White Census

2,717 words

So as not to mislead, I should note at the outset that there is no reliable global census of whites. I do not have even a ballpark notion of what the number might be, except that my estimate is usually lower than the back-of-the-envelope figures most white racialists arrive at on the rare occasions when they address the issue. The biggest hurdles are: a lack of hard data, no sustained focus on the question within the movement, and difficulties in specifying who is white. How many whites exist at any given time (or existed in the past, or are projected to exist in the future) also depends heavily upon your definition of “white,” and the degree of admixture you are willing to accept.

We all have a general, ill-defined picture of present-day population dynamics. Notably, conservative columnist and thinker Patrick Buchanan has attempted to wrestle with the numbers in articles and books such as The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (2002).

We also assimilate vague impressions of what’s happening via an intermittent diet of fragmentary news accounts like the following by the Left-wing, anti-white Guardian (UK) newspaper thirteen years ago: “The last days of a white world: We are near a global watershed – a time when white people will not be in the majority in the developed world, Britain included.” ^[2] (Emphasis added.)

Unfortunately, trustworthy numbers that could shed greater light on the situation do not exist. Few countries in the world have census categories for whites, and the few that do, like the United States, cannot be accepted at face value. Prevailing Left-wing (including government) ideology is that either “race does not exist” or is a “social construct” (i.e., can mean anything). Although no one actually believes this, it is the party line and badly distorts the few scattered, sloppy official datasets that exist.

An Attempt at a Solution

An ultimately unsuccessful but instructive, one-time effort to rectify the situation was made by the National Policy Institute (NPI) ^[3] in 2008 in a press release entitled, “Global White Population to Plummet to Single Digit [sic]—Black Population to Double.” It was illustrated with very clear graphs. Ideally, a process would be in place to compile and continually update ever-changing demographic data and account for relevant policy changes, improvements in analytical methodology, and newly-discovered sources of information.

NPI describes itself as “an independent think-tank and publishing firm dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States, and around the world.”

Its full report was apparently never released, or else was compiled only in the form of the 2008 press release. The release has since been removed from the organization’s website. However, it can still be read in PDF format here ^[4]. (Click on the green “Download” button.) The last two pages summarize the authors’ methodology.

Thumbnails of eight pie charts that formerly could be clicked on to be seen online are too small to read. Six of them are population projections for each decade from 2010 to 2060. However, all of the graphs, except the one for 2000, can be read (when paused) in a 4-minute 2008 YouTube video ^[5] that remains online.

Of course, it would be helpful to first know the size of the white population in the past, in both absolute and percentage terms, and how many people we have now. But the report’s focus was primarily upon population projections, using 1950-2000 as a baseline.

According to two graphs, “Europeans” (i.e., whites of European descent, but including Jews and possibly some other non-whites and hybrids) comprised 28 percent of the world population in 1950, and 18.5 percent in 2000. One would have to examine extrinsic data to gauge whether non-white immigrants and mixed-race individuals figured largely into the “white” estimates for the year 2000, because by then everything had radically changed.

Patrick Buchanan cited the NPI report/press release favorably in his column, “The Way Our World Ends ^[6]” (May 2, 2008), which also referenced a 2007 UN survey and a Pew Center (US data only) study.

Problems

While the NPI numbers and graphs appear convincing because of their highly professional presentation, a number of problems exist. One is the sources used. (Note that the report does explicitly cite its sources and state its methodology.) Unfortunately, most of them are flawed.

For example, the “Ethnicity and Race by Countries” ^[7] table from the website of the Information Please Almanac is used. Online, at least, the Almanac does not specify where it gets its numbers from, or why they should be considered reliable. Also, precise definitions of races/ethnic groups are not provided. These flaws preclude the use of the Almanac as a primary source, just as Wikipedia cannot be used for that purpose. (Both can be utilized as starting points for further research.)

Other problems are revealed simply by glancing at the Information Please table. (I’m addressing what’s online today, not in 2008.)

For example, Norway’s entry says only: “Norwegian, Sami [Lapps] 20,000.”

Sweden’s is: “Indigenous population: Swedes with Finnish and Sami minorities; foreign-born or first-generation immigrants: Finns, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks.”

Besides the lack of numbers, the entries are prima facie incorrect, and certainly not indicative of the actual racial makeup of either country. Both nations have large contingents of colored residents, including Africans, Asians, and Muslims who are not Turks, not to mention many hybrids.

Similar problems plague most compilations that continue, against the grain, to provide racial or ethnic data—even supposedly authoritative ones such as The World Factbook ^[8] published by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). (The Factbook was not used by the authors.)

