Whither America: Elitism or Racism?

3,972 words

In our universities today and in the pages of the scientific journals a battle is being waged between scientists concerned with racial matters on the one hand—biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists of professional integrity—and pseudo-scientists concerned with upholding the fundamental liberal dogma of universal human equality on the other hand. Despite the well-entrenched position of the pseudo-scientists and their powerful allies in politics and the communications media, encouraging progress is being made by the scientists. Bit by bit the truth is coming to the fore, and the forces of censorship, moral intimidation, and liberal bigotry are losing ground. Reference was made to this struggle in an article on sociobiology in a recent issue of Attack!

The battle is far from being won, however, even in the pages of the scientific journals. And on the popular front the pseudo-scientists still rule almost without opposition. The same tired, old lies about race are being fed to high school students and college undergraduates via their textbooks and their brainwashed teachers and to the general public via their television receivers and their daily newspapers. The slow and painful progress being made on the scientific front is not filtering down to the man in the street.

And it will never filter down to him if a dangerous trend now underway is not halted. That trend is cosmopolitan elitism, and it is flourishing most unwholesomely in those very segments of our society where the greatest progress has been made against the pseudo-scientific equalitarians.

Consider, for example, the scientists themselves. Their classes have been picketed on university campuses, and they have been heckled and sometimes physically attacked by gangs of Jewish, Chicano, Negro, and other non-White students who have accused them of being racists. The all-too-common response to this intimidation has been the claim by the heckled scientists that they are not racists; that they are not interested in promoting racism but only in establishing the truth in racial matters. William Shockley, a Nobel laureate physicist-turned-geneticist at Stanford University; Arthur Jensen, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley; and Richard Herrnstein, a Jewish psychologist at Harvard University, are all in the forefront of the battle against the equality myth, and all have repeatedly announced that they are not racists.

To the hecklers, of course, wanting to establish the truth is racism; the only way not to be a racist is to fervently believe the equality myth. For our discussion here let us adopt a somewhat less extreme definition of racism; let us define it as a subjective preference for living, learning, and loving among the members of one’s own race—as a spiritual and emotional bond between the members or a racial group. That is a definition with which most reasonable people will agree. That is the definition most scientists have in mind when they claim they are not racists: they are claiming that they have no subjective preference for members of their own race.

That does not mean that they regard their race as equal to all others. They recognize the manifest fact that individual men are unequal in intelligence, in aggressiveness, in creative ability, and in every other characteristic you might name—and they also recognize that there are racial differences in all these characteristics. They recognize the scientifically demonstrated fact, for example, that the Negro population, as a whole is less intelligent than the White population as a whole. But they maintain that it is not the population as a whole with which they are concerned in making personal decisions about living, learning, and loving but only the individual.

This attitude was illustrated especially well by an article which appeared in American Opinion, the magazine of the conservative John Birch Society, some months ago. The author of the article was complaining about the Federal government’s forced-housing program. His position was that a person should have the right to sell or rent a home to the kind of people he wants to, not those the government says he has to.

The Bircher said that he—and conservatives generally—have no objection whatever to living next to clean, quiet, orderly, upper-class Negroes—in fact, they prefer such Negroes as neighbors to lower-class Whites; they just don’ t believe the government ought to stick its nose into the business of choosing people’s neighbors for them.

Now, I have a suspicion, although I can’t prove it, that if that Birch Society writer were presented with the choice of living next to an upper-class Black—say, a Black neurosurgeon like we see on TV—or an upper-class White, he would choose the upper-class White; and if given the choice of having his daughter marry a Black garbage collector or a White garbage collector, he would again choose the White.

In other words, there is racism in all of us, even Birch Society members. It’s in our genes, and even the unnatural and artificial lifestyle of today hasn’t been able to suppress it entirely.

But the Birch Society writer—and, I am afraid, a great many other upper-class Whites who consider themselves conservatives—still consider race a matter of only secondary importance. It is the individual, not the race, which comes first in their scheme of values.

They recognize that the average Negro is less intelligent than the average White, but they’re perfectly ready to accept the Negro who isn’t average. The Black banker, the Black store-owner, the Black high school principal, the Black judge are perfectly acceptable to them, while they look down their noses at the White factory worker, the White coal miner, the White who never finished high school and never earned more than $600 a month in his life.

They judge a person by his socio-economic status—by his class—rather than by his race. They are elitists.

