[Adapted from the latest Radio Derb, now available exclusively on VDARE.com.]
I hold the eccentric opinion that effective social policies should be based on truth about the world. That includes the biological world—the world of living creatures, to which our species belongs. Social policies that are not thus based will fail, leaving society—that’s us—worse off than before. In that spirit I’m a Race Realist.
Our species, like any other species with wide distribution, consists of local groups—races—separated from each other for many hundreds—even thousands—of generations, sometimes in radically different living environments. These groups exhibit different statistical profiles on all kinds of heritable traits. That’s just Biology 101.
We now have multiracial societies where descendants of these groups live together under a single common legal and cultural system. We see those statistical differences plain, in every multiracial society. Here in the U.S.A. blacks, whites, and Northeast Asians present strikingly different statistical profiles in all sorts of categories: presence in AP Math classes, arrests for crimes of violence, and so on.
These statistical differences, now known as inequities—some of them very striking indeed—are not the fault of anyone other than Mother Nature.
Here, however, we encounter the sad truth I expressed in my book We Are Doomed.
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
When one of those statistical differences results in worse social outcomes for one race compared with another, it is natural—just as natural as the differences themselves! —for the less-advantaged race to blame the more-advantaged one for making the difference happen.
The blame can take different forms.
- They conspire to keep us down!
or
- Maybe they don’t conspire to keep us down; but their ancestors conspired to keep our ancestors down, and the effects linger!
or the theory of “systemic racism,” currently very respectable in the U.S.A.
- They, or their ancestors, constructed a social system that is, in and of itself, regardless of anyone’s present intentions, designed to keep us down!
or just
- They cheat!
And these blame theories aren’t fantastic. There really have been historical examples of one race conspiring to keep another race down, although you can argue that this or that example was not driven by blind malice but by frank, practical accommodation of innate race differences. There are also peculiar cases, like the Hindu caste system, where biology and sociology work on each other in ways we don’t completely understand.
The different social outcomes by race—those inequities—that we see in today’s U.S.A., however, are sufficiently well explained by race realism. Races exist and races differ statistically in all heritable traits: size, shape, color, strength, disease susceptibility, behavior, intelligence, personality.
Can we get to a place where such simple, straightforward truths are widely accepted and endorsed by our Ruling Class?
Perhaps not. Perhaps our tribal impulses—innate, wired in, part of our human nature—are too strong. Probably no more than half of America’s current adult population could successfully complete a course in basic statistics. By contrast, close to a hundred percent of us are capable of blaming other people for our own failures.
Truth is truth none the less, and we should honor those who speak the truth against mighty headwinds of social disapproval. Magna est veritas et praevalebit: “the truth is great and shall prevail.”
A fictional schoolboy once mis-translated the Latin original as “the truth is great and shall prevail a bit.”
I’ll allow that’s closer to our everyday experience, but I’ll take what I can get.
Hence my extravagant admiration for Jared Taylor, proprietor of the American Renaissance. I alerted you to the fact that he was speaking to a student group at Arizona State University on September 9th. Based on the experiences of myself and others—Amy Wax, for example—I wondered whether the college bureaucrats would allow Jared’s talk to proceed; and if they did allow it, whether it would end with broken windows and neck braces.
To ASU’s great credit, Jared’s speech did proceed as scheduled. VDARE.com’s own correspondent Reginald De Chantillon posted his coverage of the event here:
In summary, the ASU CRU sponsored event with Jared Taylor was an outstanding success that saw him in his first campus appearance in ten years, during which he brought needed information to a new and young audience.
(I confess to being a bit baffled by that name, “College Republicans United.” College Republicans are not united. At Arizona State, there is a rival student group to College Republicans United called just “College Republicans.” That group joined with the anarchists and anti-white activists on campus to denounce CRU’s invitation to Jared. That split of course reminds us that on a national scale, the Republican Party is on the same page as radical Democrats where honest speaking about race is concerned. Perhaps that’s the whole idea of CRU’s chosen name—to make a joke of Establishment Republican cowardice and cuckery).
But the surprisingly neutral coverage of that ASU event has left me wondering: Might we be about to enter a new interglacial?
In geology, an interglacial period is one of the warm spells that punctuate an Ice Age. An Ice Age lasts for millions of years. Within an Ice Age there are these warm spells—interglacials—lasting mere thousands of years. The glaciers retreat for a while, then they come back.
In 2009 I hypothesized that there had been a modest flowering of honesty about race in the mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s, tapering off thereafter as we returned to the previous hypocrisies—like glaciers retreating for a while, then coming back. I even attempted to quantify this “interglacial” period by counting the number of relatively race-realist books year by year. (I think Peter Brimelow actually coined the term “interglacial.”)
There’s definitely something to it—to my hypothesis, I mean. Back in the 1990s Jared Taylor was appearing on C-SPAN. That’s been more than twenty years of zero progress in advancing “equity”—that is, equal outcomes by race—in spite of mighty efforts [Affirmative Action Was Banned at Two Top Universities. They Say They Need It., by Stephanie Saul, NYT, August 22, 2022] and vast expenditures.
It’s also been twenty years of increasingly desperate attempts to create equality by means of increasingly brazen anti-white measures on the part of both private and public organizations. Here’s a selection just from the past few days; and I’ll confess I lifted it from American Renaissance’s handy aggregator of news stories about anti-white Discrimination.
- Headline: Amazon Faces Suit Over $10k Offer Made Exclusively to “Black, Latinx, and Native American Entrepreneurs.”
- Headline: After Attempting Racially Segregated Welcome Week Events, UC San Diego Edits Event Page to Include Students of All Races.
- Headline: No-Down-Payment Mortgages for Non-Whites.
- Headline: No Whites Allowed: Pfizer Fellowship Flagrantly Violates the Law, Lawyers Say.
- Headline: American Express Slapped With Lawsuit Alleging Discrimination Against White Employees.
- Headline: [Teachers Union head]Randi Weingarten Appears to Endorse Minneapolis District Policy to Lay off White Teachers First.
- Headline: Berkeley Co-Op Bans White People From Common Areas.
And so on. As anti-white measures get ever more shameless white Americans are bound to start Noticing in spite of all the heavy school and workplace indoctrination sessions against Noticing.
This should be especially the case for young people just entering into the main body of society and suddenly seeing—and not just seeing but experiencing—how empty all the cant about “White Privilege” is.
I know from personal contacts that when this year’s crop of college graduates go out applying for jobs, the story they hear from their older friends and relatives already in the workforce is that big organizations, both public and private, are diversifying up as fast as they can, so that white and Asian applicants are at a disadvantage in getting hired.
Possibly this is just urban legend; I haven’t seen any statistics confirming it. The point is, though, that true or false, the youngsters are hearing it from people who are in the system and know more about the job market than they do.
This has to be giving young people a good strong nudge towards race realism.
A new interglacial? Possibly.
And sooner or later there comes an interglacial that isn’t an interglacial at all, but the actual end of an Ice Age.
Hey, we can hope. Magna est veritas et praevalebit.
John Derbyshire [email him] writes an incredible amount on all sorts of subjects for all kinds of outlets. (This no longer includes National Review, whose editors had some kind of tantrum and fired him.) He is the author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism and several other books. He has had two books published by VDARE.com com: FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT (also available in Kindle) and FROM THE DISSIDENT RIGHT II: ESSAYS 2013.