Counter-Currents
Ask A. Wyatt Nationalist Is it Rational for Blacks to Distrust Whites?
Greg Johnson
1,116 words
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As part of our new Commission an Article feature, A. Wyatt Nationalist will give a White Nationalist perspective on your questions for a donation of $100 or more. New Paywall subscribers can also commission one article per year. Just send in your questions to [email protected]. A. Wyatt Nationalist can be any Counter-Currents writer, depending on your question and which writers are available. This week’s topic comes from J.S. and is discussed by yours truly.
Greg Johnson
Today’s reader question was stated in a complex way, but as I understand it, it boils down to this: Is it rational for blacks to distrust whites? To which my answer is: yes, absolutely.
Why is this important? If blacks and whites are to live together in a workable society, they have to be able to trust one another. For instance, people of a classical liberal bent believe that a workable multiracial society is possible if people act as individuals and follow their rational self-interest. But this model fails if blacks have good reasons not to trust and cooperate with whites.
How do we understand and trust people of different races? We can’t read their minds. So we have to listen to what they say and observe what they do. Based on what white people say and do, do blacks have a rational basis for trust and cooperation? The answer is no.
Some white people genuinely like blacks and treat them decently. An astonishing number of ordinary white people have the gut conviction that, as far as blacks are concerned, they are good, well-meaning, and trustworthy people.
But some of these nice white people quite freely condemn other whites as incorrigible anti-black racists. Sometimes, it is even true. Beyond that, some whites quite candidly declare that they dislike blacks. Between the whites who admit to being racist and the whites who condemn the racism of their fellow whites, blacks have ample reason to think that a significant number of white people bear them ill will and are thus not to be trusted.
Slavery ended a long time ago, but white supremacist laws were on the books in the United States within the lifetimes of many who are reading this essay. Leopards can’t change their spots, but humans can change their minds. Few people today admit to being racists. But do people really change that fast? And is it prudent to assume that they have changed when something important is at stake?
Since it is not possible to tell good whites and bad whites apart simply at a glance, it is not rational for blacks to trust any whites—not even the whites who say they like blacks. After all, if white people are bad enough to hate blacks, aren’t they also bad enough to lie about it? Even as explicit forms of racism and white supremacy have disappeared, don’t white people say that blacks are still victimized by increasingly subtle and occult forms of implicit racism? Sure, racist macroaggressions like lynching are a thing of the past. But what about microaggressions so small that only experts can discern them? Don’t nice white people like Robin Diangelo tell us that even nice white people like her are guilty of racism? Don’t white experts now say that whites need not think bad thoughts about other races to be a racist? It is merely enough for whites to exist to be racist. Blacks who internalize this message would be crazy to trust white people.
Nor is it rational for blacks to undertake the risks of trying to turn white strangers into white friends. Extending the hand of friendship always entails some risks. Taking that risk is only rational on the assumption that others are basically trustworthy and well-disposed toward you. But that assumption is precisely what is lacking between blacks and whites. So it is not rational for blacks to risk befriending whites, especially when it is far less risky to befriend their own kind.
Therefore, trusting whites, which is the foundation of any workable multiracial society, is simply not in the rational self-interest of blacks.
Norman Rockwell, The Problem we All Live With, 1963
This argument is bound to provoke angry denials from white liberals and libertarians, who believe that a multiracial society really is workable. It is likely to spur them to new attempts to demonstrate their good will toward blacks, unlike those bad white people.
Such protestations are likely to be popular with blacks, because they usually involve free stuff, but they are also likely to be futile for two main reasons.
First, protesting yet again that one is unlike those bad white people over there simply underscores the existence of bad white people. Furthermore, it would not help white liberals to simply shut up about the existence of bad white people. There are enough outspoken white racists out there, so remaining silent about something so obvious is sure to cause distrust.
