Review: Face to Face with Race

Face to Face with Race
Edited and with an introduction by Jared Taylor
New Century Books, 222 pages
Reviewed by Matt Forney

There are many things that separate the United States from other Western countries, but one of the most defining is the presence of blacks.

Let’s just be honest: everyone hates blacks. Even middle-class and wealthy blacks hate blacks, if Chris Rock’s Niggas vs. Black People sketch is any indication. The SJW media wallpapers over the worst black behavior, but with the implosion of the Ferguson narrative and a million other miscalculations from the PC left, whites are rapidly getting fed up with what is basically a hostile, parasitic population in their midst.

Face to Face with Race, Jared Taylor’s compilation of whites’ experiences with diversity, is a misnomer: it should have been called Face to Face with Blacks. Latinos and Asians are glossed over in its 200-plus pages; its primary subject is black people. Its protagonists are ordinary whites, some of them liberals, who became cynical race realists after having to deal with black perfidy on a daily basis, whether it was in the classroom, at their jobs, or in prison.

Face to Face with Race is a fantastic read because it offers a clear look at one of the most important–and ignored–aspects of modern America. All the “magical negro” narratives from Hollywood, all the cultural Marxist brainwashing in the universities, all the race pandering from politicians cannot erase the basic facts: many blacks are just rotten people, and whites are tired of having to put up with them.

The first story in the book, “The Wages of Idealism,” sets the tone for what follows. It’s an account from a young white woman who worked in various domestic violence shelters and minority-focused nonprofits in New York City. When she was wasn’t being openly harassed on the job by her co-workers, she was gazing into the abyss of “Dindu” dysfunction:

The unintentionally offending white person would be made to grovel at the feet–yes, I have seen whites go on their knees before blacks–and apologize for slavery, white privilege, blacks in prison, the poor state of black neighborhoods, AIDS, drugs in their community, etc. Often the white worker was reduced to tears in a desperate attempt to appease the mass of angry black and brown faces. Finally, when the white employee was humiliated enough, and the cathartic cleansing had been achieved, a tentative truce would be called. The angry black employee would be praised and his anger encouraged, while the traumatized, cowering white worker would be put on probation and, through an act of supreme magnanimity, allowed to keep his job. These sessions were supposed to be run by social workers, but often just ran themselves while the social workers watched.

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Even when blacks are well-meaning, in many cases they can’t help but screw up. As the “Profession” portion of Face to Face with Race shows, affirmative action policies designed to get blacks into fire departments and other professions have led to a decline in efficiency and quality of work. It’s not even a matter of diversity in general; when other races are mentioned in the book, such as Latinos or Asians, it’s either in a complementary fashion or at least favorable compared to blacks.

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This is the tragedy underpinning Face to Face with Race: an entire race is dependent on the “white devils” they despise. The final chapters of the book drive this home. “Katrina Diary” is an account of a white man’s efforts to survive in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: his description of the Superdome, which was used to house (primarily black) survivors, is full of comic, Celinean observations:

I eventually got inside the dome and immediately regretted it. It was an absolutely putrid-smelling zoo. The air was so foul I could barely keep from throwing up even with my shirt pulled up over my nose. The strong urine/feces/ammonia smell made my eyes burn, and it was hard to see because the only light came from wall-mounted battery-powered emergency lights. The bathrooms had stopped working the day after the storm, so people started urinating and defecating any place they could find. The main concourse around the inside of the dome was a river of urine. I do not know how all those people inside could stand it.

But it’s the final chapter of the book, the only one that isn’t about American blacks, that hammers the point in hard. A first-hand account of post-apartheid South Africa, the author describes the decline of what was the Dark Continent’s most prosperous nation in exhausting detail. Left to their own devices, South African blacks have regressed to the continent’s mean, where crime, corruption and collapse are the order of the day.

Face to Face with Race excels primarily because it doesn’t try to force a narrative on you. Aside from Taylor’s introduction, the book is presented as simply the experiences of whites dealing with blacks. This approach provides a bleak insight into how millions of white Americans are slowly being radicalized. When you’re exposed to black dysfunction day in and day out but not allowed to say anything about it–indeed, are blamed for it by the left–eventually you’re just going to go nuts.

It’s this boiling pot of racial resentment–black resentment of whites, white frustration with black dysfunction–that will become the central issue of American politics in the coming years. As I and other writers have noted, the peculiar feminist obsessions of the modern media–“street harassment,” campus rape and “manspreading”–come from the hysteria of upper middle-class white women. As the U.S. becomes less white, the neuroses of white women will recede in national importance.

Face to Face with Race is a poignant, morbid portrait of what that world may look like. It’s an uncompromising look at race relations in the 21st century, where ressentiment, stupidity and culture come together to create a toxic souffle. As a record of whites’ experiences dealing with blacks, Face to Face with Race tears back the curtain of political correctness to reveal the truth within.