a conventional liberal as far as race is concerned. My views on race didn’t change ... well, they certainly didn’t change while I was in college, and it was only gradually as I studied history and as I did a fair amount of traveling — I spent several years in West Africa — it was a process of time and various experiences. There are very few particular discrete events that I can point to. I realize that may seem unsatisfactory to you, but I just don’t have a good answer for that question.

Interview: Is there any particular time period that you could point to where your interests in this subject began to grow?

Jared Taylor: I suppose in my thirties, I would guess. It was — let’s see, I attended graduate school from 1976 to 1978. I took my graduate degree in France after having lived in Africa for awhile.

Interview: What was your degree in?

Jared Taylor: It was in international economics. And, then, I suppose, gosh . . it was a very gradual process. I would say from maybe the late seventies on, I began to be interested in racial questions and also to become increasingly struck by the racial double standards that prevailed in our country. But, as I say, I’m just not able to point to many particular specific instances that changed my mind.

Interview: What are some of the specific instances of the racial double standards that bothered you?

Jared Taylor: For one, the way crime is reported. I remember ... what was that famous crime in New York City? It was before the Bensonhurst killing.

I’ve forgotten now what it was called, but it was a case in which there had been a racial confrontation between blacks and whites in Brooklyn, if I’m not mistaken. The whites came back and chased one of the blacks ...

Interview: Howard Beach?

Jared Taylor: Yes, Howard Beach, that’s exactly right. That was a huge, huge, huge media hullabaloo, and I remember thinking, well, wait a minute, wait a minute, if America is this horrible racist country, this sort of thing should be happening all the time. Why is this such an enormous media event? Why are we wringing our hands so dismally over this particular crime? I remember that that was one that struck me as very strange, whereas you would read about killings of whites by blacks with no particular investigation into their racial motives, and even if racial motives were uncovered, there was no national hand-wringing that went along with it ... that’s a double standard many people are aware of, and it’s one that probably nudged me in the directions I was already moving in.

I think perhaps living in Africa made me more open to the possibility of biological differences between the races. There you see Africans in Africa, and you encounter a certain inertness of mind and spirit among many Africans. It’s not universal, of course, and partly it has to do with endemic diseases, but I think that that began to open my mind to the possibility of there being biological differences that were mental as well as physical. Of course, as soon as you start looking into at least the race and IQ question, there’s just a tremendous amount of literature out there, and I ended up finding it quite convincing. The attempts to refute the geneticist point of view on these differences, although they get a lot of popular acclaim — books like The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J. Gould, for example — they’re not even very honest, but they’re just not convincing. I think science and the facts all line up in a very, very persuasive way to support the view that there are these biological differences.

Interview: You say in Paved with Good Intentions that there is no other subject about which public pronouncements diverge so sharply from private opinions as in the area of race. Do white people, in your experience, say things in private about race that they don’t say in public?

Jared Taylor: Well, I suppose that in the circle of white people that I move in, it tends to be somewhat unusual in this respect. They say in private the very things they say in public, but I think that’s unusual. Well, let me just give you an example. I think actions, after all, speak louder than words.

Take our beloved “Great White Father” William Clinton. He has been praising racial diversity for a long time, and he looks forward to the day when differential birthrates and increasing nonwhite immigration will reduce whites to a minority, and yet I suspect he couldn’t name a single, nonwhite neighborhood that he’d like to live in. I think that there’s a tremendous hypocrisy about this. If I’m feeling mean, I’ll sometimes ask a racial liberal, I’ll ask him is integration something worth striving for?

Is it important for blacks and whites or Hispanics, people of different races, to be together more often than they are? And almost invariably they’ll say that it is important, and yet I know of no one who has for that reason decided to buy a house in a Mexican neighborhood, or a Haitian neighborhood. Here is a profoundly significant and important act of integration that each one of us could perform. I know of no one who has done that, and I think that in that sense, people’s actions do speak quite loudly. Whites don’t want to live among large numbers of nonwhites. They don’t like it, and although very few of them will say so, they certainly act upon those impulses when their neighborhood or their school or their church becomes nonwhite. I think that it’s pure hypocrisy to pretend otherwise. I forgot what your question was.

Interview: Well, that pretty much answered it. I asked you whether whites often say things about race in private which they don’t say in public.

Jared Taylor: That’s right. Well, the New Century Foundation, of which I am president, just conducted a poll. We hired one of these polling firms to do this, and we asked the question two different ways. One of the questions was: Would you prefer to live in a neighborhood where your race is the majority or your race is a minority? We offered three different replies. One was, I prefer that it be the majority, the other is that I prefer it to be a minority, and the other is that it makes no difference.