Second, offering mistrustful blacks free stuff is self-defeating. It simply rewards them for being sullen, hostile, and suspicious, so why would they change their behavior? As long as whites are willing to pay blacks to establish their good will, blacks have massive economic incentives to dig up old grievances and invent new ones. Beyond that, nice white people have created a system in which blacks are babied, pandered to, placed above criticism, and literally allowed to get away with murder. Such a system gives free rein to blacks’ worst impulses. It would make even the best of people into monsters.
White liberals believe, however, that after decades of soul-corrupting privilege and highly incentivized grievance mongering, blacks will become virtuous, open-hearted, trusting people like themselves. They’ll decide to give up their racial privileges and lucrative rackets. They’ll magnanimously descend from their pedestal. Then they’ll finally be white people’s equals.
White liberal outreach toward blacks has made race relations worse. Such measures can only make race relations worse. Yet white liberals continue to support such policies. Frankly, such self-defeating behavior should make blacks question not just the sincerity but the very sanity of whites who act this way — even as they queue up for more free stuff.
I really see no way around this problem. White racists and white anti-racists alike announce to blacks that a significant number of whites bear ill-will toward blacks. Thus it is simply not rational for blacks to trust and cooperate with any given white stranger.
Of course, the same arguments for why it is not rational for blacks to trust whites also imply that it is not rational for whites to trust blacks. If white people had a country of our own, however, we would not have this problem.
Sincerely,
A. Wyatt Nationalist
29 comments
Hmm, I think blacks can trust most whites completely. I can tell the author is not from the south. Whites, even racists like myself, are very kind to blacks. Whites are mean to other whites, particularly those of other classes and cliques. As Steve sailer points out, whites like to fight with each other! A good artist explication of the real relation between blacks and whites in the south is the story A Worn Path by Eudora Welty.
On the other hand, whites can’t trust blacks. Blacks show racial solidarity. Blacks almost always turn on whites when there is a conflict between them. Take for example the you g white guy who was beaten to death by blacks while his black friends just watched.
Agree 100%. I almost feel like the word “trust” is being used incorrectly here. Blacks most certainly can trust whitey all the time and constantly. That’s why they are on the pedestals they’re on. That’s why they get hired for jobs they’re not qualified for. Historically, that why they weren’t all lynched and whitey was lynched just as much. And God alone could help me today if I even looked at one wrong. I’d say they are safe as kittens and whitey is the one who cannot trust them.
One more thing; there is a black lady running as a Republican for State Senate in my district being endorsed by DeSantis. She was previously a registered Democrat. Now, do I believe she could have had a come-to-Jesus turnaround politically? I sure do. Do I also believe that she won’t be brought back to the fold with enough pressure from her “brothers and sisters?” Nope. In fact, I have so little trust that she’ll be able to resist that I am voting for the white guy, who might screw me over. But his odds are better than hers.
Yeah, in the current year blacks are positively worshiped by whites. But I’m speaking of most of the twentieth century.
The question is: Is it rational for blacks to trust whites? For the reasons given, I think not.
Good point Greg. However, doesn’t this lead immediately to the question concerning how many blacks are rational or capable of rationality? I guess we need to turn to Jensen, Rushton, Lynn, etc. to get the answer to this. It seems to me not very many. The late Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell are certainly two but how many more?
The ones who aren’t capable of rational distrust are quite capable of believing that we invented AIDS to kill them and are sterilizing them with fried chicken.
No man, it’s in the watermelon.
I think blacks SHOULD trust whites, but the media riles them up against us. In the name of “social justice” the media/elites seek social discord.
Why should they trust whites, given past history, the fact that there are whites who hate them, and the bewildering behavior of “crazyass” white liberals? It is just not rational.
I mean kindof in the current season, not dredging up ancient grievances. At the time of slavery in the us, there were much worse things going on in africa. Right, they ought not to trust liberals who foist false egalitarian lies on them and have sent their murder rates to the stratosphere.
That’s not to say there are not some unreconstructed whites out there somewhere who might harm blacks. But blacks can’t trust all other blacks either. Blacks should not trust certain whites—in the music industry.
We are on this trajectory to extermination for one & one reason only – the many Europeans aka Whites that are traitors.
