Twisted admissions

Dennis Saffran has stood as a Republican candidate in New York and has written columns for City Journal - so he is somewhere on the right of the political spectrum.

He has had a column published in the New York Post regarding the racial balance in the eight elite specialised high schools in New York.

It's an interesting case study in the way that race is spoken about now.

Entry to the high schools is by a competitive examination:

But now, troubled by declining black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools, opponents of the exam have resurfaced. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has filed a civil-rights complaint challenging the admissions process.

Here is the first point to note. It is true that black and Hispanic enrolments have fallen. But the most notable decline in enrolments has been amongst whites:

white enrollment at Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech has plummeted as well, dropping from 79 percent, 81 percent and 77 percent, respectively, in 1971 to just 22 percent, 23 percent and 20 percent today.

So why not be up in arms about the decline in white enrolments? Why the concern only for blacks and Hispanics?

As it happens, Saffran does not want the exam to be dropped. He argues that this would be unfair to the Asian community which now dominates these high schools. Asians are 13 per cent of the New York population but 73% of the specialised school enrolments.

Now, if whites were 13 per cent of the New York population but 73 per cent of the elite high school population, you would never hear the end of it. There would be talk of privilege and racism. And Saffran does seem to believe that he needs to justify the discrepancy. So he makes the claim that Asians are poor and therefore, unlike privileged whites, deserving of the high school places.

He makes this argument despite admitting that:

True, Asians nationally have the highest median income of any racial group, including whites — and in New York City, their median household income ranks second to that of whites and well ahead of blacks and Hispanics.

So Asians in general are the wealthiest (and also the best educated); however, Saffran provides some welfare data suggesting that some of the Asians attending the specialised schools are from poorer families.

This may well be true, but let's face it - poor whites are never given such consideration. If you're white you're considered privileged no matter what; a struggling white family will be thought more privileged than someone like Oprah Winfrey.

I'm not writing any of this to have a go at Asians; it is an aspect of Asian culture that the young are pressured to compete academically for entry to elite schools.

But again, if white families value education more highly on average than black families and have better educational outcomes for that reason, nobody says they achieved that on merit, it is assumed to be an aspect of racism.

It's that idea, again, of whites being exceptional - in a negative way. It is assumed that whites created systems of oppression and injustice, and therefore the worst is to be thought of them, even to the point that Asians, who do better on average than whites on most social indicators, get to be praised for achieving on merit, whilst the poorest of whites are advised on ways to confess and to overcome their privilege.

I don't write this with the intent of further demoralising those white people reading this, but to try to make clear how lacking in credibility the whole approach to race is. There is every reason for us to treat it as lacking in credibility and to dismiss its moral claims.

The Bourne Identity 1916

In 1916 an Anglo-Saxon American by the name of Randolph Bourne wrote an essay titled Trans-national America.

In his essay Bourne criticises an older liberalism which combined open borders with an expectation that migrants would assimilate to an established Anglo-Saxonism. Bourne criticised the primacy of the Anglo-Saxonism by claiming that:

We are all foreign-born or the descendants of foreign-born

So here we already have the argument that we are all immigrants - which in one stroke denies the existence of an established national identity.

Bourne then dismisses the older Anglo-America as merely derivative:

They invented no new social framework. Rather they brought over bodily the old ways to which they had been accustomed. Tightly concentrated on a hostile frontier, they were conservative beyond belief...In their folkways, in their social and political institutions, they were, like every colonial people, slavishly imitative of the mother country...

It is just this English-American conservatism that has been our chief obstacle to social advance.

The immigrant has the superior qualities:

We have needed the new peoples—the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun—to save us from our own stagnation.

Bourne, an Anglo-American himself, claims that America up to 1900 simply had no culture:

The Anglo-Saxon was merely the first immigrant, the first to found a colony. He has never really ceased to be the descendant of immigrants, nor has he ever succeeded in transforming that colony into a real nation, with a tenacious, richly woven fabric of native culture. Colonials from the other nations have come and settled down beside him. They found no definite native culture which should startle them out of their colonialism

Haven't we heard that over and over from Western intellectuals from Sydney to Stockholm - a denial that a national culture even exists to be defended?

Bourne goes on and on attacking Anglo-America, attacking the South, for instance, as being a cultural backwater. But what happens next is quite revealing. His aim is to praise the immigrant cultures and so he argues that it is better for these cultures to stay strong:

It is not the Jew who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his who is dangerous to America, but the Jew who has lost the Jewish fire... Just so surely as we tend to disintegrate these nuclei of nationalistic culture do we tend to create hordes of men and women without a spiritual country, cultural outlaws, without taste, without standards...The influences at the centre of the nuclei are centripetal. They make for the intelligence and the social values which mean an enhancement of life.

OK, but surely this argument can be turned against Bourne himself. Where is his Anglo fire? Where is his boasting of his venerable culture? Where is his spiritual country? He has cast it all aside, denied its existence, identified it as a source of stagnation....

We have the beginnings here of that double standard, in which the leftist argues for pluralism (the vibrancy and enrichment of cultural diversity) whilst at the same time attacking and denying his own culture.

So what then is the role for an Anglo-Saxon American? According to Bourne, it is not to enjoy his own national tradition, but a newer cosmopolitan one. Bourne begins on this general note:

It is for the American of the younger generation to accept this cosmopolitanism, and carry it along with selfconscious and fruitful purpose. In his colleges, he is already getting...the privilege of a cosmopolitan outlook...If he is still a colonial, he is no longer the colonial of one partial culture, but of many. He is a colonial of the world. Colonialism has grown into cosmopolitanism, and his mother land is no one nation, but all who have anything life-enhancing to offer to the spirit...If the American is parochial, it is in sheer wantonness or cowardice. His provincialism is the measure of his fear of bogies or the defect of his imagination.

The Anglo-Saxon American is to liberate himself from his own repressed and stagnant provincial culture through a cosmopolitan intermixing with the vibrant immigrant cultures:

Indeed, it is not uncommon for the eager Anglo-Saxon who goes to a vivid American university today to find his true friends not among his own race but among the acclimatized German or Austrian, the acclimatized Jew, the acclimatized Scandinavian or Italian. In them he finds the cosmopolitan note. In these youths, foreign-born or the children of foreign-born parents, he is likely to find many of his old inbred morbid problems washed away. These friends are oblivious to the repressions of that tight little society in which he so provincially grew up. He has a pleasurable sense of liberation from the stale and familiar attitudes of those whose ingrowing culture has scarcely created anything vital for his America of today. He breathes a larger air.

Dual citizenship is necessary, thinks Bourne, because it would be unreasonable to expect someone to give up the identity they were born to:

Dual citizenship we may have to recognize as the rudimentary form of that international citizenship to which, if our words mean anything, we aspire...Once a citizen, always a citizen, no matter how many new citizenships he may embrace. And such a dual citizenship seems to us sound and right. For it recognizes that, although the Frenchman may accept the formal institutional framework of his new country and indeed become intensely loyal to it, yet his Frenchness he will never lose. What makes up the fabric of his soul will always be of this Frenchness, so that unless he becomes utterly degenerate he will always to some degree dwell still in his native environment.

Again, Bourne thinks it would be "utterly degenerate" for a Frenchman to lose the Frenchness that "makes up the fabric of his soul". But what about his own Anglo-Saxon identity? Why is it not utterly degenerate for him to deny it and to denigrate it in favour of cosmopolitanism?

