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White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century

Book by Jared Taylor · 14 quotes · Diversity, Race, Immigration

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White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century Quotes

“Now that Mexicans can retain their nationality, activist groups encourage them to naturalize and become active in Hispanic causes. There was a huge push in 2007 to naturalize in time for the 2008 elections. Newspapers and television joined church groups and Hispanic activists in a campaign called Ya Es Hora. ¡Ciudadanía! (It’s time. Citizenship!). La Opinión, a Los Angeles newspaper, published full-page advertisements explaining how to apply for citizenship, and the Spanish-language network Univision’s KMEX television station in Los Angeles promoted citizenship workshops on the air. A popular radio personality named Eddie Sotelo ran a call-in contest called “Who Wants to be a Citizen?” in which listeners could win prizes by answering questions from the citizenship exam. In 2008, Janet Murguia, president of La Raza, was frank about why she was part of a widespread effort to register Hispanics to vote: She wanted them to “help shape the political landscape.” In California, where 300,000 people—overwhelmingly Hispanic—were naturalized in 2008, whites were expected to be a minority of the electorate in 2026. Joanuen Llamas, who immigrated legally in 1998, naturalized in 2008 after attending the massive 2006 demonstrations in support of illegal aliens. She said she was inspired by one of the pro-amnesty slogans she had heard: “Today we march, tomorrow we vote.” Hispanics like her are not naturalizing because they love America but because they want to change it.”

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“Another reason for our passivity is the fact that Hispanics are now 16 percent of the population, and their numbers are growing. Politicians from both parties say they cannot afford to alienate Hispanics because of their increasing power at the ballot box. But what do Hispanics want? Amnesty for illegal immigrants and yet more Hispanic immigration. It is folly for white politicians to think they will win the loyalty of Hispanic voters by endorsing policies that increase Hispanic power. As Hispanics gain in numbers and influence, they will replace non-Hispanic politicians with Hispanics. Foolish whites will be shoved out just as blacks shoved out Chris Bell, the white Democratic congressman from Texas [...] who was left sputtering that blacks forgot all about his career of “fighting for diversity” once they had a chance to vote for a black. It is already nearly impossible to discuss immigration rationally, or even enforce laws that are on the books. If we are afraid to take measures that might upset 16 percent of the population, what are our chances of defending larger interests if Hispanics are 20, 30, or even 40 percent of the country? We already have tens of millions of citizens whose primary loyalty is not to the United States but to Mexico. If there were a crisis with Mexico is there any doubt which side they would take? The United States already finds it difficult to advance its own interests against Mexican opposition. As the Mexican-American population grows, it could become impossible.”

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“Benjamin Franklin wrote little about race, but had a sense of racial loyalty. “[T]he Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably [sic] very small,” he observed. “ . . . I could wish their Numbers were increased.” James Madison, like Jefferson, believed the only solution to the problem of racial friction was to free the slaves and send them away. He proposed that the federal government sell off public lands in order to raise the money to buy the entire slave population and transport it overseas. He favored a Constitutional amendment to establish a colonization society to be run by the President. After two terms in office, Madison served as chief executive of the American Colonization Society, to which he devoted much time and energy. At the inaugural meeting of the society in 1816, Henry Clay described its purpose: to “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of the population.” The following prominent Americans were not merely members but served as officers of the society: Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Stephen Douglas, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, Winfield Scott, and two Chief Justices of the Supreme Court, John Marshall and Roger Taney. All opposed the presence of blacks in the United States and thought expatriation was the only long-term solution. James Monroe was such an ardent champion of colonization that the capital of Liberia is named Monrovia in gratitude for his efforts. As for Roger Taney, as chief justice he wrote in the Dred Scott decision of 1857 what may be the harshest federal government pronouncement on blacks ever written: Negroes were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they have no rights which a White man is bound to respect.” Abraham Lincoln considered blacks to be—in his words—“a troublesome presence” in the United States. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates he expressed himself unambiguously: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.” His opponent, Stephen Douglas, was even more outspoken, and made his position clear in the very first debate: “For one, I am opposed to negro citizenship in any form. I believe that this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever, and I am in favor of confining the citizenship to white men—men of European birth and European descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes and Indians, and other inferior races.”

