A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks & Africa:
A Review

2,254 words

Jared Taylor, ed.
A Dissident’s Guide to Blacks and Africa [1]
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 [2].

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 [3] 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 [1].

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