Posted on May 9, 2008

Multiculturalism and the War Against White America

Lawrence Auster, American Renaissance, August 1994

Lawrence Auster

Lawrence Auster

Underlying everything we have heard at this conference are two bedrock truths about race and race relations that go against everything we have been taught. The first truth is that there are significant differences in average intelligence between different populations, and that such gaps in intelligence cannot be closed by any known human means.

The second truth is that not all groups are equally assimilable to each other, in the sense of the ability to come to share a common outlook, identity and way of being. The greater the historical and racial differences between two peoples, and the greater the numbers involved, the harder assimilation is going to be, and the more likely it becomes that conflict between such different peoples will be permanent.

Today’s liberal and conservative orthodoxies hold the opposite beliefs — first, that all racial groups are equal in inherent abilities, and second, that all racial groups in the world, no matter how different, are at bottom basically alike and equally assimilable into American culture.

The first belief, in the equality of abilities, leads to the notion that any actual differences in achievement between races must be due to discrimination, which is to be overcome by preferential racial quotas. The second belief, that everyone in the world is equally assimilable, has led to an immigration policy based on what are in effect racial quotas applied to the entire world. The continuing influx of over a million immigrants per year, 90 percent of them non-Europeans, combined with higher nonwhite birth rates, is steadily turning America into a multiracial, nonwhite country — a “mirror” of the entire world.

A good way to understand the impact of massive nonwhite immigration on American society is to compare it to the impact of preferential minority admissions in the university. As Dinesh D’Souza has described it in Illiberal Education, universities admit under-qualified minority students, while assuring them that they are perfectly well qualified. When these students find themselves having academic difficulties, they blame “institutional racism,” then they blame the curriculum itself, which they say is culturally alien to them.

The administration, not wanting to admit the truth, eagerly agrees with the minority activists that racism is at work. In effect, the administration makes the entire university community, especially the white students and the faculty, the scapegoat for a racial inequality that was created by the administration itself when it admitted unqualified minorities. The school then sets up coercive “anti-racist” programs and speech codes aimed at whites, and adopts multicultural curricula and intellectual standards that conform to minority cultures and “learning styles.” When white students protest these things, the minorities, in D’Souza’s words, “conclude that they have discovered the latent bigotry for which they have been searching.”

In sum, the result of admitting large numbers of unqualified minorities into a university is that whites start to be demonized as racist and are systematically silenced, while their civilizational heritage is attacked as unrepresentative and illegitimate and begins to be systematically dismantled.

Now if all these things happen when you admit large numbers of nonwhite students into a predominantly white school, what happens when you admit massive numbers of nonwhite immigrants into a predominantly white society? The very same things. The failure of the nonwhite population to fit into the society is blamed on the society itself, rather than on the fact that they were admitted in the first place. The white majority starts to be demonized as racist and is systematically silenced, while its civilization is attacked as unrepresentative and begins to be systematically dismantled. The great irony is that the admission of nonwhites is supposed to prove that the society is non-racist and egalitarian, yet the more nonwhites are admitted, the more racist and unequal the society seems.

Impact on American Life

While the “delegitimizing” impact of unassimilable immigrants can be seen in many areas of American life, in no other field is it more obvious than in the arts. Cultural institutions in cities with large third-world populations are rapidly abandoning the Western high culture tradition in favor of third-world folk cultures. According to music critic Edward Rothstein writing in the New Republic, the new immigrants simply aren’t interested in Western music:

[S]trikingly in a city like New York, [classical music culture] is largely a racially stratified culture as well: there are almost no black or immigrant faces (aside from Asians) to be seen in concert halls . . . My neighborhood arts organization, like many others around the country, has been unsuccessful in marketing Western art music to the new racial and international communities in the area. So instead they’ve begun presenting the folk musics of immigrant and black cultures.

The same applies to the theater. “The reason that Broadway appeals less to New Yorkers these days,” writes theater critic Thomas Disch, “isn’t just that Broadway has changed: so have New Yorkers . . . [A] glance around the lobby at any Broadway show reveals who isn’t there: any of the city’s readily identifiable minorities — blacks, Hispanics, Asians . . .”

