Posted on November 19, 2010

Building White Communities

John Hunt Morgan, American Renaissance, November 2004

Image Credit: Chris Light / Wikimedia

Image Credit: Chris Light / Wikimedia

Thomas Hardy is supposed to have said that men and women generally take different views of reform. Men, he argued, seem to think they have to remake the entire world in order to be happy in their little corner of it, whereas women tend to concentrate on improving their corner, and leave the rest of the world alone.

In this respect, American Renaissance is a typically masculine undertaking. It is full of articles about the larger society, written clearly in the hope of changing society. AR is an almost touching expression of faith in Richard Weaver’s famous dictum, “Ideas have consequences.” It sends powerful ideas out into the world in the hope that they will have powerful consequences.

I note that over the years readers have written to complain that AR does a good job of explaining what the problems are, but has little to say about how to solve them. These people are not asking for suggestions about how to change their little corner of the world. They are men who want to know what they can do personally to help change the world.

I hope and believe that some day the ideas promoted by AR and other racially aware publications will change the world, but this will not happen soon. It will be some time before people who think as we do are setting policy. In the meantime, it is worth considering Hardy’s female approach. As we work to promote a general understanding of race, how can we also improve our little corners of the world?

I once met a group of Identity Christians, who almost perfectly demonstrated Hardy’s view of the sexes. One of the men told me he was working on a way to reconcile Biblical creationism with the geological evidence for evolution. He explained to me that he was finally approaching a solution: Whites were created but the other races evolved from primitive life forms.

The women had other priorities. They had set up a network for passing around baby clothes as children outgrew them. They were also working on a pro-white coloring book with practical instruction for children. Mixed in with Charles Martel and President Polk, there was a page with an automatic pistol and a message that said something like: “This is Daddy’s gun. If you find it, don’t touch it. Tell Mommy or Daddy right away.” As one of the women explained, many people in their circle have guns, and children need to be reminded of gun safety. Thomas Hardy would not have been surprised: The man was working out who was created and who evolved, while the women were making sure the children had clothes and didn’t shoot each other.

The women were particularly interested in children — and rightly so. Our children must grow up with healthy racial views, and yet they are uniquely vulnerable to bad influences in countless ways we are not.

Adults can live in a world full of anti-white, anti-”racist” propaganda without being affected by it, because people who have gained a sound understanding of race are not likely to lose it. People do not give up a view of the world that explains so much for one that leaves life full of mysteries. Once we have taken off the blinders, we see the racial double standards clearly, we know which part of the story the newscasters left out, and we see how desperately every American institution distorts the truth. The foolishness we read and hear may infuriate us, but the propaganda is so simple-minded no one who has seen through it will ever be duped again. And even if our neighbors and associates are conventional liberals, we are part of a community of publications, conferences, and Internet discussion groups.

Things are much more difficult for children. Simple-minded propaganda works on them because they have simple minds. At the same time, no matter how racially healthy their homes may be, the pressure to conform to the outside world is tremendous. Children hate to be different, and today, a child whose mind is not poisoned is different. How do we protect children from propaganda and from the pressures of conformity?

I can cite several examples of the dangers. I have gently done my best to give my children healthy racial views, but I have not always succeeded. I am from a family of Southerners, and over the years, I have tried to interest my 10-year-old daughter in her Confederate ancestors. I have not been very successful. The Confederacy does not get much respect either at school or among her friends, and what I say has little effect. However, some months ago I took her to see the movie Gods and Generals, which is about the early years of the War Between the States. It paints as realistic a picture as possible, and offers a sympathetic portrait of Stonewall Jackson. His death, after the battle of Chancellorsville, with his wife by his side, is a very moving scene.

This single movie affected my daughter more than anything I ever said to her. She marched out of the theater a staunch Confederate, and remains one to this day. The results on this occasion happen to have been good, but this only proves the extraordinary power of film, and we all know the insidious message that is most often on the screen.

At school, children try to please their teachers, and what pleases them is standard anti-”racism.” In grade school one year, my daughter had a choice of several biographies on which to write a report. I was surprised to find that one of the choices was the life of Robert E. Lee, and I encouraged her to read about him. One day, she came home from school and announced she had chosen her book. “I thought about General Lee,” she said, “but I chose Rosa Parks instead.” She later reported that the book was the most boring thing she had ever read, but she decided to please her teacher and classmates rather than her father. This is hardly surprising.

