Breaking the Great Taboo

Samuel Francis (ed.), Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time, The Occidental Press, 2006, 446 pp.

Race, as the late Samuel Francis writes in the introduction to this collection of race-realist essays, is the Great Taboo of our age, as sex was for the Victorians. Just as the Victorians punished people who “talked about sex, made jokes about sex, or wrote too openly and frankly about sex,” so do the racial Victorians of the 21st century, denying as they do the reality of race, punish people who assert that race lies at the heart of many of our most intractable social problems.

Dr. Francis should know. He suffered firsthand the consequences of violating the Great Taboo. At the first American Renaissance conference, held in Atlanta in 1994, he said:

[W]e as whites must . . . reassert our identity and our solidarity, and we must do so in explicitly racial terms through the articulation of a racial consciousness as whites. . . The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race that created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die.

For this and other observations he was fired from his job at the Washington Times, the “conservative” Washington newspaper. A lesser man might have groveled to keep his job, and perhaps submitted to sensitivity training. Not Sam Francis. He spent the remaining decade of his life writing and speaking on a variety of topics, including the racial crisis whites face. He spoke at every AR conference until his death in February 2005, and his speeches were always among the highlights of the program. He was, in the words of American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor, “the premier philosopher of white racial consciousness of our time.”

Race and the American Prospect was Dr. Francis’s last book. He conceived of it, chose the contributors, edited their essays, and wrote two chapters. The book as a whole is an exhortation to whites in North America, Europe and Australia to reclaim their racial birthright before they and their descendants are displaced by non-whites in their ancestral homelands. It is not a screed, but a sober, scholarly, well-reasoned examination of the crisis that we as whites face in an era of mass immigration, multi-racialism and multiculturalism.

What is racial consciousness and why is it important to whites? Simply put, racial consciousness is the conviction that a biologically unique group has a right not only to survive, but to thrive, that it is entitled to protect its interests as a group in the geographical territory from which it sprang or in which it developed. Racial consciousness asserts the right of a race to fashion a society and institutions that serve and advance its interests, and from which its people and their descendants are the main beneficiaries.

Racial consciousness is both natural and moral. It is particularly important to whites because it is to them, and to them alone, that it is now prohibited. As even a cursory glance through Race and the American Prospect will show, this was certainly not always the case. But as Dr. Francis explains in the introduction, over the last century the West has suffered a “racial revolution” that has “eviscerated” white racial consciousness and identity “through the pseudoscientific denial of race, the political and cultural demonization of whites, and the political and legal destruction of white cultural power.” The same revolution has encouraged non-white, and indeed anti-white racial consciousness among minority groups. Thanks to mass immigration, within this century non-whites are likely to displace whites as the majority in many of their historic homelands.

Dr. Francis lays out three reasons why whites must recover an explicitly racial consciousness. First, science has rejected the “race is a social construct” fallacy. Races are biologically distinct, and one cannot replace another. If whites were to be displaced, no other race could replicate their contribution to human society. Second, independent of the scientific reality of race, whites are entitled to survive and thrive for their own sake, just as all members of a family want that family to survive and thrive. Finally, whites must recover racial consciousness for reasons of self-protection. Every non-white group in Western nations explicitly promotes its own interests. By abandoning racial consciousness, whites have unilaterally disarmed in the face of non-whites who promote their racial interests, often at the expense of whites.

The essays in Race and the American Prospect expound on these three reasons why white racial consciousness needs to reassert itself, and what is likely to occur if whites do not wake up to the crisis they face. The essays examine various aspects of the crisis- — from the scientific to the historical, from the religious to the philosophical- — and some seek to explain how white racial consciousness, which was so deeply ingrained not just in America but also in Britain and Europe, was lost.

In “The Reality of Race,” Kevin Lamb, editor of The Occidental Quarterly, offers a detailed analysis of current scientific thinking on race. Science confirms what racial liberals deny: that race is real, and that it is racial differences that primarily account for the success or failure of different groups. No one who understands genetics any longer subscribes to the environmentalist “blank slate” model developed by Frankfurt School sociologists. Those who explain black and Hispanic underachievement in terms of “racism” and discrimination have an agenda that is political, not scientific.