Apart from the ethnic double standard that emerges in Bourne's essay, there are two other features worth noting. The first is Bourne's emphasis on creative spirit, which I believe is one aspect of human nature that liberals tend to prioritise. The second is the "magic thinking" that runs through his essay, by which I mean his willingness to hold contradictory, inconsistent or mutually defeating positions at the same time. For instance, he wants America to be at the same time diverse but also unified and integrated; a land with a cosmopolitan outlook but in which different groups retain their distinct, historic national traditions; a land, in his words, whose "colonies live here inextricably mingled, yet not homogeneous. They merge but they do not fuse." He wants America to be trans-national and yet at the same time a nation.

Challenging Amnesty

I went to the Eltham library yesterday and I was surprised to find that Amnesty International had a large stall there with banners and literature promoting the boat people cause.

It's so rare to get a chance to talk things through with open borders people that I took the opportunity to engage them in a discussion. There were two women, an older, very warm-hearted Anglo woman and a younger, well-spoken Persian woman from Iran.

I told them that I opposed the current refugee system because it took people from very different ethnicities and put them all together in Australian cities which would make it impossible for any group to keep their own tradition and culture going. There would be a melting pot in which no particular culture would survive. A better alternative would be for the wealthier nations to contribute to a fund which would be used to settle refugees in whatever country was closest both ethnically and in living standards to the country the refugees were coming from.

The Anglo woman was receptive to these arguments. She told me she had noticed that the Somalis she worked with in Melbourne seemed to be culturally dislocated here. But the Persian woman disagreed. She said she had no problem with all the cultures and peoples of the world merging together. I asked her if she really had no problem with people living only as individuals rather than belonging to a particular culture and people and she replied that it would be OK as long as everyone obeyed the law.

Now, that's an easier position to take if you belong to an ethnic group, like the Iranian Persians, which is growing quickly rather than facing decline. If you're in this position, the idea of losing your own tradition won't seem as real.

But here's another problem with the position taken by the Persian woman. At the same time that she was making these arguments to me she was distributing a pamphlet called "No place like homelands". It was about the importance of Aborigines having their own homelands in which they could retain their own traditions and culture rather than having to assimilate into the mainstream.

Here are some quotes from the pamphlet:

"Living on homelands allows Aboriginal people to ... raise their families within their traditional culture ... Having a strong connection to culture, family and land allow Aboriginal Peoples to have more control over the lives... language and culture can be passed down to future generations."

The pamphlet also quotes an Aboriginal woman who complains that without a homeland Aborigines will "lose our identity".

So Amnesty wants different things for white Australians and Aboriginal Australians. Aborigines need a homeland, an identity and a traditional culture. But, according to Amnesty, white Australians don't need the same things. Apparently we are so different we can just accept life in a melting pot of different cultures, rather than preserving one of our own.

Minister wants to lecture Europe

A senior state government minister from here in Victoria wants to go to Europe to lecture governments there on multiculturalism. Nick Kotsiras believes that we have done it right with a policy of actively wanting people to retain their separate identities that stand apart from the others because this is a strength. This welcoming of standing apart is held to be the most effective way of integrating people by making them feel like they are not outsiders.

I think what they should do is perhaps follow Victoria's example and put in policies that we have to overcome the problems they're facing in the Netherlands. You can't force people to, you can't restrict people, you can't take away a person's identity without consequences.

After visiting Austria and Denmark he wrote:

A large number of people who I spoke to on the street felt that they were not wanted, that they did not belong to the country and they were seen as outsiders. There are no government programs like in Australia where we say we want your specific skills, cultures and religions that stand apart from others - because that is our strength

.
That's an interesting insight into how a senior minister looks at what is happening in Australia. What interests me is that he recognises the importance of communal identity to immigrants. The question is: if communal identity is important to an immigrant, won't it also be important to someone who belongs to the existing mainstream culture of a society?

In other words, if it is wrong to take away an immigrant's identity, isn't it also wrong to take away the identity of those who belong to the founding culture of a nation?

Nick Kotsiras's policy rests on an arbitrary distinction: identity matters for migrants, not for those who belong to the founding culture.

And there is a second problem with the Nick Kotsiras policy. As I wrote in a previous thread:

For a culture to reproduce itself it needs to have the "space together" to do so - something that multiculturalism doesn't allow for. In this sense it is an "anti-cultural" policy.
 

If you have a street in a Melbourne suburb where an Egyptian Muslim lives next to a Macedonian Orthodox who lives next to a Mexican Catholic who lives next to a Indian Hindu - and all of these people inhabit a society that is oriented to career and consumerism - then what kind of culture is going to reproduce itself? How are these cultures going to be able to "stand apart from others" even in the medium term?

If you are someone who believes that identity matters then mass immigration combined with mixing people randomly into big cities isn't the way to go - which is why Nick Kotsiras shouldn't be lecturing the Europeans about the wonders of the Victorian policy.

The alternative policy you sometimes hear in Victoria, the traditional right-liberal one, isn't any better. This policy prefers mass immigration combined with the idea that identity doesn't matter for anyone, not for Aborigines, founders or recent migrants. That's a radically individualistic view which tells individuals that they can just identify with themselves alone.

Where does that leave us? First, it's useful for a senior government minister to have admitted that identity does matter. We should file away the quote. Second, we can't rely on governments right now to do the right thing by us. If your identity and heritage is important to you, you have to organise independently of the government. No more "passive citizen who votes every few years". Instead, we need men who see themselves more actively as protectors and builders of the particular tradition they belong to.

Once that change of attitude takes place, those identities which want to continue on will have to concentrate forces somewhere (it could be in more than one location), and to build up the kinds of institutions through which cultures reproduce themselves (media, schools, arts, churches and so on).

If, like me, you belong to the founding culture, you're going to have to accept that much ground will be lost. It's no use being too paralysed by this fact, as the task is to dig in somewhere and to build. The further along we get, the more likely it is we will appeal to those who don't just want to witness decline but who want to contribute more positively to something that is growing into the future.

Catholic schools celebrate "A Proud Race"

Australian Aborigines are not only allowed to be a race, they are allowed to be a proud race:

Proud Race is the unique initiative from the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry Victoria capturing the attention of school communities across Australia. Since Proud Race was launched in June over 105 schools have signed up to take part in the program.

...The National 'Proud Race' campaign is initiated and supported by the Aboriginal Catholic Ministry for Victoria and sponsored by Reconciliation Victoria and Reconciliation Australia to develop the project.

But if we admit that an Aboriginal race exists, then doesn't that mean that other races exist too?

And if it's good for an Aborigine to be proud of his race, then isn't it good for others to be proud of their race as well?

What gets printed in the mainstream media

Race issues are once again in the news in Australia. Actor Jay Laga'aia, who is of Samoan descent (and is best known for his role in Star Wars), has accused Australian television of being racist after his character was axed from a popular soapie.

It's probably true that Australian TV has remained more Anglo than the general population. However, Laga'aia himself has done well out of the industry, having won roles on 20 or more shows.

But what really struck me were the comments on the story from readers of the Herald Sun here in Melbourne. A few of the comments attacking whites would not have been made about any other group of people:

Wolfie, Dubbo: As much as I can't stand his screen presence, he sort of has a point. Home and Away is pretty much heterosexual and white. That world doesn't exist anymore, thank goodness.

Really Wolfie? Substitute "black" for "white" and you'd land yourself in front of some sort of tribunal. And then there's this:

Svetlanababe: Whites on Australian TV should be portrayed as the drunken, tattooed bogans they so often are.

Again, would that get into a mainstream newspaper if it were aimed at any other group? The Herald Sun did, it is true, publish the other side of the debate:

M. Taylor: The average Australian is over all these racist claims being made by attention seekers. Laga'aia has done very well out of the Australian TV industry. He should be grateful instead of making such comments.

