Africans and African Americans

Survey of Anti-White Attitudes

Aporia Magazine commissioned two Penn State professors, Eric Silver and Prof John Iceland, to survey anti-White and anti-Black attitudes.

The way we talk about racism has changed. Over the past decade or so, words like “bigot” and “extremist” have been overshadowed by words like “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “white fragility.” The new words portray a new kind of racist. Instead of wearing a hood and spewing hate speech, the “new racist” is an ordinary white person whose socialization into “whiteness” causes them to undermine people of color, whether they know it or not.

It’s not hard to see why well-meaning people might be drawn to this image of the new racist. Racial disparities persist. More than a century after Emancipation and 50 years after Civil Rights, blacks continue to lag behind whites in virtually all areas of success. To attribute these disparities to anything other than racism might seem like blaming the victim. Condemning the “new racist” avoids this problem. [It avoids the problem of persistent disparities that have not disappeared despite massive expenses over at least 5 decades by creating “causes” that are unmeasurable and therefore immune from rational criticism. White racism as a cause has become an axiom, a statement that is accepted without controversy or question, like a tautology. Such a statement is supposed to be so obvious that there is no need to try to prove it.]

Not everyone, however, agrees. Parents protest at school board meetings. State universities quietly soften their antiracism agendas. Individuals take defiant stands, sometimes at great cost to themselves, to combat what they perceive as the spread of anti-whiteness. And then, of course, there’s Florida, where “woke goes to die.”

These actions are motivated in part by concern over the antiracism movement’s use of morally charged language that depicts contemporary whites as racists and blames them for past and present racial injustices. They are also motivated by a fear that if left unchecked, the movement will succeed in normalizing a culture of anti-whiteness, with devastating effects not just for whites but for the country as a whole.

Are such worries warranted? How much of a problem is anti-whiteness, really?

To investigate this, in 2021, we hired YouGov, one of the world’s leading survey research firms, to ask a nationally representative sample of 1,125 US adults whether they agreed or disagreed with five statements designed to measure their “anti-whiteness.”

The statements were:

●     Most white people in this country believe that whites are better than other groups.

●     Most white people in this country just don’t get it when it comes to understanding the hardships of other race groups.

●     Most white people in this country would rather keep society as it is rather than make changes that would benefit other groups.

●     Most white people in this country don’t care about the hardships experienced by other race groups.

●     Most white people in this country are reluctant to give up their white privilege even though doing so would make society more equal.

We found there’s a lot of anti-whiteness out there, including among whites! Blacks were the most anti-white (69-79 percent), followed by Latinos (47- 62 percent), whites (40-53 percent), and other race groups (33-39 percent). Anti-whiteness, it seems, is far from rare, making concerns about its effects on society far from unreasonable.

These results may come as a surprise to those who view the US as a hopelessly white supremacist society where whites are universally admired and put on a pedestal. The data suggest this is far from the truth.

What’s most depressing is that between 30 and 40 percent of White people agree with these statements. These are the people prone to voting for leftist policies along with their non-White coalition partners, an increasingly unbeatable coalition given current demographics and the continuing deluge of non-White immigration, legal and illegal.

The results for Blacks are the opposite. In general, they don’t blame themselves for their problems, trying harder is not the answer, they are not responsible for racial tension, and they don’t think they have too much influence on politics.

The authors propose that diversity training should focus on common values, “shared values that transcend race”— like “liberty, and progress, values that have been a source of unity in the American context for centuries.” However, the problem with that is that it’s not going to change the disparities, and Blacks and Latinos can’t get stuff like affirmative action in education, job preference, and a lenient criminal justice system. by endorsing them. So we’re back where we started.

Black people and morality

Images of Black people are pressed on us so insistently these days, usually as models of some kind, that it is natural to ask just how admirable Black people are. For example, are they especially moral? Are they especially industrious, especially respectful of other people’s property, especially reliable, especially good to children, especially merciful, especially honest?

In the nineteenth century, White people were not impressed by Black people’s industriousness. A British explorer estimated that an average English labourer would accomplish more per day than twelve Africans. [1] In an experiment in Virginia, two White men brought in more crops in a certain period than did thirteen negroes.[2] A German professor found Africans indolent as well as careless, inattentive and unpunctual.[3] John Speke, the first White man to reach Lake Victoria, was amazed by their “inherent laziness”.[4]

Some people find Black people indolent today. Commenting on a video in 2022, a British carer wrote that the Africans he had worked with were invariably late for work and didn’t do much when they arrived.[5] They were always on their cell phones, which he found “rather frustrating”. What had struck another man about the Black workers at his mother’s care home was their complete lack of haste under any circumstance, even when their assistance was needed for a resident. An American stated that almost every Black person he had ever worked with had done his best to get paid for doing nothing. No one said that they found Black people hard-working.

It has been suggested that the reason Black people have a tendency to indolence is that they evolved in conditions where little effort was needed to survive.

The old explorers found that Africans stole compulsively. One described theft as their predominant passion.[6] Similar testimonies are quoted in another article. More recently, African leaders such as Jacob Zuma, Robert Mugabe and Laurent Kabila are notorious for having appropriated extremely large amounts of other people’s money. Today, theft in the form of looting is a more or less exclusively Black pastime.[7]

It could be that Black people lack the other races’ concept of private property. They certainly seem to be without some of their other mental constructs. Noting that African languages are missing certain basic moral terms, the philosopher Gedaliah Braun concludes that Africans lack the corresponding concepts.[8] Zulu has no word for obligation, a concept without which there can be no concept of a promise.[9] Zulus rarely keep their promises and never apologise when they break them, which suggests that they do indeed lack the notion of obligation.[10] Apparently Nigerians and Kenyans are the same. We see the lacking sense of obligation in African countries’ failure to repay their debts, which leads Western countries to “forgive” them.

Black people have difficulties with the concept of time, which is presumably connected with the fact that many African languages have no words for the past or future. Gedaliah Braun thinks this could be why gratitude, which is felt for something done in the past, is rarely seen in Africa.[11] Lacking a concept of the future could explain the African failure to plan ahead or maintain things, such as the South African power supply system. The historian Simon Webb comments on Black people’s apparent inability to arrive anywhere at an agreed time.[12] Africans use the term “African time” for their alternative to what the rest of us call time. If you are invited to an African party starting at eight o’clock, in Western time this means eight o’clock; in African time it means any time you like. West Indians have an equivalent expression. Americans speak of “CP time”—Colored people’s time.

So perhaps the Black concept of property is equally limited. For you or me, a person’s property is theirs by right. For a Black person it is perhaps only theirs as long as they can physically stop someone walking off with it.

In the nineteenth century, the explorer Richard Lander wrote that Africans did not appear to have the least affection for their children: “A parent will sell his child for the merest trifle”.[13] Sir William Harris wrote that Africans would sell their children for the sordid love of gain.[14] “So little do they care for their offspring”, wrote John Duncan, “that many offered to sell me any of their sons or daughters as slaves”.[15] All over Africa, according to Mungo Park, parents might sell their children.[16] Strangely enough, Herbert Ward found that the cannibals of the Congo showed more affection for their children than did the non-cannibals.[17] Only among the cannibals did he ever see a father kiss his child.

Black people still show less love for their children than they might do, as seen in the fact that social services departments are always short of suitable Black foster-parents for Black youngsters. The race produces more neglected or mistreated children than it will take. We sometimes hear of cases like that of Victoria Climbié, whose great-aunt took her in to increase the welfare payments she would receive. She ended up torturing the six-year-old to death.

If John Duncan saw little affection between Black parents and their children, he saw no more between Black adults, nor did Herbert Ward ever witness “any display of tenderness betwixt man and wife”.[18] The naturalist Samuel Baker concluded that there was no such thing as love in Africa: “the feeling is not understood”.[19] One rarely sees Black couples holding hands today.

John Duncan found that Africans cared little for animals.[20] A horse might be left tied up for days without food or water. Coming back from the fields after the experiment in Virginia, the Black labourers’ mules looked emaciated and forlorn whereas the White labourers’ ones were fat and sleek. Black people rarely keep pets today. Looking after animals does not appeal to them.

Black people kill people at an extraordinary rate: in America, more than twenty times the rate of Whites.[21] They can do it in gruesome ways and for no good reason. In 2022 a 73-year-old American woman died after her arm was separated from her body when she was dragged almost a block with it caught in the seat belt of her car, driven by a young Black man who with three others had surprised her by jumping into it.[22] All with pending murder charges, they were aged fifteen to seventeen. In Britain a young Black man stabbed a young White man to death on a bus for trying to stop him throwing potato chips at his girlfriend. Another killed a White man by bringing an iron horseshoe down on his head at a railway station after his victim’s brother had asked a member of his group to turn his music down on the train.[23]

Black people can take pleasure in gratuitous cruelty. The details of “necklacing”, said to have been Winnie Mandela’s favourite means of murder, are too grim to go into here; suffice it to say that spectators count it as a good thing that death takes quite a long time to come.[24] Braun quotes a press report on the trial of four young Black men who in 1993 killed an American woman, Amy Biehl, apparently because she was White, who was in South Africa trying to help Black people. When a witness told the court how the battered woman groaned in pain, the killers’ friends in the public gallery burst out laughing.[25]

No one who had read Sir Richard Burton’s accounts of his travels in Africa would have been surprised. He noted that for the African, cruelty seemed a necessary part of life: “all his highest enjoyments are connected with causing pain and inflicting death”.[26] Burton could not believe that this was only because Africans knew nothing of civilisation; he saw them as a case of arrested development, which had left them with “all the ferocity of the carnivore [and] the unreflecting cruelty of the child”. He compared the way they tortured and killed their prisoners to the way English boys tormented and killed cats.

One morning in the 1800s, a Westerner named Thomas Freeman saw lying in an African street “the mangled corpse of a poor female slave, who had been beheaded during the night”.[27] Later he saw natives dancing round the body “in the very zenith of their happiness”. Thomas Hutchinson, an Anglo-Irish explorer, wrote in 1857 that Africans appeared to take pleasure in cruelty. “The sight of suffering seems to bring them an enjoyment without which the world is tame.”[28]

Worth remembering, especially in view of the dogma of essential racial equality, is the statement made by Geoffrey Gorer in 1935 that a White man can no more think like a Black man than he can think like a bee.[29] Gorer did not see Africans as childlike, incidentally; he thought they were raving mad, “far madder than most of the inhabitants of our asylums”. Yes, at times they could act in a fairly normal fashion, but, he pointed out, so could many maniacs.

Another theory is that Africans cannot internalise imperatives. A study carried out in Senegal found that no matter how many times the Senegalese are told not to do something, it does not get into their heads that they mustn’t do it. Moral constraints must therefore be imposed from outside. In these terms Braun explains the fact that Black behaviour was kept within tolerable limits, as he puts it, in White-ruled South Africa, colonial Africa and the segregated American South, but descended into crime, drug use and unbridled violence when external constraints were removed. This is consistent with the way that the more the anti-racist British police refrain from checking anti-social Black behaviour, the worse it gets. The other races are better able to regulate themselves.