Correct. In the Revilo Oliver book America’s Decline, reviewed here a few weeks ago, Oliver at one point seems to imply that the racial weakness of whites is psychologically related to our historically demonstrated collective superior imaginative capacity (one does not have to be an expert in Oriental languages to know that most of the world’s greatest literature was written by Europeans; various multilingual Asian, not to mention white, scholars have admitted as much). In brief, whites more than other races let our imaginations get the better of us. We seem to be especially prone to (really) believing in utopian possibilities (Jews of course have been extremely prominent in radical movements, but it’s difficult to discern how much of their activism was based on sincere utopian commitment vs the use of utopian rhetoric to weaken the cohesion and strengths of European societies and thereby concomitantly enhance Jewish ethnic power).
Our heightened racial imagination is thus a double-edged sword, enabling us to produce the greatest geniuses while rendering (too) many of us suckers for disregarding hard wisdom about the imperfectability of man and society, thereby periodically launching white nations on projects to “build a better world” which only end up strengthening our less imaginative but more realistic racial competitors at the expense of ourselves and our descendants. We in the West are clearly in one of these eras of utopian ambition right now. By denying that the imperfectability of man (obviously) extends to race relations and the possibility of building successful multiracial societies, we are on yet another of our race’s periodic fool’s errands. But this time, given our racial genetic recessiveness combined with the paucity of our racial numbers relative to other races, our vulnerability to utopian folly may lead us to a point of no return. We would hardly be the Earth’s first sub-species (race) or species whose maladaptedness to an altered set of conditions led to its extinction.
I continue to believe that our only hope remains white nationalist territorial ingathering into various sovereign or semi-sovereign jurisdictions where we can eventually form electoral as well as racial majorities. With such majorities we can push for secession and full sovereignty, after which we can commence the steadily intensifying “slow cleanse” theorized by Dr. Johnson. But without our own sovereign, defensible territories run by white preservationists in ways intended to ensure white preservation, we are, in the simple nature of existing trends, doomed – and this in the foreseeable if not exactly near future.
Agreed, John: traitorous whites.
Blacks would be irrational to distrust whites given the fact the vast majority of whites loooove the worthless things and would sooner stab their own grandmother in the eye than have someone call them a racist. 94% of them would happily agree to their children being married to a porchie. I just heard this one radio presenter verbally ejaculating that the American hating negroid feetsball league is back.
The author seems to be conflating trust with other ideas like agree and cooperate. I think trust is believing someone will do what they say they will do.
A black can absolutely trust a White Nationalist, like G.L. Rockwell (RIP) or NJP/TRS types. You can trust what they say and believe they’ll do what they say, given the power. That black may disagree or not wish to cooperate, but they can surely trust.
A black can’t trust a jew, White leftist or White conservative. They can’t be trusted.
You can’t agree or cooperate if you don’t trust people to follow through.
I am amused at the protestations of good character by white commenters here. I didn’t know so many white people descended from angels. I descend from a race that kept black slaves and used liquor and smallpox as biological weapons against Indians. I didn’t do that myself, and I don’t feel any guilt over it. But I don’t blame Indians and blacks for looking upon me with suspicion because of my race. That’s just the rational thing to do, even if they have not thought it through rationally.
The main goal of this essay is to get whites who hold onto the fantasy of a multiracial society of rational individualists to admit that it will never happen because of factors that they would prefer to leave out, like race and history, which make the trust assumed by their model irrational.
But blacks and Indians did a lot of bad things too in those days. Slavery was a way of the world.
It would absolutely be rational, but they do trust us a lot more than we trust them, much to our chagrin. The fact that they follow us everywhere we go and copy everything we do and then claim they are the ones being culturally appropriated is the telltale sign that they have an insane amount of trust for whites. They know they can literally get away with murder because they trust this system so much. That’s why as amoral, low-IQ and high-time preference that this race happens to be, they still are extremely careful when it comes to certain things about maintaining this system and contouring it to their advantage. It’s why they always use amorphous phrases like ‘we still have a long way to go.’ They inherently know they can’t allow white self-determination ever again because one little beachhead away from the blacks is all it takes for the gap to become an insurmountably descending loss for the black collective.
