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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: A Reply To Prof. Weissberg A Reply To Prof. Weissberg Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, March 1999 Most readers of AR will agree with Prof. Weissberg’s first four numbered points. Blacks do not have the same average level of abilities as whites, and therefore do not reap the same rewards. Society has discovered no effective way to improve black abilities, and blacks have a well-deserved reputation for violence. Here, however, I part company with an analysis that I think both misinterprets the causes of black violence and is inadequate from a nation-building and perhaps even moral perspective. As a factual matter, I believe Prof. Weissberg is mistaken about the likelihood that blacks would react violently to changes in public policy. Even if racial differences were publicly accepted and the goal of equal outcomes officially abandoned, there would not be wide-spread rioting. This false fear should be set aside. From a nation-building perspective Prof. Weissberg’s argument is defeatist in the short term and suicidal in the long term. He suggests that we have to resign ourselves to a United States that officially proclaims false, egalitarian principles that few people believe. This not only sets in motion a large and increasingly cynical “civil rights” industry, but it also makes it difficult to oppose Third-World immigration. And although as Prof. Weissberg points out, honorable choices still remain open to individual whites, those choices will be swept away if the United States becomes a Third World country. From this perspective, therefore, Prof. Weissberg’s counsels would be unwise even if he were right about the fury and intensity of a black reaction to changes in policy. If theresult of making war on today’s corrupting lies is riots—even on an unprecedented scale—that is the price we must pay to restore the truths without which our civilization cannot survive. Finally, Prof. Weissberg’s faith in private resistance seems too individualistic. As he points out, many of us can avoid the violence and incompetence of our increasingly multi-racial society but do we have no responsibility to those who cannot? Violence There is no doubt that blacks and sometimes Hispanics are prone to rioting. However, they riot because of specific, concrete events and not to protest public policy. Police action is by far the most common cause of riots and has produced mayhem in Miami, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Detroit, and countless other places. It was the acquittal of the officers who beat Rodney King—a specific, easily-understood event—that provoked the most serious race riots of recent times. The assassination of Martin Luther King—yet another specific event—also provoked riots. Blacks simply do not riot for reasons so abstract as a change in policy. This is partly because the rioters are not the people who profit from myths and preferences. As Prof. Weissberg suggests, the rabble that burn buildings and drag whites out of their cars and beat them are criminals who happen to be out of jail at the time. They are untouched by “affirmative action,” do not vote or read newspapers, and have no idea what the Supreme Court does. The blacks who benefit from preferences and who understand the importance of legislation and court cases, that is to say the people who might have reason to riot, do not. However, they are not above predicting riots when they want to scare whites. All this has been amply demonstrated by the entirely peaceful reactions to recent well-publicized changes in public policy that have badly damaged the racial preference system. In the last year or so, California and the state of Washington voted to abolish racial preferences. A judge threw out the preference programs in the city of Houston, Texas. Courts have forbidden discrimination at the University of Texas, and the California university system abandoned it even before the state-wide ballot. In the same period, the Supreme Court outlawed racially gerrymandered districts designed to vote non-whites into office. Not one of these changes—all of which have dismantled policies Prof. Weissberg says we must maintain if we are to keep the peace—provoked violence. Indeed, the Supreme Court has clearly reversed course on racial preferences, and seems so eager to abolish them entirely that “civil rights” groups are afraid to bring a case before it. Jesse Jackson, who understands that court decisions are much more important than police shootings, has tried to mount protests in front of the Supreme Court but he cannot get many blacks to shout “No justice, no peace!” over something as abstract as a court case. Another very important policy change that did not cause riots was welfare reform. It is now much harder to stay on the dole for life, and when Congress was debating reform, black “spokesmen” denounced the changes as “racist,” hinting broadly that cities would burn if blacks didn’t get checks. Now, hundreds of thousands of welfare cases have been bounced from the rolls—without even a hint of riot. Once again, this was predictable: It is men who riot but it is women who get the checks. There is simply no evidence that blacks react violently to a change in the law, a redefinition of welfare eligibility, or academic debates about what causes the IQ gap. Whites mistakenly assume that blacks behave more or less as whites would, that if blacks riot it is for clearly-understood reasons. Whites have been making this mistake for a long time. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 partly for fear that if segregation were not outlawed there would be violence. In fact, by far the worst riots of the 1960s occurred after the Civil Rights Act passed. Congress was wrong then and Prof. Weissberg is wrong today. Chicago blacks will go on the rampage to celebrate a Bulls victory in a basketball championship but they will not riot for more places at Harvard or even for more welfare. Blacks are violent, to be sure, but not for the reasons whites think. Dishonesty In my view, it is constant dishonesty about racial equality—dishonesty Prof. Weissberg seems to think we must learn to live with—that makes blacks and, now, Hispanics more likely to riot. The current obligatory myth is that blacks are exactly, mathematically, geometrically equal to whites (except perhaps in sports, though it opens the door to other, less favorable, comparisons to admit this). Therefore if, as Prof. Weissberg points out, they are not reaping the same economic rewards as whites it can only be because whites are oppressing them. And, indeed, white society must be harboring prodigious amounts of racism if that is what is keeping blacks at the low levels at which we find them. Since every difference in achievement must be due to “racism,” virtually every white person must be part of a grand plot to keep blacks down. Of course the only thing accomplished by telling blacks that whites cause all their problems is to make