Counter-Currents
3,887 words
Author’s Note:
I was arrested to prevent me from delivering this talk at The Scandza Forum in Oslo on November 2, 2019. The Norwegian Security Police somehow divined — without knowing the topic or even the title — that this lecture would lead to political violence if delivered. Judge for yourself. For a fuller account of my arrest, see “Anarcho-Tyranny in Oslo.”
I want to thank Fróði Midjord and the rest of the Scandza team for making this event possible, as well as all of you for coming out to hear me. I am honored today to be speaking alongside these distinguished doctors of the human sciences.
My Ph.D., however, is in philosophy. Philosophers don’t do scientific research. Instead, we stand back and try to talk about the big picture, including the meaning of scientific discoveries for politics and morals. My topic today is “The Very Idea of White Privilege.”
A privilege is an advantage that you enjoy and others don’t. Privilege is inherently unequal. Special privileges are the opposite of equal rights. White privilege means advantages enjoyed by whites just in virtue of their race — rights not enjoyed by non-whites. White privilege is a form of hereditary privilege. Whites do nothing to earn or merit white privilege over and above simply being born. White privilege thus refers to a whole range of unequal and unearned — and thus unjust — advantages enjoyed by whites and denied to non-whites in the societies that whites created. White privilege is just another word for white “racism.”
The concept of white privilege has exploded in American public discourse in the last five years, coinciding with the so-called “great awokening,” the wave of Left-wing hysteria and gaslighting set off by the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown hoaxes, namely the claims that two blacks who were killed while committing crimes were actually the real victims, innocent victims of white racism.
The concept of white privilege has provoked a great deal of eye-rolling and healthy anger from whites. This manifestation of white toughness has, absurdly, been termed “white fragility,” which is a clear sign that the Left is not just out of touch with reality but simply thinks that it can be conjured up or banished with magic words.
Whites reject the idea of white privilege for various reasons.
- Some think that racism is a terrible thing, but they don’t think that they or their societies are guilty of it.
- The vast majority of white people work very hard and never had anything given to them, so they resent the idea that they benefit from unearned privileges.
- Others think there is nothing wrong with racial inequality and believe that white privilege is just another politically correct moral swindle in which non-whites seek unearned advantages by accusing good-hearted whites of spurious offenses for which they can buy forgiveness.
But as much as I applaud this pushback against white privilege, the concept is not entirely meaningless. For instance, within the lifetimes of some people present today, whites enjoyed legal privileges denied to non-whites in Apartheid South Africa and the American South.
But there is not a white society in the world today in which whites enjoy such legal privileges over non-whites. Even the idea of nationality through descent is being chipped away as a form of privilege. Indeed, in South Africa and the United States, non-whites now enjoy privileges over whites, both legally and through massive private discrimination.
Yet, even with decades of official and unofficial non-white privilege behind us, certain non-white groups are more likely than whites to be uneducated, poor, and in trouble with the law — to name just three important factors in overall social well-being.
The official explanation for these lingering inequalities is “racism,” that is to say: white malevolence, as well as “systemic” forms of inequality. According to this theory, since all people want to thrive in white societies and have equal inherent potential to do so, the fact that some groups conspicuously do not thrive needs to be explained.
Since white people are the architects of these societies, we are obviously the ones to blame. Thus white people must be hectored and browbeaten and reeducated. We must be punished by affirmative action and reparations. And we must endure having our societies torn apart and rebuilt over and over again, until racial equality is attained. Because nothing stands in the way of racial equality except white institutions and ways of life, white ignorance and ill-will, white guilt and white privilege — or so they say.
But it is increasingly difficult to believe this viewpoint because white legal privileges have been overturned. White privilege has not, moreover, been replaced by a classical liberal meritocracy, in which all people are subject to the same rules and judged on individual merit, but by a system of non-white privilege. But even with the system rigged in their favor, some non-white groups conspicuously lag behind whites in a vast number of indexes of social well-being. [1]
Even though anti-racist activists and non-whites find it increasingly difficult to point to any specific cause of persistent inequality, they just know that it is somehow white people’s fault. This is why the Left has resorted to increasingly “occult” — i.e. hidden and mysterious — explanations for persistent racial inequality.
Since fewer and fewer whites are consciously racist, the problem must be unconscious racism somehow keeping certain groups down. Unconscious racism is a real phenomenon, but how far does it explain persistent inequality? [2]
Since fewer and fewer whites hold negative racial stereotypes about other groups, yet non-whites still display stereotypical behavior, non-whites must be sabotaging themselves because of the “threat” — the mere specter — of negative stereotypes existing in their own minds. And this is still white people’s fault, somehow.
Since explicit, legal racism has been dismantled and even reversed, the legacy of past racism must still exert a subtle influence that is powerful enough to cancel out the effects of much more recent systems of non-white privilege, somehow.
