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Psychological Challenges to Developing an Explicit Culture of White Identity and Interests

The foregoing has discussed psychological mechanisms underlying the power of human cultures to influence behavior and attitudes. Clearly, the wider culture of the West, now dominated by the anti-White left, poses a major obstacle to developing an explicit culture favorable to White identity and interests. In the absence of changes in the explicit culture on issues related to the legitimacy of White racial identity and interests, Whites will simply continue to retreat into implicit White communities.

There are obviously a great many obstacles to developing such a mainstream culture, the main one being opposition by elites in the media, academia, business, and political cultures. However, there are other mechanisms that have come into play which make it difficult to create such a culture. 

Self-interest and the Anti-White Infrastructure

A large part of the problem is that these elites have created a very elaborate infrastructure so that, for the vast majority of individuals, economic and professional self-interest coincides with support for anti-White policies. Particularly egregious examples are individuals and companies that directly benefit from immigration via cheap labor, or companies, such as First Data Corporation, that benefit from remittances sent by immigrants to relatives in other countries.

Noteworthy examples are university presidents, many of whom earn seven-figure salaries. For example, Mary Sue Coleman earned over $1,000,000/year before resigning as president of the University of Michigan in 2014. She had been a leader in attempting to preserve racial preferences for non-Whites and in promoting the (non-existent) educational benefits of diversity.[1]

Similarly, when three White lacrosse players at Duke University were accused of raping a Black woman, faculty and administrators issued statements assuming their guilt.[2] Because the leftist political cultural of the university has become conventionalized, statements deploring the racism and sexism of the players could be counted on as good career moves, even when they turned out to be groundless. Adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity is a sine qua non for a career as a mainstream academic (particularly an administrator), a public intellectual, or in the political arena.

Consistent with the importance of self-interest in supporting explicitly White policies and politicians, a 2017 study found that high-income Whites were less likely to support politicians who strongly identify as White if they think the racial hierarchy is unstable. In other words, Whites who have the most to lose are most likely to be unwilling to “rock the boat” by provoking minorities if they think that the racial hierarchy could change because of demographic shifts.[3]

As Frank Salter has pointed out, Whites who fail to attend to the interests of their wider kinship group benefit themselves and their families at the expense of their own wider ethnic interests.[4] This is especially true for elite Whites—people whose intelligence, power, and wealth could make a very large difference in culture and politics. They are in effect sacrificing millions of ethnic kin—for example, by turning their backs on the White working class who are well known to suffer most from non-White immigration and the multicultural regime—for the benefit of themselves and their immediate family.

This is a disastrously wrongheaded choice by the standard measures of evolutionary success. However, because our evolved psychology is much more attuned to individual and family interests than to the interests of the ethnic group or race, Whites who benefit economically or professionally from adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity are unlikely to feel unease at the psychological level. Indeed, given that conventional views on race and ethnicity have been buttressed by the ideology that departures from these views indicate moral turpitude or psychopathology, such individuals are likely to feel morally righteous by signalling their support—virtue signalling within the moral community created by elite culture. 

Social Learning Theory: The Consequences of Not Dominating the Cultural High Ground

Although changing the structure of material benefits is doubtless critical for advancing White ethnic interests, we should also pay attention to social learning, i.e., learning by imitating models. People are prone to adopting the ideas and behavior of others who have prestige and high status, and this tendency fits well with an evolutionary perspective in which seeking high social status is a universal feature of the human mind. A critical component of the success of the culture of White dispossession is that it achieved control of the most prestigious and influential institutions of the West, particularly the media and academia. Once this culture became a consensus among the elites, it became widely accepted among Whites of very different levels of education and among people of different social classes.[5]

For example, Leslie Fiedler, a Jewish literary scholar associated with the New York Intellectuals,[6] described a whole generation of American Jewish writers (including Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Karl Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, and H. J. Kaplan) as “typically urban, second-generation Jews.” The works of these writers appeared regularly in Partisan Review, the flagship journal of the New York Intellectuals. Fiedler goes on to say that

the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels … the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.[7]

Once Jews had achieved prestige and status in the literary world, it was only natural that non-Jews would admire and emulate them by adopting their views on race and ethnicity—views that were mainstream in the Jewish community and well to the left of most Americans.

Like other modeling influences, therefore, maladaptive memes are best promulgated by individuals and institutions with high social status. Because they have been elevated to the pantheon of elite culture, individuals such as Sigmund Freud or Stephen Jay Gould have become cultural icons—true cultural heroes. The cultural memes emanating from their thought, therefore, have a much greater opportunity to take root in the culture as a whole.

Moreover, adopting the views on race and ethnicity held by elites also confers psychological benefits because it enhances one’s reputation in the contemporary moral community created by these elites. On the other hand, publicly dissenting from these views carries huge costs for most people. White elites who turn their back on their own ethnic group are likely to be massively reinforced within the contemporary explicit culture, while those who attempt to advance White interests can expect to suffer psychologically painful costs.

There are many examples of White people who have been fired from their positions in the media or other positions of influence for expressing attitudes on race and ethnicity that depart from the conventional wisdom. On the other hand, the massive social approval University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman received within the culture of the university for her positions on diversity issues is doubtless a positive component of her job. If she suddenly reversed position on the benefits of diversity, her career as a university president and her $1,000,000+/year salary would have been in dire jeopardy. 

Benefits and Risks of Conscientiousness

A psychological system that bears on moral reputation is Conscientiousness, discussed previously in connection with inhibiting our natural tendencies in the service of long-term payoffs. However, people who are high on Conscientiousness also tend to be deeply concerned about their reputation.

This is no accident. In fact, developing a good reputation is an important way for conscientious people to get long-term payoffs. Think of it this way. If someone cheats another person, he gets a short-term gain at the expense of developing a bad reputation when his cheating becomes known. The only way he can continue to survive is to prey on others who don’t know his reputation, and that means moving on and interacting with strangers—who will be less trusting—rather than with friends and allies. On the other hand, if he cooperates, both persons benefit, and he develops a reputation as a cooperator that may last a lifetime. In the long run, therefore, he will be better off.

Conscientious people, unlike sociopaths, are cooperators, and as a result they are vitally concerned about their reputation. This is particularly critical for individualists because they tend to interact more often with strangers—their reputation is first and foremost established among non-relatives who would be relatively quick (compared to relatives) to cease interacting with them if there are signs of untrustworthiness.

Theoretical work has shown that having access to people’s reputation is likely to be a necessary condition for the evolution of cooperation.[8] Information on the reputation of individuals constitutes a collective memory of the past history of individuals and is made possible by language—that is, explicit representations of the past history of individuals in cooperative situations.[9] Without such explicit information on reputation, cooperators would be at an evolutionary disadvantage and vulnerable to a strategy of short-term exploitation rather than long-term cooperation with like-minded others. This explicit information on reputation is therefore processed by the higher brain centers located in the prefrontal cortex linked to Conscientiousness.

I suggest, therefore, that evolutionary pressure for cooperation is a critical adaptive function accounting for the evolution of Conscientiousness. Psychological research shows that people high in Conscientiousness are responsible, dependable, dutiful, and reliable. Indeed, responsibility emerges as a facet (i.e., subcategory) of Conscientiousness defined as cooperative, dependable, being of service to others, and contributing to community and group projects.[10] These traits are also highly correlated with honesty and morally exemplary behavior.

Thus Conscientiousness not only makes us better able to inhibit natural impulses like ethnocentrism, it also makes us more concerned about our reputation in a moral community. We want to fit into the community and we want to be known as cooperators, not cheaters. At the low end of Conscientiousness are sociopaths (also low on Love/Nurturance). They are more likely to take advantage of people for short-term gains and care nothing about developing a reputation as honest and trustworthy. After they prey on one victim, they must move on to an area where their reputation is not known.

Obviously, Conscientiousness as defined above is a pillar of human civilization and cultural life. This is especially so in the individualistic cultures of the West given its importance in achieving a good reputation in groups of strangers.

To this set of traits, Francis Fukuyama also adds trust as a critical virtue of individualist societies.[11] It is linked to Conscientiousness because we are more likely trust people who have a good reputation—people who have the trust of others. Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust ends at the border of the family and the wider kinship group. Social organization, whether in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality is defined as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., “Is it good for the Jews?”).

