Posted on February 18, 2011

Sam Francis in His Own Words

AR Staff, American Renaissance, April 2005

Sam T. Francis

This is an excerpt from the speech Dr. Francis gave at the first AR conference, held in Atlanta in 1994. Although he never received a full explanation of why he was fired from The Washington Times, publicity given to this speech by his detractors was certainly a factor. The original article was published in the September 1994 issue.

A concerted and long-term attack against the civilization of white, European and North American man has been launched, and the attack is not confined to the political, social and cultural institutions that characterize the civilization but extends also to the race that created the civilization and continues to carry and transmit it today. The war against white civilization sometimes (indeed often) invokes liberal ideals as its justification and as its goal, but the likely reality is that the victory of the racial revolution will end merely in the domination or destruction of the white race and its civilization by the non-white peoples — if only for demographic reasons due to non-white immigration and the decline of white birthrates . . .

In the universalist world-view, there is neither history nor race nor even species, neither specific cultures nor particular peoples nor meaningful boundaries . . .

In the happyland of universalism, we owe as much to the children of Somalia — indeed, more — than we do to the hapless citizens of Los Angeles. Marines who could not have been sent from Camp Pendleton to Los Angeles during the riots of 1992 and who are not ordered to prevent violation of the Mexican border adjacent to their own installation in southern California are speedily dispatched to Somalia. Even to invoke “our” identity, our interests, our aspirations is to invite accusations of all the “isms” and “phobias” that are deployed to prevent further discussions and to paralyze the formation or the retention of a common consciousness that might at some point swell up into actual resistance to our dispossession. The principal white response to the incipient race war thus far, manifested in neo-conservative critiques of “Political Correctness” and multiculturalism, is merely to regurgitate the formulas of universalism, to invoke the spirit of Martin Luther King, and to repeat the universalist ideals of equality, integration, and assimilation. The characteristic defense of Western civilization by most conservatives today is merely a variation of the liberal universalism that the enemies of the West and whites also invoke. It is to argue that non-whites and non-Westerners ought to value modern Western civilization as in their own best interests. It is to emphasize the liberal “progress” of the modern West through the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of non-whites, the retreat from imperialism, the achievement of higher living standards and political equality, etc. . . .

Instead of invoking a suicidal liberalism and regurgitating the very universalism that has subverted our identity and our sense of solidarity, what we as whites must do is reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. The reassertion of our solidarity must be expressed in racial terms for two major reasons. In the first place, the attack upon us defines itself in racial terms and seeks through the delegitimization of race for whites and the legitimization of race for non-whites the dispersion and destruction of the foundations of our solidarity while at the same time consolidating non-white cohesiveness against whites . . .

[A]t a time when the self-declared enemies of the white race define themselves in racial terms, only our own definition of ourselves in those terms can meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as the Tutsi people have been slaughtered in Rwanda, they will do so not because we are “Westerners” or “Americans” or “Christians” or “conservatives” or “liberals” but because we are white.

Secondly, we need to assert a specifically racial identity because race is real — biological forces, including those that determine race, are important for social, cultural, and historical events. I do not suggest that race as a biological reality is by itself sufficient to explain the civilization of European man — if race were sufficient, there would be no problem — but race is necessary for it, and it is likely that biological science in the near future will show even more clearly how necessary racial, biological, and genetic explanations are to understanding social and historical events more fully.

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization. Until we do so, we can expect only to keep on losing the war we are in . . .

As long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession and their eventual possible physical destruction. Before we can seriously discuss any concrete proposals for preserving our culture and its biological and demographic foundations, we have to address and correct the problem we inflict on ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it.

What Benjamin Franklin told his colleagues at the birth of the American Republic remains true today as the Republic, and the race and civilization that gave birth to the Republic, approach their death: If we do not hang together — not only as members of a common nation but also as part of a common race, a common people — then most assuredly we will all hang separately.