The classic statement on white privilege is Peggy McIntosh’s 1989 essay, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” where she writes:
I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was “meant” to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks. [3]
McIntosh offers fifty examples of white privilege. McIntosh’s backpack is more of a grab bag, ranging from discrimination in housing and law enforcement to the color of band-aids. McIntosh’s examples make it very clear that when she speaks of non-white Americans she is thinking specifically of black Americans.
Most of McIntosh’s white privileges fall into two broad categories: (1) aspects of having a homeland, and (2) not being black. Aspects of having a homeland include:
1. I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.
2. I can avoid spending time with people whom I was trained to mistrust and who have learned to mistrust my kind or me.
6. I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.
7. When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.
8. I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race.
12. I can go into a music shop and count on finding the music of my race represented, into a supermarket and find the staple foods which fit with my cultural traditions, into a hairdresser’s shop and find someone who can cut my hair.
14. I can arrange to protect my children most of the time from people who might not like them.
15. I do not have to educate my children to be aware of systemic racism for their own daily physical protection.
16. I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their race.
23. I can criticize our government and talk about how much I fear its policies and behavior without being seen as a cultural outsider.
24. I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the “person in charge,” I will be facing a person of my race.
26. I can easily buy posters, post-cards, picture books, greeting cards, dolls, toys, and children’s magazines featuring people of my race.
27. I can go home from most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance, or feared.
32. My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people of other races.
46. I can choose blemish cover or bandages in “flesh” color and have them more or less match my skin.
All of these “privileges” are simply aspects of having a homogeneous homeland, of belonging to a community of people with whom you share a common biological and cultural heritage. In white societies, one can call this “white privilege.” But in Asian societies, one would call it “Asian privilege” and in African societies, “African privilege.” Furthermore, it is too crude to speak about privilege simply in terms of broad racial categories. Instead, we should speak about Norwegian privilege in Norway, Japanese privilege in Japan, Swazi privilege in Swaziland, and the like. It would also be nice to live in a world in which stateless peoples, like Palestinians and Kurds, have similar privileges.
McIntosh describes privilege as “invisible” and “weightless.” We are “oblivious” of privilege. The unconscious aspect of privilege is also an aspect of having a homeland. A homeland is not just a realm in space. It is also a realm of meaning. To be truly at home, one must fully internalize and master these codes of meaning — language and manners being the most important — so one does not have to consciously reflect on them. Then one can simply relax and live rather than be self-conscious.
A foreign land is not just a place with unfamiliar people and things. The conventions are unfamiliar as well, thus one is constantly forced to reflect upon things that are taken for granted by the natives. Is this the right word? Is this the right greeting? How do I call 911?
It is fun to visit foreign lands, but it can be alienating, stressful, and psychologically exhausting to actually live in one, and this is the everyday experience of minorities and stateless peoples in other people’s homelands. The cure to this problem is to give every people a land of their own where they can feel at home rather than constantly alienated.
Many of McIntosh’s alleged privileges of being white are more accurately described as the absence of the disadvantages of being black. These include:
3. If I should need to move, I can be pretty sure of renting or purchasing housing in an area which I can afford and in which I would want to live.
4. I can be pretty sure that my neighbors in such a location will be neutral or pleasant to me.
5. I can go shopping alone most of the time, pretty well assured that I will not be followed or harassed.
13. Whether I use checks, credit cards, or cash, I can count on my skin color not to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
18. I can swear, or dress in secondhand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race.
19. I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting my race on trial.
25. If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.
35. I can take a job with an affirmative action employer without having my co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race.
36. If my day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether it had racial overtones.
38. I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative, or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.
39. I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my race.
40. I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
41. I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help, my race will not work against me.
43. If I have low credibility as a leader I can be sure that my race is not the problem.
McIntosh describes black disadvantages as white privileges because she wishes to absolve blacks for these problems and blame whites. Unfortunately, many anti-black stereotypes — for instance, black criminality and financial irresponsibility — are not just dreamed up by evil-minded white people. They are based in experience.
Of course most blacks are not criminals and spendthrifts, but enough of them are that it is rational for whites to be vigilant around blacks they do not know, a burden of suspicion that falls equally upon the problem minority and the blameless majority.
It really is an injustice. But it is also rational. Thus whites should not feel guilty about it. Such rational distrust is an inevitable product of diversity, and it will only increase as our societies become more multicultural. The Left’s only response to the rational distrust generated by diversity is to morally shame whites into dropping their guard, making them more vulnerable to predators and parasites.