But even so it seems to be the case in Australia today that Anglos/whites are the one group who are "unprotected" in the sense that you can say in the mainstream media anything derogatory you like about them.

Bolt ruling dangerous and inconsistent

Australian journalist Andrew Bolt was found guilty this week of racial hatred. What was his offence? He wrote a column in the Herald Sun in which he questioned why light-skinned Aboriginal activists would identify with the minor part of their biological descent.

I have to say that I disagree with Bolt's position. The worst of Bolt's right-liberalism comes out on these issues. Bolt believes we should all assimilate on the basis that we are individuals only with no ethnic, racial or national identities. That's why he wrote of one mixed race Aboriginal activist that:

She could call herself English, Afghan, Aboriginal, Australian or just a take-me-as-I-am human being called Tara June Winch. Race irrelevant.

He even once opposed a tribe of Aborigines wanting the return of an historic artefact on the basis that we were forgetting:

The humanist idea that we are all individuals, free to make our own identities as equal members of the human race.

"Free to make our own identities" is just stock standard liberal autonomy theory: what Bolt thinks matters is that we are liberated from traditional identities in order to self-create our own.

In his own comment on the court case, Bolt has explained his right-liberal position in more detail. I find it very sad:

I am the son of Dutch parents who came to Australia the year before I was born.

For a long time, I have felt like an outsider here, not least because my family moved around so very often.

You know how it is when you feel you don't fit in. You look for other identities, other groups, to give you a sense of belonging, and perhaps some status.

So for a while I considered myself Dutch, and even took out a Dutch passport.

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Bolt's.

So I chose to refer to myself as Australian again, as one of the many who join in making this shared land our common home.

Yet even now I fret about how even nationality can divide us.

To be frank, I consider myself first of all an individual, and wish we could all deal with each other like that. No ethnicity. No nationality. No race. Certainly no divide that's a mere accident of birth.

So that's the background to the calamity that hit me yesterday.

That's why I believe we can choose and even renounce our ethnic identity, because I have done that myself.

This is a very radical position. He wants us all to renounce race, ethnicity and nation in favour of a self-chosen individual identity (one that is not "an accident of birth"). Why does he want us to do this? Because he himself had trouble fitting in as the child of immigrants (something I find a bit strange, as most Dutch migrants fit in readily to the mainstream Australian identity, being relatively closely related to it ethnically).

There is something narcissistic in ditching the larger and meaningful traditions you belong to in order to assert your own personal identity in their place. Is the temporary identity "Andrew Bolt" really something that matches in significance the larger Western heritage? What is he really connecting to in identifying with himself alone?

Having said all that, the decision against Bolt shows how dangerous these racial hatred laws are. I can't help but think the decision is part of a political climate in which the left-liberal establishment is concerned with the influence of the more right-liberal Murdoch press. The Greens in particular are pressing for the media to be licensed and for there to be an inquiry into press ownership in Australia.

The way the racial hatred law is framed means that it is very easy to run afoul of it. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act outlaws public acts that are likely ''to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate'' a person or group, if the acts are ''done because of the race, colour or ethnic origin'' of the person or group.

It's not that difficult to say something that might offend or insult someone. In fact, Anglo-Australians could make a good case that most of the school curricula in Australia contravenes Section 18C. To reinforce this point, consider this part of the official judgement against Andrew Bolt:

People should be free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying.

Can we really say that any white person is free to fully identify with their race without fear of public disdain or loss of esteem for so identifying? Modern liberal societies are set up to discourage white people from identifying positively with their own race and tradition. More accurately, they are set up to persuade white people to identify against their own race and tradition. So Section 18C if applied consistently would require a massive upheaval within liberal society.

Note too that the judge insists, as a matter of law, that people should be fully free to identify with their race. And yet if a white person were to talk about his race to a liberal he would get the scoffing reply that race doesn't exist. So we have a situation in which young liberals are brought up to believe that their own race doesn't even exist, whilst the law insists that people should be free to fully identify with their race. Go figure.

Why do Pandorans get to be traditionalists?

The blockbuster film Avatar has just been released. It's about a group of humans who wish to mine the resources of the planet Pandora. The humans are portrayed as white, industrial society imperialists and the Pandorans as pre-industrial, close to nature indigenes. One of the whites is rescued by a Pandoran woman, taken up by the tribe and learns to love their traditional ways. He becomes the hero of the film by turning against his own race and leading the fight of the natives to preserve their existence.

The blogger Fjordman is not impressed:

Avatar has to be one of the most anti-Western and especially anti-white Hollywood movies I have seen in a long time.

The hero is the U.S. Marine Jake Sully who has been sent to the planet-like moon Pandora because humans desire the mineral resources found of Pandora, which is inhabited by a race of tall, blue-skinned aliens, the Na’vi. They have a non-industrial civilization technologically inferior to ours but apparently spiritually richer and in perfect ecological harmony with the natural environment. The hero predictably falls in love with the native culture and connects with a native girl ...

Basically, the white characters are portrayed as brutal, greedy and insensitive beasts who rape the environment and destroy other cultures with a smile in the search for profit. The main antagonist is the white Colonel Quaritch, a brute who hardly possesses a single positive character trait. The final climax of the movie is when he screams “How does it feel to betray your race?” to the protagonist while he is trying to murder him.

Although a few of the white characters such as Jake Sully are portrayed in a more redeeming light this is only because they totally reject their own civilization and join the other team in the fight. In other words: the only good whites are the ones who utterly turn their backs on their own destructive and evil culture. As reviewer Armond White put it, “Avatar is the corniest movie ever made about the white man’s need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.”

Fjordman isn't alone in taking the film this way. Another reviewer writes,

Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy ... it's undeniable that the film ... is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

If we think of Avatar and its ilk as white fantasies about race, what kinds of patterns do we see emerging in these fantasies?

In both Avatar and District 9, humans are the cause of alien oppression and distress. Then, a white man who was one of the oppressors switches sides at the last minute, assimilating into the alien culture and becoming its savior ...

These are movies about white guilt. Our main white characters realize that they are complicit in a system which is destroying aliens, AKA people of color - their cultures, their habitats, and their populations. The whites realize this when they begin to assimilate into the "alien" cultures and see things from a new perspective. To purge their overwhelming sense of guilt, they switch sides, become "race traitors," and fight against their old comrades. But then they go beyond assimilation and become leaders of the people they once oppressed. This is the essence of the white guilt fantasy, laid bare ...

There are two things that have to be explained about all this. The first is why white liberals would fantasise about being traitors to their own race. The second is why liberal moderns, who think of themselves as progressives, would support the traditionalism of non-white societies.

It can seem very confusing. In the film the native Pandorans are portrayed in the most positive terms for having "a direct line to their ancestors". You would think, then, that the whites in the film would be encouraged to have a strong sense of ancestry and ancestral loyalty. But they don't. Quite the opposite - their path to redemption is to become race traitors.

So why do liberal moderns have a fantasy of fighting against their own race? I put forward part of an explanation just a few weeks ago. I'd noticed that Australian men were being told that domestic violence was a product of a patriarchal male culture. In other words, men committed violence against women in order to perpetuate their own unjust privilege in society.

I cautioned men against accepting this idea because of what it logically entailed. Once a man accepts that masculinity and masculine culture are an oppressive source of privilege and injustice, then he loses moral status and authority in society. This in itself is bad enough, but worse follows. What the domestic violence campaigners then tell men is that they can redeem themselves, and restore their moral status and authority, by breaking ranks with other men and acting against the masculine culture. They are redeemed, not only by forfeiting their own masculine self-identity, but by identifying in opposition to the masculine in society.

