White Pathology/Guilt

Women, Minorities and Academia

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I recall that someone—perhaps it was William F. Buckley—said that you can’t have both affirmative action and nuclear power.

His point, of course, is obvious: merit of the highest order is necessary to invent, build and maintain a highly complex system like America’s nuclear power industry. To the extent standards are bent or diluted in favor of political goals such as increasing the number of minorities and women—though they be less qualified—a cost will be paid in efficiency, reliability, and potentially safety.

Despite this truism, America and other Western nations have headed down the road to diversity despite these costs. Thus, we have seen robust efforts to change the demographic face of life-saving occupations such as firefighting, where highly qualified White males are often passed over in favor of politically favored groups such as Blacks, Hispanics or women. For example, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Maria Sotomayor famously ruled against White firefighter Frank Ricci (the pre-Sotomayor Supreme Court overturned the ruling, a rare instance of justice and safety winning out over political correctness).

Another instance where ability and inclination still prevail over politics is commercial aviation, which has remained solidly in the hands of White males. Among commercial airline pilots, for example, only about 2% are women, with blacks accounting for far less than that. The Organization of Black Airline Pilots reports around 700 African-Americans working for U.S. airlines, about fifteen of whom are women.

In many areas of life, however, stakes are far lower, so blatant affirmative action policies elicit far less concern or reaction. For instance, does it really matter if your freshman English teacher at a community college is male, female, Black, White or other? Probably not that much. Even at better schools it is not a matter of life and death, though cumulatively it could affect the culture in some way.

Thus, the humanities have been able to politically alter the make-up of university faculty across America. Where White males overwhelmingly filled professorial roles through the 1960s, today’s academy is the dream-come-true of the  minority activists of the 70’s (though not of today’s activist, where complete absence of straight White non-Jewish able-bodied males is taken for granted as the holy grail).

As you leave the humanities and move toward the more quantitative subjects, however, political gerrymandering gets a little harder. By the time you are in the highly objective fields such as mathematics, engineering and physics, ability and merit are harder to fudge. Then-president of Harvard Larry Summers ran smack into this uncomfortable fact when in 2005 he commented on why, in the previous year, 88 percent (28 of 32) of newly tenured faculty had been men. Despite having reliable evidence on his side, his conjecture that men and women could have differing abilities in some fields created an uproar. (See Steve Sailer’s take here.)

As is so depressingly common under our multicultural regime, Summers was forced to apologize repeatedly, “in the style of a Communist show trial,” in the words of one observer. Wikipedia gives us the follow-through:

Desperately trying to keep his job, Summers quickly appointed female historian Drew Gilpin Faust, head of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute For Advanced Study, to lead Harvard’s Task Forces on Women Faculty and on Women in Science and Engineering.

Heather Mac Donald noted in Harvard’s Faustian Bargain in City Journal:

“Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country.”

Eventually, Dr. Faust brought back a $50 million wish list of payoffs to feminist interests, which the beleaguered Summers immediately agreed to fund. Hey, the money wasn’t coming out of Larry’s pocket, so why not?

Such aggression on the part of Dr. Faust did no harm, as she now sits in the Harvard president’s office, where her website proudly displays endeavors such as this: Empowering girls all over the world.

This is all meant as background material for our current leading example of  “The Disappearing of the White Male Academic: Shirley Tilghman and Princeton.” As Kevin MacDonald reported in this blog space, “Once again . . . all of our elite institutions are essentially enemy-occupied territory. Princeton’s president, Shirley Tilghman, is the sort of White person that is absolutely poisonous to our cause…. She is also doing her best to absolutely eliminate White males from high-profile positions.” MacDonald noted something that stood out for me as well: “My favorite is making a woman dean of the School of Engineering even though she is not an engineer.” What could be more blatant than this?

And don’t think that Tilghman is alone as a female president of an Ivy League school. Currently half of the eight Ivy League universities have women presidents, with Ruth Simmons being the only African American. (I’m not sure if this is better or worse than the days when six or seven of the Ivy League presidents were Jews.)

This topic of White male displacement in academia has cropped up in other instances this week as well. For example, a friend who earned a graduate degree in the field of American Studies sent me information on gender representation in the discipline to justify his decision to abandon a career in the field. (This reminded me of Alex Kurtagic’s own justification “Memoirs of a Dissident Student in Postmodern Academia”.)

American Studies was once a White male preserve that sought academic diversity by combining the study of American literature and history in an interdisciplinary way. Since then it’s gone the way of most other humanities departments and hosts minority activist groups such as The Minority Scholars Committee, Ethnic Studies Committee and Women’s Committee.

The women’s committee, of course, looks after the interests of women. Fair enough.

