Norman Podhoretz's "My Negro Problem — and Ours," Then and Now 

Simon Krejsa 

June 12, 2010

In one of his most famous essays, "My Negro Problem — And Ours," Norman Podhoretz writes of "being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated" by Negroes as a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the late 1930s and early 40s. He was "puzzled to think ... that Negroes were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were doing the only persecuting I knew about — and doing it, moreover, to me." Consequently, though he viewed his left-wing sister's racial dogmas as "sacred" and believed her when she told him that Negroes were oppressed and persecuted not only in the segregationist South but in America generally, he was "still afraid of Negroes" and "still hated them with all [his] heart." Obviously, such feelings were wholly rational and justified given his childhood experiences.  

But despite his honesty about being a victim of Negroes, repeatedly assaulted and robbed, bullied and terrorized, and despite the understandable and expiable hatred and fear of Blacks that such victimization engendered,  the essay is vitiated with left-liberal platitudes, ideals, assumptions, moral righteousness, fantasies, and revolutionary goals. In a postscript to his essay written in 1993, he ridicules the liberal cliché that “Negroes were all long-suffering and noble victims of the kind who had become familiar through the struggles of the civil rights movement in the South,” and he jokes about how the only Blacks that most liberals knew "personally were maids and cleaning women." Nevertheless, his fundamental premises and positions are left-liberal in attributing all differences between the races to culture rather than biology and in the resultant obsession with equality and integration that must be realized to make the United States a just and decent society.  

The article begins with a quote from James Baldwin:  

If we — and...I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. 

At the end, Podhoretz writes: 

The most numerous, influential, and dangerous movement that has grown out of Negro despair with the goal of integration is, of course, the Black Muslims. This movement, whatever else we may say about it, must be credited with one enduring achievement: it inspired James Baldwin to write an essay which deserves to be placed among the classics of our language. Everything Baldwin has ever been trying to tell us is distilled in The Fire Next Time into a statement of overwhelming persuasiveness and prophetic magnificence. Baldwin's message is and always has been simple. It is this: "Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality." And Baldwin's demand is correspondingly simple: color must be forgotten. 

Podhoretz agrees with Baldwin that "color is indeed a political rather than a human or a personal reality" and "must be forgotten." But exactly what does this mean? I assume that Podhoretz and Baldwin are not actually denying the reality of skin color and other superficial anatomical differences. Rather they are asserting, in the current trendy parlance, that race beneath the skin is an "artificial social construct," that Blacks and Whites are exactly the same apart from skin color and other physical characteristics of negligible importance, just as feminists argue that males and females are exactly the same apart from the inescapable differences in anatomy — that "gender" (i.e., "masculinity" and "femininity") as opposed to sex (maleness and femaleness) is an "artificial social construct."

Obviously, skin color and the like are not "political realities" and "artificial social constructs." They are biological, objective, human, and personal realities. And neither is "race beneath the skin an artificial social construct." The problem with Blacks is not the color of their skin per se but what the color of their skin signifies: an average Black African IQ of 70; an average American Black IQ of 83–85, largely because Negroes in the United States enjoy superior nutrition, and because they are 17–20% White on average.  

Nor are these low average IQ’s easy to change. Scholars and experts such as Michael Levin, Philip Rushton, Richard Lynn, and others persuasively argue that Black cognitive inferiority has a strong genetic component. 

Rushton and others have also noted that Blacks have generally higher levels of testosterone than Whites and East Asians. Consequently, Blacks in America, Europe, and Canada have rates of criminal violence that are roughly 10-times greater than Whites (and greater still than those of North Asians). One doesn't need a PhD in biology or to be an expert in "HBD" to understand why a race with an average IQ in the mid-80s and higher levels of testosterone is far more prone to violence and criminality than a race with an average IQ of 100 or 105 and lower average levels of testosterone. 

The problem with Blacks is not their superficial bodily characteristics, but what skin color and so forth reveal about statistical probabilities and behavioral patterns. Podhoretz writes that "there are nights when I experience the old apprehensiveness again, and there are streets that I avoid when I am walking in the dark, as there were streets that I avoided when I was a child. ... I cannot restrain my nervousness whenever I pass a group of Negroes standing in front of a bar or sauntering down the street." Obviously, this "apprehensiveness" and "nervousness," as well as the subsequent precautions, are completely rational — necessary to avoid being mugged, beaten, stabbed, shot, and possibly murdered, given the spectacularly higher crimes rates of Blacks. If Blacks had the IQs and crime rates of Jews and North Asians, no one would fear them simply because of their physical characteristics. 