Prospects for Racial and Cultural Survival

In the February 1995 issue of American Renaissance (and following issues) several writers discussed approaches to ensuring the survival of American whites and their culture. This is excerpted from Dr. Francis’s typically pugnacious reply to those who proposed partition of the United States along racial lines.

Ending [the threat] to the white European character of the United States would involve no vast constitutional or political changes, but it would involve an uncompromising assertion of white will and identity. The fundamental problem with whites today will not be solved by giving away any more of what remains of their country and their heritage but by asserting their own will and identity in order to retain the primacy of their heritage in their own country. It is that lack of will and identity, that lack of racial and cultural consciousness, that must be remedied before we resort to any dissolution of the country (or indeed any other resolution of the racial crisis) . . .

Nevertheless, though I am not convinced by their arguments, white separatists are correct that we do face what is probably the most serious and threatening crisis in our racial history, a crisis that, if it is not resolved in our favor, will almost certainly result in the loss of white control of the United States within half a century, the disappearance of white civilization, and eventually in biological extinction. If white separatism is not the answer, what is?

The answer is, quite simply, the reconquest of the United States. This reconquest does not involve any restoration of white supremacy in the political and legal sense that obtained under slavery or segregation, and there is no reason why nonwhites who reside in the United States could not enjoy equality of legal rights. But a white reconquest of the United States would mean the supremacy of whites in a cultural sense, or in the sense of what is nowadays called “Eurocentrism.” There are essentially three things that whites must do in order to carry out this reconquest of the nation and culture they have almost lost:

(1) Whites must formulate a white racial consciousness that identifies racial and biological endowments as important and relevant to social behavior, and their own racial endowments as essential to the continuing existence of Euro-American civilization. The formation of a white racial consciousness does not mean that whites should think of themselves only as whites, to the exclusion of ethnic, national, religious, regional, class, or other identities, nor that individuality should yield to the collective category of race. It means merely that we recognize racial realities, that we recognize that racial-biological endowments are necessary to certain kinds of human behavior (e.g., the political and civic behavior appropriate to stable self-government, the work habits and life-styles appropriate to a dynamic economy; the intellectual behavior that is necessary for science and scholarship, etc.) and that because these endowments are largely unique to whites, the behavior they make possible cannot be replicated by most nonwhites.

Nor does the formation of white racial consciousness mean that we should conceive of ourselves only as biological beings to the exclusion of religious or metaphysical identities. Racial consciousness means that we add recognition of biological and racial factors to our traditional concepts of human nature and modify both our biological and non-biological conceptions of what man is, as evidence and reason dictate. It may be true that some traditional religious and metaphysical conceptions would not survive recognition of the scientific realities of race, just as some did not survive earlier scientific discoveries in astronomy, geology, and biology.

But the formation of white racial consciousness does mean that whites would recognize themselves as a race and their racially based behavior as legitimate, and hence it would mean the end of tolerance for nonwhite assaults on white people and the norms of white civilization. Whites would simply no longer countenance nonwhite aggression and insults or the idolization of nonwhite heroes, icons, and culture; white children would be raised in accordance with what is proper to being white, and norms openly recognized as appropriate to whites would be the legitimizing and dominant norms of American society as they were prior to the 1960s. Racial guilt and truckling would end.

(2) Based on this racial consciousness, whites must counter the demographic threat they face from immigration and nonwhite fertility and whites’ own infertility. This means (a) an absolute halt to all future legal immigration into the United States, deployment of the armed forces on the appropriate borders to cut off illegal immigration, and deportation of all illegal immigrants (and perhaps many recent legal immigrants); (b) the end of subsidies for the nonwhite birth rate through welfare programs, obligatory use of contraception by welfare recipients, and encouragement of its use among nonwhites, and (c) encouragement of increases in white fertility.