Many of the old explorers were struck by Africans’ dishonesty. Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton referred to “the inborn cunning and deceit of the native African. The truth is not in them.”[30] According to William Reade, Africans told a lie more readily than they told the truth; falsehood was not recognised among them as a fault.[31] Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming wrote that Africans were “remarkable for their disregard for truth”.[32] Paul Du Chaillu reported that lying was thought an enviable accomplishment among all the tribes; nowhere could a more thorough and unhesitating liar be found than in Africa.[33] John Speke observed: “Lying being more familiar to their constitution than truth-saying, they are forever concocting dodges with the view, which they glory in, of successfully cheating people”.[34]

We see the same today. Most people have come across a Nigerian fraudster of one kind or another. According to Peter Brimelow, in 1993 a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies reported that in the view of law enforcement officials, fully 75 per cent of the Nigerians in America were involved in some sort of fraud.[35] Commenters on the video mentioned above acknowledged Nigerians’ skill at tricking people. “Given half a chance they will screw you over”, wrote one.[36] Another reported that three of his employees all said that Yorubas could not be trusted. “They told me many stories about the absolute craftiness of the people they worked with. My friend even used this phrase: ‘Don’t beat yourself up over getting conned. They are absolute masters of the craft’.”

Black people tell lies when others tell the truth. In 1976 an educational psychologist described a habitual wrongdoer from the West Indies who when caught red-handed would attempt to persuade his teacher that he had done nothing wrong, irrespective of the evidence.[37] She had met other Black boys like him and got the impression that this was the accepted philosophy of those with whom he lived. Backing this up, the Trinidadian race activist Darcus Howe stated that in Trinidad a guilty person was expected to lie.[38] He had done it himself after getting a girl pregnant as a teenager, protesting that he had never met her. “I never admitted the charge. I stuck to my guns”, he wrote, as if proud of his refusal to own up. While lying himself, a guilty West Indian accuses his accusers of lying. Darcus Howe played this game when defending himself in court in 1970 against charges of riot and affray. The police had fabricated their evidence, he asserted, although he went on to write: “Bricks, stones, bottles, any ammunition at hand we threw at the police”.[39]

In 2023 a chief constable wrote that young Black men rarely admit that they have committed crimes.[40] It is because Black criminals generally plead not guilty that they receive longer sentences than more honest people who have committed similar offences.

A Black woman who told one ridiculous lie after another was the former reality-television star Ariel Robinson. After being voted America’s worst cook, she came back into the news in 2021 having adopted a White child and then, when the girl was three, beaten her to death.[41] At first she blamed the fatality on her seven-year-old son, then said that the girl had drowned from drinking too much water.[42] As she must have realised, it was known that the death was caused by physical violence. Equally surprising, one might think, are the résumés Black people submit that cannot possibly be true,[43] and the telephone interviews they give in the names of other people, who will be seen to be incompetent as soon as they start their new jobs.[44]

Black people are never readier to lie than when blaming something they have done on Whites. In 2000, a young Black man in Birmingham claimed to have been set on fire by racists in what the police described as a sickening racial attack.[45]  It turned out that he had been trying to set fire to a car.[46] In Leicester, a young Black man who had a broken ankle told the police that he had been assaulted by five White youths with an iron bar. He had been felled by the walking stick of an old lady whose handbag he had been trying to snatch.[47] When pedestrians in Notting Hill noticed that the finger of a young Black man was bleeding, he told them he had been racially assaulted by a White man in the man’s house. They called an ambulance for him. He had cut his finger while stabbing the man to death, presumably having broken into his house and been surprised to find him there.[48] These three incidents occurred within a few weeks of each other, which suggests that this kind of thing happens all the time.

It is not surprising that Blacks blame Whites for their misdeeds since Whites are the first to blame themselves. They do not blame Black people for failing to work but blame themselves for not employing them.[49] They do not blame Black people for not saving money but describe them as deprived, meaning by them, by White people. They do not blame Black people for being constantly at war with other Black people in Africa but blame themselves for drawing the borders between African countries in the wrong places. When Victoria Climbié died in 2000, her great-aunt was not blamed for killing her so much as social services were blamed for not stopping her. By contrast, when a White woman, Lucy Letby, was convicted of killing seven babies in 2023, she was described as evil incarnate.

Other White theories include the idea that the reason Blacks do not do well in school is that the schools are underfunded, that the reason they do poorly in aptitude tests is that the tests are biased, and that the reason they are stopped and searched by the police is that the police are out to get them. If Whites can think of no better explanation of an unwanted racial difference than slavery, they blame that, thereby making sure that they are never without a way of assuming responsibility for Black behaviour. Black people only copy them by giving them that responsibility.

Accusing Whites of being anti-Black has been a standard Black strategy since at least the Second World War. Referring to Black airmen, a Jamaican activist told V. S. Naipaul: “Whenever they was in any real trouble, I used to tell them: ‘Boy, your only hope is to start bawling colour prejudice’.”[50] Later, a Black doctor who was found guilty of gross negligence and incompetence and had his license suspended because of his “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician”, called himself the victim of a racist medical system. [51] According to an American cop, every Black person who is arrested by a White officer describes the police as racist.[52]

A Black speciality is the race hoax. To mention three well-known ones, in 1987 Tawana Brawley, aged sixteen, appeared with excrement smeared over her claiming to have been abducted by a group of White policemen and abused in a wood for four days and nights. She had been at home all the time, where she had smeared the excrement over herself. In 2006 Crystal Mangum, a stripper, accused three members of the Duke University men’s lacrosse team of gang-raping her. She made it up. In 2019 Jussie Smollett paid two brothers to help him appear to have been racially attacked outside his apartment building.

In the twelve months to December 2017, more than a hundred race hoaxes were counted in America, including those of the Black student who scrawled anti-Black graffiti at an Air Force Academy school in Colorado Springs, the one who did the same at Eastern Michigan State University, the one at Kansas State University who wrote the word “Nigger” on his car, and the one at St Olaf’s College in Minnesota who wrote it on her car.[53]

Showing how attached White people are to the idea of White transgression, harsh treatment of those at first assumed to be responsible does not necessarily stop when an event is found to be a hoax. At Colorado Springs, the Commandant assembled the student body in a hall to give it a severe talking to. When it turned out that no White cadet was guilty, he did not turn on the cadet who was guilty but defended his original remarks. “Regardless of the circumstances under which those words were written, they were written”, he observed, “and that deserved to be addressed”.[54] Anyone who failed to get his drift was not welcome at the school, he said. In other words, woe betide any White student who did what no White student had thought of doing.

Hoaxers are encouraged by the media, who have an insatiable appetite for stories, true or false, of White racial misbehaviour. With their outraged editorials and demands for an end to presumed bigotry they draw pity to these vicious people. The public respond by holding candlelit vigils to show how sorry they are about the dreadfulness of Whites, until it becomes apparent that the incident was a hoax, at which point they have to go back to their lives of dreary innocence.

So-called Black history consists largely of lies. In 1989 the authors of the “Portland Baseline Essays” told us that Black people invented gliders in ancient times and perhaps electrochemical storage batteries too.[55] Now we hear that they invented the electric light bulb, the spark plug, the cell phone and the internet.[56] The only reason we didn’t know this before, say the historians, is that White people try to cover up evidence of Black originality. They also tell us that Black people have been in Britain since at least Roman times rather than just since 1948[57] and that they reached North America hundreds of years before Whites did.[58]

In fact the absence of inventions and heroic journeys by Black people is complete. Black people have invented nothing since the bone-tipped harpoon 35,000 years ago. Not the wheel, not written language, not even a lamp with an oil-soaked wick to help them find their way in the dark did Black people invent in all those dozens of millennia. Peanut butter itself, supposedly a crowning Black achievement, was not invented by a Black person.[59] Nor is there any reason why it should have been. Black people are not the inventive type. As for great expeditions, it was others who left Africa and went on, after interbreeding with Neanderthals and in some cases Denisovans, to create civilisations elsewhere; today’s Blacks are the descendants of those who stayed where they were and have only the original human DNA. Africans were not even the first to reach Madagascar, 220 miles off the African coast; people of another race got there first after sailing almost 5,000 miles. But again Black people should not be mocked for failing to discover Madagascar. It is not in them to explore.

It might seem obvious that the tall tales of “Black history” come out of an inferiority complex, but against this is the fact that Black people rarely seem perturbed by their lack of inventiveness or adventurousness. Perhaps, then, the stories simply illustrate the Black love of theft. Seeing inventions and discoveries of value, Black people appropriate them as they might appropriate anything of value.

Just as baseless as “Black history” is the idea that Black people endure “institutional racism”. If by this is meant that institutions discriminate against them, the opposite is true. The whole “diversity” drive is devoted to discriminating in their favour. But usually “institutional racism” just means that the races’ circumstances differ, as in Black people tending to pass fewer exams than Whites, have less money and be more likely to go to prison. But this only shows that the races themselves differ, nor is it necessarily Whites who are at the top of the tree in such regards. In Britain it is more likely to be Gujaratis or the Chinese. In America too, people from South and East Asia are notably successful and law-abiding. But Blacks like to make their circumstances into a sob story, or a guilt story, to lay at the door of Whites.

In the case of truth-telling, Black people do not lack the concept. They can grasp this; what they cannot do is see why they should apply it if they think that an advantage might be gained by lying. What is missing is again the sense of obligation, in this case the obligation to be honest. It is perhaps in lacking this basic aspect of the most basic requirement of morality that Black people differ most from the other races.[60]

So we have an answer to our question. No, Black people are not especially moral.[61] From this point of view it seems that we are being shown the wrong models.


[1] This note and others below refer to Hinton Rowan Helper (“HH”), compiler of The Negroes in Negroland, 1868, New York: G W Carleton. Helper’s notes give abbreviated references, such as, here, on p. 122, to “Duncan’s Africa, Vol. I., page 40”. Where possible these have been expanded to give the author’s full name and the title and date of the book presumably referred to. In this case, HH quotes John Duncan, 1847, Travels in Western Africa, p. 40.

[2] On p. 124 HH quotes the Raleigh Register, Jan. 17th 1868. This could be a typo since his book was published in 1866.

[3] On p. 122 HH quotes Hermann Burmeister, 1853, The Black Man: The Comparative Anatomy and Psychology of the African Negro, p. 15.

[4] On p. 123 HH quotes John Hanning Speke, 1863, Discovery of the Source of the Nile, p. 27.

[5] Viewers’ comments on History Debunked, March 25th 2022, “The thing with Nigerians”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4elhOK34tk4.

[6] On p. 96 HH quotes Duncan, 1847, op cit, p. 141.

[7] Not only do we see Black people breaking into shops and looting them whenever there is a riot; in several English cities looting high-street stores looks set to become a weekly routine for young Black people (History Debunked, Aug. 4th 2023, “Disorder on the streets of England is on the increase, although we don’t like to talk about it”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b53l2k8TuI0).

[8] American Renaissance, Oct. 15th 2017 (first published Feb. 2009), “Racial Differences in Morality and Abstract Thinking” by Gedaliah Braun, https://www.amren.com/news/2017/10/morality-racial-differences/.

[9] Gedaliah Braun writes that the Zulu dictionary does contain a word for obligation, defining it as “as if to bind one’s feet”. However, he says that the compilers did not take it from the language but added it themselves (American Renaissance, Oct. 15th 2017, op. cit.).