Well, what would you guess were the sorts of answers we got from whites? Given the choice of I’d rather “be a majority,” rather “be a minority,” or “makes no difference,” what percent ... think about it for a moment, and tell me what sort of answers we are likely to get from a representative sample of whites.

Interview: I would assume you’d get a vast majority saying they would rather be with their own group as the majority.

Jared Taylor: Well, the overwhelming majority claimed that it makes no difference. [Laughter]

Interview: And you interpreted that to mean that they weren’t being honest with the pollsters?

Jared Taylor: Well, who am I to impute dishonesty to my fellow Americans, but 70 percent said that it makes no difference [laughter]. No, I don’t think they’re being honest.

Interview: Judging from where they actually move, you’re saying that they’re not telling even an anonymous pollster in public what they actually believe privately?

Jared Taylor: Nope, I don’t think they do. About 25 percent said they’d rather be the majority, and then 1 percent said they’d like to be a minority. I think the idea that it makes no difference, that’s a joke! I mean, for a very small number of whites, perhaps it does make no difference, but for 70 percent to claim that it makes no difference, I just don’t think they’re being honest, and this, of course, is because attitudes toward race today have become a kind of touchstone of morality. The overwhelming view in this country, at least publicly, at least officially, is that people who take my view on race are moral inferiors. My views are loathsome, retrograde, hate-filled, and very few people, even if in their bones they believe as I do, are prepared to face that kind of condemnation.

Interview: Many a reader of Paved with Good Intentions who would agree with many of the things you say in the book regarding the behavior of blacks and the attitudes of blacks and whites toward each other would nevertheless criticize you for lacking a certain compassion or fellow-feeling with the underclass blacks whose often self-destructive and socially destructive behavior you described in very vivid terms.

How would you respond to that kind of a criticism?

Jared Taylor: Of insufficient sympathy?

Interview: Yes.

Jared Taylor: Well, perhaps I would only dig myself further into a hole if I were to say that I’m not sure I have any less sympathy for black degenerates than I do for white degenerates. I think that by and large we can’t blame the factors outside ourselves for what we do. And I think that part of the problem in the United States has to do with an unwillingness to tell people that it is their own fault. Blaming the victim is almost a cliché phrase these days, but I think there is a real hesitancy among any kind of public person, certainly a politician or journalist, to say, “Well, yes, these people are poor because they’re lazy,” or, “These people are in jail because they’re just bad.” And I’m not restricting these observations to any particular racial group. I think there are plenty of whites who are a very bad lot, and they deserve to be in jail, and they deserve to be poor. Now that may sound like a very heartless thing; on the other hand, I think that charity — and I make this case pretty strongly in Paved with Good Intentions — I think charity should be voluntary, and not engineered by the government, but that’s more a principled classic libertarian position than one that has anything to do with race. I think that if you were to criticize my attitudes toward the black underclass, I think you would probably have to make the same criticism of any libertarian view of social or economic differences.

Interview: To what extent have government policies and programs, in your view, either increased or decreased racial tensions in America?

What government policies or programs would you like to see changed and which ones retained?

Jared Taylor: Well, I think the obvious culprit in terms of increasing racial tension is our immigration policy. Up until 1965, we had an immigration policy that was designed, I think, to keep the country white. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think that’s a healthy, normal, and natural position for a country to take. I think Japan should stay Japanese. I think Mexico should stay Mexican. Some think somehow that it’s virtuous of the United States, after having been founded and built by Europeans, according to European institutions, to reinvent itself or transform itself into a nonwhite country with a Third World population. I think that’s a kind of cultural and racial national suicide.

We never had a tremendous amount of, say, black — Hispanic hostility in this country, because there weren’t any Hispanics ... or only a very small number of Hispanics. But now there are jails in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and certainly lots in many parts of Texas and California, that are sometimes in a virtually constant state of lockdown because Hispanic and black prisoners will be at each others’ throats if you let them mingle in the day rooms. Or when prisoners riot, one of their first demands is almost invariably that they be separated by race. They don’t like to be mixed up together, and, after all, prison is a kind of forced intimacy with strangers that many of us can’t even imagine, and to share that forced intimacy with people who are of different races and who often have quite a strong racial consciousness, this is an extremely disagreeable experience. But, once again, this kind of experience, which has become increasingly common, of having to deal with some kind of racial tensions or racial barrier, this problem has been terribly exacerbated by our immigration policies. We now have, oh, groups of Haitians in Florida, many of whom don’t get along well with American blacks, for heaven’s sake, much less with Hispanics. Asians have by and large done very well in contact with whites, but I’m sure you are familiar with the conflicts between Koreans and blacks. In Detroit, we have the conflicts between what are called the Chaldeans — my recollection is that they are Christian Iraqis — between Chaldeans and blacks. Wherever you go, wherever you mix racial groups, you’re going to have tensions, you’re going to have friction, and to have an immigration policy that imports millions of people of all sorts of different racial and ethnic groups, I think it’s bound to cause racial tension.

