Counter-Currents
Smells Like . . . White Guilt:
Christian Lander’s Whiter Shades of Pale
Greg Johnson
2,686 words
Christian Lander
Whiter Shades of Pale: The Stuff White People Like, Coast to Coast, from Seattle’s Sweaters to Maine’s Microbrews
New York: Random House, 2010
I saw Christian Lander in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 2nd, speaking to a tiny sweater-clad audience at a small independent bookstore in the Marina District. Lander told the story of the amazing success of his blog Stuff White People Like (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/), which in about six months grew from a private joke to a New York Times bestselling book (with a reported $300,000 advance). (See Christopher Donovan’s review of the Stuff White People Like book.)
In his talk, Lander made it very clear that he is not talking about all white people, but just “the right kind of white people,” as opposed to “the wrong kind of white people.”
The right kind of white people are urban, college-educated, and from upper-middle and upper-class backgrounds. And, most importantly, they are liberal.
Lander also adds that the right kind of white people are “rich”: they live in expensive cities, go to expensive colleges, travel widely, and can afford to take a year off from time to time. They know how to trade their hip, grungy attire for expensive suits and ties, and their ironic detachment for “attaboy” attitude, when opportunities for advancement in the system present themselves (courtesy of people from their parents’ generation and social circles).
And they know how to hold onto what’s theirs. They can be cheap and multicultural at the same time simply by replacing white workers with Guatemalans.
The wrong kind of white people live in suburbs and rural areas. They are not college educated, or, if they went to college, they were in frats and sororities, did not attend first tier schools, and did not take liberal arts degrees. They are working or middle class, or horrible businessman and industrialists. And they are not liberal. They are Tea Partiers and Republicans. They watch Fox News.
The right kind of white people define themselves by looking down on the wrong type of white people. This sort of intra-white status competition is a perennial feature of colonial societies like the United States and Lander’s native Canada, where an absence of fixed class distinctions creates immense social anxiety and a strong desire to distinguish oneself from “those people” through an ever-shifting set of conventional status markers that Lander focuses on with often uncanny perspicacity. (It takes a special kind of brilliance to see things that are so close to who we are that we cannot help but overlook them.)
I asked Lander “What percentage of white people are white people?” and he answered “90%” But it was clear he was talking only about 90% of the people he knew. In fact, 90% of the people he knows belong to the 20% of Americans who describe themselves as liberals. Lander also mentioned growing up in Toronto, where the white working and middle classes have been pretty much replaced by non-whites, which is a vision of the world being engineered by Lander’s type of white people for the rest of us.
Lander’s work is softball satire, not serious sociology. But he is nevertheless significant, because white liberals tend to think that they are generic, universal humans that all other humans aspire to imitate. In this, white liberals are true white supremacists. White Nationalists, who actually believe that the races are different, would never expect the other races to yearn to be just like us. We would sooner just let them be themselves.
By getting white liberals to realize that no, the things they like are not universal but parochially and ethnically white, Christian Lander has stumbled into something very subversive.
White liberals wish to give all the things they like the force of law: women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, environmentalism, historical preservationism, natural foods, walkable communities, general social tolerance. But the wrong type of white people stand in their way.
The solution is simple: dissolve the people and elect a new one. Destroy the wrong kind of white people by shipping their jobs overseas and importing non-whites to displace them at home. Destroy their will to reproduce by ridiculing and penalizing large white families. Destroy their ability to reproduce by taxing them to support large non-white families. And do whatever you can to make a buck producing a culture that leads the wrong kind of white people to political powerlessness, poverty, degradation, and death.
The right kind of white people think this will work, because they believe (1) that the new non-white peasantry will be grateful to them, (2) that deep down the grateful peasants all want to be just like them, and (3) that the emerging non-white majority will continue to accept the leadership of “the right kind of white people” even when they have dwindled to a minority segment of just another minority group. Lander talks about the magical process by which expensive colleges and urban environments transform select non-whites, mostly Asians, into white people.
Of course White Nationalists know that the white liberal plan for hegemony leads only to oblivion. The non-white hordes are well-aware of the parochial whiteness of liberal values. But non-white groups tend to be highly ethnocentric, and given the power, they will promote their own values, not the values of white liberals. Why in the world would they adopt the values of a people who have destroyed their civilization and handed their lands over to aliens?
In an America ruled by blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Hindus, and Muslims of all races, the stuff white liberals like–tolerance, feminism, gay rights, support for “the arts” (for white arts), environmentalism, historic preservationism (of white history), animal rights, etc.—will have pretty much the same status they have in every Third World country.
And aren’t there already enough corrupt, violent, impoverished, misogynistic, filthy, environmentally devastated Third World countries?
Lander’s work interests me for another reason. White Nationalism will not triumph if it is merely a phenomenon of the far right. We need to work to make white racial consciousness hegemonic up and down the political spectrum. In a White Nationalist society, we will still be arguing about drug legalization, gay rights, enviromentalism, abortion, etc. It is just that the Reds and the Blues will all be Whites, and whites will not have the opportunity to bring in non-whites to gain economic or political advantages in their battles with fellow whites.
