Whiteness Is More Than Anti-Blackness

^[1]2,216 words

German translation here ^[2]

Whiteness has been most commonly defined in terms of “anti-blackness,” a distinction that remains supremely important to the Left. For liberals, the 1940s and 1950s never ended. Hitler and Joseph McCarthy still stalk the earth, and white supremacy rules the US and the world. Wherever liberals look they see malign white faces!

Structural racism of this sort was most prevalent in the United States and southern Africa.

Until recently it was not meaningful in other European countries. (They, too, now have substantial black populations, however.) Even so, a thorough examination would have to analyze all European colonial experiences in sub-Saharan Africa as well as the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

The Special Place of Blacks in the White Psyche

Historically, whites could see the difference between themselves and blacks—physically, psychologically, and culturally—more clearly than they could other racial differences.

Whites also consistently displayed a stronger natural antipathy toward blacks than toward other non-whites. In the absence of Jewish control whites were able to erect and maintain effective barriers to mixture between themselves and blacks.

It is a testament to the awful, combined power of the monolithic mass media and comprehensive censorship of marginal speech that Jews have succeeded in erasing in the minds of whites the formerly clear bright line between the two races as quickly and comprehensively as they have.

Whites have been psychologically and culturally unmanned.

Hybridization between white women and black men has been normalized, signifying the sexual conquest of the race’s women by aliens.

Widespread negrification of lifestyles, attitudes, behavior, dress, cultural tastes, speech patterns, and even body language is commonplace.

In the past, whites occupied one end of a racial spectrum, blacks the other. Red, brown, and yellow races were distributed between the two poles.

Steve Sailer has produced a series of brief articles under the heading “Diversity before Diversity” ^[3] (also individually reprinted on VDare’s blog) consisting of capsule biographies of famous non-whites widely honored by white society.

He states, “One of the points I’m trying to make with this Diversity Before Diversity series is that when thinking about the past, we shouldn’t project how African-Americans were treated to other minorities” and “The color line discrimination against blacks was both quantitatively and qualitatively more severe than the discrimination suffered by other groups.”

Sailer’s point is valid, albeit with an important caveat. Almost all of his minority examples are drawn from post-1933 America, when the country, though still demographically white, was no longer actually run by whites.

A candid and explicit statement of the traditional viewpoint on blacks and race has been articulated by John Derbyshire.

From the Establishment’s and mainstream conservatism’s perspective Derbyshire is an out-and-out racist.

In fact, he is anti-black. He would object to such a characterization, but it captures the strictly circumscribed nature of his racialism. He says,

As you can see from my IAT [Implicit Association Test] results, I bond effortlessly with East Asians & I think always have. I’m more at ease in a room full of Chinese people than I would be in a room full of black American rap artists. And my personal predilections aside, I think the big division in our society is always black-nonblack. The other stuff—Hispanics, Asians—is a bagatelle [unimportant, a trifle] by comparison. This makes sense paleoanthropologically, too: Homo sap. first left Africa, then differentiated into other races. (“‘I May Give Up Writing and Work as a Butler’: Interview with John Derbyshire,” ^[4] Gawker, April 9, 2012)

Derbyshire is married to a Chinese woman and has hybrid children. He has written, “I am not—obviously not—a racial purist. I’m fine with miscegenation. I don’t even have anything to say to racial purists. I just think they’re wrong.” (“John Derbyshire on Immigration, Liberty, and Mating Choices.” ^[5])

On several occasions he has described himself as a “philosemite,” an “anti-antisemite,” and a Zionist (e.g., “The Jews and I: Passover Reflections,” ^[6] National Review Online, April 10, 2001, available in Google cached format only; “The Marx of the Anti-Semites,” ^[7] March 10, 2003.)

On the plus side, Derbyshire favors “a rational immigration policy that preserves the historic white-European ethnic core of the American nation, as our immigration laws did until the 1965 Act.”

And his dedication to a society of ordered liberty and basic fairness cause him to be slightly more tolerant of dissent than is ordinarily the case.