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“Needless to say, what whites now think and say about race has undergone a revolution. In fact, it would be hard to find other opinions broadly held by Americans that have changed so radically. What whites are now expected to think about race can be summarized as follows: Race is an insignificant matter and not a valid criterion for any purpose—except perhaps for redressing wrongs done to non-whites. The races are equal in every respect and are therefore interchangeable. It thus makes no difference if a neighborhood or nation becomes non-white or if white children marry outside their race. Whites have no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as whites. Given the past crimes of whites, any expression of racial pride is wrong. The displacement of whites by non-whites through immigration will strengthen the United States. These are matters on which there is little ground for disagreement; anyone who holds differing views is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. By these standards, of course, most of the great men of America’s past are morally suspect, and many Americans are embarrassed to discover what our traditional heroes actually said. Some people deliberately conceal this part of our history. For example, the Jefferson Memorial has the following quotation from the third president inscribed on the marble interior: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [the Negroes] shall be free.” Jefferson did not end those words with a period, but with a semicolon, after which he wrote: “nor is it less certain that the two races equally free, cannot live under the same government.” The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. A more contemporary approach to the past is to bring out all the facts and then repudiate historical figures. This is what author Conor Cruise O’Brien did in a 1996 cover story for The Atlantic Monthly. After detailing Jefferson’s views, he concluded: “It follows that there can be no room for a cult of Thomas Jefferson in the civil religion of an effectively multiracial America . . . . Once the facts are known, Jefferson is of necessity abhorrent to people who would not be in America at all if he could have had his way.” Columnist Richard Grenier likened Jefferson to Nazi SS and Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, and called for the demolition of the Jefferson Memorial “stone by stone.” It is all very well to wax indignant over Jefferson’s views 170 years after his death, but if we expel Jefferson from the pantheon where do we stop? Clearly Lincoln must go, so his memorial must come down too. Washington owned slaves, so his monument is next. If we repudiate Jefferson, we do not just change the skyline of the nation’s capital, we repudiate practically our entire history. This, in effect, is what some people wish to do. American colonists and Victorian Englishmen saw the expansion of their race as an inspiring triumph. Now it is cause for shame. “The white race is the cancer of human history,” wrote Susan Sontag. The wealth of America used to be attributed to courage, hard work, and even divine providence. Now, it is common to describe it as stolen property. Robin Morgan, a former child actor and feminist, has written, “My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others’ agony.”

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“In 1998, Anthony Williams was elected mayor of Washington, DC. Mr. Williams had attended Harvard and Yale, clearly wanted to run an efficient city government, and had considerable white support. Although he was black, Mr. Williams left many blacks wondering if he was “black enough.” A black writer for the Washington Post raised “the question of whether whites, assuming they care one way or the other, even understand the concept of ‘How black is a black person?’ ” He went on to say that Mayor Williams had fired incompetents, but that “the firings hurt black workers most of all, creating the impression—fairly or unfairly—that he has little or no special concern for people who look like him.” A black politician who is more concerned about efficiency than about jobs for blacks may not be black enough. The writer concluded: “Blackness . . . is a state of common spiritual idealism that serves to unite the group for the purpose of survival. . . . [T]here is not one person of color who can separate himself or herself from the rest of the people of color.” The mayoral election in Washington 12 years later raised exactly the same question. Incumbent Adrian Fenty was black, but not black enough. Like Mr. Williams before him, he hired people for their ability, and not one of his top three appointments in public education was black, nor were the police chief, fire chief, or attorney general. “How can there not be one African-American leader in that cluster?” asked his 2010 challenger, Vincent Gray, also black, in a question that resonated with black voters. Mr. Gray went on to win with 80 percent of the black vote. A columnist who is himself black explained Mr. Fenty’s loss: “In short, the mayor appointed the best people he could find, instead of running a racial patronage system, as a black mayor of a city with a black majority is apparently expected to.”

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“Whites may be surprised by the strength of black voter solidarity. Chris Bell, a white Democratic congressman from Texas, was redistricted into a largely black area and promptly crushed in the 2004 Democratic primary by the former head of the Houston chapter of the NAACP. He felt betrayed: He said he had spent his entire career “fighting for diversity, championing diversity,” and was dismayed that “many people do not want to look past the color of your skin.” This only demonstrated how little Mr. Bell understood blacks. As Bishop Paul Morton of the St. Stephen Full Gospel Baptist Church in New Orleans said of black voters, “I’ve talked to some people who say, ‘I don’t care how bad the black is, he’s better than any white.’” Many blacks also expect all blacks to vote the same way. Jesse Jackson criticized Alabama congressman Artur Davis for voting against Mr. Obama’s signature medical insurance legislation, saying, “You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.” Racial consciousness explains why President Barack Obama drew support even from blacks who ordinarily vote Republican. No fewer than 87 percent of blacks who identified themselves as conservatives said they would vote for him. In the three states that track party registration by race—Florida, Louisiana, and North Carolina—blacks were dropping off the Republican rolls in record numbers and rallying to the Democrats. As one GOP black explained during the primaries, “Most black Republicans who support John McCain won’t tell you this, but if Barack Obama is the nominee for the Democratic ticket, they will go into the voting booth in November and vote for Obama.” “Among black conservatives, they tell me privately, it would be very hard to vote against him [Obama] in November,” said black conservative radio host Armstrong Williams. During the campaign, former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown said, “I think most white politicians do not understand that the race pride we [blacks] all have trumps everything else.”