(3) Whites must correct the political and legal order to end the political power of nonwhite minorities and their white anti-white allies. This political effort would involve a radical dismantling of all affirmative action and civil rights legislation as well as a good part of the federal governmental superstructure that entrenches minority power. It also would require recovering an understanding of constitutional law that permits local and state governments to govern, and private institutions to function independently of government . . .

In order to achieve these goals and the reconquest of the United States they involve, there must be an immense amount of cultural and intellectual reconquest beforehand, a long march through the dominant institutions and apparatus of power by which the incumbent elites exercise control over the state, the economy, and the culture of the United States. I have outlined the theoretical framework of such a long march elsewhere (see “Winning the Culture War: The American Cause,” Chronicles, December 1993). Recent political developments encourage me to believe that such a movement remains possible and is indeed beginning, though the danger is that it will be captured and betrayed by agents of the incumbent elite.

However great that danger may be and however remote the chances of victory today may seem, it remains a strategy that is far more likely to succeed than the strategy of surrender that racial separatism involves. What white Americans must do is get on with ensuring that it does succeed before they lose their country, their heritage, and their posterity forever.

The King Holiday and Its Meaning

In this excerpt from a February 1998 cover story, Dr. Francis describes the purpose and effect of celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday as a national holiday.

Yet, incredibly — even after thorough documentation of King’s affiliations with communists, after the revelations about his personal moral flaws, and after proof of his brazen dishonesty in plagiarizing his dissertation and several other published writings — incredibly there is no proposal to rescind the holiday that honors him. Indeed, states like Arizona and New Hampshire that did not rush to adopt their own holidays in honor of King have been vilified and threatened with systematic boycotts. The continuing indulgence of King is in part due to simple political cowardice — fear of being denounced as a “racist” — but due also to the political utility of the King holiday for those who seek to advance their own political agenda. Almost immediately upon the enactment of the holiday bill, the King holiday came to serve as a kind of charter for the radical regime of “political correctness” and “multiculturalism” that now prevails at many of the nation’s major universities and in many areas of public and private life . . .

To those of King’s own political views, then, the true meaning of the holiday is that it serves to legitimize the radical social and political agenda that King himself favored and to delegitimize traditional American social and cultural institutions — not simply those that supported racial segregation but also those that support a free market economy, an anti-communist foreign policy, and a constitutional system that restrains the power of the state rather than one that centralizes and expands power for the reconstruction of society and the redistribution of wealth. In this sense, the campaign to enact the legal public holiday in honor of Martin Luther King was a small first step on the long march to revolution, a charter by which that revolution is justified as the true and ultimate meaning of the American identity. In this sense, and also in King’s own sense, as he defined it in his speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, the Declaration of Independence becomes a “promissory note” by which the state is authorized to pursue social and economic egalitarianism as its mission, and all institutions and values that fail to reflect the dominance of equality — racial, cultural, national, economic, political, and social — must be overcome and discarded.

By placing King — and therefore his own radical ideology of social transformation and reconstruction — into the central pantheon of American history, the King holiday provides a green light by which the revolutionary process of transformation and reconstruction can charge full speed ahead. Moreover, by placing King at the center of the American national pantheon, the holiday also serves to undermine any argument against the revolutionary political agenda that it has come to symbolize. Having promoted or accepted the symbol of the new dogma as a defining — perhaps the defining — icon of the American political order, those who oppose the revolutionary agenda the symbol represents have little ground to resist that agenda.

It is hardly an accident, then, that in the years since the enactment of the holiday and the elevation of King as a national icon, systematic attacks on the Confederacy and its symbolism were initiated, movements to ban the teaching of “Western civilization” came to fruition on major American universities, Thomas Jefferson was denounced as a “racist” and “slaveowner,” and George Washington’s name was removed from a public school in New Orleans on the grounds that he too owned slaves. In the new nation and the new creed of which the King holiday serves as symbol, all institutions, values, heroes, and symbols that violate the dogma of equality are dethroned and must be eradicated. Those associated with the South and the Confederacy are merely the most obvious violations of the egalitarian dogma and therefore must be the first to go, but they will by no means be the last.