So, how close are Christian Lander’s “right kind of white people” to white racial consciousness? Sitting in that audience and listening to the smug, self-satisfied sniggering at Lander’s gentle satire, I realized: They are already there.
The “right” kind of white people are supremely confident in their own superiority. Their self-esteem and sense of entitlement are rock solid. The right kind of white people believe that (1) all other human beings aspire to be just like them, and (2) they will always remain in power and able to secure and perpetuate their values. Those white people down at the Marina believe that the rising tide of color will float their boats.
One fellow asked Lander about what sort of criticism he gets. Apparently, a lot of Stormfront types take him to task for double standards: “How come it is OK to make fun of white people but not black or Hispanic or Asian people?” he asked in a mock-macho, working class accent. Lander’s answer stunned me: “It is always OK to make fun of white people, because no unhappy ending is possible.” Translation: white people will always be on top and in control.
But the double standard is not limited to mockery. In the present social climate, whites and whites alone are not allowed to think of ourselves as white unless we are mocking ourselves. Whites are not allowed to take pride in our race and its achievements. But other races are encouraged to. We are not allowed to weigh policy questions in terms of our racial interests. But other races are encouraged to, and even helped by whites. Increasing racial and ethnic diversity is leading to increasing polarization and conflict, in which all groups except whites are encouraged to take their own side and get their share.
In this context, such a double standard can only have an unhappy ending: white dispossession. As Mike Polignano puts it in the title essay of his Taking Our Own Side:
In the midst of a race war, there can be no greater folly than impartiality, than the pious rot that “there is only one race, the human race.” Robert Frost once brilliantly described a liberal as a man who will not take his own side in a fight. In a fight to the death, such a policy is suicide.
In every transaction between a partial man and an impartial man, the impartial man is at a disadvantage. When the impartial man has a benefit to confer, the partial man appeals to the other’s impartiality and often walks off with the prize. But when the impartial man needs something from the partial man, his appeals to impartiality fall on deaf ears. As social interactions multiply, so do the partial man’s advantages at the expense of the impartial man. (The essence of the Jewish strategy of dominance is to practice ruthless partiality while urging their victims to be free of prejudice and partiality.)
Once the impartial man has nothing left to bargain with, once he has been reduced to powerlessness and penury, to what will he appeal to preserve his life and freedom? Impartiality? Universal notions of freedom and justice and rights? These are just pleading words unless one has the power to force others to respect them. But the impartial man has bargained all his power away. Pleading alone will not prevent him from being reduced to a slave or a corpse, and that is what we Whites will become unless we start taking our own side, and quickly.
* * *
Is Christian Lander Jewish? His humor definitely has a self-conscious, neurotic Jewish feel. On his website, there is a picture of him wearing a t-shirt with a Star of David and Hebrew lettering. So is Christian Lander “white” in the same way that Tim Wise is “white”: namely a Jew who pretends to be one of us so he can better mock us or sell us ethnocidal poison? Lander claims in his interview in Heeb Magazine that he is not Jewish. He just got the t-shirt at a thrift store. He was wearing it “ironically.” (In his talk, Lander gave examples of clothes that cannot be worn ironically by white people: Nazi uniforms and KKK robes.)
I believe Lander. The kind of white-versus-white status competition he explores existed long before the rise of Jewish hegemony. It has been deftly exploited by Jews, but it was not created by them.
What is Jewish about Lander is his penchant for irony and self-mockery. By “irony,” I do not mean the literary trope where one means something other than what one literally says. Instead, I mean a cynical pretense to have seen through the emptiness of something: a simple gesture like a handshake, an ideal, a practice, a religion, or a whole culture. Irony, of course, is incompatible with sincere commitment. Irony requires detachment, a step back, a look down. An ironist may still shake one’s hand. He may even shake it vigorously. But inside, he is only acting. He sees the gesture as meaningless, but goes through with it anyway, feeling superior to those who are “fooled.”
Diaspora Jews, of course, are natural ironists, because they are hostile aliens in every culture they inhabit. Jewish relations to non-Jews therefore are shot through with irony and mockery. Jewish cultural hegemony insures that ironism is now the reigning attitude of high and middlebrow non-Jews as well. Jewish hostility to white society means that the only acceptable form of white self-consciousness is ironic self-mockery. Sincere ethnic pride, of course, is “hate” when practiced by white people (and only white people). Thus Christian Lander is simply a non-Jew who has mastered how to write as a self-conscious white man within Jewish-imposed boundaries of discourse.
* * *
So, is Christian Lander funny? Yes, but I think he is a lot funnier in person than in print. There is a great deal of smugness and self-satisfaction in Lander’s brand of soothing satire. The right sort of white people look down on everybody else. When they read Lander, they also look down on themselves for just a second—but only at their most lovable little foibles—and in the end, their sense of superiority is merely reinforced. After all, they are not like those Stormfront rednecks who can’t laugh at themselves.
Lander’s big giveaway is #50: Christopher Guest Movies, the most smugly unfunny movies around.