One of the central contentions of the Black Lives Matter movement is that blacks are arrested for crimes at a greater rate than whites simply because of white racism. But objective data show that blacks are arrested for crimes at pretty much the same rate that they commit them. [4] Thus, if Black Lives Matter wishes to lower the black arrest rate, they should work to lower the black crime rate.
But there is not a single politician in America who has the courage to simply tell blacks to commit fewer crimes. Instead, police departments are being intimidated into giving blacks license to break the law with impunity. Police are also more likely to use violence with white suspects than blacks in comparable situations. This is objectively a system of black privilege. [5]
Blacks feel oppressed in white societies by negative white stereotypes. But the most momentous of these stereotypes are based in experience. Thus it is rational to use them as guides in dealing with black strangers. Because of this, no amount of reeducation is going to banish them. [6]
As long as multiracial societies persist, whites will continue to resent blacks for not living up to white standards, and blacks will continue to resent whites for imposing alien standards. The ethnonationalist solution to such irreconcilable differences is racial divorce: the creation of homogeneous sovereign homelands, to the extent that this is possible, for all distinct peoples who wish to exercise this right.
The main reason to reject the claim that America is a white supremacist society is the fact that some non-white groups — chiefly East Asians and certain communities of South Asians — do better than whites in key indicators of success, such as educational attainment, income, and law abidingness, and they did so before anti-white discrimination and non-white tokenism became rampant. If American whites were intent on creating systematic white privilege and supremacy, we failed miserably. Therefore, white racism is not a sufficient explanation for differing racial outcomes in America.
We have an alternative hypothesis based on the science of Human Biological Diversity. The differing levels of education, income, and law-abidingness — to name just three factors — among racial groups in America are precisely what we would predict given measurable differences of IQ and sociopathic personality traits between the races. For a survey of the effect of IQ on a wide range of social outcomes, see Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve. On racial differences in personality traits beyond just IQ, including psychopathy, see Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters. [7]
This does not mean that the American system is “fair” in the sense of being a color-blind meritocracy. We are perfectly willing to admit that some forms of discrimination favor whites — if it is also acknowledged that significant non-white privileges exist. But I believe that Human Biological Diversity is so powerful a determinant of social outcomes that it can basically overpower both white and anti-white privileges, allowing us to act as if these forces do not exist, even though we know that they do. In a similar way, although we know that other measurable psychological traits matter to social outcomes, IQ differences alone are so powerful at predicting social outcomes that we can act as if other factors do not exist. (This was brought home to me by Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve.)
Different races really are different. That means that when different races live in the same social system, subject to the same laws, institutions, and incentives, some will inevitably flourish better than others. There will never be a social system that is equally conducive to the flourishing of all races and cultures. Such inequalities will persist even if we institute remedial forms of discrimination in favor of groups who lag behind. The science of Human Biological Diversity also explains why some non-white groups excel in white societies, even though they too have trouble finding flesh-colored band-aids.
Many of us would prefer not to mention biological racial differences at all, for fear of hurting the feelings of disadvantaged groups. But we have to talk about such differences, because the present system blames whites for the failure of some non-whites to flourish in white societies. As long as whites are charged with evil intentions to keep some races down, and as long as white institutions and ways of life are targeted for demolition and reconstruction by egalitarian social engineers, we must press the alternative hypothesis of biologically based inequality.
So if the different races are biologically unequal, what does this imply for social policy? Today’s conservatives and libertarians think they can retain multiculturalism by establishing a true “color-blind” meritocracy. While I am all for meritocracy, it is simply naïve to believe that groups that will naturally gravitate toward the bottom of such a system — the “losers” — will be satisfied with their lot, even if they arrived there by entirely “fair” procedures, and even if they enjoy higher material standards of living than they could in non-white homelands.
Classical liberalism is simply blind to non-material motivations like honor and pride. Many non-whites would rather rule in hell (their own homelands) than serve in heaven (classical liberal meritocracies). Ethnonationalists, however, understand completely.
Every human being deserves a home, where he can be himself free of the interference of others. But we should feel at home outside our front doors as well. We should be able to live among people who share our language and values, our history and destiny, the whole litany of “white privileges.” We don’t just need homes. We need homelands. Not alienating, bewildering, multicultural bazaars filled with people who do not share our language and values. A country’s Gross Domestic Product does not matter if nobody feels at home.
If races really are different, that means they will create different social systems. These systems will express their natures. They will feel as comfortable to them as well-fitting shoes. But this means that other races will not feel comfortable, even if they are treated with utmost courtesy and fairness — even if they are given advantages over the natives. The solution is not to further change our societies, to further abandon our norms and ways of life to accommodate outsiders. That simply doesn’t work. Multiculturalism does not create societies where everyone feels at home. It creates societies where no one feels at home.
