The Whiteness of the West, By James Reed

Bo Winegard, writing for the very interesting Aporia Magazine, boldly and bravely makes the case, which would not have been need to have been made in the pre-World War II world, that the West was created by White people, and sustained by them.Conservatives shy away from stating this now in opposition to globalist multiculturalism, and the deconstruction of Whiteness by the postmodernists, perhaps out of lack of courage, perhaps because they have given up that battle, not realising that it means all the other battles, like economics, also will fall, as civilisation is radically, ethno-racially changed.

Hence Winegard puts the case, that since all other ethno-racial groups embrace their identity, Whites should to. Not to do so is not going to change anything positively, but will simply speed up the demise of Whites ever sooner, and already the world that White decline is bringing in looks to be one destined to cultural collapse:

"Whites should not cower from their identity or their cultural achievements. Instead, they should embrace them. Ethnic pride is normal and healthy; so too is white identity. It does not require hating other groups. Nor does it require domination and subjugation. It simply requires a healthy embrace of this fact: The West is pervaded by whiteness because it was created and sustained by white people. Instead of apologizing for this or running from it, we should be proud of it—and grateful to our (mostly) white ancestors who bequeathed the gifts of Western Civilization."

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/whiteness-and-the-west

"Even conservatives are afraid to state the obvious: The West was created and sustained by whites and is indeed pervaded by whiteness.

"It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me."
—Ishmael, Moby Dick

Like Ishmael, Western elites are appalled by whiteness. Some have compared it to a disease—a plague or cancer; others, to an almost metaphysical force for evil and savagery. Indeed, in a country riven by political and cultural polarization, progressive and conservative elites remain united in their distaste for white identity. However, this convergence arises from different motives and goals.

Progressive elites are hypocritical. Their desire to eradicate white identity is not impelled by a consistent objection to racial identity; it is impelled by a unique contempt for whites, whom they endlessly deride and lampoon. They have even created a factitious identity, "people of color," which is defined wholly by its negation of whiteness. It is that which is not white. In this Manichaean worldview, humans are divided into whites, who are evil, and non-whites, who are good. The Marxist obsession with class is transferred to race. Same script with different actors.

Damon Young's article begins: "Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people."

Conservative elites, on the other hand, are consistent but naïve. They want to transcend white identity, and their antipathy to whiteness is caused by a philosophical objection to racial identity, which they view as primitive and illiberal. The primary sin of progressivism's attitude toward race is not its hypocritical denunciation of white identity, but rather its rejection of individualism. And the answer to mainstream double standards about racial identity is the unifying power of national identity. Tribalism must be transfigured into patriotism.

Both positions are flawed. White identity is not sinister, and it is not some lamentable surrender to primitivism to be moderated by wisdom and tolerance. No. It is a reasonable, even laudable response to pervasive anti-white rhetoric and policy. Whites can and should organize to oppose the spread of an ideology that denigrates them while promoting their replacement in countries their ancestors built. If they do not, they will continue to watch their own history trampled underfoot like rubble in the path of a marauding army. Worse, they will be forced to celebrate while it happens.

Cooperation is commendable; but cooperating with a defector is not. Since progressive elites will not relinquish their anti-white antipathy, their anti-white rhetoric, their anti-white conspiracies, whites should stop playing the losing move in the game. White identity is necessary to fight against anti-white identity. Pleas for fairness are not enough. Game theory 101. As Sean Connery's character Jim Malone put it in The Untouchables, "You wanna know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue."

But white identity is justified not only as a bulwark against anti-white policies and ideologies. It is also a positive good, an attachment that provides meaning and discipline and teaches reverence and humility while encouraging the transmission of a commendable heritage of political, philosophical, institutional, and artistic ideas. Without white identity, European culture, the unique manifestation of the European temperament, will decay and its fragments will either be absorbed into a vast, insipid cultural porridge or they will disappear. The machinery of diversity eventually turns everything into a homogenous cosmopolitan paste.

Admittedly, this makes many people in the center squeamish. They are not used to this style of thinking. Whiteness has for so long been sullied by association with racism, imperialism, and even Nazism that moderates see the explicit embrace of white identity not only as boorish but also as a cawing raven that heralds disaster. Today one celebrates whiteness, tomorrow despotic racism triumphs. But this is largely a misguided fear inculcated by years of propaganda and warnings that any resistance to progressive pieties about race will lead to the next racial massacre or the new Jim Crow.