I know that some people take what is to me an absolutely absurd view, namely that, well, okay, yes, there’s racism in this country ... well, we’ll solve racism or we’ll try to improve the situation by getting more and more different kinds of people. Well, that just makes things worse. And to me, the notion that somehow America is going to be improved by gradually swapping out the founding stock and replacing it with people from the four corners of the earth, people who are as unlike each other as it’s possible to be, that that’s somehow going to be an improvement and a source of strength and goodness, truth, and beauty, it’s just absurd. It’s absurd. It’s absurd on the face of it. And to me it’s just astonishing that grown people can even pretend that it’s true. Of course, a great many people do, but I think it’s because they’ve essentially been brainwashed. It’s like pretending that the racial composition of your neighborhood doesn’t matter. We’re all now more or less obligated to say, “Oh! Diversity is a wonderful thing for the country,” whereas, practically every example of tension, bloodshed, civil unrest around the world is due to precisely the kind of thing we’re importing — diversity. So that to me is the one government policy that I think is ultimately suicidal, and I would certainly change that. I would completely revamp the immigration law.

Frankly, I don’t see the point of having more people. Why should the United States be increasing its population at Third World rates.

When was the last time you were out driving on the highway and you thought to yourself, “My gosh! There’s just not enough cars on the highway — I wish there were more!” Or when’s the last time you went up to a checkout counter in a supermarket and there was no line, and you thought, “Oh, my gosh! I wish there were more people. I wish there were people to stand behind!” Or, when were you out in the country-side, and you saw green hills and forest, and you thought, “My gosh! How ugly! I wish there were a strip mall there. I wish there were more people here.” The idea that somehow 270 million people isn’t enough, the whole business is cuckoo as far as I am concerned. Why do we import more people? Do we need more people? I certainly don’t think so.

In any case, government policies — what would I change? Well, gosh, you see, I think the federal government has no business passing race-related laws at all. I think, if you read the Constitution, you would find absolutely no federal authority for passing antidiscrimination laws of any kind, and I would certainly repeal every one of the antidiscrimination laws that the United States Congress has passed. There’s nothing in the Constitution that prevents states from passing antidiscrimination laws, or, for that matter — depending on how you read the Reconstruction amendments — from passing discriminatory laws. But I think everything, everything from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 onward in terms of antidiscrimination — including laws against sexual discrimination — I think all of that is an unconscionable invasion of federal government power into what should be private decision making. I mean, after all, there is no real qualitative difference in the government telling you that you must not discriminate on the basis of race when you hire someone and the very same government telling you that you must not discriminate on the basis of race when you marry someone.

Interview: Are those two cases comparable in terms of the level of intimacy and privacy that is involved?

Jared Taylor: Well, some people spend more time with their employees than they do with their wives. No, I think most people would say that obviously marriage is the more intimate relationship, but at what degree of intimacy are we allowed to discriminate and at what degree are we forbidden to discriminate. I think that it’s clear that, oh, when people choose their church congregations, it’s often lamented that 11:00 a.m., Sunday morning, is the most segregated hour in America. That reflects natural, unfettered preferences, and I don’t think that it’s the government’s right to interfere with those natural, unfettered preferences.

After all, what’s known technically as a refusal to deal — that is to say, if I refuse to hire you or if I refuse to sell you something, refuse to do business with you, I’ve not actually harmed you because you are no worse off than you were before our encounter and my refusal. But I think the refusal to deal or the refusal to associate is one of the absolutely fundamental human rights — or should be. It certainly was one of the essential rights of an Englishman, the freedom of association, and I think to have given that up as nonchalantly as we did has led to all manner of mischief ... that was the camel’s nose under the tent. Now, we are obliged to at least pretend not to discriminate on the basis of all kinds of other things.

Interview: Where do Asians fit in here. You suggest that Asians, unlike Hispanics and blacks, integrate well with whites. How would you describe your vision of the future for America in regard to Asians?