How can we give our children a proper start in life? In the October 2001 issue of AR there is an excellent article about rearing honorable white children. Prof. Robert Griffin of the University of Vermont profiled a number of families that have taken their racial responsibilities seriously, and who have arranged their households so as to instill sound racial and cultural values. These are inspiring stories, and the children will no doubt benefit greatly. However, these families all did something not all families can do: They taught their children at home rather than send them to school.

Home schooling is, of course, the only way to control what children learn, but not every family can do it. Even if an adult is home all day, not all parents or children are temperamentally suited to home schooling. Also, a single, self-contained family is not a community. Children need playmates.

What would be ideal is a place where the neighbors think as we do, and where the school teachers, the mayor, and the fire chief do, too. We need a community of racially conscious whites who build — simply by being together — the healthy atmosphere whites used to take for granted.

As a father, I am particularly conscious of the benefits such a community would have for children, but it would have great benefits for adults, too. How pleasant it would be for a neighborhood get-together to feel like an American Renaissance conference. At the last conference I attended, someone said to me, “It’s great to be among the living again.” It would be wonderful to live among the living.

The most important aspect of such a community would be the education it offered children. Any group that is out of step with the mainstream in any fundamental way — and, for the time being, racially-conscious whites are radically out of step — must be able to rear children in a way that supports dissident thinking.

Would it be difficult to gather together the nucleus of such a community? Certainly it would, but it would be easier than electing a racially healthy Congress or state legislature. At the same time, even a small zone of healthy white consciousness could become a base for efforts at achieving larger changes. Sooner or later, whites will form communities of their own, and the sooner we begin, the more successful we will be.

Communities of like-minded people do not spring up by accident. People have to build them, and Americans have a long history of building them. Most such people, like the Amish and the Shakers and Mormons, have had religious motives, but Americans have gathered for all kinds of reasons, some of them completely harebrained. Until recently, a black man named Dwight York, a convicted rapist who claimed to have come from the planet Rizq, ran the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors at a compound not far from Eatonton, Georgia. One hundred fifty Nuwaubians lived at the site, practicing an odd mixture of invented and Egyptian religion. They would still be there if it had not come to light that Mr. York was molesting little Nuwaubian girls.

An even more extreme example was Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple. He managed to get more than 900 people to move to Guyana and build a town in which they could practice their religion. They built a system to train members in their dissident views, but it began to unravel, and on Nov. 18, 1978, they all committed suicide. The point here is that even crazy people can leave their old lives and build communities. Sane white people should certainly be able to do considerably better.

Probably the best-known example of a group that has built its own institutions to maintain a sharply dissident way of life is the Amish. They have been very successful in preserving a way of life completely at odds with the rest of America, but they are not a good model for racially-conscious whites. They have farm communities that have been established, in some cases, for centuries. Most racially-conscious whites are not farmers, and they need to form new communities, not carry on the ones into which they were born.

The Amish also have an unusual education system. They study in private, one-room schools that go up only to 8th grade. The Amish and Mennonites received a special Supreme Court exemption in 1972 from state requirements for education beyond middle school, successfully arguing that their people learn wisdom in the household and behind the plow, and that secondary schools are purveyors of temptation and worldliness. Racially conscious whites have the same distrust of high schools, but most would rather fix them than abolish them.

There are other successful dissident communities, established much more recently, with the express intention of building institutions to encourage a way of life at odds with the mainstream. These are the Orthodox Jewish towns of Monroe, Monsey, and New Square, all in New York. As a rule, Orthodox Jews have a head start on community because they are forbidden to drive on the Sabbath and must walk to temple services. This means they cannot live very far away from each other.

However, in these three cases they have gone much further, and have established all-Orthodox towns that reflect their desire to build institutions in which they can rear their children. If anything, Orthodox Jews are more out of step with the rest of America than racially-conscious whites, and they understand that without communities, without schools for their children, their way of life will disappear.

Jews founded New Square and Monroe as entirely new settlements. New Square got its start in 1953, when an Orthodox congregation bought an old farm, and parceled it out as lots. New Square now has a population approaching 10,000. Monroe was established in the mid-1970s by a larger congregation, and has a population of about 20,000. All the schools in both Monroe and New Square are private.

