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White Pathology/Guilt

Should Haiti be Rebuilt?

January 25, 2010/28 Comments/in Evolutionary Psychology, Neoconservatism, Race Differences in Behavior, White Pathology/Guilt/by Kevin MacDonald

It’s impossible to turn on television these days without messages to donate to Haitian relief by Michelle Obama and others. Or we read a newspaper article and find that there is an outpouring of concern about Haiti — leading not only to financial donations but to offers of adoption by American, presumably White, parents of the estimated 380,000 Haitian orphans:

Tammy Gage of Stanberry, Mo., cries every time she turns on the TV and sees the devastation in Haiti. And though she already has three daughters, she didn’t hesitate when her husband suggested that they adopt from Haiti.

“That’s all he needed to say,” she said.

Gage and her husband, Brad, are among many Americans expressing interest in adopting children who have been left orphans from the quake last week. Adoption advocacy groups are reporting dozens of calls a day.

Patrick Cleburne points out that 37% of Americans say they or someone in their family has donated to Haitian relief.

This altruism on behalf of genetically unrelated people who have created the quintessential dysfunctional society is pathetic and shows how far we have to go to get people to think rationally about this issue.

It is yet another example of the power of the media. Imagine if the media simply framed this as what you would expect from a people with an average IQ of 72 and a 200-year record of economic failure and inability to govern themselves. Imagine if the media messages were informed by ethnic genetic interests and if adopting parents were made aware that they would feel less psychological involvement with their African children than to genetically similar others. Imagine if there were no high-status figures on TV advocating Haitian relief and thereby appealing to our evolved psychology of emulating high-status people. (By adopting a Haitian refugee or making a donation, I can get the approval of people like George Clooney, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera.)

Altruistic Whites who contributed to the relief effort would be scorned as naïve and misguided — and they would be made aware that they will likely be unhappy in the long run. The aid would dry up. Our explicit processing mechanisms (human rationality) could easily overcome the natural empathy that we feel when we see human suffering. On the other hand, Whites would not at all be surprised that Blacks and other non-Whites (including presumably President Obama given his strongnon-White identity) strongly support the immigration of Haitians because in doing so they are supporting their own ethnic genetic interests in a non-White America. Indeed, 70% of Black Americans favor Haitian immigration compared to 45% of Whites.

A recent TOO article is an anecdote to all that. As it notes, the left has a “profoundly Eurocentric” belief that other peoples are the same. It adds that the result is a campaign for ever more aid and development, fuelled by the belief that, given enough money, education, and opportunity, the Third World (including even Haiti) will eventually converge with Europe.

From the standpoint of the multicultural left, societies like Haiti can’t be allowed to fail because the failure challenges their whole belief system.

It’s interesting that one of our favourite neocons, Elliott Abrams, wants to increase Haitian immigration to the US so that they can send money back to Haiti. This is a twist on the leftist theory that everyone is equal and that Haiti, given enough support, will be just like Sweden. Abrams’ implicit theory is that Haiti cannot possibly be expected to make itself into a viable society unless it can siphon off wealth from the US. As he points out, this is already happening for a great many countries, prototypically Mexico, Honduras, and, El Salvador, and the Dominican Republic.

As a charter member of the Israel lobby, he knows all about siphoning off wealth (not to mention the lives of US military personnel) from the US on behalf of a foreign country. And as a Jew, he is certainly well within the Jewish mainstream when it comes to immigration policy generally. The implicit model of the US for Abrams is exactly the model advocated by Jewish activists for the last century: A proposition nation composed of different cultures and ethnicities, each with an allegiance to their own people wherever they may live.

Needless to say, this vision of American is profoundly antithetical to the interests of European-descended people in the United States.

More on the academic culture of the left

January 23, 2010/10 Comments/in The Arts and Culture, The Left, White Pathology/Guilt/by Edmund Connelly, Ph. D.

Kevin MacDonald wrote this week in his blog, “Kevin Lamb’s TOO review of William Tucker’s book on Raymond Cattell is a microcosm of how far the academic world has sunk.”