[10] A Zulu informed Braun that when a Zulu promises, he means “Maybe I will, maybe I won’t” or perhaps “I’ll try” (American Renaissance, Oct. 15th 2017, op. cit.).

[11] The rarity of gratitude in Africans was noted in the 19th century, when Samuel Baker found them “utterly obtuse to all feelings of gratitude”, even upon being freed from slavery (on p. 134 HH quotes Samuel Baker, 1870, The Great Basin of the Nile, pp. 53 and 197).

[12] History Debunked, April 5th 2022, “The psychopathology of lateness as a minority behavioural trait”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XptapQIv9OE.

[13] On p. 153 HH quotes “Lander’s Africa”, p. 348. This could be Robert Huish, 1836, The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa, or Richard Lander could have written a book.

[14] On p. 39 HH quotes Sir William Cornwallis Harris, 1843, Major Harris’s Sports and Adventures in Africa, p. 314.

[15] On p. 39 HH quotes John Duncan, 1847, Travels in Western Africa, p. 79.

[16] On p. 87 HH quotes Mungo Park, 1815, The Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, in the Year 1805, p. 216.

[17] Ward 2019, op cit, p. 95.

[18] Ibid., p. 95.

[19] On p. 115 HH quotes Baker 1870, op cit, p. 148.

[20] On p. 145 HH quotes Duncan op cit, Vol. I, p. 90.

[21] American Renaissance, March 24th 2023, “A harsh new light on race and murder”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/DkJclYNa5D9S/. The multiple of twenty-plus should not be too surprising. According to Wikipedia, Jamaica’s homicide rate is 75 times Norway’s.

[22] The Red Elephants, March 24th 2022, “WHITE GRANDMOTHER HAS ARM LITERALLY RIPPED OFF BY BLACK TEENS, MEDIA IS SILENT”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/WEUMJkPp4ZfT/.

[23] The New Culture Forum, July 15th 2023, “Anti-Social Behaviour: Would YOU Challenge Someone in Modern Britain? BBC Becomes its Own Soap Opera”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc9_q8m9dNo. Sources for the crimes: (1) Evening Standard, March 9th 2007, “Boyfriend murdered for stopping thug throwing chips at his girlfriend”, https://www.standard.co.uk/hp/front/boyfriend-murdered-for-stopping-thug-throwing-chips-at-his-girlfriend-6581291.html and other sources; (2) BBC, March 27th 2023, “Reading Station death: Horseshoe murder-accused feared attack, jury hears”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-berkshire-65091271.

[24] For those who want to know about necklacing in detail, Gedaliah Braun quotes a description (American Renaissance, Oct. 15th 2017, op. cit.).

[25] Occidental Observer, Aug. 23rd 2023, “Amy Biehl, Forgiveness, And the Nature of ‘Hate’” by RockaBoatus, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/08/23/amy-biehl-forgiveness-and-the-nature-of-hate/.

[26] Occidental Observer, March 24th 2021, “Sir Richard Francis Burton: Explorer, Linguist, Race Realist” by Christopher Donovan, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2021/03/24/sir-richard-francis-burton-explorer-linguist-race-realist/.

[27] On pp. 22-23 HH quotes “Freeman’s Africa”, presumably a book by Thomas Freeman, pp. 53-54.

[28] On p. 29 HH quotes Thomas Henry Hutchinson, 1858, Impressions of Western Africa , p. 283.

[29] Geoffrey Gorer, 1945 (1935), Africa Dances, London: Penguin, p. 142. Gorer attributes the observation to Richard Hughes. He was referring to adult negroes “in a community which has not been destroyed by outside influence”.

[30] On p. 97 HH quotes Dixon Denham and Hugh Clapperton, 1826, Narrative of Travels and Discoveries in Northern and Central Africa, Vol. IV, p. 184.

[31] On p. 95 HH quotes Reade, 1864, op cit, p. 447.

[32] On p. 84 HH quotes Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, 1850, Five Years of a Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa, Vol. I, p. 128.

[33] On pp. 97-98 HH quotes Du Chaillu, 1867, A Journey to Ashango-Land, p. 437.

[34] On p. 98 HH quotes Speke, 1863, op. cit., p. 28.

[35] Peter Brimelow, 1996 (1995), Alien Nation, New York: HarperCollins, p.186.

[36] History Debunked, March 25th 2022, op cit.

[37] Irene Caspari, 1976, Troublesome Children in Class, London: Routledge, pp. 50-52.

[38] New Statesman, Aug. 21st 1998, “My friend the PM sent his secretaries up a ladder and waited below” by Darcus Howe.

[39] Darcus Howe, 1988, From Bobby to Babylon: Blacks and the British Police, London: Race Today, p. 44.

[40] Avon and Somerset Police, June 16th 2023, “Chief Constable Sarah Crew on Institutional Racism”, https://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/news/2023/06/chief-constable-sarah-crew-on-institutional-racism/.

[41] Image of news story posted to Telegram by Mark Collett on Feb. 1st 2021.

[42] The Sun, Feb. 15th 2021, “SICKENING EXCUSE Food Network star who ‘beat adopted daughter, 3, to death’ claims girl died from drinking too much water”. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14057410/food-network-star-beat-adopted-daughter/.

[43] See the case of Chanelle Poku, History Debunked, Dec. 8th 2021, “The awful consequences of positive discrimination”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT_D0NW4NL4. See also https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/nhs-job-cheat-chanelle-poku-croydon-crown-court-b970225.html.

[44] See History Debunked, March 25th 2022, op cit.

[45] Telegraph, May 2nd 2000, “News in Brief: Man Set Alight in Race Attack”.

[46] Telegraph, May 18th 2000, “Race hate victim ‘made up attack’”.

[47] Telegraph, June 1st 2000, “Four Years for Mugger Bagged by Pensioners”.

[48] Telegraph, April 8th 2000, “Addict Who Killed Banker Gets Life”. The young Black men were, in the order mentioned, Chris Barton, Matthew Frape and Jacob Rhoden.

[49] Many unemployed Black people do not work because they prefer living on welfare, namely money earned by others. But White people blame Black unemployment on the “racism” of employers.

[50] V S. Naipaul, 1995 (1962), The Middle Passage, London: Picador-Macmillan, p. 283.

[51] This was Patrick Chavis in 1997. See William McGowan, 2002, Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, San Francisco: Encounter Books.

[52] Arthur Sido, Sept. 3rd 2022, “American Renaissance — What It’s Like to Be a White Cop”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78exIQu3GZM.

[53] altCensored, June 25th 2020 (first published by American Renaissance, Dec. 12th 2017), “The psychology of hate crime hoaxes”, https://altcensored.com/watch?v=K4jVWChVk4Y.

[54] Washington Post, Nov. 8th 2017, “A Black student wrote those racist messages that shook the Air Force Academy, school says”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/11/08/a-Black-student-wrote-those-racist-messages-that-shook-the-air-force-academy/.

[55] Education Week, Nov. 28th 1990, “Excerpts From Portland’s ‘African-American Baseline Essays’”, https://www.edweek.org/education/excerpts-from-portlands-african-american-baseline-essays/1990/11. The glider claim was based on fanciful speculations about the achievements of the Ancient Egyptians, whom the essayists counted as Black because Egypt is in Africa and Blacks are African. The battery claim had something to do with electric eels in the Nile.

[56] See many videos by Simon Webb, such as History Debunked, Oct. 30th 2021, “A review of the book Why we Kneel, How we rise, by Michael Holding (Simon & Schuster, 2021)”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiRd4z9awKc.

[57] There were always a handful of Black people in Britain, such as sailors waiting for their next voyage in ports like Liverpool and Cardiff, one who qualified as a lawyer in London in the 19th century, and Dr. Johnson’s servant Francis Barber. Only after the passage of the Commonwealth Act in 1948, however, did they start coming in any numbers. An extension of the idea that Black people came to Britain with the Ancient Romans that is popular with Black historians is that Britain was inhabited by Black people, such as “Cheddar Man”, 10,000 years ago.

[58] For example, according to Professor Brittney Cooper of Rutgers University, Black people were in America, creating libraries and coming up with inventions, “long before White people showed up being raggedy and violent and terrible”. See American Renaissance, Nov. 5th 2021, “‘WE GOTTA TAKE THOSE MOTHERF***ERS OUT’”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/ZuQX8mLypsSc/?list=subscriptions.

[59] Counter-Currents, Feb. 5th, 2011, “Who Invented Peanut Butter?”, https://www.counter-currents.com/2011/02/the-invention-of-peanut-butter/.

[60] American Renaissance Oct. 15th 2017, op. cit. On top of the Senegal study, an anthropologist could find nothing in the Manyika of Zimbabwe that corresponded to the Western concept of morality.

[61] Needless to say, not every Black person is less moral than every White person.

Psychodrama: The Psychosis of Whiteness

The Psychosis of Whiteness: Surviving the Insanity of a Racist World
Kehinde Andrews
Penguin, 2023

Britain has an unfortunate tendency to import the more questionable aspects of American culture, and so it is proving with Critical Race Theory (CRT). Both the literature and the practice have been in the UK for some time and will doubtless further their incursion into schools once transgenderism has finished its turn.

Now that the US armed forces are advised to read Ibram X. Kendi, Britain has some catching up to do, and a new, home-grown addition to the CRT pantheon is vying for position in a boom industry, The Psychosis of Whiteness (PW), by Professor Kehinde Andrews. Professor Andrews is attached to the Birmingham City University School of Social Sciences and is described as “an activist” on his university’s webpage. “Kehinde led leading the development of the Black Studies degree and is director of the Centre for Critical Social Research; founder of the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity; and co-chair of the Black Studies Association.” Yes indeed, he is an activist.

His university provides a good working definition of CRT, along with a word of warning to its critics;

From its origin in US legal studies, CRT has grown to become one of the most important perspectives on racism in education internationally. Frequently attacked by detractors who over-simplify and caricature the approach, CRT offers an insightful and nuanced approach to understanding the processes that shape and sustain race inequality in society.

It is not easy to over-simplify CRT, as its initial problem is that it is a one-trick pony. There are only so many ways in which you can say that the White man is evil and oppressive, the Black man sainted and oppressed. And after a while, as the books plod by, they begin to read like a series of women’s romance novels, where each plot differs slightly but is basically the same formulaic stroll through familiar territory.

Dogma aside, another central problem with CRT is that the model of rationality it uses is not one the post-Enlightenment West is used to. The CRT professional’s riposte to this charge would be that the Enlightenment was a White man’s enterprise, and therefore part of the problem (even though slavery appeared in the West before the Enlightenment and was eradicated in the century after it appeared). Unfortunately, White men didn’t invent rationality, they discovered it, and it is not quite as malleable as CRT suggests.

The reasoning used in CRT is not tethered to the objective world, and the result is that the practitioner can switch from objectivity to subjectivity as easily as a roulette player moves his chips from red to black. And so race is a social construct unless it pertains to one of the White races, in which case it is an immovable part of the objective world. The guiding idea in CRT (and “woke” thinking in general) is that epistemology offers a range of choices, like a supermarket. This has been called “standpoint epistemology”, giving rise to expressions like “my truth” and allied to and supported by a co-axial language in which ordinary words are co-opted and invested with meaning by diktat rather than traditional meanings. But while we are wearily used to reading about “micro-aggressions”, “unconscious bias”, “White fragility”, “systemic racism”, and all the other jingles, PW has an addition to the lexicon; psychosis.

