Freedom of Association and the Right of Exclusion: The Rights Before All Others, Part 1

What follows is a 2005 exchange between Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court and Joshua Rosenkranz, an attorney arguing for the unconstitutionality of a law that denied federal funding to law schools that barred military recruiters from campus.[1]

Justice Breyer: — So, in fact, to be clear, you also think schools that are angry at the military because they’re too favorable to gays in the military, they have the same right.

Mr. Rosenkranz: Absolutely, Your–

Justice Breyer: Okay.

Mr. Rosenkranz: — Honor, because–

Justice Breyer: And also the same right Bob Jones University, because they disapprove of social mixing of the races?

Mr. Rosenkranz: — If… to answer the first hypothetical first, if that’s a matter of conscience, absolutely–

Justice Breyer: All right, so–

Mr. Rosenkranz: — if we’re talking–

Justice Breyer: — so, what… and there are a lot of people in the country, they may… there’s few, anyway… may not believe in either affirmative action, they may not believe in… they may not believe in diversity, they may not… they may even believe in racial segregation, for all I know.

I hope there are not too many…  I would like an answer to my question, because I’m thinking, as you correctly say, if you have that right, so do all the worst segregationists you can imagine, et cetera…

Rosenkranz lost his case.  His client, the law schools, opposed military recruiters on campus because of the military’s exclusion of gays.  In other words, they wanted to exclude the excluders.  The justices unanimously rejected the argument on grounds that if the law schools accepted federal money, they also had to accept Congressionally-set conditions – which were, in this case, that they had to allow military recruiters on campus (aka the Solomon Amendment).

Years ago, I listened to the replayed arguments on the radio while driving home from a law firm dinner in Washington, D.C.  I anticipated that one of the justices – probably a Jewish one – would bring up race.  Here was a lawyer – himself a liberal, and likely Jewish as well – arguing for a right of association.  Justice Breyer,[2] poised high on the bench, raced to the worst-case scenario for his tribe:  if we grant a right of association here, despite the liberal thrust of the request, we’ll create precedent that could be used by “all the worst segregationists you can imagine.”

In this article I propose that Whites who believe in racial segregation – who if measured by revealed preferences would in fact be many more than Justice Breyer hopes exist – have more than a First Amendment right to express that belief.  They have the right to it actually.  They have, simply, a right of group association.  And they have the right to pursue its necessary correlate, exclusion of non-Whites.  Whites even have a right of separation from other Whites, though (tellingly), this is not controversial.

The proposition can stand without need for violence, unfair treatment of non-Whites, denigration or “hatred” of others, belief in so-called “supremacy,” denial of any other group their own right to association and exclusion; and it aligns with international law.  The Earth is a big planet with a lot of square footage; we need not all live on the same few.

More than 50 years ago, the U.N. declared that “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”[3]   The drafters of this declaration no doubt had indigenous Third-Worlders in mind, but imagine them attempting to explain that White First-Worlders do not have the same rights.

Within White advocacy circles, this proposition is a given.  But it needs articulation, elaboration, and justification.  As the United States and the rest of the West lurch more surely toward White minority status, reasoning for associational rights will need to be better understood as Whites seek stronger protection from the courts and legislators.  This protection will be sought both under current political systems and ones that are hoped to emerge from the inevitable ashes.  Indeed, it may form the basis of systems yet to come.

This treatment addresses the pursuit of associational rights in social and political, rather than military, contexts:  successful armed secession by Whites, of course, would need much less justification.  It would simply be.  But from fantastic (and presently unrealistic) notions of a “White homeland” somewhere in the Pacific Northwest to the desire of a White homeowner to rent only to fellow Whites in an otherwise bustling multiracial area of the Northeast, the justifications are the same.

I will provide evidence that racially homogenous societies are happier, healthier, more efficient and more productive.  Like the traditional family unit of a married father and mother and their natural children, they are an indispensably solid template of a functional sovereign political unit.  Millennia of evolutionary forces have made it so.[4]  The racially homogenous society is like a balanced ecosphere or healthy human body – natural in form, all parts working (more or less) together.  For White advocates of faith, I will set forth a limited argument that racially homogenous societies are consistent with principles of the Christian Bible.  For those neither scientific nor religious, an appeal to common sense should seal the deal.