Lander’s white self-mockery smells like white guilt: self-congratulation disguised as self-abasement. Pity always involves invidious comparisons: One feels superior to those one pities. Moral self-deprecation has the same quality: One revels in one’s superior self-consciousness. Every stroke of the flagellum is, in the end, just a pat on the back.
But in pointing this out, I don’t want white people to engage in genuine guilt and self-abasement. I want us to take honest and straightforward pride in our virtues, not praise them under the guise of self-mockery. But I also want white elites to wake up and recognize that their hubris and snobbery endangers us all. I hope Lander’s writings might contribute to this awakening, but honestly I think it will take an altogether more savage brand of mockery. God knows they open themselves up to it.
Lander lists 92 things that the “right sort” of white people like. The fun of this book is seeing how well one is reflected in it. (The Dutch translation of Stuff White People like has a mirror on the cover.) I divided Lander’s 92 “likes” into five categories. Here are my scores:
- Yes, I Like: 41
- No me gusto: 37
- Don’t Know: 1 (Thailand)
- Above My Pay Grade: 2 (Ivy League, nannies)
- WTF?: 11 (These are probably things I would know about if I watched TV or went to malls. They include: #26 Adult Swim, #30 Ugly Sweater Parties [I regift all my ugly sweaters], #31 Anthropologie, #44 Roller Derby, #58 Hating People Who Wear Ed Hardy, and #87 Banksy)
My likes include #6 Foreign Accents (as long as they are European), #11 Moleskine Notebooks (wherein the first draft of this was written), #12 Messenger Bags (wherein the former was stashed), #15 Promising to Learn a New Language (Italian is next), #16 Political Prisoners (yes, like Ernst Zündel, Germar Rudolf, and Horst Mahler), #17 Disinfectant (hand sanitizer is a must for travel in Calcutta or New York City), #19 Bumper Stickers (I don’t have a car, but I have bumper stickers, like “Bush: The Only Dope Worth Shooting” and “Annoy a Liberal: Kill, Hate, and Steal”), #35 Vespas, #36 Short Stories (as long as they are by H. P. Lovecraft or Flannery O’Connor), #37 Alternative Newspapers (actually I don’t like any newspapers, but I wrote something for The Aryan Alternative once), #41 Halloween, #45 Appearing to Enjoy Classical Music (and really enjoying it, in my case), #49 Sweaters, #59 Swimming, #83 Taking a Year Off, #85 The Winter Olympics, #89 Old Maps (one of his uncanniest calls), and #90 IKEA.
Food-related likes include: #14 Raw Milk (right down to the glass bottles), #20 Berry Picking, #22 Community Supported Agriculture, #27 Whole Wheat, #28 Sea Salt, #42 Trader Joe’s, #52 Small Batch Soda, #66 Hummus, #68 Heirloom Tomatoes, #70 Olives, and #84 Growing Their Own Food.
The most dead-on funny entries are on things that racially-aware white people don’t like: #24 Self-Aware Hip-Hop References, #53 Black Music That Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore, and #54 Bob Marley. Other stand outs are #60 Google, #71 Facebook, #73 Cult Movies, and #88 Being Offended.
* * *
So what lessons does Christian Lander teach us about our white liberal brothers and sisters? Their white racial consciousness is alive and well. Their white pride is flourishing behind the masks of white guilt and irony.
But while Lander’s “right kind of white people” are extremely secure of their status vis-à-vis non-whites, they are very insecure of their status vis-à-vis other white people, “the wrong kind,” our kind. Thus white racial consciousness will not become hegemonic until the “right” whites start fearing non-whites more and hating other whites less.
16 comments
Somehow, the comments censors at City Journal didn’t bring their White guilt to work today. Take a look at all the WN on display! How long can it last?
http://tinyurl.com/2bnb76f
I posted the following on your article at TOO (or tried to – it didn’t show up despite trying to post it twice, maybe it’s awaiting moderation), figured I would post it here too:
I also went to a Christian Lander book signing recently. Like you, I also have mixed feelings about the guy, but fundamentally I see him and his work as positive.
As a White guy somewhere between an SWPL and the archetype of implicit White identity depicted by Weird Al in his video “White and Nerdy”, I kinda wonder where the hostility toward White liberals is really coming from. Are White liberals really worse than militantly Zionist, MLK-worshipping White conservatives? Is the farmer’s market somehow a less valid icon of White identity than the NASCAR stadium? One thing Lander said at the book signing that really resonated with me, is that conservatives are incapable of satirizing the left because they really do not understand the left at all. That is definitely apparent in some of the comments in this thread, as well as what you read around the racialist blogs in general. Having self-identified as a liberal at one point, and having talked about race with both liberals and conservatives in real life, I think there is essentially no truth to the concept that conservative = racialist and liberal = anti-racist.