This lack of trust beyond the kinship group is the fundamental problem that prevents the development of civil societies in much of Asia and Africa, where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups define the political landscape. People who have good jobs are expected to help their relatives, leading to high levels of corruption.[12] The movement of the West toward multiculturalism and opposing identity groups based on race and ethnicity means the end of individualist Western culture, replaced by a culture characterized by conflict between self-interested groups rather than individuals.

In individualist cultures, organizations include nonfamily members in positions of trust, and nepotism is looked on as immoral and is subject to legal sanctions. Morality is defined in terms of universal moral principles that are independent of kinship connections or group membership. Trust therefore is of critical importance to individualist society.

And fundamentally trust is about building a trustworthy reputation—for example, a reputation for honest dealing, not only with fellow kinsmen, but with others as well. It follows that European-derived people are particularly prone to being concerned with reputation. In the individualistic societies in which Westerners evolved, cooperation (and therefore success) resulted from having a good reputation, not from being able to rely on extensive kinship relations.

There are obviously great benefits to trust and the wider psychological system of Conscientiousness. The suite of traits associated with individualism is the basis of Western modernism. Relying on the good reputation of others is a key ingredient to building cooperative civil societies capable of rising above amoral familism.

The downside, however, is that conscientious people become so concerned about their reputation that they become conformists. Once the cultural and political left had won the day, a large part of its success was that it dominated the moral and intellectual high ground on issues of race and ethnicity. The culture of critique had become conventionalized and a pillar of the intellectual establishment. People who dissented from this leftist consensus were faced with a disastrous loss of reputation—nothing less than psychological agony.

There are many examples showing the power of this mechanism. Over 75 years ago Anne Morrow Lindbergh became one of the first victims of the modern version of political correctness when her husband, Charles Lindbergh, stated that Jews were one of the forces attempting to get the United States to enter World War II. Shortly after his speech, she wrote:

The storm is beginning to blow up hard. … I sense that this is the beginning of a fight and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known before. … For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more criticism and coldness and loneliness. … Will I be able to shop in New York at all now? I am always stared at—but now to be stared at with hate, to walk through aisles of hate![13]

What is striking and perhaps counterintuitive, is that the guilt and shame remain even when she is completely satisfied at an intellectual (explicit) level that what her husband said was based on good evidence, that it was morally justifiable, and that he is a man of integrity.

I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through? Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid? I do not know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have the greatest faith in him as a person—in his integrity, his courage, and his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness—his nobility really. … How then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it wrong to state it?

Her reaction is involuntary and irrational—beyond the reach of logical analysis. Charles Lindbergh was exactly right in what he said, but a rational understanding of the correctness of his analysis cannot lessen the psychological trauma to his wife, who must face the hostile stares of others. The trauma is the result of the power of the Conscientiousness system in leading to loss of reputation resulting from breaching the cultural taboo against discussing Jewish influence.

I’ve had similar experiences, on a much smaller scale, resulting from attacks on me at the university where I worked.[14] As with Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s concern about going shopping in New York, the most difficult thing is dealing with loss of reputation in my face-to-face world at the university. The biggest problem is that being an academic nonconformist on race and ethnicity has huge moral overtones. If one dissents from the reigning theory of macroeconomics or the main influences on nineteenth-century French Romanticism, one may be viewed as a bit eccentric or perhaps none too smart. But one is not likely to be subjected to torrents of moral outrage.

Given that academics tend to be Conscientious types, it’s not surprising that academics are generally loath to do or say things that might endanger their reputation. This is at least ironic, because it conflicts with the image of academics as fearless seekers of truth. Unlike politicians, who must continue to curry favor with the public in order to be re-elected, and unlike media figures who have no job protection, academics with tenure have no excuse for not being willing to endure labels such as “anti-Semite” or “racist” in order to pursue their perception of the truth. Part of the job—and a large part of the rationale for tenure in the first place—is that they are supposed to be willing to take unpopular positions: to forge ahead using all that brain power and expertise to chart new territories that challenge the popular wisdom.

But that image of academia is simply not based in reality. Consider, for example, an article that appeared almost two months after the publication of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s famous essay on the Israel lobby,[15] appropriately titled “A Hot Paper Muzzles Academia.”[16]

Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply too hot to handle—and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

Professors refused to take a stand on the paper, either in favor or against. As one Ivy League professor noted, “A lot of [my colleagues] were more concerned about the academic politics of it, and where they should come down, in that sense.” As in 1941, discussing Jewish influence—even in a fact-based, dispassionate manner—carries huge costs.

Sadly, there is now a great deal of evidence that academics in general are careful to avoid controversy or do much of anything that will create hostility. In fact, some researchers are pointing to this fact to question whether tenure is justified. A recent survey of the attitudes of 1,004 professors at elite universities illustrates this quite clearly. Regardless of their rank, professors rated their colleagues as

reluctant to engage in activities that ran counter to the wishes of colleagues. Even tenured full professors believed [other full professors] would invoke academic freedom only “sometimes” rather than “usually” or “always”; they chose confrontational options “rarely,” albeit more often than did lower ranked colleagues. … Their willingness to self-limit may be due to a desire for harmony and/or respect for the criticisms of colleagues whose opinions they value. Thus, the data did not support the depiction of Professorus Americanus as unleashed renegade.[17]

Seen in this context, the reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper makes a lot of sense. As one professor noted, “People might debate it if you gave everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card and promised that afterward everyone would be friends.”[18] This intense desire to be accepted and liked by one’s colleagues is certainly understandable. Striving for a good reputation is part of our nature, especially for the conscientious among us.

Ostracism and moral condemnation from others in one’s face-to-face world trigger guilt feelings. These are automatic responses resulting ultimately from the importance of fitting into a group—i.e., they were developed over evolutionary time. This is especially so in the individualistic cultures of the West, where having a good reputation beyond the borders of the kinship group forms the basis of trust and civil society, and where having a poor reputation would have resulted in ostracism and evolutionary death.

Moreover, it’s interesting that in my experience, decisions by academic departments and committees are by consensus as is typical of egalitarian groups, as in Scandinavian culture as discussed below. Going against a consensus is thus likely to risk ostracism.

As shown by these examples, being able to rationally defend the ideas and attitudes that bring moral condemnation is not sufficient to defuse the complex negative emotions brought on by this form of ostracism. One might think that just as the prefrontal control areas can inhibit ethnocentric impulses originating in the sub-cortex, we should be able to inhibit these primitive guilt feelings. After all, the guilt feelings ultimately result from absolutely normal attitudes of ethnic identity and interests that have been delegitimized as a result of the ultimate failure of the period of ethnic defense discussed in Chapter 6—failure that eventuated in the erection of the culture of critique in America and throughout the West. It should be therapeutic to understand that many of the people who created this culture retained a strong sense of their own ethnic identity and interests. And it should help assuage guilt feelings if we understand that this culture is now propped up by people seeking material advantages and psychological approval at the expense of their own legitimate long-term ethnic interests. Given the strong Jewish influence in erecting this culture,[19] the guilt feelings are nothing more than the end result of ethnic warfare, pursued at the level of ideology and culture instead of on the battlefield.

Getting rid of guilt and shame, however, is certainly not an easy process. Psychotherapy for White people begins with an explicit understanding of the issues that allows us to act in our interests, even if we can’t entirely control the negative feelings engendered by those actions.

Evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers has proposed that the emotion of guilt is a sign to the group that a person will mend his ways and behave according to group norms in the future. Shame, on the other hand, functions as a display of submission to people higher in the dominance hierarchy.[20] From that perspective, a person who is incapable of shame or guilt even for obvious transgressions is literally a sociopath—someone who has no desire to fit into group norms. As noted above, sociopaths are at the low end of Conscientiousness, and there were doubtless strong selection pressures against sociopathy in the small groups that we evolved in, especially among the individualistic peoples of the West; as noted above, White subjects in fact do score higher on Conscientiousness than other groups with the exception of East Asians. The trustworthy cooperators with excellent reputations won the day. 

Cognitive Dissonance as a Force of Psychological Inertia

Once the left had established cultural hegemony throughout the West, people were essentially socialized to see the world through the lens of a leftist worldview—i.e., a worldview in which Whites, especially White males, see themselves as past oppressors of the entire gamut of identity groups that make up coalition of the aggrieved: Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, Jews, women, sexual non-conformists, etc. Once established, such a mindset of liberal-left beliefs is difficult to change.