Tension, Violence and Economic Waste:  Why We Need a Right of Exclusion

Of course, no society is perfect, and if the last millennium has taught us anything, it is that utopias fulfill the actual meaning of the word:  no place.  But that is no impediment to the recognition that certain basic structures must be in place for a society to be a decent place to live.  Multiracial societies are failed societies.  They descend, always, into low-level, if not high-level, warfare between groups.  Democracy becomes nothing but a contest to see which group can angle for the largest share of the other groups’ wealth.  At best, they are uncomfortable arrangements, preserved as Potempkin Villages through oppressive government measures, mind control, propaganda and lawsuits.  In the contemporary West, the bulk of the discomfort is borne by Whites.

Yet it is more than mere discomfort.  Whites in the United States and Europe find themselves victimized by racial hate crimes ranging from verbal assault to murder.  Their job prospects are cut short by affirmative action.  Their educations are marred by disruptive behavior and politically correct curricula.  Their hard-earned wealth is siphoned away to support massively expensive welfare and incarceration schemes, to say nothing of the value lost through incompetence and confusion in the “legitimate” work sector.

Whites are psychologically scarred by Babel-esque communities in which their languages are not spoken and their religions are not practiced.  They have no recognized advocacy groups, no explicit representation in Congress or any other elected body.  Their traditions and history are swept aside – even forbidden from mention – to make room for celebration of other groups.  They are committing suicide at record numbers, with the White suicide rate up 40 percent from 1999 to 2010.[5]  This is no way to live.

In making the argument for racial homogeneity, freedom of association and the right of exclusion, it is difficult to know where to begin, because, for most of recorded history, they were the unquestioned pre-existing conditions.  Certain Whites themselves did not always recognize other groups’ associational rights as they pressed forward with African slavery and colonial rule.  But it was in the clean-up from such misadventures that Whites found themselves facing what Thomas Jefferson termed the “wolf by the ear” problem:  you cannot hold Blacks in servitude, but letting them go causes problems.

In the Western world in 2014, unwanted race relations go unquestioned and undiscussed.  Neither liberals nor conservatives come anywhere near this topic, though its resolution has the potential to clear up so much of what ails us. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam let slip this secret in a five-year study, concluding that rather than “enrich” us, ethnic diversity harms civic life.[6]  In the presence of diversity, “we hunker down. …  We act like turtles.  The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined.  And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us.  In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”[7]  The least trusting place on Earth may well be the most multicultural:  Los Angeles, California, Putnam found.

The British Home Office found the same thing:  the more ethnically diverse an area is, the less people trust each other.  Multicultural communities are simply less happy.[8]  The BBC quoted Trevor Phillips, the Black chairman of the U.K.’s Commission for Racial Equality, as saying that “We’ve done work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren’t other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness.”

Even small children – contrary to the song in the musical South Pacific about being “taught to hate” –prefer their own ethnicity naturally and find it easy to dislike other groups.  Canadian researchers observing Asian and White preschoolers found that within race, children were more interactive, whereas when mixed, they preferred solitary play.[9]  The British government pushes for Big Brother-style conditioning of the very young, asserting that White children and non-White children must be forced to “play together from day one.”[10]

Liberals are bound to ignore this reality, but many of their goals are hamstrung by the poisonously diverse society – including redistribution efforts.  Studies show that support for public goods falls as diversity rises. This is because individual taxpayers have difficulty imagining the hypothetical recipient of the benefits (e.g., the middle-aged White female in the Midwest does not relish the thought of a Mexican-heritage older man in New York getting medical services she has paid for, though she would feel differently about an older White woman who looked like her own grandmother).[11]

The United States fought terrific battles to force racial integration of public schools, but the effort to desegregate schools, of course, is a famous failure.  In Boston, White enrollment dropped from 73 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2004.[12]  A Black student in Boston in 2004 attended a school that is only 11 percent White, compared with 32 percent in 1967.  Statistics from around the country are similar.

In 2009, a California school reverted to racial separation as a way to boost test scores.[13]  Called “heritage assemblies,” one principal said they were a way to encourage better performance without singling any racial group out in a negative way.  Swarthmore professor Thomas Dee, studying data from schoolchildren in Tennessee, found that Black students did best when they had Black teachers.  Similarly, White students did best when they had White teachers.[14]  One study found that rather than improve educational quality, racial diversity harms it – and aggravates, rather than eases, racial tension.[15]

Forced association makes life unpleasant and interferes with even simple attempts at civic improvement.  In a 2007 cover story for The American Conservative,[16] Steve Sailer recounts a personal experience in Chicago in which he and his wife tried to organize a drive to improve a local public park. This proved difficult because many of the neighbors did not speak English.  Cultural differences, even down to an ethnic conflict between Eritreans and Ethiopians imported to the American Midwest, got in the way.

