I’ve just finished researching and writing a long essay on a two decade-old phenomenon in which the film image of African American males has improved dramatically. It now rivals that of white males, who outnumber blacks by about seven to one. (We might also mention that it was white males who ruled and largely built the nation we know as America.) Like others, I do not believe this process has “just happened.” Rather, I believe it is the result of a determined effort of elites to displace whites—especially males—from positions of status and power, if not to eliminate them altogether.

J.B. Cash, who is associated with the website Caste Football, describes this process about as well as anyone:

There are various names for the ideology of the elite. Some call it “political correctness.” Others call it “Cultural Marxism.” But the labels don’t matter as long as one understands what is going on: the ruling elites are waging a cultural and racial war against Western values, Western civilization, and particularly Western man, i.e., the white man. In the name of the feel-good mantras of diversity and multiculturalism, all the values of traditional white civilization have been declared bad and everything opposed to them declared good. Every idea, attitude, and institution that protects the white race and promotes its continued existence is being destroyed, as a precondition for the physical destruction of the race itself. No arena of life is spared this agenda’s icy grip. Every movie, television show, news story, book, and sermon must advance it, under the watchful eye of an army of censors and snitches demanding unyielding fidelity to the agenda. No argument or evidence is allowed to challenge it.

(For those so interested, William Lind’s Who Stole Our Culture adds further useful discussion.)

As my main area of academic research is film and its influence on society, I am naturally interested in the changing portrayals of various ethnic, racial, and gender groups in American society. Toward this end, my recent research involved the image of the noble black man, or, as Richard Brookhiser dubs him, the Numinous Negro.

Brookhiser tells us that the word ‘numinous’ is a Roman term for “the presiding divinity . . . of a place.” It also means “spiritually elevated.” According to Brookhiser, the Numinous Negro presides over America, “and contact with him elevates us spiritually.” The most obvious example comes in the person of Morgan Freeman in films such as The Shawshank Redemption, Deep Impact (U.S. president) and Bruce Almighty, where he plays, well, God. Though Brookhiser adds that “the Numinous Negro need not be a man — Toni Morrison and Oprah are Numinous Negroes (Ms. Morrison is a seer; Oprah is a sage)” — the vast majority of recent films featuring the Numinous Negro star male characters. I’ve already written about Denzel Washington, another excellent example of the genus.

Morgan Freeman Expressing his Numinosity as God in Bruce Almighty

Previously, I had done more work on the films of Washington than those of Morgan Freeman, so my latest essay saw me delving into the filmography of Mr. Freeman. Though I’ve emphasized how positive the Hollywood version of the Numinous Negro has become, even I was surprised by how extensive Freeman’s oeuvre is in that respect.

My general understanding was that Freeman’s public emergence as a Numinous Negro came in 1989 as the aw-shucks chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy and was cemented by his role as the redeemed prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Of course, film critics point out the irony that the tall Tennessean’s first big role in film was as the cruel pimp Fast Black in Street Smart (1987), for which he was nominated Best Supporting Actor. This exception aside, the point remains that Freeman’s characters have marched in lockstep with the multicultural ideology that increasingly elevates blacks in the American imagination.

I could easily go on to describe how by 1998, when Freeman played the role of kindly U.S. President in Deep Impact, his film persona was fixed as the intelligent moral center of each of his films. Steve Sailer, the film critic for The American Conservative and VDARE’s special Sunday columnist, aptly dubs Freeman America’s “Spiritual Presence-in-Chief.” Just go to the Wikipedia page on Freeman’s filmography to confirm this.  

For example, a year after The Shawshank Redemption, he played brilliant police mentor to Brad Pitt’s rash character in Seven, followed by his role as savant Dr. Alex Cross, a forensic psychologist, in Kiss the Girls. Having written tomes on the psychology of (presumably white) serial killers, he is unusually expert in following ambiguous clues. Freeman reprised his role as Dr. Cross in Along Came a Spider (2001), where once again Cross is an agent of deliverance to a young white woman.

In The Sum of All Fears, Freeman played Director of Central Intelligence to Ben Affleck’s young white Jack Ryan character (is anyone noticing a pattern here?) A year later, in 2003, Freeman appeared as God in Bruce Almighty (the 2007 sequel was Evan Almighty).

The following year saw Freeman team up with Clint Eastwood in the drama Million Dollar Baby, where Freeman won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as former prize fighter Eddie “Scrap-Iron” Dupris, a washed up, blind-in-one-eye boxer who manages to get by with a job as janitor at a local gym.