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“In 2010, the state of Arizona passed a law that made illegal immigration a state offence, but the prospect of even one American state taking illegal immigration seriously was anathema to Hispanic groups. The National Council of La Raza said the Arizona law reflected “the rhetoric of hate groups, nativists, and vigilantes.” MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund) said the law “launches Arizona into a spiral of pervasive fear.” The president of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), Rosa Rosales, called it a “racist law,” and an official with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said it would “open the door to discrimination and racial profiling.” One of Arizona’s congressmen, Democrat Raul Grijalva, called for a boycott of his own state. The law, of course, said nothing about race; it merely paralleled largely unenforced provisions of federal immigration law. The people of Arizona were tired of playing host to an estimated half million illegal immigrants no matter where they came from. Hispanic groups were furious because they feared fellow Hispanics might be deported. We can assume they would have had no objections to the law if most illegal immigrants were Irishmen or Poles. There was irony but nothing unusual when Hispanics, who were acting out of pure racial solidarity, accused Arizonans, who were trying to enforce federal law, of racism.”

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“If some Mexican-Americans have their way, they will not have to go back to Mexico for burial; Mexico will come to them. What is called the Reconquista movement aims to break the Southwest off from the United States and reattach it to Mexico or establish it as an independent, all-Hispanic nation, thus reversing the territorial consequences of the Mexican-American war. Reconquista is widely promoted on college campuses. Charles Truxillo, a professor of Chicano studies at the University of New Mexico, thinks “Republica del Norte” would be a good name for a new Hispanic nation, which would contain all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas and the southern part of Colorado. The Albuquerque-born Prof. Truxillo says the new nation is “an inevitability,” and should be created “by any means necessary.” He doubts violence will be necessary, however, because shifting demographics will make the transition seem natural.”

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“Vicente Fox, who succeeded Mr. Zedillo and was president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, institutionalized the policy of ensuring that Mexican-Americans remained Mexican. In 2002, his government established the Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior (Institute for Mexicans Abroad) to promote “a more comprehensive approach” to promoting Mexican loyalty. One method was to invite Mexican-American elected officials to Mexico, to deepen their Mexican identity. In October 2003, for example, the Instituto invited 30 American state legislators and mayors for two days in Mexico City, where they met lawmakers, ministry officials, scholars, and advocates for immigrants. The Instituto had plans to bring 400 Mexican-American officials on similar trips every year. The Instituto also sends representatives to the United States. Jacob Prado, counselor for Latino affairs at the Mexican Embassy, explained to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials that it was in “Latino officials like yourselves that thousands of immigrants from Mexico find a political voice.” He went on to explain: “Mexico will be better able to achieve its full potential by calling on all members of the Mexican Nation, including those who live abroad, to contribute with their talents, skills and resources.” American citizens who hold elective office in the United States are still expected to be “members of the Mexican Nation.” One Instituto official is Juan Hernandez. Born in the United States, and therefore a US citizen, Mr. Hernandez was at one time a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, but made no secret of his real loyalties. In 2002 he wrote that he had “been commissioned to bring a strong and clear message from the president to Mexicans abroad: Mexico is one nation of 123 million citizens—100 million who live in Mexico and 23 million who live in the United States.” On ABC’s Nightline on June 7, 2001, he explained, “I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think ‘Mexico first.’ ” Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, who later became national security advisor to Vicente Fox, wrote in the Mexican newspaper El Siglo de Torreon that the Mexican government should work with the “20 million Mexicans” in the United States to advance Mexican “national interests.” Vicente Fox’s interior secretary Santiago Creel once complained, “It’s absurd that (the United States) is spending as much as it’s spending to stop immigration flows that can’t be stopped . . . .” When he took over in 2004 as the man in charge of border relations with the United States, Arturo Gonzalez Cruz explained that his ultimate goal was to see the border disappear entirely. Mr. Fox himself insisted that any measure the United States took to arrest or deport illegal immigrants was a violation of human rights.”

