Posted on January 7, 2011

If We Do Nothing

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, June 1996

Divided America

In March, the Census Bureau released its periodic projection of the ethnic makeup of the United States during the next few decades. It reported cheerfully that if current immigration and birth rates hold steady, by the year 2050 the percentage of Hispanics will have increased from 10 to 25 percent, that of Asians from three to eight percent, and that of blacks from 12 to 14 percent. All these increases will come at the expense of whites, who are projected to fall from 74 percent of the population to about 50 percent.

Within 54 years, therefore, whites will be on the brink of becoming just one more racial minority. And because whites are having so few children, they will be an old minority. Within just 34 years — by 2030 — they will already account for less than half the population under age 18, but will be three quarters of the population over 65. Some of the people reading these words will be alive when these things come to pass.

As usual, the Census Bureau’s projections stirred little interest. The New York Times did note that the projected changes would represent “a profound demographic shift” and that the future mix of old whites and young blacks and Hispanics might give the debate about Social Security “a racial and ethnic tinge.” This seemed to be the most disturbing thing the Times could think of.

Why is there almost complete silence about a population shift that, if it takes place, will transform much of the country beyond recognition? Why is there no debate about what this would mean in terms of education, politics, democracy, the jury system, national unity, racial friction, crime, foreign policy, labor productivity, or virtually any other national indicator?

The demographic future of the United States is perhaps the most important question we face, yet it receives no attention. Most whites simply refuse to think about what is happening to their country or about the third-world future they are ensuring for their children and grandchildren. Those who do think about demographic change have been browbeaten into believing that it is inevitable and that resistance would, somehow, be immoral.

What makes the silence so unaccountable is that there is very little mystery about the nature of the changes we can anticipate. Miami and Detroit and Monterey Park, California are good examples of what happens when a city becomes Hispanic, black, or Asian. The details of the transformation are interesting, but it is sufficient to note the obvious: Once the concentration of non-whites reaches a certain level, whites cannot or will not live among them. Except in a few gilded enclaves, there are virtually no whites left in Miami or Detroit or Monterey Park. “White flight” is a universal fact of American life. Liberals may deplore it, but no one can deny it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, whites were generally fleeing blacks, but the great black migrations have largely come to an end, and whites have reestablished distance between the two races. In recent decades, it is massive, non-white immigration that most often drives whites from their neighborhoods, and continuing immigration only hardens the alien character of these places. No one believes that the arrival of yet more Haitians, Guatemalans, Mexicans, Jamaicans, or Vietnamese will somehow restore the former character of South Central Los Angeles or Miami and induce whites to move back.

The process works the other way. As their numbers increase, non-whites continue to expand into adjacent areas. Whites, many of whom fled their homes in the face of the first incursion, move away once again.

This, then, will be one of the certain effects of demographic change: More and more parts of the United States will become, for whites, essentially uninhabitable. It will be physically possible for whites to live with the Mexicans of Brownsville, Texas or the blacks of Camden, New Jersey but such places will be almost as alien and as uninviting as Oaxaca or Mombasa. They will actually be more uninviting. The people of Oaxaca and Mombasa like and admire white Americans, whereas those of Brownsville and Camden have a strong and sometimes violent dislike for whites.

There is much irony in the course on which our nation has been set. Most white Americans can think of any number of communities or neighborhoods in which they might want to live. Not one is likely to have a non-white majority. Likewise, most whites cannot name a single non-white community in which they could bear to live. Furthermore, if one were to ask whites what countries they might move to if given a choice, almost all will mention a European country, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. All are white. Our country has therefore embarked on a course that will make ever larger parts of it inhospitable, even off-limits, to whites. Eventually the country as a whole could become one in which whites do not wish to live.

At some level, everyone in America understands this. Not even the most deluded white liberals live in Harlem or Watts or South Central Los Angeles, or in any of a thousand other neighborhoods that have been transformed by non-whites. Despite their pronouncements about the vital importance and desirability of integration, virtually no white is willing to take the most obvious step towards making it happen: buy a house in a black neighborhood.