While Freeman’s main persona in Hollywood films is that of the wise and kindly mentor, generally to the young white star, in Batman Begins (2005) he is also elevated to the pinnacle of technological sophistication. Playing Lucius Fox, he is a scientist in biochemistry and mechanical engineering, supplying Bruce Wayne with the fabulous equipment he needs as a flying crime fighter. (He reprises the role in the 2008 sequel The Dark Knight.)

(Steve Sailer unravels the opening Hollywood conceit in Batman Begins, referring to the opening murder of Bruce’s parents: “As an old Chicagoan, I can assure you that one aspect of Batman Begins is standard-issue Hollywood hokum: the murderous mugger is blond. Blond bad guys are a lot more common in movies and television than in real life.”)

I could go on, but this is a mere website column, not a book. After all, by 1995 Freeman was starring in about two films a year, increasing to an average of three by 2005. In any case, my attention during my research turned in the other direction, to what Freeman had been doing in the decades prior to his Hollywood stardom. My discovery there was a surprise.

Freeman did not simply emerge fully formed as a great actor in the late 1980s. Rather, he honed his skills as a main character on the children’s educational program, The Electric Company, which was a product of The Children’s Television Workshop and ran on the Public Broadcasting Service. Clearly, this was a concerted effort at social engineering, following as it did the earlier success of Sesame Street. Funds came from the usual cast of liberal suspects, such as the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Corporation For Public Broadcasting, and the Office of Education, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Both Sesame Street and The Electric Company were the very models for what was to become multiculturalism in America, introducing the tolerant cast of mixed races and genders that later became the official norm throughout the country, as NASA did with space shuttle astronauts, etc. etc.

Freeman’s roles included Easy Reader, a “smooth hipster who loved to read at every opportunity and every printed thing he saw.” (Ironically, in the 1989 Academy Award-winning film Driving Miss Daisy, Freeman’s character was originally illiterate.) He also did Mel Mounds, a hip disc jockey who introduced songs, where his signature phrase was “Sounds righteous, delightious, and out-of-sighteous! Heavy, heavy!” Vincent the Vegetable Vampire was another of his roles.

Morgan Freeman: Before the Numinosity — The Vegetable Vampire

So for most of the Seventies, millions of American children were made to feel comfortable watching a dark African American with an afro sing ditties and spell words. Then, over a decade later, when he had aged and his hair grayed somewhat, he becomes America’s “Presence-in-Chief.” Interesting.

Morgan Freeman: Before the Numinosity — The ‘Fro Years

I may be reading too much into this, but the whole process reminds me of what author Jeff Gates discusses in his new book Guilt by Association: How Deception and Self-Deceit Took America to War. (I reviewed it here.) On matters far more serious than spelling, Gates outlines a strategy where a target audience is prepared for accepting future beliefs. This “preparing the minds” allows a displacement of facts with beliefs. The result is that the audience can be manipulated by inducing self-deceit, and pop culture plays a large role.

While I don’t believe that back in 1971 someone consciously set out to prepare Morgan Freeman to be, say, Dr. Alex Cross the brilliant psychologist, it would still be true that his appearances on The Electric Company succeeded in “laying the mental threads” of the image of a helpful and non-threatening black man.

What I am talking about, then, is sophisticated propaganda. One of my favorite accounts of the effects of propaganda come from Jacques Ellul’s ground-breaking 1965 work, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, where he states that

once the individual has been filled with and reshaped by propaganda, the smallest dose now suffices. It is enough to ‘refresh,’ to give a ‘booster shot,’ to repaint, and the individual behaves in striking fashion — like certain drunks who become intoxicated on one glass of wine. The individual no longer offers any resistance to propaganda; moreover, he has ceased to believe in it consciously. He no longer attaches importance to what it says, to its proclaimed objectives, but he acts according to the proper stimuli. The individual is arrested and crystallized with regard to his thinking.

An obvious example, used by Gates and many others, is the propagation of the media image of a threatening Arab. Using our Electric Company illustration, we see that even that “educational” show featured a stereotype of the evil Arab. As media scholar Jack Shaheen tells us in his study The TV Arab, there was a character known as the evil Spell Binder, “a short, grubby-looking villain who resembles those turbanned Arabs in the escapist Arabian Nights’ films of the fifties and sixties.” (He also notes that most other children’s shows had negative images of Arabs, too—Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, Speed Racer, Tennessee Tuxedo, Jonny Quest . . .)

