Posted on November 20, 2017

Racial Nationalism — Real and Imagined

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, November 20, 2017

Senator Al Franken is fighting for his political life. He is in office thanks only to the votes of felons and/or illegal immigrants, two pillars of the Democrat base. If the groping scandal costs him his Senate seat, the likely replacement is Keith Ellison, Deputy Chair of the DNC and the first Muslim in Congress.

Mr. Ellison is a classic example of how the rules of political “respectability” do not apply to the political Left. Mr. Ellison was first elected with the active assistance of members of the Communist Party. He was associated with the Nation of Islam for a decade and repeatedly defended its leaders from charges of anti-Semitism. (Defending NOI from charges of being anti-white was unnecessary, because hating whites is accepted by the media.)

Keith Ellison has also explicitly endorsed black nationalism. In a column written under the name of “Keith Hakim” on February 2, 1990, he complained that welfare payments were not generous enough, and called for territory to be ceded from the United States for the creation of a black state:

[B]lacks would have the option of choosing their own land base or remaining in the United States. Since black people toiled most diligently in the southeastern section of the United States, this land, quite naturally, would be most suitable. That means Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi. Blacks, of course, would not be compelled to move to the black state, and, of course, peaceful whites would not be compelled to move away.

This is a bargain.

Whites would be relieved of the burdens of the black-faced but white-dominated social programs. Blacks would employ themselves, teach their own children the truth and control their own neighborhoods. Black-white interaction would be voluntary instead of compelled. No more busing, no more affirmative action and, best of all, no more white guilt. White people could righteously say they have settled their debts with blacks. Urban blacks, long alienated from society by poverty, forced segregation and media-vilification, would no longer strike fear in whites. Think of it, whites could reclaim their cities — without dispossessing anyone.

It’s hard to disagree with “Hakim.” Blacks would have real control over their own culture and communities. Whites would be liberated from white guilt. And public policy could be based on what works instead of ethnic grievance.

In other columns, “Hakim” describes the Constitution as “their Constitution,” with “their” referring to white people. In his words, “Their constitution is the bedrock of American law; it’s the best evidence of a white racist conspiracy to subjugate other peoples.” It’s this Constitution we are now told Keith Ellison has sworn to uphold.

Mr. Ellison was in his late 20s when he wrote these articles, and it’s striking that someone who has such a prominent career now receives no criticism for his plan to dismember the Union. Anyone who proposed a white ethnostate in college would never find a job — even in the conservative movement; this is an absolute ideological litmus test for the Beltway Right. Not only has Mr. Ellison’s career flourished, no black in Congress has ever disavowed his plan to break up the country along racial lines. Congressman Hank Johnson — last heard wondering if the weight of a military base would make the island of Guam tip over — said “I don’t see anything really objectionable [with the partition plan].” Aside from a few complaints in conservative media, there was no reaction in the press.

In contrast, someone like Steve Bannon, who has quite unreasonably denounced white Identitarians, is still described as a “white nationalist” by the mainstream, or at least as someone friendly to them. The President might call something like this “fake news.” I’d call it knowing deception by those who claim we should trust them. It’s because of deceit like this that an ever-increasing number of people treat the solemn pronouncements of self-serious journalists as they would North Korean propaganda claims.

What explains this, aside from the usual anti-white double standard? Civic nationalism is implicitly white because most American citizens are still white, and, more importantly, civic nationalists claim European-America’s history as a source of pride and identity.

Non-whites regard this history as something to be tolerated at best and condemned at worst. Their own history is one of resistance against European-America. Their participation in our political system is to further their own interests. Thus, we have foreigners seeking citizenship, not for the purpose of becoming American, but to advance foreign interests. They want the material benefits of being American but reject any suggestion they should identify with America or become American.

Anti-whites usually justify their arguments for increased non-white immigration on the grounds that America was founded on racial equality. But do they really believe this? What Peter Brimelow calls the historic American nation is above all a European nation, which is why its history, heroes, and symbols are being deconstructed. It’s for this reason that even colorblindness — neutrality on racial issues — has become “racist,” because colorblindness means siding with a legal system, a culture, and a history defined by whites.

A call for a white ethnostate will always be criticized much more severely than a call for a black one. This is partly because America is squeamish about any kind of criticism of blacks or their demands, even when black claims are perfect parallels of white claims. “White lives matter” is “hate,” while “black lives matter” is a legitimate expression of social grievance.

But there is a more important reason why whites who call for an ethnostate are always much more of a threat than blacks who call for one: We are serious and they are not. Everyone knows a white ethnostate would thrive, and why whites would want to live in one. And everyone knows a black homeland would be a wreck, and blacks wouldn’t want to live in it.

The central myth of American race relations is the assumption that whites benefit from the presence of “black bodies.” In reality, blacks impose a terrible cost on whites. White nationalism — or separatism — is simply a large-scale expression of how most whites already lead their lives. They move as far away as possible from blacks and their attendant financial costs, emotional distress, and physical danger. Whites want only to be left alone. Blacks require constant subsidies.

In theory, black nationalism should represent the aspiration for blacks to live free from their white oppressors. In practice, blacks know this would not work. If they really believed in black nationalism, they would be fleeing to the ethnostates already created for that purpose, such as Liberia and Sierra Leone, or to black homelands forged through revolution such as Haiti. As most blacks do, Mr. Ellison abandoned nationalism in favor of the more lucrative and pragmatic approach of milking liberal whites for more handouts.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Rep. Keith Ellison attend the sixth annual Minnesota Congressional Delegation Hotdish Competition. (Credit Image: © Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly/Newscom via ZUMA Press)

And as Mr. Ellison himself recognized when writing as “Hakim,” white liberals seem to have a psychological need to serve such a role. White liberals value the non-white pets they can use to demonstrate their superior virtue to other whites. And leftists don’t really seem to consider their non-white mascots to be fully human. They act as though they are utterly helpless victims of “racism,” thus denying them both agency and moral responsibility. The spectacle of Mr. Ellison defending the hateful madness of a Khalid Muhammed can be dismissed as youthful enthusiasm, while white middle schoolers posting a cartoon frog on the internet warrants a crackdown from the most powerful companies in the world.

If black fury at white America and the relatively low socioeconomic status of most blacks could be magically cured, white liberals would lose their raison d’etre. Or, as Keith Ellison strikingly put it when explaining why white liberals would oppose black nationalism, liberals “justify their existence by championing so called lost causes.”

Thus, white nationalism will always be a systematic danger in a way black or Hispanic nationalism never will. As The Atlantic put it, white nationalism is an “existential threat.” Even saying “It’s Okay to be White” throws the system into turmoil. White identity threatens to remake the entire social order because a white ethnostate would work, and would work far better than the Third World disaster emerging today. Indeed, the United States for most of American history operated as something approaching an ethnostate and it became the most powerful nation in the world.

Most whites still think of the United States as somehow existing in this way. “The symbol of America, Uncle Sam, still displays white features,” as Wilmot Robertson put it in The Ethnostate. Thus the double standard endures, as most whites filter their racial nationalism through the vehicle of American civic nationalism, and non-whites filter their nationalist posturing through ever-increasing demands for white financial and social concessions. But ultimately, it is premised upon a white supermajority willing and able to foot the bills for Mr. Ellison’s unending demands.

That supermajority is gone, and whites cannot carry increasing numbers of non-whites on their backs forever. Whites have nothing to gain by trying to live in the same society as Mr. Ellison. The double standard of insisting on integration while smiling benignly on fantasies of black separation looks increasingly threadbare. Here’s hoping Mr. Ellison replaces Sen. Franken, so that the double standard becomes more obvious to everyone.