Destroying the Infrastructure

Where it matters most — where they make their homes and rear their children — even the most liberal whites suddenly demonstrate a grasp of reality at odds with what they claim to believe and stand for. Even they have noticed that although the details of non-white dispossession differ according to the part of the country and the people who arrive, something essential is always lost when whites move away.

Blacks frighten even the most ardent integrationists. East Coast blacks, in particular, have the disconcerting habit of physically destroying the cities they move into. Detroit, Newark, the South Bronx, Camden, North Philadelphia, and the South Side of Chicago now have huge expanses of vacant lots and derelict buildings.

Detroit can no longer afford to serve some of its most blighted, sparsely inhabited neighborhoods. It is considering moving out the few remaining people and decommissioning whole sections of itself — shutting off utilities, stopping mail delivery, pulling out bus lines, ending police and fire service, and letting nature take over. There are similarly stark proposals for parts of down-town Detroit, where empty skyscrapers tower over deserted streets. Some people want to turn the area into a theme park for urban architecture — like the ghost towns in the West.

Blacks have destroyed cities in several ways. One is arson. Many East Coast neighborhoods never completely rebuilt after the race riots of the 1960s. Today, black youngsters in Detroit, Newark, and elsewhere celebrate Halloween eve — which they call Devil’s Night — by burning down as many houses as they can. Other buildings, often charming turn-of-the-century townhouses, become uninhabitable because no one bothers to maintain them. Others are simply abandoned as the decent, responsible blacks flee crime and degeneracy. The result is the blasted, vacant look of so many Eastern black ghettos. Entire cities have slowly shifted away from the parts that blacks have occupied, as whites build homes and businesses away from the expanding blight. In what were once the centers of important cities, whole chapters of urban history have been wiped away. Not a trace remains of generations of industrious whites who worked hard, reared children, and hoped for a better future.

Hispanics do not ordinarily tear cities down, though the 1992 Los Angeles riots showed that they can sometimes burn and loot their own neighborhoods just as blacks sometimes do. Likewise, the Puerto Rican sections in New York’s outer borough can be as menacing as any inhabited by blacks.

Hispanics have a different effect. They bring crime and lower the quality of public schools — reasons enough for whites to move out — but they also bring an alienness blacks do not. Many are willing to live ten to a room, turn garages into bedrooms, park cars in the front yard, keep chickens, and practice a gaudy, third-world version of Catholicism. But the greatest sign of alienness is Spanish. The airwaves, magazine racks, storefronts, and the very air itself ring with a language most whites do not understand. The occasional passing car marked “Police” rather than “Policía” is a reminder that this is still, theoretically, the United States.

In 1991, the president of a black homeowners association in South Central Los Angeles explained her opposition to a wave of Mexicans moving into a formerly black area: “It’s a different culture, a different breed of people. They don’t have the same values. You can’t get together with them. It’s like mixing oil and water.” The now-forgotten and long-departed white residents may well have said the same things about blacks.

When Asians arrive in large numbers, their effect is more ambiguous. Some North Asian groups commit fewer crimes than whites, make more money, and do better in school. Others, like the Hmong and the Cambodians, have fantastically high rates of poverty and welfare dependency. However, it does not matter whether Japanese or Chinese build societies that are, in some respects, objectively superior to those of Europeans. It matters only that they are different.

When large numbers of North Asian immigrants moved into Monterey Park, the long-term white residents did not leave because the newcomers rioted, opened crack houses, covered walls with graffiti, or were rapists and robbers. They moved out because Monterey Park, in countless ways, ceased to be the town in which they had grown up or the town to which they had moved.

The merchandise in the stores and the faces behind the counters changed. So many signs appeared in strange languages that the fire department insisted that at least street numbers be legible to English-speakers. Even city council meetings began to include exchanges in languages other than English. The new-comers reworked zoning laws to permit businesses in what had been residential neighborhoods. Asians bought the little bungalows whites had lived in, bulldozed them, cut down all the trees, and built huge new houses nearly out to the property line.

