Posted on July 4, 2020

A Declaration of White Spiritual Independence

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, July 4, 2020

White consciousness is rising throughout the country. It’s supported by the most powerful institutions in our society. It’s sweeping all regions, classes, and subcultures. It’s just not the racial consciousness we want. Still, we can turn it to our advantage.

There’s no escape from race. While Americans are stuck at home because of the coronavirus and renewed lockdowns, YouTube, Amazon Prime, and Netflix are all promoting Black Lives Matter. (In contrast, American Renaissance just lost its eight-year-old channel.)

Sports offer no retreat. The National Football League plans to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the “black national anthem,” before every first game of the next season. There are some reports that the NBA may paint “Black Lives Matter” on the courts or allow players to wear militant slogans on their jerseys. Even NASCAR has gone PC by banning the Confederate flag.

Meanwhile, mobs destroyed monuments to Southern heroes, the Founders, Ulysses S. Grant, St. Junipero, and many others. In Portland, they so badly burned the base of a statue of an elk that the city had to take it down. Perhaps protesters were enraged by ABC reporting that the National Parks “remain overwhelmingly white,” which is an “existential crisis.”

“Whiteness” itself is the problem. The book of the moment is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. I’ve argued it is the basis of a death cult, the Bible for a church with no salvation. In Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, Paul Gottfried explained that multiculturalism had a semi-religious component, a “Secular Theocracy.” However, it’s no longer merely secular. Edward Dutton argues that Black Lives Matter is best understood “as a religious revival,” a heretical mutation of Christianity, complete with rituals of self-abnegation, iconoclasm, and attempts at transcendence.

We shouldn’t underestimate the scope of this radical creed. White Fragility is the number-two bestselling book at Amazon. (Amazon banned Jared Taylor’s White Identity.) White Fragility is the number-one paperback nonfiction bestseller on The New York Times Best Seller list, the first of five “anti-racist” books. It’s number two in combined print and e-book nonfiction, preceded by John Bolton’s attack on President Trump, who is the Archfiend of the new faith.

Miss DiAngelo is hardly a prophet covered in sackcloth and ashes. She’s a highly-paid corporate consultant who does anti-racist training. The Trump Administration itself reportedly paid her company for diversity consulting. The Black Lives Matter movement and the resulting corporate donations will be a massive boost to the already flourishing “diversity industry.”

The New York Times’s 1619 Project,” which puts blacks at the “very center of American history,” is being worked into school curricula around the country. Other authors, including Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are teaching whites about the breadth and depth of their racism. The creed is producing catechisms. There are several books about “how to be an antiracist,” including coloring books for children.

Some think it’s all for show. Tablet noted that “self-help social justice” is allowing privileged, spiritually starved white women to embark on a “journey to nowhere, unpacking and repacking the invisible knapsack, journaling through their guilt while the world burns outside.” Once, people would travel to South America or take LSD for a spiritual quest. Now, you can stay home and meditate on Between the World and Me.

There are also books about how to argue with racists, especially about whether race is biological. Adam Rutherford’s upcoming How to Argue With a Racist: What Our Genes Do (And Don’t Say) About Human Difference will certainly be a bestseller. I believe race is a biological reality. However, whether it is or not, we are certainly treated that way. When it comes time to figure out who is to be punished for the sins of “racism,” no one has any problem figuring out who is white.

All this is forcing white consciousness on us. Whether or not they believe the white race exists biologically, leftists have no problem finding white villains when it suits them. Administering race preferences in hiring, promoting racial angles in news stories, breaking down race differences in wealth, reviling the latest “Karen” — you can’t do these things unless you can tell whites from non-whites. Needless to say, whites are being force-fed a negative racial consciousness. It’s being pushed by media, businesses, government, and in classrooms. Whites are being forced to believe they are beneficiaries of gigantic, white-supremacist systems.

In truth, Robin DiAngelo is right about whites. We are fragile. We are fragile because we, and we alone, believe in individualism. Whites alone took Martin Luther King Jr. seriously when he talked about judging people by the “content of their character.” Majorities of every other race see race or ethnicity as central to their identity. Just 15 percent of whites do. Most whites believe that being “racist” is deeply immoral. (There’s “literally nothing worse than white supremacy,” says Taylor Swift.) And “racism” and “white supremacy” have become so broadly defined that there’s nothing we do that isn’t blameworthy.

