Counter-Currents
A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks & Africa: A Review
Spencer J. Quinn
2,254 words
Jared Taylor, ed.
A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa
Oakton, Virginia: New Century Foundation, 2020
More than any of the required reading produced by American Renaissance, A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa captures the essence of what American Renaissance is all about. Racial differences lead to racial preferences, and Jared Taylor has built a career promoting the rights of white people to associate with whomever they prefer — which most often will be other whites. A Dissident’s Guide, which features essays dating from 1997 to 2017, highlights the stark differences between blacks and whites in order to demonstrate both the wisdom behind freedom of association and the danger in pretending that racial differences do not exist.
What makes A Dissident’s Guide so special is how it approaches this singular problem from so many different angles. We have historical perspectives, brief biographies, book reviews, race-realist memoirs, psychological analyses, personal tragedies, and dire predictions. That some of its authors are black and about a third of its essays deal with Africa rather than the United States only adds layers of meaning and complexity to this unforgettable essay collection. Yes, it is truly a dissident’s guide which will fortify anyone brave enough to be on the race-realist Right these days. But it will also serve as an expeditious (and perhaps nearly painless) eyeopener for non-dissidents. It leaves all the dry science and statistics to people like Michael Levin and J. Philippe Rushton, and instead focuses more on the social, psychological, and emotional stakes we all have in dealing (or not dealing) with race. A Dissident’s Guide is not so much hard to refute but hard to refuse. Of all the great works I have read coming from American Renaissance, this one might have the best chance of breaking through to a broader audience.
Gedaliah Braun’s 2009 article “Racial Differences in Morality and Abstract Thinking” might be the gem of the collection for taking such a startlingly original approach to the topic. After spending over a decade teaching in South Africa and living in many places across black Africa, Braun theorizes that blacks, in general, lack the ability for abstract thinking. This, he concludes, leads to a dearth of morality. His evidence comes from his own in-depth study of the limitations of African languages. He notes that while there are many dictionaries translating English to an African language and vice versa, there are few wholly African dictionaries. The only one he could locate of the Zulu language contained a mere 252 pages. Further, he attempts to find African equivalents of abstract terms and finds woefully inadequate and often absurd concrete interpretations. For example, “precision” in Zulu means “to make like a straight line,” and “obligation” means “as if to bind one’s feet.”
One refrain Braun encounters a lot with these problematic definitions is that they were added by the white compilers of the dictionaries. So not only must foreigners write African language dictionaries, they have also attempted to insert into African languages concepts the Africans themselves have no use for.
Braun then goes on to argue that lacking the ability to fully grasp abstract concepts such as time and numbers makes blacks less able to internalize equally abstract moral concepts. In order to function in society, blacks must rely on external behavioral constraints either from tribal elders in the pre-colonial times or from the whites during colonial times. In the post-colonial era, most external constraints have been stripped away, leaving nothing to prevent blacks from committing acts of wanton violence and cruelty.
Africans, I believe, may generally lack the concepts of subjunctivity and counterfactuality. Subjunctivity is conveyed in such statements as, “What would you have done if I hadn’t showed up?” This is contrary to fact because I did show up, and it is now impossible for me not to have shown up. We are asking someone to imagine what he would have done if something that didn’t happen (and now couldn’t happen) had happened. This requires self-consciousness, and I have already described blacks’ possible deficiency in this respect. . . .
One of the pivotal ideas underpinning morality is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. “How would you feel if someone stole everything you owned? Well, that’s how he would feel if you robbed him.” The subjunctivity here is obvious. But if Africans may generally lack this concept, they will have difficulty in understanding the Golden Rule and, to that extent, in understanding morality.
A Dissident’s Guide also offers several splendid mini-biographies of cherished black historical figures. Of course, these essays explode the myths surrounding these men and present them as highly flawed and often quite mediocre individuals. Included is the Mount Rushmore of twentieth-century black America: W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. American Renaissance has provided us the invaluable service of not only doing the legwork researching these men but also in putting all this research together in one volume.
Jared Taylor himself takes on the twenty-first century’s candidate for Black Rushmore, Ta-Nahesi Coates. In reviewing Coates’ Between the World and Me, Taylor effortlessly exposes Coates as a fraud and simple-minded bigot who deserves not a word of the unctuous praise that the Leftist media has heaped on him. Taylor is unsparing in his assessment of Coates:
Between the World and Me is shockingly, appallingly bad. It is full of willful blindness and shows a contempt and even hatred for whites that goes well beyond orthodoxy. There can be no common ground with any black who sees the world as Mr. Coates does. I don’t know whether his white admirers actually believe his poisonous ravings or are simply indulging the Negro du jour, but there is no common ground with lunatics or cowards, either.