All these changes and many others — some of them vastly more troubling than issues that are routinely put to the voters to decide — took place without the permission or consent of the whites who had lived there for years. One unhappy resident paid for a billboard that said, “Would the last American to leave Monterey Park please take down the flag.”

Once again, the significance of racial change does not lie in the particulars. It lies in the fact of unwelcome, uncalled for, irreversible change. People have every right to expect their children and their children’s children to be able to grow up and walk in the ways of their ancestors. They have a powerful, natural desire that their grandchildren be like them — that they speak the same language, sing the same songs, tell the same stories, pray to the same God, take pride in the same past, hope the same hopes, love the same nation, and honor the same traditions. The crucial elements of peoplehood cannot be preserved in the face of a flood of aliens, especially when the central institutions of the nation itself preach fashionable falsehoods about the equivalence of all races, cultures, and peoples.

Most people who grew up in America want to grow old in America, not in some bustling outpost of Mexico or Southeast Asia. They should not have to move to Montana or Idaho in order to grow old with people like themselves. Eventually, of course, if the foreign outposts continue to expand, there will be no refuge in Montana and Idaho either. This, then, is the effect of racial change at the local level: Whites become refugees in their own land.

What will happen at the national level? We cannot be sure but we can guess. Many non-whites now seem genuinely to believe that equal treatment requires preferences for themselves. It may yet be possible to abolish racial preferences while whites are still a majority, but what will prevent their reappearance when whites become a minority?

Whites will still have higher incomes than blacks and Hispanics, but this will be seen only as proof of white wickedness and exploitation. Is it so outlandish to imagine outright confiscation of property owned by whites? Supplemental taxes for whites? Sumptuary laws? Exclusion from certain professions? Asians will also be a small but successful racial minority, and their wealth, too, is likely to attract unwelcome government attention.

What sort of foreign policy would a non-white America have? What would it do — or not do — with nuclear weapons? What sort of public health standards would it maintain? How would a third-world America treat its national parks, its forests, its rivers? So far, only whites have shown much interest in the environment.

In the long term, there is some doubt that a non-white America could even maintain a functioning democracy or any semblance of the rule of law. The record of non-white nations suggests not. Even if our forms of government survive, what fanciful, anti-white readings will a black and Hispanic Supreme Court find in the Constitution? What subjects or opinions will be found to lie outside the protection of the First Amendment?

Not an Ounce of Sympathy

But these will be future concerns. To return to the present, in the United States today, there is not an ounce of public sympathy for whites who escape when the neighborhood turns black or Mexican. The theory is that only ignorant bigots run away from non-whites, but the fact is that people with money never even have to face the problem. As a very clever man once put it, the purpose of a college education is to give people the right attitudes about minorities and the means to live as far away from them as possible.

And, indeed, college-educated, right-thinking people have come up with a whole set of mental exercises for the working class unfortunates who do not have the money to send their children to private school. The first exercise is to try as hard as possible to believe that aliens and strangers are bearers of a special gift called diversity. We are not being displaced; we are being enriched and strengthened.

Of course, the idea that racial diversity is a strength is so obviously stupid that only very intelligent people could have thought it up. There is not one multi-racial anything in America that doesn’t suffer from racial friction. Our country has established a gigantic system of laws, diversity commissions, racial watchdog groups, EEO officers, and outreach committees as part of a huge, clanking machine to regulate and try to control racial diversity — this dangerous, volatile thing that is supposed to be such a source of strength. People are so exhausted by this source of strength that they run from it the first chance they get. Families, churches, clubs, and private parties — which are not yet regulated by the government — tend to be racially homogeneous.

Nothing could be more obvious: Diversity of race or tribe or language or religion are the main reasons people kill each other on a large scale. Diversity — within the same territory — is strife, not strength.

Another comical idea is that a “diverse” workforce is somehow a great advantage for business or world trade. This is one of those giant, untested notions that otherwise skeptical people swallow without a gurgle. Ninety-nine percent of the things we buy have nothing to do with “diversity.” No one cares whether his computer was assembled by a Chinaman or a Dane or whether his bread was baked by a robot or a chimpanzee.