. . . The logical meaning of the holiday is the ultimate destruction of the American Republic as it has been conceived and defined throughout our history, and until the charter for revolution the holiday represents is repealed, we can expect only further installations of the destruction and dispossession it promises.

The President’s Dialogue on Race: A Critique

Early in 1997, safely back in the White House for a second term, President William Clinton hit upon a project he hoped would establish his legacy as a great president: he would solve the American race problem, or at least win renown by trying. With much fanfare, he launched what was officially known as “One America in the 21st Century: The President’s Initiative on Race.” Today, hardly anyone even remembers this grand program that was supposed to immortalize Mr. Clinton. The initiative accomplished exactly nothing, partly because it was upstaged by the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal and impeachment, but mainly because race is an intractable biological and social fact that cannot be papered over by initiatives, presidential or otherwise. In this May 1998 article, Dr. Francis explains the real objectives of Mr. Clinton’s project.

The purpose of the president’s race initiative, then, whether manifested in his own words, in the actions of his advisory board, or in what the advisory board and the president fail to discuss or forbid to be discussed, is not “tolerance,” “diversity,” “harmony,” “equality,” or “justice.” The real purpose is to accommodate white Americans to the end of their culture and their dominance as a majority of the American nation and as the cultural core of the nation, and to manage their adjustment to the coming non-white dominance of the near future. The real issue of the president’s race initiative, then, is, as so many things are, a question of power — in this case, racial power.

White Americans today are confronted with the two most overwhelming facts of our time — first, the coming demographic transformation of American society from a majority white to a majority non-white society, and, secondly, the emergence of what can only be described as an explicit racial consciousness among non-whites that identifies whites as their enemies and oppressors, a racial consciousness that is encouraged and exploited and certainly seldom challenged by many whites themselves, whether liberal or conservative. This racial consciousness ranges in its expression from a mild but unquestioned assumption of non-white solidarity in conflict with whites to outright, militant hatred of whites, but whatever its form of expression, white Americans need to ask themselves what will be their fate as a white minority in a non-white society where the racial demonology created by non-whites prevails, and they need to think hard about the answers they reach.

White Americans also need to question and indeed reject the very premises of the president’s “dialogue” — that the racial and cultural transition to a non-white America is inevitable or desirable; that whites somehow possess a monopoly on racial bigotry, the perpetration of racial injustice, or racial consciousness and solidarity; and that it is morally incumbent on whites to alter their behavior, their culture, and their sense of moral and social responsibility in deference to non-white and often anti-white demands. If there is anything we as a nation have learned since the civil rights movement thirty years ago, it is that race is a reality, a natural as well as a cultural and social reality, and that the denial of racial realities that has been written into our laws, our public conduct, and our national public discourse is a denial of a major truth about human beings. Every other race and ethnic group in the United States has learned or is presently learning this truth, and only white Americans deny it, deny themselves their own racial consciousness, and deny the threats to their civilization and to their own safety that their denials invite. If we are to have a real dialogue on race, then let us have one, but let it be one in which white Americans engage only if they are able and willing to claim the identity and the heritage to which they have every right.

Race and the American Identity

In the following passages, Dr. Francis refutes the fashionable view that the United States was founded as a “universal” or “proposition” nation. It is taken from remarks at the 1998 AR conference, which were published in two parts, in the December 1998 and January 1999 issues.

But the most casual acquaintance with the realities of American history shows that the idea that America is or has been a universal nation, that it defines itself through the proposition that “all men are created equal,” is a myth. Indeed, it is something less than a myth, it is a mere propaganda line invoked to justify not only mass immigration and the coming racial revolution but also the erosion of nationality itself in globalist free trade and a One-World political architecture. It also justifies the total reconstruction and re-definition of the United States as a multiracial, multicultural, and transnational swamp. Nevertheless, the myth of the universal nation or proposition country is widely accepted, and today it represents probably the major ideological obstacle to recognizing the reality and importance of race as a social and political force . . .