In “Racial Differences in Intelligence, Personality and Behavior,” Prof. Richard Lynn shows that observations about racial differences throughout history, before the revolution in genetic science, have proven more accurate than those of modern-day sociologists. His conclusions are well known: East Asians have higher IQs than whites, who have higher IQs than blacks. Blacks are more likely than whites, who are more likely than East Asians, to engage in destructive behavior and suffer from what Prof. Lynn calls “psychopathic personality.” There is no moral dimension here. Racial differences are the result of evolutionary development in different environments. They do explain, however, why not all population groups fit well into white societies.

The difficulties blacks face in white American society are examined in detail in “The Cost of Racial Pluralism in Black and White” by Joseph Fallon. Using data and charts, Mr. Fallon shows that from rates of criminality and welfare use to disease and unemployment, blacks are at the bottom on most indices of social health. The trillions of dollars spent to lift blacks out of poverty since the 1960s- — money largely taken from white taxpayers- — has not had the transformative effect the architects of the Great Society hoped for. Today, the Great Society’s spiritual heirs blame persistent white “racism,” and demand even more money and penance from whites.

Having failed to solve the black-white race problem, American elites made things worse in 1965 by opening the United States to mass non-white immigration from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In “Immigration and Race,” Dr. Wayne Lutton, editor of The Social Contract, offers a detailed examination of US immigration from colonial days to the present. For most of its history, the US had an explicitly racial immigration policy. The first naturalization law restricted citizenship to “free white persons,” and until the late nineteenth century, nearly all immigrants were from Northwestern Europe: Britain, Ireland and Germany, along with some Dutch and Scandinavians. Chinese and Japanese were excluded on racial grounds. When the source of immigration shifted to Eastern and Southern Europe, old-stock Americans responded with the 1924 Immigration Act, which established national-origin quotas based on the populations of each ethnic group present in the country at the time of the 1890 census (this was later changed to the 1920 census).

Supporters of immigration restriction were unapologetic about their desire to retain the Northwestern European character of the nation. As Congressman William Vaile of Colorado, a prominent supporter of the 1924 act, explained, “the northern European, and particularly Anglo-Saxons made this country.” Others helped, but “they came to this country because it was already an Anglo-Saxon commonwealth. They added to it, they often enriched it, but they did not make it, and have not yet greatly changed it. We are determined that they shall not. It is a good country. It suits us. And what we assert is that we are not going to surrender it to somebody else or allow other people, no matter what their merits, to make it something different.” No public official today would dare make such a statement.

The immigration restriction movement of the early 20th century was the last hurrah of classic white racial consciousness. Following the Second World War, immigration “reformers” worked tirelessly to abolish the national-origins quotas, and scored their great triumph with the 1965 Immigration Act.

Sadly, the story of mass immigration has been played out in all English-speaking countries- — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and even Britain. Derek Turner, editor of the British magazine Right Now! demonstrates in “The Dis-United Kingdom” how mass non-white immigration is rapidly turning Britain into a multiracial society, with all the attendant problems: crime, social disintegration, and cloying political correctness. In some ways, the racial situation in Britain is even worse than in the United States, and it beggars belief that Britain, the land of the Anglo-Saxon, a racially homogeneous society for centuries, may be majority non-white by the end of the century.

It is extraordinary how rapidly white consciousness disappeared after the middle of the 20th century. Jared Taylor, in “The Racial Revolution,” shows just how deeply racial consciousness was imbued in the men who created and developed the United States. Nearly all of the historical figures of the American past, from Thomas Jefferson to Dwight Eisenhower, had a clear view of themselves as white men living in a white civilization. Even so-called progressives or liberals like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were explicit in their view of America as a white country. By modern standards, nearly every prominent American before the mid-1950s was an irredeemable “racist.” Today, the race-realist views of Wilson, Abraham Lincoln, or Samuel Gompers are air-brushed out of the history books. If today’s Americans knew the truth about the great figures from their past, they might more easily reassert their legitimate interests.