Also, importantly, white identity does not mean white separatism anymore than Catholic identity means Catholic separatism. Although some people who embrace white identity advocate for separatism, most do not.

Now of course racial identity can lead to conflict—any tribal affiliation can. Families go to war with other families. Communities with other communities. And so on. But this is not an objection to tribal identity, it is an objection to belligerence. And a reminder that violence and competition are an integral part of human nature. Diligence is always needed to maintain a reasonably peaceful society. But such diligence does not require expunging the tribal affinities that make life meaningful. Furthermore, eradicating racial identity, were it possible, would not eradicate tribalism. It would merely transfer it. (The cosmopolitan, for example, is an imperial tribalist whose outgroup is everyone who resists cosmopolitanism.)

White identity, though more popular and more confident than it once was, is still assailed by mainstream pundits and rejected by ordinary moderates on both sides. Often those who attack white identity do not waste time with arguments. They insult, demean and denigrate. But more thoughtful critics do forward arguments, and these should be addressed by advocates of white identity. The three most popular and persuasive of these objections are:

1.It's illiberal

2.It's anti-American/Western

3.It will intensify racial conflict

The first objection that white identity is illiberal rests upon a peculiar and misleading view of liberalism. Liberalism champions individual liberty, legal equality, free markets, rule of law and human rights. None of these are violated by white identity or even by white identity politics. In fact, one could make the opposite case: Modern interdictions on white identity violate the spirit of liberalism and especially violate freedom of association, which is a crucial individual liberty.

Perhaps one can best appreciate this if we compare racial identity to religious identity. Many people value their religious identity; they seek out friends and lovers who share their religious views; and they purposefully avoid people who reject or denigrate their views. On weekends and holidays, they attend meetings with other people who share and affirm their identity. And though such meetings often welcome unbelievers, they generally would not welcome insistent and flamboyant unbelievers, that is, though friendly, these meetings strive to preserve their religious identity and exclude people who threaten it.

All of this is perfectly ordinary. Birds of a religious feather flock together. Catholics can marry Catholics. Baptists, Baptists. Jews, Jews. And so on. Few of us find any of this objectionable, religious freedom being a widely celebrated feature of the United States and the West more broadly. In fact, most of us would find the insistence on religious integration and claims of "religion blindness" baffling and coercive. Religious identity and affiliation are valuable and preventing their elimination is a commendable virtue of liberalism.

The same should apply to white identity in the West—perhaps even more so since the West is a traditionally white civilization. If people find white identity meaningful and edifying, they should be able to endorse and promote it. And they should be allowed to interact with others who share their views and their reverence for white culture. This is not a betrayal of liberalism; it is an integral feature of liberalism.

Public policy is a different matter. Liberal principles should preclude race-based law or institutional favoritism. Ironically, but perhaps not surprisingly, those who most enthusiastically fulminate against white identity often equally enthusiastically applaud racial preferences—so long as those preferences hurt whites. In the war against whiteness, rules are just another weapon in the armamentarium, espoused when convenient and discarded when necessary.

The second objection that white identity is anti-American or anti-Western is often propounded by mainstream conservatives and classical liberals as a rebuttal to the taunts of progressives, who vilipend the West for the sin of whiteness. The claim seems to be that the West is not pervaded by or defined by whiteness, but that it is open and tolerant and cosmopolitan—a set of ideas and institutions that are not defined by race or ethnicity.

As a historical claim, this is obviously false. The West—and its cultural offshoots—was created by white people. Before the 1900s, this was so self-evident that few bothered to articulate it. The United States was founded not as a grand experiment of cosmopolitan democracy, as is sometimes claimed, but as a European, perhaps even English, experiment in republicanism. As John Jay wrote in Federalist No. 2:

"With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

Similar and even more explicitly pro-white passages are available in the writings of the Founders. Thomas Jefferson, who has fallen out of favor because of his views about race and slavery, lauded the superior beauty of whites (as did Benjamin Franklin), writing:

"Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by great and less suffusions of colour in the one [i.e., whites], preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immovable veil of black, which cover all the emotions of the other race?"