Shaheen is wise to point to the selective framing of Arabs and the repetition of that framing. “You cannot deny the reality—there are people who really want to kill Americans. But those are basically the only images we see.” Naturally, such repetition has a goal, one captured in an old Arabic saying: “Al tikrar biallem il hmar. By repetition even the donkey learns.”

The donkey in this case is presumably the American people, who, as we all know, are pliable to sustained manipulation.

The real world consequences of Hollywood’s image of Morgan Freeman is obvious: We have our first black president. Given the long history of depicting black presidents as “calm, earnest, utterly decent and way, way cooler than white presidents,” who is surprised at this outcome?

Freeman continues apace in his work. Rumor has it that he has long wanted to do a film based on Nelson Mandela. Now that dream has come true, as Freeman again works with Clint Eastwood, who will direct the Mandela bio-pic titled The Human Factor. Tough guy Clintwood used to stand for the average white man, but lately he’s gone multicultural on us, especially with his latest, Gran Torino, in which he mentors a Hmong youth. Thus, I suspect that watching Freeman as hero Nelson Mandela will not exactly make my day.

Edmund Connelly is a freelance writer, academic, and expert on the cinema arts. He has previously written for The Occidental Quarterly.

We start to wonder about our identity at the moment when we are about to lose it. Our grandparents never asked questions about the meaning of identity; they never worried about who they were. They took for granted their affiliation to their religion, to their tribe, and to their race. It is with the rising tide of multiculturalism, followed by the waning of the traditional nation-state that identity becomes a problem.

The term “identity” has become fashionable because it can mean everything and nothing at the same time. It is no accident that it is much in vogue today because, as noted in a recent publication of the Institut für Staatspolitik, “it has a resonance more scientific than ‘national consciousness’ or ‘national soul.'”

After the tragic experience Europeans had with their brands of nationalisms during World War II and its minor extension during the recent Yugoslav war,  the European political class prefers to use neutral terms such as ” national identity.” The old expression “national consciousness,” which in the German language has a particularly strong resonance (i.e., Volksbewusstsein) or in the French language conscience nationale, smacks of fascist vocabulary and must be prudently avoided.

By contrast, the expression “national identity” sounds neutral. It can be used by all— even by those who reject their national identity or who discard the notion of racial pride. Even the icons of the left often give lip service to national pride by posing with patriotic symbols.

Barack Obama, American Patriot

It is true that when a White European or White American speaks of  the “national conscience” of his ingroup, the mainstream media will automatically point to the rising spectre of racism.  In the postmodern world, the barren term “identity” provides a certificate for decent civic consciousness, excluding any suspicion of xenophobia or the rejection of the Other.

Most White Europeans and White Americans resort to “functional” identities with no ties to their racial or cultural identity. Psychological research shows that Whites have fairly strong identities as Whites at the unconscious level — what Kevin MacDonald terms “implicit Whiteness.” But at the explicit, conscious level they identify themselves as Americans, or Christians, or classical music fans.

Indeed, for many Whites in the postmodern world, identity is expressed by the choice of different life styles and adherence to exotic mores. These new postmodern trendy identities replace the old identities derived from our racialand cultural heritage.

For example, an ever growing  number of Whites, while gleefully expressing their French, American, English or German roots, extol bizarre supranational and transnational identities. They gladly embrace exotic Afro or Asian escapism,  or the rap music of urban America. They detect their new identity not in the primeval White vicinity of their own village, but places as far away from their actual lives as possible.

Alain De Benoist observes that in postmodern society, individuals often seek alternative identities by identifying with trade marks, logos, or exotic imagery.  If a new fashion dictates that new identity must be  sought in Jewish Kabbala or in the mimicry of the life style of a Negro tribe from Timbuktu,  it will be gladly embraced.

Madonna proudly sporting her identity as a Kabbalist

Quite possibly modern European Americans or Europeans at large cannot become racially conscious without first facing serious physical threat by someone else’s well defined identity.  Witness the break-up of Yugoslavia, when many Croats discovered an intense form of national identity thanks to the onslaught of Yugoslav communist tanks.   

Victimology: A negative identity

In a multiethnic and multicultural society, the identity of different ethnic groups is incompatible with liberal individualism. On the one hand liberalism preaches thefree market with happy consumers as the ultimate identity for all; yet on the other, the very dynamics of liberalism cannot dispense with the conflicting racial and ethnic identities in its own multicultural body politic.

