Posted on October 7, 2020

Notes on Ron Unz’s ‘White Racialism in America, Then and Now’

Chris Roberts, American Renaissance, October 7, 2020

Ron Unz has published a lengthy essay on the people and books that have influenced American white advocacy. Like many of Mr. Unz’s essays, it’s interesting and well researched, and takes white advocacy seriously.

Jared Taylor and American Renaissance get high praise:

Jared Taylor launched his American Renaissance newsletter in late 1990, initially under a slightly different form of his name and in 1992 he published Paved with Good Intentions, a powerful compendium of the apparent failures of America’s efforts at racial integration, with a heavy focus upon black crime and other social dysfunction. At that time, his more controversial ideological views were not yet generally known, so the book was released by a fully mainstream press, then widely and favorably reviewed in regular conservative media outlets, even receiving respectful treatment by a leading liberal academic in the pages of the prestigious New York Review of Books. . . .

Taylor’s three decades of public activity have probably established him as America’s most prominent White Nationalist, while the print version of his American Renaissance publication shifted to an entirely online presence about a decade ago. Although many of its items have dealt with transient day-to-day events, his archives provide a cornucopia of serious racialist content, including lengthy book reviews that would be found almost nowhere else, as has already been demonstrated in this article. The quality of the content is often quite high, and under a different ideological regime one could easily imagine many of these pieces appearing in America’s leading general interest magazines rather than being confined to the margins of the Internet. Although his publication covers racialist matters in general, over the years the primary focus has probably remained the subject of his original book, namely the problematic aspects of blacks in American society.

That “cornucopia of serious racialist content” is worth highlighting. Due to its scope, Mr. Unz’s essay touches on several intellectuals and books, and some readers may want to know more. Most have been written about at length by AmRen contributors. This is an AR-appendix to “White Racialism in America, Then and Now.” The topics are in the order in which they appear in the essay.

Mr. Unz writes:

By 2005, he [Aruthur Jensen] was widely regarded as the Grand Old Man of psychometrics, and he published an article summarizing the previous thirty years of research on racial differences in intelligence, with his co-author being Prof. J. Philippe Rushton, an evolutionary theorist who held explicitly White Nationalist beliefs.

The article is “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability,” reviewed by Jared Taylor here.

Mr. Unz writes:

[William] Shockley was a Palo Alto native, and in 1956 after inventing the transistor he had founded Shockley Semiconductor in neighboring Mountain View to commercialize his invention, choosing to relocate back from the East Coast in order to be closer to his aged and ailing mother. His difficult personality and poor management skills eventually produced an exodus of his early employees, who went on to spawn many of the most important technology companies in the region, arguably making Shockley the father of the modern Silicon Valley, which otherwise might never have come into existence. But although he is probably the most important Palo Altan in history, his controversial racialist views have prevented any appropriate recognition. For years I have driven past his simple clapboard home on Waverley Ave., which is unmarked by any plaque or historic designation, and his name has never graced any building, monument, or award.

As expected, the American Renaissance archive has something about this.

On the life and work of William Shockley

Mr. Unz writes:

At the time of the initial [James] Watson firestorm [2007], Slate was our leading online publication, generally neoliberal and well-respected, and William Saletan, one of its senior editors, began publishing a lengthy five-part series entitled “Liberal Creationism,” in which he explained the solid scientific basis of Watson’s casual remarks. But Saletan immediately encountered such a ferocious wave of denunciations that he soon apologized for having used “disreputable sources” amid widespread doubts that he would be able to keep his job.

Jared Taylor wrote on this ordeal in his article, “Rushing for the Lifeboats


Finally, Mr. Unz very incisively outlines Carleton Putnam’s motivations:

As a prominent voice in the national campaign to maintain segregation, Putnam argued that the leading figures in his political movement were pursuing an ineffectual strategy, staking their claim on the constitutional doctrine of “states’ rights” while they avoided raising the scientific reality of the large biological differences between blacks and whites, which he believed should have been their main issue. He claimed that these individuals all privately acknowledged those racial facts, but as members of the Southern elite they had been closely associated for generations with the families of their black household domestics and other retainers, and considered it impossible to publicly discuss the biological differences that they so readily acknowledged in private. Thus, for cultural reasons they were foregoing their strongest political weapon, and Putnam believed his own work was necessary to remedy that lack. He also claimed that numerous prominent scientists privately endorsed his scientific views about race but were too fearful of academic or financial retaliation to acknowledge those facts in public.

That predicament is still with us, and Putnam’s mission largely describes AmRen’s mission.