More on the West-Is-Evil Narrative

In walking-on-eggshells multiracial America, exit poll data showing an electorate polarized along racial lines is of no interest to mainstream media. Their indifference suggests that we had best take a comprehensive look. Whites supported Governor Romney by landslide proportions, 59 to 39—a minimal estimate because the White category includes millions of people without European ancestry (e.g., Middle Easterners) and Jews, a group that does not identity with the traditional people and culture of Europe and who vote much more like non-Whites.

The White vote total, however, masks a gaping divide among Whites. This divide is illustrated by the demographically and politically extreme states of Mississippi and Vermont. Mississippi’s electorate is 59 percent White, 37 percent black. Mississippi’s Whites voted 89 percent for Romney, and Romney carried Mississippi 55-44. Vermont is 96 percent White, 1 percent black. Vermont’s Whites voted 33 percent for Romney. Obama carried Vermont 67-31.

Real, on-the-ground, daily experience with diversity, it seems, concentrates the minds of White voters. The majority of northern and mid-western Whites have but brief encounters and manufactured images provided by the media, Hollywood, schools and universities to guide their thinking. This dearth of experience precludes thoughtful decision-making.

Minorities supported President Obama by wide margins: 93 percent of African-Americans voted Democratic. 85 percent of Muslim-Americans voted Democratic. 73 percent of Asian Americans voted Democratic. 71 percent of Hispanic Americans voted Democratic. 69 percent of Jewish Americans voted Democratic.

One reason the media ignore such data may be their alarming implications. With roughly one million mostly non-White immigrants arriving in the U. S. each year, with higher birthrates among non-White groups, and with the demographic voting patterns noted above likely to be permanent, Whites’ political power is now in rapid decline. Is it in the interest of those who run mainstream news organizations to have a White population that is thinking about what is happening to them, why it is happening, the rapid pace of White dispossession, or what dispossession will mean for Whites and their posterity?

Secondly, playing no small role in Whites’ displacement, are history and literature. A recurrent theme at TOO is the that Western culture is pervaded by the “West is Evil” narrative (e.g., “The media drumbeat: The West is evil“). This is certainly the case throughout the American educational system.

America’s premiere education historian NYU professor Diane Ravitch, reflecting on her own education in 40s and 50s in the Houston public schools, has observed: “the public schools took it as a given that they should teach a common culture to American youth. . . . We learned about our country’s history not to criticize it, but to celebrate it. . . . [Schools] saw themselves as the agency responsible for assimilating newcomers and transmitting American culture—a culture, they agreed, that had a strong grounding in English literature and Western-European history.”

That was the aggressively assimilationist, 89.5 percent White America of 1950. Now for today’s aggressively anti-assimilationist 63.4 percent White America: “We’ve gone from one extreme to the other,” says Ravitch. “Instead of a simplistic patriotism, we have in our public schools . . . a treatment of American history that emphasizes the nation’s warts and failings and diminishes its genuine accomplishments.”

The warts-and-failings narrative is thought more serviceable in multi-racial America. In Losing our Language : How Multicultural Classroom Instruction is Undermining Our Children’s Ability to Read, Write and Reason (1999), Sandra Stotsky, then a Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, examined leading readers for elementary grades 4 and 6 published in 1993 and 1995:

Beginning in the early 1980s . . . the most effective way to upgrade the status of students whose academic performance in school had barely changed . . . was not so much to enhance it positively through celebratory readings but to reduce the moral and cultural status of the mainstream. To do so, they [educators] began to load the history and literature curriculum with literary works . . . that stressed the flaws and failings of the United States. . . . Although this literature became known facetiously as ‘victim lit’ or ‘White-guilt lit’ for its highlighting of a group’s victimization by White Americans, many teachers believed it was useful precisely because it served to elevate a minority group’s moral status . . . and create guilt in White students. (p. 49)

Even the smallest Whites must be taken down a peg.