Theatrical companies have tried to address the problem by introducing multiracial casts into Western plays, but have been disturbed to find that the audiences for such multiracial productions are still almost exclusively white. Evidently, third-worlders are simply not attracted to Western theater, even when it has lots of nonwhites in the cast. Since changing the cast doesn’t work, the only solution will be to give up the plays themselves. The irony is that these problems, are not seen as the result of nonwhites’ lack of interest in Western culture, and therefore as proof of their non-assimilability; rather, Western culture itself is blamed for not appealing to nonwhites.

Artistic images of American history are also coming under attack. Rush Limbaugh recently noted that the state of Oregon, after commissioning a beautiful bronze statue of a 19th century pioneer family, had rejected the completed statue because the image of a white pioneer family was considered “racist” and “noninclusive.” While Rush was unusually upset about this incident, it didn’t seem to occur to him that it had anything to do with demographic change — i.e., that it is our society’s increasingly nonwhite character that is making any “all-white” image seem unrepresentative and therefore illegitimate.

In 1993, there was an angry protest by black and Hispanic students at the University of Massachusetts who wanted the school to dump its official symbol, the Minuteman. The image of a “white man carrying a gun,” they charged, was racist. For the time being the school has resisted this demand. But for how long? As the university’s white population continues to decline, can we expect the Chinese and Pakistani students and administrators of the future to care enough about the image of the Minuteman to defend it against intimidating black and Hispanic protesters? Who will preserve the symbols of our Anglo-European national heritage after whites are gone?

Indeed, who will defend that heritage even now, while whites are still the majority? On Long Island this past Spring, a school production of Peter Pan was canceled at the last minute, after six weeks of rehearsals, because the town’s American Indian minority felt that the play’s portrayal of Indians (which, remember, is simply a childlike fantasy taking place in Never-Never Land) was insulting to them. So, to accommodate multiracial America, this classic play that we all remember with fondness from our childhood is to be proscribed. The most significant thing about the incident was that no one in the town, including the parents whose children had their play taken away from them, seriously protested this outrage.

In an even more horrifying example of white surrender, an elite private school in New England was considering hiring a well-known multicultural curriculum consultant when it was discovered that the consultant — a Caribbean-born black woman based in Toronto — had admitted in a published interview that her approach would make white children feel intimidated and guilty. After some discussion, the school’s board of trustees went ahead and hired her anyway.

These are examples of what is happening to our entire country and culture. As America becomes more and more nonwhite, everything we think of as the American culture and identity will be either censored, squeezed out or transformed into something else.

The response of establishment conservatives to these concerns is to say that such problems are created not by immigrants but by alienated white elites, as well as by the general moral decay of our society. “It is true that radical and liberal elites in education, government, and media appear to be doing everything they can to destroy whatever is left of traditional America, and they might well be doing so even if there were no immigrants at all.” But we must understand that even if there were no “cultural revolution” going on in this country, the kind of massive demographic change we are experiencing as a result of immigration would still be enough, by itself, to destabilize and ultimately destroy our culture.

The list of horrors proving this point goes on and on: the dominance of Latin American mores and language in southern Florida; the transformation of southern California into an outpost of the third world; multiracial juries unable to reach verdicts because jury members don’t share any common understanding of reality; the exodus of hundreds of thousands of whites from immigrant-intensive areas every year; the booming population of Southeast Asian refugees that will make a town like Wassau, Wisconsin (which was 99 percent white 15 years ago) a Hmong-majority city in a generation; the Santeria animal sacrifice cult from the Caribbean; Muslim extremism and terrorism; expanding Chinese and other foreign-based criminal networks; the takeover by Dominican drug-dealers of upper Manhattan, where Dominicans marched with huge banners denouncing “500 Years of Genocide” after a Dominican drug dealer was killed by a police officer in self-defense.

These and many other disorders are occurring not because of cultural radicalism or affirmative action or middle-class moral decay. They are happening as the direct result of revolutionary changes in this country’s ethnic and racial make-up.

The Weapon of ‘Race-neutrality’

What is it that prevents whites from protesting their own demographic and cultural dispossession? The most common explanation is that people fear being called racist. That is true, and it’s not just political correctness. Deep in the American mind is the ideal of America as a country where advancement is open to anyone, where “it doesn’t matter who your parents were.” The fatal problem with that formula is that it can work only within certain limits — when you’re speaking of individuals sharing a basic commonality. If you apply it en masse to radically diverse populations, it becomes absurd and dangerous. The ideal of “race-neutrality,” applied to incommensurable groups, turns out to be not race-neutral at all, but becomes a weapon used by one race to dispossess the other.