Don’t I know it! Frankly, even if I had a good shot at getting a decent academic job at an American university, I don’t think I would take it, for the same reason MacDonald wrote about in a previous blog: “My fate in life is to work at a university. What that means right now is to be completely immersed in the culture of the left.”

The hostility toward White men and Western culture that I noticed got very strong about 1995 is just too much for me. Absolutely everything I’ve observed since only confirms it’s gotten worse — much worse.

For instance, the leading journal in my field recently eulogized a former President of the American Studies Association: “When Emory became an assistant professor at Princeton in 1972, he joined an overwhelmingly White and male academy, one steeped in privileges of tradition and exclusion.” That’s White folks for you. It’s all about exclusion and privilege.

One wonders if he approved of the rate and degree of change during his watch.

The same journal also has a long essay by one Jodi Kim (I assume she’s Korean American) about (White) Americans adopting Asian babies. Representative sentence: “It is also a highly racialized and gendered process implicated in the United States’ imperialist, capitalist modernity and indeed its foundational or constitutive projects of racial formation and ‘nation building’ both domestically and internationally.” Please go back to Korea if you hate your adopted country so much.

Or this: “The films make visible how the conditions of possibility of transracial adoption surface at the disturbing nexus of the successive forced migrations engineered by US and Western capitalist modernity, cold war imperialism in Asia, the White heteronormative bourgeois nuclear family ideal, and the long-standing imperialist desire to ‘save’ the world.” Tranraical adoption is part of Western imperialism engineered by evil “heteronormative” (!) White people trying to “save” the world? Okay, let’s send all the non-White children back to their Asian homeland.

And this all comes within the first two pages.

Interesting footnote from the essay: “Since 1954, over 200,000 children have been adopted from South Korea, including 150,000 sent to the US and the remainder to Europe.”

Recently, China has become the main source for such adoptions. Why? As a footnote tells us: “Almost all transnationally adopted Chinese babies are abandoned girls.” Golly, who’s the bad guy in this tale, the Whites who adopted them or the non-Whites who abandoned thousands of babies?

I’m not surprised by such writing, though, since it is so routine in the humanities in America. Over a decade ago, for example, I read social scientist Derek Freeman’s account of debunking Margaret Mead’s Franz Boas-inspired book. The title of Freeman’s account is The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research. Here’s a telling story about the sad state of social “science” these days.

In an earlier book, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Freeman ignited a firestorm in the world of anthropology by challenging, in one professor’s words, “the Mother-Goddess of American Anthropology.” From the publication of that book in 1983, Freeman “was subjected to a highly emotional and, at times, flagrantly ad hominem campaign that reached its apogee in Chicago during the Eighty Second Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, when . . . there was a special session (to which [he] was not invited) devoted to the evaluation of [his] book.” Descriptions of the meeting from those who attended ranged from “a sort of grotesque feeding frenzy” to “I felt I was in a room with 200 people ready to lynch you.”

Whatever happened to dispassionate search for truth and the advancement of science?

Another excellent point MacDonald makes concerns both the brother- and sisterhood of victims, and its hierarchy with Jews at the top:

What’s striking is that Jews and other non-Europeans wear their ethnic identity and sense of victimhood proudly and explicitly. The Whites typically have their own sense of victimhood — as gays or as women. In my experience, the heterosexual White males become adept at effusive expressions of guilt in order to be accepted into the system. In this culture of victimhood, all the rewards go to those who make alliances with other victims.

Zoom in on another tribute in our field’s journal to a fallen multiculturalist, a person who can best be described as the patron saint of American studies. I really don’t think you readers need this pointed out, but the author hates the idea that America has any White identity at all. She is writing in tribute to a fellow Chicana, “internationally recognized cultural theorist, creative writer, and independent scholar Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa.”

Remember, this is the leading journal in the field. That means that publishing there is the route to tenure and recognition. The route to tenure is to wallow in one’s victimhood, and in the victimhood stakes, this woman is thrice blessed — female, non-White, and lesbian: the diversity trifecta all in one person.