And a similar logic applies when it comes to race. Once a white person accepts the idea that whites are privileged at the expense of the non-white other, then there is a loss which will be hard for the most conscientious and politically aware to bear. Such people will want to speak with moral authority in society, but how can they as white oppressors? The path to redemption is, again, to break ranks and to identify with the non-white other in opposition to other unenlightened whites.

This helps to explain why some liberal whites are so obsessed with an anti-white/pro-other agenda.  It comes to express their self-concept and identity. It lies at the heart of how they see themselves and the ground on which they stand.

But why do white liberals praise what is traditional and non-liberal in native societies? Why are the Pandorans allowed to express a connection to ancestry and to defend their own culture but not whites?

If I understand Lawrence Auster correctly, a possible answer is as follows. There are white liberals, white non-liberals and non-white non-liberals. All three are necessary for the liberal script to play out in society. White liberals see themselves as morally virtuous because, in contrast to white non-liberals, they are open and accepting of the non-white other. But this then requires the non-whites to remain something "other" to the white liberal. What could be more "other" to the white liberal than non-white traditionalists?

In other words, the white liberal is practising his "virtue" by identifying with non-Western traditionalists. He is being a liberal in the very act of romanticising what is traditional and non-liberal.

Here's something else to consider. Liberals want equality and yet there appears to be inequality of power and wealth between different races and cultures. How can this be explained?

There are left liberals who believe that such inequality came about when one group of people, "whites", invented race and racism as an excuse to dominate and exploit other groups of people. Therefore whites are exceptional - exceptionally bad, that is. All that's necessary to restore equality is to attack white privilege and power.

If you believe this, then you'll get upset with any expression of white group identity. Even the most harmless expressions of such identity will be condemned as an attempt to defend "supremacy". But the identity of other groups won't matter so much, since they aren't seen as being tied to power, privilege and inequality. In fact, they might even be tied to resistance to whites and therefore be seen as progressive.

This is another reason for whites being treated differently to others and not being allowed to express a communal identity, whilst the identity of other groups gets a free pass.

Or there's the issue of dissent. There are left-liberals who see themselves as dissenters to the establishment (even though they are themselves a significant part of the establishment). But how do you demonstrate your dissent? If you think the establishment is a conservative bulwark against reform, then you can express your dissent in a predictable way - by advocating for progressive reform.

But what if you see the establishment as a soulless, materialistic, powerful Western industrial complex squashing the small, indigenous tribes in its path? Then perhaps you will express your dissent by identifying against the Western power complex in favour of the disappearing underdog tribes with their ancient wisdoms.

You might even then have a politically legitimate way to identify with things that you really do feel are lacking in more atomised modern liberal societies. You might even sound at times like a bit of a traditionalist - just not for the mainstream Western culture which retains its negative status as powerfully oppressive and destructive.

More Elshtain - Sartre

Still reading Jean Bethke Elshtain's book Sovereignty. It's a "big picture" work, so there is only a brief sketching out of the territory she covers. I was interested in her criticism of Jean Paul Sartre:

Sartre's atomistic sovereign self could not be clearer: we are isolated monads confronting an external social and natural world set off against and in opposition to our free projects. The natural state of human affairs, a la Hobbes, is a war of all against all - a bleak reiteration of an a priori and fundamental human asociality. There are no ties binding the individual to the past or holding him in the present. (p.185)

Sartre is clearly a modern. He holds to the following ideas that I criticise so often at this site:

• an atomised self
• an asocial human nature
• a rejection of a given nature (an "external social and natural world") as a predetermined and therefore limiting imposition on the autonomous individual
  

Simone de Beauvoir followed Sartre in this line of thought, applying it to the lives of women. If the idea is that we should transcend the "muck" of nature, and be active, transforming, rebelling, appropriating, possessing agents, then the traditional role of women will seem inferior. Not surprisingly, Simone de Beauvoir thought that women should aim to throw off the "tyranny" of biology.

But note in particular this quote:

Human civilisation is male; woman is "the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute - she is the Other".

The logic would seem to be that you get equality by inviting those who have been "othered" as natural, inessential objects into the entity that is active, transforming and appropriating. The aim is for Woman to not be "othered" as a passive and natural entity, but to become part of the active, transforming Man entity.

I'm just throwing out an idea here, but if whites were identified at this time as the transforming civilisational force, then equality would mean inviting "the Other" to become part of this entity. Perhaps this is one possible reason for the exceptionalism applied to white societies - the exceptionalism being that white societies are expected to be open to the Other, with the openness of non-white societies being a matter of indifference.

She loves you not

What do left-wing journalists think of you? Catherine Deveny, columnist for the Melbourne Age, has a seething contempt for her co-nationals. She's on holiday at the moment, enjoying the culture and the countryside in Tuscany. This gives her the opportunity to stick the boot into her fellow Australians:

STREWTH! Will someone get me out of here? I'm being raped by intoxicating beauty, inconceivable tranquillity, warm hospitality and a depth of cultural and historical immersion ...

The thing is, yes, I suppose staying in a rustic 250-year-old villa in Tuscany bathed in soft light, kissed by gentle sun and grazing on heavenly food would be OK if you were a masochist constantly chasing a new level of pain. Tuscany? What a hole! I long for the bliss of watching families with skin the colour of phlegm huddled around food-court tables groaning under the weight of deep-fried food, drinking Coke out of buckets, news of gangland scrag fights and the dulcet tones of talkback callers alerting all to their inflated sense of self-importance by beginning their 15 seconds of fame with "I don't normally agree with you, Derryn, but in this case you're spot on …".

Right then. Catherine sees us as ugly, spit coloured, uncultured bogans.

No doubt Catherine believes that she is establishing her elite status - that she is separating herself from the masses - by taking this attitude. But she's wrong. Anyone can claim status this way. There's nothing special or distinctive about it; it's not linked to talent, achievement or character.

In fact, someone who really was elite probably wouldn't harbour such thoughts. They wouldn't think with the same level of emotional disturbance as Catherine Deveny. They would be more likely to consider themselves a leader within their own community, advancing their own culture in some way, rather than launching diatribes against it.

There's something else that Catherine gives away in her article. In a way, she decides in favour of the conservative and the traditional. She thinks it blissful to be immersed in the culture and history of a traditional monoculture. She shows herself to prefer, in practice, a conservative way of life.

But she would never admit this in her own country. In Australia she would furiously denounce a traditional, historic way of life as being a boring monoculture. No doubt she has a left-liberal counterpart in Italy, a Caterina di Veni, who is doing exactly that, railing against her own Italian tradition as being boring, or not sufficiently left-wing, or discriminatory or parochial.

We do not have to follow the way of Catherine Deveny. You can be a literary person and identify with the best parts of your own tradition. It's interesting, for instance, to compare Catherine Deveny's views with those of C.J. Dennis. In the 1930s, Dennis wrote a poem Green Walls in which he wrote appreciatively of the sunlit Australian countryside and of his own strong and suntanned (not phlegm coloured!) countrymen:

I love all gum-trees well. But, best of all,
I love the tough old warriors that tower
About these lawns, to make a great green wall
And guard, like sentries, this exotic bower
Of shrub and fern and flower.
These are my land's own sons, lean, straight and tall,
Where crimson parrots and grey gang-gangs call
Thro' many a sunlit hour.


My friends, these grave old veterans, scarred and stem,
Changeless throughout the changing seasons they.
But at their knees their tall sons lift and yearn -
Slim spars and saplings - prone to sport and sway
Like carefree boys at play;
Waxing in beauty when their young locks turn
To crimson, and, like beaconfires burn
To deck Spring's holiday.