Cognitive dissonance research has shown that people with strong beliefs, especially beliefs tied up with their personal identity, often do not change them when confronted by conflicting evidence.[21] Fundamentally, the brain wants to avoid conflicting ideas and often uses illogical reasoning and other mechanisms to retain a sense of psychological comfort. For example, when presented with contradictory evidence (such as data showing genetically based race differences in intelligence), people may ignore the data in order to retain a self-image as a morally righteous person. Moreover, people tend to forget evidence that conflicts with their beliefs, and they tend to accept weak arguments that fit with their world view while rejecting strong arguments and data that conflict with it. They may focus their attention not on the evidence itself but on the person presenting the evidence, impugning their motives and accepting guilt-by-association arguments. Clearly, the mind is designed to go to great lengths to avoid psychological discomfort.[22]

This poses a challenge in trying to convert White liberals and most White conservatives to accepting ideas such as that Whites have legitimate interests as a group, that race is real, and that immigration of non-Whites is a long-term disaster for Whites, etc.[23]

This is especially the case given the previously discussed mechanisms that promote inertia within the culture erected by the left. Nonconformity carries costs that can be avoided by dismissing contradictory information. And, given the control that mainstream media has over information presented to the public on race, etc., people can easily avoid information that conflicts with their world view. This explains why the leftist media corporations like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are removing such information from the internet or at least limiting its reach. And it shows how important it is to erect an explicit culture in which White identity and interests are legitimate.

Go to Part 5.

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[1] Mary S. Coleman, “Diversity Matters at Michigan,” University of Michigan News Service (November 8, 2006).

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www.ns.umich.edu/htdocs/releases/story.php?id=1050

[2] Michael Skube, “Duke’s Recovery from a Rush to Judgment,” Los Angeles Times (December 31, 2006).

[3] Sora Jun, Brian S. Lowery, and Lucia Guillory, “Keeping Minorities Happy: Hierarchy Maintenance and Whites’ Decreased Support for Highly Identified White Politicians,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 43, no. 12 (2017): 1615–1629.

[4] Frank K. Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny, and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007; orig. published in 2003 by Peter Lang, Bern, Switzerland).

[5] MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, Ch. 6.

[6] The New York Intellectuals are analyzed as a Jewish intellectual movement in The Culture of Critique; Ibid.

[7] Leslie A. Fiedler, “The State of American Writing,” Partisan Review 15 (1948): 870–875, 872, 873.

[8] Lan Liu and Tong Chen, “Sustainable Cooperation Based on Reputation and Habituation in the Public Goods Game,” Biosystems 160 (2017): 33–38; Manfred Milinski, Dirk Semmann, and H-J. Krambeck, “Reputation Helps Solve the ‘Tragedy of the Commons,’” Nature 415 (2002): 424–426; Dirk Semmann, H-J. Krambeck and Manfred Milinski, “Reputation is Valuable within and outside One’s Own Social Group,” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 57(2005): 611–616.

[9] Mojdeh Mohtashemi and Lik Mui, “Evolution of Indirect Reciprocity by Social Information: The Role of Trust and Reputation in Evolution of Altruism,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 223 (2003): 523–531.

[10] Brent W. Roberts, Oleksandr S. Chernyshenko, Stephen Stark, and Lewis S. Goldberg, “The Structure of Conscientiousness: An Empirical Investigation Based on Seven Major Personality Questionnaires,” Personnel Psychology 58 (2005): 103–139.

[11] Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (New York: Free Press, 1995).

[12] Kajuju Murori, “Just Like Corruption, Nepotism Also Strains Africa’s Growth,” African Exponent (June 27, 2016).

https://www.africanexponent.com/post/7434-just-like-corruption-nepotism-also-strains-africas-growth

[13] Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 220–239.

[14] Kevin MacDonald, “Campaign Against Me by the Southern Poverty Law Center,” kevinmacdonald.net.

http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Beirich.htm

[15] John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, “The Israel Lobby,” London Review of Books 28, no. 6 (March 23, 2006): 3–12.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/john-mearsheimer/the-israel-lobby

[16] Eve Fairbanks, “A Hot Paper Muzzles Academia,” Los Angeles Times (May14, 2006).

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-14-op-fairbanks14-story.html

[17] Stephen J. Ceci, Wendy M. Williams, and Katrin Mueller-Johnson, “Is Tenure Justified? An Experimental Study of Faculty Beliefs about Tenure, Promotion, and Academic Freedom,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29, no. 6 (2006): 553–594, 565,

[18] Fairbanks, “A Hot Paper Muzzles Academia.”

[19] MacDonald, The Culture of Critique.

[20] Robert Trivers, Social Evolution (Benjamin-Cummings, 1985).

[21] Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957).

[22] Margaret Hefferman, Willful Blindness (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012).

[23]

Go to Part 1.

Controlling Ethnocentrism: Implicit and Explicit Processing

As noted in Chapter 5, psychological research indicates two different types of psychological processing: implicit and explicit processing. These modes of processing may be contrasted on a number of dimensions.[1] Implicit processing is automatic, effortless, relatively fast, and involves parallel processing (i.e., processing going on independently in different parts of the brain) of large amounts of information; it characterizes the modules described by evolutionary psychologists. Explicit processing is the opposite of implicit processing: conscious, controllable, effortful, relatively slow, and involves serial processing of relatively small amounts of information in a sequential manner (e.g., performing the steps of solving a math problem). Explicit processing is involved in the operation of the mechanisms of general intelligence[2] as well as controlling emotional states and action tendencies (such as anger or frustration tending lead to aggression).[3]

As noted in Chapter 5, religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., the traditional Catholic teaching of eternal punishment in Hell as a result of mortal sin) to control sub-cortical modular mechanisms (e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action tendencies mediated by evolved implicit processing are controllable by higher brain centers located in the cortex.[4] The same goes for ethnocentrism.

Being able to control impulses of any kind taps into the personality system of Conscientiousness, often labelled “effortful control” because it involves explicit, conscious effort to control impulses (see discussion below). Simply put, conscientious people are relatively better able to regulate the more evolutionarily ancient parts of our brain responsible for many of our passions and desires.

Why is this important for thinking about psychology and White ethnocentrism? Just as conscientious people can inhibit their natural tendencies toward aggression and sexual arousal, they are able to inhibit their natural ethnocentrism. The critical point in the following is that cultural information is of vital importance for enabling people to inhibit their ethnocentric tendencies. This cultural information relies on explicit processing and provides the basis for prefrontal inhibitory control of ethnocentrism.

The conclusion is that the control of ethnocentrism is a direct consequence of the control of cultural information. My book The Culture of Critique is an attempt to understand what happened after the highwater mark of the period of ethnic defense (~1870–1930) discussed in Chapter 6.[5] The rise of the new elite meant that explicit messages about race (e.g., “there’s no such thing as race”) and ethnocentrism (e.g., “White ethnocentrism is a sure sign of psychopathology and disturbed parent-child relationships) were being disseminated by the media and throughout the educational system. Especially since World War II, these messages have been consistently hostile to White ethnocentrism. And that in turn has meant that Whites have been encouraged to inhibit their natural ethnocentrism.

Moreover, as emphasized throughout this book, White people tend to be more individualistic than other peoples, implying that they are less likely than other peoples to make invidious distinctions between ingroups and outgroups and are more likely to be open to strangers and people who don’t look like them. Because Whites are low in ethnocentrism and high in Conscientiousness, controlling ethnocentrism is easier for them on average. Their subcortical mechanisms responsible for ethnocentrism are weaker to start with and hence easier to control.

There is considerable research on the roles of implicit and explicit processing in ethnocentrism and its control. Implicit attitudes on race can be measured, e.g., by performing brain scans when the subjects are looking at faces of people of different races.[6] On the other hand, explicit attitudes on race are typically assessed by filling out questionnaires which tap explicit processing. College student populations of Whites in the West typically exhibit pro-Black attitudes on tests of explicit attitudes. For example, one study found that Whites scored 1.89 on a six-point scale, with 1 meaning strongly pro-Black and 6 being strongly anti-Black.[7]

Another way to measure explicit attitudes is by interview. A recent representative sample of 2000 households found that a surprising 74 percent of Whites thought that racial identity was very important (37 percent) or somewhat important (37 percent).[8] In general, people become more racially conscious as they get older—only 53 percent claimed that racial identity was important while growing up. (I have noticed this also as a feature of Jewish identity.[9]) Even more surprising is the finding that 77 percent of Whites thought that Whites had a culture that should be preserved. However, despite asserting the legitimacy of White ethnic identity, only 4 percent of Whites claimed to be a member of an organization based on racial or ethnic identity. (This presumably includes organizations for, say, Scottish or Polish identity which are politically irrelevant in the American political context.) And 75 percent of Whites state that prejudice and discrimination are important or very important to African-American disadvantage.