I quote at length only to give you a feel for what is going on in the academy these days:

I was introduced to your borderlands theory at the same time that I left the El Paso/Juárez border, never realizing how your work would impact my own scholarship in a field that I, at first, found as White as a midwestern winter.

On May 21, 1980, almost exactly twenty-four years before your death, you wrote “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,” in which you visualized other women of color engaged in the radical act of writing and theorizing about our own lives, contemplating our raced/sexed/gendered/ classed realities and histories, and reclaiming our right to write. “Forget the room of one’s own,” you wrote, “write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals, between sleeping or waking.” . . .

First, I should admit: I knew nothing about either you or the field until 1985, when I began my Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Iowa. Once there, I was dazed by cold and culture shock. From what I gleaned in my classes, “doing” American studies meant reading White male historians, White male literary critics, and great White male literature, trying to find the immanent “American” mind and character—a concept so riddled with problematic assumptions about what “American” meant that I was ready to pack up my bags and run for home.

I can’t tell you the intellectual malaise I wallowed in that first semester, feeling for the first time in my life like a cultural alien in a White wilderness. Little did I know I was in the throes of what you called the nepantla state, “that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from one place to another . . . to be disoriented in space is to experience bouts of disassociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups.” Little did I realize I was experiencing my first rite of passage as an academic border crosser.

And then, you came to town. I couldn’t believe it, a tejana fronteriza dyke like me, speaking the same three tongues I speak. Lenguas de fuego, you named them, tongues of fire—the queer tongue, the decolonial tejana tongue, and the forked tongue of the border. You were finishing up with Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (a doctoral dissertation, if I ever saw one) and were trying out some of your theories—La Facultad, the Shadow Beast, the Coatlicue State, Mestiza Consciousness—on a multicultural college audience in Iowa City. Even among all those maricones and tortilleras (who knew I would find such queer Latinidad in Iowa?) your lecture settled over us like cosmic dust from another planet. The Whites in the room, even the liberal ones wearing Guatemalan shirts under their parkas, shifted uncomfortably in their seats; the more honest ones stared at you as though you’d just dropped a crop circle in their cornfield.

I saw how the queers, the rape survivors, and the people of color responded with recognition to your idea about a certain faculty of mind that people who live in the margins develop early in life, a “survival tactic,” you called it, that teaches us to become aware of the racist, the rapist, or the homophobe in the room before that person even approaches. The African American and Latina professors, whatever their sexuality, saw themselves reflected in that beastly mirror of self-doubt and self-hate that you explained was a consequence of internalized racism and sexism. As a border dweller myself, I completely identified with your discussion on linguistic terrorism and the way those of us who are bred in the borderlands develop an ability to negotiate two languages and two cultures as a way of protecting ourselves against cultural schizophrenia.

But when you got to the part about how identity must be fluid like the river, how we must shed our skins by entering into the Coatlicue state of death and renewal, the immersion into crisis when an old self dies and a new self awakens with a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity and a talent for seeing through “serpent and eagle eyes”—you lost us. More accurately, you plunged us into that nepantla state.

Now ask yourself if the writer of the above — or the intended audience — can ever gain freedom from the constraints MacDonald identified. To wit: “In the humanities, it’s a lost cause. The triumvirate of the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and Marxism is impervious to scientific findings and is intensely political; it will strenuously resist significant change.”

Since I’m skewering the academy in which I’ve spent so many years, let me also allude to Christopher Donovan’s current TOO article “A Window on the Warping of Whites: The Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine.”

To be honest, I share the same experience about my alma mater that he writes about Swarthmore. My school is a good second-tier private institution, one with a historically White ethnic/religious background that continues to this day. Yet it tries to go more upscale by aping the same trends Donovan highlights. In every issue they try to cram more photos of blacks and articles about Jews into the publication than I find even remotely warranted.

Yes, Donovan gets it exactly right: “What’s so amazing . . . is the totality of intellectual takeover.”

Again, this is not new. As a thirtysomething in 1992, I returned from six years of working abroad and did an unpaid internship at the leading pro-American manufacturing think tank in D.C. The other nine or so interns were college kids who just wanted to play softball with other interns during the hot Washington summer. Few of them even knew what the think tank dealt with.