There is no moral imperative to destroy our homelands to accommodate strangers. There would be no such imperative even if it were possible. And there is certainly no imperative to destroy real homelands in pursuit of the impossible dream of a society in which all peoples feel equally at home.
But there is one place where all the peoples of the world can feel at home. It is called the planet Earth. This planet is big enough for all races and nations to have places they can call their own. This is the ethnonationalist version of utopia. Privilege is inherently unequal. But everyone can be privileged in his own homeland. Norwegians can be privileged in Norway. Somalis can be privileged in Somalia. Kurds can be privileged in Kurdistan. As long as every people has a place to call home, there is nothing unfair about this situation.
Peggy McIntosh describes white privilege as a package of “unearned assets.” That is meant as a criticism. But we must be careful here. Only a bourgeois individualist equates the unearned with the unjust. There are some cases where we have a right to unearned assets. For instance, if a gift truly is a gift, and not simply a disguised form of exchange, then it is an unearned asset to which we have a right. A gift created by past generations and handed on to future generations cannot be a disguised exchange, for there is no way to pay our ancestors back for our genetic and cultural heritage. We can only pay it forward, to future generations. A homeland is an unearned asset, a privilege, and you have every right to defend it zealously.
Norway is not something that all people can enjoy. It is something for yourselves and your posterity. It was created by your ancestors, carved out of a remarkably harsh environment through will and ingenuity. It was passed on to you, for safekeeping and improvement. And I hope you will pass it along to future generations once strangers like me have left your shores.
Notes
[1] An excellent summation of these differences is Richard Lynn’s The Global Bell Curve: Race, IQ, and Inequality Worldwide (Augusta, Ga.: Washington Summit Publishers, 2008).
[2] On unconscious racism, see Kevin MacDonald’s “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,” The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 6, no. 4 (2006).
[3] Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” Peace & Freedom Magazine (July/August 1989), pp. 10–12.
[4] See for instance, Edwin S. Rubenstein’s The Color of Crime: Race, Crime, and Justice in America (Oakton, Vir.: New Century Foundation, 2016).
[5] On Black Lives Matter and the collapse of policing blacks, see Heather MacDonald’s many studies on “the Ferguson effect.” On the over-policing of whites in America, including increased chances of death by cop, see Richard Houck’s “Law Enforcement and the Hostile Elite,” Counter-Currents, June 20, 2018.
[6] For a more detailed discussion of the rationality of experience-based prejudices, see my essay “In Defense of Prejudice,” in In Defense of Prejudice and It’s Okay to Be White.
[7] Michael Levin’s Why Race Matters (Oakton, Vir.: New Century Books, 2016).
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34 comments
‘As long as multiracial societies persist, whites will continue to resent blacks for not living up to white standards, and blacks will continue to resent whites for imposing alien standards.’.
Great essay
It is certainly a relief that you didn’t hurt anyone’s feelings with this speech in Norway. What a travesty it would have been if some white person in that country were exposed to such unsavory thoughts, or heaven forbid s POC! Perhaps it is best that Norway remain a safe space. Nest time just bring them some coloring books.
I have got to stop typing up comments without my reading glasses on.
Me, too. I do better when I type my comments in Word and cut and paste them here. I can’t see the small print in these comment boxes well enough.
May all the Norwegians who have landed here at Counter-Currents for the first time due to “The Deporting” review the ideas presented in Greg Johnson’s essay with an open and objective mind. Note that this is the same man that your state apparetus deemed too dangerous for you to hear…
And y’all come back early and often!! There are YEARS worth of archives that are worth double the amount of time you’ll spend reading them.
Well done to the Norwegian authorities aka traitors to your own people. By denying Greg Johnson’s speech, a speech to aid in the survival of the Norwegian People, you have aided in the further destructing any chances of your survival. Deny nature at your peril fore nature is about survival. Choosing to not survive as a distinct Norwegian People & rest assured you will not survive.
If the Norwegians in charge had any brains they would at the very least publicly apologize to Greg Johnson. Otherwise, they are traitors to their own People.
I believe that the antiwhites know very well that the idea of white privilege is vulnerable to the kinds of criticisms made here, but that they will continue to use it regardless because it has proven very effective in the past. They can’t give it up, because it’s one of the best weapons against us that they have.
The point that there is a form of White privilege after all, namely, the fact that Whites are comfortable living in a society formed by other Whites, is profound. On a factual, as opposed to a normative plane, the allegation of White privilege is absurd, flatly incorrect. It is an inversion, like all other Progressive claims, of the truth. Blacks receive every form of privilege.
Black nature against White norms: there’s the rub. Blacks constantly fail in White societies. Since no one is allowed to speak the truth about racial differences in intelligence and temperament Whites are always blamed for Blacks’ failures. So, Whites either make Blacks conform to White norms or else surrender those norms, which equals death.