In fact, as ironic as this may sound. multiculturalism (which is the fraudulent euphemism for multiracialism),  presents the biggest  threat to the liberal systemThis is because it provokes the sentiments of victimology among its differentethnic and racial constituents.  Modern multicultural society, as the former Yugoslavia has shown and as modern US is showing daily, is a fragile systemprone to racial and ethnic tension.  Pierre André Taguieff a French left-leaning writer and politically  correct dissident, notes, that “particularly interethnic rivalry can be radicalized by the slightest spark (a minor event ) and merge into a conflict resembling a civil war.”

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Since the end of the Cold War, the political class claims its identity by constant resurrection of  the fascist straw man and the forever looming anti-Semite. Even if that anti-Semite bogeyman is not around, he must be reinvented  in order toprovide credibility to the liberal system. Over and over again.

At the beginning of the third millennium, one can hear on all wavelengths endless horror stories about the evil Hitler — a man who is surely destined to live foreverin infamy.  It appears that liberal democracy cannot function at all without using the negative Other.

The Jewish Holocaust has become a critical component of identity for the Western world in need of new quasi-religious symbolism — the culture of the Holocaust.  In 2005, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Horst Köhler, tearfully declared in the Israeli Knesset that the responsibility for Shoah is part of  German identity.” (“Die Verantwortung für die Schoa ist Teil der deutschen Identität.) Similarly, the former Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schröder declared that  “the remembrance of the Shoah  belongs to our identity.”

Think about that. If taken literally, it would mean that one could not think of oneself as a German without also thinking about the role of Germans in the Holocaust. To be a German is to have the mark of Cain branded on one’s forehead.

This culture of the Holocaust is staunchly maintained by the judicial system in Europe. The perception of either real or surreal anti-Semitic identity triggers judicial wrath. Any academic who questions the modern Jewish narrative can easily land into the claws of the Criminal Code — the dreaded German StGB, Section 130, or the French “Loi Fabius- Gayssot.”

There is an obvious double standard here. It is widely permissible to  exercise one’s  own identity by cracking jokes against “fat Krauts”  or  “stinking Frogs.” or “hypocrite  Wasps.” One can go even go so far as to utter a mild joke against proverbial “camel riders.”  But a minor joke about Jewry is unthinkable in the media and political circles of America and Europe. One can criticize the Other by invoking free speech, provided that the Other is not a Jew.

Ersatz-substitute identities

In their desperate search of a non-racial identity, White Europeans resort to ersatz identities. For instance, they espouse the Palestinian or Tibetan identity or the identity of some distant Third World tribe  as if it was their own identity. They will spot some lost Indian tribe in the Amazon forest and then, with all  vicarious passion, strive to protect and preserve it.

But when it comes to defining and preserving their own racial identity — let alone preserve their race, they remain silent. To say aloud “I am proud of being a White European” smacks of racism.

Such substitute or foreign-inspired ersatz identity is particularly strong when it is couched in the narrative of victimology. Europeans are keen at erecting monuments to exotic tribes that they never heard of until the day before yesterday— especially ones that may have been victimized by Europeans. Days of atonement keep accumulating on the calendar. Every White European or American politician is obliged to pay moral and financial tributes to peoples whose identity has nothing in common with his own.

While Western media and opinion makers assure us that history is creeping toward an end, we are witnessing a staggering demand for the revival of non-European micro-identities, often couched in self-centred victimhoods. And each of those non-European victimhoods requires an expanding number of its domestic dead and foreign culprits. Culprits are always White Europeans, who are forced to practice the ritual of remorse.

The old sense of the tragic, which until recently was the fundamental pillar of the old Greco-Roman historical memory in Europe, cedes its place to Levantine-inspired jeremiads for victimhoods of Asian and African tribes. Slowly but surely, the European sense of the tragic is supplemented by a fixation on non-European identities.

What a scandal if a White European or American statesman fails to display remorse for the past suffering of some non-European people! What counts is the endless enumeration of non-European victims of the European past.

In this postmodern “battle of memories,” victimhoods cannot be equal. Some must take precedence over others, and it’s quite obvious that the Jewish Holocaust is the apex of victimhood in the postmodern West.

But there is a grave danger for all. Given the victimological atmosphere thatprevails today in the multiracial West, each non-European tribe, race, or community is led to believe that its own victimology is unique. This is a dangerous phenomenon because each victimology competes with other victimologies for pride of place.