Nature, not culture and politics, created these inequalities. Biology preceded culture and politics. Culture and politics are what we make of our biology. This explains the culture and politics of Black or Black-dominant nations and cities and neighborhoods, the horror and hell of Haiti, Black Africa, Detroit, East St. Louis, the Southside of Chicago, etc. Haiti will never be like Norway or Denmark. And they will never turn into Haiti. East St. Louis will never be like Bismarck, ND. Detroit will never be like today's Portland, and Portland will never turn into Detroit unless it becomes 80–90% Black. And so forth, with hundreds of similar examples. The reason is the essential immutability of nature, not the vicissitudes of culture and politics. 

Total Miscegenation 

Like almost all left-liberals, Podhoretz believed that race was a "political reality" or "artificial social construct" and, as a result of this sacred and inviolate dogma, he was an advocate of equality and integration. But, unlike most left-liberals, he despaired of its fulfillment largely because he was convinced that “we white Americans are — for whatever reason, it no longer matters — so twisted and sick in our feelings about Negroes that I despair of the present push toward integration." As a result of this “logic,” he demands wholesale miscegenation. 

Remarkably, Podhoretz asks, "in thinking about the Jews I have often wondered whether their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant? Did the Jews have to survive so that six million innocent people should one day be burned in the ovens of Auschwitz?" Then he asks what the American Negro has that might correspond to the Jewish "memory of past glory and a dream of imminent redemption."  

His past is a stigma, his color is a stigma, and his vision of the future is the hope of erasing the stigma by making color irrelevant, by making it disappear as a fact of consciousness.  

I share this hope, but I cannot see how it will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means — let the brutal word come out — miscegenation. The Black Muslims, like their racist counterparts in the white world, accuse the "so-called Negro leaders" of secretly pursuing miscegenation as a goal. The racists are wrong, but I wish they were right, for I believe that the wholesale merger of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned. I am not claiming that this alternative can be pursued programmatically or that it is immediately feasible as a solution; obviously there are even greater barriers to its achievement than to the achievement of integration. What I am saying, however, is that in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in no other way.  

So the eradication of color as a "political reality" and "fact of consciousness" demands the disappearance of color as a "human and personal reality." And 30 years later, Podhoretz was still proud of his honesty and courage in calling for wholesale miscegenation: 

Failing to anticipate these developments in "My Negro Problem," I found no escape from the trap I was describing except the wholesale merging of the two races. And because my objective in writing the essay was to speak the truth as I saw it and to go where it took me no matter what the consequences, it would have been a cowardly betrayal to shrink from the conclusion to which my analysis inexorably led. Yet if I did the right thing from the perspective of intellectual coherence and literary fitness. 

How could an article so honest and realistic in some ways end with a panacea so dishonest and estranged from objective reality. Far from being courageous, his solution to the "Negro problem" ends up being chimerical, fatuous, perverse, crazy, and morally execrable, at least for those Whites who aren't “sick and twisted” with guilt and self-loathing. Only someone who supported integration as an ideal and as a moral imperative but despaired of its practical realization could have advocated something so fantastic. 

First, precisely how would this cure for the "Negro Problem" have ever been achieved? Did he envision tens of millions of Whites and Blacks willingly marrying each other and happily producing a nation of mulatto children. Granted, Podhoretz realized that this "solution" wasn't "immediately" or "programmatically" feasible. But why advocate something that has absolutely no chance of being realized in a free and private society. Even today, after 50-years of pro-Black and anti-White propaganda, including the celebration and encouragement of miscegenation, what percentage of Whites and Blacks marry each other and have mulatto offspring? His hare-brained nostrum for the "Negro problem" could only be realized by a regime that forces all Whites and Blacks to marry and/or have children together. Not even Fidel Castro enacted such a policy to "solve" the racial problems of Cuba. 