I definitely agree with what you wrote about racialism needing to incorporate both liberal and conservative Whites. I will go one step further: getting liberals on our side is more important. Realistically, most White people with triple-digit IQs are liberal. Most White people who have read a book in the last 6 months are liberal. Just compare the intellectual levels that liberal and conservative media outlets shoot for. PBS is more intelligent than Fox News. NPR is more intelligent than Rush Limbaugh. TED talks are more intelligent than… wait, there is nothing conservative even remotely comparable to TED, in fact the idea of it is hard to even imagine. Let’s face it: liberals are the people who matter most. These are the people who have the potential to put up some resistance to Jewish domination of the West. Accomplishing that is going to require ideas, media, art, music, etc. much more than it will require military tactics and survivalist training. Conservatives are clearly not cut out for this task.
Another thing, is that if we accept that Jews and non-Whites dominate the left, the only logical conclusion to draw from that is that White liberals are actually not very powerful right now. Thus, blaming White liberals for our present mess is completely irrational. In fact, the most vociferous critics of “SWPLs” seem to be Jews: HBD bloggers like Half Sigma, Mencius Moldbug, and Whiskey come to mind.
As far as Lander’s motivations – frankly, I think this guy could be a closet racialist. Something in the book you didn’t mention in your review (unless I missed it), is the flowchart on page 152-153, “How to Win Arguments with White People”, where if all else fails, the last step is “Call them racist” which inevitably leads to victory. Steve Sailer has also claimed that Lander is a regular reader of his blog, and while Steve is not exactly a WN, most of the readers of his blog tend more toward our side than average. And ultimately, Lander’s work promotes the idea that it is okay for White people to have a sense of identity, and even if he has to make a few compromises to do that, I see it as undoubtedly a good thing.
I,
You made some good thoughtful points.
I don’t put really any weight behind terms like conservative and liberal. The definitions of these terms that are supposed to distinguish each other have changed so much that I don’t think they really have any meaning left. And no, a conservative definitely doesn’t equal racialist, considering that you’ll find many self-described conservatives who put little to no weight behind the idea of race in their thought.
And truth be told, I don’t think there really ever was a difference between liberal and socialist, and conservative and libertarian, since they seem to share the same source. One side emphasizes unqualified equality, the other emphasizes unqualified liberty. And as someone who wants to uphold the traditional principles of Indo-Europeans which is order and hierarchy, I’m not one among those ranks. I believe that both the left and the right (as conceived in north america) are responsible for the problems that beset society. With that said, one can find some of the truth even among the most delusional of sources, and I admit that both american style liberals and conservatives each have some good points in their thinking.
And to answer one of your questions, no, I don’t think a farmers market is any less a valid icon of Europeans living outside of their homeland than a NASCAR stadium…..in fact, I think a NASCAR stadium shouldn’t even be an icon, and all whites should use those stadiums for showcases of the great achievements of European culture.
Greg Johnson’s Half Measures
By Cartesse Dalton
In the serial TV show “Breaking Bad,” there was a scene we need to remember. The drug boss’ enforcer was giving Walt a threat, and told a great story to do it.
When the enforcer was a cop, he had repeatedly been called to a domestic disturbance after a husband had beaten his wife again. Finally, the then-cop got fed up. He took the abuser husband out into a remote field, put the point of a revolver in his mouth, and then gave him a good talking to about why he should stop beating his wife.
On the next call to the house, the cop found the wife beaten to death with a baseball bat. “So much blood you could taste the metal.”
Then he told Walt what need to tell ourselves: “I learned right then, no more half measures.”
Greg Johnson is a must read WN author, and I always learn something new and uplifting and fortifying when I read his posts. But he is via negativia (contemplative), and not enough via positivia (action). His half measures are good starts, but he misses the opportunity to make a difference with the full potential of his talent.
Liberal White elites are indeed smug in their anti-racism, and we can discomfit them very easily, but we need calls to action to start. Greg Johnson has what it takes to put us in the attack mode.
The fad in White academics is to demand that Whites start recognizing and acknowledging the “burden of our unearned White privilege.” That’s the first step in their atoning for the sins of segregation. (Whites’ not wanting to be around blacks is assumed to be the greatest crime against human dignity since the use of Zyklon-B.) We need to jump on that fad and push it forward toward its most logical next step: Forcing anti-racist Whites to actively dispossess themselves or force the wrath of their Diversity pets who turn on them for being hypocritical racists.
When Whites acknowledge the burden of their White privileges, we need to pounce on them with the Mark Lloyd treatment:
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=110775
“There’s nothing more difficult than this. Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions,” Lloyd said. “And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem.”
He continued, “We’re in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”
Our job is to help Whites who feel bad about being White to renounce all their benefits of Whiteness, such as holding on to a job that a more deserving black wants for himself. Our end game is to make White liberal elite race betrayal so expensive and painful that our White enemies will decide on their own that the costs of talking correctly about race have just become too high.
We need to push up that cost, and we can do it easily. Just start an email campaign to their local newspaper demanding that they surrender their unearned White job. Let them suffer from the attention. Take their complacency on as a disease to be cured, much as the Jew-NAACP front shames Whites into apologizing for speaking unmentionable thoughts.