Elitism certainly isn’t a new phenomenon—and, in fact, it is not inherently an undesirable phenomenon, under the right circumstances, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But elitism is an especially important phenomenon today, because it is gaining ground among White intellectuals, among upper-class Whites, among intelligent Whites who think of themselves as conservatives—and it is gaining that ground at the expense of White racial solidarity.

There are several reasons for this, and we should understand them. One of the reasons is that elitism is an acceptable alternative to equalitarianism.

As we are all painfully aware, a lot of White people are not very bright. They actually believe their TV and their morning newspaper and their minister when these oracles tell them that the races are really equal and that all indications to the contrary are illusory. They really believe that.

But that’s a pretty hard thing for an intelligent White person to believe—a hard thing for a hardheaded, alert, successful White person to swallow. After all, he makes his living by having a good head on his shoulders and by using it, and it’s just too obvious to him that Blacks and Whites aren’t inherently, biologically equal. He just can’t swallow the equalitarian lunacy the TV preaches. Such myths may be all right for the boobs, for the great unwashed, but not for him. He knows better.

So what is he to do? Is he to be a racist?

Goodness, no! That’s not acceptable. That’s disreputable. That’s dangerous.

So he becomes an elitist. “Equality is a bunch of baloney,” he says. “But I’m not a racist. I don’t have anything against superior Blacks, against Blacks who are a credit to their race. I despise only inferior Blacks, just as I despise inferior Whites.”

And why is this an acceptable alternative to equalitarianism? Well, it’s acceptable because it is the position held by Mr. Herrnstein—and by a number of other Jews as well. The elite is an open club; Jews are admitted. Therefore, one will not be socially stigmatized by the controlled media for being an elitist. It’s a safe position.

Of course, the communists don’t like elitists. They denounce elitism almost as vehemently as they denounce racism. But, then, one can live with that.

Elitism can be justified by the successful, aggressive White person in terms of his essentially individualistic outlook on life. Furthermore, it jibes with the insidious idea, which was subtly planted deep inside his head by the brainwashers during his earliest years, that it is somehow unjust to judge a person by his race, but that each person should instead to be judged only on his individual merit.

The elitist reasons that a person can’t be blamed for his race, because he has no control over that; but he can be blamed for his socio-economic status, because he does have control over that. If a White person—or a Black—had any intelligence and any ambition, reasons the elitist, he wouldn’t be a garbage collector or a coal miner. If he isn’t making a lot of money, then that’s his fault, because in our free and democratic society it’s only ability that counts.

Again, the communists disagree. They claim that a person’s class is forced on him: that if a person is doing disagreeable work for low wages it’s not his fault, not his lack of ability or ambition, but the fault of the capitalists, of the ruling class, which is holding him down. But, again, who cares what the communists say?

Finally, elitism is an unconscious and indirect way of satisfying—at least, partially—the inherent racism in all of us. Because, after all, it is really the lower-class Blacks—the field niggers—who evoke the strongest racial feelings in most of us. They behave more naturally, whereas the Black bankers and the Black judges and the Black neurosurgeons—the house niggers—have repressed their Blackness to a greater or lesser extent. They have learned to dress like Whites, to talk like Whites, to act like Whites. (Most of them, in fact, are more White than Black, genetically.)

They are what the real Blacks refer to as “oreos”—Black on the outside, but White on the inside. And oreos just don’t evoke as strong a feeling of racial antipathy on the part of most upper-class Whites as genuine Blacks, as real niggers, do. It’s easier to accept the oreos, easier to live next door to them, easier to convince oneself that they’re really equals.

And, in a certain sense, they are equals. It is clear that, despite the low average intelligence of Blacks, there are some who are quite intelligent. And if intelligence is all that counts, if IQ is all we measure a man by, then there are Blacks—or, at least, mulattos, part-Blacks—who are roughly equal to most upper-class Whites.

Intelligence, of course, is not all that counts, but there is a tendency in some circles today to believe that it is. This tendency is associated with one of the prevailing errors of our times: the error of rationalism, the error which leads a man to the conceit that, because he is capable of reason, he stands far above the animal world, which is merely mechanical. Reason, the rationalist believes, is the master of everything.

The amazing accomplishments of Western science in the last century help to reinforce this conceit. And if one is a rationalist, then it is easy to slip into an elitist attitude and reject the primacy of race.

The elitist will say: “Reason is above race; it has nothing to do with race. Nuclear physics has no race; thermodynamics has no race. How can one decide the race of a mathematical equation or a chemical formula?”

“I recognize,” says the elitist, “that fewer Blacks than Whites are capable of learning what the mathematical equation or the chemical formula means, but there is still no race to it. The exceptional Negro, who is able to understand it, is just as good as the White man who is able to understand it—and just as acceptable to me.”