I think of Anzacs when the dusk comes down
Upon the gums - of Anzacs tough and tall.
Guarding this gateway, Diggers strong and brown.
And when, thro' Winter's thunderings, sounds their call,
Like Anzacs, too, they fall ...
Their ranks grow thin upon the hill's high crown:
My sentinels! But, where those ramparts frown,
Their stout sons mend the wall.

Who does Catherine Deveny want to purge?

Catherine Deveny is impatient. There are too many middle-aged, middle-class white men holding responsible positions in the workforce for her liking. They're not easy to get rid of. Catherine doesn't want to wait for them to fade away - she wants them culled. They're standing in the way of change.

That's the gist of a recent column Catherine Deveny penned for the Melbourne Age. Here are some choice extracts:

... there are too many rich, middle-aged, middle-class white men in suits running the place. They are the ones who got us into this financial and economic mess. An impenetrable wall of them is not the answer to getting us out of it ...

We're not saying Ians should be exterminated. God knows we need them. Who else would file the tax returns, perform hip replacements and keep Harley Davidson in business? We're just saying it wouldn't hurt to cull a few. My suggestion is to organise a program to reduce the number of Ians by 70% ...

Even more terrifying than the disproportionate number of Ians who have always held the power is the mindless chant of "It's just the way it is" when you mention it. This may be true, but it doesn't mean that ... it's not time to subvert the dominant paradigm ...

The Ians are not taking the involuntary redundancies ... The Ians are too expensive to sack ... Many being strapped to the rocket of power at the moment are Ians who've been waiting patiently in line ... Blokes being rewarded for playing the game by the rules ... They're out of touch. They're not the answer ...

The Ians set up the power structure and it's tricky for anyone else to get in without knowing the password, the secret handshake and the magic dance. Apparently you had to have your name down before you were born.

It's interesting to consider the way Deveny crafts this piece. She's trying to tell an audience of "Ians" - white male professionals - that they are redundant, holding back progress and should be shunted aside. She humanises the message somewhat by throwing in some humourous quips. Written any more bluntly and the message would come across as more obviously vicious.

Note too the way that Deveny slips in the idea that white Australian men are responsible for the world financial crisis. She doesn't debate the idea or make any arguments for it. She simply assumes it as a given.

Yet it's a ridiculous claim. The crisis began in America at a time when the Australian economy was strong. The origin of the crisis was a misguided egalitarianism promoted not by the average white collar worker but by those in the political class who demanded that banks equalise mortgages given to ethnic minorities in the US, even if this meant approving loans to those unable to repay them.

Deveny also simply assumes that she is a deprived outsider, locked out of a power structure dominated by white men. Again, we are supposed to simply assume this to be true.

It's difficult, though, to see Deveny as a marginalised, excluded outsider. She has a cushy, influential job, writing for a major newspaper with an audience of hundreds of thousands. How many men really have a greater chance to influence society than she does?

She wants us to think of her as the outsider, the dissenter, the maverick, the creative innovator. In reality she is yet another member of the left-liberal political establishment, which has fashioned the course of Western societies for generations now. She is an orthodox insider offering us the same politics and the same ideas which have dominated the West for decades.

There's craftiness too in her portrayal of white men. On the one hand, she emphasises the idea that white men have power that others lack. She doesn't want to give the impression, though, that this makes white men strong or capable. No, white men are old, stale, burnt out, and incompetent. White men are "Ians" - all too ordinary and comfortable. Pretenders in cardigans.

It's an odd picture; white men are "terrifying" in their power but at the same time to be ridiculed as bumbling suburban uncle types. We are invited to smugly look down on white men even as we complain about their "impenetrable" power.

Which raises an important question. Why would any self-respecting white man go along with the politics of the left? Why put up with this kind of treatment?

Lawrence Auster made a similar point in a column posted yesterday. He observed that the real development of liberalism is not toward a race neutral society, but toward the disempowerment and denigration of whites. In other words, if you're white then you're not going to be treated neutrally:

Liberalism is not a journey from a historically white society to a society in which race neutrality is the guiding principle. It is a journey from a historically white society to a society in which the advance of nonwhites as nonwhites—along with its corollary, the disempowerment and denigration of whites as whites—is the guiding principle. And if those are the rules of the game, why should any self-respecting, non-suicidal white person play?

Responding to Greer's rage

Germaine Greer has published an essay, On Rage, in which she blames white men for the domestic violence in Aboriginal communities.

The essay is yet another example of an ethnic double standard. Greer is a radical liberal in her attitude to white Australian society, but a traditionalist when it comes to Aborigines.

For instance, Greer complains that the effect of white society on Aborigines has been to set men and women against each other and to undermine the traditional male role, thereby marginalising Aboriginal men within the family. This, she argues, has fostered the rage of Aboriginal men which then leads to domestic violence.

Greer quotes an Aboriginal woman who laments that,

Our communities are like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other. (p.56)

Greer also voices disapproval of the effects of government welfare in increasing the autonomy of Aboriginal women to the detriment of the male role within the family:

The fact that government welfare payments are often made to women ... means that more and more women can live independently of men, and are doing so.

... When hunter-gatherer societies begin to break down, it is invariably the gatherers, the women, who combine to hold them together, but in doing so they further marginalise their menfolk, including their own sons. (pp.75,76)

To give you some idea of how Greer treats the Aboriginal family and the male role within it, here is part of her discussion of the issue:

According to anthropologists RM and CH Berndt, traditionally "the most cherished possessions of men were women, children and their sacred heritage," in that order ... The Aboriginal man's wife was not simply a woman he met by chance and fancied, but a kinswoman ... it is the level of avoidance which signifies just how fundamental, how absolutely shattering this loss and humiliation must be. (pp.56,57)

It's curious to find a Western feminist writing in this vein. After all, Greer led a movement to achieve in her own society the very things she is so dismayed occurred in Aboriginal society.

Take the complaint that Aboriginal societies have been left "like a piece of broken string with women on one side and men on the other".

This view of society, in which men and women are set against each other, is built into the feminist theory championed by Greer. In feminist patriarchy theory, men are believed to have organised a power structure in society in order to protect an unearned privilege gained at the expense of oppressed women.

In this world view, the traditional male role within the family is a source of oppression to be overthrown; men are motivated by a desire to assert power over women; women must therefore compete with men for money, power and status.

Millions of Western girls have been brought up to follow this world view, almost like a religion.

The more radical feminists even go so far as to assume that men, by having organised society to oppress women, must be assumed to hate women. Greer herself, in her influential book The Female Eunuch, goes to great lengths to describe male hatred of women.

Nor has Greer overcome this negative view of men. As I'll describe a little later, Greer is all too ready to vilify white men in her essay on rage - the same essay in which she laments the setting apart of Aboriginal men and women.

It's a similar story when it comes to the issue of autonomy. Greer is terribly concerned that Aboriginal men have been emasculated and marginalised by the decline in their provider role (and in their leadership role); this may have made Aboriginal women more independent, but to the overall loss of cohesiveness of Aboriginal communities.

Yet it is exactly a radical individual autonomy which has been most keenly sought by Western feminists, regardless of the larger consequences to society.

There is another aspect to Greer's ethnic double standard. Greer is a traditionalist in wanting Aborigines to survive as a people, as an ethny. For example, when she discusses the problem of domestic violence in Aboriginal communities, she is concerned not with issues of patriarchy or gender equity, but with the survival of Aborigines as a race:

What is now undeniable is that violence towards women and children across the same spectrum has reached the level of race suicide. (p.91)

When Greer writes about Aborigines, traditional attachments are held to matter. She tells us that Aborigines have lost "what makes any human life worth living". What does she include in this category? Well, she holds that Aborigines have lost "all the important things" including "their families, their social networks, their culture, their religion, their languages and their self-esteem". Furthermore, Aborigines, instead of living in their own tribes, have been forced to amalgamate and live in "polyglot assemblages" (pp.30, 31).