I grew up under segregation in the Deep South. There were few problems of the sort that are widespread today. Blacks lived in their own communities. They dressed well and behaved themselves. They had their own houses, unlike today. Their neighborhoods were perfectly safe for Whites to enter. There were prosperous and even prominent Blacks, e.g., A.G. Gaston in Birmingham. They had their own schools and colleges, funded at public expense. Since they could not live in White neighborhoods, there was no “brain drain” as there is today. Today, the most promising Blacks move out of their increasingly deteriorating neighborhoods as quickly as they can. The result is those areas grow worse and worse, and larger and larger. They spread to White areas–the “Black cancer” as I heard someone call it once–which claims ever more nice areas.
Jared Taylor thinks that allowing perfectly free association will result–without a formal, political separation–in voluntary separation, each tribe seeking its own. But it seems to me that Blacks would encroach, and ever more vigorous enforcement would be required, if the arrangement were informal.
So, we are left with a dilemma: Either oppress Blacks by enforcing White norms, as was done under segregation, or else formally separate into racially homogeneous sovereign nations with the eventual goal of repatriation to Africa. I don’t see a third way that is viable.
‘But it seems to me that Blacks would encroach, and ever more vigorous enforcement would be required,’
Well sure isn’t thats whats happenjng right now in Europe? Blacks wanting to freeload off of the White commons?
Seeing as you grew up under segregation I was wondering if you had read Gedaliah Braun’s (Dr Eugene Valberg) book racism, guilt and self deception? He is a White man (Jewish actually-with a black wife no less) who arrives in Africa with preconcieved notions and his book is an explanation of why those notions were no longer feasible once he got to understand blacks on thier own terms.
His main point is that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with White paternalism and that egalitarianism emboldened the blacks to behave badly.
Would you agree?
It can be bought on kindle for a few dollars-the extracts online do not do it justice.
Egalitarianism emboldened blacks to behave more in line with their true nature.
Anywhere black people live freely with no pressure to conform to Western standards, the same behaviour emerges. It cannot be a social factor of the host nation as it even happens in their own black majority countries. It’s a matter of simple pattern recognition.
Agree that is his point.
I would agree with that. They behaved, by our standards, under a strict segregationist system that was a matter of law in the South and custom in the North. They are being themselves now, without our paternalistic guidance or oppression, and that spells ruin for us. I was just listening to Greg’s interview with JF Gariepy that covered many of these points in depth: “Sargon and the Absent Black Father,” TPS #51 on bitchute.com. I’ve stumbled onto bitchute lately since many of Greg’s and Jared Taylor’s video’s have been removed from YouTube. That’s a great interview.
Egalitarianism has also destroyed the male/female construct that worked so well for thousands of years.
It is worth adding that prior to the “Great Society” era, there was a vibrant and growing black economy: businesses run by, and generally, though not exclusively, for blacks. This entire sector of the economy was destroyed by the actions of the Kennedy and later Johnson administration.
Yep, they were better off then, materially at least. Guess who stirred them up? There are some great essays on this topic in Sam Francis, ed., Race and the American Prospect; also Carlton Putnam, Race and Reason.
Racist statements one hears often (especially in Germany):
“There is a natural hierarchy between black and white people” (30%)
“Some cultures are clearly superior to others” (40.7%)
“Some people are more gifted than others” (42%)
In Germany, a third of those surveyed are convinced of a natural hierarchy between white and black people. More than 40 percent of the population is committed to the clear superiority of some cultures. And almost half of them think that some people are more gifted than others. Quite in contrast to the official proclamations about the equality of peoples and cultures as expressed in the human rights declarations after the second world war, a significant minority – not only in Germany – is of a completely different opinion, despite political correctness.
Here too it is more revealing to look at the underlying distinctions and appraisal criteria than to get outraged about the extent of racist attitudes: firstly, it is a comparison between “peoples and cultures.” Secondly, they are compared in terms of “gifts.” As much as the racist statements may deviate from the officially desired attitudes on the subject, neither the idea of peoples in competition with each other nor the question about the results achieved by the competitors in each case and the resulting hierarchy were thought up by the racists themselves.
Rather, the global competition for growth and power is the content and supreme purpose of the world order which is legitimized by human rights. Capitalist nation states compete in peace with the productivity of their working people and their wages over world market and world power successes, accepting “in the worst case” major wars and crises which must be paid for with the wages and blood of the masses who have no property. Both of these factors set in motion, among other things, a considerable “migration movement” on the part of the survivors. The preliminary interim results are a relatively undisputed world power, the largest military alliance in world history, seven relatively successful global economic powers, some emerging economies, most of them former colonies trying to ascend to this select circle and, above all, a large number of states whose recognition as formally equal subjects of the “family of nations” after the Second World War brought them a quick career from former colonies to so-called “developing nations” to today’s “failed states.”