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“In 2000, interior minister [of France] Jean-Pierre Chevenement said Europe should become a place of race-mixing (métissage) and that governments should make efforts to persuade Europeans to accept this. In 2007, both candidates in the French presidential election took the same view. Socialist Ségolène Royale, said that “miscegenation is an opportunity for France,” adding that she would encourage immigration and would be “president of a France that is mixed-race and proud of it.” Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative candidate who won the election, said he was proud of “a France that understands that creation comes from mixing, from openness, and from coming together—I’m not afraid of the word—from miscegenation.” It is common to project contemporary views upon the past. George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni has written that people who marry across racial lines are “accepting the core American value of openness and living up to its tenets.” Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic has written that “miscegenation has always been the ultimate solution to America’s racial divisions.” These two got it wrong. For most of American history, miscegenation was the ultimate nightmare for whites. That whites should now see it as the ultimate solution to racial conflict is a sign not only of how radically our thinking has changed but also of how stubborn racial conflict turned out to be. Civil rights laws were supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. To propose now that the only solution to racial enmity is to eliminate race itself through intermarriage is to admit that different races cannot live together in peace. Of course, widespread miscegenation would not eliminate race; it would eliminate whites. Whites are no more than 17 percent of the world’s population and are having perhaps seven percent of the world’s children. No one is proposing large-scale intermarriage for Africa or Asia. Nor would mixing eliminate discrimination. Blacks, South Americans, and Asians discriminate among themselves on the basis of skin tone even when they are the same race. Thomas Jefferson looked forward to the day when whites would people the Americas from north to south. Today such a view would be universally scorned because it would mean the displacement of other populations, but the revolution in thinking among today’s whites leaves no grounds to argue against their own displacement through immigration or disappearance through intermarriage. Whites may have a sentimental attachment to the notion of a white America, but if races are interchangeable that attachment is irrational. If the only legitimate group sentiment for whites is guilt, perhaps it is only right that they should retreat gracefully before the advances of peoples they have wronged. There could hardly be more striking proof not only of how the thinking of whites has changed but how different it is from that of every other racial group. All non-whites celebrate their growing numbers and influence—just as whites once did. Whites—not only in America but around the world—cheerfully contemplate their disappearance as a distinct people.”

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“Crews that fight forest fires in Oregon are now so heavily Hispanic that in 2003, the Oregon Department of Forestry required that crew chiefs be bilingual. In 2006, the department started forcing out veterans. Jaime Pickering, who used to run a squad of 20 firefighters, says the rule means “job losses for Americans—the white people.” Zita Wilensky, a 16-year veteran, was the only white employee of Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Unit. Her co-workers made fun of her and called her gringa and Americana. Miss Wilensky says her boss gave her 60 days to learn Spanish, and fired her when she failed to do so. It is increasingly common, therefore, for Americans to be penalized because they cannot speak Spanish, but employers who insist that workers speak English are guilty of discrimination. In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced a small Catholic college in San Antonio to pay $2.4 million to housekeepers who were required to speak English at work. There are now about 45 million Hispanics in the country. What will the status of Spanish be when there are 130 million Hispanics, as the Census Bureau projects for 2050? In 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the prohibition against discrimination because of “national origin” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that if a foreigner cannot speak to a government agency in his own language he is a victim. Executive Order 13166 required all local governments that receive federal money (all of them, essentially) to translate official documents into any language spoken by at least 3,000 people in the area or 10 percent of the local population. It also required interpreters for non-English speakers. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that hospitals alone would spend $268 million every year implementing Executive Order 13166, and state departments of motor vehicles would spend $8.5 million. OMB estimated that communicating with food stamp recipients who don’t speak English would cost $25.2 million per year.”

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“Different groups have different priorities. Because Hispanics tend to have low incomes, they support increases in government services, even at the cost of more taxes for others. Most Hispanics supported all five spending initiatives on the May, 2005 California ballot; most whites opposed all five. Prof. Nikolai Roussanov of the Wharton School has found that both blacks and Hispanics spend 50 percent less on medical care than do whites with similar incomes, and that blacks and Hispanics spend 16 percent and 30 percent less, respectively, on education than do whites with similar incomes. Many studies have also found that blacks and Hispanics save less than whites for future goals like retirement. How do they spend their money? Blacks are more likely than whites to buy lottery tickets and to spend disproportionately more money doing so. Prof Roussanov says the biggest difference, however, is that blacks and Hispanics spend 30 percent more than whites with the same income on what he calls “visible goods” meant to convey status, such as clothing, cars, and jewelry. Different groups have different buying patterns. In 2004, Sears decided to turn 97 of its 870 locations into “multicultural stores,” in which clothing, signs, décor, and displays were geared to Hispanics and blacks, who do not have the same tastes and body sizes as whites. Hispanics want “stylish,” form-fitting clothing in bright, loud colors, and the highest heels available. Blacks need more “plus” sizes. In the multicultural stores, Sears displays the loud clothing prominently, near entrances. Clothing white women are likely to buy, such as the more traditional Land’s End line, is in the back. For years there was a Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum in Victorville, California, filled with Roy Rogers memorabilia and even his horse Trigger—stuffed, of course. That part of California is now heavily Hispanic, and no one is interested in Roy Rogers. The museum moved to Branson, Missouri, which has become a resort catering to bluegrass and country music fans, who are overwhelmingly white. Victorville immigrant Rosalina Sondoval-Marin did not miss the museum. “Roy Rogers? He doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “There’s a revolution going on, and it don’t include no Roy Rogers.”