So for Greer it is a terrible fate for Aborigines to live in "polyglot assemblages" as this destroys "what makes any human life worth living". Yet isn't "polyglot assemblage" just another term for "diversity". Is Greer willing to apply her principle to Westerners, just as she does for Aborigines?

I suspect not, as Greer vilifies whites frequently throughout her essay. She claims that Judy Atkinson "puts it as delicately as she can" when she writes of "marauding white males" (p.58); she uses terms like "Australian racists"; she claims that the rape of Aboriginal children by white men "prevailed on a massive scale across the continent, wherever the white man penetrated, in the words of Strehlow's superior, "all the time"" (pp.49-51); she writes too that "From the beginning of white contact in the 1780s ... the white man has considered Aboriginal women his for the taking" (pp. 39-40).

At the end of the essay, the derogatory treatment of whites hits a low point: she uses the term "Whitey" in an openly hostile way:

People now talk of establishing an annual sorry day, as if it would do Whitey good to remind himself how magnanimous he was on 13 February 2008. More useful would be an annual angry day, when Whitey would get reminded of just what he has done for Australia. (pp.97-98)

Little concern here for the "self-esteem" of her own race, despite having previously described it as one of the qualities "that makes any human life worth living".

What is happening here with Germaine Greer? The key thing is that Greer cares about Aboriginal society. She identifies with it and wants it to survive as a distinct entity. Therefore she does not apply liberal concepts to it. She takes instead a traditionalist view.

It's important to understand this, so I'll rephrase it. Here we have a leading figure of left-liberalism, who has expressed on many occasions her alienation from her own tradition and her concern for Aboriginal society. It is no coincidence that she pushes liberalism on her own tradition but refrains from doing so when it comes to Aboriginal society. She wishes to conserve Aboriginal society and therefore takes a conservative, rather than a liberal, stance toward it.

So the question then is why she cares for the survival of Aboriginal society but not her own. I can only speculate as to the reasons why.

Perhaps it has to do with a certain understanding of equality widespread on the left. If you assume that our status as humans depends on our autonomy (our power to enact our will), then an imbalance of power means that some people are human at the expense of others. Therefore, you have to either accept that some people aren't fully human (not a palatable option) or else claim that the inequality in the balance of power is the result of an unjust, unnatural, "racist" organisation of society. The group doing the oppression then loses its legitimacy - its moral status.

As whites were the dominant group for a period of time, it's easy for the left to regard them as the illegitimate, oppressive party - and to prefer to identify instead with a non-dominant minority.

Greer has, in fact, throughout her life identified with an ethnic minority. As a young woman she chose to believe that she was Jewish, despite little evidence of Jewish ancestry. More recently she has sought an Aboriginal identity; in one essay (Whitefella Jump Up, 2003) she wrote of Australians declaring themselves Aboriginal "as if by an act of transubstantiation".

In her essay on rage she also emphasises the powerlessness of Aborigines ("utterly powerless"), whereas white society is represented by "racist authorities". It fits the framework of a majority organised illegitimately around the oppression of a powerless minority.

The framework itself deserves to be criticised: it assumes that human equality is contingent and is to be measured by an autonomous power to enact our will; it makes any majority tradition illegitimate; and it falsely assumes that a majority tradition is organised primarily as an act of oppressive dominance over others.

The framework also distorts Greer's understanding of the real situation. She seems to believe that whites are so powerful that their existence can be assumed to be perfectly secure, whereas Aborigines are so powerless they are on the brink.

If anything, the position of Aborigines is advancing, whilst that of whites is declining. Aborigines are becoming more numerous; there is an increasing amount of land set aside permanently for their own use; they are free to celebrate their own existence and there are considerable government funds at their disposable to organise themselves as a community.

In contrast, whites have declining birth rates; are being relegated to minority status throughout the West by immigration; and do not have the same freedom to celebrate their own existence.

That Greer doesn't see this suggests to me that she is still working through the theory I described above. The distance of this theory from reality, and the double standard it encourages in Greer's own writing, are reasons for younger Australians to question the politics of an older generation of left-liberals.

Whiteness theorists hit back!

I've had a response to my recent series of articles on whiteness studies.

The body representing whiteness theorists, the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association (ACRAWSA), has a forum where the articles are being discussed.

Whiteness studies, you might recall, is based on the theory that the white race doesn't really exist, but was socially constructed as a means to exploit indigenous peoples.

I criticised the theory for its inconsistencies. However, if you read the three comments posted on the ACRAWSA forum so far, none of my specific criticisms are responded to. Instead, the line taken is that my criticism of whiteness studies only proves that I am desperate to avoid recognising my own "complicity": the unearned privilege I accrue from being fictitiously white.

According to whiteness theory, all whites are guilty of complicity. In her comments on the forum, Robinder Kaur, a Sikh woman working (studying?) at York University, tells us that for whites:

there is no "safe space," no haven of guiltlessness to retreat to.

Following this is a comment by an Australian woman, Veronica Coen. She tells us her own personal story of recognising her "complicity": before undertaking an Aboriginal Studies elective she thought herself to be "thoroughly non-racist". Then she discovered that her pioneering family had used Aboriginal labour on their cattle station and she,

began to recognise that my privilege as an educated middle-class white woman was directly attributed to my ancestor's theft of Indigenous land and their exploitation.

She then,

took a frightening journey into Australia's violent history ... The path was at times very distressing. My study journal was often wrinkled with tears

Which leads her to suppose that in resisting whiteness theory I too am struggling with complicity:

Clearly Mark is experiencing discomfort with the contentions about his white privilege.

Which is all a bit of a surprise to me. I'm not a teary kind of person, so I wouldn't feel "distressed" even if I accepted that "complicity" was legitimate. As it happens, though, I think there are good reasons to reject the notion of complicity outright.

Why? One reason is that complicity depends on the idea that the wealth and status of whites was taken at the expense of indigenous peoples. This doesn't seem likely. Aboriginal labour in Australia was only a very minor part of the economy; it was tiny, for instance, in comparison to white convict labour.

One of the most prominent Aboriginal leaders today, Noel Pearson, explicitly rejects the idea that the problems in Aboriginal communities are a result of loss of land or the exploitation of Aboriginal labour:

It seemed to me that the problems are pretty similar between communities that have never been dispossessed of their land - like in the western Cape York peninsula - and those that had been positively uprooted. It wasn't about poverty, and it wasn't about land, and it wasn't about the degree of trauma experienced in history.

Pearson blames a misguided transfer of welfare money into Aboriginal communities for the current level of dysfunction, and describes in comparison the relatively intact nature of the Aboriginal community he grew up in:

Everybody in Hope Vale of my generation or older grew up in a family, or household, where parents worked hard, the kids were looked after. They were bequeathed a real privilege.

And Pearson is exactly right to identify these social norms as a real privilege - something the whiteness theorists don't seem to understand.

Let me put it this way. The whiteness theorists want me to think of myself as enjoying unearned privileges. Yet my daily reality is one of hard work, both at my workplace and in my role as a husband and father. This is what adult men have to adapt to, and it's much easier to succeed in this if you have role models in the men around you.

This is the "privilege" I recognise: that the men in my family have a tradition of hard work, of commitment to family and financial responsibility. But this is not a "privilege" which inspires guilt or tears, but rather pride and admiration.

I admire my grandfather who started out laying railway lines, who pioneered a country town, and who worked two jobs up to his retirement to support a modest lifestyle for his family. I admire my father who has shown tremendous strength and stamina in maintaining long hours of work in a 45 year career.