The story of the 20th century is that the greatest mass murders in history — the mass murders of communism — were made possible by the Marxist ideology of victimization and they were rationalized in the name of tolerance and so-called human rights. The communist ideology of victimization resulted in the dehumanization of dissident intellectuals and political opponents, and even whole groups of people — with monstrous consequences.

The spirit of victimhood must search for its negative identity by negating  and abolishing the Other, who is henceforth no longer perceived as human, but depicted as a monster. The spirit of victimology does not serve to prevent the conflict. It renders the conflict inevitable.

The diverse identities in the multicultural West are a severe problem. On the one hand, modern liberal Western societies require that each non-European ethnic group receives an appropriate identity and its right to historical grievance; yet on the other, liberal societies are unable to function well in an environment beset by ethnic Balkanization.

In particular, the contest of diverse victimologies makes the functioning of the liberal system extremely precarious. In essence, each victimological spirit in multiracial society is confrontational and discriminatory. It creates a climate that promotes divisiveness in the society. The only way such societies can function is with high levels of social control. This prospect is doubtlessly viewed quite positively by postmodern intellectuals. But it will lead to alienation and disengagement for the great majority — especially for Whites who cannot claim victimhood and who are forced to witness the disintegration of their once homogeneous communities.

American and European societies are facing a schizoid situation. On the onehand, they are being overwhelmed by the rhetoric of negative identities derived from guilt  feelings — the various anti-colonial victimologies and the endless palaver about past European fascist crimes. Yet on the other hand, one can barely hear a word about gigantic crimes committed by Communists and their liberal allies during and after WWII — crimes committed to avenge the Marxist victimology of the class struggle.

Whites in Europe and America have to overcome the sense of territorial rootedness and intra-ethnic infighting. European racial and cultural identity stretches from Argentina to Sweden and to Russia and to many other places on the globe.

Even more importantly, White people must explicitly accept a White identity. This explicit White  identity does not imply that Whites are superior to other peoples or that other peoples are not also unique and have a right to maintain their uniqueness. It merely states that we are a unique people with a unique culture and that both our people and our culture are worth preserving.

White identity can best be preserved in the transcendental sphere of its own uniqueness. But White uniqueness need not and should not come at the price ofdenying the uniqueness of other peoples and other races.

Tom Sunic (http://www.tomsunic.info/; http://doctorsunic.netfirms.com/) is an author, former political science professor in the USA, translator and former Croat diplomat. He is the author of Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age ( 2007).

Review of Stuff White People Like: A Definitive Guide to the Unique Taste of Millions, by Christian Lander. New York: Random House, 2008

From The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 8, no. 4 (Winter 2008–2009). (Click here for information on subscriptions to TOQ.)

Does Christian Lander have our number? For a wide, mostly liberal swath of the white Western world, the answer is “yes.”

His observations about white tastes are so accurate, a goodly number of them apply even to this convert to white advocacy. (See also Kevin MacDonald’s TOO article on Lander.) While reading his book in the family room of my house on a fall Sunday, I was struck by how many of Lander’s items were within eyeshot: I was wearing New Balance shoes and a semi-ironic T-shirt (Items No. 94 and 84, respectively) after having gone for a run (Items No. 9 and 27), with an i-Pod around my neck (Item No. 40). There was a Sunday New York Times and several New Yorkers on the table next to me (Items No. 46 and 114, respectively), Netflix in the drawer below me (Item No. 39), a mug of coffee from earlier in the morning on the coffee table (Item No. 1), a bottle of water in my hand (Item No. 76), and, of course, a book—Stuff White People Like—in the other hand (Item No. 138).

Merely opening the garage door or walking upstairs would have put a dozen more items in range (Item No. 24, Wine; Item No. 31, Snowboarding; Item No. 61, Bicycles; Item No. 53, Dogs), and if I were to add the stuff preferred by just two or three family members or acquaintances, the entire list of “stuff white people like” would be covered, many times over.

Talk about busted. I started to wonder if Lander’s been spying on me, but this would have only branded me yet whiter (Item No. 126, Conspiracies; Item No. 149, Self-Importance).