Jared Taylor: Well, let’s see ... I think Asians are objectively superior to whites by just about any measure that you can come up with in terms of what are the ingredients for a successful society. This doesn’t mean that I want America to become Asian. I think every people has the right to be itself, and this becomes clear whether we’re talking about Irian Jaya or Tibet, for that matter. No one would defend the wholesale incursion of non — New Guineans into Irian Jaya, changing their way of life, even though we might think that objectively the standards of civilization on New Guinea are extremely low and the level of culture is abysmal. We might accept that cultural differences objectively exist and yet be completely opposed to the displacement of that culture and those people by those with a culture that we might describe as superior. By the same token, even if Asians build societies superior to those built by white people, I think white people are perfectly legitimate in preferring the kinds of societies that they build. And I think they have the right to build those societies.

Interview: What about Jews? Where do Jews fit into your picture?

Many of the white nationalist or white pride publications have a deep hostility toward Jews. Your organization though, or at least your magazine, has had a number of Jews who have written articles for it. What are your views regarding the Jews? Are they considered “white”?

Jared Taylor: Oh, I think European Jews are Europeans, sure.

Interview: So you don’t see any problem with Jews integrating into American society?

Jared Taylor: I think if they — if European Jews wish to assimilate — I think many of them have and do. I don’t see any particular problem there. I think it’s unquestionably the fact that, by and large, Jews tend to be more liberal on the kinds of questions that we’ve been talking about. I think there are all sorts of historical reasons for that, but I don’t think Jews, simply because they are Jews, are necessarily going to be not part of a European nation.

But if I could back up and make another point about this issue of displacement. People can work up a certain amount of sympathy for the Tibetans, for example, because Han Chinese are coming in and displacing them and their culture, and yet we’re not supposed to feel sympathy for whites in the United States, despite the fact that they are being displaced. Ultimately, what I’m concerned about is the survival of my people. And I have the bad taste to be earnest about that question, and if you were to imagine a situation ... if you were to imagine the reverse situation in which, say, hundreds of thousands of whites were pouring across the border into Mexico, insisting on school instruction in English, ballot papers in English, celebrating the Fourth of July rather than Cinco de Mayo, and buying up radio and television stations and broadcasting in English, and some of them perhaps even muttering darkly about breaking off chunks of northern Mexico and turning it into an all-white nation, it would be impossible to trick the Mexicans into thinking that this was some sort of cultural enrichment. It’s only whites that have been brainwashed and bamboozled into thinking that somehow it’s a virtue to be displaced by people unlike themselves.

Now since you raised the question of Jews, I might quote to you Yitzhak Rabin. Not long before he was assassinated, he told U.S. News& World Report that he had done many things as a leader of Israel of which he was proud, but the thing that he cared most about was that Israel remain at least 80 percent Jewish. Well, what he’s saying is that the character of Israel is dependent on its people. Israel, in order to be Israel, must be Jewish, and to the extent that Israel ceases to be Jewish, it will not be Israeli in the sense that’s meaningful for him. By the same token, in my view, the United States of America as founded by my ancestors is a white nation, and as it ceases to be white, it will change in ways that are as unacceptable to me as it would be unacceptable to Yitzhak Rabin should Israel cease to be Jewish.

Interview: America was settled primarily by people from northern and western Europe, but in the last years of the nineteenth century there was an influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans, who, over time, integrated well into America. I am thinking particularly of Italians, Poles, Romanians, Jews, Russians, and so on. Why can’t the same process proceed and expand the circle of who is considered American to include Hispanics and people of African ancestry?

Jared Taylor: Well, I think you know what my answer to that question will be.

Yes, it’s frequently pointed out that there was nativist sentiment, oh, against Germans, for heaven sakes, and certainly against Southern Europeans, and that, yes, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, many of them have integrated very nicely in the United States. The analogy, of course, is that the people who were nativist then are just as wrong as today’s nativists — that Haitians and Guatemalans and everyone else will integrate just as the Italians and the Poles did. That overlooks a number of things. First of all, it overlooks race, which is a subject most people don’t wish to talk about. We have a bubbling successful melting pot in this country so long as the ingredients are essentially European. It overlooks the fact also that there are two racial groups in this country that have been here for far longer than the Hungarians and Poles, namely, blacks and American Indians, who are still in some respects on the margins of society. The white ethnics integrated because they’re white.

They assimilated because they are white, whereas blacks and American Indians, who have been here far longer, didn’t assimilate because they’re not white. Race is this great biological barrier, and so long as you have that biological barrier, it’s one that will always, in my view, be an obstacle to assimilation and to building up any kind of strong, national unity or national consciousness. So, really, the obstacle once again is race. It would be as if language were an immutable characteristic, then the Germans, the Poles, the Hungarians would not have assimilated. Well, race is by and large an immutable characteristic, and for that reason it becomes a barrier, whereas language and culture, and to some extent religion, are not.