In general, Blacks and other minorities have much stronger explicit ethnic identities than Whites do. For example, this same survey found that 90 percent of Blacks thought that racial identity was very important (72 percent) or somewhat important (18 percent), and 91 percent felt that Black culture was worth preserving. Blacks also demonstrate a substantially larger explicit ingroup preference than Whites.[10]

The gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes is made possible by the inhibitory mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex. In one study, subjects were shown photos of Blacks and Whites while hooked up to a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine that takes pictures of the brain in action.[11] When the photos were shown for very brief periods—too short to be consciously processed, the fMRIs showed that Whites had a negative response to the photos of Blacks. This procedure therefore measures implicit negative attitudes toward Blacks.

However, when the photos of Blacks were presented for a much longer period, so that they were consciously experienced, then the difference in reaction to Black and White faces decreased. This happened because the prefrontal region was activated. In other words, people who are consciously aware that they are seeing photos of Blacks are able to inhibit the automatic negative responses from the sub-cortex. Subjects who showed the most prefrontal activation showed the lowest subcortical response. This implies that they were better able to inhibit their negative attitudes toward Blacks.

This study (and there are other studies with similar findings) shows the importance of prefrontal inhibitory control over automatic negative attitudes of Whites toward Blacks. White ethnocentrism exists, but for most Whites, it exists only in a sort of underground world of unconscious, automatic processing: it is an ethnocentrism that dares not speak its name: As soon as the explicit, conscious processor swings into action, it acts to suppress the negative implicit attitudes coming from below so that the subject’s responses align better with the cultural norms of the social environment.[12]

Young children tend to have unabashedly explicit bias in favor of their own race. Explicit race bias emerges early, as young as age three or four, peaks in middle childhood, and then undergoes a gradual decline through adolescence, typically disappearing in adulthood.^[13] However, there is no such decline in implicit racial preferences, which remain strong into adulthood.^[14] There is also a decline in cross-racial friends and companions as children get older. White schoolchildren are much more likely to have White friends than chance would account for, and this trend increases as they get older.[15]

This means that even as explicit racial preference in White children is declining, they become less likely to actually interact with and form friendships with children from other races. In effect, schools undergo a process of self-segregation. And among adults, Whites are significantly less likely than other racial groups to report interracial friendships and contacts.[16]

The bottom line, then, is that as children get older, they become increasingly aware of the official explicit racial ideology, and they conform to it. Their prefrontal centers of inhibitory control are becoming stronger, so that they are better able to inhibit their implicitly generated negative thoughts about racial outgroups. At the explicit level, they are free from any negative attitudes toward non-White groups and may even be politically liberal or radical. At the same time, however, they are “voting with their feet” by choosing friends and companions of the same race.

And their parents are doing the same thing. Liberals show a greater gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes and behavior than do conservatives. Moreover, while highly educated White parents tend to have liberal explicit attitudes on racial issues, including the desirability of school integration, these same highly educated Whites seek out schools that are racially segregated and are more likely to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. A 2018 article noted that for progressive parents, “more often than not, [their progressive] values lost out” when choosing a school.[17] Indeed, there is a positive correlation between the average education of White parents and the likelihood that they will remove their children from public schools as the percentage of Black students increases.[18] Michael Emerson, an author of the study, is quite aware of the gap between explicit attitudes and behavior: “I do believe that White people are being sincere when they claim that racial inequality is not a good thing and that they’d like to see it eliminated. However, … their liberal attitudes about race aren’t reflected in their behavior.”

The flip side of this is that less affluent Whites are more likely to have explicitly illiberal attitudes on racial issues that are condemned by elites. Yet they are also more likely to actually live in racially integrated areas and send their children to racially integrated schools, presumably due to financial constraints.

Implicit White Communities

Children’s choice of friends and parents’ choice of schools and neighborhoods reflect the raw reality of racial hypocrisy in the United States. These children and their parents are acting on their implicit attitudes, and there is a profound gap between their implicit attitudes and their behavior (which show ingroup racial preference) versus their explicit attitudes (which express the official ideology of racial egalitarianism). In effect, they are creating implicit White communities—implicit because even though these communities are an expression of (implicit) racial preferences, they cannot speak their name: Whites behaving in an implicitly White manner do not explicitly state that their friendship choices or their choice in neighbourhood or school derives from racial preference, because that conflicts with their explicit racial attitudes and with the official racial ideology of the wider culture.

White Americans are gradually coalescing into political and cultural affiliation as Whites, and this trend will continue to strengthen in the future as America ethnic diversity is more of a reality even away from the immigration centers on the East and West coasts and the southern border. But at present, this political and cultural affiliation is not yet consciously and explicitly White, at least partly because conscious White affiliation is a cultural taboo.

In the face of overwhelming sanctions on explicit assertions of White racial identity in the post-World War II world, Whites have adopted a variety of implicit identities which serve as the basis of White association and community. All of these identities exist under the radar of the political correctness enforced by elites in academia, politics, and the media: Republican political affiliation, NASCAR racing enthusiast, evangelical Christian, and country music fan. Each of these identities allow White people to associate with other Whites and even to form a White political base without any explicit acknowledgement that race plays a role.

Implicit White communities have become an increasingly important part of the American landscape as racial polarization increases due to the rise of identity politics—first among non-Whites (and encouraged by the left) but now clearly also among Whites as a reaction. The most important of these implicit White communities results from residential segregation due to White flight. As Kevin Kruse notes, “at the dawn of the twenty-first century, America found itself dominated by suburbs and those suburbs dominated by the politics of White flight and urban secession.”[19] “In the past, the hostility to the federal government, the welfare state, and taxation had been driven by racial resentment, whether in the form of segregationists inside Atlanta or secessionist suburbanites outside it. In the 1990s the new generation of suburban Republicans simply took the politics of White flight to the national stage.”[20]

As Kruse notes, race is never part of the explicit rhetoric of White flight, which tends to be expressed as opposition to the federal government, the welfare state, taxation, and perceived moral issues like abortion and homosexuality. But at the implicit level, the desire for White communities and the aversion to contributing to public goods disproportionately benefiting non-Whites are the overriding motivations.

White flight is part of the fragmented future that lies in store for the U.S. and other Western countries with high levels of non-European immigration. It is a well-established finding that the more ethnically mixed a population becomes, the greater is its resistance to redistributive policies.[21] For example, a study of donations to the United Way of America charity found that White Americans give less when their communities are more than 10 percent non-White. Robert D. Putnam recently showed that greater racial diversity of a community is associated with a loss of trust.[22] Putnam’s result is confirmed by studies conducted at the local community level[23] and, given the recent surge in ethnic diversity, by recent survey data according to which 71 percent of Americans believe that trust in fellow citizens has declined in the last 20 years.[24] Moreover, people are found to be happier living among fellow ethnics than as an ethnic minority.[25] White people living in relatively homogeneous areas like New Hampshire or Montana are more involved with friends, the community, and politics than people in more diverse areas.[26]

At the political level, implicit Whiteness is also reflected in Howard Dean’s famous comment that the Republican Party is the party of White Christians.^[27] Non-White ethnic groups tend to vote Democrat even when they have relatively high socioeconomic status, while working class Whites tend to vote Republican—a good indication that this pattern results from identity politics rather than economics. The long-term trend is that since 1992, the Republican share of the White vote has been increasing 1½ percent every four years. Moreover,

it seems a bit touchy to assume that Republicans will max out at around 60 percent of the White vote. This might be the case, but … it’s entirely possible that as our nation becomes more diverse, our political coalitions will increasingly fracture along racial/ethnic lines rather than ideological ones.[28]

Another implicit White community is NASCAR racing, which strongly overlaps with evangelical Christianity, country music, and small-town American culture, particularly that of the South. A famous Mike Luckovich cartoon that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows a Black man and a White man talking with a Confederate flag flying in the background. “We need a flag that isn’t racist … but preserves White southern culture…” The next panel shows a NASCAR checkered flag. The implicit/explicit distinction could not be more obvious. Ninety-four percent of the NASCAR fan base is White, compared to 92 percent for another implicitly White sport, professional hockey.[29]