In short, taken out of the context of the whole document of the Declaration and the historical context and circumstances of the document itself, the “equality clause” of the Declaration opens so many different doors of interpretation that it can mean virtually anything you want it to mean. It has been invoked by Christians and freethinkers, by capitalists and socialists, by conservatives and liberals, each of whom merely imports into it whatever his own ideology and agenda demand. Taken by itself, it is open to so many different interpretations that it has to be considered one of the most arcane — and one of the most dangerous — sentences ever written, one of the major blunders of American history . . .

As late as 1921, Vice-President-elect Calvin Coolidge wrote an article on immigration called “Whose Country Is This?” in the popular women’s magazine Good Housekeeping. He argued that “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” Not only the white but the Northern European racial identity of the nation could thus be publicly affirmed by a leading national political figure in a widely read magazine as late as the 1920s . . .

[I would like to] reinforce two points: First, we are not and never were a “universal nation” or a “proposition country” defined by the equality clause of the Declaration or the bromides of the Gettysburg Address. On the contrary we — Americans in general and our public leaders in particular — repeatedly and continuously recognized the reality and importance of race and the propriety of the white race occupying the “superior position,” [as Lincoln put it in his debates with Stephen Douglas] and indeed it is difficult to think of any other white-majority nation in history in which recognition of the reality of race has been so deeply imbedded in its thinking and institutions as in the United States.

Second, whatever we think of that history and its recognition of race, we have to understand that the current propaganda line about being a universal nation is not only a totally false account of American history but also is a prescription for a total rejection of the American past and the national identity as we have always known it. Racial universalism is not simply an adjustment or a “reform,” let alone a continuation of the proper direction of American history, but a revolutionary reconstruction of the American identity . . .

Americans have never been asked whether they think it’s a good thing for their nation to undergo the transition from a white majority to a non-white majority country. They have indeed been lied to about the transition, in being told in 1965 that it wouldn’t happen, but until President Clinton embraced it last year, no president has even bothered to mention it.

If white Americans do not desire the transition, they still have a short time to prevent it and to try to salvage what is left of the Old Republic most of them still imagine they live in, and if they do wish to salvage it, they will have to reject, as clearly and firmly as the original Framers did, the universalism and egalitarianism that now threaten to destroy them and their race. Political philosophies and constitutional forms come and go, but nations — peoples and races — remain. Yet without the common blood that made us a nation in the first place, there will be no American nation, no matter what abstractions and forms we vainly invoke.

The War on White Heritage

In this excerpt from a July 2000 article, Dr. Francis warns that the attack on Confederate symbols is really an attack on white heritage, and should be understood as such by all whites, Northern and Southern.

The indifference and hostility of non-whites to symbols and icons of white heritage and identity expose the central fallacy of the “multiracialism” that our current political and cultural elites promote. Its premise is that different races and ethnic groups can all “get along” with each other, that they can live together in egalitarian harmony, and that, as President Clinton said in 1998, “we can strengthen the bonds of our national community as we grow more racially and ethnically diverse.”

But the reality is that the egalitarianism and universalism of the “civil rights” era have led to the rediscovery of race and the rebirth of racial consciousness among non-whites and hence to the animosity that non-whites feel toward whites and their heritage. It is racial consciousness, not egalitarianism and universalism, that fuels the non-white crusade against the American past, and obviously, if “multiracialism” means that some races with more consciousness, more solidarity, and more power can boycott and bludgeon out of existence the symbols of other races and the cultural legacies the symbols represent, then multiracialism promises nothing but either perpetual racial conflict or merely the same kind of racial supremacy that used to exist in the United States — though with a different supreme race whose rule would be perhaps considerably more draconian than that of whites. Of course, whites can always try to buy temporary peace and harmony by agreeing to every demand of non-white radicalism and abandoning the symbols of their own heritage. That, of course, is exactly what whites today are doing, though every concession merely leads to further demands from non-whites . . .