Interview: What about intermarriage? When people of different races intermarry and they produce mixed-race offspring, the racial lines are blurred. Many people think that intermarriage on a large scale is the ultimate answer to racial cleavages and racial divisions.

Jared Taylor: Well, even if it were to take place, it would not bring about the end of racial conflict. As I’m sure you know, even among blacks there is a considerable amount of conflict just based on the skin tone — lighter-skinned blacks and darker-skinned blacks. I think that if we were all of mixed race, I don’t think that would bring about an end to racial conflict. At the same time, I think that would be a biological disaster.

It’s interesting to me that the people who talk about celebrating diversity are sometimes the ones who wish to destroy biological diversity or racial diversity. I think that it is entirely natural for people to want their children to be like their ancestors. I think there’s something basic and fundamental about that desire, and that is of course why there is as little interracial marriage as there is. People are loyal to their language, to their culture, to their race, to their own appearance, to the appearance of their ancestors. And I think to mix everything up into a kind of stew, I think that would be a biological and social and cultural disaster. In effect, though, what is being proposed is not the elimination of races, because no one proposes that as a solution for any sort of problems you might find in Asia or Africa. It’s the solution that one proposes only for the United States or perhaps for Europe. So in effect what is proposed by this massive miscegenation scheme is not the elimination of race, it’s the elimination of whites. Why should I be in favor of this so-called solution that results in the elimination of my race?

Interview: Many people would characterize American Renaissance as a racist publication. How do you respond to charges of that kind, and if “racist” is an inappropriate label to describe your views, what sort of label do you prefer?

Jared Taylor: Well, “racist” is inappropriate because it’s pejorative, and I think that my views on race are perfectly natural, normal, and healthy, and I wish everyone had them. So it’s not acceptable to me that my views be labeled with this emotional and morally charged term. Unfortunately, having rejected that and just about any other label you’d propose, I don’t have one to offer in its place, because the way I view race is something that has been the way Americans viewed race up until just a few decades ago, and so there was never really any term to describe it. I think my views on race are by and large quite similar to those of Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, to those of practically every American president clear up until John Kennedy, and because those were the views that were taken for granted by virtually every American, there’s no word to describe them. It’s only after those views became a moral failing that we had to cook up terms to describe those views. It would be a little like, say, if we were living in a kibbutzim society and the theory was that all children were to be reared in common, and yet there were a few odd holdouts who insisted on loving their own children more than the children of people that were not their own. And suddenly you came up with a derogatory term for them — let’s call them, I don’t know, “familial-centrists” and that became a terrible pejorative term. How would the people who thought that it was entirely legitimate to love their children more than the children of others, how would they reply if asked to come up with a word to describe themselves. I just don’t know, but that is the situation I find myself in. In other words, my views on race are those that have always been the mainstream. There was no word to describe them because it was the mainstream, just as there is no word to describe people who love their own children more than they love the children of strangers.

When someone suddenly demands that I come up with a term to describe those views, I am at a loss.

Interview: You think that a certain type of racial/ethnic pride is not only natural but healthy and good and you don’t begrudge other people their racial and ethnic pride. Would that be an accurate description of your views here?

Jared Taylor: Yes, certainly. I think not only is it healthy and good, ultimately it’s necessary. If whites have no sense of racial consciousness, they will simply disappear. They will either disappear through miscegenation, or they will disappear through displacement. And, you see the crazy thing about the United States today is that for someone to be conscious of being white and happy to be white, this is equated with hatred, and yet if someone is conscious of being Asian or happy to be black or proud to be Hispanic, that’s considered normal, healthy ethnic pride. Only for whites is this essential sense of group consciousness forbidden and considered to be some form of moral failing. As I say, ultimately, any group has to have some form of group cohesiveness or group consciousness in order to survive. General Motors, the people who work for General Motors, have to put the interests of General Motors before those of Ford or Chrysler. If they don’t, General Motors will disappear and collapse. It’s the same for any group, any team, any family. If I don’t put the interests of my family before the interest of strangers, my family disappears. It will collapse. It’s the same with a race. All other races take this absolutely for granted, and the odd thing is even whites who would disallow racial solidarity for whites are happy to permit it and encourage it among nonwhites. But, yes, I have no animosity whatsoever for people of different races, people of different groups. I think that, in fact, when illiterate Mexicans cross the border into the United States, it’s impossible for me to fault them. They’re looking for a better life for their children, and they are coming from a society that has made a mess of a lot of things to a society that has done a better job on many of those things. It is an entirely natural thing for them to do, and it is difficult for me to fault them for it. The people that I fault are the people who run this society, who in effect want to open up their own society, open up their own house, and let a bunch of strangers move into it.

