The Inexpressibly, Unthinkably Obvious

Fred On Everything

Somber Thoughts on Race and Ethnicitye

May 14, 2011

I have just read Jared Taylor’s new book, White Consciousness. The title might lead one to expect racial ranting, but there is none. It is a good read. Jared deals thoughtfully with America’s changing racial and ethnic make-up and the probable consequences. He is usually painted as a hate-monger who regards his bed sheets as evening wear, wants (as Lincoln did) to send blacks back to Africa, shoot Hispanics, and blame Jews for sun spots and loose fillings. Alas, he fails to perform. The book is no more extreme than Pat Buchanan, well documented, and utterly incorrect politically. His crime is asking questions one mustn’t because the answers come up wrong.

For example, he doubts the existence, and the desirability, of racial integration, as very distinct from desegregation. It hasn’t worked, he says.

Isn’t this obvious? I ask my readers, most of whom are white, how many close black friends do you have? When did you last have them over for dinner? We talk mixing. We don’t do it.

I lived a couple of decades in Washington, DC, a city mostly black, and had many white liberal friends. They believed they believed in multiculturalism, but they—we—lived in an overwhelmingly white world: white restaurants, friends, bars, clubs, dances. I can’t remember even once being in an establishment in which the majority, or anything close to it, were black. Whites associate with whites, blacks with blacks. That’s how it is.

Jared points out that most of what we think we are supposed to think about race and ethnicity isn’t true. He notes the mandatory refrain, “Diversity is our strength,” and asks, exactly how is it our strength? I have myself wondered. Name five ways diversity has made the country stronger (without mentioning ethnic restaurants or music).

Um…ah…well…ah…urg.

The book is a curious one in that most of it is obvious though one mustn’t say it. Does not diversity just cause trouble, almost everywhere? As much as one might want it to lead to comity, it doesn’t. Consider: Shiites and Sunnis, Irish Protestants and Catholics, Hutus and Tutsis; blacks, whites and Hispanics in the US; Turks and Kurds; Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Turks and Armenians; Indians and Ugandans; Turks and Germans; Moslems and the French; Moslems and Dutch; Jews in many places; Christians and Moslems in Sudan; Chinese and Indonesians, and so on for pages. None of these groups is evil, but none mix well. Usually they kill each other.

A staple of political correctness is that groups eventually merge into happy indistinguishable citizens. Occasionally, yes, if the groups are similar and want to assimilate: The Irish and Italians in the US did. Jared points out that, whatever one might wish, it usually doesn’t happen. Sunnis and Shiites have been around since the seventh century. They celebrate diversity by exchanging car bombs. In the US, neither blacks nor Amerindians have assimilated to the dominant European culture, nor have the cultures blended.

Jared notes that the US now has fifty million Hispanics, or sixteen percent of the population, expected to rise soon to twice that, as well as thirteen percent of blacks. Now, since I live in Mexico, have a Mexican wife, and speak Spanish at home, it will be difficult to nail me with racial hatred of Hispanics. Nor do I hate blacks. But…is this going to work? Or are we going to end up with three mutually hostile countries in one land? The possibility is real. Several states, including California, have Hispanic majorities, which means that shortly they will have Hispanic governments. If the majority vote as a bloc—bingo.

Aggravating the problem is that the people who most believe that we will eventually be one big happy family are those with the least experience. They have never been in the huge, hopeless, festering slums of Detroit, Chicago, Newark, Washington, on and on and on. These are awful, culturally isolated, and not getting better. If there is an answer, no one has found it.

Americans hardly notice the cost of diversity, as they have never known anything else. Jared was born in Japan to missionary parents, went to Japanese schools, and speaks Japanese. He makes the point that in Japan there is virtually no diversity, and therefore no civil-rights acts, no forced busing, no governmental agencies counting how many of whom one hires, no voting-rights laws, no affirmative action and resulting anger. An employer simply hires the best qualified candidate. And the Japanese do not burn their cities in racial rioting.

We are what we are, a mixed nation, but need we make things worse? Unrestricted immigration may let us feel good about ourselves, but does it really have a happy ending? One maywell wonder what will follow when half of the country is either black or Hispanic.

Further, when some groups are economically and academically way below the dominant culture, hostility and separatism become almost assured. As Jared points out, blacks and Hispanics are on average scholastic disasters. In the schools the gap in achievement is large between white and black, and has proven resistant to everything: Head Start, forced busing, integrated class rooms, segregated class rooms, affirmative action, schools run entirely by blacks, or entirely by whites, and so on. Hispanics in the US are not doing a whole lot better. If the shortfall doesn’t change, it won’t matter whether it is genetic or cultural in origin.

The implications, discussion of which is verboten, are not trivial. The US depends on and rewards deployable intelligence, particularly on IQs bordering on the scary, as in 180 and up. The clearest examples are in Silicon Valley, many of them from the physics department at Stanford or Harvard. These men—almost all are men—have given the US its dominance in technology. They are not just bright, like the valedictorian in your high school. They are off-scale, almost another species.

If you follow the computer/internet racket, you know that they are overwhelmingly white, Jewish (a subset of white, granted), Chinese, Asian Indian, Korean. The black and Hispanic proportion is close to zero if not actually zero. This isn’t because of racial discrimination. Santa Clara runs on raw brains, and doesn’t care what package they come in. Google would hire a giant clam if it could program well enough.

Sez me, this is not going to lead to cheery Kum Bah Yah harmony. As the country becomes a two-tier society—it already is, but as the second tier grows rapidly in size and political potency—how is this going to work?

Jared will disappoint many by not making exterminationist recommendations. But if you want a clear exposition of what is happening, he’s worth a read.