A large part of the attraction of NASCAR is a desire for traditional American culture. NASCAR events are permeated with sentimental patriotism, prayers, military flyovers, and postrace fireworks. As sociologist Jim Wright notes, “just about everything … you encounter in a day at the track drips with traditional Americana.”[30]

However, “race is the skeleton in the NASCAR Family closet. On the tracks and in the stands, stock-car racing remains a White-person’s sport.” The Whiteness of NASCAR races can be seen from a comment that, after surveying the crowd at the 1999 Daytona 500, “there were probably about as many Confederate flags here as Black people”—i.e., fewer than forty out of a crowd of approximately 200,000.[31] “The near-universal discrediting of the Stars and Bars as a politically incorrect, if not racist, symbol has obviously not yet reached every Winston Cup fan. Either that, or they just don’t care. And, as you might imagine, there was no pussyfooting or self-flagellation about the point among fans at the Southern 500, which was adorned by a profusion of Confederate flags the likes of which I had not witnessed at any other track.”[32]

Wright stresses the link of NASCAR to traditional small town and rural American culture and its links to outdoor pursuits like hunting, fishing, camping, and guns.[33] There is a large overlap between NASCAR fans and gun ownership. There is also a strong Christian religious atmosphere: Races begin with a benediction and a prayer. There is “a visible Christian fellowship” in NASCAR, including entire teams that identify themselves publicly as Christian teams; many of the drivers actively participate in Christian ministry.[34] Other values in evidence are courage in the face of danger—another throwback to traditional American culture, deriving ultimately from the Scots-Irish culture of the English-Scottish border: “As we enter the third decade of women’s liberation and the second decade of the post-communist era, we’ve come to expect, even demand more sensitivity and empathy in our men than bravado or grit, and the traditional manly virtues of courage, bravery, and ‘guts’ strike many as anachronistic at best, even dangerous and moronic.”[35]^,[36]

While NASCAR is a White sport, the NBA is widely perceived to be a Black sport. Whites, especially nonurban Whites, are a decreasing audience for the NBA, and in general Whites spend the least percentage of time watching NBA games of all U.S. racial/ethnic groups.[37] Moreover, NBA culture is seen as African-American, and the response of the NBA has been to attempt to make the NBA look more like White America in order to restore its fan base. Sports writer Gary Peterson notes that

for decades there has been a racial divide between NBA players (mostly Black) and the paying customers (largely White). That divide has become a flashpoint over the past 15 years. … Never before have the players seemed so unlike the fans. This divide is the top concern at the league office—even ahead of declining free throw shooting and baggy shorts. For proof you need look no further than the league-wide dress code NBA commissioner David Stern imposed last season. It was an extraordinary step—he might as well have told the players, “Quit dressing like typical young, urban African-Americans. You’re scaring the fans.”[38]

Besides banning ostentatious gold chains and mandating business casual attire, the NBA has also handed out draconian penalties for fighting among players. This is because fighting fits into the image of urban, African-American culture. Fines are $50,000 for throwing a punch plus possible suspension (implying loss of pay).^[39] It’s interesting therefore that Major League Baseball does not have similar penalties for fighting and indeed, MLB tweeted about a brawl between the Yankees and the Red Sox—in effect, advertising it. The obvious explanation is that the NBA is anxious to avoid the stereotype of Black urban thugs because of its image as a Black sport (80 percent of the players are Black), while MLB has no need to do that because it is not seen as a Black sport.^[40]

The point is not that the NBA is more violent than, say, professional hockey—a largely White sport that is notorious for fighting. Rather, the NBA is conscious of racial stereotyping processes among Whites. Part of NASCAR’s attraction for Whites is that it is an implicit White community. By regulating dress and conduct, the NBA seems to be trying to make the NBA more attractive to Whites despite the racial composition of its players.

Managing White Ethnocentrism: The Problem with Non-Explicit White Identity

White people are clearly coalescing into implicit White communities that reflect their ethnocentrism but “dare not speak its name.” They are often doing so because of the operation of various mechanisms that operate implicitly, below the level of conscious awareness. These White communities cannot assert explicit White identities because the explicit cultural space is deeply committed to an ideology in which any explicit assertion of White identity is anathema. Explicit culture operates in the conscious prefrontal centers able to control the subcortical regions of the brain.

This implies that the control of culture is of critical importance. The story of how this explicit cultural space came to be and whose interests it serves is the topic of my book, The Culture of Critique, combined with the material in this volume on European individualism: these cultural transformations are the result of a complex interaction between pre-existing deep-rooted tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science) and the rise of a new elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of Europe.[41] The result has been a “culture of critique” that represents the triumph of the leftist movements that have dominated twentieth-century intellectual and political discourse in the West, especially since the 1960s. The fundamental assumptions of these leftist movements, particularly as they relate to race and ethnicity, permeate intellectual and political discourse among both liberals and mainstream conservatives and define a consensus among elites in academia, the media, business, and government.

Because implicit ethnocentrism is alive and well among Whites and affects their behavior in subtle ways (implicit Whiteness), one might suppose that Whites are in fact able to pursue their interests even against the prevailing wind of the explicit culture of powerful anti-White social controls and ideologies. The problem, however, is that White ethnic identity and interests can be managed as long as they remain only at the implicit level. In general, implicit White communities conform, outwardly at least, to the official multicultural ideology and adopt conventional attitudes and rhetoric on racial and ethnic issues. This allows them to escape the scrutiny of cultural elites that enforce conventional attitudes on racial and ethnic issues. However, it renders them powerless to promote issues that vitally affect their ethnic interests actively and explicitly.

A good example is non-White immigration. During the 2016 presidential campaign and since Donald Trump’s election, there has been much discussion of immigration stemming from Trump’s proposed policies aimed at preventing illegal immigration. His rhetoric tapped into a very large reservoir of public anger about the lack of control of our borders and, I think, the transformations that immigration in general—legal and illegal—is unleashing. Indeed, his rhetoric on immigration may well have been responsible for his election. Although it is common for proponents of illegal immigration to label their opponents “racists,” the fact that illegal immigration is, after all, illegal has made it easy for mainstream conservatives to oppose it without mentioning their racial interests.

This contrasts with the tendency within the establishment media—from far left to neoconservative, libertarian right—of presenting little or no discussion of the over one million legal immigrants who come to the U.S. every year—no discussion of their effect on the economy, social services, crime, or competition at elite universities; no discussion of their effect on the long-term ethnic composition of the U.S. and how this will affect the political interests of Whites as they head toward minority status; no discussion of the displacement of native populations in various sectors of the economy; and no discussion of whether most Americans really want all of this. Indeed, it has been quite common for high-profile conservative opponents of illegal immigration to assert their support for legal immigration as a means of dodging the charge of “racism,” although many are also in thrall to business interests wanting cheap labor. While assertions of ethnic interests by non-Whites are a commonplace aspect of the American political and intellectual scene, mainstream explicit assertions of ethnic interests by Whites have been missing since the 1920s (see Chapter 6).

The result is that leftist ideologies of race and ethnicity have become part of conventional morality and intellectual discourse even within implicitly White communities. As a result, such communities are unable to oppose the forces changing the country in ways that oppose their long-term interest. Because there is no mainstream attempt by Whites to shape the explicit culture in ways that would legitimize White identity and the pursuit of White ethnic interests, implicit White communities become enclaves of retreating, resentful Whites rather than communities able to consciously pursue White interests.

Bottom line: The creation of an explicit culture legitimizing White identity and interests is a prerequisite to the successful pursuit of the interests of Whites as a group.

End of Part 2.

---

[1] See, e.g.: David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind: Evolution of Brain, Cognition, and General Intelligence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2005); Kevin MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions,” Psychological Review 115, no. 4 (2008): 1012–1031; Keith Stanovich, Who is Rational? Studies of Individual Differences in Reasoning (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999); Keith Stanovich The Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).

[2] Dan Chiappe and Kevin B. MacDonald, “The Evolution of Domain-General Mechanisms in Intelligence and Learning.” Journal of General Psychology 132, no. 1 (2005): 5–40.

[3] MacDonald, “Effortful Control, Explicit Processing, and the Regulation of Human Evolved Predispositions.”