Our hope is that once enough Whites are called out as idiots, fewer Whites will be willing to take the risk of incurring our searing examinations and demands. They just don’t need another headache, because life is a struggle enough as it is already. No need to rile up the White Nationalists to make things worse for themselves.
Yes, that’s how we do it. Shame them for declaiming White privilege while holding on to White privileges. Should be very easy to do.
Maureen Dowd was hit with our tactic, but I think she just ignored the pressure. The pressure must have stopped, because she kept her White job at the NYTimes. http://spectator.org/archives/2009/07/21/the-unbearable-whiteness-of-be
If she had made Sharpton angry, he would never had let up on the pressure. He takes opportunities like that as fundraisers. Counter-Currents should too. Create some news for yourself, drive traffic your way, and get more donations. Play the game by the rules that work. Mimic those who are most successful, even if you have to hold your nose for sounding like a whining victim status minority (which we are!).
If our plan had been in place, we could have easily gone after the White bishop in New York who made this incredible admission, and then kept her job!
“For as you know, I, too, am a racist, dear Africa, but I hope I am in recovery a day at a time.”
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/81840_95960_ENG_HTM.htm
How did we allow an admitted racist to keep her job? Some sins are unforgivable. Shame on us.
Why not try a test case? The Episcopal Diocese of California has an Anti-Racism Commission. Go to their meetings, take names of the Whites, find out where they work, hold them accountable, and make some news, which is a full measure instead of a half.
http://tinyurl.com/2f38huw
Take a look at their diocesan leadership- they are proudly 100% White. Looks like an easy target for a full measure Diversity Treatment. All of these Whites would have attended the mandatory Anti-Racism training and pledged then and there to hold themselves accountable to people of color for their unearned White privileges. Doesn’t look like any of them felt badly enough about the injustice to create some Christ-like compassionate Restorative Justice by surrendering their job to a more deserving black. Counter-Currents can help them take the next step and help solve some of our nation’s unfinished and tragic business.
http://tinyurl.com/2czrho7
See the Episcopal Church spin and the resources- all you need to know about their tactics can be derived from their rhetoric and the exhibits listed- http://tinyurl.com/2fm48h7. In Traces of the Trade (a true White guilt tear jerker) they lay out the anti-racist, pro-reparations formula: acknowledge, apologize, reconcile, heal.
We can force White liberal elites to acknowledge, apologize, surrender! That’s a full measure. We can take bad p.r. right to them and force them to respond.
(Lynch and Kurtagic should review this Free Indeed training video- http://tinyurl.com/26dzonl- we free ourselves of racism by giving everything away to blacks- sorta like Rev. James Cone’s demand that Christians can’t be authentically Christian until they give back to blacks all that we stole- thankfully, he says it with an authentic jive accent- http://tinyurl.com/2e3fk9c.)
Next step would be to create a “crisis” at your local segregated synagogue. Use all the liberal pathos about how painful it is to see Jews refusing to embrace Diversity and refusing to encourage their White Jew daughters to bring the black boyfriends and lovers to the synagogue.
We must take the full measure of using the liberal tactics against the liberals themselves. That full measure will draw thousands to our cause, because healthy Whites will see us acting out their thoughts. Prejudice is very present and only needs permission and encouragement to grow into the full recruitment phase of its growth. Greg Johnson is a leader, and we’d like to see him lead more. Run with it.
Thanks for your kind words. These are excellent plans. But I am primarily a writer, editor, and translator, and I already have too much work on my plate. I hope other take your suggestions to heart, though.
I like the plan. Let’s implement Planned Diversity upon those White liberal elites who force social pain upon us while protecting themselves from the same Diversity Curse.
The responsibility falls upon us to “do the right thing and work harder for bringing about the justice of America’s unfinished business”. Our business is in making sure that those who speak Equality are forced to endure Equality on Equality’s own terms, which always should result in poetic White dispossession.
Let’s be on the lookout for any White owned business that sponsors, hosts, or organizes a Diversity and Inclusion seminar that sounds anything like the Continuum below. We can organize a boycott if they don’t comply with our anti-racist demands.
Any White who gets tainted with this hate-filled poison must be forced to immediately surrender their White job and White daughter to the “enriching Diversity”. (Inclusive = Surrendering) If White daughter complains about the syphilis, she just needs more training in cultural sensitivity. (Inclusive = Accepting Differences)
From the same Mennonite website, I find Negro Jesus. http://tinyurl.com/2w7y5ee
One spiritual advantage I have in being a White Gentile Christian is that I can ask Jesus to forgive me for hating the Mennonites for turning him into a [black].
http://tinyurl.com/2w7y5ee
Continuum on Becoming and Antiracist, Multicultural Institution
by Damascus Road. Adapted from original chart by Ronice Branding, developed from concepts in multicultural organization by Baily Jackson and Rita Hardiman, and further developed by Andrea Avazian.
Racial and cultural differences seen as defects
EXCLUSIVE
An excluding church: Enforces the racist status quo of dominance and exclusion of African Americans, Arab Americans, Native Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans through its official program, practice, policy, procedures, constituency, structures and mission. Intends to exclude people of color and succeeds in intent. Reflects sinful attitudes and systems of surrounding society. Cannot see the racism iceberg.