As an aside before Professor Andrews presents his working concept of psychosis, the book’s preface reminisces about childhood television, and how Black programs were “oases in a desert of Whiteness” (Blacks do seem to require race-based television). He does not mention the current wilding of British televisual drama featuring, among many metamorphoses, a Black Anne Boleyn. There is a host of other actors on British TV today whose characters have transitioned not in terms of gender but rather genetics. I wrote about this at Occidental Observer here. But on to psychosis.

With the word in the book’s title, a working definition of “psychosis” is obviously required, and Professor Andrews consults DSM V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Despite the book being criticized by some as a sales catalogue for the pharmaceutical industry, it is the Bible of psychiatry, and as such a perfectly valid starting-point.

Professor Andrews finds psychosis to be a sub-set of schizophrenia, of which the author has experience through family diagnoses. The following seems like an incidental observation, but it is key to understanding Professor Andrews’ epistemology;

Brain scans of schizophrenics show observable changes to the structure of the brain over time. By any measure, schizophrenia is as ‘real’ a condition as there is. [Italics added].

While brain-scans, writes the professor, confirm schizophrenia, psychosis is purely subjective. We have moved swiftly from the bio-medical, objective plane in which brain-scans are valid diagnostic tools, to one in which they are not. So, although we appeared to have access to a working medical definition of psychosis, we change direction, learning that “[P]sychosis is a political construct rather than an objective medical diagnosis”. Despite the apparent scientific validity of familial brain-scans, scientific definition is invalid because “One of the delusions of Whiteness is that ‘science’ is an objective pursuit, free from the constraints of politics and emotion”. Emotion is the default position for CRT, and politics crucial to the very essence of the Black experience;

“Blackness is defined by politics and not by skin tone”.

So, Professor Andrews has defined psychosis as a sub-set of a condition which can be objectively proved by scientific method, but claims that it is purely subjective. The medical world would not necessarily agree. Dr. Graham Blackman, for example, psychiatrist and clinical lecturer at Oxford University, has noted this year that;

“Patients presenting with psychosis may have another physical illness or condition causing their symptoms that can be identified using MRI scanning”.

So, after a fleeting visit to objective science, we have moved to the familiar postmodern idea of objective givens as subjective constructs. Indeed, for Professor Andrews, the whole psychotic state is subjective and, instead of trying to further clarify what it might be, he states that “We must problematize the term psychosis, a condition that does not exist outside the imagination of the diagnoser”. In another twist, it is now the person supplying the diagnosis who is the one hosting the condition in her imagination. Professor Andrews alludes to Alice in Wonderland with reference to the television, and his definition of “psychosis” is certainly getting curiouser and curiouser.

Psychosis, then, relies on the bedrock of the medical but is also a political and emotional construct. And there is more;

“Given the racist history of psychiatry and its inheritance of a deeply racialized idea of what mental health is, I use the term ‘psychosis of Whiteness’ as a provocation”.

And we are not done yet.

“I use psychosis here as a metaphor”.

Objective medical condition, subjective state of hallucination, provocation, metaphor. “Psychosis” is proving to be an elusive quarry.

Professor Andrews is on firmer ground when it comes to the relationship between psychosis and Blacks. The consideration of Black mental illness is among the first of many puzzles Professor Andrews solves by applying the principle of limited degrees of racial separation. Whatever the problem for Blacks, the ultimate cause can be traced unfailingly back to the White man, and his complex psychosis, that provocative metaphor which is now objective, now subjective, now pragmatic, now hallucinatory. And so the increased likelihood of Blacks being diagnosed with mental illness is easily explained;

“Sadly, it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that Black people are more likely to suffer serious mental illness because living with racism is in itself a source of trauma”.

Whites even dominate mental illness. “Black people,” we are told, “do not have a happy history with the word psychosis. The term has historically been used as a stick to beat us with”.

Curiously, and if this is the case, it is reminiscent of another era and a famous and now vanished state which at one time used mental illness as a stick with which to beat their opponents, and Professor Andrews rather lets us in on what he would like to see in terms of the White electorate.

Professor Andrews correctly observes that delusions of grandeur can be symptomatic of psychosis — they have been linked in the clinical literature — and naturally ascribes this trait to the White ruling class. But he goes further;

“[W]hy were bumbling charlatans and closet fascists being elected all over the world? But the answer is simple: delusions of grandeur aren’t just reserved for the men themselves but are shared by much of the voting public”.

When Whitey votes for Whitey, then they must be mentally ill. This is reminiscent of Soviet Russia, in which the KGB often incarcerated political dissidents in mental hospitals with a diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia”.

The psychosis of Whiteness is at least an equal opportunities psychosis;

It cannot be reiterated strongly enough that the psychosis of Whiteness is not reserved just for those with White skin. There are countless historic and present-day examples of racialized shucking and jiving to the tune of White supremacy to pocket some pieces of silver.

Judas Iscariot did not dance for his silver (at least the Bible makes no mention of it), but his payment was for betrayal, and Professor Andrews devotes a chapter to those often described by their brethren as “Uncle Tom” and “house nigger”. This is a particularly hated species for the professional Black academic. Tony Sewell, the Black British education expert who has done so much to improve outcomes for Black schoolchildren, is repeatedly mocked. Professor Andrews writes of “the Sewage Sewell report”, this strike-through being a device he uses several times for the purposes of unsophisticated humor. Channeling a 14-year-old blogger doesn’t enhance the professor’s academic style, and Mr. Sewell has obviously riled him by going off the plantation to work in the house for the master. One of CRT’s many fortune-cookie mottoes is “White fragility”, but the Black version is a good deal more delicate.

Despite the fact that we have rather a rickety working definition of psychosis, Professor Andrews is in no doubt about the other half of his title; Whiteness. One of the central formulae of the CRT grift is as follows: Black achievement is due to Blackness, Black failure is due to Whiteness. This is empirically unverifiable, but we must not forget that objective science is a White enterprise and as such invalid, unless temporarily required by a Black academic for a diagnostic brain-scan or some such. Science aside, part of the CRT stratagem is to rig the argument in order to make it unwinnable for Whitey, and part of this gaming of the system is to concentrate not on the present, in which the racism required of Whites is hard work in the proving, but on the past.

Black race writers have a cognitively dissonant view of history. They need it as a grand narrative of oppression dominated by Whites in order to fund their grievance — and protect their revenue stream — but they also require a revisionism which shows that Blacks invented everything from the printing press to the Large Hadron Collider.

Historically, the grievance list is a long one for a short book, but it all proceeds down very well-trodden pathways, and Professor Andrews’ working maxim paraphrases Stalin’s deputy Beria’s famous instruction; Show me the White man, and I’ll show you the crime. And so there is plenty of standard Empire-bashing in PW, the Empire having been a slaughterhouse of rapine and looting with no evidence of having civilized the colonialized countries in any way. Segregation, Civil Rights, Jim Crow — the gang’s all here. Also present and correct is the obligatory attempted rebuttal of the moral relativity argument. With anything remotely woke, such as CRT, relativity is perfectly serviceable as a methodological tool unless Whitey is using it to excuse the past.

The argument over the applicability of contemporary standards of morality (such as they are) to events from the past prompts a bizarre comparison in PW in which the Professor utilizes a very English cultural reference in proposing the invalidity of pardoning the past because it was another country and they do things differently now;

By that logic we can’t condemn slavery, genocide, the denial of women to vote or any other atrocities committed in the past, as they were simply a product of their time. This is what I call the ‘Jimmy Savile defence’.

This is an extraordinary comparison. British DJ Jimmy Savile was found posthumously to have sexually abused many young children via his charity. Professor Andrews’ analogy implies that people now are excusing Savile because that’s just the way it was then (only the BBC covered for Savile), which they most certainly are not. There is always the feeling that CRT operators such as Professor Andrews get suckered into absurd notions because they give them the conventional reinforcement they crave. Certain wrong ideas stick because they are useful. A small but telling example:

Professor Andrews misquotes Enoch Powell’s famous Birmingham speech of 1968 concerning immigration. All Left-wing commentators do this with the Powell speech because the falsehood is always more appealing than the facts if it satisfies the narrative under construction, and so Professor Andrews writes of “Powell’s warning that blood would run in the streets as a result of multiculturalism”. Powell, of course, said no such thing, but made a classical allusion to the river Tiber “foaming with much blood” as a portent for trouble ahead.

Professor Andrews also seems unclear on other political events. Democracy appears to be a White playground in which the biggest boy wins. “In 2019”, writes the professor, “Boris Johnson had forced his way into the leadership of this country”. Johnson was leader of the Conservative Party which won a General Election. He therefore became Prime Minister, and that is how British democracy has worked for centuries. But if Whitey wins anything, illegitimate force must be lurking somewhere. No White Briton in a position of power is legitimate, he is a plantation owner manqué. There is, unsurprisingly, plenty in PW on slavery, the center of gravity of CRT.

Professor Andrews also makes much of the fears of Whites that they will be over-run by “Darkies” (the Professor’s term). But Whites needn’t worry;

For all the existential crises about minorities becoming the majority, or even the optimism that this might lead to powerful coalitions, the data tells us that the future is white. [Italics added]

The inventory of imagined grievances of a Black academic, which is all he provides, is not “data”, but we already know he has no idea what real data would look like. Maybe he means that civilization will remain predominantly White simply because the space Whites increasingly choose not to inhabit will almost certainly not qualify as civilized.

Which leads us to the familiar trope of “White flight”. In terms of relocation, Whites are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Whites moving into a Black area – which I saw happen in Brixton, south London, in the 1990s – is sneered at as “gentrification”, while Whites leaving Black areas is cursed as “White flight”. But Professor Andrews seems rather indignant that Whites should want to move away from vibrant and diverse ‘hoods’:

Most White people do not live near or socialize with racialized minorities, and this segregation is both a cause and effect of the psychosis of Whiteness.

Yes, that must be it. This is followed by another misdiagnosis;

“White middle-class people are the most self-segregating group. They move as far away from minorities as possible and are proud of it”.

A social scientist should be able to tell pride from relief. Obviously, fear of Blackness and its range of social problems from crime to dysfunctional schools is the reason people want to move out of Black areas, but “Through the distorting lens of the psychosis of Whiteness, all Black people are a threat, aliens to be feared”.

This is absurd. Some Black people actually are a physical threat — not least to each other. But fortunately they have been marked out — or their culture has marked them out — like venomous creatures in the wild with bright markings, and one can note the way Blacks dress, walk, speak, act, and look at White people, and act accordingly. Gold chains and teeth, walking with a pimp roll, trousers at half-mast? These are all reliable indicators of dangerous Blacks. The rest of them are not a threat except in cultural terms.

Professor Andrews is less than charitable to some of those one would expect to be his allies, and he distrusts the anti-racism complex. The reader gets the sense that the writer wants to forge ahead in the race to build a world without Whitey (even though the future is said to be White), and so needs a few new ideas to attract readers who, as noted, might be in need of a fresh angle in a field rapidly becoming stale. There isn’t really much more you can build in the house of CRT once you’ve got the central supporting wall of White guilt for Black dysfunction in place.  CRT is like ideological Cat’s Cradle; the strands look separate, but they are joined in one long, continuous thread.