The point is not that these claims are aesthetically defensible or edifying, but that they were expressed by two of the most revered Founders. America was conceived as a white country—any other claim is simply mendacious. Modern mainstream conservatives often partially accept this, but argue that the whiteness of early America was like an exoskeleton that was molted with maturity. The blinkered infant country becomes the enlightened adult. America is an idea. The West is an idea. And neither should be conflated with whiteness.

Two things. First, even if one accepted the implausible claim that the West is an idea, a civilization that is not inevitably associated with a particular people, it was associated with a particular people for most of its history. Therefore, the claim that whiteness or white identity is antithetical to the West is false. The West is pervaded by whiteness for an obvious reason: White people created and maintained Western civilization.

And second, because races are different, they create slightly different cultures and institutions. That is, the claim that the the West is an idea which is not associated with a particular people is wrong. If the demographics of the West were changed overnight, the culture would ineluctably change too. Civilizations are not free floating ideas that anybody may absorb and promote. Instead, they are more like the nests of birds or the webs of spiders. If one finds a particular nest or web, one can predict the species that made it. Similarly, if one examines the norms, institutions, and achievements of a civilization, one can predict the race that made it. This is a simile—and it should not be taken too literally. Human culture is vastly more complex than bird or spider "culture," and humans are more plastic than birds and spiders. But this is closer to reality than the cultural blank slatism that prevails among mainstream elites.

When whiteness disappears from the West, the West will have changed irrevocably.

Everything is white supremacy according to some progressives. But the West is pervaded by whiteness and Americans should celebrate Columbus day. In other words, conservatives must accept that the West will always be called "white supremacist" by progressives.

The third objection that white identity will intensify or inflame racial tensions is, I think, the most plausible objection to white identity. The mainstream conservative's desire to promote national identity over any local or parochial identity is not inexplicable or wholly wrong. Identities can become factions and factions can instigate internecine wars that destroy the nation. At minimum, factionalization reduces general social trust and makes collective action more difficult.

Yet, the force of this argument is diminished by several facts. First, progressives eagerly promote black and hispanic and Asian identities while concomitantly promoting anti-white rhetoric and policy. As noted earlier in this essay, refusing to fight identity with identity is unilateral disarmament, an obvious losing move. One might counter that calls for fairness and universalism should be enough to battle effectively against progressive hypocrisy, but often the only way to defeat a defector is to defect as well. Fairness only works when an authority can and will enforce the rules; and in the West, authorities are loath to do so. Double standards about racial identity are orthodox, even while conservatives futilely advocate color blindness.

Second, and more important, the West is historically white. It was created and preserved by white people. And yet white people are being replaced in the very countries their ancestors built. To compound this wrong, they are being asked to celebrate their own diminishment. Diversity is our strength! Of course, progressives promote this replacement with great enthusiasm, but mainstream conservatives have also capitulated. This makes the taboo on white identity even more galling and pernicious. Diminishment is bad. But contending that one cannot even take pride or meaning from one's heritage while being diminished is too much. To demean whiteness is to demean the West, however much contemporary conservatives may deny it in effort to compromise with the regnant ideology.

And third, the most powerful cause of racial tension in the West is not white identity or whiteness; it is the resentment that grows like a poisonous fang from the mouth of other races and their white allies. The color-blind champions have contended that race differences are trivial and that culture is to blame for racial disparities. But this is implausible. And it certainly does not alleviate the bitterness caused by envy of more successful groups, bitterness which is encouraged by progressives and many mainstream outlets who constantly condemn the supposedly pervasive racism that holds blacks and hispanics down. Color blindness will not work. Large racial disparities are inevitable. And thus honesty and an embrace of white identity—not a truculent white identity of course—may in fact ameliorate racial hostility.

Whites should not cower from their identity or their cultural achievements. Instead, they should embrace them. Ethnic pride is normal and healthy; so too is white identity. It does not require hating other groups. Nor does it require domination and subjugation. It simply requires a healthy embrace of this fact: The West is pervaded by whiteness because it was created and sustained by white people. Instead of apologizing for this or running from it, we should be proud of it—and grateful to our (mostly) white ancestors who bequeathed the gifts of Western Civilization."