And what else is a true privilege? Think of what Aborigines want. They want to maintain a sense of ancestral connection to the land and their culture. They want to enjoy a pride in their identity. They want a confidence in their future as a people.

Am I enjoying an "unearned privilege" as a white in such matters? Clearly the answer is no. Whiteness studies itself is part of a process in which such privileges are made illegitimate for whites. How can we enjoy such privileges when whiteness itself is treated as a fictitious category and when all whites are held to be inescapably complicit in an evil history of exploitation?

Which brings me to my final point. The attitude encouraged by whiteness studies is an untrue expression of our natures. It leaves an individual like Veronica Coen feeling hostile and guilty toward her ancestry.

Compare this to the case of Robinder Kaur, who wrote the comment on the ACRAWSA forum about whites lacking any haven of guiltlessness.

She is of Sikh ancestry. As it happens, there is actually a magazine called Kaurs edited by a woman called Robinder Kaur (I don't think they're the same person). This magazine celebrates the identity of Sikh women along the following lines:

The magazine will encourage the Sikh woman to rediscover herself in the light of the glorious heritage and current meritorious achievements of the Sikh community.

And how does the magazine think that people get ahead? According to the editor life is full of challenges, which leads to this advice:

... how to overcome these challenges and emerge as a winner? Hard work, confidence, dedication and, of course, the blessings of the Almighty are a sure recipe for success.

So we have one Robinder Kaur telling whites that they should feel guilty about their heritage and that their success is not due to their own hard work but to exploitation; whilst the other Robinder Kaur tells us that Sikhs should enjoy their glorious heritage and attribute success to their hard work and dedication.

Are we going to fall for the double standard? Will we accept the denatured view for ourselves, whilst others adopt a more positive, supportive stance?

I hope that most of us reject whiteness theory in favour of the more positive, life-affirming option.

Pale, male & stale?

In yesterday's Business Age there was a report on the need to feminise the Australian workplace. According to Stephen Bevan, director of the British based group The Work Foundation:

If employers here think they need what I call pale, male and stale employees, they're going to be disappointed.

It's interesting that Stephen Bevan should refer in such a negative way to older, white, male workers. First, most of the employers he is appealing to are themselves going to fit within this category. Is he hoping that they won't twig to the fact that in attacking the older, white, male category of their workforce that he is spitting in their eye as well?

Second, I note that The Work Foundation has on its website the following statement:

With our emphasis on promoting respect and dignity within every organisation as a means of boosting performance, The Work Foundation is way ahead of the game on people management.

Respect and dignity? Not for everyone it seems.

Third, for a case study in grand hypocrisy take a look at the directors of The Work Foundation. Every single one "pale" and "stale" and all but one "male" as well. Maybe they should be the first to step aside for the younger, female, multi-ethnic workforce they are so keen to promote (for other people, just not for themselves).

Whiteness studies III - Is it vilification?

There is one last contradiction within whiteness studies I'd like to raise.

Whiteness theorists think of themselves as being at the cutting edge of anti-racism. Yet it is they who are arguably the worst perpetrators of racial vilification.

There are three grounds on which I base this claim. First, whiteness theorists deny the real existence of a white race; second, they wish to put an end to the existence of whatever white identity does exist: and third, they give whites an inescapably inferior moral status to other groups.

(It might be argued against the first point that whiteness theorists deny the real existence of all races. However, as we've seen they allow some other groups a real existence as "indigenes", and anyway they're only concerned at deconstructing whiteness - they don't target other races.)

Imagine if, say, black Americans were the target of such an academic theory. Imagine if young black students were forced to enrol in university courses in which they were told that the existence of their race was a fiction, that the "moral" thing was to be a traitor to their own race and to seek the abolition of black identity, and that, no matter what they did, they would always be morally inferior to other groups.

There would be a tremendous uproar if black students were forced to undergo such indoctrination. Yet this is what is happening to white students in Australia and overseas.

For instance, those studying to be teachers at Perth's Murdoch University have had to undertake courses taught by whiteness theorist Nado Aveling. She has written of her students:

I know that some of them only enrol in "Aboriginal and Multicultural Education" because it is a mandatory course. These students are apt to comment along the following lines:

I would never have done this course if I wasn't forced to and find it offensive that I need to pay for the privilege.

I felt I was forced to take on her views, otherwise I would not get anywhere with my marks.

Anti-racist content needs to be changed to ensure that white students are not affronted.

Nado Aveling then notes that such responses are not peculiar to her students. She quotes another whiteness theorist, Cochran-Smith, who has observed that:

responses are often strongly emotional, and resistance, misunderstanding, frustration, anger, and feelings of inefficacy may be the outcomes.

There are white students, in other words, who do react strongly at being racially vilified in whiteness studies courses.

Finally, if you're still not convinced let me introduce you to Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard academic. The kind of ideas found it whiteness studies have unleashed in Dr Ignatiev a most forthright vilification of whites. Here are some of his thoughts on the matter:

"The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race."

"The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition."

"we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as "the white race" is destroyed -- not "deconstructed" but destroyed."

"treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"

As I pointed out earlier, whiteness studies is based on a number of contradictions, the chief of which is that it claims to be "anti-racist", whilst clearly encouraging a most radical racial vilification of whites.

Whiteness studies II: real indigenes vs fictitious whites

Whiteness studies is worth a part two. By drawing out the theory a little more, you get a better sense of what is really involved in this field of studies.

Indigenous Sovereignty

The basic claim of whiteness studies is that race is a social construct, rather than a biological reality, formed to allow some people to enjoy an unearned privilege at the expense of the oppressed other.

But who is this oppressed other? According to Australian whiteness theorists it is the Aborigines. This leads these theorists to talk a lot about "indigenous sovereignty".

Damien Riggs, for instance, states that "indigenous sovereignty is the ground on which we stand", whilst the whiteness studies association has as its first aim to "respect the existence of and continuing rights deriving from Indigenous sovereignties in Australia and elsewhere".

But this creates some logical tensions within whiteness theory. Just as it's difficult to assert that whites don't exist as a race but are a racial power group, so too is it awkward to claim that Aborigines don't exist as a race but are nonetheless a real entity, even to the point of being 'sovereign' over other groups.

Whiteness theorists, in other words, are assuming Aborigines to have some real, essential existence as a distinct group, whilst at the same time treating the existence of whites as a kind of fiction to be socially deconstructed.

Furthermore, it's difficult to set up an opposition between really existing indigenous peoples and fictitious whites, given that it is whites who are the indigenes in Europe.

Do European whites have a real sovereign existence, given that they are the indigenes? I would bet anything that whiteness theorists would wish to argue no, but this is the implication of connecting indigeneity and sovereignty.

Complicity

Another feature of whiteness studies is the idea of complicity.

According to this idea all whites, even the whiteness theorists themselves, remain part of the oppressor group. There is no way to separate oneself from this group, as all whites benefit from unearned privilege and are trapped unconsciously within white ways of knowing the world.

In his essay, Riggs frequently turns to the idea of complicity, as when he reports that:

all non-indigenous people are implicated in practices of oppression, and that the task is to develop ways of exploring this complicity, rather than denying our location within it.

Why stress the idea of complicity? It seems to me that whiteness theorists are trying to close any loopholes by which whites might escape "reflexivity": a discomforting confrontation with their own oppressive privilege.

The noose is set very tight. Riggs quotes another whiteness theorist, Janne Haggis, to the effect that anti-racists are just as complicit as racists:

I contend, we (the social analyst) still construct in the anti-racist position, a moral space of no more or less complicity.