Professor Andrews has no time for White conversion therapy;

“There is no evidence that engaging White people in discussions of Whiteness makes any difference to how they see the world”.

This is a blessing for White people, as Blacks quizzing Whites about their racism is like the Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner, carefully crafted and cross-referenced questions designed to see if a White — or an “Oreo” Black — is a real anti-racist or a replicant.

Professor Andrews also shares a central concern with other CRT scribes: himself. The hero is never far from the narrative and it is he. Black people very often have a heightened sense of dramatic self-importance, and their academics do not differ in this. Walking into the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Professor Andrews “felt physically sick. The design is no different to that of any European art museum, sporting the fake columns and calicos of the Renaissance”. In the academic workplace, “I can attest to a daily assault of microaggressions [and] the fact that my wounds are not larger is a privilege”. Then there is the traumatic legacy of Blackface, minstrel shows, “the disgusting golliwog toy”. It is often apparent that the problem with Black CRT academics is not the color of their skin but its thickness, or lack thereof.

Although Professor Andrews is not a keen-eyed observer of Britain’s current public sector hiring policies, he still wishes to remind us that he is a victim:

Affirmative action will probably never happen in Britain, but I have heard derisive ‘affirmative action hire’ remarks upon my elevation to professor thrown at me more times than I care to remember.

I doubt very much that he has heard such remarks, given today’s Stasi-like academic environment. And affirmative action has been happening in the UK for at least twenty years, when it began to be commonplace in England to see job ads with the tagline “People from ethnic minority backgrounds are particularly encouraged to apply for this position”. I know. I saw them when I was looking for a job. Most recently, and as one example from many available, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) announced that their hiring policy would be to “stop hiring useless White males”.

Sweeping and dramatic statements punctuate the text to boost the tragic historical role of the Black man. The Jewish quarter are not going to like the Professor’s wish that ex-slave plantations in the Caribbean now used as wedding destinations and restaurants, “should be treated with the same dignity with which we treat former Nazi concentration camps”.

And students of the history of industry might be surprised at this curt summation of the English century that changed the world, produced by White men and benefiting people of all colors:

Three hundred years of murdering and treating Black people as animals provided the fuel for the industrial revolution that has shaped the world we live in today.

The Psychosis of Whiteness is pure Nietzschean ressentiment, written not from the standpoint of the oppressed or enslaved, or even in alliance with them, but by someone who simply sees the White man and hates what he sees: phenomena such as invention, civilization, order (at one time), and successful nation-states rather than chaotic failures. What methodology there is here suffers from an emotive approach and a resultant and pathological need to tear down imaginary prison walls. Professor Andrews makes obligatory mention of “deconstructing Whiteness”. Academics love the phrase “deconstruction” because it makes them feel as though they are turned into the currently fashionable academic jargon. .

Professor Andrews shares common cause with organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and Anti-Defamation League in America, and HOPE not Hate and Stop Funding Hate in the UK. They all operate a self-fulfilling prophecy by which their all-consuming need to see racism everywhere makes them see racism everywhere, like the possessed nuns of Loudon in 1634, shrieking as they saw devils in every corner.

“The aim of this book,” writes Professor Andrews, “is to demonstrate that Whiteness is deluded, irrational, and based on a set of collective hallucinations”. But, as we have seen, to make an accusation of irrationality from an irrational position presents a fine philosophical conundrum. If you want to base your book around what Plato called “illegitimate reasoning”, be my guest. It didn’t seem to bother the French post-structuralists. But a sociology professor ought to be able to do better than this dime-store psychology (or Poundland psychology in Britain). Stay in your lane, would be my advice.

From our perspective, books such as these are useful indicators, like litmus paper or barometers, or other White inventions that measure the nature of the world. This is an important book for three reasons.

Firstly, it exemplifies the epistemological confusion at the heart of CRT. Truth becomes an iPad in an Apple store, available to whoever grabs it first. Secondly, it shows the seething, simmering hatred the Black CRT caucus has for the White man. It makes them feel good about themselves, though — raises their self-esteem. So they keep on doing it. Much of CRT’s race-baiting voodoo is actually therapy for academics such as Professor Andrews, like letting out your rage in primal scream therapy or psychodrama.

Thirdly, it shows a deep-seated fear of the White man. Not a physical fear, and not a “phobia” like Islamophobia or transphobia, which are more concerned with perceived hate speech and hate crimes. No, this is a fear of what the White man can achieve in adversity, which is where he is now.

But the real fear is not the presence of the White man but his absence, although this is gruffly denied by Professor Andrews: “One of the most dangerous delusions of the psychosis is believing that we are lost without the White man”. Like in Africa.

Professor Andrews seems to be suggesting Black separatism, a plan many, many Whites would heartily endorse, and Godspeed you on your way to the new Wakanda. But should Blacks ever get what they wish for, and for Professor Andrews that is to “collectively work to build a reality free from White supremacy”, they must be careful what it is they wish for, and heed Kipling’s warning in the poem The White Man’s Burden;

“And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch Sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought”

The anti-racism of Ibram X. Kendi

One only needs to hear an anti-racist like Ibram X. Kendi speak to sense that he is a trickster. Below is a description of his anti-racism in the context of anti-racism as a whole that will explain this intuition.

Where institutions are concerned, anti-racism has only ever had one aim and made one argument. The aim is to overturn the principle of equal treatment so that black people can receive what they are not entitled to.[1] The argument goes like this. The races are the same, but their circumstances differ. Black people must be being discriminated against, therefore we need to discriminate in their favour.[2]

The problems with this argument are obvious. There is no reason to think that the races are the same. Secondly, if black people were being discriminated against, there would be evidence of it. Finally, if such discrimination were going on, the answer would be to stop it, not reverse it. Despite these flaws, the argument has served anti-racism well for decades thanks to the media’s skill in making it seem plausible.

Insisting that the races are the same is essential to anti-racism. If we could point out that they differ, this would explain the fact that their circumstances differ, and the idea that these differing circumstances are the fault of whites would collapse. And so, underlining the existing taboo against mentioning racial differences, Kendi calls the idea that the races differ “racist”.[3] He doesn’t say what is wrong with it; this is just a “principle” of his.[4]

His second “anti-racist principle” is that “Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy”, where by “racial inequity” he means the races being in different circumstances and by a policy he means any rule, law, requirement or procedure. By a “racist policy” he means a policy that tends to increase racial inequity. According to him, then, wherever we see a differences in the races’ circumstances, a racist policy is behind it.[5] Again he backs this up with no argument. The link between “racial inequity” and “racist policies” is created by stipulation.

If racial disparities are caused by racist policies, clearly something must be done. For example, any difference between the SAT scores of blacks and the SAT scores of whites must be eliminated to remove and atone for that racism. This might be a difficult task since two thirds of black twelfth-graders lack even partial mastery of basic twelfth-grade maths,[6] and the number of blacks at the advanced stage is too small to show up in the statistics.[7] However, by hook or by crook, racial equity in academic qualifications must be achieved, which will lead to racial equity in the world of work as well, with black people being employed as scientists and technicians at the same rate as whites. Most black scientists and technicians will be innumerate, but at least there will be plenty of them. Similarly, if white people’s wealth exceeds black people’s, white people owe some of their wealth to blacks. If I have $100 but a black man has only $50, I owe him $25.

It is a mistake, thinks Kendi, to say that there is necessarily anything wrong with racial discrimination.[8] It depends on its effects. “The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist.”[9] Indeed, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination”.[10]

Nor is there any such thing as a non-racist policy. According to Kendi, every policy is either racist or anti-racist because it either increases or reduces racial inequity.[11] People who think that it is possible to be non-racist or “race-neutral” — meaning to treat a black person like anybody else — are deluded. Worse, they are racist: the drive for race-neutrality is the “most threatening racist movement” of today.[12] Unless we want to be threatening racists, therefore, we must discriminate in favour of black people as hard as we possibly can, 24 hours a day.

Kendi’s technique is so simple that it is embarrassing to think that anyone falls for it. He just attaches the word “racist” to whatever he opposes. Such is the voodoo-like quality the word has acquired from Americans’ guilt about the racism of the past, however, that many think that if something is described as racist there must be something wrong with it.

One of the peculiarities of Kendi’s position is that it makes it impossible to appraise a policy on its merits; it can only be appraised by looking at its effects. Thus if I invite everyone to a party, we cannot know whether the invitation was racist until after the event. If no black people come, it was racist because it gave rise to racial inequity; if many do, it was anti-racist. In the case of murder, if black people committed the crime at the same rate as whites, the law against it would be no problem since there would be equity in the races’ incarceration rates. Because black people commit it at a higher rate, however, the law against it is a racist policy. Indeed, it must be about the most racist policy there is, for American blacks commit murder at more than twenty times the rate of whites.[13] Kendi’s solution would presumably be for the police to turn a blind eye to nineteen black murders out of twenty, or, to tackle the problem at its root, to repeal the law.

In deploring policies that have a “disparate impact” on the races, Kendi follows every anti-racist who came before him. It is part of basic anti-racist doctrine to say that if blacks fail to meet a requirement at a higher rate than others, the requirement is illegitimate, as is any attempt to enforce it or to monitor occasions on which it is not met. We saw this in Britain in 2000 when the Commission for Racial Equality argued that the police should stop going after muggers because the law against mugging “indirectly discriminated” against young black men.[14] Years before, American anti-racists had opposed the requirement for teachers to take basic-skills tests periodically on the grounds that black teachers failed them at a higher rate than did white teachers.[15] Recently, speed cameras were deemed racist for showing that black drivers are more likely to break the speed limit than are the other races.[16] To be anti-racist, Miami and Rochester, New York took down their speed cameras.[17]

Writing with another author about the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, Kendi confirms our impression of his character.[18] The authors lament the fact that the ruling will mean that racial inequity will again become normal, by which they mean that when college admissions are decided on merit, black people will go to college at a lower rate than whites. They don’t say what is wrong with inequity, which is an inevitable effect of fair competition, be it between individuals, countries or racial groups, since one competitor must come out on top. Rather, it is a dead heat that should raise suspicions, suggesting as it might do that the competition was rigged to obtain this result. Such rigging is what Kendi demands, calling a dead heat “equity”.

The authors ignore obvious facts. “Admissions metrics”, they assert, by which they seem to mean test scores, say more about wealth than about students’ potential. They ignore the fact that any child, black or white, rich or poor, can do well if it is talented and works hard. They also ignore the fact that, according to the literature, taking account of socio-economic status diminishes the size of the Black-White IQ difference by only about a third. Moreover, most studies indicate that the difference is not reduced but increases as parental socioeconomic status rises. In other words, greater parental wealth is associated with a rise in Black IQ but with an even bigger rise in White IQ.[19]

The authors misrepresent reality, referring to “these metrics that give preferential treatment to white students”. The “metrics” do no such thing; they show that whites outperform blacks. Similarly, the authors refer to the “deep advantages white Americans receive” from “race-neutral” admissions metrics, putting “race-neutral” in quotes to signify that they do not consider the metrics to be really race-neutral. Therefore, they suggest, the advantages gained by whites are not deserved. But the “metrics” confer advantages on any American who makes the grade; it is just that blacks less often do. By pretending that whites gain undeserved advantages at the expense of blacks, the authors insinuate an argument that seeks undeserved advantages for blacks at the expense of whites.