There are two obvious problems with this strategy. First, if you keep telling whites that we have a collective identity, eventually we’re going to believe you. Second, we’re going to ask ourselves why we should go along with our own destruction just because you tell us to.

This is what happened to me, and most other Millennial white advocates. We weren’t raised to have a racial consciousness. We didn’t want it. We were “radicalized” by multicultural student programs, race-obsessed media, and liberal professors.

When someone powerful is talking to you, you should always ask what he stands to gain if you believe him. Why should we believe those who insult our history and culture? It’s obvious that the people telling us about “white privilege” are the privileged. If we were privileged, we wouldn’t be fired for saying things like “all lives matter,” journalists wouldn’t be doxing us, it wouldn’t be a crime to say “It’s OK to be white,” and corporations wouldn’t ban and deplatform us.

The system ends when we decide it does, when we assert our identity and fight for our interests. The hard part is getting whites to realize that we have collective interests. However, the “woke left” is helping us. Some realize this, and it worries them.

White Fragility has a simple message,” wrote Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, “there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.” Calling it the “dumbest book ever written,” he argues that liberals who want to put “race even more at the center of our identities” and “fetishize the unbridgeable nature of our identities” will create more conflict. No white advocate I know thinks race encompasses a person’s entire identity, but this seems to be what Miss DiAngelo is suggesting. She’s more extreme than we are.

The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher also thinks the “woke left” is creating a monster. He writes: “[W]hen racist ideology like DiAngelo’s is embraced by mainstream institutions, which throw away the old liberal colorblind model that post-MLK America was raised with, it becomes much harder to convince angry white kids that the system is not stacked against them.” Though he calls people like us “haters,” Mr. Dreher is right when he exclaims, “these left-wing idiots are doing the work of white nationalists for them!”

Podcast host Katie Herzog worries that the focus on whiteness will forge a powerful racial consciousness. (So does white nationalist Greg Johnson).

Jesse Singal, who has contributed to New York Magazine, is also worried.

Progressive journalist Glen Greenwald:

The Intercept’s Murtaza’s Hussain:

Jared Taylor has, for years, welcomed the fanaticism of Black Lives Matter as a great force that pushes whites “into our arms.”

As for RobinDiAngelo, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, managed to locate an interesting statement on her personal “Accountability Statement.” (It is 14 words long.)

We agree. Whites must acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience. Sam Francis said whites exist objectively, but not subjectively, meaning that whites don’t see themselves as whites, despite the malevolent gaze of others. Now, some whites are beginning to become conscious of their identity as whites. White consciousness is inevitable, but the form it takes is not. Self-hating white consciousness is worse than no racial awareness at all. But for some, a negative identity may be a necessary steppingstone to a positive one. A white woman who publicly kisses the boots of a black man can surely sink no further.

“White privilege” conspiracy theories notwithstanding, we are not in power. Indeed, once the institutions of society start to rail against “white privilege,” we can be certain that there is no such thing. We are unrepresented. No one speaks for us. And no one will until we recognize that we are a people with the right and duty to advance our interests, whatever they may be. We have nothing to apologize for and a proud legacy to defend. We are European-Americans, People of Light, one branch of that great white diaspora who served as torchbearers to the world.

We are still part of the United States of America. We built it. However, we can no longer pretend that it is our country. We are one of several peoples living under this government. We can expect that other groups will soon want their own anthems, flags, and special treatment. We must do the same, developing and defending symbols that are part of our “collective racial experience,” as Miss DiAngelo puts it. We must organize not as Republicans, conservatives, Christians, or even Americans, but as whites. This July 4th, we need a spiritual declaration of independence, an assertion of our own racial identity.

This will be uncomfortable for whites who want to think of themselves simply as Americans, or even as free individuals. They must understand they can no longer make that choice. A different choice has been made for them. Hostile authorities, academics, corporations, and media constantly define us by race. We welcome this. It is forcing us to do what we should have done a long time ago and band together. We will form a state within the state. We will heed the words from our revolutionary past: Join, or Die.