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
That Taylor refutes Coates point by point indicates that he had held his nose long enough to actually read Between the World and Me (something I am sure most on the Dissident Right would not have the patience for). Taylor should be commended for this. And, of course, his refutations are impeccable. He corrects the record on the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings which Coates cites as examples of how irredeemably racist white people are. He demonstrates how absurd it is for Coates to blame historic white supremacy for the high black-on-black murder rate (“Blacks kill each other because they are marionettes, still dancing on the strings pulled by long-dead white people. . .”). He also exposes Coates’ bizarre obsession with black “bodies” and how Coates believes that white racism somehow remotely controls them.
Indeed, Ta-Nahesi Coates becomes nothing less than a logic piñata in the hands of Jared Taylor, and, as usual, it is a great pleasure to witness Taylor deliver every carefully placed thwack.
Whiteness is a dream of the people who believe they are white:
I have seen that Dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream. . . . But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
In other words, everything that makes white people white and that makes their lives desirable is built on the mangled bodies of blacks. This is breathtaking. Does Mr. Coates really believe that without black bodies to mangle, whites would never have had block associations and nice lawns? How did Canadians and New Zealanders and Swedes build pleasant lives without black bodies to mangle? And why do so many American whites fail to have nice lawns and tree houses despite all those black bodies available for mangling? What losers they must be. But Mr. Coates’s point is that only insofar as whites live in viciousness are they white at all.
Another unique aspect of A Dissident’s Guide is how it includes four essays written by black authors. Three of the four are personal accounts of how a young black found his or her way through the thicket of cultural Marxism and into the harsh yet rewarding world of race realism. Despite how most on the Dissident Right have similar revelations, it is refreshing to know that such stories are not just limited to whites. Also, it’s hard not to admire a black author such as Sade Adebayo, whose blunt candor may very well come at the expense of some emotional pain:
I did not come to these conclusions overnight. Initially, I believed what I was taught by my parents and teachers: Sub-Saharan Africa is poor because of centuries of exploitation, and black Americans lag behind white Americans because of slavery and segregation. My belief in the egalitarian vision was based on a reluctance to accept that I am of inferior stock.
The best of the black-penned essays, however, comes Zora Wheatley, who responds to Taylor’s fairly light-hearted essay, “What I Like About Black People” with the decidedly not light-hearted essay, “What I Don’t Like About Black People.”
Oh, boy. It’s like the woman had decided to grab a switch and beat the tar out of her own kind as if they’d been caught reaching for candy behind the commissary counter. I can see why Taylor included Wheatley in this volume — she’s about as unsparing as he is.
Mr. Taylor cites a lack of inhibition, cheerful spontaneity, and the paying of compliments as likable black traits. I don’t like the way most black men pay compliments. Even if they are genuine compliments such as “I like your smile” or “You’re pretty,” the very next sentence is usually a tactless rush to judgment: “Can I get yo’ number?” or “Do you wanna go out wit’ me?” It is healthy and normal for men to notice physical attributes, but personality type, future plans, or courtship are alien concepts to many black men.
A Dissident’s Guide then takes us to Africa, where we meet author Paul Theroux (of Mosquito Coast fame), whose travelogue The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari is reviewed by Marian Evans. While traveling through Africa, Theroux’s depicts “a nightmare world of poisoned and ruined landscapes; impoverished, starving villages” — and eventually decides to abort his journey because traveling further meant “traveling into madness.” Most poignantly, as he observes a typically decrepit African slum with a white Angolan, the man observes, “This is what the world will look like when it ends.”
South African dissident Dan Roodt ends the compilation with his chilling “An African Planet?” There is no greater black-pill call to action than this. Roodt projects how changing demographics will impact the world with an estimated 4.2 billion African blacks on the planet by 2100. Not only this, but he warns of the lethal consequences of European populations in decline. These are projections I’m sure many on the Dissident Right have envisioned, but Roodt gives us statistics that perhaps many of us hadn’t considered before:
In a few decades, the European old-age dependency ratio — the number of people age 65 and over to those of productive age between 15 and 64 — will rise above 50 percent. A report from the Eurostat statistical agency states that:
Europe is currently the oldest continent with the highest old-age dependency ratio, and will remain so in 2060. Other parts of the world are, however, also experiencing a dramatic ageing of their populations, with old-age dependency ratios climbing to levels clearly above the ones in Europe now on all continents except Africa.
The old-age dependency ratio in Europe, which includes Russia and other non-EU countries, could reach 50 percent in 2040 and stay there. China, which also has a rapidly aging population, could reach 50 percent by 2060.