They compare “race-neutral” admission policies, again in quotes, to the way that in the South the right to vote was restricted to those who could read and write, which excluded many blacks, the suggestion being that the real aim was to stop blacks voting. But the restriction was just as race-neutral as it seemed, for it didn’t stop literate blacks voting or give the franchise to illiterate whites. For anti-racism, however, no group to which something desirable is granted must be defined by reference to a quality that few blacks have. Accordingly, the practice of awarding Nobel prizes has been condemned because few blacks seem to have the intelligence, imagination or perseverance needed to win a Nobel prize.[20]

The deviousness goes on. The authors come out with Kendi’s idea that “racial inequities prove that policies proclaimed to be ‘race neutral’ are hardly neutral”. What the inequities in fact prove is that the races differ — the idea that Kendi tries to ban as “racist”. They say that so far from there being anything wrong with affirmative action, it was never taken far enough. What do they want, a PhD awarded to every black person at birth? They are not above making an utterly meaningless statement. They write: “Race, by definition, has never been neutral”. You might as well say that pastry has never been neutral.

But we have bigger problems than an anti-racist like Ibram X. Kendi. On both sides of the Atlantic, anti-racism is the national ideology. In 2000, one of London’s top policemen boasted that he had reduced the number of young black men stopped and searched by almost forty per cent in the previous twelve months,[21] during which muggings rose by at least two thirds.[22] That display of anti-racism was a response to an official report of 1999 that described the police as institutionally racist.[23] The police still accuse themselves of institutional racism, citing the fact that black people fall foul of the law at a higher rate than others.[24] All they can do to bring “equity” to the criminal justice system is look the other way when black people commit crimes. Politicians are quite blatant in their pro-black discrimination. As fast as black police officers are convicted of gross misconduct or criminal offences, Home Secretaries introduce schemes to fast-track them to senior ranks.[25]

So internalised is the anti-racism of British institutions that they need no nudge from activists to take their pro-black discrimination to ever new extremes. In 2021 Lloyds Bank gave itself four years to increase black representation in senior roles to at least three per cent, citing “diversity” as the justification.[26] The following year His Majesty’s Treasury stated its aim of making six per cent of its staff black, almost twice the percentage of black people in the population.[27] Such moves are as nothing compared to the lengths to which pro-black discrimination is taken by the advertising and entertainment industries. In Britain the principle of equal treatment — treating people on their merits, racial impartiality, fairness, whatever you want to call it — is an increasingly distant memory.

According to Heather Mac Donald, America’s institutions permit only one explanation of racial differences of outcome that are not to black people’s credit: the “racism” of American institutions.[28] The institutions’ folly and self-hatred are turned back on them by activists, who demand that the results of academic tests be ignored or that the tests themselves be abolished since black people’s performance in them shows that they are “racist”. Illustrating the repetitive nature of anti-racist claims, this one has been being made for decades, at least if anti-racist objections to IQ tests are any guide. The claims never change; what changes is the amount of purchase they have on the mainstream, which always increases, with the occasional blip as in the recent Supreme Court decision.

If every requirement that black people rarely meet and every rule they are prone to break must be done away with, this, as Heather Mac Donald points out, is a recipe for civilisational suicide. As she does not point out, the destruction of Western civilisation was always the aim of the more far-seeing anti-racists, as it is of Marxists, climate-change alarmists and many other intellectuals today.[29]

This includes the media, who cannot see the West rush towards its suicide fast enough. So avidly did they promote Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist (2019) that it sold more than two million copies in its first two years. Companies everywhere recommended it to their employees. Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.[30]

The bitter opposition of our intellectuals to the principle of equal treatment means that they are bitterly opposed to the continuation of our civilisation. Ibram X. Kendi is just riding the wave of success which, thanks to them, anti-racism has been enjoying for the last sixty years.


[1] One could have said “non-whites” rather than “black people”, but anti-racism has always been mainly concerned with black people, who by most white standards are the least capable race. That it is black people, not non-whites in general, who are the intended beneficiaries of anti-racism is demonstrated by the fact that Asians, who on average are more intelligent than whites, pay a price for affirmative action rather than being favoured by it.

[2] A variation of the argument has arisen in step with the spreading of the idea of equality of circumstance as an ideal. In the variation, white people must favour black people solely on the basis that the latter’s circumstances are less favourable than their own. This does not have to be in the opinion of black people; all that is needed is that white people would prefer not to be in those circumstances. Thus the variation appeals to white people’s capacity for pity, whereas the original argument first appeals to their hatred of injustice, by presenting black people as wronged, and secondly, in accusing whites of perpetrating that injustice, seeks to make them feel guilty.

[3] In his book How to Be an Antiracist (2019), Kendi writes: “A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way” (Penguin, June 9th 2020, “Ibram X. Kendi defines what it means to be an antiracist”, https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist.html. “Inferior or superior to” translates into “different from” because as soon as a difference between two races is recognised, it becomes possible to say that one race is superior to the other in that way. Thus if Race A can run faster than Race B, to say as much is to say that Race A is superior to Race B at running fast. Therefore Kendi is in effect condemning any comparison of the races.

[4] Politico, 2019, “Pass an Anti-Racist Constitutional Amendment” by Ibram X. Kendi,  https://www.politico.com/interactives/2019/how-to-fix-politics-in-america/inequality/pass-an-anti-racist-constitutional-amendment/.

[5] Thus Kendi told the New York Times in 2018: “When I see racial disparities I see racism” (Headline shown on American Renaissance, March 10th 2022, “‘Unconditional war’ on racism”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/AhbzYJ4r9vlr/).

[6] For readers outside the USA, twelfth-graders are students in their final year at high school (seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds).

[7] The New Culture Forum, July 19th 2023, “Lowering the Bar for Ethnic Minorities ‘Threatens Lives & is a Recipe for Civilisational Suicide’”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYR7_YPYMwE. Heather Mac Donald was being interviewed about her book When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives (2023).

[8] From Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist (2019): “Racial discrimination is not inherently racist” (Penguin, June 9th 2020, “Ibram X. Kendi defines what it means to be an antiracist”, https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/june/ibram-x-kendi-definition-of-antiracist.html).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] There is “no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy”, Kendi says in How to Be an Antiracist (ibid.).

[12] “The most threatening racist movement is … the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ [state]” (ibid).

[13] American Renaissance, March 24th 2023, “A harsh new light on race and murder”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/DkJclYNa5D9S/. The multiple should be no surprise. According to Wikipedia, Jamaica’s homicide rate is 75 times Norway’s.

[14] Commission for Racial Equality, Feb. 2000, “Race Relations (Amendment) Bill” (briefing note), http://www.cre.gov.uk/publs/dl_rrab3.html.

[15] S. Thernstrom and A. Thernstrom, 1999, America in Black and White, New York: Touchstone-Simon and Schuster. pp. 349-50.

[16] American Renaissance, Feb. 18th 2022, “Building Haiti right here in the United States”, https://www.bitchute.com/video/G7zaRiwM11KV/.

[17] American Renaissance, Feb. 18th 2022, op. cit.

[18] Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/p/CuFS1hrNJco/, quoting and commenting on The Atlantic, June 29th 2023, “‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal’” by Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Ibram X. Kendi, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/supreme-court-affirmative-action-race-neutral-admissions/674565/.

[19] Charles Murray, Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race and Class (Twelver, 2020). See F. Roger Devlin’s review: “Murray on Race Differences in IQ,” The Occidental Observer (February 20, 2020). https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/02/20/murray-on-race-differences-in-iq/

[20] According to CNN in 2020, the Nobel Prize organisation had a diversity problem: not enough black people were getting prizes. See CNN, Oct. 10th 2020, “The Nobels honored 4 women this year. But the awards still lack diversity”, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/10/world/nobel-prize-diversity-2020-intl/index.html.

[21] This was John Grieve, Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (Metropolitan Police, Feb. 22nd 2000, “Press Conference Held Re the Anniversary of the Lawrence Inquiry Report”, http://tap.ccta.gov.uk/[…]/b3cb2697adf8d9e1802…OpenDocument).

[22] Muggings in London went up by more than 75 per cent in the fifteen months to May 2000 (calculation based on figures given in Telegraph, April 24th 1999, “Muggings soar as police tread softly”, and Sunday Times, June 25th 2000, “Straw on rack as muggings soar”).

[23] Sir William Macpherson, 1999, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, CM 4262-I, The Stationery Office, Paragraph 6.34. Macpherson also stated that “Colour-blind policing must be outlawed” (Paragraph 45.24).

[24] Avon and Somerset Police, June 16th 2023, “Chief Constable Sarah Crew on Institutional Racism”, https://www.avonandsomerset.police.uk/news/2023/06/chief-constable-sarah-crew-on-institutional-racism/.

[25] This was first done by Jack Straw in 1999, when he introduced quotas for the number of non-white police officers (Home Office, March 1999, Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Home Secretary’s action plan). He wanted to see non-whites promoted to the highest ranks, including chief constable (Telegraph, April 11th 1999, “Straw to set ethnic quota for every police force”, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/et?ac=000659276559150&rtmo=aNN3…/npol11.htm).

Priti Patel announced a scheme to fast-track non-white officers to the rank of superintendent in 2021 just as the case against a black Chief Superintendent was being heard, who was accused of spending almost fifty times the sum of his allowance at a conference using someone else’s credit card. Another case was that of Superintendent Robyn Williams, a black woman, who in 2019 was found guilty of handling indecent images of children. We can be sure that if such cases arose involving white people, we would hear about them.

Black people and other non-whites have always been investigated for misconduct at a higher rate than whites, as have non-white doctors and solicitors. Typically, the BBC presents this as evidence of racism (BBC, June 30th 2020, “My 30-year struggle with racism in the Metropolitan police”, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-53224394).

[26] Lloyds Banking Group, no date given (June 2021), “Ethnicity”, https://www.lloydsbankinggroup.com/who-we-are/responsible-business/inclusion-and-diversity/ethnicity.html.

[27] Telegraph, Nov. 15th 2022, “Treasury aims to have six per cent of staff from black backgrounds in race target”, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/11/15/treasury-aims-have-six-per-cent-staff-black-backgrounds-race/.

[28] The New Culture Forum, July 19th 2023, op. cit.

[29] In 1992 Maurice Strong as chairman of the UN’s Earth Summit said: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialised nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” (quoted by Tom DeWeese in Redoubt News, Oct. 20th 2017, “Agenda 21/Agenda 2030 there is no difference” https://redoubtnews.com/2017/10/agenda-21-2030/).

[30] Insider, Aug. 20th 2020, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey donates $10 million to Ibram X. Kendi’s center on antiracism at Boston University”, https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-donates-ibram-kendi-center-on-antiracism-boston-university-2020-8?op=1&r=US&IR=T.

Why do intellectuals support affirmative action?

The Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions met with dismayed, hostile and sarcastic reactions from intellectuals, meaning the media, academics and others who make a living out of conveying ideas to the public.[1] This was predictable, but why are they like this? Why do intellectuals support affirmative action?[2]

Many do so out of an attachment to the doctrine of essential racial equality, which tells them that the races are inherently the same. Seeing that they do not perform the same, and especially that Black people do considerably less well than others, they think that Black people’s performance must have been depressed by environmental factors such as their mistreatment by Whites. To make up for this, affirmative action is needed.