[4] Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution and a Dual Processing Theory of Culture: Applications to Moral Idealism and Political Philosophy,” Politics and Culture (Issue, #1, April, 2010; unpaginated); see also Kevin MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology, and a Conflict Theory of Culture,” Evolutionary Psychology 7, no. 2 (2009): 208–233.

[5] MacDonald, The Culture of Critique.

[6] Another method of assessing implicit attitudes is use of the Implicit Attitudes Test (IAT) in which subjects are presented with photos of Blacks and Whites in succession and asked to pair positive or negative words (e.g., “intelligent,” “law-abiding,” “poor,” “success”) with the photos. Eighty percent of Whites take longer to associate positive words with Blacks than with Whites. This is interpreted as indicating that Whites have implicit negative stereotypes of Blacks.

Recently, the results of the IAT showing that people higher on the IAT are more likely to engage in discrimination have been called into question. However, these findings do not reflect on studies that do not focus on discrimination; nor do they affect studies based on brain scans.

For a good summary of the controversies surrounding the IAT, see Jesse Singal, “Psychology’s Racism-Measuring Tool Isn’t Up to the Job,” The Cut (January, 2017).

https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html

[7] Elizabeth A. Phelps, et al., “Performance on Indirect Measures of Race Evaluation Predicts Amygdala Activation,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 12 (2000): 729–738.

[8] Paul C. Croll, Douglas Hartmann, and Joseph Gerteis, “Putting Whiteness Theory to the Test: An Empirical Assessment of Core Theoretical Propositions,” unpublished manuscript, Department. of Sociology, University of Minnesota American Mosaic Project (2006).

[9] I describe several cases in my trilogy on Judaism, such as Heinrich Heine; see Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents, Ch. 2, n. 9.

[10] Brian A. Nosek, Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Anthony G. Greenwald, “Harvesting Implicit Group Attitudes and Beliefs from a Demonstration Web Site,” Group Dynamics 6 (2002): 101–115.

[11] William A. Cunningham, et al., “Separable Neural Components in the Processing of Black and White Faces,” Psychological Science 15 (2004): 806–813.

[12] A similar study explains what happens when people confront controversial issues related to race and ethnicity. White subjects were shown pictures of a smiling interracial couple and then told that their response to the photo indicated that they were prejudiced. After being told this, subjects took much longer to respond to later photos. This is interpreted as being due to subjects trying to consciously control their responses to the photos. The photo serves as a “cue for control”—a warning that “the situation is one in which prejudiced responses may occur and that the brakes need to be applied to ongoing behavior.”

Margo J. Monteith, Leslie Ashburn-Nardo, Corrine. I. Voils, and Alexander M. Czopp. “Putting the Brakes on Prejudice: On the Development and Operation of Cues for Control,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83 (2002): 1029–1050, 1046.

[13] Frances Aboud, Children and Prejudice (New York: Blackwell, 1988); Martha Augoustinos and Dana Louise Rosewarne, “Stereotype Knowledge and Prejudice in Children,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 19 (2001): 143–156.

[14] Yarrow Dunham, Andrew S. Baron, and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “From American City to Japanese Village: A Cross-Cultural Study of Implicit Racial Attitudes,” Child Development 77 (2006): 1268–1281.

[15] James Moody, “Race, school integration and friendship segregation in America,” American Journal of Sociology 107 (2002): 679–716.

[16] Michael O. Emerson, Rachel Talbert Kimbro, and George. Yancey, “Contact Theory Extended: The Effects of Prior Racial Contact on Current Social Ties,” Social Science Quarterly 83 (2002): 745–761.

[17] Margaret A. Hagerman, “White Progressive Parents and the Conundrum of Privilege,” Los Angeles Times (September 30, 2018).

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-hagerman-White-parents-20180930-story.html

[18] David Sikkunk and Michael O. Emerson, “School Choice and Racial Segregation in U.S. Schools: The Role of Parents’ Education,” Racial and Ethnic Studies 31 (2008): 267–293.

[19] Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 259.

[20] Ibid., 263.

[21] Frank Salter (ed.), Welfare, Ethnicity, and Altruism: New Data and Evolutionary Theory (London: Taylor & Francis, 2005).

[22] Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century”; recent literature: Salter, “The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity”; Peter Thisted Dinesen, Merlin Schaefer, and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov, “Social Trust: A Narrative and Meta-analytical Review,” Annual Review of Political Science 23 (2020), in press. Preprint:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335924797_Ethnic_Diversity_and_Social_Trust_A_Narrative_and_Meta-Analytical_Review

[23] See Salter, “The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity.”

[24] “The State of Personal Trust,” Pew Research Center (July 22, 2019).

https://www.people-press.org/2019/07/22/the-state-of-personal-trust/

[25] Salter, “The Biosocial Study of Ethnicity.”

[26] Steve Sailer, “Fragmented Future: Multiculturalism Doesn’t Make Vibrant Communities but Defensive Ones,” The American Conservative (January 1, 2007).

[27] Shailagh Murray, “Dean’s Words Draw Democratic Rebukes,” The Washington Post (June 9, 2005).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/08/AR2005060800650_pf.html

[28] Sean Trende, “Does the GOP Have to Pass Immigration Reform?,” Real Clear Politics (June 25, 2013).

[29] “Demographics of Sports Fans,” Demographic Partitions.org (July 10, 2017).

http://demographicpartitions.org/demographics-of-sports-fans-u-s/

[30] Jim Wright, Fixin’ to Git: One Fan’s Love Affair with NASCAR’s Winston Cup (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 35.

[31] Ibid., 83.

[32] Ibid., 141.

Wright’s book was published in 2002. Since then, the Confederate flag has been less in evidence and there have been efforts to minimize its presence. In 2015 Brian France, Chairman of NASCAR, called the flag an “offensive symbol,” and asked, but did not require, that it not be shown. Some well-known drivers have discouraged it. In 2019 NASCAR rejected an ad for a semiautomatic rifle. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that NASCAR is any less an implicit White community.

Mike Hembree, “NASCAR Fans: Confederate Flag Still Important Symbol,” USA Today (August 8, 2017).

Awr Hawkins, “NASCAR Shifts on Guns, Rejects Ad Showing Semiautomatic Rifle” Breitbart (September 09, 2019).

[33] Ibid., 156.

[34] Ibid., 37.

[35] Ibid., 156.

[36] Country music is also an implicit White community: The vast majority of people [over 90 percent] who listen to country music on a regular basis are White, while only 3 percent of Hispanics and 5 percent of African-Americans say that they prefer country music to other genres of music.

Brandon Gaille, “49 Curious Country Music Demographics” (May 9, 2016).

https://brandongaille.com/46-curious-country-music-demographics/

[37] “Hoop Dreams: Multicultural Diversity in NBA Viewership” (February 26, 2915).

http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2015/hoop-dreams-multicultural-diversity-in-nba-viewership.html

[38] Gary Peterson, “Brawl puts glaring spotlight on NBA,” Contra Costa Times (Dec. 22, 2007).

[39] Gabe Fernandez, “Baseball Fights Highlight a Double Standard in Sports Perception,” The Sporting News (April 12, 2018).

http://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/baseball-fights-yankees-red-sox-nba-brawls-players-double-standard/15e4ngugjbiv217ebzyvhzeia8

[40] Ibid.

[41] MacDonald, The Culture of Critique.

At this writing, in mid-May, 2021, former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted by a jury of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of George Floyd during Floyd’s arrest.  Chauvin hasn’t been sentenced yet.  The first charge carries a maximum of forty years in prison.

Chauvin was one of four officers involved in the arrest of Floyd on May 25th 2020 for passing a counterfeit $20 bill.   They handcuffed him but were unable to get him to go into the back seat of a police car.  While Floyd was lying face down in the street, Chauvin had his knee on Floyd’s neck and shin on his back for over nine minutes and he died.  Mobile phone video taken by a bystander recorded the episode.  The autopsy revealed that Floyd had COVID, heart disease, and high amounts of fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death.  The medical examiner’s opinion was that Floyd died of cardiac arrest and that his health condition contributed to his death, which he ruled a homicide.  The case received extensive attention because of its racial angle: Chauvin is White, Floyd was Black.  It fit the current widely-believed narrative of an epidemic of racism-motivated killings of blameless Blacks by White cops.

