The Delusion of Black Separatism

Black resentment is on the rise, four main reasons come to mind:

• New militant black groups such as Black Lives Matter.
• The political class’s promotion of anti-white theories like “white privilege.”
• The media’s obsession with police shootings.
• The election of Donald Trump.

Resentment will keep rising. The Left plans to fight President Trump with everything it’s got. The media will denigrate Mr. Trump and his supporters for the duration of his presidency, and many universities will do the same. Nor does the Democratic Party seem interested in recapturing the white votes it lost this year. California elitist Nancy Pelosi fended off her working-class white contender, Tim Ryan, as leader of the House Democrats, and Keith Ellison, a black Muslim, is a serious candidate for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Anti-white animus leads to race riots–like the recent one in Milwaukee–and brutal anti-white and anti-police violence.

In light of this, it is worth remembering what Wilmot Robertson wrote about black violence 45 years ago in The Dispossessed Majority:

An undeniable cause of black violence has been the weakening of white resistance. Throughout American history white supremacy has been a basic premise of the country’s social relationships. Even the most fiery abolitionists exuded the air of the Great White Father. In fact, white supremacy had such overwhelming acceptance, was so firmly entrenched and so thoroughly institutionalized that Negroes scarcely dared to criticize it, let alone take more forceful measures. Today, however, white supremacy or to give it its modern name, white racism, is so debilitated that Negro militancy is not only possible but profitable. That it would come to a halt once Negroes achieved both equal opportunity and equal results is the purest form of wishful thinking. Who would be the judges? Black activists? Militant black politicians? And how are equal results to be measured?

If Majority members would only comprehend that the whole point, the whole drive, the very essence of minority racism is not to obtain equality but to obtain superiority, most of the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of contemporary Negro behavior would be avoided. Racism simply cannot be bought off by token cabinet appointments, Supreme Court seats, or racial quotas. In its dynamic stages racism can only be controlled or suppressed by superior force, a force most effectively provided by an opposing or countervailing racism. What is indisputable is that the one way not to stop Negro militancy is to reward it.

There is no better evidence of the decline of the American Majority than the continuing successes of black racism. Negroes belong to the most backward of the world’s major races and to the most backward of America’s large population groups. Nevertheless in the past few decades they have managed to erect a kind of state within a state and in the name of equality have achieved a kind of superequality which has led to the establishment of a double standard–one for themselves, one for whites–in the judicial, educational, and economic sectors of American society. That what has come to be known as affirmative action has been accomplished so quickly is vivid confirmation of the power of racism. Negroes, as some of their own leaders will admit in private, have little else working for them.

Robertson went on to note how essential blacks were to the liberal program as a whole, and vice versa. Many blacks have demanded some kind of segregation, or even a black ethno-state in North America. Malcolm X did so in the 1960s, Keith Ellison did so in his law-school days, and Black Lives Matter leaders do so now. I suspect Americans will hear more calls for black separatism in the coming years, but we can be certain that they will not be meant seriously. Their purpose will be to shame denatured whites into begging blacks to stay, to goad whites to even greater efforts in the impossible task of trying to satisfy black people.

If white America ever took blacks seriously and offered them a state or two in which they would have to support themselves with no help from whitey, separatists would immediately lose their swagger. In their hearts they know they are far better off living with us for as long as we let them, benefiting from our technology and infrastructure, contemptuously accepting our charity, and playing the role of victim for which they have an instinctive genius. Without us, blacks would wreck anything we gave them. And they know it.

Robertson had a different and valuable insight into what it would mean if blacks tried to go it alone:

The great deterrent to black separatism is not the integrationist aspirations of assorted black Marxists and black social climbers but the whole superstructure of modern liberal thought. If the notion of racial equality is surrendered to separatism, which recognizes and institutionalizes racial differences, environmentalism, behaviorism, economic determinism, and even democracy itself would soon be called into question. The prevailing Western orthodoxies might then dissolve into thin air, and the occidental mind might have to set off on an entirely new path or find its way back to an old one.

From a political standpoint black separatism would be an overwhelming loss to the liberal-minority coalition. Racial separation of any kind being not at all uncongenial to racially minded whites, it is not inconceivable that hard-pressed Majority members, especially in the Deep South, together with harder-pressed Assimilable Minority members in the nation’s largest cities, would join black separatists in a pact to free both whites and blacks from an integrationist liberal administration in Washington. Also, if Negro separatism should ever become the order of the day, other Unassimilable Minorities might take the hint, leaving liberalism an ideology in search of a party. At the other extreme, total integration [were such a thing actually possible] would deal an equally lethal blow to leftist political power by spelling the doom of all minorities and with them present-day liberalism’s principal raison d’etre. It is only in the boundary zone between the segregated and the integrated society, between reality and utopia, that today’s liberal feels truly at home. [emphasis added]

Blacks will never go their own way. Our destiny lies in our hands alone.