This is a poor rationale for affirmative action since there is nothing to suggest that the races are inherently the same, nor is there any evidence of the supposed mistreatment. To deal with the first problem, the intellectuals call anyone who points it out a racist. To deal with the second, they go back to the Jim Crow era or even to slavery, where mistreatment can be found, and say that the present generation is still affected, therefore it must be compensated. This argument also fails, if only because it is not just Black people whose ancestors were mistreated. Everyone probably has ancestors who were mistreated in one way or another, yet we do not seek to identify these long-dead individuals so that we can compensate their living descendants.

A second rationale refers to equal opportunities. These are weasel words, which on the intellectuals’ interpretation do not denote a requirement of justice. The intellectuals will argue that not all candidates sitting a given test have the same opportunity to pass it because some of them had to stay up all night looking after their sick mothers whereas others got a good night’s sleep. The tired ones are predominantly Black, they will find, therefore affirmative action must be taken. But justice does not require equal opportunities in this sense, which would be impossible to arrange. It requires equal treatment, which can easily be arranged by having all the candidates sit the test at the same time in the same hall with the same amount of time to complete it. No more elaborate concept of equal opportunities is needed.

A third rationale refers to the presumed value of racial diversity. Black students without the test scores needed to get into college must still go there, says this rationale, so that White students can benefit from their presence. This is just silly.

The urge of Whites to favour Blacks can be strong. The purpose of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to end racial discrimination in employment. To underline this, soon after the Act was passed, President Johnson issued an executive order stating that employees must be taken on and treated without regard to race. Before long, hiring goals for Blacks were being introduced, not only at the behest of organisations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but also by the Department of Labor itself.[3] Already in the 1920s it was customary for Black students at New York University to be marked two grades higher than Whites for a given level of work.[4]

On the day the Supreme Court announced its decision, Harvard officials sent a letter to the university community, which contained all the vagueness, evasion and general waste material that characterises politically correct language. It also invoked all three rationales for affirmative action mentioned above.[5] “Diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence”, it said. Diversity of what? Difference between what? If it meant diversity and difference of race, how can these help anyone attain academic excellence? Doesn’t Harvard know that academic excellence is attained by talent and hard work?

The letter stated that to prepare leaders for a complex world, “Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience”. If one can live a facet of experience, what makes Harvard think that not enough of these facets would have been lived by a student body selected on merit? Black people might be especially unlikely to add to the total number of such facets since they are not known for being adventurous. How many of Harvard’s Blacks are likely to have climbed a mountain or even gone for a walk in the countryside? How many will have visited an art gallery or museum?

The letter went on to say that Harvard must be a place of opportunity, “whose doors remain open to those to whom they had long been closed”. Presumably by “those to whom they had long been closed” it meant Black people of the past to whom doors were closed because they were Black. Apparently Harvard finds the historical existence of such people a sufficient reason for letting in Black people who lack the qualifications required of the other races.

But affirmative action works, say the intellectuals, and point to their poster boys. An early one was Patrick Chavis, who in 1975 was among the first Black students to be admitted to medical school when had he been White he would have been rejected.[6] When he set up in practice after graduating, a journalist named Nicholas Lemann called him a living and breathing refutation of the claim that racial preferences favour unqualified Blacks over better-qualified Whites. How he thought that this had been refuted is a mystery since it is the very definition of affirmative action and its whole point. Anyway, misfortune struck Chavis when in 1997 his licence was suspended as he was deemed grossly negligent, incompetent and a danger to public health. He could not perform “some of the most basic duties required of a physician”. Two patients nearly died as a result of his botched operations; a third did. Presumably the intellectuals quietly took down that poster.

A famous beneficiary of affirmative action is Justice Clarence Thomas, who bitterly regrets accepting a place at Yale after clearing a specially lowered bar. The burden of being suspected of being less bright than his White peers is one that he had to bear for decades.

One person who escaped affirmative action is Anthony Brian Logan, who after growing up with drug addicts and criminals in his family worked tirelessly in various jobs before putting himself through a local college and starting up as a graphic designer. He went on to create a successful YouTube channel, where he puts out a video each day with excellent commentary on current affairs. In his opinion, Blacks who aspire to go to Harvard and are let in without the grades required of the other races are misguided. They find it hard to keep up and would have been better off at less well-known but perfectly adequate colleges that would not have treated them as special cases.

The fact that the intellectuals have no good argument for affirmative action does not diminish their support for it. For them it is not a matter of argument; it is a matter of fending off the thought that Black people are innately inferior to Whites, which would mean that they as Whites belonged to a superior race. To them this thought would be more than they could bear. They would see death camps on the way. Lifelong programming and continuing social pressure have prevented them from being able to see that relationships of superiority and inferiority are universal facts of life and nothing to be afraid of.

Another reason intellectuals might have for supporting affirmative action is that they believe in racial discrimination on principle. They do not share the general view that institutions should treat all alike without regard to race; they think they should have a favourite race and do all they can to benefit members of that race without a thought for the others. These are the anti-racists.

Yet another reason could be that the intellectuals want to avoid Black violence. After the Supreme Court decision, the commentator John Derbyshire wrote a piece saying three times that meritocratic college admissions were unacceptable.[7] His first justification for taking this view was a non sequitur: “The meritocratic option is unacceptable because of race differences in intelligence”. How do race differences in intelligence mean that colleges should not select applicants on merit? Derbyshire referred to a report which stated that if Harvard selected on merit, less than one per cent of its students would be Black. He didn’t say why this would be a problem.

His second justification was that if Harvard stopped favouring Black people — and he saw a loophole in the Supreme Court ruling that will let it continue doing this — “the oceans would boil and the earth would crash into the sun”. Perhaps by this he meant that if a serious attempt were made to abolish affirmative action, there would be an outcry, particularly on the part of Blacks, who might riot. We don’t want that, so colleges had better continue discriminating in their favour.

Going back to the intellectuals who passionately believe in essential racial equality, one might wonder who they are trying to benefit. They admit Black students to college on the basis that they have the intelligence that theoretically is in them but unrealised, which makes student populations look as they would do if things were as the intellectuals wished, then point to the results as though they proved that things really are this way. “Look at all these Black students!”, they say. “Who says Blacks aren’t as intelligent as Whites?” The point seems to be to allow them to perform a trick which they can then claim was no trick rather than try to help the Black students, who can only sink or swim with the intelligence at their disposal. Perhaps their passion comes from the struggle between the two sides of their double-think.

A final speculation is that contributing to these intellectuals’ inability to tolerate the thought of innate racial differences is the fact that they belong to a spoilt generation. They want the races to be the same; they don’t want to be superior. No one has ever told them that you can’t always have what you want.


[1] This use of the word “intellectuals” comes from Friedrich Hayek, 1998 (1949), The Intellectuals and Socialism, London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, pp. 9-18.

[2] By “affirmative action” this article means discrimination in favour of Black people. It does not discuss discrimination in favour of Hispanics, women or other groups.

[3] Jared Taylor, 2004 (1992), Paved with Good Intentions, New Century Foundation, p. 126. The Executive Order was No. 11246.

[4] James Burnham, 1964, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism, New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, p. 197.

[5] The letter is quoted in V-DARE, June 30th 2023, “Nobody Wants An 0.76 Percent Black Harvard. The Oceans Would Boil, The Earth Would Crash Into The Sun” by John Derbyshire, https://vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-nobody-wants-an-0-76-percent-Black-harvard-the-oceans-would-boil-the-earth-would-crash-into-the-sun.

[6] William McGowan, 2002, Coloring the News: How Political Correctness Has Corrupted American Journalism, San Francisco: Encounter Books.

[7] V-DARE, June 30th 2023, op cit.

The Anniversary the Media Would Prefer You Forget

The Anniversary the Media Would Prefer You Forget

How did I miss the third anniversary of George Floyd’s death? Were the media caught sleeping? Three years ago, Floyd was given funerals in three states, carried in a gold casket and driven to his final resting place in a horse-drawn carriage. It was like the funeral for a pharaoh.

      From Floyd’s death on May 25, 2020, to the end of the year, The New York Times alone ran more than 4,000 articles about him. But exactly three years later, Floyd’s name made it into only three Times items — fleetingly and barely.

      Are the media (and Democrats, and Hollywood, and corporate America, and the universities and grade schools, and hospitals and military and President Biden) hoping we’ll forget about their weird campaign to make Black Americans even angrier?

      Since May 25, 2020, the single-minded message delivered to Black people, without interruption or contradiction, has been that they live in a country steeped in White supremacy, anything bad that happens to them is proof of racism, and oh by the way, the police are trying to kill them.

      The You Are a Victim! message is unlikely to produce stellar behavior in anyone. Directed at a group that already had a pretty high rate of criminal offending, it nearly destroyed our country.

      By the end of 2020, the national homicide rate had shot up an unprecedented 30% and has continued to climb since then.

      As Heather Mac Donald writes in her new book, When Race Trumps Merit:

      “New homicide records were set in 2021 in Philadelphia, Columbus, Indianapolis, Rochester, Louisville, Toledo, Baton Rouge, St. Paul, Portland, and elsewhere. The violence continued into 2022. January 2022 was Baltimore’s deadliest month in nearly 50 years, with 36 people killed, compared to 35 in 1973, when the city’s population was much larger.”

      With the Black community itself bearing the brunt of the violence, by now, the ruling class’s fawning embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement has gotten tens of thousands of Black people killed.

      If I’d done that, I’d want everyone to forget about the “racial reckoning,” too.

      Although the hourly “racism updates” have ended, BLM’s lies have calcified into received wisdom. It is still a matter of doctrine that Black people are victims of systemically racist police.

      In fact, as Mac Donald has been documenting for years, police are 400 times as likely to be killed by a Black person as unarmed blacks are to be killed by cops.

      Using the latest figures, in 2021, a grand total of eight unarmed Blacks were killed by cops. That same year, an estimated 29 police officers were killed by Black suspects. Of course, there are a lot more Black people (47 million) than police officers (700,000). Thus, the apples-to-apples comparison works out to: For every 100,000 blacks, 1/100th of one unarmed Black is killed by a cop; for every 100,000 cops, four are killed by black men.

      Maybe it’s the moms of Black cops who ought to be giving their sons “The Talk.” Son, do everything you can to avoid being assigned to a Black neighborhood. Be alert at all times, even when sitting in your squad car. If at all possible, do not arrest a Black suspect. If you absolutely have to, make sure you have backup.

      One person too full of her own self-righteousness to notice that the rest of her party had decided to keep mum about the “racial reckoning” was Rep. Ilhan Omar. She marked the occasion by regurgitating the exact same boilerplate about racist cops and “black bodies.”

      “Regardless of the heightened scrutiny and spotlight on state-sanctioned violence on to Black bodies,” she told The Guardian, “it still continues to happen at the same rate, if not higher.”

      (What I admire most about third-world immigrants is their realization that their ancestors were people utterly incapable of building a functioning society, and therefore, if they happened to find themselves in a successful country, like the U.S., they should shut up, listen and learn.)