When they found out about the pro-American slant of the think tank (a car maker—since gone bankrupt—was the biggest funder), they nearly rebelled.

They came from Cornell, Harvard, Bates . . . and Swarthmore.

So I think I’ll remain aloof from the American academy and earn my bread elsewhere. I don’t want to work somewhere where I’m always unfairly attacked because I was born a White male. Plus I don’t want to be around people teaching or educated at places like Swarthmore—or any other “good” university.

Needless to say, I send not a penny to any of the three universities from which I gained degrees. I’ll let others fund those glossy photos of high-achieving African Americans and “socially active” Jews.

Christopher Donovan on Swarthmore

January 21, 2010/25 Comments/in Anti-White Attitudes, Political Correctness, The Left, White Pathology/Guilt/by Kevin MacDonald

Christopher Donovan’s current TOO article “A Window on the Warping of Whites: The Swarthmore College Alumni Magazine” is yet another example of the anti-White hostility that is rampant in American universities. Coming on the heels of Trudie Pert’s exposé of German Studies at the University of Minnesota in TOO and a New York Times article on the institutionalization of the left at American universities, it shows the unrelenting messages of multiculturalism, White altruism toward non-Whites, and the legitimacy of non-White ethnocentrism. Besides earnest Whites helping Blacks and Ecuadorian Indians, Whites are presumably also altruistic simply by paying tuition. The article shows that one year tuition at Swarthmore is $49,600 (!). 55% receive financial aid averaging $35,450. The proportion of incoming students not receiving financial aid is pretty much exactly the percentage of White students. Here’s the featured photo of the class of 2013. I doubt they’ll be paying their way.

Swarthmore is proud of its Quaker heritage. The president of Swarthmore, Rebecca Chopp, told the first-year students about one of Swarthmore’s founders:

She was 4 feet, 11 inches tall and weighed not quite 90 pounds. Over the course of her lifetime (1793–1880), Lucretia Mott would not only help found Swarthmore College but also shelter runaway slaves in her home, co-found with her husband the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, advocate for peace rather than war, and sign the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment at the first women’s rights convention, which she and Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized in 1848.

Quakerism is part of the indigenous culture of critique so important during the 19th century and seamlessly joining the current culture of political correctness now. As I noted in my review of Eric Kaufmann,

An important node this network [of leftists who worked to undermine the cultural and ethnic homogeneity of the US] was the Settlement House movement of the late 19th century–early 20thcentury. The settlements were an Anglo-Saxon undertaking that exhibited a noblesse oblige still apparent in some White leftist circles today. They were “residences occupied by upper-middle-class ‘workers’ whose profile was that of an idealistic Anglo-Saxon, university-educated young suburbanite (male or female) in his or her mid-twenties” (p. 96). The movement explicitly rejected the idea that immigrants ought to give up their culture and assimilate to America: “To put the immigrants (as individuals) on an equal symbolic footing with the natives, a concept of the nation was required that would not violate the human dignity of the immigrants by denigrating their culture” (p. 97). Cultural pluralism was encouraged: “The nation would be implored to shed its Anglo-Saxon ethnic core and develop a culture of cosmopolitan humanism, a harbinger of impending global solidarity” (pp. 97–98).

The leader of the Settlement House movement, Jane Addams, advocated that America shed all allegiance to an Anglo-Saxon identity. Addams came from a liberal Quaker background — another liberal strand of American Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, like the Puritans stemming from a distinctive British sub-culture. In general, the Quakers have been less influential than the Puritans, but their attitudes have been even more consistently liberal than the Puritan-descended intellectuals who became a dominant intellectual liberal elite in the 19th century. For example, John Woolman, the “Quintessential Quaker,” was an 18th-century figure who opposed slavery, lived humbly, and, most tellingly for the concept of ethnic defense, felt guilty about preferring his own children to children on the other side of the world.

We who are dismayed at the impending self-destruction of our culture and people have to look in the mirror and attempt to understand this strand of ethnic self-abnegation characteristic of so many Whites.

