Navigating the Racial Landscape

It’s depressing to read the continual barrage of racial propaganda in the mainstream media.  A December 28 LA Times’ op-ed, “The dark side of white,” by Gregory Rodriguez is a wonderful example of intellectual confusion and ethnic special pleading. He writes, “Oh sure, some dim-witted people thought [race] was a rigidly scientific category. But for the most part, the evolving definitions and elastic boundaries were subject to cultural bias and, let’s face it, whim and subjectivity.”

Races are descent groups. It couldn’t be more obvious or more rooted in the modern science of population genetics. Of course, there is a biological reality to race as even a brief glance at a diagram like the following shows.

Race exists as a biological reality and, as Frank Salter reminds us, race constitutes an important storehouse of genetic interests for all humans. The number of races is not set in stone but is a more a matter of where one wants to draw lines. The figure results in seven different racial groups, but one could easily combine some groups together and get a lower number.

Biological descent is not the whole story, but I suspect that Rodriguez is well aware that the cultural components of race are far more than “whim and subjectivity.” To a large extent cultural influences result from conflicts of perceived interest and political infighting, and multiculturalists like Rodriguez are experts at this game.  Indeed, the #1 way that culture influences our concept of race is the denial by the political left that there is any biological basis for race at all.

As noted in a previous blog, by using our rational faculties (what psychologists label ‘explicit processing’), we can decide how to carve up the racial landscape to best suit our political and genetic interests. A good example is in crime statistics where “Hispanic” is considered as a victim category for “hate crimes” but not considered a category of offender.  Another example is provided by Rodriguez: An Arab American leader complains “because we are not treated as white in society and by the government, but we also don’t qualify as minorities to get the benefits of some programs.” There are obvious benefits for being in an official victim category.

Rodriguez notes that the 2010 census will not have ethnic breakdowns for Whites — a tribute to the genetic and cultural assimilation among the pre-1965 White population. On the other hand, Latinos and Asians will have sub-categories (Mexican-American, Cuban; Chinese, Japanese). He then worries that “we as a nation care less about the many ethnic groups that helped build this country than the divisive racial categories that have generally served to divide it. … As the concept of ethnicity vanishes into whiteness, society’s alienation abounds.”

In Rodriguez’s ideal world, there would be no category of ‘White” at all—the peoples that now make up the category of White would remain separate — German-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc.

But it’s too late for all that: America has indeed been a melting pot for the various European ethnicities and there’s no going back. Getting rid of the category of White would be a great strategy for Rodriguez and his people but would be a poor strategy for Whites:  For a European-American, it makes much more sense to identify with others who can trace their ancestry back to Europe before 1492, but quite possibly excluding Jews given the unusually long history of hostility and mistrust between Jews and Europeans and  because most of their genetic background derives from the Middle East.  We may not want to include Arab Americans because of the genetic distance and because their voting patterns are not similar to those of European Americans.

Rodriguez would love it if Whites identified themselves only as Scottish Americans or Italian-Americans because these relatively small groups have much less political potential in multicultural America than the category of White or European-American.

When push comes to shove in the US — and push will come to shove, it will indeed be Whites versus the non-White racial and ethnic minorities. We have already traveled a long way down this road, with 90% of Republican votes coming from Whites and an average of around 80% of non-Whites voting Democrat. The gulf will only become more obvious as time goes on. (Incidentally, including groups like Jews and Arabs in the White category functions to blunt perceptions of the racial divide in American politics because these groups are far more likely to vote with the multi-cultural Democrat coalition than people whose ancestry derives from Christian Europe.)

The concept of race is not set in stone. How we behave on the basis of this information is not at all determined by the genetic data. We Europeans must define ourselves in a way that makes strategic sense. And we have to make explicit assertions of racial identity and explicit assertions of our racial interests. No other strategy will succeed in staving off the dispossession of European America.