I didn’t follow the Chauvin case all that closely.  I sampled front-page news accounts in the paper and read daily summaries of the trial on the internet.  I watched the defense closing argument on television, which brought up questions for me and prompted this writing.  Later, I read a transcript of it.¹

In his closing argument, Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson, didn’t exactly hit the ground running.  It’s fifteen minutes into his presentation and he’s still defining reasonable doubt and the presumption of innocence and I’m going, I got it, I got it, move it!   When Nelson finally got into the substance of what he had to offer, it seemed as if the word “reasonable” was in every other sentence: what was reasonable for a police officer to do in this circumstance; reasonable, reasonable, reasonable.  This from the transcript characterizes the thrust of Nelson’s closing argument:

And then you look at the direct knowledge that a reasonable police officer would have at the precise moment force was used. That includes information that they gather from dispatch, their direct observations of the scene, the subjects, and the current surroundings. They have to take into consideration whether the suspect was under the influence of a controlled substance. They can take that into consideration, because again, this is a dynamic and ever-changing. Just like life, things change.  It’s a dynamic situation. It’s fluid. They take into account their experience with the subject at the beginning, the middle, the end. A reasonable police officer tries to, or is at least cognizant and concerned, about future behavior, and that factors into the reasonable police officer’s analysis too, because sometimes officers take someone into custody with no problem and suddenly they become a problem. It can change in an instant.²

This went on for about forty-five minutes and I’m thinking, what’s he doing this for, reasonableness is the last thing you want to try to tack on to Chauvin.  What Chauvin did was, it seems to me, obviously unreasonable.  The reasonable thing to have done when all four officers couldn’t get Floyd into the police car—he was a really big muscular guy—was to call for a police van, or better, an ambulance and emergency medical personnel (Floyd was saying he couldn’t breathe), and let Floyd sit or lie somewhere handcuffed until they got there.   At least Chauvin could have taken his knee off Floyd’s neck as soon at Floyd stopped thrashing around.

And anyway, I thought to myself, Chauvin isn’t accused of being unreasonable. You don’t go to jail for being unreasonable.  You go to jail for breaking a law.  It struck me that, really, I didn’t know what law or laws Chauvin was accused of violating.   As did everyone, I had seen the video and assumed that it was to be taken as Chauvin out-and-out murdering Floyd, but I wasn’t up on the particulars—first degree, second degree, and so on–and Nelson going on about reasonableness wasn’t helping me out in this regard.

I quickly checked online while Nelson was making his presentation and learned that Chauvin was accused of second degree murder and two lesser charges, manslaughter being one of them.  I didn’t get into any details of the laws, wanting to get back to Nelson—or sort of; in truth, he was boring the hell out of me.  I kept waiting for him to deal directly with the charges against Chauvin and how the prosecution hadn’t proved them, but it never happened.  He jumped around, this, that, and the other thing—all the trouble they had getting Floyd to cooperate, what force is authorized, how long Chauvin’s knee was on his neck (or was the knee on his upper back?), Floyd’s cause of death, and the hostile bystanders, and what was reasonable in all of that.

It was clear Nelson was conscientious and had put in a lot of preparation time, but I’m reacting, “How exactly does all of this relate to what Chauvin’s accused of doing?”  The trial must be more than just whether Chauvin is a racist White cop like all the rest of them and oppresses Blacks for no reason at all and looked very bad on a video, and that if you agree that what was going on was evil personified, and who wouldn’t, put the creep in prison and throw away the key.  The law is more precise, nuanced, than that, or so I assumed anyway.  (Later: Yes, the law is more precise than that, but I’ve concluded from writing this up that Chauvin was indeed convicted of looking on the video like your typical racist White cop who tortures and executes poor, helpless Blacks, case closed, cart him off.)

I’m not an attorney, but I’ve taught school and written for publication, and I know that to convince people of something—which was the challenge for the defense here—you need to organize your presentation so that things tie together in an easy-to-understand, accessible, convincing way.  People ought to feel good about themselves for getting on board with you.  From watching his presentation and later reading a transcript of it, my call is that defense attorney Nelson didn’t bring that off.

 *   *   *

Take this for what it’s worth, I’m no expert on the details of the case and have zero legal expertise, but I’m going to be so presumptuous as to sketch out how I would have come at the closing defense argument in the Chauvin trial for your consideration.

I’d have grounded my presentation in the specifics of the laws Chauvin was accused of violating and argued that the prosecution hadn’t established beyond a reasonable doubt that he had violated them.  I’m not contending this would make any difference in the verdict, just that it would have been better than what Eric Nelson did.  This was a rigged proceeding from the get-go, right out of Stalin’s time or East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall.  It was a show trial.   Here’s an enemy of people, nail him good (and, in this instance, if you don’t, it’s an apocalypse, and we know where you live).  Clarence Darrow couldn’t have won this case.  But even if a cause is futile, we still are obligated to do the right thing the best we can.  We can push the rock up the mountain even if it is sure to roll back down on us.  Here’s how I would have pushed the rock.

In the closing argument, I would have put the Minnesota legal statutes Chauvin was accused of violating on big pieces of cardboard and set them on easels.   I looked it up, there were three of them, three counts.   With a pointer that had a rubber tip on it, I would have directed my presentation at what was on the three pieces of cardboard.   If it wasn’t on the cardboard, I wouldn’t deal with it (with one exception, which I’ll get to right at the end of this writing).

As it was, in no time at all, the jury found Chauvin guilty on all three counts.  One juror after the trial said that eleven of the twelve were ready to convict twenty minutes into the deliberation, but one juror held them up a bit on some technicalities.  Count I was second degree murder.  Count II was third degree murder.  Count III was second degree manslaughter. Wielding my pointer, I’d have said to the jury, “These are the three laws that Derek Chauvin is accused of violating.  Let’s go through them one at a time.  The question for you is whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin did these things.  Men and women of the jury, much less a reasonable doubt, there is no doubt that Derek Chauvin didn’t violate any of these laws.”

I’ll go through the three counts here and briefly say how I’d come at them.  You can add your own thinking to mine.   The counts are taken from the formal charges against Chauvin.³

COUNT I

Charge: Second Degree Murder – Unintentional – While Committing a Felony

Minnesota Statute 609.19 (1)

Maximum Sentence: Imprisonment for not more than 40 years.

Offense Level: Felony

Charge Description: That on or about May 25, 2020, in Hennepin County, Minnesota, Derek Michael Chauvin caused the death of a human being, George Floyd, without the intent to effect the death of any person, while committing a felony offense other than criminal sexual conduct in the first or second degree with force or violence or a drive-by shooting, namely assault in the third degree.

This is the big one, forty years.   What jumps out here is that in order to be guilty of violating this law, it isn’t enough that Chauvin caused the death of Floyd, he had to do it while committing a particular felony, third degree assault (which usually isn’t a felony, but sometimes is if the offense is bad enough).  Subdivision 1 of the Minnesota statute for third degree assault applies in this case:

609.223 ASSAULT IN THE THIRD DEGREE

Subdivision 1.   Substantial bodily harm.

Whoever assaults another and inflicts substantial bodily harm may be sentenced to imprisonment for not more than five years or to payment of a fine of not more than $10,000, or both.

The issue with this count is whether the prosecution has shown beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin was assaulting Floyd rather than restraining him.

To the jury:

“Are you certain enough that Chauvin was assaulting Floyd to put him in prison for forty years?   The video has this exchange:

Chauvin:  Relax.
Floyd: I can’t breathe!
Chauvin: You’re fine. You’re talking fine.

And this:

Officer: I just worry about the excited or delirium or whatever.
Chauvin: That’s why we have EMS coming.

“Does that sound to you like assault with the intent to inflict substantial bodily harm, no reasonable doubt about it?   Could it be that Chauvin thought he was restraining Floyd until the medical people got there?  He may have been unreasonable, or unwise, in doing what he was doing, but that is not the issue in this count.  It is whether he was committing the felony offense of assault against Floyd.   Ask yourself, ‘How has the prosecution demonstrated to me beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin was assaulting rather than restraining Floyd?’  They haven’t, and there is no doubt about that.”

The second count, third degree murder. 

COUNT II

Charge: Third Degree Murder – Perpetrating an Eminently Dangerous Act and Evincing a Depraved Mind

Minnesota Statute 609.195 (a)

Maximum Sentence: Imprisonment for not more than 25 years

Offense Level: Felony

Charge Description: That on or about May 25, 2020, in Hennepin County, Derek Michael Chauvin caused the death of another, George Floyd, by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.

The key elements here are perpetuating an eminently dangerous act and evincing (revealing) a depraved mind, without regard for human life.