Atlanta attorney Sam G. Dickson, in “Race and the South,” takes a well-deserved swipe at Southern neo-Confederates who deny there was a racial element to the War Between the States. The neo-Confederates refuse to admit that Southern secession was driven primarily by the South’s desire to keep black slaves. Mr. Dickson cites leading Confederates like President Jefferson Davis, Vice President Alexander Stephens, and General Robert E. Lee to show that it was slavery — and therefore race and not states’ rights — that drove the Southern cause.

White racial consciousness was not restricted to Southerners, or even Americans. Brent Nelson and J. L. Woodruff in “Race and the Left” and “Race in Philosophy” demonstrate that many European social and political philosophers, even those on the left, were critical of blacks and other non-whites, and viewed European civilization as the apotheosis of human achievement. Mr. Woodruff makes a particularly trenchant point. Throughout most of modern history, European and European-derived societies have been so far ahead of non-white societies, that whites did not even think of non-whites in the same terms as themselves. Thus Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, wrote “All men are created equal,” but believed blacks were an inferior race. The enemies of white racial consciousness have seized upon statements like this and applied them to non-whites, something Jefferson would have found absurd and even dishonest.

Who is responsible for what Dr. Francis calls the “evisceration” of white racial consciousness? In what will be the most controversial chapters of Race and the American Prospect, both Kevin McDonald and Richard Fausette blame Jews. In “Jews, Blacks and Race,” Prof. McDonald writes that Jews view themselves as an out group in Western societies, and have developed an evolutionary strategy of undermining traditional white societies to make them safe for Jews. In his view, this means eliminating white racial consciousness. Thus Jews were at the forefront of the social movement to re-label America as a racially and culturally pluralist nation, in which no one group was dominant. This revisionist notion glorifies “diversity” and “multiculturalism.” Politically, Jews were the force behind the immigration reform movement that abolished the national-origins quota system, opening the country to mass immigration. Prof. MacDonald writes that both movements undermined the US as a white nation, and both were seen by Jews as in their interests.

Mr. Fausette, in “Race and Religion,” looks at the decline of Western society from a Biblical perspective. Jews have adhered to God’s plan by maintaining biological purity in the form of what he calls “Orthodox breeding” communities; non-Jews have not. By accepting aliens into their societies they have violated God’s view of how a people should live, and therefore will suffer the punishment of having their “altars pulled down.” By placing responsibility for our plight on another group, these two chapters are a departure from the general themes of the book, which are directed towards the thinking and behavior of whites rather than that of others.

Dr. Francis takes a different view of who is responsible for what whites face today. Relying on his study of James Burnham’s theory of managerial elites, he writes in “Why the American Ruling Class Betrays Its Race and Civilization” that since the New Deal, a new globally oriented, technically sophisticated managerial elite has used its mass-organizational skills to promote its interests and power. This new elite sees any vestige of traditional America — or any other traditional society — as an obstacle, and uses all means at its disposal, including finance and propaganda, to destroy it. It happens that the group interests of Jews coincide with the interests of the new elite, which explains why many Jews have risen to prominence in the institutions the elite has developed since the New Deal.

Race and the American Prospect concludes with “Racial Preservation” by Richard McCulloch, which outlines how whites could recover and pass on racial consciousness. For Mr. McCulloch, white racial consciousness is love for our people, not hate for any other. It means keeping white racial interests firmly in mind. All public policy must be viewed through the prism of whether it is good for whites. We should not be concerned with the interests of other groups, for they will look after themselves. We should always oppose multiracialism, because it is inherently anti-white and will ultimately lead to the disappearance of whites through race-mixing.

Race and the American Prospect is generally quite readable — a testimony to Sam Francis’s editing skills — but the book cannot be called an easy read. It is long, it is serious, it is scholarly. At the same time, the variety of its contents, the high quality of its contributors, and the wealth of information it contains are all proof that the field of white racial consciousness has reached a level of maturity and confidence well beyond what activists of 20 or 30 years ago would have imagined.

Race and the American Prospect is bristling with arguments many Americans would find eye-opening — if they were ever to hear them. Access to the public is the challenge all dissident movements face. Let us hope that this solid work of reference becomes the volume to which Americans turn as the reality they see around them conflicts ever more sharply with the myths they are told to believe. That would be the legacy most befitting the memory of Sam Francis.

Though long out of print, a limited number of copies of Race and the American Prospect are available for purchase from Noontide Press.