Or, they want to open up my house and let strangers move into my house. That’s what is insane. What the nonwhites are doing is perfectly understandable.

Interview: Haven’t immigrants, though, contributed greatly to America in terms of their energy, their enthusiasm, their willingness to work harder than Americans?

Jared Taylor: Which immigrants?

Interview: Well, immigrants from all over. For instance, the Mexican immigrants certainly work at jobs that most whites won’t take and will do it with a great deal of enthusiasm and a sense of satisfaction.

Jared Taylor: Well, picking tomatoes, for example. Sure, people who are desperately poor, who come from a society where the average wage is about one-sixth of the American minimum wage are certainly going to accept jobs that white Americans are going to be reluctant to take. And it is certainly going to make it easier for people running companies that depend on labor to manufacture products less expensively. There’s an economic argument made for importing people who are willing to work for next to nothing. Of course there is. Is that kind of argument going to be the basis for building a successful nation? I think the answer to that question is obviously no. I just read a newspaper article today about Los Angeles. It said that if they were to apply real academic standards for graduating students in the L.A. public school system from one grade to another, they would have to flunk half the students there.

That’s half the students. In other words, you don’t get cheap labor all in a vacuum all by itself. At the same time, you get racial problems, you get language problems, you get Hispanic solidarity, you get Hispanic groups, you get the second generation of Hispanics who are not willing to work in the fields the way their parents did. It is a very, very shortsighted and short-term solution to a problem that I think in a healthy society would be solved domestically. No, the answer obviously is that white people are capable of picking tomatoes, white people have picked tomatoes for centuries. Perhaps the price of tomatoes would go up, but the price of law enforcement, the price of schools, the price of social stability, the price of the integrity of our culture, all of these things would be much less, even if the price of tomatoes were higher.

Interview: The kind of white pride or white nationalist viewpoint that you articulate in American Renaissance is often identified in America with the less educated and poorer elements of the white population.

You, obviously, don’t fit into this group. You are educated, you are articulate, and people who know you say you have all the refinement and manners of a courtly gentleman. Do you see white nationalist or white pride-type of thinking — or whatever we want to label the sort of thinking represented by American Renaissance — do you see this type of thinking as gaining ground among the better-educated middle and upper-middle classes in America?

Jared Taylor: Oh, I think it’s certainly gaining ground, and I think it’s inevitable that it will gain ground. I think that as whites become more beleaguered, more criticized, as their influence and numbers dwindle, they will resist. It’s amazing to me that they have resisted as little as they have, but I think that an increase of resistance is inevitable, absolutely inevitable. I just don’t think white people — there is maybe what? 175 million white people in this country — I don’t think they’re going to smilingly and gladly walk off the stage of history and say, okay, fine, our culture and our institutions can be taken over by others, and we will gladly step aside. No people in the history of the world has ever done that, and whites are in the process of doing it, but I think there is gradually a certain firming of resistance to this process of dispossession.

Interview: We celebrate in America annually the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. What is your opinion of Dr. King and the black-led civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in which he played so prominent a role?

Jared Taylor: I think, well, Martin Luther King is as close to a secular saint as the United States has ever produced. I think that there is no ... probably no person about whom criticism is ... well, so frowned upon. I don’t know if you recall when it was learned that he had plagiarized his Ph.D. thesis and in fact plagiarized quite a few things that he had written. This fact was sedulously kept from the public, and even when the press learned of this, American newspapers refused to publish it. It was a British newspaper that first broke this story. Now contrast that, if you will, with the ill-concealed glee with which the press reported on the DNA analysis that reported that Thomas Jefferson could well have been the father of Sally Hemmings’s third son. I think the contrast here is astonishing. We are perfectly prepared to catch the third president in hypocrisy and in a lie, and yet we are very, very hesitant to call to public attention anything that could be considered unfortunate about Martin Luther King’s character. The fact that he was an inveterate womanizer is something that we’re not supposed to consider, the fact that he had communist sympathies and a number of very, very left-leaning advisors, these are things that we are supposed to leave completely out of the equation when it’s time to determine what sort of monument we’re to build to Martin Luther King on the Mall.