In Africa, by contrast, the average age is only 18; 40 percent of Africans are 14 years old or younger. By 2040, when most of Europe will be a vast old-age home, with only two workers to support each person over 65, Africa’s old-age dependency ratio will be only 7.8 percent.
Roodt then describes three “planets” which offer vistas of dire futures in which dwindling white populations must share a planet with over four billion blacks. Each of these scenarios should be required reading for dissidents. Roodt not only offers comprehensive visions of very near and realistic futures, but he also remembers to instill at least one of them with an equally realistic sense of hope.
To limit spoilers, I omitted several powerful essays from this review. These include a horrific account of a South African farm murder (“Boxy Lays Down His Life” by Heinrich B. Zaayman), F. Roger Devlin’s discussion of the African weakness for superstition and irrationality (“The Horror, the Horror”), Thomas Jackson’s incisive review of Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers (“All You Need to Know About White People”), and several others. After reading A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa one is left not only with a greater understanding of racial differences between blacks and whites, but also with a greater sense of urgency when dealing with the problems of race.
Can anyone ask more of an essay collection than that?
You can order the book here.
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24 comments
Sounds like my kind of book. Will order. I had dreamed of bicycling Africa, but now not so much…
As a scotch Irish white, I too have been forced to reconcile being of inferior stock, so this candor is heartening. I thought I was only born just smart enough to grasp this, like some cruel irony. We have substantially worse markers than Jews Asians and nordics. We are burdened by lust, substance abuse, and low matriculation rates at elite universities. I have been frustrated in just about all my aspirations, but I’ve learned not to blame other groups for my failings.
Bicycling in Africa? Are you suicidal? Even well-tuned Land Rovers have trouble navigating those roads, from what I’ve heard. But I will definitely read this book by Taylor, if for nothing else than to validate my post. I still envision most of Africa as ‘The Heart of Darkness”, so I’ll see if the vision still stands.
I never thought I’d see it written by an Ulster Scot that he is of inferior stock.
If it serves as any consolation, most US Presidents are descended from Ulster lines.
If I remember correctly, Nathan Bedford Forrest was of Scotch-Irish decent. The late historian, Shelby Foote, thought very highly of his abilities.
Sure, sure. Perhaps they were mixed with higher groups. I refer to the Appalachian ozark population of central US. Their markers and indicators are similar to blacks.
I’m Nordic here (and look the part too) but I’d never look down on you.
Denim Wearer, I think there’s much to admire about Western “hill” or “mountain” people, whether they’re from Appalachia or the Scottish Highlands. I know less about eastern Europeans, but I’m sure you’ll find that same élan and espirit de corps among people in the Carpathians. They have always exhibited that wonderful Western trait of defiance. Collectively, we whites need that infusion of “spine” and honor.
The Scotch-Irish played a huge role in the settling of the American frontier, doing much of the hard Indian fighting. Indeed, they have always played a disproportionate role in the American military. Read the essays of League of the South honcho Michael Hill on the noble qualities of the Scotch-Irish. We need more of ’em!
Great review! I’m reading A Dissident’s Guide now, and it is fantastic. I strongly recommend it.
Very interesting. Where can one buy this book? I just noticed that Abebooks.com, where I often used to buy books, has dropped all identitarian books and writers.
I am going to get this book. I need another book like a hole in the head, but I do want this book. Several copies, and give to others who need to read these things.
Come to think of it, there really are many ideals that we hold in common with the Left. We both want a “better world”, where there is no more war, unemployment, hunger, desperation; a world of clean air and water and space for everyone to reach their full human potential. And other ideals as well.
Many on the Left assume they have a monopoly on social idealism. What they do not know, but need to understand, is that WE are the true progressives, and that only the path of racial realism will lead us AND THEM to the world that THEY themselves want. They need to realize that their current path, that of the false dogma of “blank-slate” collectivist man, and demanding Western destruction, will only take them further from the world they themselves want.
I understand that this common-cause “talking cure” approach will not change many Left minds at this point. But I want to believe there are some of “our people” on the Left who have recently seen enough racial reality, and who could now be brought over per the above appeal.
Taylor’s compilation of essays may be just the vehicle for such persuasion.
How do we buy this?
AmRen will release the book next month.
I would think that one could buy it from the Amren store once it is released.
It’s not up at Amren’s site yet so I’m assuming it is not for ssale yet.
It’s always struck me that while other races are generalists, the sole specialism of blacks in academia is the plight and achievements of Africans and their diaspora. The same is true of all black writers: the subject is always the same. The most one can hope for is an allegorical treatment.