“Has the prosecution demonstrated to you beyond a reasonable doubt that the neck restraint Chauvin applied is eminently—exceedingly, extremely—dangerous?  No, it hasn’t. This restraint is authorized by the Minneapolis police department, is widely used by law enforcement throughout the world, and is not known for causing death; it certainly hadn’t in Minneapolis before the Floyd incident.  Are you sure beyond a reasonable doubt that Chauvin thinks to himself, ‘Here’s my chance to perpetrate an eminently dangerous act right here in front of all these people and with this young woman taking a video on her cellphone.’  Conjecture isn’t evidence. Presumption isn’t evidence.  What hard evidence has the prosecution given you that supports you being so certain that this human being—Chauvin is a human being, just like George Floyd, just like you—was perpetrating an eminently dangerous act rather than trying to do his job that you are willing to put him in prison for 25 years?  Twenty-five years from now is 2146.  And how have you been shown that Derek Chauvin is no less than depraved?  Not just performing an ill-advised act, but depraved.  And that he is without regard for human life?  The prosecution has established this?   When?  How?  This count takes the cake.  It’s absurd.”

And the third charge, second degree manslaughter.

COUNT III

Charge: Second Degree Manslaughter – Culpable Negligence Creating an Unreasonable Risk

Minnesota Statute: 609.205 (1)

Maximum Sentence: Imprisonment for not more than 10 years, or payment of a fine of not more than $20,000, or both.

Offense Level:  Felony

Charge Description:  That on or about May 25, 2020, in Hennepin County, Minnesota, Derek Michael Chauvin caused the death of another, George Floyd, by his culpable negligence, creating an unreasonable risk and consciously took the chance of causing death or great bodily harm to another, George Floyd.

The angle here is the part about consciously took the chance of causing death or great bodily harm.

“It’s fair to say that what Derek Chauvin did contributed to George Floyd’s death, though even that isn’t a dead certainty given Floyd’s dire health condition.   But did Chauvin consciously take the chance of killing Floyd?  Was that on his mind?   The prosecution has established that?  Absolutely, it hasn’t.  Chauvin had no way of knowing about Floyd’s COVID and heart disease.  We’re talking about a police officer here, not a medical expert.  It’s commonly believed that if you can speak you can breathe.  Should Chauvin have just let Floyd lie there until medical help got there, where Floyd said he wanted to be (‘I want to lay on the ground, I want to lay on the ground.  I’m going down, I’m going down.  I’m going down’).   Arguably, yes.   Given that Mr. Floyd died, we can assume that with 20/20 hindsight Derek Chauvin would do things differently.  But that doesn’t justify putting him in prison for ten years.  He didn’t consciously—consciously, with intent—take the chance of causing Floyd’s death. There is no evidence that supports that speculation.”

More to be said, but you get the idea of how I would have come at the closing argument.  If nothing else, it provides an alternative to the approach taken by Chauvin’s defense attorney, Eric Nelson.   A New York Times article squared with what I saw Nelson doing, that is to say, pushing the reasonable-police-officer theme.

For nearly three hours, Mr. Nelson focused on Mr. Chauvin’s decision-making and on what factors may have caused Mr. Floyd’s death.  He emphasized that the jury instructions say that no crime has been committed if a police officer was justified in using reasonable force and that jurors should determine what is justified by considering what “a reasonable police officer in the same situation would believe to be necessary.”⁴

As far as I can see, in going this route, Nelson didn’t speak to what the charges against Chauvin actually were, and it was deadly bad for Chauvin.  I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be making the case that what Chauvin did was reasonable.

I keep thinking I have to be missing the point in all of this somehow.  I’ve recently begun reading the Powerline site online and finding it very informative.  It’s a group of attorneys commenting on the news.  One of them, Scott Johnson, wrote this with reference to federal charges against the four police officers involved in the Floyd case:

State convictions and stiff sentences against the former police officers in this case would easily satisfy federal concerns. The theory of the state prosecutions is that, even though George Floyd was lawfully arrested and detained, police exploited their detention authority, abusing his rights to (a) be subjected to only reasonable (not excessive) force, and (b) have police protect his right to life. Chauvin was found guilty of those abuses, and it is highly likely that the other three former officers will be, too.⁵

Exploited detention authority?  Used unreasonable force?  Didn’t protect Floyd’s right to life?  Chauvin was found guilty of those abuses?  I thought the charges were violating Minnesota statutes prohibiting assault, committing an eminently dangerous act, behaving from a depraved mind and having no regard for human life, and knowingly taking a chance on causing death or great bodily injury.  Scott Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney who for 25 years has written for major publications, including National Review and The New York Times, and he is a fellow at the prestigious Claremont Institute.  He’s got really strong legal credentials, and I’m following the NFL draft (Wilson has a history of shoulder surgery).   I don’t know.  I’ll leave it to you to sort this out.

*   *   *

I’ll close with three things I would have done if I had been defending Chauvin.

First, I would have done my best to get that mask off him.   Personalize him, make him an individual.  With the mask on, Chauvin comes off as a type, a symbol for racist cops everywhere.  If you throw the book at him, you are making a statement about police and their practices in general, not punishing a mortal, fallible-like-we-all-are, individual person, with parents and a sister and former stepchildren whom he may still be in contact with and a job that happens to be that of a police officer.   I’d try to humanize Chauvin, make the jury aware that whatever they do, for whatever reason, they are doing to him.

I would have had him testify.  Attorneys are really skittish about having defendants testify, something about them getting worked over by prosecution grilling.  I don’t get it.  I don’t care what instructions judges give juries—don’t read anything into the defendant’s choice not to testify, etc.  If I’m on a jury, I’m thinking he has something to hide or he’d be bursting at the seams eager to tell his side of the story.  Plus, I want to hear from him.  We’ve heard from everybody else.  Tell us, what were you doing and why?   Give us your side.

I don’t see how Chauvin would be vulnerable on the stand.  All he has to do is hang in there with a simple story.  “We’ve got a guy who we can’t wrestle into a car and he’s ranting and thrashing around and kicking his legs.  I thought I was staying calm and restraining him until the ambulance got there, which turned out to be longer than I expected.   People were yelling at me and threatening me and I thought I might have to use mace to protect myself when in my mind I was doing the proper thing.  It was a dangerous situation, so bad that the emergency medical people wouldn’t attend to Floyd until they got him out of there.  Absolutely, I wasn’t assaulting Floyd.   I thought the knee restraint was safe and that since he was talking he could breathe.   I feel terrible that he died.   I’ll live with it for the rest of my life.  I wish I could have done better by George Floyd, but I know in my heart that I did the best I could to safely make the arrest within the intense pressure of that moment.”

And last, I would have ended my closing argument by referring to the elephant in the room: people were threatening to tear apart the city of Minneapolis, and other cities as well, if the jury didn’t convict Chauvin, and there were threats against the jurors themselves if they didn’t do the mob’s bidding.  The jurors weren’t sequestered, they knew this.  I don’t know how directly I could have addressed the threat that was looming over the trial.  Perhaps something like this: “There are times in our lives, not more than a few, when we are called upon to do the truly honorable thing and there is a very strong temptation not to.  Doing the honorable thing in that circumstance tests our character: our honesty, our integrity, our autonomy, our toughness, our courage.  This is a highly charged case, you knew that before you took your oath as a juror.  You’ll very likely never be tested like this again in your life.  You have the responsibility to assess thoroughly and impartially whether or not the prosecution has established beyond a reasonable doubt that Derek Chauvin violated three Minnesota laws.  You pledged to do that, and only that.  Now is your time to stand up and be counted, as a citizen and as a human being.  Thank you.”

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Endnotes

1. Both the transcript and a video of the defense closing argument are online.

https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/video/5503824-full-video-defense-presents-closing-arguments-in-derek-chauvin-trial-part-1/

2. From the transcript of the defense closing argument. Op. cit.
3. The formal charges against Chauvin.

https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6935897/Derek-Chauvin-Second-degree-murder-charge.pdf

4. “In His Closing Argument, Derek Chauvin’s Lawyer Urges Jurors to ‘Not Let Yourselves Be Misled.’” Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, The New York Times, April 19, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/derek-chauvin-defense-closing-argument.html
5. “A Redundant Prosecution, Star Tribune Edition,” posted on Powerline by Scott Johnson on May 8 th, 2021. https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/05/a-redundant-prosecution-star-tribune-edition.php