What, then, are we to make of the fact that women in American Studies today by far outnumber males? And by the looks of it, this disparity will only increase in the future, for recent Ph.D.s become future faculty, and they too are overwhelmingly female.

Last year, for instance, freshly-minted female Ph.D.s outnumbers males 65% to 35%. In 2008 it was a whopping 75% to 25%. I told my friend he should inquire about why American Studies still needs a Women’s Committee. (Better yet, why not agitate to establish a men’s committee?  Yeah, right.)

Anyway, I can only thank my lucky stars for the fact that I was born with and continue to enjoy White male privilege.

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

Eugene Terreblanche or Amy Biehl: Whites End Up Dead Either Route

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Despite a decade-long career as a pro-White thought criminal, I know precious little about Eugene Terreblanche, the South African political figure (“White supremacist” per the MSM) who was beaten to death by two Blacks recently.  To the media, he was an evil figure for opposing ceding power to Blacks in South Africa.  They use the word “supremacist” at every opportunity in describing him.

Recently, on a chatboard where I spar with liberals and conservatives alike on the issue of race, a poster mockingly offered me condolences on the murder of Terreblanche.  “You and your white-hooded buddies must be in mourning”, she said.

I responded with a post about Amy Biehl, the White Californian and Stanford student who traveled to South Africa as an anti-apartheid crusader.  Biehl, as it happens, met the same fate as Terreblanche:  she was brutally killed by Blacks.

Yet Biehl was at the opposite end of the spectrum, politically.  She’d gone to South Africa to “help” Blacks.  They returned the favor by beating her to death.  Her father, in an act of thoroughgoing racial groveling typical of today’s White male, forgave her killers and shook their hands.

My point:  whether a White person’s intentions toward Blacks are “good” or “bad”, it doesn’t matter.  Whites end up dead either route.  Whites imagine that Blacks distinguish between “good” and “bad” Whites, and that while a figure like Eugene Terreblanche might suffer a violent fate, a figure like Amy Biehl would be protected.  Thus, to earn their protective coating, Whites strive to be politically correct, sensitive toward Blacks, and so forth.  But Blacks aren’t thinking it through like this.  And the more Whites capitulate to Blacks, the more Blacks seem emboldened to lash out.

Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.

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Trudie Pert on Princeton

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Trudie Pert’s current TOO article (Post-Genome Princeton) illustrates once again that all of our elite institutions are essentially enemy-occupied territory. Princeton’s president, Shirley Tilghman, is the sort of White person that is absolutely poisonous to our cause. She doubtless feels morally superior as she champions Black causes, investing millions of dollars in faculty and facilities for the Black Studies Department and admitting Blacks with an average of 230 points less on the SAT than Whites. She is also doing her best to absolutely eliminate White males from high-profile positions. My favorite is making a woman dean of the School of Engineering even though she is not an engineer. Non-Jewish Whites are vastly underrepresented as students by a factor of around 4, while Jews are overrepresented by a factor of around 5 (unusually low for an Ivy League University).

It is common among White advocates to see White politicians and at least some anti-White activists (such as Morris Dees) as sociopaths, and there is much to recommend this point of view. I don’t think that is the case with people like Tilghman, even though she has profited mightily from her position (>530,000 salary + millions in stock and stock options from being on the Google Board of Directors). People like Tilghman believe in what they are doing with a moral fervor. They feel good about themselves, and they really are virtuous people — exactly the sort you would want in your tiny hunter-gatherer band during the Ice Age. I think it’s that Puritan moralism that seems to be so common among White people:

What is striking is the moral fervor of the Puritans. Puritans tended to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues. They were susceptible to appeals to a “higher law,” and they tended to believe that the principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of a dozen ‘isms.’”

There was a tendency to paint political alternatives as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as evil incarnate—inspired by the devil. Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism and slavery.

My view is that this is an ethnic trait of our people — adaptive in small ingroups during our evolutionary history and massively maladaptive now given the current anti-White moralism that pervades our culture.

We have to convince people like Tilghman  that there is a morality in White advocacy as well. The ultimate irony is that without altruistic Whites willing to be morally outraged by violations of multicultural ideals, the multicultural utopia that they envision is likely to revert to a Darwinian struggle for survival among the remnants. But the high-minded descendants of people like Tilghman won’t be around to witness it.

What is striking is the moral fervor of the Puritans. Puritans tended
to pursue utopian causes framed as moral issues. They were susceptible
to appeals to a “higher law,” and they tended to believe that the
principal purpose of government is moral. New England was the most
fertile ground for “the perfectibility of man creed,” and the “father of
a dozen ‘isms.’”13 There was a tendency to paint political alternatives
as starkly contrasting moral imperatives, with one side portrayed as
evil incarnate—inspired by the devil.
Whereas in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts the moral fervor
was directed at keeping fellow Puritans in line, in the nineteenth
century it was directed at the entire country. The moral fervor that
had inspired Puritan preachers and magistrates to rigidly enforce laws
on fornication, adultery, sleeping in church, or criticizing preachers
was universalized and aimed at correcting the perceived ills of capitalism
and slavery.