If the roles were reversed and we were enslaved and then liberated, would a single white live as sharecroppers under their former slave masters? Absolutely not. There are plenty of examples of white minority repatriation in nonwhite land as soon as the writ of white or even ethnic hegemony is undermined: the French/Spanish/Italians in North Africa (specifically in Algeria/Egypt), the Germans of Central Asia/Eastern Europe, white Rhodesians etc.
I would rather live in a mud hut in my own hellscape continent with people who look like me and even war with me than have to look at my former alien slavers, even if it means having a lower standard of living. So would every other white.
This article completely gets it wrong. White liberals do not believe any of this. You have to read between the lines. They vote with their feet exactly as we do: away from diversity. In fact, they pay extra to create their own gentrified enclaves. They scapegoat white rednecks so they can use them as a stalking horse to describe blacks because that is ‘politics.’ So when they mock Walmart people they are also talking about blacks, but won’t admit it. Nobody believes in multiculturalism besides using it as a series of proxies to avoid direct warfare like before. Liberal democracy is just a continuation of the Seven Years War. Groups of white people using diversity against other whites. Franco did it in Spain. Putin is doing it now. The Entente did it against the Central Powers, neoliberals do it against nationalists etc.
Preying on whites and mooching off whites aren’t trusting whites. Maybe it is counting on us in some way, counting on us to be victims or suckers. It is a social relationship of a type, but it is not the sort of social relationship envisioned by advocates of workable multiracial societies of rational, self-interested individuals. Indeed, rational self-interest dictates cutting off contact with moochers and criminals.
White liberals may be hypocrites when it comes to mates, schools, and neighborhoods (which I applaud), but they really do think that with a little more virtue signaling and gibs, blacks will one day become their equals.
White liberals read publications that confirm their worldview. And they read a lot. I know because I used to be one. Orgs like NPR uses selective statistics and emotional narratives to constantly promote this worldview. So liberals aren’t dumb. They’re just sheltered from reality and living in virtual, white collar worlds. At some visceral level, it doesn’t feel right because reality intrudes from time to time from the tinted window of an Uber. But this unease comes out as pity and condescension for blacks instead of respect. Oh your poor thing! It’s no wonder blacks don’t respect them and use them for free stuff. I would too.
If I were a black person I’d definitely think twice before I trust a white guy – especially the scrawny kind with piercings, multicolored hair and scraggly beard who claims to WORSHIP my kind. For the same reason I wouldn’t trust a stranger offering me candy, or the emotionally needy girl who claims we can be “so happy together” even though she’s quite clearly deranged – even if things might be nice in the short term, the situation definitely seems nightmarish in the long run.
If I were a black person looking at these liberal honkeys prostrating themselves before me I’d only see the creepy twins from the Shining. “Come play with us, blackie… forever, and ever…” as images of lynchings from bygone eras flash before my eyes. “Hell no,” I’d say.
I believe blacks have less to fear from us no-nonsense “racist” whites for the simple reason that we’re not totally detached from reality and we’re playing with a full deck. Our worldview doesn’t require the abolition of reality, and we can be reasonable… while a lefty or a liberal in this day and age, of the seething, cannibalistic and self-hating kind, doesn’t know the definition of reason.
Greg,
I think I can resolve our disagreement. It is purely semantic and hinges on the meaning of the word “rational”. You are using the word to mean whatever is in the interest of the organism in question. For American blacks, with an IQ of 85, “rational” implies hating whites because by hating whites, blacks can ally with white leftists and get political power and free stuff such as welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing, etc. etc. By this meaning of “rational”, a dog with an IQ of say 40 (I don’t know canine IQ) can fetch a stick and return it to his master and get a dog treat when the task is completed. The dog would be rational. I meant by “rational” a higher level of reasoning such as one would need to write computer programs, read and understand Hume, and do Differential Calculus. By your definition of “rational” blacks are indeed rational to hate white. By my definition of “rational” very few people, and an extremely tiny number of black people are rational. Both definitions are legitimate. As Michael Levin points out in “Why Race Matters”, philosophical disputes often come down to verbal disputes concerning the meaning of terms.