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“While whites were still the majority, they established preferences for blacks and Hispanics that took such deep root that Congress and state legislatures have been powerless to abolish them. These programs would provoke outrage if they were practiced in favor of whites, but they have been partially curbed only by state ballot initiatives and equivocal Supreme Court decisions. Demography would change this. In 2006, the state of Michigan voted to abolish racial preferences in college admissions and state contracting, but the measure passed only because whites were still a majority. Eighty-five percent of blacks and 69 percent of Hispanics voted to maintain racial preferences for themselves. When they have a voting majority nothing will prevent non-whites from reestablishing and extending preferences. Are there portents in the actions of Eric Holder, the first black attorney general, appointed by the first black president? J. Christian Adams, a white Justice Department lawyer resigned in protest when the department dropped a case of voter intimidation the previous administration had already won by default against the New Black Panther Party. In this 2008 case, fatigue-clad blacks waved billy clubs at white voters and yelled such things as “You are about to be ruled by the black man, cracker!” Mr. Adams called it “the simplest and most obvious violation of federal law I saw in my Justice Department career.” He believed the decision to dismiss the case reflected hostility to the rights of whites. He said some of his colleagues called selective prosecution “payback time,” adding that “citizens would be shocked to learn about the open and pervasive hostility within the Justice Department to bringing civil rights cases against nonwhite defendants on behalf of white victims.” Christopher Coates, who was the head of the voting section of the Civil Rights Division, agreed with this assessment. In sworn testimony before Congress, he called the dismissal of the Black Panthers case a “travesty of justice” and described a “hostile atmosphere” against “race-neutral enforcement” of the Voting Rights Act. He said the department had a “deep-seated opposition to the equal enforcement of the Voting Rights Act against racial minorities and for the protection of white voters who have been discriminated against.” How will the department behave when whites become a minority?”

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“Although political representation by racial quota is the effect of government policy, it is not yet respectable to call for it explicitly. When President Bill Clinton tried to appoint Lani Guinier as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights her appointment failed, in part because of Miss Guinier’s advocacy of representation by race. In her view, if blacks were 13 percent of the US population, 13 percent of seats in Congress should be set aside for them. It does not cause much comment, however, when the Democratic Party applies this thinking to its selection of delegates to presidential conventions. Each state party files an affirmative action plan with the national party, and many states set quotas. For the 2008 Democratic Convention, California mandated an over-representation of non-white delegates. Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics were only 4.6, 5.2, and 21.1 percent, respectively, of the Democratic electorate, but had to be 16, 9, and 26 percent of the delegates. Other states had similar quotas. Procedures of this kind do lead to diversity of delegates but suggest that race is more important than policy. Perhaps it is. In Cincinnati, where blacks are 40 to 45 percent of the population, Mayor Charlie Luken complained that the interests of blacks and whites seemed so permanently in conflict that “race gets injected into every discussion as a result.” In other words, any issue can become racial. In 2004, the Georgia legislature passed a bill to stop fraud by requiring voters to show a state-issued ID at the polls. People without drivers’ licenses could apply for an ID for a nominal fee. Black legislators felt so strongly that this was an attempt to limit the black vote that they did not merely vote against the law; practically the entire black delegation stormed out of the Capitol when the measure passed over their objections. In 2009, when Congress voted a stimulus bill to get the economy out of recession, some governors considered refusing some federal funds because there were too many strings attached. Jim Clyburn, a black South Carolina congressman and House Majority Whip, complained that rejecting any funding would be a “slap in the face of African-Americans.” Race divides Cook County, Illinois, which contains Chicago. In 2007, when the black president of the county board, Todd Stroger, could not get his budget passed, his floor leader William Beavers-also black—complained that it was “because he’s black.” He said there was only one real question: 'Who’s gonna control the county—white or black—that’s all this is.”

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