Although Derbyshire prides himself on his empiricism, his philo-Semitic assertions are mostly counterfactual. (I am not referring to his critique of evolutionary psychology; Sam Francis also had reservations about the discipline. Such views are severable from Derbyshire’s supposedly factual or historical statements about Jews.)

His hemming and hawing about white miscegenation not being a problem because the numbers involved are inconsequential is also wrong.

Derbyshire grew up in a white world, resides in metropolitan New York, and has witnessed the revolutionary transformation that has taken place during his lifetime. Steve Sailer has independently expressed similarly untenable views about current miscegenation rates.

Derbyshire would greatly strengthen his empirical case if, instead of maintaining objectively indefensible positions he simply said, “Yes, all of that is true. But I just don’t care. I like, admire, and look up to Jews. I hold them in much higher esteem than I do whites, and apply different, in fact no, moral standards to them.”

Because, in truth, that is the gist of every philo-Semite’s position.

Probably the reason white philo-Semites, or philo-Semites of any race, don’t say this is because they know it would make them look monstrous.

Philo-Semitism in the Old South

The combination of anti-black racism and philo-Semitism seen in John Derbyshire and others is not new.

In fact, it was a little-known but central feature of Southern society, as demonstrated by the black authors of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, vol. 2: How Jews Gained Control of the Black American Economy ^[8] (n.p.: The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, 2010), 509 pp.) previously reviewed by Counter-Currents ^[9].

The book reveals that Southern whites from colonial times to WWII were also anti-black and philo-Semitic.

The “tenacious myth of Jewish suffering in the South,” the authors assert, is false.

Popular writing about the Southern Jewish experience is often peppered with the unsupportable assertion that “anti-Semitism” and the fear of it ruled the lives of Southern Jews. This fallacy is most often advanced to imply that “anti-Semitism” was responsible for the complete and total refusal of Jews to take any moral stand on the question of Black slavery and its brutal aftermath. [Jim Crow] (p. 53)

But there is no evidence to support the “widespread but misinformed” belief “that Jews were collateral sufferers of the many injustices endured by Black Americans.” (p. 49)

“The popular assumption is that ‘God’s Chosen People’ could not have survived in a place infamous for its ruthless racial repression.” (p. 26) Yet, “Far from being a center of anti-Jewish discrimination, the Southern white culture enabled a Jewish integration so complete that the region became known as a ‘hotbed of philo-Semitism‘—for its extraordinary love and acceptance of the Jewish people.” (p. 27)

In an argument paralleling familiar White Nationalist critiques of northern Puritans and WASPs that I have never seen made before, a great deal of Southern behavior is ascribed to “strict Christian fundamentalism that cast Jews in a Biblical role as ‘God’s ministers,'” a view that fit nicely with the Jews’ own religious self-perceptions. As a consequence, there was “Christian competition to welcome and honor the ‘People of the Book.'”

Jewish Old Testament traditions “resonated profoundly” with white Southerners, who strongly identified with the Biblical Israelites. Just as the Chosen People of God were persecuted by Pharaoh, so the white South was victimized and oppressed by Lincoln’s Yankee North.

“This ideological intimacy between Jews and Gentiles is reflected most explicitly in the writings of the South’s most ardent exponent of racist culture, the Rev. Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman [1905], a novel that inspired the profoundly racist film The Birth of a Nation [1915]” (p. 67 n. 171), which in turn gave rise to the second Ku Klux Klan.

Needless to say, although gullible whites eagerly lapped up such myths, Jews were simply engaging in business as usual. The following two quotes from The Secret Relationship are from Jewish scholars, not the book’s authors:

Jews consciously sought to “claim the status of a white religion rather than being relegated to a position as a racial other.” (p. 72)

And, they “‘play[ed] up’ the religious connection of the Jews to ancient biblical times, an image that played so well for them in the bible belt.” (p. 73)

If this portrayal of Southern philo-Semitism is correct, it replicated in many ways the more well-known Old Testament philo-Semitism of the Puritan/WASP North.

Indeed, the social discrimination common against Jews among Northern elites was entirely absent in the South.