It does not take an Irishman to sell things to the Irish. The world’s most successful trading nations today are Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and even China, none of which has even heard of “diversity” or “tolerance.” American companies are full of blather about multi-racial workforces that “look like America” — and are constantly being whipped in their own markets by workforces that look like Yokohama.

At the same time, people seem to be too dazed by this incomprehensible diversity argument to notice that it seems to be only whites who suffer from the paralysis of homogeneity and for whom diversity is going to be such a tonic. No one is urging Howard University, which is overwhelmingly black, to recruit Hispanics or Asians so its students can benefit from racial diversity. No one is suggesting that Mexico should start an immigration program to reduce Hispanics to a minority in a few decades. But if racial diversity is such a great thing for the United States, why not for Mexico, too? Why not for Howard and for all the other “historically black” universities?

If white Americans were pouring across the border into Mexico demanding that their children be educated in English, insisting on welfare, demonstrating for ballot papers in English rather than Spanish, demanding voting rights for aliens, celebrating July 4th rather than Cinco de Mayo, could anyone trick the Mexicans into thinking this was joyous diversity? No. The Mexicans would recognize an invasion when they saw one. They would open fire.

There used to be much talk about “ugly Americans,” who traveled over-seas expecting to find hamburgers and English-speakers, and who ignorantly deprecated the quaint customs of the natives. We were supposed to be deeply ashamed of them — and they were only tourists! “Ugly Mexicans” and “ugly Haitians” come here to live permanently, but we are supposed to be endlessly sensitive to their peculiarities, and revel in the diversity of toadying to their ethnic demands.

“Racial diversity,” therefore, is strictly a one-way street. Only whites are ever expected to practice it or benefit from it. The ultimate insult is to expect whites to celebrate diversity. This is nothing less than asking them to celebrate their own capitulation, their dwindling numbers and declining influence. The astonishing thing is that so many whites actually do go through the motions of rejoicing in their decline.

Just Deserts

Of course, a few whites refuse to believe that dispossession is a fine thing. For these stubborn cases, there is a completely different argument to justify demographic shift: Whites took America away from the Indians, so it is now someone else’s turn. This argument is made by the same people who chant the mantra of diversity, but it implicitly concedes that diversity is a fraud.

Diversity advocates never suggest that what happened to the Indians was a good thing. But have Indians not benefited more than any other people in history from the joys of precisely the kind of diversity whites are, today, supposed to welcome? If diversity is to be celebrated, it should be Christmas all year “round for the Indians. Of course, no one tries to make this point. The you-took-it-away-from-the-Indians argument recognizes that the European conquest of the continent was a catastrophe for Indians and that what is happening now is a catastrophe for whites. It is a catastrophe whites are supposed to accept cheerfully because they took America from its rightful owners.

But this, too, is a completely one-sided argument. The Cherokee, for example, took away the land of an earlier group called the Mound Builders. Why are they known as the Mound Builders? Because the Cherokee exterminated them and no one even knows their name. All that is left of them are their strange earthworks.

If whites are supposed to stand aside while every third-world tribe marches into the United States because whites took the country from Indians, then the Cherokee should have stood aside for the Europeans — because they took the place away from the Mound Builders. Needless to say, current orthodoxy holds that for Indians it makes no difference how many people they killed to get the land or how recently; it was theirs to defend with every means at their disposal. Whites, on the other hand, have an unending debt not just to the descendants of the peoples they refrained from exterminating but to every other non-white people on the face of the earth. Just like fairy tales about the joys of diversity, the land-title argument is used exclusively to criticize and demoralize whites.

Successful Societies

What is it, though, that gives rise to movements of peoples and debates about who has rights to the land? It is the fact that whites build successful societies non-whites want to move into. Generous Nicaraguans and Haitians do not come to America eager to share the gift of “diversity” with poor, benighted white people who are about to expire from a galloping case of homogeneity. They come because their societies don’t work and they know life will be better here.

The same process is at work in Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Whites establish the most desirable societies in the history of man. Desperate people from failed, non-white societies are willing to risk nearly everything — sometimes even their lives — for a chance to live in these societies.