So elitism has what seems to be quite a substantial basis. That basis consists of three elements—if we ignore the fear of being considered a racist, the all-too-human tendency to have only socially acceptable opinions.

First, there is the tradition in this country of individualism, a tradition which is used today to justify the claim that only the individual counts and not the group to which he belongs. It is considered wicked to categorize people, to stereotype them.

Second, we have a tradition closely related to the first one, and that is our tradition of meritocracy, the tradition that a man should be able to rise just as far as his brains and his energy and his character will carry him, and that no artificial barriers should be placed in his way.

And finally we have rationalism, the belief in pure reason as the highest faculty, coupled with the notion that reason is inherently raceless.

Let’s examine these elements one at a time.

First, an individual Black may be superior in some particular regard to the average White person, but he is still a member of his race, despite all our prejudices against stereotyping. That is, he is still genetically a Negro, and when he mates his genes carry not only his specific qualities but also the general qualities of his race. In other words, his genes carry two competing tendencies: the tendency to yield an offspring identical to himself—and the tendency to yield an offspring representing the average Negro. This latter tendency is called by geneticists regression toward the mean.

What that means is that when two persons mate, who both exhibit some particular quality (e.g., intelligence) to a greater degree than the average for their race, their children will, on the average, not exhibit this quality as strongly as their parents. On the average they will exhibit it to a degree which falls somewhere between that of their parents and the norm for the race as a whole.

And if these children mate indiscriminately with each other, generation after generation, the degree to which each generation exhibits the particular quality in question will approach more and more closely to the norm for the race.

From the foregoing we can understand that racial intermarriage is not just a private matter between two individuals, as it is regarded by the equalitarians and the libertarians. In a very real sense, one does not marry an individual of another race: one marries the other individual’s race.

There is nothing mysterious about this tendency of regression toward the mean—it is a statistical thing—and geneticists today understand it. But our genes have always understood it, and this gene-based understanding manifests itself as xenophobia, as an instinctive abhorrence of race-mixing. This is just one more case of our instinct being ahead of our intellect.

Clearly, the natural, human tendency toward stereotyping, toward categorizing people according to the group to which they belong, is a manifestation of a much deeper wisdom than that which tells us not to stereotype, but only to see each person as an individual. Only because our ancestors stereotyped are we White today. And only if we continue seeing people not just as individuals but also as members of groups—as White men or Black men or Chinamen or Jews—can our race survive.

Second, our tradition of meritocracy was largely responsible for America moving out ahead of the rest of the world economically and industrially during a time when American society was, for all practical purposes, all White. Allowing each man and each woman to contribute to society to the limit of his abilities, allowing him to reap a commensurate reward and also to rise to a position of influence and control commensurate with his individual achievements—that is the social principle which, with certain safeguards, should govern any racially homogeneous society. It is the principle of greatest social efficiency—in a racially homogeneous society. But it is one of the shorter paths to hell in a racially mixed society, because it alienates the natural leaders of a race from the masses of their racial kinsmen.

America today, of course, is no longer strictly a meritocracy. There is no reigning social principle at all, but rather a shifting and confused state of affairs in which old institutions and patterns are being obliterated, and a general scramble is underway on the part of a great many factions to set new patterns most favorable to themselves.

Thus, we have the grotesque and shameful situation in which White conservatives—ideological elitists and actual members of the former elite are fighting desperately now, in the Supreme Court and elsewhere, not to restore the former precedence of their race, but rather to outlaw all forms of racial preference in an attempt to salvage their own, individual rights. Even people with misgivings about cosmopolitan elitism are grasping for it as a counter to those who want special rights for minorities.

Whites who object to favoritism for Blacks or Mexicans or other non-Whites can take one of two positions. They can take our position, which is that race should be considered in everything, in immigration, in hiring people, in promoting them, in assigning them to schools, or what have you, and that it should be considered in such a way as to promote the welfare of our race. In other words, America should not be a country where Whites have equal rights, but where they have the only rights.

And the other position, of course, is that which the pro-Bakke people are taking in the present Supreme Court case: the position that race must never be considered, in anything—that we must have an absolutely colorblind society—that individual merit must be the only criterion by which people are judged.

The especially insidious and dangerous character of elitism under multi-racial conditions is now becoming evident: Whites who feel threatened by the government’s programs favoring racial minorities are locking themselves into a position which denies that any group should have priority. The present threat of special minority rights is leading people who might otherwise have some healthy racial feelings left in them to react in a panicky way and reject any claim to special status as a consequence of their While birthright.

