White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
By Jared Taylor, New Century Books, Oakton, Virginia
$24.95, paperback, 339 pages
http://store.amren.com

Reviewed by J. Woodruff

Not since Pat Buchanan’s two best-sellers, State of Emergency and Death of the West, has a book appeared of such importance as Jared Taylor’s White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century. Those three consitute a potent trilogy of dissent from the reigning multiculturalist ideology responsible for what Buchanan called the existential crisis facing America and the Western world. They have issued a warning about a demographic crisis that is difficult to ignore.

What a pity, then, that sales of this powerful, iconoclastic book will never reach the numbers achieved by the other two. The refusal of several mainstream publishing houses to print and distribute it will guarantee limited sales, and its unfortunate title may very well dissuade many from reading it. The title White Identity perhaps suggests to audiences steeped in multiculturalist sensitivities that some monstrous screed full of racial hatred and bigotry has reared its ugly head.

But critics and skeptics alike will search its pages in vain for any trace of racial animosity or bigotry. Taylor-haters, and there are plenty of them among multiculturalists left and right, will find here no calls for racial oppression, no endorsement of injustice, no denigration of any race or ethnicity, and no irrational elevation of race to some sacred status. A discussion of white identity itself barely even appears until the final chapters.

Instead, readers will discover a calm, rational, and meticulously documented examination of the extensive social wreckage caused by the political and racial conflicts that have erupted as a direct result of unrestricted mass immigration, coerced diversity and multiculturalism. With details that ought to horrify anyone concerned about social peace and racial harmony, Taylor argues in a comprehensive presentation what many articles in Middle American News have shown about diversity and multiculturalism -- namely, that far from being the source of “strength” touted by sloganeering journalists and politicians, coerced diversity and multiculturalism are the wellspring of division and strife.

In Taylor’s words, “This book is an attempt to understand race relations as they are, not as we might wish them to be.”

With a wealth of concrete examples from news accounts around the country that are in turns laughable, tragic, infuriating, heart-breaking, and sometimes frankly disturbing, Taylor shows that wherever racial diversity has been coercively imposed, the result has been race-based mistrust, division, and tension, generating conflicts from lawsuits to violence. Human beings of every race and ethnicity, he argues, are by nature predisposed to prefer the company and cultural expressions of people who are like themselves. It seems odd that anyone needs to argue this point, since it has been self-evident for centuries. But in a multicultualist milieu where the nation’s intelligentsia regurgitates one left-wing slogan after another, common sense bears repeating: In families, churches, neighborhoods and entertainments free from state-imposed mandates, most people of differing racial groups tend to voluntarily separate. “When they are beyond the reach of the law, Americans revert to the patterns of segregation the law forbids,” Taylor writes. In other words, diversity occurs mostly where government-regulated spheres such as schools and workplaces require it.

Exposing the day-to-day realities of coerced diversity is one of the book’s chief virtues, for a purely abstract argument against diversity and multiculturalism would be pointless. They are not policies derived from careful analysis, study, and open debate. There is no multiculturalist doctrine rooted in any philosophy whose tenets or evidentiary basis can be examined, questioned, or challenged. On the contrary, diversity and multiculturalism are merely slogans and contrived moral claims, not ideologies subject to reasoned examination.

As slogans, they provide cover for the political and economic agendas of those who trumpet them. Claiming to pursue diversity is useful cover for big businesses that prefer cheap Third World labor, for example, and it is a convenient public explanation for Democrat strategists planning future election victories with non-white immigrants who can be relied on to vote for welfare-state Democrats by heavy margins.

As moral claims, they are at their most dangerous, having combined to become an integral component of the governing myth of America’s modern ruling class. Here is where the real origin of multiculturalism lies, for it has become the political formula used to legitimize and rationalize the aspirations of an expansionist ruling class that seeks to preside over not just the historic American population, but peoples of many different races and cultures. It is the banner of empire, used to rationalize and justify its hegemony over a variety of populations while subverting the customs, habits, and social arrangements of the older American republic and its structural sources of support that, if left intact, would deny, block, or otherwise hinder the aspirations of those who rule the empire.

As the ruling class incorporates other races and cultures into its realm -- which is not limited by national boundaries, but includes a far-flung apparatus of treaty-created international bodies and global regional authorities -- stamping out resistance from America’s traditionally white core population becomes the primary focus of the empire’s multiculturalist project. That is why U.S. elites have fostered, abetted, and encouraged the development and strengthening of racially-conscious, politically active non-white power blocs. With financial and moral support from the ruling class and its institutions, black, Hispanic, and Asian groups and organizations pursue wealth, power and prestige to benefit members of their own groups while weakening and expropriating the wealth, power, and prestige of America’s traditional core white population. That transfer of society’s benefits from the white population to organized non-whites is cloaked by ruling class servants in academia, journalism, and religion, as “progress” and “justice,” promulgating the new morality that undergirds the multiculturalist ruling formula.

Hence, notes Taylor, “People of all other races are recognized as having legitimate group interests but not whites.”
In Congress there is a Black Caucus and an Hispanic Caucus, but there is no White Caucus, and under the multiculturalist system, there never can or will be, no matter how piously its advocates promise democracy, tolerance and equal rights for all. The heart of multiculturalism is a lie. It was never about tolerance, mutual respect, racial harmony and inclusion. It is about power and its transference from one group to others.

