Freedom of Association and the Right of Exclusion: The Rights Before All Others, Part 2

Begin at Part 1.

Homogenous Societies Are Healthy Societies:  Why We Need a Right of Association

It is time to affirm a White right of association.  To begin with, Whites simply desire it.  From decisions on which neighborhood to live in, whom to date and marry, and where to worship, Whites choose the company of other Whites.  The desire is typically characterized as narrow-minded, but has deep roots in biology and evolution.  Whites, like all other races, stewed in their own genetic juices for thousands of years before the present era.[1]  They were bred for togetherness, and their general pull toward it is healthy.  I do not exclude from this vision international trade, cultural exchange, and frequent travel — in fact, I mark all these as healthy and necessary for White people.

But for everyday living, homogeneity should be the default.  Said Wilmot Robertson in The Ethnostate:  “Individual and group identity can be viewed as the backbone of the human psyche, an unbent vertebra of pride, behavior and character. … The ethnostate is designed to fulfill the equally important need of all men and women for a community, for a collective home.”[2]

For Whites, it is actually physically healthier.  In 2004, Dan Buettner became interested in the topic of longevity.  He teamed with National Geographic to find the places on Earth where human beings lived the longest, and identified several he referred to as “blue zones”[3].  Loma Linda, California (home of a community of Seventh-Day Adventists), Okinawa, Japan, and Sardinia, Italy were places where people regularly lived to be 100.

The zones had characteristic behaviors:  physically, the people “moved naturally” — i.e., gardening instead of pumping iron, walking instead of running marathons.  Their diets were more plant-based than meat-based.  They didn’t eat to the point of being stuffed — the “80 percent full” rule.  They drank alcohol — wine is a good example – regularly but moderately.

Socially, their lives had purpose — something to live for.  They had routines for shedding stress.  They belonged to “faith-based communities,” that is, they had religious belief and gathered for contemplation with other believers.  Family was a priority — they lived with multiple generations, caring for aging parents and practicing high-investment parenting with children.  Finally, in the words of Buettner, they had the “right tribe” — supportive networks of people who reinforced the healthy behaviors.

As I watched the documentary on all this, I could not help notice — though it was unstated — the racial homogeneity of all these “blue zones.”  The Sardinians were racially southern European, the Okinawans, all Japanese, and the Loma Lindans, White.  Every one of the social behaviors contributing to longevity was enhanced by, if not impossible without, racial community.  If it is true, as Martin Luther King, Jr. once declared, that “Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America,” then it becomes plain that the most intimate and important human activities take place in racially homogenous settings.  The act of going to church is a communal one where individuals make themselves vulnerable by acknowledging their insignificance in the universe, their subjection to God’s will, and their sins.  In such an environment, humans do not seek the company of the “other” but of their own kind.

In this, the racial homogeneity of church mirrors other intimate associations:  marriage, friendships, college fraternities, and so on.  Where people are laid bare, they seek the comfort and solace of those who understand them most closely, empathize with them, and communicate easily with them.  “Bare” here is also literal:  by anecdote I observe that when it comes to pools, saunas and spas, racial groups cluster with a vengeance.  Ancient Roman — and modern Japanese — communal baths sound a bit odd to a modern American, but the genetic closeness of the participants, upon consideration, makes it less weird.  A public bath in a place like New York City would be revolting indeed — and in fact, there is no such thing.

The higher level of trust in racially homogenous societies improves economic efficiency.  Francis Fukuyama, in his 1995 book Trust:  The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, notes that Northwestern Europeans and Japanese possess this quality in greater degrees than other cultures, such as Mexican and African. In an interview of Milton Friedman by Peter Brimelow for Forbes in 1988, Friedman admitted that honesty in a given culture was necessary for economic success, noting that Lebanon’s achievements were due in part to the fact that the word of merchants there could be trusted.  The English-speaking world, Friedman said, is where capitalism has flourished.

A Harvard economics professor, Robert J. Barro, wrote that political separation is sometimes a good idea, particularly when the benefits accruing from a large nation (spreading of the cost of public goods, national security) slip in relation to the costs (a diverse population that cannot be satisfied).[4]  Barro wrote, “Although it may be an unpleasant commentary on human nature, a central driving force in defining a state is the desire to have a reasonably homogenous population within its borders.  Political economy explains some of the benefits of having a homogenous population within a given state.  If diversity is great – measured say by the inequality in potential earnings – then there is a strong incentive for people to spend their energies in efforts to redistribute income rather than to produce goods.”

