The Rebirth of Race
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on the way to a post-racial color-blind future. Against all expectations, race was reborn. And it’s no surprise for anyone who has been paying attention: Race is both the oldest and the newest aspect of Life, and the thin gruel of a “content of your character” worldview will never satisfy. When we speak of civilization or culture or politics, we speak of the flowers on the surface; but when we begin to talk about race we go down into the mines.
In the decades following the Second World War they really thought they had finally stuck the stake in the heart of race and that it would never be heard from again on this side of the vale. They were drooling over their newfound bogeyman Adolf Hitler: He had made racial thinking central to his movement, so now race thinking had been discredited — or at least that’s what they told themselves to soothe the demon of doubt away. Many dupes truly thought that ideology had trumped race, that they had put an end to the concept of race, had put the supposedly evil genie back in the bottle. But a funny thing happened on the way to the “one race, the human race” future: Race was reborn.
It was the era of desegregation; it was the era of pressure to end Apartheid; they had their UNESCO “statement on race” which said there were no races, and certainly no superior ones; it was the high-water mark of “natural equality,” of no innate differences, of countries based on paper and citizenship and never on blood. It was we-are-the-worldism run amok. It was a time when, they say, we had “put the racism of the past behind us,” when a Mulatto could ascend to the Presidency and magically make the world “post-racial.” It was a time when “diversity” was trumpeted as a universal cure-all, and when White homelands became a lot less White. It was a time when Coca-Cola could have a cult-like gaggle of mixed-race youngsters tell us that they “wanted the world to sing in perfect harmony.” It was the time of bussing; it was the time when they got George Wallace to apologize; it was the time of the New South and of cities that were “too busy to hate.” It was the time of “coming together,” and a time when the White race learned to be humble.
They were so sure that race was a thing of the past. They tried to consign race to oblivion. But it waited and it brooded and it bided its time; and it has now returned with a vengeance, with all of its old fury.
A funny thing happened on the road to “equality.” Race was reborn.
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When the races were largely separate, no one talked that much about race. Race was something which we simply had. We lived in the perfect, primal innocence of race. There was almost no language for race because none was needed. Like the fish in water, race was something we swam in but hardly thought about. This dearth of speaking about race leads race-deniers today to say that the ancients were not interested in race — this is quite wrong, for what they had instead of tomes on race was race itself, through and through.
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The birth of a strong White American racial consciousness happened in roughly the 1830s. In America the abolition movement began to get more fanatical, and though the seat-of-the-pants defense of slavery and White supremacy had a long tradition, the intellectuals of the South realized that more was needed. It was no longer enough just to dig in, and being gentleman they realized that a moral justification for White supremacy was required. Following the lead of the always brilliant John Calhoun, they wrote and argued that slavery was a positive good. This was predicated on the obvious and important point that Whites and Blacks were different, would always be different, and that this vast chasm of difference was based in Nature. After this, the fallacy of “natural equality” would never hold real water. In the Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the first Congress and signed by George Washington, it was specified that only Whites could become citizens. But in the following three decades or so, no literature arose around this issue. But then White southerners became voluble on the subject; so much so that a few decades later, Stephen Douglas could say what everyone knew all along but had not been willing or able to put in so many words: that America was a White country, formed on a White basis; created by and for White people — and was for White people alone and should be so for all time. Not only was it “no one else need apply,” it was “no one else has any rights the White man need ever respect.”
Whiteness, of course, had always existed — but, as is said nowadays, the intellectual “construction” of Whiteness (really, its discovery and the understanding of it) had taken wing, and a glorious day it was.
Read more:
https://nationalvanguard.org/2023/04/the-rebirth-of-race/
Love Your Race
https://nationalvanguard.org/2023/02/love-your-race-2023/