PASSIVE
Church of the status quo: Eurocentric in ambience. May say, “We don’t have a problem.” Tolerant of a limited number of people of color who are “articulate” or “just like us,” but the power of white privilege is maintained throughout the institution. Language may include “those people.” Racial superiority attitudes remain intact. Intent may have changed, but there is a high level of incongruence between stated intentions and results. May partially acknowledge the racism iceberg but only sees a small part of the tip.
Tolerant of racial and cultural differences
SYMBOLIC CHANGE
An open church: Sees itself as committed to inclusion of people of color, affirms denomination’s pronouncements but is often unaware of habits of privilege and paternalism. Symbolic inclusion; recruits for “someone of color” on committees or staff but not “those who will make waves.” No contextual change in culture, policies or decision-making. Characterized by high attrition rates of people of color. Some discomfort with incongruence between intentions and results. Antiracist language may be present but not fully owned. Only sees racism iceberg above the water.
IDENTITY CHANGE
An awakening church: Claims an antiracist identity. Desires to eliminate discriminatory practices and inherent advantage. Antiracism training owned and practiced throughout the institution. Expanding view of diversity may include other socially oppressed groups, but decision-makers still conform to norms and practices derived from the dominant group’s worldview. Theology claims essential antiracist identity. Teams equipped to dismantle racism. Institutional culture not yet thoroughly representative of cultures of people of color. Working at lowest level of the racism iceberg. Accountability to oppressed community discussed but not yet implemented.
Racial and cultural differences seen as assets
STRUCTURAL CHANGE
A redefining church: Not satisfied with just being antiracist, it begins to see the benefits of broader racial and cultural perspective in its ministry and mission. Audits all aspects of church life to represent antiracist commitments. Stated agreement on willingness to struggle; values various conflict styles. New policies and models for inclusive decision-making, mission and ministry. Redefining constituency and structure so they are no longer based on White Power. Antiracism training owned by the institution. Accountability to oppressed community now structured with identifiable veto power. Working at the core of the racism iceberg.
INCLUSIVE
A transformed church: Diversity is seen as an asset. Church reflects contributions and interests of diverse racial, cultural and economic groups in determining its mission, ministry, policies and practices; full participation in decisions that shape the church. A sense of community and mutual caring that is seen and felt. Commitment to confront and dismantle racism within the church and the broader community. Allies with others in battling social oppression. Able to develop antiracist programs. Antiracist identity understood and accepted as normal by the institution and constituency. Institution equipped to melt new forms of the racism iceberg.
The Mennonites are a very perverted church gang:
“Around 80 current and former Racial/Ethnic leaders who are connected to Mennonite Church USA are planning to gather Jan. 9-11, 2011, in Tampa, Fla., to share their experiences as leaders of color within the church and to discern what the Holy Spirit is saying to the church through them.”
That’s today’s evangelical White Christian church in essence- we can’t listen to the Holy Spirit unless he’s speaking to us through our afrovoodoos, interfaith jews, immigrant mexicans, and peaceful jihadists.
I’d rather listen to God’s Wisdom that he wrote upon my heart with his own finger. But first, he told Edmund Burke (Reflections) to write it down on paper so I wouldn’t misinterpret anything:
“YOU see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.”
See the 100% Whites Only Mennonites who are refusing to surrender their jobs to the Diversity Inclusion Continuum:
http://www.themennonite.org/about/staff
Don’t you just love Christians to let their light shine unto the world while working in a 100% Whites Only office?
On closer inspection, looks like they’ve got a token Puerto Rican. But no afros! Shame! Worse, they are whiter than a racist Tea Party rally. Our work is unfinished…
Complaint and criticism about the relatively contemplative, inactive aspect of written, esoteric racial nationalism misses the point.
Contemplation and inactivity are part of its aspect and necessity. If you’re seeking more direct and immediate action, and seeking it here, it is your mistake, not, for example, Johnson’s.
And to the extent that you crave more robust and influential praxis, it is an issue of time and situation. Conservatives still run the show of white consciousness. The open war against conservatives can be imagined and prepared, but as yet it can not be fully open. That’s an issue of conditional restraint, not of cowardice or reluctance.
Cheap reassurance, to criticize writers. Harder, longer, less glamorous effort to gradually tool up and build a personal network that might respond and survive, when supermarket shelves clear, riots begin, and tribal competition ensues.
Build connections in your personal life, and don’t pressure them directly and immediately with the cause and content of white nationalism. Get to know the locals on their own terms, and gradually learn who will listen to you, whom you may be able to trust, to what extent and on which terms. Build a profile of those who, in the event of regime crisis, will be prepared to understand, and to ally and fight for what is urgent, basic, and glorious.