They suppress all feelings of solidarity with their less able and less fortunate racial kinsmen, abandoning them to fend for themselves, and they grasp for the elitist straw. And once they do that, they’re fighting on the enemy’s terms. It’s a no-win position, a purely defensive position.

Third, we have rationalism. The rationalist position is false for several reasons. It is false, in the first place, because even pure reason—or what appears to us to be pure reason—is influenced by race.

We speak, for example, of Western science, and the racial adjective, Western, is meaningful. That is because the way our minds work—not just how well they work, but the particular way in which we reason—is a function of our race . A White man, a Black man, a Chinaman, and a Jew have different types of minds, and the different types of cultures they develop, when left to themselves, are reflections of these differences.

The differences tend to be masked today, because of the universal dominance of Western science. When a Negro, for instance, writes a mathematical equation the same way a White man would write it, it is not because his mind is the same as the White man’s, but because the Negro has adapted himself to the White man’s way of reasoning, to the extent that he can.

Actually, it’s difficult to imagine the ways in which a Negro science, a native African science, might develop differently from Western science, because the former has never existed. But there have been in the past, before Western science became the dominant model everywhere, other sciences, of sorts: what served the ancient Egyptians as science, for example, or the ancient Chinese.

The former science was as distinctly Egyptian as the latter was distinctly Chinese, and they were both distinctly un-Western. We can read translations from ancient Egyptian or Chinese documents on scientific matters, and it becomes painfully obvious that the thought processes of the beings who wrote those documents were rather different from ours.

Classical science, Hellenic science, was also different in many ways from modern, Western science, and philosophers of history who overemphasize the purely cultural aspects of history at the expense of its racial aspects (e.g. those of the Spenglerian school) make much of these differences. But the fact remains that when we read today the works of Euclid or Archimedes, there is no sense of alienness, as there is with the Egyptian or Chinese works. The reason of the Hellenes was our reason, because they were of our race.

But reason, as I mentioned earlier, is not everything. In particular, it is not the supreme faculty, not the master of our lives. Reason is a tool, a weapon, an instrument, a means. It is a servant—not the master.

Reason is a very powerful tool, to be sure, an extremely important servant—but still a servant. Pure reason can tell us the easiest way to get from A to B, but it cannot tell us, in the final analysis, why we should want to go from A to B. Reason cannot define our ultimate objectives for us; it cannot give us our basic values, our fundamental criteria. Those things are all purely subjective—that is, they come only from within us, while reason has power only over objective things.

Why should a man live? Why should he shun death? He cannot answer, except to say that he should live because he wants to—which is another way of saying that he has an instinct to survive. It is in his genes, it is subjective, and reason has nothing to do with it. Reason can be used as a tool to make survival easier, to make it more nearly certain. But it is quite clearly the instinct which is the master, and reason the servant.

And the same applies to everything else. Reason cannot tell us what is beautiful and what is good and what we should strive for. It does not give purpose or fundamental meaning to our lives, but only helps us to achieve those things which our souls, our genes, tell us we should try to achieve.

Purpose, values, ultimate meaning are in our genes—which is another way of saying that they are all racially determined. When a society’s racial composition changes—even if it is able to maintain its ability to reason, its average IQ—then its values change, its ultimate meaning changes.

And that is why elitism—raceless elitism, cosmopolitan elitism—is a false and dangerous position.

If we are to survive as a race, then we must be White before we are physicians or lawyers or other members of the professional class. We must be White before we are rich or before we have high IQs. We must prefer the White garbage man to the Black neurosurgeon or the Jewish psychology professor. We must, in other words, be racists rather than elitists. Elitism is only permissible after we have solved our race problem, and then it must be an elitism which is coupled to a strong sense of racial consciousness.

The White elitists in America today may think that they have every justification for rejecting, for cutting themselves off from, their less successful racial kinsmen and allying themselves with Blacks and Jews and other non-Whites of their own educational level or income class, but the day will come when they themselves are the ones who are rejected and cut off and cast out. Then they can turn to their fellow elitists for help, but they will not find it.

Note

This editorial is based on a talk given by Attack! editor Dr. William Pierce at the Sunday-evening meeting of National Alliance members, supporters, friends, and other interested persons in the Washington area on October 16, 1977.

Source: Attack! no. 57, 1977, reprinted in The Best of Attack! and National Vanguard Tabloid, ed. Kevin Alfred Strom (Arlington, Va.: National Vanguard Books, 1984), pp. 103–104.