It is interesting to note that the white front man for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a powerful Jewish hate group based in Alabama, is a native Southerner named Morris Seligman Dees. Dees began his life as an anti-black racist. His Jewish first and middle names were bestowed upon him by his passionately philo-Semitic father.

The book also counters a view of abolitionism common among white nationalists.

The authors reveal that Jews, Northern as well as Southern, played essentially no role at all in abolitionism, which was a white movement.

Evidence shows that Jewish Americans were publicly and privately hostile to abolitionism and that a substantial number fought vehemently for the rights of slaveholders. Jews owned and traded in Black slaves and were involved in ‘every aspect’ of the Black Holocaust during and after slavery” because it “increased their wealth. (p. 55)

Nevertheless, “white abolitionists who earnestly wanted an end to slavery had no intention of granting the Black man full social, economic, or political citizenship. They decried the horrors of that cruelest of institutions, but most [emphasis added] fundamentally believed in the rightness of white mastery over all affairs of the nation.” (p. 28)

A Revolution in Thought

With the advent of Germany, conservative anti-black racism + philo-Semitism was at last superseded. Under the new dispensation Jews replaced blacks as the group considered most distant from whites on the racial spectrum.

Physical distinctions between Aryans and Jews are much less marked than those between blacks and whites. As a consequence, the new paradigm revolved around psychological, spiritual, cultural, and behavioral differences, and the deadly threat posed by Jews to white racial and cultural survival.

As Clive Webb ^[10] noted, “[O]f all the accusations leveled against Jews, one in particular threatened their social stability [emphasis added]. That accusation was that Jews were not white.” (A History of Black-Jewish Relations in the American South, 1790–1970, 1997, p. 133)

Historian Charles Bracelen Flood recounted the following exchange during a speech at a 1920 meeting of the NSDAP:

When Hitler said, “We do not deal with Jews at all,” one or more racists shouted, “Negroes!” meaning that blacks, too, should not be dealt with. Without missing a beat, Hitler said, to applause, “I would rather have one hundred Negroes in the hall than one Jew.” (Hitler: The Path to Power, 1989, p. 162)

This outlook turned the old paradigm upside down.

Here, for example, is how National Alliance founder William L. Pierce ^[11] bluntly described the hero of his novel Hunter (1989) ^[12]: At the start of the book he is a “typical idiot conservative who can see the niggers but cannot see the Jews, because the Jews are much less visible.”

Finally, it is important to note that philo-Semitic racists not only prefer Jews to blacks, but desire Jewish influence, control, and guidance over whites, despite Jews’ continued separate (because that is what they demand), privileged existence within white society.

In contrast, those who reject conservative racism do not desire black influence or leadership over whites, or even their continued presence within white society. Moreover, the differences between continental races are not regarded as a bagatelle.

The Fatal Embrace

Philo-Semitic anti-black racism is old and stodgy and musty, redolent of the Old South and failure. This will remain the case even if it eventually develops, with a little help from its friends as Buckleyism and Thatcherism did, into a “successful” mainstream political movement.

Adherents of the old model will never confront the perpetrators of extermination. They point their fingers at the wrong people while inviting the fox into the chicken coop. They cannot provide a foundation for successful opposition, or a future for white people.

Jews are utterly unique. The first and most significant division of mankind is not black versus white, but Jew versus Gentile—exactly as the Jews say.

Wealthier, more powerful, and more influential by far than any other human group, Jews remain forever separate by choice. Every race is perceived as hostile and alien by them. Temporary accommodations notwithstanding, Jews will always nurse a deadly grudge against all non-Jews.

Contrary to what many believe, or say they believe, Jews do not regard themselves as white, and never will.

Even philo-Semites who have no conscious intention of harming whites by embracing Jews, as was arguably the case with white Southerners and South Africans, may nevertheless contribute directly to our destruction.

Their mistake, intentional or not, is to lovingly embrace what hates and must ultimately kill us. There is no excuse for this since the “Holocaust.”

The Jews of the American South and South Africa did not perish. The white nations that venerated them did.