Can’t do all that in my neighborhood. The Whites all sport Obama stickers on their cars, and the blacks are all dredlocked thugs with saggy pants. I’m stuck here in suffering White Misery, which makes me a fine exhibit in the display case of the successes of Equality, Opportunity, Integration, Civil Rights, Human Dignity, Restorative Justice, Affirmative Action, Diversity Is Our Strength, Inclusive Tolerance, Multicultural Understanding, Safe Space, Radical Hospitality, Interfaith Dialogue, and Listening to the Other.
If I try to exercise my rights to White Life, White Liberty and the pursuit of White Happiness, I’ll be scorned for “refusing to acknowledge and relinquish my unearned White privilege.”
What I call White Misery is what they call “only your anxiety over the waning significance your racial privilege and your guilty refusal to recognize your responsibilty to welcome the enrichment that our Mexican and Muslim friends bring to our greening communities”.
I’ll just sit here and drink, awaiting more Section 8 housing, plotting my inversion of their attack. I’ll see to it that Section 8 housing’s “strengthening of the community” gets taken into rich White liberal elite neighborhoods.
If I can’t enjoy the pleasure, I’ll spread the pain.
By the way, I observed the other day on the sidewalk at Vanderbilt University why the black bucks wear the ridiculously cut jeans with inseams to their knees. Watch how these jeans make them walk. They rock back and forth, tossing from side to side, just like a gorilla does. The jeans make them walk with an intimidating jungle swagger.
I wish those shaved head, high yella business types who wear suits and ties and act White around Whitey would wear their ghetto garb all the time. And I want them to grow out their afros. I want to see the afrovoodoos authentically afro. I want to hear edumacated blacks speak in real Ebonics, not some distinctly pronounced version of my White language.
I suppose such soullessness doesn’t afflict my locality?
I find perhaps one real, flesh-in-blood person to talk to every six months. But I find that one person. And finding the one potentially builds momentum and understanding.
Greg Johnson is great at exegesis of our allies who help shape our WN thinking, but he misses opportunities to really stoke profitable White resentment and bitterness. If on occasion, he would apply his skills to critiquing the plans the afrovoodoos have for us, he’d see a boost in recruitment.
Look at the Christian churches who have allowed the blacks to see a path to getting their black hands on the White investment endowments and properties of formerly White denominations. Billions of Dead White Men’s Money there for grabbing in the name of Restorative Justice, if only the White Anglo Dominants will just hand it over in the name of Christ.
The shakedown in happening before our eyes in real time. Keep an eye on the scam artist, race hustling, anti-racist developments in the Mennonites, and watch the afro rhetoric that triggers immediate White surrender, always in the name of Christ’s unity.
Why can’t Christians have enough awareness to demand that Jews in Israel start building Human Unity by embracing the authentic vibrancy of non Jew cultures in the Holy Land?
The anti White Mennonite lessons are too good to miss using as weapons in our battles.
Black boy sets up the White Dispossession based on the need for Whites to “heal”:
http://www.themennonite.org/issues/13-9/articles/Racial_healing_in_the_church
“The dominant culture group has to not only own the process and work at understanding why healing is needed but truly share power with those in the minority culture group. These things are key in moving beyond symbolic change to actually transforming an institution.”
White girl sets up the White Dispossession based on reconciliation:
http://www.themennonite.org/issues/13-9/articles/Giving_up_veto_power
“We decided to focus our work on the passage from 2 Corinthians 5:16-20, which will be our Convention 2011 theme. Indeed, we can be reconciled to each other as we are made into a new creation. At the same time we also acknowledged that we aren’t always vessels through which God can make an appeal. Therefore we affirmed a confessional approach to our work. Before God can make an appeal through us we must be aware of our complicity with oppression and be reconciled.”
Greg Johnson, please use the Mennonites in your ongoing, but not quite varied enough, scholarship. Their convention is in July, and the proposed and passed resolutions will offer plenty of good WN fodder. The rhetoric will be cutting edge White Dispossessive Persuasion Tactics.
And keep an eye out for anything that points toward universal enforcement of the “Making White Babies Is A Hate Crime Against Human Dignity,” which will be promoted by Jews who exempt themselves because White Jew babies will grow up to give us the Diversity Leadership we need to bring about a more just and humane global family and hopeful future for all.
The error that White Christian Gentiles made back in the antebellum South was baptizing the negroes into White Christianity. White Humanity should have kept our White Religion all to ourselves. Let the afros have their voodoo, just control it using their natural susceptibility to superstition and emotionalism. Create some voodoo god that tells the negroes to behave or else the fierce Thor Jesus will attack. Teach them that the meek and mild Jesus only acts meek and mild when everybody is behaving, but when they act up, White Jesus attacks negro voodoo and wins.
Instead, we let the baptized negroes see that what is most dear to the White Man, his White Daughter, has no religion that the negroes can’t share. If they can share religion, the church, the Gospel, salvation, eternal life, etc., they why shouldn’t they be able to share the White girls’ beds?
Whites always make fatal miscalculations when dealing with negroes. We just can’t comprehend the afro mind. We should spend as much time learning about their gang rituals and immorality as we do talking about Rosa Parks and MLK. We should watch the most disgusting rap videos and ask the liberal White elites, “What more do we need to know about Diversity?”