Now, as far as Martin Luther King’s own interests are concerned, I don’t blame him for that at all. I think he was a black man who was interested in the welfare of black people, and I think he struggled his entire life for the good of black people. That’s exactly what black people are supposed to do. I don’t fault him for that in the slightest. What’s aberrant here is that what he was demanding for black people came by and large at the expense of whites and whites are supposed to be grateful for this. That is what is so entirely strange. Now, I do not defend the hierarchical arrangement that prevailed in the United States before the civil rights movement. I think it was an inevitable consequence of trying to build a society that was multiracial and a society in which this biologically salient fact had to be dealt with. Slavery was unjust, apartheid was unjust, Jim Crow was also unjust, but I think our prevailing situation is likewise unjust. If it’s not unjust, it’s untenable and ultimately will lead to a United States in which whites lose their majority and lose their culture. So as far as the civil rights movement is concerned, as I say, I don’t at all fault the blacks who wished to destroy white freedom of association. I do fault whites who worked to destroy white freedom of association, and I do fault whites for having given it up so easily. There was a famous debate, I believe, between James Farmer and some rather thoughtful black spokesman in the early 1960s who realized that by forcing whites to give up freedom of association, blacks, too, were theoretically giving up freedom of association, and if a black congressman, for example, or a black newspaper editor wishes to hire only black employees, that of course should be his right, and these days that kind of racial preference is almost never criticized. But theoretically it should be criticized just as loudly as the preferences of whites to hire only whites. In any case, this is a long and roundabout answer to your question. I don’t think that Martin Luther King is by any stretch of the imagination a national hero. You could consider him a black hero. He was very successful at making whites feel guilty about exercising their freedom of association, and he was instrumental in destroying the right to freedom of association, but to then make him a national hero for this I think is part of the insanity that prevails on virtually all questions of race in the country today.

Interview: Martin Luther King attracted to the civil rights movement a great number of supporters who were not black because he articulated a religiously based vision of universal human dignity that transcended race. His vision is well represented in the following quotation from his book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community.

Let me read this and have you comment on it: “Deeply rooted in our religious heritage is the conviction that every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Our Judeo-Christian tradition refers to this inherent dignity of man in the Biblical term ‘the image of God’. The image of God is universally shared in equal proportion by all men ... . Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him. The worth of an individual does not lie in the measure of his intellect, his racial origin or his social position ... . An individual has value because he has value to God. Whenever this is recognized, ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ pass away as determinants in a relationship and ‘son’ and ‘brother’ are substituted.” What is your view of King’s vision here? Isn’t it powerful enough, and inspiring enough, to serve as the basis for a harmonious, multiracial society in America?

Jared Taylor: What he is proposing here is that race be transcended. And you are right to point out that this vision of brotherhood was one that attracted whites as well as blacks. It is very appealing to think of America as a place where racial and other divisions are beneath us and that we can all live in happy unity, but I am convinced this is a vision that runs counter to human nature. You know what it reminds me of?

Communism. The idea of communism was to build a society in which people would live “from each according to his ability to each according to his need.” The idea was to transcend selfishness, and this also was a vision that inspired many people. But what was the result? Forced collectivization, endless purges, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, slaughter in Cambodia — not to mention economic systems that were terrible failures. Communism was a high, inspiring ideal, but it was a misreading of human nature that produced one calamity after another. The Soviet Union staggered on for more than seventy years under this impossible system and will be paying the price of communist folly for years to come.

My view is that the attempt to transcend race is just as much a misreading of human nature as the attempt to transcend self-interest. We now have precisely the kind of ideological orthodoxy, hypocrisy, and refusal to acknowledge the obvious that characterizes the Soviet Union — except that we suffer from racial delusions rather than economic delusions. Sure, the idea of transcending an age-old source of conflict appeals to people. But I think the American experience clearly shows it is not possible to transcend race, and I think we should acknowledge the importance of race rather than keep pursuing an ideal that each new generation finds impossible to achieve.

Interview: What would you do regarding the black people who live in the United States today? You don’t believe that members of different races get along very well, but it’s not clear that you support a more radical separationist policy either. What would the racial landscape of America look like if your vision for the future were realized, whatever that vision might be?

Jared Taylor: That’s a good question. No, I don’t believe in forcibly driving people out of the country, for goodness sake! I don’t believe in antimiscegenation laws, for example. They were very common in the United States. I believe twenty-four states had them on the books up until 1963 or 1964 or thereabouts when the Supreme Court struck them down. I don’t believe in forcible separation any more than I do in forcible integration, but I do think that there comes a point at which the United States has to ask itself what sort of nation does it wish to be. I think the majority of whites do not want to leave to their grandchildren a Third World nation, which is what we will do if current immigration policies continue. What I would do is to stop immigration, and I would overturn all antidiscrimination laws. At that point, what one might do after that I’m really not certain. Of course, if we were to get to the point where the United States were to stop immigration, even if only in part for racial reasons, or if we were to overthrow antidiscrimination laws for racial reasons, it’s possible that the sentiments that resulted in those change of policies might result in other policies, too, but I wouldn’t go any further than that myself.