blacks hate whites. Why shouldn’t they? It is hard to get through the day without reading some sinister account about racist policemen or bankers or teachers or insurance agents or corporate executives beavering away at the great national project of black oppression. It is this hatred of whites—born of the egalitarian lie—that works out its ugly course in the terrible statistics on interracial violence. Since blacks hear over and over that whites are responsible for everything that goes wrong for them, just about any act of hatred can be justified as “payback.” Perpetuating the egalitarian myth only justifies—and invites—”payback.” Many whites think the egalitarian myth keeps the peace, and that blacks would react violently to hard discussions about race and IQ. Once again, this is a groundless fear. The leaders of demonstrations against Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Philippe Rushton, and Michael Levin have almost always been whites. My own experience in speaking about race and IQ at universities has been similar. There are usually a few militants who make a fuss, but most blacks are fascinated by straight talk about race, and many are genuinely pleased to meet a white man with whom they can have a completely honest conversation. Race relations in the United States were better, not worse, when everyone took it for granted that the races were different. This is not surprising, since societies always work better when they are based on fact rather than fantasy. Although today’s myth requires us to believe that blacks were constantly chafing under the restrictions of pre-1960s “racism,” the “civil rights” movement was largely manufactured by whites. Especially in the south, many blacks were not at all unhappy with secure, comfortable and, yes, subordinate relations with whites whom they liked and respected. Relations would only improve if blacks learned that whites are not trying to harm them, and that differences in achievement are not the work of malicious “racists.” Hatred of whites—inevitable in any society that preaches egalitarian dogma—is far more likely to be an ingredient in rioting than are the details of government policy. For all these reasons, Professor Weissberg’s main argument for suggesting we must tolerate the status quo does not hold up. Indeed, false egalitarian doctrine does not curb black violence; it stimulates it. It may therefore be unnecessary to address Professor Weissberg’s other points, but thoughtful opinions deserve thoughtful replies. Professor Weissberg seems to think the country can go on for a long time mouthing egalitarian platitudes while most people quietly avoid their consequences. I believe it is fatal for a country to try to build a society on lies, especially if no one believes them. We must not reconcile ourselves to the deeply corrupting equivalent of the old Soviet joke: “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” A nation dedicated to principles that virtually no one bothers to believe breeds cynicism so deep that it corrodes the very basis of nationhood. We are not yet at this point. I disagree with Professor Weissberg—perhaps naïvely—in that I suspect many of the uplift specialists who operate the preference system really do think utopia will be upon us when white people are finally cleansed of sin. These people must be persuaded of their error, and if that is impossible they must be removed from positions of authority. The alternative is an endless deepening of the psychological and intellectual rot that pervades every area of national discourse. And the logic of that rot means that non-white engineers and executives cannot forever be given fancy titles but no responsibility. If we take Prof. Weissberg’s advice, eventually an affirmative-action surgeon will kill your daughter, or an incompetent pilot will fly your family into the ground. As a strictly economic matter, Prof. Weissberg is right to point out that the United States does not have an army of unemployed whites pushed into the poorhouse by the preference system. However, aside from the very real individual casualties of that system—people turned away from college or a job—the egalitarian myth has worked untold damage on untold numbers of people. The myth has made it impossible for whites to draw the line and maintain their neighborhoods and institutions—and who can measure the tragedy of the millions of Americans who haveseen their schools and cities turn into outposts of Mexico or Liberia? Every once-happy street that is now desolate, every flight to the suburbs, every working-class family that must scrimp to pay for private school is a tragedy. And greater still is the tragedy of those who cannot flee and who cannot pay. Prof. Weissberg got his son transferred out of a class taught by an affirmative-action incompetent. Not all of us can do that. The greatest victims of egalitarianism, however, are the whites who are killed, raped, or robbed by people with whom they would have never come into contact—or with whom their contacts would have been very different—in a society that recognized the importance of race. For a few whites, the forced integration that egalitarian doctrine requires is nothing short of a death sentence. Still, the worst long-term consequence of egalitarian doctrine is to make it much more difficult to oppose Third-World immigration. Americans who know in their bones that their country is being given away to aliens dare not say so, and they watch in silent horror as non-whites shove aside their culture and way of life. For this reason alone, whatever the costs may be, whites must either challenge the dominant racial myths or watch their nation subside into Third-World squalor. Prof. Weissberg writes that we must keep things in proportion, and that because most of us, most of the time, can pick a path through the hazards of present-day multiracialism, “a grand crusade is not obligatory.” A grand crusade may seem disproportionate to those who can avoid the worst. With a little money, anyone can spend his life quite agreeably in the receding but still ample civilized zones. But as the members of any healthy people know instinctively, our lives do not begin and end with ourselves alone. No nation was ever built by atomized individuals and no nation can long survive if its citizens cease to see any further than the boundaries of their own restricted lives. We are the heirs to a civilization that is thousands of years old. It is ours to cherish and defend. It could not have been built by men who were content to manage decline and let their children manage yet more decline. We have a purpose and a cause that go well beyond calculations of which truths might cause a riot and which might not. Our survival depends on our willingness to speak the truth no matter what the cost, and on our unwavering pursuit of the justice and wisdom that can come only from the truth.
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#1. To: Tauzero (#0)
Outstanding – bookmark for later.
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