So the reinterpretation of the competition between capitalist nation states into a contest between peoples is taken by racists from the official interpretation of the world which is authorized by politicians, journalists, and teachers. From them, racists also learn that the historically quite new division of the world into nation states has its deeper origin in the supposedly age-old existence of these peoples whose political unity has been “stamped” by their allegedly pre-political common culture, history, and so on. In this ideology, it is not by chance that blacks and Muslims are of particularly low status. By the way, this way of talking about “cultures” filled the gap that was left once the concept of “race” was no longer opportune.
Only the translation of the established hierarchy of states into a natural hierarchy of peoples which is attributed to their different talents characterizes the undesirable contribution of the racists. Applied to the results of the current world order, the dominant position of the imperialist actors is expressed, according to the logic of racism, as the superiority of occidental culture, western civilization, or European peoples. The basic logic of racism always consists at all times of the same method of making conclusions. According to this, the violently established social order is traced back to a supposedly likewise inclined human nature. The socio-political order is considered to be a natural order. Nor did modern racists invent this process of inference. Rather, it is already customary in the constitutions of the successful capitalist states to interpret the stRiki-Eiking results of free market competition as the “unfolding” of differently inclined and gifted “personalities.”
The basis of this central ideology is equal opportunity competition, i.e. the formally equal treatment of all citizens in the education system and on the market by the egalitarian supervisory authority. It is precisely because the citizens have the same legal opportunities to pursue their interests “without regard to the person” and thus without regard to the specific conditions of competition, especially their property, that the different results of their efforts can be traced back to their different wills or abilities to succeed.
In this “ideology” of modern racism, the social hierarchy, the opposing positions and functions of the developed market economy, look like the full utilization of human talents and inherited traits. In this racist logic, the losers in bourgeois working life always necessarily rate as failures in some way. And vice versa. Economic success implies an inner capability and entitlement to success according to the motto: Each person earns what they deserve. That’s the reason for the shame of the losers and their costly efforts to deny their economic failure to the outside world through brand name clothes, private debt, and tanning salons, despite their lack of ability to pay. The winners’ nasty displays of exclusionary pleasures are also based on this success racism of the market economy. Once this “racism of success” has become a valid criterion of assessment, a diagnosis that somebody needs help is considered stigmatizing, as it testifies to the fact that those in need are not in a position to make it on their own. This is, by the way, the reason why help is perceived by proud competitive subjects to be insulting and is rejected even when it is urgently needed. To be a victim of circumstances is – mediated through the racism of success – a personal accusation: “You loser! You victim!”
Through racist eyeglasses, the refugees from the economically, politically, and militarily ruined states of the Third World must look like representatives of inferior peoples and cultures. The poorer and more war-torn their homeland is, the more clearly their cultural inferiority can be deduced. And in the capitalist centers, the more precarious the life coping strategies of the immigrant underclass, the clearer it becomes for the racist that this only reveals their deficient human nature, which, as is well known, has always lacked drive, talent and civility. Insofar as refugees and the migrant underclass are foreigners who do not really belong to the national community and certainly do not increase its power and wealth, nationalist popular racism joins the egalitarian racism of success of developed market economies. No wonder, then, that the poorer and more helpless the foreigners are, the more they attract the hatred of “mainstream society.”
I’m really glad I came by this site a month or so ago and agree with everything written here! My background is Scottish and Norwegian, born in Scotland grew up around UK, before moving to Australia. I plan to move back home soon to to have a family and I’m so distressed about what’s happening in Europe at the moment. It’s our only home in the world and it troubles me greatly the current state though it’s always good to come across fellow travelers 🙂
Great piece x
Excellent speech/essay. The funny thing about leftist academics who are afraid of you, is that they pretend they have the monopoly on the word ‘reason’. When in fact their first premise usually is a lie and they proceed from there into fantasyland. I really do appreciate a piece based on truth and reality. While white nationalist states may be a utopian dream, it is the kind of dream that can make one reflect on one’s actions and ask if I do this will it harm or help the cause. Knowing why you yourself want it, is the door that opens to it. Then you can discern who your real allies are.
The world needs you Greg
Those “privileges” listed by Ms. McIntosh back in 1989 read like the list in my mind of all the things I feel are now constantly under attack, day in and day out.
I wish to live in peaceful coexistence with others like myself and not have every foundation of what feels like home be undermined.
The more that I read ideas written by those here at Counter-Currents, articles at AmRen, and numerous content creators on the internet, the more it is apparent I am not the only one tired of being berated, belittled and besieged for merely existing and doing well in the wonderful culture and society our ancestors created and left to us.
It’s so wonderful, and yet you’re constantly besieged and under attack? How does that go together?