Monsey developed differently, and is perhaps the most promising model for racially-conscious whites. It was an ordinary, gentile town that began to develop as an Orthodox community after a seminary was founded there and many graduates decided to stay. Once a Yeshiva was built for younger students, Monsey became a center in which Orthodox Jews of all ages had the institutions they needed. The Orthodox from the entire area started moving in, and residents found they could sell their houses for a hefty premium. Soon Monsey was overwhelmingly Orthodox. There were no doubt some gentiles who were sorry to see their community transformed within a generation, but they had the consolation of getting out at a nice profit. This has certainly not been the case for millions of whites displaced by blacks or Mexicans.

These three towns are now completely stable, with more people wanting to move in than there are spaces available. Owners will not sell to anyone who is not Orthodox — not even to other Jews — and though this is against the law, only the Orthodox want to buy houses there anyway. The schools are Orthodox, the mayor is Orthodox, and all the plumbers and painters are Orthodox. These towns do not have police forces because the only crimes are parking violations. Parents have the perfect set of institutions within which to rear children, and Orthodoxy has a guaranteed future.

The school system is the key to a successful community. Children cannot sustain a dissident point of view in the face of a school system that teaches liberal nonsense. Orthodox Jews have always understood this, and because their schools are religious they have built private schools to sustain their way of life.

Private schools for whites are desirable but not necessary. Setting one up is a big job, and with enough people in a community, it would be easier and cheaper to elect a school board, and revamp the public schools. American schools teach the same subjects they did 50 years ago. It is the emphasis that has shifted, and there is no reason why a racially-conscious school could not shift the emphasis back. A curriculum taken unchanged from 50 years ago probably would be, except for a few odds and ends like sex education, in compliance with current standards. If state regulations demanded teaching units on American Indians, the slave trade, or American multiculturalism, these subjects could certainly be taught — though from a more traditional point of view. In fact, it would be important to cover those subjects thoroughly whether they were required or not. Any child who went to college after an education of this kind might be in for a shock, but by that age healthy ideas would probably be unassailable.

There are now more than enough racially aware whites to move gradually into a small town and remake its institutions. These whites would not have to be a majority in order to elect town councilmen or school board members. An activist minority can achieve a great deal, and any largely white town would have a certain number of original inhabitants who would support a return to good sense.

The question, of course, is where whites should go. Moving is a great bother, and everyone can think of reasons why the best place for a white community is the place where he already lives. Some obvious criteria are that if an existing town is to be taken over, it should be small, already overwhelmingly white, and with its own small school district. If a school is part of a huge, county-wide school district, for example, it could not be returned to sanity without taking over the entire district — an extremely difficult undertaking.

After people move, they have to make a living. It would be important to choose a town not far from a metropolitan area with jobs. When the Orthodox congregations built new towns, they arranged for private commuter buses into New York City so people could support themselves. It would be good to attract a certain number of retired people whose pension or Social Security income would follow them wherever they moved. A retirement home in a white town would be attractive to older people who prefer to be looked after by people from the community rather than by black and Puerto Rican orderlies.

Some would fear that the government would make it impossible to run a white town, but I disagree. Sooner or later it would become clear what was happening, but no laws require residential integration, and the country is still largely segregated. As soon as a town had a reputation for white consciousness, no non-whites would want to live there. If a few insisted on moving in as test cases, they would have to be let in; there could be no outright discrimination. However, no one wants to spend his life as a test case. Such people would move in with great fanfare, but would soon move out. If a certain number of non-whites decided to stay, they would have to be tolerated. Very few would choose that kind of life, and a handful of odd-balls would be a small price to pay for a healthy-minded community. The town would have to be very careful never to break anti-discrimination laws, but practically everything necessary for a real white community can be achieved entirely within the law.

Some might argue that starting small in this way is a renunciation of the larger, national goals of a white consciousness movement. On the contrary, it could well be that only modest beginnings can lead to greater achievements. A successful white community would grow. It could become the nucleus for a region that would send representatives to the state house and to Washington. The region would not only have a political voice, it would inspire imitators.

In the Feb. 1995 issue of AR there was a debate about whether the United States could be saved as a unitary, white state or whether whites would have to accept partition if they are to gain a homeland. This was an interesting but entirely abstract debate that does nothing to solve the problems we face every day. White communities are compatible with either approach — partition or unitary state — and have the immeasurable advantage of large benefits now. Small gatherings of whites will not immediately change the government in Washington or detoxify the national media, but they would be the beginnings of a real, practical movement to save our race and culture. Let us begin to cultivate our corners of the world even as we work to change it.