The Factbook’s entry for the United States reads: “white 79.96%, black 12.85%, Asian 4.43%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.97%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.18%, two or more races 1.61% (July 2007 estimate).” Until very recently that’s where it ended, making the entry look utterly ridiculous.

But a note about “Hispanics” has now been added, indicating that they constitute about 15.1% of the US population. Presumably the entire figure must be subtracted from the white population, bringing it down to a more believable 64.9%. But even that number (assuming the Factbook is following the census) includes Jews, Arabs, other non-white “Caucasians,” and so forth.

According to the US Census Bureau, “White” means ^[9] “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as ‘White’ or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.” “Non-Hispanic White alone” ^[10] “Includes people who reported White and no other race group and did not report being of Hispanic origin.” All census categories derive from self-reporting by subjects. No external verification takes place.

As with the Almanac, no ethnic definitions or detailed citations to authority are provided by the Factbook. Since such matters cannot be checked, the Factbook is not a reliable source of information for race or ethnicity, even though it undertakes to provide “Ethnic group” information for all the countries of the world. (I haven’t actually checked every country, but I’ve looked at many of them.)

Although a “World” entry contains the same general category breakdowns utilized for the individual countries, it omits aggregate figures for what the book everywhere else designates as “ethnic groups.”

The NPI report may be the best model for clear presentation of data—though it cannot be used as a dependable source of population information or projections. I suspect its white population figures err considerably on the high side.

The authors state that “The population estimates and projections were calculated on an order of magnitude ^[11] basis. We believe them to be representative of the trends indicated and will be pleased to make corrections brought to our attention.” A method of broad approximation such as this would have to be used in any study of this type.

The Situation in 1914

In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), author Lothrop Stoddard (1883–1950) presciently analyzed racial population figures in a similar manner. His book was widely known, so much so that it was alluded to by novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby (1925).

Referring to the year 1914—exactly a century ago—Stoddard in his opening pages succinctly summarized white geopolitical power and demographics.

In addition to largely unmixed homelands worldwide, whites exercised direct political control over most of the earth’s surface. Of the 53 million square miles (excluding the polar regions) constituting the world’s land area, Stoddard calculated that only 6 million square miles (11%) had non-white governments, and 66% of that was attributable to China.

Clearly, the rapid collapse of colonialism, which most of us do not think about, was an alarming symptom of profound sickness, possibly impending death. I am thinking now of collective racial life as a form of struggle, completely divorced from any altruistic, unreciprocated moral calculus.

When Stoddard focused solely upon the “real white world” of 1914—those regions such as North America and Europe where whites numerically predominated—then just 42 percent of the earth’s surface belonged to whites. And fully one-third of that, Australasia and Siberia, was “very thinly inhabited and is thus held by a very slender racial tenure—the only tenure which counts in the long run.”

In his book, Stoddard identified five primary races of mankind: White, Yellow, Brown, Black, and Amerindian. Although he does not say so, this approach derives from a racial classification based upon skin color introduced by German anthropologist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in a footnote to a 1788 German translation of Swede Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae. (Linnaeus’s own breakdown, the first scientific classification of human races, was different.)

To backtrack for a moment, the division used by NPI was sevenfold: European (meaning whites), East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian), Central Asian (Indians, Pakistanis, Bengalis, Kyrgizians, Kazakhs), Southeast Asian (Indonesian, Malaysian, Vietnamese, Philippinos, Pacific Islanders), African (blacks), Arabic (North Africa and the Middle East), and Amerindian/Mestizo. Turks were placed in the Arabic category, although Turks are not Arabs ^[12].

I discussed the issue of racial classification at some length in Andrew Hamilton, “Taxonomic Approaches to Race,” ^[13] The Occidental Quarterly (Fall 2008), pp. 11-36.

Turning from surveys of area to unspecified “tables of population,” Stoddard stated that the population of the earth one hundred years ago was 1.7 billion, of which 1.15 billion (68%) was colored and 550 million (32%) white. (Recall that NPI calculated whites at 28% for 1950, and 18.5% in 2000—which I suspect is too high.) Moreover, the bulk of whites, 450 million, was concentrated on the continent of Europe ^[14].

Four-fifths [80%] of the entire white race is concentrated on less than one-fifth of the white world’s territorial area (Europe), while the remaining one-fifth of the race (some 110,000,000 souls), scattered to the ends of the earth, must protect four-fifths of the white territorial heritage against the pressure of colored races eleven times its numerical strength.