I came across a remarkable example of this in the coverage of the South African election. Amidst all the media’s joyous talk about a “non-racial” or “multiracial” democracy being born, Newsweek came out with a sensational cover with bold letters crying “Black Power!” So deep is the doublethink in which we live today, that I wonder if more than a handful of people noticed the gross contradiction of celebrating black power in what was supposed to be a “non-racial” election. But of course it’s not a contradiction at all: What “non-racial” really means is that it is whites who are supposed to be indifferent to race, in order to help nonwhites advance their racial interests.

This same double standard and delusion works across the board. For example, the belief that all the peoples of the world are equal in intellectual abilities is thought to be a race-neutral or “non-racial” idea, since it is saying that race doesn’t matter. But since the races are not equal in average abilities, this “non-racial” belief in equality turns out to be completely racial. It holds that blacks have far greater abilities than they in fact have, and invariably blames white racism for actual black inequality. It is therefore the duty of whites, until the end of time, to exhaust their wealth and spiritual energy in a hopeless effort to make blacks collectively equal to themselves. The “non-racial” belief in equality thus turns out to be a kind of black racialist mythology.

Similarly, our immigration policy, which is thought to be race-neutral, is in fact turning America into a nonwhite country, dispossessing white America and its culture. Yet it is considered “racist” to oppose this policy, and “non-racist” to support it.

Ultimately the pursuit of race-blindness (in anything more than a legal and procedural sense), leads to complete incoherence. Columnist Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Examiner once complained about the fact that we are supposed to respect everyone’s differences, while at the same time we’re supposed to treat everyone equally — which requires us not to notice differences at all. Carroll continues:

“One is required to deny the evidence of one’s senses. I perceive that African American men are different from Caucasian men are different from Asian women are different from (what?) Ethiopian Jews. Can we compare these differences? No, we cannot. We may say for the record that these differences are beautiful, equally beautiful, precisely geometrically equally beautiful, but that’s it.

And if we do begin to compare these differences, Carroll says, that leads us right back to value judgments about racial differences, which immediately devolve into “racism.”

Paralyzed by these contradictions, as well he should be, Carroll concludes: “I think intermarriage may be the only way out . . . Of course, we’d lose a lot of interesting specific cultures that way . . .” What he means, of course, is that we’d lose a lot of interesting races that way, including our own.

Along the same lines, but with far more enthusiasm, Morton Kondracke in the New Republic wondered how America could overcome its racial inequalities, and concluded that racial intermarriage is the only solution: “It would be a lot easier if each of us were related to someone of another color and if, eventually, we were all one color. In America, this can happen.” Racial intermarriage is even more aggressively championed by Ben Wattenberg, who sees it as the path to universal salvation.

I want to make the meaning of all this very clear. Modern liberalism told us that racial differences don’t matter, and on the basis of that belief, liberals then set about turning America into a multiracial, integrated, race-blind society. But now that very effort has created so much race consciousness, race conflict and race inequality, that the same liberals have concluded that the only way to overcome those problems is to merge all the races into one. The same people who have always denounced as an extremist lunatic anyone who warned about “the racial dilution of white America,” are now proposing, not just the dilution of white America, but its complete elimination. Race-blind ideology has led directly to the most race-conscious — and indeed genocidal — proposal in the history of the world.

This is the insanity that results from uncritically accepting the idea that race doesn’t matter. And the moral paralysis of whites in the face of immigration comes from the terror or distaste that they feel at saying that race does matter. There is also whites’ inability to face the fact that they are a civilizationally distinct group — comprising only 15 percent of the world’s population — that is demographically threatened by the rest of the world’s desire to live in the uniquely attractive societies that whites have created.

If whites continue to be open to nonwhites, as their race-blind moralism tells them they must, their societies will cease to exist; but if they exclude or disengage from nonwhites, that will require them to be “harsh,” “unkind,” “mean-spirited.” It will require them to say that they care about the survival of their race vis-a-vis other races. To the contemporary white person, such an idea is utterly evil and unacceptable. But the funny thing is, there is really nothing evil or horrible about it at all. It turns out to be the most reasonable and commonsensical thing in the world. It’s the current race-blind ideology that is insane.