White Humanity must learn to take negroes on face value. What you see is what is really there and is what you will always get: negrodation.
The Abolitionists really did win more than we realize. In order to justify the Christian mission of the institution of afro slavery, Whites were desperate to church their negroes on the plantation and have them baptized by the Episcopal bishops. The Abolitionists wanted social equality between the negroes and the Southern White Elites. They got it through the White religion that the Southerners just gave away to the negroes. Now we have White girls hugging negroes in churches and exposing themselves to the horrors of negrodated cesspool Haiti while on “mission” trips. Insidious victory.
“I say ‘over two millenniums’ meaning that the disintegrating influence of Jewry upon the Aryan race began before the advent of Christianity. The disastrous new scale of values drawn from the misapplied other-worldly religion, and the spreading of the creed itself, were the consequences of Jewish influence, not its causes.” Lightning and Sun, page 213.
Dear Greg Johnson,
What were the values of her system compared to Christianity’s values? Was there a version of Christianity that she would have accepted if it hadn’t been “misapplied”? What would have been correctly applied Christianity?
Thank you.
This was a great article! I really have to get those books, just for the fun of it.
I think part of the reason I liked this article so much is that I grew up in a hyper-liberal household that almost completely fit the bill of the “right kind of white people” (RKWP). Actually, one parent was quite a bit more radical than the average RKWP when I was young, which caused me to have a very interesting childhood (doubly so considering my spiritual-philosophic-political beliefs).
I found Johnson’s comments that “the “right” kind of white people are supremely confident in their own superiority. Their self-esteem and sense of entitlement are rock solid” and “Lander’s white self-mockery smells like white guilt: self-congratulation disguised as self-abasement. Pity always involves invidious comparisons: One feels superior to those one pities. Moral self-deprecation has the same quality: One revels in one’s superior self-consciousness. Every stroke of the flagellum is, in the end, just a pat on the back” to be particularly astute observations regarding the people I grew up with. Furthermore, I agree with the comments about the RKWP needing to exchange their hatred of the ‘other’ whites in favor of more fear (and resentment) of non-whites. I would like to point out, however, that the RKWP will never give up their snobbishness. The most we can hope for is for it to be diminished to a degree that allows for cooperation with ‘other’ whites and the smoldering hatred of the RKWP to shift towards non-whites and their Jewish leaders.
Despite its highly self-deceptive, hypocritical, and in this case, (self) destructive characteristics, I believe it is based on the aristocratic law of nature. White societies, and almost every human society, for that matter, have always been hierarchical, and always will be to one extent or another as long as we continue to exist. The difference is only in degree, and personally I would prefer a more hierarchical and explicit system based on merit. One of the downsides to the natural occurring phenomena of caste separation is that it frequently is based off of wealth and the leading castes suffer from dysgenics with each generation becoming increasingly less worthy than the previous. Right now it is based mostly on money, (academic) education, and sensitivity to fitting in with the prevailing social order among other educated whites. In my opinion, the RKWP are every bit as snobby and narcissistic as our aristocratic ancestors are portrayed in movies, except the RKWP have none of the merits and are dedicated to an infinitely more poisonous philosophy.
What I am trying to say is that we racialists need to reach out to the RKWP instead of resent them so much. We should take a lesson from Fascist Italy which took the focus off of class-warfare and had the rich and the working class come to the table in order to do what was best for Italy. Whites need to recognize, like Fascists in Italy did, that both groups are necessary for any kind of civilization or society, and thus should join in a spirit of union in the fight against forces that wish to destroy them.
I think we need to be honest with ourselves (and this is no knock towards working class whites), but a large part of why white nationalism has been an abysmal failure so far is that it has focused almost only on the working class and has effectively (albeit sometimes unintentionally) excluded the more status-conscious “right” white people. Now don’t get me wrong, they do a pretty good job of excluding themselves and certainly bear a large portion of responsibility for our current situation (continuing). All I am saying is we need to offer an alternative that better suits those who desire to exit this suicidal social group and join our cause. This is precisely why I believe the TOO and C-C are meeting with so much success. They certainly don’t bash the “wrong” kind of white people, but they help bridge the gap by offering material (and the beginnings of an online community?) that appeals to the RKWP but concerns our race as a whole.
By the way, the West-Coast White Nationalism article is also very good and hits on this topic. I really think that this, coupled with the metapolitical approach (and of course great suggestions like those Cartesse Dalton gave) is the best course of action.
This was a very insightful and prescient article. Despite being a decade old, it is more relevant today than then. I do think many white liberals are mentally defective; but it is probably true that some are merely unthinking members of the liberal tribe. As an ur-Ivy Leaguer myself, I can attest that many intelligent people are not philosophically inclined; others, simply possess weak characters. If the hegemonic attitude within the Ivy League/Christian Lander/SF-Marina district world were WN, these same “liberals of convenience” would be WN (or close enough to it).
The white liberals of convenience we might one day reach, as we become the Strong Party. But the antifa-sympathetic liberal mental defectives can only be segregated or destroyed.
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