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Kevin MacDonald: Review of Podhoretz, Part II

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Kevin MacDonald: Part II of my review of Podhoretz is now posted on Alternative Right. Quite a bit of it relates to the current discussion of Jewish intellectual style on this site. I agree with Podhoretz that Jews are attracted to religious thinking in which they accept theories that explain everything but are incapable of disconfirmation. The problem is that Jews have advanced these religious theories as “scientific” not only in the social sciences and humanities, but also, perhaps, in theoretical physics, as some have argued here.

The other point is to underline the fact that the only theory that can account for Jewish political behavior in the Diaspora is that it is motivated by ethnic conflict with the White, Christian majority seen as the historical enemy. I note that the status as an elite outsider has grave moral implications. In fact, Jews are actively engaged in making alliances with the soon-to-be non-White majority. Whites should be deeply concerned about what this portends for the future.

It’s interesting that in the Comments section Paul Gottfried agrees with my analysis but also points to White guilt as a critical factor. I agree with that and have written about it several places. For example, White predispositions to guilt and the manufacture of White guilt by prominent Jewish intellectual and political movements is the topic of my review of Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo America. (see also here.)

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Mark Green on Tim Wise’s Hypocrisy

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Mark Green’s current TOO article “My Smackdown with Anti-White Crusader Tim Wise” is a must read. The article is an email exchange between Green, the editor of Persecution Privilege And Power, and the notorious Tim Wise who makes a living laying guilt trips on Whites about how privileged they are. Wise turns out to be Jewish (Why am I always the last to find out?). The interesting thing then is how Wise deals with the fact that he has directed all his energies against White “racism” in America and against apartheid South Africa while pretty much avoiding the issue of Jewish ethnocentrism and apartheid in Israel.

Wise is typical of the vast majority of American Jews. 83% voted for Obama, and the Jewish community is a pillar of multiculturalism in America. At the same time the Jewish community strongly supports Israel even though it has become dominated by racial Zionists and religious fundamentalists dedicated to Israeli expansion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

I think that Wise is better than most Jews in trying to be intellectually consistent. He desperately wants to feel like a good guy, but there’s a huge blind spot. When I brought these issues up on faculty email battles at CSU-Long Beach in responding to morally superior Jewish professors who accused me of racism, the response was a mild version of Wise’s — something like “I oppose some of Israel’s actions” — and then immediately go back to attacking me. They didn’t feel any need to oppose Israeli racism with the same energy and intensity as they oppose any manifestation of White ethnocentrism. And yet as members of the Jewish community they certainly bear a huge burden of responsibility for Israel’s actions, since US support for Israel continues to be critical to its ability to create an apartheid state and oppress the Palestinians.

As Green’s article makes clear, the only consistency is “What’s good for the Jews.” Wise and other Jewish leftists are consistently pursuing their ethnic interests — opposition to the White majority in the US motivated by fear, loathing, and a desire for power, while supporting at least implicitly the aggressively ethnonationalist state of Israel. Hard-nosed, aggressive ethnic politics all around. But Tim Wise will be the absolutely last person to see his own actions as the height of ethnocentrism.

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Kevin MacDonald: The Genteel Mr. Bradlaugh

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I agree with everything in Christopher Donovan’s blog on Bradlaugh’s take on the AmRen cancellation. But a couple of things Bradlaugh wrote stick in my craw. It used to be that Jews complained about genteel anti-Semites. Now we have people like Bradlaugh who spout genteel philo-Semitism: He complains about “the antisemitism of the AR followers, which rubs me the wrong way. I fall in line with the long tradition of British philosemitism (Cromwell, Victoria, Lloyd George, Maggie Thatcher), and just have no patience with the other thing.” He could have included Winston Churchill who was philo-Semitic to the point of corruption.

It seems to me that anyone writing on politics has a responsibility to write honestly about the various forces that influence public policy. For Bradlaugh, it’s simply not genteel to discuss embarrassing things like Jewish power. I suppose Mearshimer and Walt rub him the wrong way as well. I had this to say about John Derbyshire, Bradlaugh’s alter ego:

Derbyshire is, apart from some minor irritations, quite uncritical about Jewish motives and influence, even when they conflict with the interests of people like himself. He implies that non-Jews should understand Jewish motivation to break down the ethnic homogeneity of their own societies while advancing the interests of Israel as an ethnostate. … Derbyshire lives in a sort of childlike world in which Jewish interests are legitimate and where Jewish attempts to pursue their interests, though they may occasionally be irritating, are not really a cause for concern much less malice. It doesn’t require an evolutionary theory to realize that good, reasonable people can have conflicts of interest, and that the results of conflicts of interest can be devastating to the side that loses.