In The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn (2003), Ravitch describes how textbook publishers achieve the desired “White guilt effect.” Publishers use elaborate and extensive “bias and sensitivity” guidelines to preemptively censor textbooks. They thus avoid the risk of losing multi-million dollar sales to large public schools systems. Ravitch provides the example of how the “bias and sensitivity” work with textbook publishing giant McGraw-Hill:

The MH [McGraw-Hill] guidelines express barely concealed rage against people of European ancestry. They deride European Americans for exploiting slaves, migrant workers, and factory labor; they excoriate the land rapacity of the pioneers and mock their so-called courage in fighting Native Americans: ‘Bigots and Bigotry,’ say the guidelines, referring to European Americans, ‘must be identified and discussed.’ European Americans, the guidelines suggest, were uniquely responsible for bigotry and exploitation in all human history. (p. 44)

Perfect. No risk there.

The warts-and-failings/The-West-Is-Evil narrative is also central to the mission of American “higher” education. Elizabeth Kantor, the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature, has a PhD in those subjects from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In a presentation on C-Span’s BookTV.org, Kantor describes English professors: “They’re the folks, who probably of everybody in America, hate Western Culture with the deepest and most abiding passion. . . . If anything, they actively want to prevent that culture from being transmitted.  . . . This might explain why a lot of English professors teach Marxism or Freud or history of ballet . . . anything except what they were actually hired to teach.”

Popular culture, too, promotes the narrative, as Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian immigrant, explains in Front Page Magazine: “After we [immigrants] are here, we are told by the popular culture that we are victims.  . . . We are told that the system is rigged, not fair and that ‘Whites’ . . .are racists and bigoted.  . . . In America today, every national origin and race is encouraged to find a minority group to belong to. When I first moved to America, no Muslim women wore the Islamic garb . . . Now many Muslims find power in sticking together, and go back to the Islamic garb and cry victimization.”

British author Theodore Dalrymple has his own memorable term for The-West-Is-Evil/Warts-and-Failings history omnipresent throughout the West. Dalrymple calls it “miserabilist historiography”. In his The New Vichy Syndrome:Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism (2010) Dalrymple writes: “The habit of seeing in the past no glory, but only whatever leads up to our present discontents, has become general and widespread. . . . A kind of miserabilist historiography has become the mark of the sensitive and well-informed ” (p. ix).

Where does miserabilist historiography lead? Dalrymple again: “A belief that one’s history contains nothing good or worthwhile leads either to utopian dreams of a new beginning, or a failure to resist those utopian dreams; in other words to fanaticism or apathy. Fanaticism is resentment in search of power; consumerism is apathy in search of happiness” (p xi).

Ethnomasochism is relatively new phenomenon for the West. In America, for example, “Great Wave” immigrants from 1880 to 1920, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, disembarked in a proud, self-confident America. Immigrants were pressured to give up all things foreign —culture, values, ideas, language — except religion. They were encouraged to embrace everything American, including a celebratory American history. No welfare or affirmative action awaited.

What a difference one century makes! Today all major culture-transmitting institutions — schools, universities, news industry, entertainment industry — advance the warts-and-failings narrative. Status within those institutions is based on embrace of the narrative. The ideology of “diversity” is supreme. Each immigrant is encouraged to define himself or herself in opposition to and as a victim of, the majority. In Congress alone there is the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, the Congressional Asian Pacific-American Caucus, each pursuing particular ethnic interests. Such identity politics makes voting for the party of the Left, the Democratic Party, inevitable.

Unrelenting promulgation of the warts-and-failings/miserabilis historiography/The-West-is-Evil narrative over the past five decades has consequences. It has sapped the confidence of the majority. Phase two, replacing the culpable majority — “electing a new people” some call it — is now well under way. Demographic displacement is most advanced in California. California was 92 percent non-Hispanic White in 1960, according to the Census. Whites will be 39 percent of the California population by July of 2013 — according to recent Census Bureau estimates.

No matter where you live in America, displacement is coming: “Non-Hispanic Whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July [2011], according to Census Bureau data . . . while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history . . . a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by White Europeans” (“Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.” (NYTimes, May 17, 2012).

What to do? Start with the narrative.