It seems they exhibit a profound lack of curiosity and strange deficit of creative techne, the only exception being in the field of music, where they display innate talent, albeit of a perfomative rather than theoretical nature.
One has to wonder if this stems from the evolutionary history of the sub-Saharan hominid population. When it was discovered that all non-African Homo sapiens are slightly admixed with Neanderthal and Denisovans populations the Left gleefully pounced on the findings as a refutation of ‘racial purity’: only Africans are the true modern humans, they said, and all cultural and technological innovation stems from them.
But we now know that in fact West Africans themselves are admixed with an as yet mysterious population of archaic hominids. Could it be that the stay-behind hominids of Sub-Saharan Africa were held back by a Lower Palaeolithic element, in contrast to Upper Palaeolithic or Mesolithic admixture events elsewhere?
There are choppy waters, but I’d wager that fearless researchers will be rewarded with further clues to the vexing and perennial enigma of African underachievement.
That common expression they have regarding any occupation, TV show, picture book, doll, etc.: “I want to see someone who looks like me.” A mirror, in other words, pure narcissism.
Do blacks indeed display innate ability in musical performance? How many great classical black musicians are there? Perhaps you mean simply that blacks like very low grade ‘music’ relatively more than whites, and thus spend more time at it and therefore develop some greater expertise in producing and performing it. If whites seriously devoted themselves to rap, do you not think they’d become dominant in it (not that I would consider that to be much of a true artistic achievement)?
As for the evolutionary history of blacks, it used to be thought (pre-PC) that they were the youngest racial population, and thus, by implication, the least evolved. I’m not qualified to assess that hypothesis, but I do think we must never forget that American blacks have a substantial admixture of white in them. Also, that an occasional very high IQ even pure black is always a possibility, given the sheer number of them now on the planet.
I think there is some debate about the nature of the US African American population. It’s certainly true that they display 10-25% European admixture, with high-achieving African Americans, such as President Obama lying even closer to the European spectrum.
But we should also look at the population that were transported: some were undoubtedly made captive in Africa by war or the predations of the Arabs. But others will have been miscreants and undesirables sold to the European slave-handlers by local rulers as a punishment.
Indeed in the UK there is evidence that later purely African incomers from Nigeria, whose mercantile ancestors had never been enslaved and who were only briefly under British rule, far outperform their Afro-Caribbean cousins. Those are of course the descendants of slaves somewhat admixed with Europeans and they score poorly in terms of educational attainment and employment, while ranking in petty criminality, sports and popular music.
I do not know whether similar comparisons have been undertaken in the US: the present climate of vindictive hysteria probably now renders that anathema.
“The African generally is a realist. His life is spent in raising just sufficient food to feed himself and nights are spent in dancing- literally!- drinking of beer that has been brewed by his womenfolk… These people know how to live. This is the reduction of thousands of years… they’re not bedeviled with the problems we [whites]have, of civilization.”
-“Mad Mike Hoare Talks Africa “. Video available on YouTube (for now).
Great review Mr. Quinn,
I just have one microscopic criticism.
You write “It leaves all the dry science and statistics to people like Michael Levin…” Michael Levin is by no means “dry”.
He is not a scientist; he is a philosopher (and a philosopher of science) and his book “Why Race Matters” is the single best book I have read on the race problem. It was the one book that completely red-pilled me on the truth of Race Realism. While I have great respect for Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow, after I read “Paved With Good Intentions” and “Alien Nation” I was still a conventional conservative on the race problem. After I read “WRM “ in 1998, there was no turning back. The book cannot be refuted.
I wish someone would write a book listing all of the white children murdered by blacks since they were brought to this country–it would be at least a 1,000 pages long.
Another solid review from Quinn. Two matters. First, is any of this book’s content unique to it? Most of what Quinn cites I’ve already read in the past at the AR site.
Second, I think Taylor’s WHITE IDENTITY is the best book for introducing openminded but racially naive whites to racial truth (I have not read the one under review here, except perhaps fragmentarily). I was so impressed with WI as an introductory primer (note: for most here, it’s a bit basic philosophically and ideologically, though it still contains much useful factual info), I bought a second copy just for lending out to potential converts. After WI, the still openminded person can be given Johnson’s THE WHITE NATIONALIST MANIFESTO. But I would give them in that order. WHITE IDENTITY is perfect for GOP “normiecons”. Maybe Dissident’s Guide to Blacks is, too.
I like the book’s cover photo, assuming that’s what is shown at the head of the article. Is that what used to be called a sleeping porch? I read Babbitt a few years ago and despite how the critics say we should hate or, at least, distance ourselves from the character Babbitt, he seemed OK to me. I liked how he was proud of his sleeping porch. If I had one, I would be proud of it too.
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