I agree. I am talking about practical reason. You can substitute “prudent” for “rational” if you want.
Here I want to ask, SINCE WHEN the Blacks (in America) hate the Whites. As I am not American, I can see it only as outsider, but I have read some books about Soviet intelligence, espionage and disinformation (Active measures) in America in 1930´s and later, I know about VENONA, etc. And as I see from these books the American Negroes of 1930-1950´s were mostly very patriotic, religious and politically conservative. Soviet spies have recruited many agents in the US, both as spies and as agents of influence. But among them there were virtually no Blacks. There were many Jews, mostly from the “Eastern Europe”, you know the names, I did not have to list them. There were many WASPs, the most notorious was Hiss. There were some Italians, Germans, French, but not many. And almost no Negroes. Soviets wanted (through Comintern) create the separatist movement among the Blacks and establish “Negro Soviet Republic”, but failed – not because of good work of the FBI. But because lack of support among Black Americans. Some Blacks sympathized Left ideas, and few were pro-Soviet fellow-travellers, like Paul Robeson, but he was just a singer and actor, not comparable with Alger Hiss or Harry Dexter White.
In the 1950s and 1960s, exposed Soviet agents in the United States who were sent to prison were very afraid of being in the same cell with blacks, because they could simply kill them as traitors. The Blacks were then strongly anti-Communist. Thus when Khrushchov and Castro once drove to Harlem on their way to the UN to call on the oppressed American Blacks to rise up against their “imperialist oppressors”, they had to flee from there, and even ask the police to protect them, since the Blacks were very angry with such propaganda and wanted to beat both communist leaders.
It seems that even under Kennedy, there was no particular hatred of blacks for whites. Is it correct to say, that it appeared at the end of the Johnson administration and later under Nixon, and arose as a result of the actions of the New Left (all of which were White and many were Jews), spurring blacks to fight against “white exploiters”? And that without the agitation of the New Left such “Black Hate” would not emerge or would be much “softer” and less dangerous?
Perhaps I have been too influenced by Leo Strauss, but as soon as I started reading the piece, I was waiting for the final paragraph, which I took to be the underlying and more important message.
You’re far less likely to find naive Whites at C-C, of course, but the number of normies who still think you can have a rational or honest “conversation about race” with the Africans-in-America is one of our biggest problems.
What has the history of our Four Hundred Years Together shown but that we are inherently incompatible and hostile races and that our only future is separation?
I understand this argument. Put the shoe on the other foot. Imagine an alternative history where whites were enslaved in China. Discrimination ended in the 1960s but whites never caught up economically. Some Chinese kiss your butt and tell you how cool and authentic you are and how the system is rigged. Other Chinese are befuddled about your lack of patriotism and reverence for Chinese history and at the same time hostile about any special preferences you might receive based on historical disadvantages. The vast majority are kind of fake nice and try avoid any offense but it’s clear they feel uncomfortable around you.
And even if it’s rational to conclude that hey, whites just aren’t as smart or hard working as Chinese, and that’s why we’re poorer, as a human being and a man, it’d be very hard to accept. I’d be primed to accept alternative explanations. And it’d be a constant low trust situation with the majority Chinese, unsolvable without some level of segregation.
It’s not a perfect analogy because the white/asian genetic and cultural distance is different than the white/black one, but you get the point. Multi-racial societies are only possible with some level of coercion and overt nation building (e.g. Singapore).
Thanks, this is helpful.
Does anyone else dislike that Rockwell painting? The four headless marshals have the same form, as if they were marching, or line dancing. What gives? It’s creepy and weird. I normally like Rockwell but this one should be egged.
Maybe that’s intentional?
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