How small can the population be, while still enjoying the distribution of labor that makes for a sound modern economy?  About a million, Barro says, providing the allowance of international trade.  That is something for Whites to consider, as the U.S. population inches toward half a billion.

Moral, Philosophical, and Religious Considerations

Academic treatments of the right of association — and right to exclude — are hard to come by.  I found one[5], published in 1997 by an MIT (later Oxford) professor named Stuart White.  White accepts the multiracial society, and seeks to establish criteria for when exclusion within such a society is permissible, and when it is not.  He is not, of course, writing from a White advocacy perspective, but has at least analyzed the issues with some rigor.

Stuart balances what he calls “integrity interests” (the right of association) with “opportunity interests” (we’ll call it the right of intrusion).  He calls the right of association a powerful, intuitively-felt human impulse, almost self-evidently justified.  For the individual, the right of association is crucial to expression of “ethical personality and self-realization.”

Integrity interests are “related to the individual’s physical security, and, more broadly, to his/her freedom to shape and live authentically in accordance with a distinctive ethical personality.  By ‘ethical personality’, I mean the cluster of commitments — philosophical, religious, affective — which represent the individual’s personal response to fundamental questions of value and meaning and which thereby give his/her life its basic normative shape and direction.  The individual has a profoundly important moral interest in protecting the integrity of these commitments, and the communities which are necessary for their pursuit.” (italics added)[6]

Impinging on that, White says, requires bearing a burden of proof.  This is where the “opportunity interests” come in.  These “relate centrally, though not exclusively, to having fair access to income and wealth, and to other goods, like education and employment, which have a clear instrumental value in enabling the individual to realize his/her ethical personality.”  Exclusion that puts too hard a crimp on opportunity interests is disfavored, in White’s scheme. Specific examples of “opportunity interests” include economic benefits, community participation (for instance, why American courts say that Blacks cannot be excluded from juries, even though this does not arguably impinge on the rights of any party to the case), and “dignity”.

As a final element in the analysis, an association must be legitimately purposeful, and the exclusion must be “purpose-protecting,” i.e., letting outsiders in would destroy the very purpose of the association.  An example of this would be the Catholic Church — it may rightly exclude non-Catholics or non-believers, because to admit them would mean that the church itself would cease to exist.  It is, by definition, an association of the like-minded.

White rejects the “choice principle” as the only legitimate ground of exclusion — that is, only personally chosen characteristics, like religious belief, can be used to exclude (and not race or gender).  In some cases, White says, “excluding individuals from association membership on the basis of unchosen characteristics do not necessarily strike one as morally troublesome.”  A women’s only fitness club is a good example, he says.  Yet he also rejects the “choice principle” in so far as it could used in a “racist” way, i.e., keeping all Muslims out of a trade union.

What struck me about White’s article is that a mainstream academic would have put forth such a powerful a priori case for the right of association.  For the White advocate seeking moral analysis of racial separation, he identifies the costs of exclusion, which can then be addressed in turn.

The first response to “opportunity interests” as hampered by exclusion is:  there is little injustice in a limitation of opportunity interests that comes about by the exercise of free will by others.  Opportunity interests found within a racially homogenous group should be sufficient, and if there are opportunity interests outside the group, they must come about because the outsiders willingly create them.

The problem with “opportunity interests” in the United States is that groups like Blacks and Hispanics do not trade in such a free market.  Their “opportunity interests” come about because of such forced and artificial measures as welfare, affirmative action, federal employment law, housing discrimination law, media pressure, amnesty for illegal aliens, and so on.  “Fair access to income and wealth” in a society of unequals inevitably results in forced transfers of wealth, to borrow a libertarian phrase.

Dignity — the final “opportunity interest” identified by White — is, I believe, not to be discounted.  Preservation of dignity — for all human groups — I believe to be an essential component of the move toward White separation.  By preservation of dignity, I do not mean the provision of welfare goodies to non-Whites, but an absence of humiliation, mockery, or degradation.  The best way to achieve dignity for all groups is for them live independently.  I see no dignity for Blacks or Hispanics in a nation where the former are held to White standards of behavior — which they cannot achieve in the aggregate — and end up imprisoned in absurd numbers and resentful of relative White material success.  Likewise, I see little dignity for Whites in a nation where such a large share of their wealth is transferred to Blacks and Hispanics for their care — resulting not in gratitude, but resentment from all.