Interview: Is there anything we haven’t asked you about that you would like to address, any issues or any problems that haven’t been mentioned that you’d like to discuss?

Jared Taylor: Well, I probably should have been keeping a checklist of essentials here. But if I can elaborate on an analogy I was hitting on earlier ... when people criticize my views of race, I think it really is no different from the way people feel about their own children. They do love their children more than they love the children of strangers. That doesn’t mean they have the slightest ill will toward the children of other people, and that’s the way I feel about race. I think race is one’s extended family. In fact, the word “nation” comes from the Latin that means to be born — nascare, I believe is the past participle, meaning to be born. And a nation is, I think, the largest group of people to which one can feel a kind of familial association — and it is perfectly natural, normal, and healthy to want one’s people to prosper and, certainly, to survive. And in that sense it’s an extension of the legitimate feelings that we have for our family, and once again legitimate feelings that do not require or even imply any ill will to those not of our family.

Interview: But you don’t believe that either blacks or Hispanics can become part of that family and that commonality of feeling that constitutes the national relationship?

Jared Taylor: I think in certain very unusual cases it can happen, but I think that once a language group, for example, or a racial group, reaches a certain critical mass, then the natural gravitational pull of that critical mass begins to compete inevitably with the larger loyalty to a nation, and so, no, you cannot have a multiracial nation in any kind of healthy sense. I think it’s impossible.

Interview: What about Switzerland? You have French speakers, German speakers, and Italian speakers, yet they consider themselves all to be Swiss?

Jared Taylor: Yes, I think that’s an example where the natural centripetal forces of language seem to be pretty well under control. It’s not exactly a frictionless environment either though.

As you know, it has very strong cantonal government. Nobody can name the president of Switzerland because the federal government has very little power. There’s lots of local autonomy, which is the kind of thing that’s required in a situation like that. At the same time, in Belgium you have the Flemish speakers and the French speakers, who are practically prepared to break the country apart on the strength of language. Quebec, of course, came very, very close to voting itself right out of Canada. All of these divisions are very important ones, and I think language is not as salient a social fault line as race, and I think, by and large, when you do have linguistic blocs in a country, wherever you look, you’ll find that there’s tension — the Czechs and the Slovaks decided they were better off going their separate ways. Was that such a bad thing? No, I don’t think so. I think they’re happier that way, and more power to them. The Slovenians and the Croatians and the Bosnians, they’re all happier living separately from each other. The Jews and the Arabs, they’re happier living apart. It’s almost impossible to think of any visibly or culturally or linguistically or religiously distinguishable groups coming together, embracing each other and saying, Yes! We want to live cheek by jowl with these people.

You know, the Navaho and the Hopi have long lived next door to each other. They have shared some of the same hunting grounds, and when their major reservation — I forget in which state it is — when their major reservation was established, the federal government was not going to draw any line and say this side is Hopi and this side is Navaho.

The Hopi and the Navaho insisted it be drawn, however. They wanted separate reservations, and I think that’s just the natural state of humanity. You can call it a fallen state, if you will, but that is the way we are, and I think to try to drive nature out through sheer ideology can only fail and only lead to suffering. In this case, of course, in the case of the United States, it’s whites who have essentially disarmed unilaterally in the face of the racial consciousness of others. It’s whites who are saying,

“Yes, race doesn’t matter.” “White people don’t have any legitimate racial interests.” “Oh, it’ll be wonderful when we become a minority.”

And, of course, they don’t really believe it. To me, it’s a kind of collective insanity.

Interview: And you think, though, that it won’t last very long, that whites will come to recognize what you are talking about and will adopt views more similar to your own?

Jared Taylor: Well, do you read Commentary?

Interview: Yes, actually I do.

Jared Taylor: Did you read Ron Unz’s article about — oh, I forget what it was called — it’s the latest issue.

Interview: I haven’t seen that yet. [California and the End of White America, Commentary, November, 1999]

Jared Taylor: He was writing about the fact that whites are now a minority in California, and he described white racial consciousness as the most potentially nation-breaking or nation-destroying phenomenon on the horizon. That’s a very ironic thing. In effect, he is trying to come up with ways to shepherd whites gently into dispossession, and he’s hoping for ways to persuade whites to accept minority status without developing any kind of racial consciousness. Well, I mean why should whites put up with that? Why should whites be happy to see their country transformed in the ways that demographic transformation will inevitably transform it? Why?! Why?! This is just crazy. He’s asking whites to quietly commit suicide, and I think that’s completely illegitimate and unfair.

Interview: Thank you.

[Reprinted with permission.]