What the racial assault on the Confederacy and other non-Confederate symbols really shows, however, is not only the dangerous flaws of multiracialism and the inexorable logic of the racial revolution of this century but also that today regional differences among whites — like many other cultural and political differences — are no longer very relevant. It shows that Southerners and “Yankees” today face common enemies and common threats to their rights, interests, identity, and heritage as whites, and that the forces that have declared war on them and their heritage define themselves as well as their foes not in political, regional, or cultural terms but in terms of race. Whites who have been indifferent to the fate of the Confederate flag and similar symbols in the recent controversies should not be surprised, therefore, when historical symbols important to their own identity come under assault from anti-white radicals in the future.

And it is as a race that whites must now learn to resist the war being waged on them. So far from being a symbol of a lost and forgotten cause relevant only to a dwindling band of Confederate loyalists, the Confederate flag and the battles swirling around it today should serve as reminders to all white men and women of a simple lesson: Unless they forsake the many obsolete quarrels and controversies that have long divided them and learn to stand, work, and fight together for their own survival as a people and a civilization, the war against them that their self-proclaimed racial enemies are waging will not permit them or their legacy as a people and civilization to survive at all.

It’s Race, Stupid

In this January 2001 article Dr. Francis pointed out the folly of Republican attempts to win more non-white voters.

If there is one pattern that emerges from the confused national election of 2000, it is that race and ethnicity are the driving forces in American politics today. An analysis of exit polls confirms that, so far from evolving toward a “color-blind” society in which most citizens are indifferent to racial identity, Americans are voting along clearly defined racial and ethnic lines. These voting patterns strongly suggest, if they do not confirm, that racial consciousness is a major determinant of voting behavior and that political appeals to racial interests and consciousness will continue to play a major role in the politics of the future . . .

For all the rhetoric among “new Republicans” about winning non-whites, the lesson of the 2000 election for the GOP ought to be clear: Trying to win non-whites, especially by abandoning issues important to white voters, is the road to political suicide; the natural and logical strategy of the Republican Party in the future is to maximize its white vote.

The party could accomplish this by supporting a long-term moratorium on legal immigration, terminating welfare and other public benefits for immigrants, seeking the abolition of affirmative action, and working for the repeal of “hate crime” laws and the end of multiculturalism. The Republicans could become and remain a majority party by seeking to raise white racial consciousness; they do not need to appeal to irrational racial fears and animosities, but they can and legitimately should encourage white voters to (1) perceive that they as a group are under threat from racial and demographic trends and (2) believe that the Republican Party will support them against this threat.

Advocates of Rainbow Republicanism will argue that this is not possible or desirable, that it will only promote racial divisions, and that attracting more white voters than the Republicans now are able to win is not practical. This line of argument is wrong. Racial animosity is already being inflamed by the Democrats’ willingness to exploit anti-white sentiments and by racial demagogues like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP, and analogous Hispanic activists. The only force that can quell or check this kind of anti-white racism is the solidarity of whites against it and those who try to use it for political gain.

Twelve Years After

In this December 2002 reflection on AR’s first 12 years, Dr. Francis describes how current “race-realist” thinking differs from racial thinking of the past.

What attracted me to Jared Taylor and AR is what seems to attract most of their other readers — not that AR is the last, quaint representative of a dying breed gnashing its fangs at a world that has passed it by but that it is in fact the harbinger of a new breed. The left senses this truth about AR (and for that matter about the Council of Conservative Citizens) when it tells us that such publications and groups are “Klansmen in coats and ties” or “more dangerous” than Timothy McVeigh. Both have succeeded in learning how to discuss, and in teaching others how to discuss, the scientific, social, and political realities of race without reliance on the old rhetoric of what was called “white supremacy” and “hate.” The older rhetoric may have been appropriate for its time, but just as conservatives in the post-World War II era of the 1950s needed to adopt a new rhetoric in place of that of the political right of the pre-Depression and pre-World War II era, so racially conscious whites today need to learn a new rhetoric about race. In so far as American Renaissance has accomplished any significant achievement, it is that it has begun to develop and disseminate just such a rhetoric, and it is largely the absence of such a rhetoric in American political culture that makes white racial consciousness so weak.