So before we recoil in horror or embarrassment from speaking explicitly about race, let us remember that America’s current politics is already a race-conscious politics, only it’s a politics based on lies about race. It’s a politics directed against whites and their civilization. And it pretends that it’s not about race at all, but that it’s race-neutral and universal. So instead of today’s race-conscious politics, which is based on lies about race, let us have a race-conscious politics based on truths about race.

These truths include the following propositions:

Long-term harmonious relations between a racial majority and racial minorities are possible only when the minorities do not exceed a certain percentage of the population.

While individuals of different races living in the same society can get along on a basis of equality and mutual recognition, entire races, living in the same society, cannot.

In the right circumstances, individuals or small groups of one people can be assimilated into a host culture of a different people, but there are limits to such assimilation. Certainly if the entire people associated with the host culture is displaced or swamped by a different people, the host culture will also disappear. Even smaller shifts in numbers can be enough to delegitimize the host culture and produce chronic cultural conflict.

Therefore, the culture, identity and traditions of white America and Western civilization cannot survive in any community or institution that becomes multiracial or white-minority.

Because of the greater attractiveness, prosperity and openness of white Western societies, nonwhites will keep moving into them as long as they can. Therefore white America can survive demographically and culturally only if it recognizes itself as a threatened ethnoculture; if it ceases or drastically reduces, on a national scale, all non-European immigration; and if it assures, on a local scale, communities where its own institutions may survive.

The large and enduring differences in average intelligence between blacks and whites mean, first, that blacks on their own can never be expected to maintain a modern, democratic, civilized society; and second, that blacks can never be expected to achieve collective economic equality and other kinds of parity with whites. The forced attempt to achieve such collective equality, through affirmative action and through endless attacks on white racism as the supposed cause of existing inequalities, can only break down all the institutions and standards of society and lead to race warfare.

There are therefore only two sane options for black-white relations in this country. Either blacks accept the above facts; accept a society where white Western standards of law, behavior and intellectual life are dominant and where advancement will be open for blacks only on an individual, not a collective basis; accept their status as an ethnic minority and be grateful to be living in a white society where they have goods and opportunities undreamed of in a black society; or else, if blacks are not willing to accept these things, then to avoid race warfare there must be peaceful separation between the races.

These propositions have nothing to do with any notions of race-hatred of the other, or of race-worship of one’s own. White people are just as sinful and imperfect as any other people. Unlike ideologies such as Afrocentrism and Nazism, which are based on the deification of one’s own people and the demonization of others, this new politics is based on a Christian recognition of our human limitations, namely that we do not possess the godlike power to create a perfect world where everyone is equal, and where differences don’t matter. If there is any arrogance to be seen today, it is in our current immigration and affirmative action policies, which are among the greatest examples of hubris in the history of the world.

The irony is that whites are terrified that non-whites will hate them and even start a race war if whites stand up for themselves, while the truth is that many nonwhites will begin for the first time to respect whites. Currently minorities don’t respect whites because whites have defined themselves ideologically as nothing while, in personal terms, they still try to protect their self-interest. Whites thus seem both weak and hypocritical and therefore despicable, and nonwhites just keep moving into the vacuum left by white surrender. But when whites begin to assert their own civilizational and racial identity and their desire to preserve it, not in a hateful way but in a calm, intelligent and firm way, then nonwhites will begin to see whites, not as the “oppressors” of left-liberal demonology, but as human beings who have the same basic interests and concerns for their people and culture that the minorities have for theirs.

At bottom, all we are doing is making an appeal to justice. The injustice and unacceptability of the current double standard will become obvious to any person of good will once it is pointed out. And that is why the principles I’ve described need to be at the center of an anti-multiculturalist, pro-Western civilization politics in this country. In my view, given current demographic realities, any conservative politics that lacks these principles cannot be a serious politics.

In Deuteronomy, Chapter 28, God pronounces the curse that will fall on the people of Israel if they fail to follow God’s law:

Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people, while your eyes look on and fail with longing for them all the day; and it shall not be in the power of your hand to prevent it. A nation which you have not known shall eat up the fruit of your ground and of all your labors; and you shall be only oppressed and crushed continually; so that you shall be driven mad by the sight which your eyes shall see.

Unless America wakes up to the threat of demographic and cultural dispossession, and finds the will to resist it, the curse pronounced in Deuteronomy awaits us all.

[Editor’s Note: This essay is in A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century, a collection of some of the finest essays and reviews published by American Renaissance. It is available for purchase here.]