For some, a right of association and exclusion conflicts with what they consider to be Christian benevolence or the dictates of Christ.  Yet the Christian Bible, taken as a whole, appears more supportive of the organic, ethnically homogenous society or nation than any kind of multiracialism.  The most frequently quoted line against racial separatism comes from Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”[7]  Yet one need not be a theologian to see that is a reference to salvation, not earthly living arrangements.  Nowhere in the New Testament does Christ command racial suicide, miscegenation, or forced integration.

The Old Testament, of course, is in a large part the story of the rise of the Jewish nation, its enslavements and exiles, and the building of Israel.  When they follow God, they prosper and their enemies are destroyed; when they turn their backs on God, their enemies destroy them.  It is far from multiracial; in fact, it is nationalism with a vengeance (the vengeance being God’s).   Genesis’ Tower of Babel account is prophetic indeed, and God later set down what he meant for the people of the Earth:  “When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of man, He set the boundaries of the people” (Deuteronomy 32:8).

The priest Ezra, upon returning from the Babylonian exile, rips his own hair out when he hears that people of Israel “have mingled the holy race with the peoples around them”[8] and rails against intermarriage. So much for Adolf Hitler’s monopoly on the ideology of racial purity.  The apostle Paul identified first and foremost as an ethnic and cultural Jew, even after full acceptance of Christ.  Both the Old Testament and the New Testament provide repeated affirmations of the organic nature of the nations, e.g., ethnic homogeneity.[9]

White advocates who are atheists might scoff at the need to address religious belief, but recall that in our struggle for a right of association, our most important audience is our fellow Whites, many of whom are Christian.  These White Christians seek heaven, and have been convinced that a commitment to their race will send them to hell.  They need to be assured that a right of association steers us away from that fate, both here and in the hereafter.

As far as simple secular morality goes, I see no issue with one group of people voluntarily and non-violently disassociating themselves from others.  Nothing is owed in either direction.  No physical harm befalls anyone.  Theft, cheating, deception, sexual impropriety, insults, trespass — none of the standard moral issues are implicated. A man who dates and is later rejected by a woman has zero moral claim against her:  she has, however painfully to him, decided to move in another direction.  She has chosen her own destiny.  Nobody questions her decision.  No lawyer files a lawsuit on his behalf, no editorials are written, no criminal charges filed, no inquest is held.  It is simply the rhythm of freedom.

If there is a relationship comparison to the racial morass, it may be that of a couple needing a divorce.  In securing the separation, there are tricky issues to be dealt with, and there are costs and adjustments made, most of which take getting used to.  But the result — assuming a sound decision to get the divorce in the first place — is typically worth it.  The White race needs a divorce.

There is simply no moral imperative for forced racial association.  The current White morality, which holds Whites responsible for every last primitive in the South American jungle and subsistence farmer in southeast Asia, is laughably incorrect.  Moral regard should radiate outward in concentric circles, with immediate family first, race next, and others beyond that.  Garrett Hardin recognized as much with his observation of “promiscuous altruism.”  We currently have it backward:  we consider the starving African child a more pressing issue than the fact that the White child doesn’t even exist because we refuse to marry and have children.  The current state of multiracialism is due to a precious few — and transitory — factors:  slavery and uncontrolled immigration.  These are temporary and can be reversed.  No human group has an unending right to the material support provided by any other group. Yet this is the only notion supporting the rickety, rotten infrastructure of the forced multiracial society.

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

Go to Part 3 of 3.


[1] Ethnic Conflicts Explained by Ethnic Nepotism, Tatu Vanhanen, 1999 (Jai Press Inc.)

[2] The Ethnostate, Wilmot Robertson, Howard Allen Enterprises, Inc., 1992.

[3] bluezones.com

[4] Small is Beautiful, Robert J. Barro, Wall Street Journal, Oct. 11, 2001.

[5] Freedom of Association and the Right to Exclude, Stuart White, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 5, No. 4, 1997, pp. 373-391.

[6] This serves as a nicely-phrased justification for racial nationalism.

[7] King James Version.

[8] Ezra 9:1 (NIV).

[9] The Christian Doctrine of Nations, H.A. Scott Trask, American Renaissance, Vol. 12, No. 7, July 2001.