Great essay.
It really is worth bearing this in mind:
That’s all that need be done.
The gift is the invisible backpack or whatever that failure of a person called it. But it must be taken as a positive thing, which we carry about with us as a burden for the future, where we intend to pass it on to our children to carry in the way we did. It’s the collated achievement of all our ancestors back to the year dot. As it is invisible, many people have chosen not to pick the thing up, they weren’t forcefully strapped onto it at birth – you have to see the gift with a certain trick of the light so to speak, and then can take it up to be your task of work to pass on to the coming generations. It’s well illustrated in Fahrenheit 451 with the clandestine group who are living representatives of the great works of writing which the culture produced before their day. Each one has the burden of carrying the book, and passing it on so that it may live forever. Hopefully things will never get to such a drastic stage, but i do often wonder what will become of all the masterpieces of art which reside in our national galleries when society reaches a stage where they are no longer seen as part of the current culture. Will they be quietly disappeared into billionaire’s bank vaults, to be traded as assets, covetously squirreled away by ‘art lovers’, used as chips in a status game? These things already happen, just not to the pieces owned by the nation… who knows.
The culture of the European mind must persist, and requires only that the living make certain to take care of it for those yet to be born, perpetuation. That’s all that need be done.
Your fears are exactly my fears, and you have stated them eloquently. Already in one English museum which I visited this summer in Birmingham, 19th Century Pre-Raphaelite paintings had been removed from a wall to make room for a series of video screens degrading the former paintings as offensive and oppressive to women. I was so shocked I couldn’t even watch the videos — they were so ‘offensive’ to me. The British artist, Sonia Boyce, who is also Professor of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts, London, was, I believe, the coordinator of this show at Birmingham Art Gallery. I fear these ‘video critiques’ hung beside paintings will be the socialist rage of the future, until our entire artistic heritage will be ‘in storage’ while museum-goers will just flit from one video. critiquing a painting that is not there, to another.
I’m very saddened, but unsurprised, to hear of that experience of yours Alexandra. The damning irony in the situation is that these women who sat for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were far more cultivated talents than that no-hope ladder climber who displaced their beautiful depictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Morris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Siddal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Spartali_Stillman
If the story of Jane Morris née Burden doesn’t move the heart as to the potential for a human being to better themselves through application and study, i doubt much could. These women were exceptional people who had full awareness of their status, worked to remedy their shortcomings, and were not squeamish of being tutored by men.
The PRB were deeply libertine in their attitude towards the morals of their day, and despite being outwardly upright, conducted numerous intrigues behind closed doors, as did their models and spouses. But, it’s arguable that women were so central to their works that without being able to portray them the entire movement would not have been able to exist. Representations of the feminine through mythological, religious and literary characters are the basic ground for much of the best of the body of work that that group produced. And there is a conscious attempt at regaining a medieval sense of honour towards women through the ideal of a courtly love to whom all one’s work is dedicated.
There is also a piece which could be called an early study of the ‘male chauvinist pig’, showing a scene clearly intended to explain the scenario as a man having led a woman astray from righteous moral behaviour, “The Awakening Conscience” by Wm. Holman Hunt.
To accuse this movement of sexism in any sense is ignorance of the first order. Women were its very core.
This article represents an important step in the right direction, but it stops short of the rock-bottom truth, namely that the current crisis the author so-ably describes, one now enveloping the West (European civilization), is being engineered and undertaken with specific aims in mind. Some have remarked that the West is dying. If this is in fact so, then her death will not have been a suicide or from natural causes, but a cold-blooded homicide carried out by the globalist ruling class.
The demographic “great replacement” now underway has been intended by its creators to look accidental, the product of chance and random events. This is a precise inversion of the truth; in reality, the globalists have been steadily working toward this goal since the 1950s. In its own way, the “reverse invasion” they have engineered whereby the diaspora of the Third World are invading Old Europe and claiming it for themselves, is every bit as intricate and complex as the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The fact that this 21st century invasion is not explicitly military in character, with tanks and planes and guns, is irrelevant. It is still an invasion, one whose participants mean to seize Europe.
No real progress can be made in stopping this catastrophe if the leaders of the globalist movement and their explicit goals are not made more manifest to the public. That step is a necessary one. Mobilizing the people to stop it can’t begin until the enemy and his aims are clearly-envisioned.
Thanks for this, Greg. You have unpacked a lot here, and remain very reasonable and generous. You don’t say anything innovative or novel, you simply state the obvious. It’s like a vest-pocket précis of a couple of recent essay collections.
It’s really quit simple. The answer is ” NO”. Not playing their game, not listening to their words, watching their deeds.
