Posted on February 26, 2015

Does White Identity Mean White Supremacy?

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, February 25, 2015

There is a man named Daryush “Roosh” Valizadeh who is popular in what is called the “manosphere.” He is a male agony aunt who offers the kind of advice that can be packaged in articles with titles like “The Secret to Getting Laid,” “How to Pick Up Girls For Real,” “How to Choose the Best Prospects for Fast Sex,” and “The Secret to Fast Sex.”

The “manosphere” prides itself on flinty-eyed realism. Men shouldn’t delude themselves about their own nature. Evolution designed them to want to copulate with every attractive woman they see, and the more they copulate the happier they are. Evolution designed women differently, so they have to be maneuvered into copulation, and Mr. Valizadeh has developed a following by sharing his “secrets for fast sex.”

The trouble with explaining human nature in terms of evolution is that once you see how it explains sex differences, it’s hard not to see how it also explains race differences. And, indeed, compared to mainstream journalism, the “manosphere” is pretty frank about race. For Mr. Valizadeh, however, race can be not only a bothersome distraction from fast sex; taking it seriously could be a sign you are loser or a potential mass murderer.

And so it is that Mr. Valizadeh’s column for today begins with this sentence: “Every few months there is some eruption of race in the manosphere where I’m accused of ‘censoring the truth’ about race differences and how I’ve taken the red pill on everything but race.” In order to prove that he is not one of those weedy blue-pill guys, Mr. Valizadeh admits a lot:

[R]ace differences exist. Varying evolutionary pressures in different environments created the world’s races, leading to genetic differences in personality, physiology, and thinking that can’t be entirely attributed to environmental upbringing. These differences give each race their own profile of strengths and weaknesses that make them compatible and incompatible with certain behaviors and features of society.

So far, excellent. But Mr. Valizadeh then assures us that this is not very important–but does so in a strangely ineffective way: “Unless you’re a policy wonk concerned with immigration, a university official in charge of an affirmative action program, or a politician who creates actual policy, race realism provides a marginal utility in your life.” Affirmative action, immigration, and “actual policy” are important, and you don’t have to be a “policy wonk” to think so. If you have interests that go beyond fast sex, “actual policy” is probably one of them, and if race helps you understand the implications of policy–and it does–it is valuable.

Mr. Valizadeh also notes that people have a powerful desire to form ingroups, and that the most natural grouping is race. “I believe these ingroups have a right to form and further their own interests,” he adds, but then he jumps the tracks: “The only problem with such nationalism is that the end game is subjugation or genocide of races deemed to be inferior. Race realism by white people leads to the idea that whites are the superior race and all other races are inferior (white nationalism).” [emphasis added]

In other words, racial solidarity–forming “ingroups”–and pushing racial interests is fine for everyone but whites. Blacks and Hispanics and Asians can join with their co-racialists to build a United States that suits them, while whites grin as their country and their culture are taken from them. It’s startling to find a man who prides himself on hard-nosed realism peddling this lefty double standard.

And the reason why only whites must not act in the name of race is because they are uniquely susceptible to evil. Get them thinking about the implications of race and they might go berserk. Like the liberals he despises, Mr. Valizadeh thinks Nazi Germany–a single regime that lasted 12 years and was crushed by other racially conscious white regimes–is the eternal symbol for what happens when white people take race seriously.

Does Mr. Valizadeh think we’re the only people who know how to kill? That the Japanese just had a little party for the locals in Nanking in 1937?

The Hutu and the Tutsi managed to kill about a million of each other with machetes. No telling what they could have done if they’d had the Wehrmacht.

White racial identity need not be malign at all. Mr. Valizadeh doesn’t seem to realize that the white people who stopped the slave trade, freed their own slaves, forced Africans to give up slavery, and gave black people basic civil rights all thought that blacks, on average, were less intelligent than whites. That was taken for granted until the 1950s–but it never sent them into genocidal frenzy.

What is more, race realists recognize that North Asians have a higher average IQ than whites and that blacks are better at certain sports. White nationalism is nothing more than an interest in the collective destiny of whites, and the desire for a land in which to pursue it. It neither requires nor implies hostility to others. Mr. Valizadeh should be embarrassed by the caricature of “white supremacy” he is trying to palm off on his readers.

And apparently whites who care about the future of their race are likely to be losers: “I strongly suspect that active participation in white nationalist circles is a cover for feelings of personal inferiority.” If Mr. Valizadeh dipped his toe into such circles and attended an American Renaissance conference he would find the very opposite of what he describes.

A few whites may be attracted to racial activism for the wrong reasons–so what? Does everyone like wine or opera or sex or dark suits for the “right” reasons? The reasons people like something don’t change its intrinsic value.

The “eruptions” Mr. Valizadeh complains about no doubt come from whites who are especially conscious of race. They are the people–committed people–without whom no movement ever makes progress. Some people devote their lives to ensuring that snail darters or spotted owls have a future. A future for one’s people is surely an even more worthy goal.

Ultimately, though, Mr. Valizadeh’s argument is one of irresponsibility. He writes: “So yes, there are race differences that range from trivial to significant, and those differences can affect societies, but besides using my knowledge of race differences to select a race of woman that I’m most compatible with, race should not be used as a pillar, foundation, or main component of your belief system, because it will have little effect in improving your day-to-day individual existence.”

Mr. Valizadeh is conceding that race changes society. It changes neighborhoods, schools, institutions, cultures. It changes the country. As he seems to glimpse–if ever so hazily–it changes everything. But he says race is useful for an individual only to the extent that it helps him rustle up “fast sex.” It shouldn’t be an important component of identity–at least if you are white.

Mr. Valizadeh is reportedly of Persian-Armenian heritage and lives in Europe. It may be hard for him to understand the commitment others have for their communities and for their larger identities. For myself, there is a lot more to my life than my individual existence. I care about the country my children and grandchildren will live in. I care about the biological group that created the culture I love. And there are plenty of people who think exactly as I do. Mr. Valizadeh may not like it, but those “eruptions of race in the manosphere” are only the beginning.