I think that Bradlaugh’s problem is that he sees himself as genteel and that being genteel is a very good thing. (Definition: 1. Refined in manner; well-bred and polite. 2. Free from vulgarity or rudeness. 3. Elegantly stylish: genteel manners and appearance. 4. a. Striving to convey a manner or appearance of refinement and respectability. See Synonyms at polite. b. Marked by affected and somewhat prudish refinement.)

He seems very impressed with good manners, a well-rounded education, and being polite. Genteel people simply don’t discuss Jewish power and influence for fear of offending the Jews. In the same way, genteel people would not want to offend others by calling attention to their garish clothes. To do so would make one impolite and vulgar and therefore consign one to a lower order of society.

His gentility is probably also why he doesn’t resonate with AmRen’s “ethos of the South, which I don’t really … get. I wonder if a foreigner ever can get it. It’s as odd and particular, in its own way, as Tibetan Buddhism.”

The reality is that White Southerners are by far the largest identifiable group of White Americans who have held onto their culture and identity in the face of the onslaughts of the last 50 years. The White vote for Obama was nearly in the single digits in three southern states, and lopsidedly Republican in the others. White Southerners understand, at least implicitly, that it’s about racial and ethnic conflict. As the racialization of American politics continues, all Whites will tend even more in this direction. (The recent election in Massachusetts certainly supports this). Conservatives who think they can take back the country without Southern Whites are seriously deluded.

Bradlaugh’s gentility also leads him to entirely avoid framing the issue in ethnic or racial terms at all:

My own strong preference, as I argued in that debate with Jared, would be for everybody to shut up with the race business. There doesn’t seem to be much prospect of this happening, though, so it’s not hard to see the AR-ers point of view. In any case, I say again, whatever you think of that point of view, it’s a point of view. It shouldn’t be shut out of the public square; and if it is so shut out, by goons phoning in death threats to hotel employees, there ought to be a fuss made. Well, here I am on Secular Right, making a fuss as best I can. Freedom of speech! Freedom of assembly! Liberty! Liberty!

This is “proposition conservatism” at its finest. If only people would stop talking about racial and ethnic conflict, then we could frame everything in terms of principles like free speech without soiling ourselves like the AR crowd. For people like Bradlaugh, massive immigration would presumably be fine if the immigrants were all principled people like himself.

The reality, of course, is that whether or not we talk about it, racial and ethnic conflict will continue. There is no other possible outcome given that 100 million more non-Whites are to be added to the population of the US in the next few decades.

The bottom line is that no one has come up with a formula to get rid of ethnicity as a form of identity and as a vehicle of expressing interests. None seems on the horizon. And in the process of losing the ethnic battle, the society will be less and less committed to Bradlaugh’s cherished principles because, in the end, the principles of free speech, individual liberty, and the rest of the corpus of Western individualism are ethnic creations.

But people like Bradlaugh are more willing to lose the ethnic battle than to become anything less than genteel by mentioning the ethnic conflict that is at the heart of the political divisions in the US. It just wouldn’t seem proper.

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Note to Whites: Animals Aren’t Children, May Actually Kill You

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Dawn Brancheau, the 40-year-old White woman killed by a (surprise) killer whale, was married and had no children.  But “she loved the animals like they were her own children”, a family member says.

Allow for a moment my angle on this, which I realize isn’t shared by some White advocates:  Dawn Brancheau represents a disturbing trend among Whites whereby puppies, kittens, dogs, cats, horses, orangutans and other beasts are considered their “children.”  They collect them, work with them, hoard them, fawn over them and spend absurd amounts of money on them.  Meanwhile, they have no actual children — and I’m betting it’s not often because they’re biologically unable.

My unclinical opinion is that this is a form of obsessive compulsive disorder, though possibly with a historical root in an evolutionarily-developed survival affinity for animals (unique to Whites) that can provide food and protection.  The latter is understandable, but the former is a problem.

White women seem to be able to think of pretty much anything as their children — except natural children from their own wombs:  adopted children from Africa, expensive houses, dogs, even killer whales.  It has to stop.  Dawn Brancheu was fit and attractive and probably would have borne great White children.  Instead, she walked in front of nature’s moving train and got crushed.  Can you hear the Black comedians joking about this one? (“Da lady got in the tank with killer whales.  And guess what happened?”)

I’ll have to give them this one. Talk about survival of the fittest.

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Christopher Donovan is the pen name of an attorney and former journalist. Email him.