Americans are confident that however insane political correctness becomes, free speech remains a sturdy right.  But multiracialism, much more than any other condition, threatens it.  In the United Kingdom, Canada and several European countries, the right of Whites to racial dissent speech is sharply curtailed and far too many figures to list have been imprisoned for it.  In the United States, the clear pattern is that administrative bodies like “fair housing” councils or “human relations” commissions can work end-runs around free speech. Mainstream media Internet sites (exercising, paradoxically, a right of exclusion) strictly forbid racial dissent speech from public commenters.[17] “Outburst”-style expressions of racial frustration by Whites can lead to criminal charges (with no corresponding punishment for non-Whites)[18], and Whites who express racial dissent are guaranteed to lose their employment, placing an extraordinarily high cost on free speech.

Minnesota requires its lawyers to attend “diversity” training, and its highest court turned away a Constitutional challenge to the practice.[19]  An Indiana lawyer was suspended from practice for 30 days for stating in a letter to opposing counsel in a domestic dispute that the lawyer’s client was an illegal alien.[20]  The opinion — written by the state’s chief judge, no less — said the remark was not legitimate advocacy and embarrassed the mother, which was deemed a violation of the rules of professional conduct.

It is easy to see how any other profession could use the same techniques, squelching White racial dissent under the guise of “professional regulation.”  The American military, for instance, is taking this route.  The Department of Defense in 2010 issued a directive that members “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology, or causes”, including writing on the Internet.[21]  Other large institutions – American colleges and universities come to mind – keep a very tight leash on expressions of White racial dissent, under “campus speech codes” that codify the desired mind-sets of the left.  Jeremy Waldron, a Harvard professor, advocated in his 2012 book The Harm in Hate Speech that the United States consider moving toward a more European-style approach to expressions of racial belief.

The point of all this is to observe two things.  First, freedom of speech and freedom of thought are, as evidenced by enshrinement as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, seen as perhaps the most sacrosanct right held by the people.  From far left to far right, there is agreement on this in American politics.  But secondly, see how the fiercest competitor of these freedoms is multiracialism and the surrounding political correctness — and how multiracialism is gaining ground quickly.  This in turn leads to the point that without a right of association, all other rights are at risk – including the most unquestioned.

The Second Amendment, to continue the point, guarantees a right to keep and bear arms.  Yet the contrasting views on this issue are largely driven by race:  rural Whites want to keep their guns for hunting and self-protection, while urban Whites who fear Black and Hispanic gun crime want them banned.  According to Pew research, Blacks overwhelmingly support gun control, with 68 percent considering it more important than gun rights, while a majority of Whites think the opposite.  The point is that a right of association would likely eliminate much of the concern over the issue to begin with:  a traditionally White nation like Switzerland might even compel gun ownership, while a traditionally White Nordic nation might ban them outright — and neither condition is particularly controversial, because race is not a back-of-the-mind animating factor.

Multiracialism thus plagues our political discourse by warping it around the undiscussable of racial difference.  Political discourse in America has indeed become a farce, with line-ups of supposedly liberal vs. conservative engaging in shoutfests over the same tired set of side-ring issues:  abortion, the free market, gays, guns.  The show in the center ring, which is the rapid displacement of Whites, goes totally unremarked by the media, politicians and even in private gatherings, save the fraught hotel gatherings of a few bold White advocates.

The more racially diverse America becomes, so rises the cost of the litigation over perceived racial discrimination.  Between 1991 and 2007, racial discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission more than doubled.[22]  Affirmative action was estimated to cost us $225 billion a year in 1993[23] and can only have risen dramatically in the past 20 years.  Welfare since the dawn of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society has cost around $17 trillion, with a disproportionate share going to non-Whites.  The cost of the multiracial society, for Whites, is staggering.  One leading White advocate speculates that the cost of the multiracial society roughly equals the entire economic output of White women in the workforce.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an American attorney and writer.  He coined the term “White advocate.”