I was a tad disappointed by my overall whiteness score (a mere 56 percent), but as I say, the “white people” in “Stuff White People Like” are the NPR-listening (Item No. 44), Volvo-driving set (oddly, Volvos are not on the list, but the Toyota Prius, Item No. 60, is) found in Manhattan and Brooklyn (Item No. 26) and small college towns in the Northeast. Lander leaves out working-class whites, many Christians, and political conservatives (excepting perhaps the “crunchy cons” identified by writer Rod Dreher). In other words, none of Jeff Foxworthy’s rednecks (Item No. 8, Barack Obama—White people like Barack Obama because they are afraid that if they don’t they will be considered racist; Item No. 118, the ACLU).

So who is Christian Lander? According to the book cover and interviews, he’s a left-leaning Ph.D. dropout now living in Los Angeles who once taught public speaking at Indiana University. It was his wildly popular blog, stuffwhitepeoplelike.com, that set the stage for his book.

Mr. Lander is not, at least wittingly, a white advocate. He expressed revulsion at the popularity of his observations among posters at Stormfront.org. But as with the honest observations about Jewish power in the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters, sincere and principled gentiles from the hip left occasionally stumble onto the truth.

How can the following be denied?

Item No. 2: Religions Their Parents Don’t Belong To. White people will often say they are “spiritual” but not religious. This usually means they will believe in any religion that doesn’t involve Jesus.

Of course, Christianity is big for much of white America, just not the set Lander has focused his anthropology on. As for “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual,” I can attest that this is something I’ve heard many, many times—using those exact words—from whites in more-educated settings across the country. What these whites are saying is that it would be cool to practice heathen rituals in the forest, but that Bible study is starchy and repressive.

Item No. 7. Diversity. White people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.

Naturally. (Here’s a Steve Sailer gem debunking the Restaurant Rationale for immigration.) Now that a white left-wing hipster has called them on it, how will all the other white left-wing hipsters react? Perhaps by dryly noting, “Oh, those Free Tibet stickers are so Number 7,” cluing other whites into their familiarity with Lander’s book. Being ahead of the curve is indeed very important to whites.

Item No. 11. Asian Girls.

No argument here, although anyone who’s ever laid eyes on Sean Lennon cannot seriously believe that the white/Asian mixture makes for attractive children.

Item No. 20. Being An Expert On Your Culture. White people are pretty conflicted about their culture. On one hand, they are proud of the art, literature, and film produced by white culture. On the other, they are very ashamed of all the bad things about white culture: the KKK, colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow laws, feudalism, and the treatment of Native Americans.

So, they make up for it by attempting to absorb the “authenticity” of any culture but their own. This regrettably goes far enough that whites feel compelled to adopt non-white (though rarely black) children from China and Guatemala, or move to dangerous corners of the globe where they sometimes get themselves killed in an attempt to prove their non-white authenticity. I call this the “Amy Biehl Syndrome,” after the blonde California woman who ventured to South Africa to help blacks and ended up being killed by them.

Not that I’m so immune myself: I’ve volunteered for job placement in the Bronx and ventured to the Palestinian town of Ramallah, where I took a certain pride in being mistaken for an Englishman, because “no Jew or American would ever come here,” as one local observed. As it turns out, my explorer impulse is only another item on the list of stuff white people like.

So is a book like Stuff White People Like good or bad for whites? On balance, my answer is “good.” I am not so concerned about what Lander considers the truly negative traits of whites: they’re anti-conformity hypocrites, they’re shallow, and they hate anyone not like them. The mere fact that he’s discussing whites as a group with generalized characteristics is subversive enough. No doubt some whites will be disappointed to realize that they’re not so unique after all, but might they come to embrace white groupness? Take an ironic pride in being white, which might then stoke an actual pride? Stop and wonder why it’s so taboo for them to even declare their whiteness?

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Imagine that whites finally realize that prizing multiculturalism, diversity, and nature, and losing sleep over the fate of non-whites around the world, are specifically white things, and not universal values. The next step would be to point out that if whites, and only whites, practice these values, it puts us at a systematic disadvantage in our dealings with other races. If the other races take care of their own, and we don’t, but instead worry about their interests too, we will trade our birthrights—our wealth, our power, our homelands—for a mess of moral superiority. But these mere feelings will provide little solace to our dwindling, dispossessed progeny who will come to exist at the mercy of groups who will go on blaming us for their failures even after we become extinct.

Lander’s brand of ironic explicit whiteness may, of course, peter out as just another fad, but in a country where too many whites are petrified even to think of themselves as part of a unique human group with a right of self-determination, any ice-breaker is welcome. If you’re not inclined to be ashamed of your New Balances, how far off are the bigger thoughts about the state of your race?

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist whose writing has appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Philadelphia Inquirer.