No Place Like Home

1,046 words

This essay is from Michael Polignano’s book Taking Our Own Side, available in a limited, signed and personalized hardcover edition here.

I love to travel and have done a respectable amount in my time. In the Western hemisphere, I have visited 15 states and the Dominican Republic. In Europe, I have visited Italy (four times), France (twice), Germany (twice), Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the old Yugoslavia, and most recently Ireland.

I love to wander around European cities, not just to see the monuments, but to get a feel for life in the present day. I love to try new foods, beers, and wines. I enjoy the challenge of striking up conversations with foreigners and trying out a few native words. I love it when girls speak English with cute foreign accents.

But at a certain point, I am ready to go home. Being in a foreign country gets tiring after a while. There are customs and conventions that I don’t understand, so I am always worried about mistakenly giving and taking offense. It is hard for an adult to be put back into the position of a child, surrounded by things he does not understand. It is frustrating to have to grope for words to express the simplest of thoughts. It is tiring to have to think through things that at home are unconscious and automatic. There are not only strange people, but strange toilets, strange doors, strange windows, strange light-switches, strange telephones, strange electrical outlets, strange pillows and sheets. I begin my journey inspired to think of the greatest things in life, but in the end, my attention is stolen by the smallest.

G. K. Chesterton once wrote, “A man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very likely his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down: because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things he would miss.” The same is true of being ruled by foreigners while abroad. You can start making that list of things you miss.

That’s why there’s no place like home. Foreign places can inspire you. But home, where the petty and routine are pretty much under control and your mind is freed for higher things, is the only place where you can really do productive work, where you can really live.

But for more and more White Americans, there really is no place like home, in a different sense of the phrase.

It recently hit me when I returned from Ireland to the Bay Area. As I stood at the corner of a busy intersection, I realized that literally everyone I saw around me was Oriental, and the signs on the buildings (some of them anyway) were the only things that indicated that I was actually in the United States. And I was not in San Francisco’s Chinatown, but in an “ordinary” commercial district in the East Bay. I realized that in some ways, I felt less like a stranger in Ireland than in my own “home.” I wondered, “When did White Americans begin to lose their sense of home?”

It began with desegregation. As Blacks began to move into White working-class and middle-class neighborhoods, they brought their criminality, lackadaisical work habits, bad manners, crude tastes, and disruptive, bratty kids with them. For their White neighbors, home started feeling less and less like home. Whites began to leave, and more Blacks moved in.

Soon, the “tipping point” was reached. Neighborhood after neighborhood became unlivable for Whites. Property values crashed, all the Whites—save for a few impoverished and terrified pensioners—fled, and a once thriving White neighborhood became another Black ghetto. And when enough neighborhoods were gone, the whole city or sections of it reached the tipping point. It happened in Detroit, Newark, Camden, the South Bronx, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., the South Side of Chicago, and so forth.

For most working-class and middle-class Americans, a home is one’s single biggest investment. The destruction of White property values due to desegregation has never been calculated. It is certainly the biggest expropriation of White wealth since the looting of Germany after World War II. The mass flight of Whites when major American cities fell to predatory Blacks is certainly the greatest act of anti-White ethnic cleansing since the expulsion of fourteen million Germans from their homes after World War II. People have been tried and executed for “crimes against humanity” for far less. When will the architects of these crimes be brought to justice?

The destruction of White Americans’ sense of being at home was only exacerbated by the torrent of non-White immigration, legal and illegal, since 1965. A White American born in 1960 felt very much at home, since the US was a 90% White country. The country had many problems, but for the average White American, feeling like he was lost in a foreign country was not one of them. He would actually have to go to a foreign country to feel that way.

Today, the US is around 70% White, and there are vast areas that feel like a foreign country, a whole host of foreign countries: Mexico, the Caribbean, India, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Africa, etc.

If nothing changes, by the time that same American approaches the end of his life around the middle of this century, the country will be less than 50% White. There will be no place like the home he was born into. He may be the only White person in his neighborhood. His neighbors may speak English as a second or distant third language. He might have thought of moving to a Whiter neighborhood at one time, but the whole country will have long since reached the “tipping point,” and there will be no such enclaves left, anywhere, at any price.

Americans, particularly younger ones, need to decide: at the twilight of our lives do we want White America to be a thing of the past, a relic we can only nostalgically recall through re-runs of Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best? Or do we want to die knowing that our children and grandchildren have White communities to live in and enjoy?

Social ostracism is a small thing to risk, considering what’s at stake. It is time for White men to start speaking up!

January 15, 2004