      “State-sanctioned violence” against “Black bodies”? The fact is all police shootings of Blacks combined (justified, unjustified, armed and unarmed) is a smaller percentage of the Black homicide rate (2%) than police shootings are of the White and Hispanic homicide rates (9%).

      But the 98% of Black people who are killed by other Black people are of zero interest to the media or the Democratic Party. It’s that crucial .01% of Blacks killed by cops that get the headlines.

      Neighbor: YOUR 9-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER WAS JUST GUNNED DOWN BY GANG MEMBERS IN A SACRAMENTO PARK!

      Black mother: Please God, tell me the shooters weren’t White!

      After listing pages and pages of Black children killed in black neighborhoods by Black criminals, Mac Donald writes: “Since the black children’s assailants are overwhelmingly black themselves, the country changes the subject, lest it be accused of a taboo attention to black crime.”

      So Black bodies continue to pile up, and the only people who give a damn are conservatives — and the police.

      Happy anniversary.

     COPYRIGHT 2023 ANN COULTER

Recent Research on Race Realism

Race and Evolution: The Causes and Consequences of Race Differences
Stephen K. Sanderson
Self-published, 2022

Stephen Sanderson is the author, coauthor, or editor of sixteen books in twenty-two editions and some seventy-five articles in journals, edited collections, and handbooks. He is a retired professor of sociology and is quite unusual within his discipline for applying evolutionary principles to the study of society. His latest offering, dedicated to J. Phillippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen, combines a useful summary of the best in recent research and theory regarding human racial differences (seven chapters) with applications to such topics as the history of slavery, liberal stereotype theory, social stratification by color, the history of human accomplishment, the rise of Northeast Asia, and the decline of Africa (six chapters); a final chapter discusses policy options. Being an American, the author devotes special attention to Whites and Blacks, but includes information on other races wherever helpful.

Sanderson begins his book with several epigraphs that indicate his awareness that he is stepping into a very politically incorrect minefield. These two are well worth pondering in the present context where woke ideology—an ideology based on moral judgments and equitable outcomes rather than science and facts—reigns supreme in universities, the media, and corporate culture:

A good society is one that permits a maximum amount of objective pursuit of truth and beauty, and this pursuit should be undertaken “irrespective of the consequences.” Such inquiry may lead to the discovery of “inconvenient facts,” but it must be undertaken nonetheless. We cannot know in advance whether the knowledge we create or discover will support or contradict certain moral positions already held. And “philosophies incongruent with the pursuit of a reduction in misery should be permitted since the basis of rationality is strengthened through argument,” and “all opinions, however obnoxious or however passionately held, [should] be heard and subjected to the test of rational criticism.” Barrington Moore, Jr.

Political thinking, especially on the left, is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of fact hardly matters. George Orwell

The first section of the book, entitled “Foundations of Race Realism,” will be well-trodden ground for regular readers of The Occidental Observer, so I shall be brief. The first chapter defends the biological reality of races by providing a point-by-point refutation of two high-profile formal statements of social constructivism, one issued by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 1998 and the other by the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA) in 1999. The author explains what is wrong with “Lewontin’s fallacy,” i.e., the inference of the unreality of race from the fact of greater genetic variation within than between racial groups. He quotes some older texts to show that the concept of race was not invented by eighteenth century European colonialists, as the AAA and many antiracists maintain. A good example of the lengths to which some people will go to deny reality is the AAPA’s declaration that “human traits known to be biologically adaptive do not occur with greater frequency in one population than in others.” Sanderson marvels that this is “obviously false and a rather astonishing statement for a biological anthropologist to make,” giving a few simple examples. The chapter closes with an account of how cluster analysis of population genetic data can reliably identify “four to six major racial groups.”

Chapter Two explains the inadequacy of non-biological explanations for differences in racial outcomes, including discrimination, the lingering effects of slavery, and systemic racism. The best of these theories focuses on the higher rates of fatherless households among Blacks than Whites, but the explanation for this difference lies ultimately in racial biology after all.

Chapter Three summarizes evidence for genetically based racial differences in average intelligences. American psychometric data showing an average White IQ of about 100 and an average Black IQ of 85 has now accumulated for over a hundred years. In the course of childhood, the degree to which environment can explain such differences steadily declines, disappearing entirely by around age fourteen. Most damning for the social constructivist position, however, is that Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) now make it possible to identify specific genes that contribute to intelligence, meaning that intelligence can be reliably (albeit not perfectly) predicted from biological data alone. One particularly telling statistic Sanderson cites is the correlation between the average IQ of the nations of the world and the percentage of their population that is Black: .808.

Many Black-White socioeconomic gaps disappear once IQ is controlled for, but one difference that does not is out-of-wedlock births. In his fourth chapter, Sanderson explains race differences in sex, reproduction and family patterns, summarizing Rushton’s evidence for high mating effort/low nurturance among Blacks and low mating effort/high nurturance among Northeast Asians, with Whites intermediate. He demonstrates that fatherless homes are common in Africa and among Blacks worldwide, not something unique to post-World War II America.

Chapter Five discusses race differences in personality and temperament. In the American context, the most important are that Blacks have significantly higher levels of antisocial personality as well as higher time preference than Whites (i.e., Blacks are more likely to place less value on returns receivable or costs payable in the future and hence more likely to accept immediate rewards rather than wait for larger returns at a later date and more likely to take out disadvantageous long-term loans with immediate up-front payouts). Confusingly, the author systematically switches the terms “high” and “low” time preference; one hopes this mistake can soon be corrected through the print-on-demand system.

Chapter Six explains racial differences in law-abidingness, including violent crime, civil disorder (mob violence), and political corruption. Such differences are in large part a consequence of differences in intelligence and time-preference.

Chapter Seven outlines the historical development of racial differences following the migration of early humans out of Africa and into colder climates where getting through the winter required planning ahead. There is also a discussion of Life History Theory and the r-K continuum (basically the continuum from high mating effort/low nurturance to low mating effort/high nurturance).

The six chapters which make up Part 2 of Race and Evolution apply the race realist perspective to particular issues. Chapter Eight provides a brief history of New World slavery, including regional comparisons, arguing it was fundamentally an economic rather than a racial institution: “Europeans did not choose Africans as slaves because they considered them biologically inferior, but because Africa provided a huge supply of labor that could be transported to the New World more cheaply than slaves drawn from, say, India or China.”

Chapter Nine discusses racial stratification around the world, showing that Blacks have the lowest average socio-economic status in multiracial societies everywhere. The author explains that the phenomenon of “pigmentocracy”—where increasingly light skin is found the higher one goes up the socio-economic scale—results from a hierarchy of ability: “Lighter skinned people are regarded more highly because they are more talented.”

Ever since psychologist Gordon Alport published The Nature of Prejudice in 1954, “stereotypes” have been a staple of social constructivist discourse, the assumption being that they are unreliable. But this has never been demonstrated. In Chapter Ten, Sanderson summarizes the findings of a series of studies published since 2012 by social psychologist Lee Jussim and colleagues. They found a high positive correlation between racial, ethnic, and gender stereotypes and empirical reality. For instance, in one study comparing stereotypes with US Census data, correlations ranged from .27 (already moderately significant) to .96, with a mean as high as .83. Jussim et al. write that “stereotype accuracy correlations are among the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology.” This is no doubt because, over human evolutionary history, accurate knowledge of behavior patterns of social groups within one’s environment must have had considerable survival value, and thus been favored by natural selection.

Chapter Eleven demonstrates that the bulk of scientific discovery and other advances in human knowledge have been the work of European and European-descended men. Northeast Asians may have somewhat higher average intelligence, but they tend to produce highly conformist cultures where copying from accepted “masters” is inculcated and originality is frowned upon. Africa, of course, has produced nothing notable in scientific discovery.

Chapter Twelve discusses the recent rapid economic development of Northeast Asia and the dominance of Southeast Asian economies by the overseas Chinese.

Chapter thirteen contrasts this with the catastrophic fate of sub-Saharan Africa since decolonization and demonstrates the inadequacy of anti-colonial theories to explain it. The late Ghanaian economist George B. N. Ayittey has described the typical African post-colonial regime as a “vampire state.” Sanderson summarizes:

A vampire state is one run by crooks and gangsters who come to power either through rigged elections or coups d’état. Their leaders are functional illiterates who debauch all major government institutions: civil service, military, judiciary and banking system. They transform their countries into personal fiefdoms for the benefit of themselves, their cronies and tribesmen.

The author offers a brief tour of the continent filled with collapsing public services, universal corruption and bribery, civil wars, cannibalism, torture, a five hextillion percent rate of inflation (in Zimbabwe a few years ago) and outright genocide (in Rwanda). As he explains:

Before colonialism Africans had indigenous political institutions that were much simpler and more easily used to maintain order than those established by the colonists. The new colonial institutions were not natural to Africans and proved beyond their ability to manage effectively. Indeed, it took Europeans thousands of years to develop such institutions, . . . so it is no wonder that Africans did not understand them.

To this must be added that many who succeed in the ruthless world of African power politics have extremely antisocial personalities and are not really interested in economic development or the general welfare. They concentrate their efforts on enriching themselves at the expense of the countries they govern, displaying “a massive failure to adhere to social norms, no regard for truth, a lack of remorse or feelings of guilt, extreme aggressiveness, impulsiveness and recklessness, and an unusually weak moral sense.”

The final chapter of Race and Evolution is devoted to policy, explaining the failure of racial preferences, the lack of any evidence for the alleged benefits of “diversity,” and the many powerful objections to slavery reparations. Sanderson agrees with law professor Amy Wax’s position that “outsiders’ power to change existing [dysfunctional Black family] patterns is severely limited; the future of Black America is now in its own hands.” Yet he notes that the choices Blacks have to make are constrained by their own biological nature. Some Blacks do make good choices and prosper as a result, but these are generally those with above-average intelligence and an absence of antisocial character traits. Many others are unlikely ever to make better choices than they are making now.

Sanderson agrees that America needs a “national conversation on race,” as advocated, e.g., by Bill Clinton and Howard Schultz (the CEO of Starbucks), but unlike them he understands that it will do no good as long as knowledgeable race realists are banned from participation. As Arthur Jensen and J. Phillippe Rushton have written:

There is a need to educate the public about the true nature of individual and group differences, genetics, and evolutionary biology. Ultimately, the public must accept the pragmatic reality that some groups will be overrepresented and others groups underrepresented in various socially valued outcomes. The view that one segment of the population is largely to blame for the problems of another segment can be harmful to racial harmony. Equating group disparities in success with racism on the part of the more successful group guarantees mutual resentment.

Racial equality of outcome is not achievable, but race relations could be greatly improved if the biological reality of racial differences were understood by more people.

There is not a lot of original material in Sanderson’s Race and Evolution, but I am not aware of any other single volume which summarizes so much useful information about race between two covers. It could do a great deal of good if made widely available. Is there any chance it will be? The author is currently trying to get an e-book version published on Amazon. For the time being, you can order the book directly from him for $12 US plus $4 US shipping (domestic) or 10 EUR plus 7 EUR shipping (outside the United States). Write to:

Stephen Sanderson
460 Washington Road, Apt. G-3
Pittsburgh, PA 15228

E-mail: sksander999@gmail.com

The author also maintains a website at www.stephenksanderson.com.