The Elimination of Whites 

And even if, hypothetically and miraculously, all this had occurred, it obviously would not have solved the "Negro problem," as envisaged by Podhoretz, but would have instead created a Black-majority and ultimately all Black country. It would have turned the U.S. into a devil's mixture of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Northern Brazil, and South Africa under Black-ANC rule. In his 1993 postscript, Podhoretz recognizes that "I was wrong to think that miscegenation could ever result in the elimination of color ‘as a fact of consciousness,’ if for no other reason than that (as Ralph Ellison bitingly remarked to me) the babies born of such marriages would still be considered black." He elaborates in an essay on Ellison: 

Even so, he did let me have it about the notorious last paragraph of my essay, where — driven by the logic of my prior analysis of race relations in America — I concluded that the only solution to "the Negro problem" was the wholesale mixing of Whites and blacks through intermarriage. Don't you realize, he asked with a decidedly unfriendly grin but in a completely civil tone — I am paraphrasing from memory here — that this would be no solution to anything, since the babies who would be produced by these intermarriages would still be considered black? All you would accomplish would be to increase the size of the black population, which would probably make things politically worse [emphasis in original]. I must confess that this criticism — which he was the only one to come up with, though a thousand different objections to the essay were raised by others — caught me completely off guard and that I had no answer to it. ("What Happened to Ralph Ellison," The Norman Podhoretz Reader, New York: Free Press, 2004, p. 362.) 

I don't know what's more mind-boggling. That Ellison was the "only one to come up with" this criticism or that Podhoretz was caught "completely off guard" and "had no answer to it." Apparently, Ellison's only or principal objection to this evil and insane proposal was that it was wrong and fanciful because of White prejudice, and thus would have made the plight of Blacks far worse.  

So precisely how, in Podhoretz's 1960's imagination, would the "wholesale merging of the two races" have made "color disappear" not only as a "fact of consciousness" but also as a physical reality? Factually, in regard to appearance, miscegenation obliterates the color of "Whites" but only makes that of browns a shade lighter. And apart from skin color, the only colors to disappear are those of Caucasians with blonde and red and brown hair and blue and green and hazel eyes, not those of people who only have Black hair and brown eyes. Podhoretz's "colorless" America would have been a nation in which everyone had medium-dark brown skin and Black "kinky" hair and brown eyes, an all-Negro world of brown and Black in which the rich diversity of "White" color no longer existed. 

Thus in calling for the "wholesale merging of the two races" and the creation of a mulatto or virtually all Black country, Podhoretz was calling not only for the destruction of White America but also for the ultimate eradication of American Whites. And since Podhoretz defines himself and his fellow Jews as "White," he was calling for the extirpation of American Jews as a White ethnic group as opposed to a religion. So, incredibly, if only in this article, a fanatical ethnocentric Jew and immigration enthusiast was calling for an end to the legacy of the "great wave" that is exalted and romanticized by descendants of Eastern European Jews like himself. 

Podhoretz frankly admits at the end of his article that he would "rail and rave and rant and tear" his hair if his daughter married a Negro but would then "curse himself" for doing so and "give her my blessing."  Propitiously, he was spared such torments of rage and guilt and cursing and overcoming — for none of his children married a Negro. Apparently, none even married a White gentile. They all married Jews and had Jewish children. 

Podhoretz desribes the response to his "notorious" article: 

When "My Negro Problem" first came out, a critic said that there was something in it to offend everyone. He was right. Integrationists, white and black alike — who were the dominant force in the civil rights movement at the time — took offense at my prediction that integration was not going to work. Black nationalists — who were mounting an increasingly influential challenge to the integrationists — took offense at my slighting references to the history and culture of their people as nothing more than a "stigma." And Jews were offended by my willingness to entertain the possibility that the survival of the Jewish people might not have been worth the suffering it had entailed. (Norman Podhoretz, "Postcript" (1993) to "My Negro Problem — and Ours.”) 

Apparently, not a single leading critic was offended by his call for wholesale miscegenation and the elimination of European-Americans. This is not surprising. Left-liberals in thrall to the fantasy of color as a "political" rather than "human reality" and indifferent to the fate and interests of European-Americans would fail to see the evil of miscegenation. They would welcome miscegenation not as a legal right and free choice of individuals but as an effective means of "solving the Negro problem" by eliminating White Americans. 

Old and New Problems 

Born in 1930, Norman Podhoretz obviously won't live long enough to see the destruction of White America that he proposed almost 50-years ago. The destruction of White America is not happening mainly as a result of miscegenation and "the wholesale merging of the two races," but by massive Third-World immigration and the resultant transformation of the United States into a non-White majority country in which European Americans are an increasingly dispossessed and persecuted minority.  