” Yes” a reckoning IS coming. Silly Communist know better then to light the fuse. These people are not Socialist, their straight up Communist. Only one thing holding these Communist in check, our guns, lots and lots of guns, and the ammo to feed em.
Tic Toc
May we talk about China? That country’s 1.3 billion population is 92% Han Chinese. America’s 330 million population is 61% Aryan or mostly Aryan, half of them liberal and/or racial masochists. In the on-going rivalry between the two societies, it may reasonably be expected that some 100 million racially-conscious white Americans will be challenged by at least a billion ethnocentric, ambitious, nuclear-armed and highly gifted Chinese with many legitimate historic complaints against the West. Far less decadent than westerners, the Chinese will not be handicapped by a dysfunctional theoretical democracy in stasis representing mutually hostile economic and racial interests.
Until the 1960s, America was and had for more than 375 years been 90% white or better and any notion that this population would allow itself to be turned into a minority would have been considered laughable. By century’s end, it is unlikely that a single white-majority state will still exist, a development organized and most passionately sought by white people themselves.
http://www.titoperdue.com
Agree about the Chinese. If they become racially conscious before (((they))) poison them with egalitarianism and democracy – look out ! There is a war brewing… between two high IQ races: the Han Chinese and (((them))). (((They))) will miscegenate themselves out of existence before the Chinese… what will do? Make white babies or STFU.
{{{white people}}}
The West is being killed and the people who are doing it have names and addresses.
White privilege does exist it is called IQ
Not just IQ. East Asians have higher average IQ than N. European man; 105 v. 100. The big 5 psychological breaks out personality working, and Europeans are more cooperative and trusting of in-group people than E. Asian. This is the current downfall of Europe, since females are in political control, looking forward to “welcoming” rapefugees with flowers and everything free, while they give birth to the “new men” hapa babies who will not have a place in any culture.
Great essay.
One can attack the leftist takes on racism on a theoretical level by pointing out that their whole theory of gender/race is tautological: they don’t know more than the fact that the racist sorting of people is produced by the “racist power structure.”
One doesn’t really explain anything by that, but just replicates what one would have to explain in a different form as the explanandum. The argument of the leftists boils down to “racism = caused by the racist structure.” They posit theoretical necessity, but rarely do more than formally pointing to it by claiming it is structural. It is also no better if one takes the opposite stance: “racism = caused by people racist nature.”
To put that differently, when they say “structure”, they posit a necessity for the racism they encounter. But the necessity is not developed but just formally posited. If you say phenomenon X is caused by phenomenon-X-producing structure, you are logically not one step further in your explanation, but are only making a tautology (a conclusion that restates the premise). The word “structural” often acts as a buzzword that suggests necessity without actually showing it. It also comes off as very radical: it seemingly condemns the whole system. But then one hears how quickly that gets retracted, especially when it comes to the gains won with rights and how praiseworthy that makes modern democratic capitalism.
One could say: Maybe there is some mechanism that leads to the current (“racialized”) composition of competition results. But one would have to find out how the whole thing works and especially how it works in a society where freedom and equality reigns. Another way of pursuing this line of argument against them would be to ask: you talk about power relations all the time, but can you tell me the “source” of power that allows people to forcefully “discriminate” people? Does a white landlord that doesn’t give living space to black people have his power to discriminate qua being white? Or is it rather the forcefully sanctioned system of private property that allows him to discriminate? Does a police officer that applies “racial profiling” have his power to profile people through the color of his skin or rather through the fact that he represents and enforces the state’s monopoly of violence?
And then one has to ask: Are you against their source of power (the state and capital) or do you just want fair competition? And this is where when one scratches a liberal with revolutionary pretensions, one uncovers a defender of the status quo, someone who really doesn’t want to go to the root of things. And with that, one thing to point out regarding the social justice people is that one has to try to push them to decide whether they want to be critics of power, the state, and capitalism (as they often pretend to be) or just its “unfair” usage. When social justice people stick to “power” as their concept, but follow the above arguments that, e.g. the landlord does not have power through his skin color, they need to completely hollow out their concept of power, or stretch it to the point of being a really useless theoretical tool.
So the argument is that when you talk about power it either originates in something other than the skin color OR it has very little to do with anything that can sensibly be called “power”.
In response to that kind of argument, most leftists revert back to the phenomenon that people are “treated differently” and that THAT is racism. To which i reply that “treating differently” is a terrible abstraction if you want to understand how racism works. One often hears the now infamous “invisible knapsack” analogy originated by Peggy McIntosh, that Greg Johnson discusses in the article. Another way to put it, is that the list of things that fill the “invisible knapsack” that always gets cited can only be the product of a false abstraction: it posits that there is ONE single reason for all these different forms of discrimination and that all these are solely based on race. One shouldn’t be so naive in granting that presupposition.
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