The older rhetoric of race among racially conscious whites assumed that the political and cultural dominance of whites was secure or at least intact, and that non-white racial consciousness was weak, non-existent, and not a serious political or cultural force. Hence, the older rhetoric could rely on a broad base of agreement among whites — about such matters as the importance and meaning of the US Constitution, the danger of communism, the heroic stature of such figures as Washington and Jefferson, and a whole universe of assumptions about human nature, human society, science, religion, ethics, and cultural values — assumptions that can no longer be taken for granted. So secure was this cultural consensus among almost all whites that racial consciousness really did not need to appeal to race itself very much or very directly. Today, that shared cultural (and political) fabric is in tatters, and appeals wrapped in it no longer work . . .

What is happening or has happened in almost all these instances is that the common cultural and political framework that enabled racially conscious whites to deflect non-white drives for power has eroded or vanished entirely. Its erosion has come about in large part because of its deliberate subversion by its enemies (not always for racial purposes), while at the same time the emergence of explicitly non-white racial consciousness and the political unity this subversion generates has rendered appeals to traditional white values and institutions ineffective. When blacks themselves regard Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and even Abraham Lincoln as well as all other early American icons as mere bigots, slaveholders, and white supremacists, when they dismiss the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as fraudulent documents that merely empowered racial oppression, then political dialogue and a shared political culture cease to be possible — unless whites themselves give up these icons as well, which is what seems to be happening. Those who seek to resist or defeat the non-white quest for power have no prospect of success if they appeal to a Constitution that non-whites respect only in so far as it can be exploited for their own purposes. What is happening, in other words, is that all the social, cultural, political, legal, and constitutional (as well as religious, moral, etc.) integument of the white race has been stripped away — delegitimized or “deconstructed.” What remains, of course, is the bare biological reality: Race . . .

The rhetoric [AR] has developed is the rhetoric of race itself, of what should be called “racial realism.”

This rhetoric, in the first place, is grounded in a fairly careful scientific view of race — that race is indeed a natural reality and not just a “social construct,” that it includes not only gross morphological and physiological features but also affects IQ, personality, and behavior, and therefore that race is a socially and historically significant force. More than any other publication in the English-speaking world, AR has actually tried to explain and popularize the earth-shaking discoveries about race by major scientists and thinkers like Arthur Jensen, Philippe Rushton, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, the late Glayde Whitney, and many others. Similarly, the AR rhetoric of race also makes fairly sophisticated use of statistics to support claims about differences in racial achievement and behavior (education, crime, etc.).

But perhaps most significantly, the rhetoric of American Renaissance in a sense does the opposite of what the older rhetoric tried to do. Whereas the older rhetoric tried to defend the race in terms of the culture (e.g., desegregation should be opposed because it is unconstitutional, “communistic,” “un-Christian,” or “un-American”), the new racial rhetoric of AR defends the culture in terms of the race (e.g., the Constitution itself, as well the culture and nation, are important achievements of the white race; no other race has created anything similar to them, and there is no prospect of any other race creating them or adapting to them; similar ideas about the racial foundations of white science, religion, and other cultural achievements are common in AR). The meaning of this rhetoric is that in so far as white Americans still care about their culture — the Constitution, religion, science, art, language, literature, aesthetics, social institutions, and morals — they must care about the race that created them and sustains them and without which they cannot exist. It does not, as far as I can recall, argue that race by itself is sufficient to create and sustain our civilization, but it does insist, clearly and unequivocally, that race is necessary . . .