For if the dwindling U.S. white majority were to be accorded the same claims to identity and self-interest as Hispanics, blacks, American Indians and Asians, they could through superior numbers, wealth, and control of any remaining intact centers of white social power, handily block and dismember the empire’s entire multiculturalist project.

Therefore, white racial consciousness -- white identity -- must be prevented at all costs.

If multiculturalists were really interested in tolerance, equality and racial harmony, there would be no need for inflammatory rhetoric accusing whites of “racism,” “oppression” and “exploitation,” allegations that dominate virtually all multiculturalist communications. It is langauge that serves to demonize, demoralize and delegitimize whites, their heritage, and their culture while inflaming non-white racial resentments. Far from aiming at accommodation, compromise, understanding and friendship, the vocabularly of multiculturalism is, as the late Sam Francis described it, “deliberately crafted to excite the resentment, envy, hatred, intolerance, and bitterness necessary to destroy a culture and rationalize the domination of the enemies of that culture.” The demonization of white America provides the justification for plundering it.

Having made a compelling case about the dangers of diversity and multiculturalism, Taylor asks simply, “If non-white groups continue to advance race-based interests, is it wise for whites to continue to act as if they have none?” In light of Census Bureau projections that whites will become a minority in the U.S. by 2042, the question is not unreasonable. Taylor concludes that a sensible response to demographic and political reality is a resurgence of white racial consciousness and assertion of white identity.

Taylor demonstrates there is nothing really novel or radical about such consciousness among whites. It was essential to America’s view of itself at least up until the mid-1960s. He shows that American elites from the Founding Fathers to Daniel Webster, John Marshall, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and even Harry Truman, consistently wanted America “to be peopled by Europeans, and thought only people of European stock could maintain the civilization they valued.”
Taylor’s purpose was not to address how such consciousness can be revived, but only to argue for its necessity. Whether and how it can be achieved remains an important but open question that those who take Taylor’s advice to heart will need to answer.

And that won’t come easy. Whether white consciousness can be revived through reasoned argument alone remains to be seen.

It seems especially problematic for whites to become racially conscious in response to rational argument while living in a materially satisfying society that expressly forbids that consciousness. Bemoaning the absence of progressive consciousness among the middle class in 1960s America, leftist theoretician Herbert Marcuse lamented, “If the individuals are satisfied to the point of happiness with the goods and services handed down to them ... why should they insist on different institutions for a different production of different goods and services? And if the individuals are pre-conditioned so that the satisfying goods also include thoughts, feelings, aspirations, why should they wish to think, feel, and imagine for themselves?”

The multiculturalist system’s propaganda engine is formidable. Multiculturalist dominance is enforced by a conditioning that employs ritualized formulas designed to short-circuit rational argument. In corporate journalist usage, for example, the word “white” is nearly always associated with suspicion. In news stories about black criminal defendants, the multiculturalist press makes note if a court’s conviction came from an “all white jury,” an unmistakable formula signaling the reader to suspect the verdict as illegitimate. Major news organizations have also referred derisively to the “all white” or “nearly all white” political rallies and meetings of conservative or libertarian Tea Party groups, suggesting that because they are largely white, these events and associations lack legitimacy and are devoid of meaningful political import. As multiculturalists transform the content of words from concepts to images, they eliminate what left-wing linguist Roland Barthes described as “any delay between the naming and the judgment.” The propaganda thereby reaches into an individual’s mind where concepts are developed to comprehend reality. As individuals internalize multiculturalist stereotypes, language itself becomes an instrument of manipulation and control even when it transmits information without demanding obedience. Within such a regimen, rational discourse, if not impossible, becomes distorted or even farcical. The propagandized mind is trained up to resist challenge to the multiculturalist world-picture, no matter how rationally devastating the challenge may be.

As a result, whites are alienated from their racial identity. Under multiculturalist conditioning, they live in a fantasy world of slogan-based sentimentality that provides a false sense of security and comfort while their heritage is gutted and their power diminished. These patterns of perception and submission become habitual as they are reinforced continuously by an all-pervasive corporate media and entertainment complex.
Breaking out from that fantasy world becomes a truly revolutionary act, and in the multiculturalists’ new moral order, such an act is perceived as immoral.

Taylor provides a telling quotation from William Raspberry, who is just one of many key propagandists for the multiculturalist state, occupying a position of considerable importance in the machinery of the ruling class, which has generously rewarded his support. The holder of honorary doctorates from 15 educational institutions, Raspberry’s columns appear in more than 200 newspapers. In 1994 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary. In 1997, he was named one of the top 50 most influential journalists in the country by Washingtonian magazine, which called him one of “a handful of journalists [with] the power to introduce new ideas and give them currency.” One of the ideas to which he helped give currency is the central moral imperative of the multiculturalist state: “It’s always illegitimate for white men to organize as white men,” Raspberry wrote.

That Raspberry can publicly announce without fear of criticism that organizations of whites are illegitimate highlights the extent to which the open hostility to whites expressed in the multiculturalist formula has become America’s official orthodoxy.

That means those who would take Taylor’s advice to build white consciousness will have to fight not just ideas, but an entire establishment and all the institutional machinery -- including corporate financial interests, political parties, the communications media, the university system, etc. -- that created, maintain and protect that establishment and its orthodoxy.

Multiculturalism’s hostility to whites organizing for their own interests while it underwrites solidarity for others is a recipe for perpetual injustice. Because of that adversarial posture, genuine equality and peace between the races will likely remain elusive, for the bridge to racial justice can only be built on the recognition of the right of all peoples to self-determination and freedom from racial oppression.