If Europeans had turned North American into a giant pesthole no one would want to come. No one would then have to think up reasons why everyone had the right to come, or why whites actually benefit from being outnumbered and pushed aside by people unlike themselves.

The same is true on a smaller scale. Rarely is it ever said, but in the United States virtually every desirable place to live, work, or go to school is desirable because whites made it that way. Non-whites naturally want access to these places even if they did not — and could not — create them. This is why it is always non-whites who are pushing their ways into white institutions — never the other way around — and why all the overblown dramas of “exclusion,” “tolerance,” “justice,” and “racism” are played out on white territory and put whites on the defensive.

Whites are not, of course, clamoring to get into Howard University, live in Harlem, or to move to Guatemala. But if there were something rare and desirable in those places, the non-whites who made them desirable would fight like demons to keep others out.

The sad truth is that, generally speaking, once non-whites have gotten what they want, and have arrived in large numbers in what were previously white institutions or neighborhoods, those institutions and neighborhoods slowly lose the qualities that attracted non-whites in the first place. Whites leave, and the spoor of European man begins to fade. For the most part, third-world immigrants eventually recreate in the United States the societies they left behind — with all the shortcomings that prompted them to leave home in the first place.

The mystery in all this is not why non-whites want the benefits of white society, but why whites are so willing to hand over to strangers the land of their ancestors — why they appear to be so willing to permit aliens to occupy and transform their nation. Just like every other argument about race in America today, white passivity is based on yet another double standard: Non-whites have powerful and legitimate group interests but whites do not.

Before he was assassinated, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin explained that what mattered most to him as an Israeli was that his country remain at least 80 percent Jewish. No one suggested that Mr. Rabin was a bigot or hate-monger — and of course he was not. He was merely stating the obvious: That if Israel ceased to be predominantly Jewish it would change in irreversible ways that would be intolerable to Jews.

Mexicans, Japanese, Algerians, Senegalese — all non-whites understand that demographic transformation is a national calamity. It is so obvious it need not even be stated. For whites it is just as much a national calamity, and the morality and reasoning of a white who wants America to stay at least 80 percent white are exactly the same as those of Yitzhak Rabin.

The forms of civility, the folkways, the demeanor and the texture of life that whites take for granted cannot survive the embrace of large numbers of aliens. The things whites love most about culture and human society have not survived in Detroit and Miami. It is not considered “nice” to say so; it prompts shouts of “racism” to say so. But it is because the things they love have not survived that whites have moved away from Detroit and Miami. Individually, whites react in an entirely natural way to racial change. American Renaissance is unusual only in making explicit what virtually all whites feel but never say.

The crisis that whites face today is that for fear of being called “racists,” for fear of being thought not nice, they seem prepared to let their country change in ways that they know will not be an improvement. How can it be good for America — or good for whites — for it to become increasingly like those very parts of the country in which they refuse to live?

Whites are so fearful of the charge of “racism” that they are unwilling even to discuss what they might do to avoid leaving a third-world nation to their grandchildren. Whites are therefore preparing to pass on to future generations a nation in which they might well be unwilling to live.

The colonists did not fight for independence from Britain in order for our generation to turn this country over to Mexicans and Haitians. The Founders did not frame the Constitution to celebrate diversity. Americans did not spill their blood at Gettysburg or in Europe or the Pacific for multiculturalism. And yet, the rightful heirs to what could have been a shining beacon of Western Civilization are giving up their country without a struggle — for fear that to do otherwise would be “racist.”

What we are witnessing is one of the great tragedies in human history. Powerful forces are in motion that, if left unchecked, will slowly push aside European man and European civilization and then dance a victory jig on their collective grave. If we do nothing, the nation we leave to our children and grandchildren will be a desolated, third-world failure, in which whites will be a despised minority. Western Civilization will be a faint echo, vilified if it is even audible. There is no other tragedy that is at once so great, so unnatural, and so unnecessary.

Editor’s Note: This essay is featured in Jared Taylor’s book, If We Do Nothing, available for purchase through the American Renaissance store.