But population is dynamic. Treating the “primary race-stocks as units, it would appear that whites tend to double in eighty years, yellows and browns in sixty years, blacks in forty years.” Thus, whites “are the slowest breeders, and they will undoubtedly become slower still,” since their birthrate was falling toward that of France, which had already “reached the extreme of a stationary population.”

A stationary white population in 2014 would represent 2.1 children per couple. In fact, the birthrate has dropped below replacement level even when the high birthrates of colored populations in white homelands, plus widespread hybridization, are statistically employed to mask what must surely be a precipitous, historically unprecedented drop in white numbers.

Yet, in the vast areas of the world dominated by whites in 1914, Europeans were busy removing all natural checks to population growth such as famine, disease, and tribal warfare. The result was a massive colored population increase in nearly every portion of the globe under white political dominance.

“Now what must be the inevitable result of all this?” Stoddard inquired. “It can mean only one thing: a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands.”

Although startlingly prophetic in terms of identifying and predicting the overall global dynamic, Stoddard’s 1914 population figures, though interesting and suggestive, are unfortunately untestable. Unlike the NPI authors, who specified their sources, Stoddard gave no indication of his. Ultimately, their accuracy cannot be directly evaluated. Still, due to the relative absence of mixing, the calculations in 1920 should have been much easier to make than would be the case today.

Who Is White?

The question of who is white is a vexed one.

Due to a long period of racial-geographic stability, it should be relatively easy to calculate approximate population figures prior to, say, 1960. For such estimates I use books written by the late Colin McEvedy: The Atlas of World Population History (written with Richard Jones) (1978), The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History (1967), The Penguin Atlas of Medieval History (1961), and The Penguin Atlas of Modern History (1972). (Two of these volumes were revised in 1992 and 2002, and therefore might incorporate politically correct falsehoods. I don’t know.)

These, of course, are secondary sources by an author who was not explicitly racialist, never mind pro-white. So it would be nice to have original research tailored to our specific problem. Nevertheless, when McEvedy’s volumes appeared society had not yet jumped onto the race denial bandwagon, and the Great Erasure hadn’t officially begun, so it is possible to form a rough picture of our population over time by using these or similar volumes.

“Who is white?” is an important question that should be discussed without assuming that differing viewpoints are ipso facto “divisive.” Ours is the only race to have devised and maintained freedom of speech and thought; I’m confident we can still handle a little vigorous back-and-forth. It’s one thing for Jews, the Left, and government to suppress speech. That’s to be expected. (Expected, not accepted.) But it’s inappropriate for us to ape lower forms of humanity in this regard.

Personally, I cannot dismiss out of hand the question of “deep ancestry” and phenotypic appearance. Probably the major issue here is Southern Europe, or “Latins”—what old-style physical anthropologists almost universally recognized as the “Mediterranean” sub-race or ethnic group. (The problem arises elsewhere as well. Are English celebrities Russell Brand and Rowan Atkinson really white? It’s highly possible that Brand is Jewish or part-Jewish, but that seems less likely in Atkinson’s case.)

Why is this an issue? William McNeill’s slender volume, The Shape of European History (1974), written before today’s rigid political correctness had set in, demonstrates with great persuasiveness that northern and southern Europe belonged to two distinct cultural and trade spheres for thousands of years. Southern Europe was part of a vast cultural/trade/population area encompassing North Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia in a way that northern Europe never was.

On top of such difficulties, replacement migration since the 1960s has swamped Europeans everywhere in a genocidal Third World tidal wave. These issues must all be coped with simultaneously. But it is wrong to dismiss important problems out of hand simply because they are controversial.

Finally, surveys that count Jews as “white” (as both Stoddard and NPI did, and as the US census does) are not very helpful. Despite their many marvelous forms of camouflage, Jews differ more from whites than does any other race on the face of the earth, including blacks.

Furthermore, I do not believe that Jews constitute just 2-3 percent of the US population as they have steadfastly maintained since at least 1917, if not earlier.

Social power and demography are closely related. The smaller the population figure you are willing to accept for Jews, the more conscious coordination (often derided as “conspiracy”) you must admit in order to account for their inordinate wealth and influence. To assert that they’re simply so much more intelligent and talented than whites and non-whites will not suffice, and at any rate raises thorny genetic and cultural issues of its own.

Jewish population numbers are controlled entirely by Jews and cannot be verified by credible (i.e., potentially critical) independent researchers. Nor do Jews permit governments to number their population.

Finally, Jewish classifications are too narrow for our purposes. Jewish conservatism on this score is valid from their point of view, but irrelevant from ours. We must exclude from the white breeding population many of the same hybrids they exclude from theirs.