Morris Dees — Allegations of Sociopathy

December 23, 2009/22 Comments/in Evolutionary Psychology, SPLC, White Pathology/Guilt/by Kevin MacDonald

Arthur Kemp has posted excerpts from the divorce papers of Morris Dees. It portrays someone eager to have sex with pretty much anything that moves — perhaps not that uncommon in 1970s America. But the excerpts also portray him as a sociopath — someone with no sympathy or empathy and inclined to use people to attain selfish goals — in Dees’ case, sexual gratification. Sociopaths feel no remorse for committing crimes against others. The prisons are full of them.

In particular, Dees is alleged to have entrapped his wife in order to get favorable terms in the divorce, and then “He hit her and gave her a busted jaw.” The allegations of sexually molesting his 16-year-old stepchild also indicate sociopathy — an attempt to take advantage of a minor in a way that would likely lead to psychological distress and perhaps dysfunction later. Another indication is that his mistress “had become pregnant by him and had received an abortion which he had paid for.” In other words, even though the relationship with the mistress is described as “permanent,” it was about self-gratification rather than family creation.

It’s not surprising that someone like Dees has no feelings for his people. Sociopaths never do. Such sociopathy is rampant among White people in our political and media elite. Bill Clinton comes to mind.

One of the things that struck me in reading the academic literature on the Bolshevik horror in the USSR was that the ethnic Russians who were involved in mass murder and torture were “psychopaths [another word for sociopaths] and criminals.” (See the Preface to the paperback edition of CofC.) Most of the damage was done by ethnic outsiders, predominantly Jews. These people quite often had strong feelings for their families and their own people — their cruelty directed at ethnic outsiders. But there was no lack of sociopathic Russians to aid in dispossessing their own people.

We are seeing the same thing now.

Britain’s Elites Consider the BBC "Hideously White"

December 6, 2009/1 Comment/in Costs of Multiculturalism, White Pathology/Guilt/by Charles Dodgson

The Sunday Telegraph reports that the BBC is trying to broaden the appeal of the highbrow Radio 4 network to attract more “ethnic” listeners (“Radio 4 to get in tune with ethnic listeners”, 29 Nov. 2009, p. 13; and see the Daily Mail report.)

Critics claim that only 2% of listeners are Asian or black. The BBC has commissioned research to discover the diversity of Radio 4 listerners. Research included focus groups with Muslims and Hindus in which they were asked for advice on programming. The review followed criticism in 2001 from Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC, that the corporation was “hideously white”. Despite there being many minority presenters on Radio 4 the present controller of the network, Mark Damazer, apparently agrees that the BBC is “too white” because he met with minority activists to seek guidance on how to meet their wishes. One such meeting was held with Ashok Viswanathan, a founder of Operation Black Vote, who remarked: “Radio 4 is still too white and has a tweetness to it, but their response to the criticism has been positive and what we’re hearing is encouraging.” One result of the new approach will be a programme starting in January to be hosted by Nenjamin Zephaniah, a poet belonging to the black consciousness Rastafarian movement. Some listeners have expressed concern that the changes will cause some existing shows to be axed.

Comment: The news signals a step-up in multiculturalism by the BBC and a retreat from assimilationism, in which immigrants are expected to adopt the folkways of the indigenous society. Yet multicutluralism was officially dumped by the Labour government following the 2006 terror bombings in the London transport system. Notice that Anglo ethnic sensibilities are given practically no voice, while open minority self-interest is taken seriously. English and British ethnicity is not even named, as if only minorities have ethnicity. The changes are intended to provide Radio 4 with a “distinctly ethnic angle”, as if its content has not always consisted of English and British culture. According to this view the only identity the English have is their whiteness and that is illegitimate. The irony! It seems that when the purpose suits the liberal establishment and minority activists are happy to adopt the racial categories employed by the neo-Nazi right. The denial of Europeans’ ethnic identity is one of the most poisonous lies spread by our liberal elites. The language of this report, relayed without revision by the conservative Telegraph, reflects a root cause of Britain’s surrender to Third World immigration. It illustrates the wisdom of the BNP’s defence of “indigenous” British peoples.