Unsurprisingly, not only have the elites not "solved" the "Negro problem." Even worse, given the "politics of guilt" and masochism and self-loathing and the repudiation of all hereditarian explanations for Black failure and racial inequality, the quixotic efforts of Whites to solve the "problem" have made it worse in many crucial respects, particularly for non-elite Whites who live in areas with large Negro populations. 

Podhoretz recognizes this in his 1993 "postscript": how the "abdication of responsibility," "dependence on government," an "obsessive and exclusive...fixation on White racism" as the cause of Black problems has "contributed mightily to the metastasis of the black underclass" — which has "subjected more and more Whites to experiences like the ones I described going through as a child in 'My Negro Problem.' …Today, when black-on-white violence is much more common than it was then, many white readers could easily top those stories with worse. And yet even today few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime." 

In 1963, as a liberal who was flirting with radicalism, such rational fear and the actions based on it made Podhoretz guilty. "Sick and twisted," he would say. And why would whites be "sick and twisted" in their emotions toward Negroes unless they felt morally obliged to love and embrace blacks and support equality and integration when what they observed and experienced in their personal lives contradicted such ideals and moral decrees? When the incongruity of the real and ideal, the abstract and concrete, the quotidian and transcendent, made their racial liberalism unavoidably problematic, and often difficult to maintain in good faith? 

But guilty and "sick and twisted" he is no longer: In 1993, he wrote that "fear of blacks has become the dirty little secret of our political culture. And since a dirty little secret breeds hypocrisy and cant in those who harbor it, I suppose it can still be said that most whites are sick and twisted in their feelings about blacks, albeit in a very different sense than they were in 1963." But to deliver whites from such guilt and "sick and twisted" feelings, it's necessary that they not only "speak truthfully in public" and private about black-on white crime and violence and recognize and staunchly defend their fears as "entirely rational." It's also imperative that they repudiate the myth of "racism" as an excuse for and incitement to Black predation and violence against Whites and as the "root cause" of underclass pathology.  

And, finally, it's especially imperative to realize that Blacks are far more prone to crime and violence because of low average intelligence and higher levels of testosterone that are essentially innate, and therefore much more likely to beat and rob and rape and murder Whites than vice versa.  

But I doubt if most or any of this will ever happen given the left-liberal control of the mass media, Hollywood, the schools, the universities, the churches, and the race-blindness and neutrality of the neoconservative and mainstream Republican opposition. 

And worst of all, the inability of elites to honestly confront the Black problem combined with an enthusiasm for non-White immigration and contempt of White Americans has created a Latino problem in general and a Mexican problem in particular that is now almost as ruinous and is destined to become even more ruinous than the "Negro problem." Together, Latinos and Blacks will turn the United States into a minority-majority dystopia and a disaster for whites generally. 

And they've also created a Muslim problem, which is not nearly as bad as that of Europe but did result in the murder of some 3,000 people on 9-11-2001, by far the worst mass-murder in American history that far surpassed in horror and destruction any single act of "Islamic" terrorism in Western Europe, and other acts of terrorism, successful and unsuccessful. On the whole, Muslim immigration does much harm and no good whatsoever. It doesn't even provide a large supply of cheap labor for greedy businessmen with no loyalty to the historic American people and nation. And it's surely not "good for the Jews."  

If Podhoretz weren't Jewish, would he be a race realist and immigration restrictionist or, at the least, sympathetic to race realists and immigration restrictionists?  

By "race realist," I mean someone who not only tells the truth about Black crime, for which Podhoretz deserved to be praised both in 1963 and 30-years later, but also realizes that the problem is largely genetic and thus resistant to left-liberal "social engineering." This realization is essential to "solving the Negro problem" for the benefit of Whites collectively. Also, by "race realist," I mean someone who opposes massive Third-World immigration for largely racial reasons; who opposes the Mexican invasion not only because of history and culture and numbers but also because virtually all of the legal and illegal aliens are mestizos or pure or almost pure Amerindians. 

I'm inclined to think so. But he is Jewish, and in his old age, as Steve Sailer observes, he has "mutated into, essentially, an ethnic activist in the mode of Jesse Jackson. Little Big Pod is the equivalent of Al Sharpton, although not as witty."  

Thus, now more than ever, he's concerned with what is "good for the Jews," primarily, not what is good for Whites generally. He will never blame the "Negro problem" on biology or renounce the ideals of equality and integration, and he will never oppose massive Third-World immigration.  

Simon Krejsa is a free-lance writer living in Wisconsin.