Letter to The American Conservative

In an article in the Feb. 13 issue of The American Conservative, Steve Sailer writes at length about the concept of “citizenism,” which he defines as putting the interests of a nation’s current citizens over the interests of others. In it, he makes the following reference to AR editor, Jared Taylor:

Nor does citizenism suffer the fatal paradox dooming the white nationalism advocated by Jared Taylor and others who encourage whites to get down and mud-wrestle with the Al Sharptons of the world for control of the racial spoils system. Unfortunately for Taylor’s movement, white Americans don’t want, as he recommends, to act like the rest of the world; they want to act like white Americans. They believe on the whole in individualism rather than tribalism, national patriotism rather than ethnic loyalty, meritocracy rather than nepotism, nuclear families rather than extended clans, law and fair play rather than privilege, corporations of strangers rather than mafias of relatives, and true love rather than the arranged marriages necessary to keep ethnic categories clear-cut.

Mr. Taylor wrote the following letter in reply, but the editor of The American Conservative declined to publish it, citing space constraints:

In his article on “citizenism” in the latest issue, Steve Sailer says any appeal to white interests will fail because whites don’t want to “get down and mud-wrestle with the Al Sharptons of the world for control of the racial spoils system.” Mr. Sailer can write as dismissively as he likes, but for most of their history, white Americans had a very clear sense of their racial interests, and they acted on them.

The very first American Congress—that of 1790—established the young nation’s citizenship laws, permitting naturalization only to “free white persons.” In 1884, nearly 100 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that this meant American Indians were not citizens—they were not white. Americans passed countless laws to exclude Asians. The ban on immigration and naturalization of Chinese continued until 1943, and was lifted only when the United States found itself allied with China in the Second World War. Congress set an annual quota of 105 Chinese. Until 1965, therefore, we had an immigration policy designed to keep the country white (“citizenism” at its best), and our laws changed only after assurances from liberals that new policies would not upset the ethnic balance.

Of the 50 states, no fewer than 44 had anti-miscegenation laws. Massachusetts lifted its ban in 1843 only for libertarian reasons. The new law explained: “It is cruel, unjust and improper to . . . punish that as a high crime, which is at most evidence of vicious feeling, bad taste, and personal degradation.”

Several Southern states wrote anti-miscegenation into their constitutions, and South Carolina and Alabama expunged their bans by popular vote only in 1998 and 2000 respectively. Thirty-eight percent of voters in South Carolina and 42 percent in Alabama voted to *keep* the ban.

Until John Kennedy, there was not a single US President who did not take it for granted that, as Harry Truman put it, “Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”

It was white people with a clear sense of race and racial interests who built the country to which non-whites now want to immigrate. If whites had kept to their earlier policies, Mr. Sailer would not need to promote his clumsy concept of “citizenism.” There would be no “racial spoils system,” and certainly no “mud wrestling.” This is the price whites have paid for their loss of racial consciousness. If they do not regain a sense of their racial interests, they will pay a far higher price: they will become a despised minority in a country that has lost its European culture.

Jared Taylor, Editor

American Renaissance