Dissenting Voices
Marian Evans, American Renaissance, December 1993
Today, when there is so much resentment expressed by blacks for whites, it can be a revelation to meet a black who speaks of whites with genuine affection.
I recently had a frank, four-hour conversation with a middle-aged black woman, whom I will call Miss Channing. She has medium-brown skin and pleasant features, and was reared in a middle-class household. She claims some French and American Indian ancestry from her mother, and an unknown black-white mixture from her father.
When we met I was immediately struck by her consistent use of the word “Negro.” “‘Black,’” she explained, “was forced on us by dark-skinned Negroes who were jealous of light-skinned Negroes.” She herself finds nothing attractive, much less beautiful, about blackness. She said that no one, not even the most strident Afro-centrist, thinks that “those big Negroid features” are appealing. She pointed out that all the models in advertisements in Ebony and Essence have light skins and sharp features. As she put it, “none of them look like they just stepped out of the jungle.”
She noted that even frankly anti-white movie producers work the same preference into their casting decisions. Female leads are the light-skinned mixed-bloods who are the only blacks whom even other blacks find genuinely attractive.
Miss Channing is single. She says that most black men are worthless and that ever since she could remember, she has been attracted to white men. She believes that the great tragedy of her life was to have been an adolescent when inter-racial dating was not considered acceptable. She says she knows many black women younger than herself who have lost all patience with black men and she confidently predicts a marked rise in the number of black women who date and marry white men.
Miss Channing is adamantly opposed to non-white immigrants, whom she calls “pre-moderns.” She fears that current policies will flood whites in a sea of third-wonders who will “turn the country into a banana republic.” At one point she put her hand on my arm and said, “You people [whites] have to do something about this. You can’t let it happen.”
She has no compunction about saying that it is not only the country that must be kept from going non-white. She quoted a black friend as asking, “Why is it that whenever we finally get into any place that we have been kept out of all these years, the first thing we do is pervert it?” She believes that whites (and the better class of blacks) have every reason to resist integration because once the percentage of blacks reaches a certain level, standards cannot be maintained.
Miss Channing became aware of the research on race and intelligence only recently. It does not make her happy to think that Africans probably are, on average, less intelligent than people of other races, but she is prepared to accept the verdict of the data — as long as whites are willing to judge her as an individual rather than simply as a “Negro.”
She observed that an understanding of racial differences and the genetic basis for intelligence has solved a riddle that had long puzzled her: Why have light-skinned blacks always been the most successful? She has recently been persuaded that although greater social acceptance may play a role in their advancement, the decisive advantage for light-skinned blacks is white genes.
Like her intellectual idols — Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams — Miss Channing believes that liberal interference by means of affirmative action and welfare has been a disaster for blacks. She thinks black underclass men are the nation’s worst scourge and even wonders if black men may not be genetically inferior to black women.
She cannot understand why whites have permitted the liberal/socialist destruction of American institutions. She scarcely recognizes in today’s whites the same race that founded the United States and made it great. “What happened to you,” she says, “is that the non-whites and the pre-moderns ganged up on you.”
Miss Channing says that she knows many blacks who feel as she does and that their number is growing. She says that since whites are so afraid to talk about race and other taboo subjects, conservative blacks will have to do it for them. “Negroes have been a huge problem in this country,” she says; “Maybe by speaking out we can become part of the solution.” Her personal vision of salvation would be marriage to a white man and children who also married whites. She would be perfectly happy to have grandchildren who looked white.
What does one make of Miss Channing? It is not unusual for people to prefer one part of their family tree over another. Whites who are “part Irish” or “part Italian” often take pride in what they think of as their ethnic heritage. A woman with no more Confederate than Union ancestors may well think of herself as a staunch Confederate.
Race is somehow different. Virtually all whites are glad that they are white, and if they had to choose some degree of black-white mixture for themselves they would go long on the white and short on the black. And yet, perhaps because an honest admission of it is so rare, there is something heart-breaking about a black woman’s admission of something that whites take for granted.
Miss Channing almost seems to think of herself as a white woman trapped in a black woman’s body. To the extent that rising racial consciousness finally prompts whites to rally to their nation and their culture she applauds it. At the same time, it can only cause whites to think of her as different from themselves, and to the extent that white racial consciousness may exclude her she fears it. Among most blacks, of course, her views are anathema. Here may be the ingredients of tragedy.