Nor are whites who give up power and privilege any less complicit. Again, Riggs quotes a colleague, Fiona Probyn, who asserts that:

claims to "giving up power" only make sense in relation to having the ability to choose to do so - they only reassert white dominance.

Nor are whites who choose to identify with Aborigines off the hook. Riggs returns to Jane Haggis who informs us that the task for the 'traitorous' sociologist of whiteness (her description) is, in part, that of:

refusing the seductions of slipping into indigeneity to avoid the discomforts of being within whiteness.

So there you are. There are to be no possible ways of avoiding the "discomforts" of whiteness.

Once again, though, there are contradictions in the theory. The idea of complicity is supposed to force whites into reflexivity. It does this, but only at the cost of what whiteness studies was supposed to achieve in the first place.

Liberal moderns treat race as a social construct because they don't like the idea that individuals might be influenced in important ways by a fixed, unchosen category like biological race.

Whiteness studies is part of this liberal effort to deconstruct the concept of biological race as a fixed category. The idea of complicity, though, lets fixed categories return with a vengeance.

According to whiteness theorists, our existence is thoroughly racialised and there is no possible way to escape from our racialised category. Our position is fixed.

So much for the "multiple fluid identities" usually touted by liberal moderns!

There is one final point to be made. The idea of complicity is supposed to leave all whites stuck in a position of discomfort. Our whiteness is supposed to cling to us as a trouble.

But what healthy minded person would accept such a theory? Why would anyone willingly take on a negative self-identity? Who would willingly make themselves subservient to others in their moral status?

We are being asked to share a kind of psychological perversity. And all for the sake of a political theory which struggles to be logically coherent.

(I'll finish here, but return in a later post to look at the most unpleasant aspect of whiteness studies.)

Why stunning?

Time magazine reports on an academic survey on race as follows:

The survey is packed with fascinating findings, some surprising (a stunning proportion of whites - 77% - say their race has a distinct culture which should be preserved).

Why should we be surprised? Isn't it normal for people to feel an affinity with their own particular tradition?

The answer, as this survey demonstrates, is yes but we are supposed to reply no for political purposes.

Whites aren't supposed to identify with their own ethnic tradition as we are supposed to behave according to liberal political principles. According to these principles we are human because we can self-determine who we are. This means that important forms of self-identity which we can't determine for ourselves, like race and ethnicity, are seen negatively as oppressive, backward impediments to be overthrown.

Furthermore, to identify positively with your own particular communal tradition is thought to impose a restriction on the ability of "the other" to choose without limitation: it is frowned on as a "discrimination" in which one will gets preferential treatment denied to another.

Whites generally get the drift of such politics and pay lip-service to them, but nonetheless continue to have a normal, healthy affinity with their own communal tradition.

It would be better, of course, if more of us learnt to challenge the political assumptions which force this affinity underground. The liberal principles which force this evasion are, after all, ultimately arbitrary: there is no compelling reason to reject a form of self-identity simply because it is inherited rather than self-determined.

Nor is it unfair if the existence of a communal tradition requires some (minor) degree of discrimination if everyone is able to enjoy the benefits of a communal life of their own. Families, after all, impose a similar form of "discrimination" in which we give preferential treatment to some over others; a sound policy is not to therefore condemn families for requiring such discrimination, but to ensure that as many individuals as possible get the benefits of a supportive family life of their own.

Insider recounts betrayal

What do US senators really think about Mexican immigration to the US?

Some unexpected information is revealed in an article “Immigration and Usurpation” by Fredo Arias-King. He was an aide to Vicente Fox (who was elected Mexican President) in 1999 and 2000; during this time he discussed the immigration issue, as part of a Mexican delegation, with about 50 US congressmen and senators.

According to Arias-King, 45 of the 50 legislators were clearly pro-immigration. He recollects that some even asked him to “send more”.

This attitude perplexed Arias-King. It was clear from polls that most Americans opposed the mass influx of Mexican immigrants and he found too that most of the American politicians were aware of the “debatable benefits for America as a whole” of such immigration.

And yet all of the Democrat politicians, and all but five of the Republicans, were supportive of mass immigration from Mexico.

Worse, some of the American politicians openly betrayed their constituents. Arias-King tells us that,

While I can recall many accolades for the Mexican immigrants and for Mexican-Americans (one white congressman even gave me a “high five” when recalling that Californian Hispanics were headed for majority status), I remember few instances when a legislator spoke well of his or her white constituents. One even called them “rednecks,” and apologized to us on their behalf for their incorrect attitude on immigration.

Most of them seemed to advocate changing the ethnic composition of the United States as an end in itself.

Some white politicians also pretended to take measures to stem illegal immigration, whilst effectively scuttling any such initiatives:

Some legislators also mentioned to us (oftentimes laughing) how they had “defanged” or “gutted” anti-immigration bills and measures, by neglecting to fund this program or tabling that provision, or deleting the other measure, etc. “Yes, we passed that law, but it can’t work because we also …” was a usual comment to assuage the Mexican delegations ...

And:

One leading Republican senator over a period of months was advising us, through a mutual acquaintance, about which mechanisms to follow and which other legislators to lobby in order to ensure passage of the amnesty proposal. In the meantime, he would speak on television about the need to “militarize” the border.

Why? Arias-King found that,

Democrats wanted increased immigration because Latin American immigrants tend to vote Democrat once naturalized ... and Republicans like immigration because their sponsors (businesses and churches) do.

There is one other important explanation according to Arias-King. In Mexico politics is based to a degree on patron-client relationships. Arias-King believes that American politicians saw some merit in this kind of political culture. He writes:

While Democratic legislators we spoke with welcomed the Latino vote, they seemed more interested in those immigrants and their offspring as a tool to increase the role of the government in society and the economy ... [Several] saw Latinos as more loyal and “dependable” in supporting a patron-client system ...

Also curiously, the Republican enthusiasm for increased immigration also was not so much about voting in the end, even with “converted” Latinos. Instead, these legislators seemingly believed that they could weaken the restraining and frustrating straightjacket devised by the Founding Fathers and abetted by American norms.

These are all interesting points. I doubt, though, that they are really adequate to explain the views of American politicians. It’s unlikely that there is anything so specific to explain pro-immigration attitudes amongst the political class, when the same attitudes are found in the political classes of all Western countries.

There has to be a more general explanation which would explain why Western elites have adopted a pro-immigration stance, whilst non-Western elites (such as the Japanese) have not.

That’s why I often focus on the role of liberalism, since this philosophy is held to (in its left-wing or right-wing forms) by all the major political parties in the West.

(BTW Lawrence Auster has an interesting item up about the way immigration is transforming Detroit.)

Becoming the embodied subject

If you look at an Australian $50 note, you will see a picture of David Unaipon, an Aboriginal writer and inventor. Below this picture Unaipon is briefly quoted as follows:

As a full-blooded member of my race I think I may claim to be the first – but I hope, not the last – to produce an enduring record of our customs, beliefs and imaginings.

David Unaipon appears to be an admirable representative of the Australian Aborigines. However, what strikes me about his appearance on our currency is the double standard involved. Only an Aborigine could get away with expressing pride in his race, culture and traditions; if a white Australian were to do the same, he would not get his face on the $50 note, but would probably be denounced as a racist or bigot.

So why do we have such a double standard? Why is the majority population expected to have no serious pride in their own ethnicity, whilst at the same time celebrating the ethnicity of others?

The answer, I believe, has to do with the basic philosophy adopted by white intellectuals, namely liberalism. Liberalism asserts that to be human, we must be free to create who we are through our own will and reason. This means that we are most human when we are least subject to any qualities which might pre-set our identity or influence our choices.

To put this another way, liberals prefer to see the individual as an atomised, thinking and choosing mind, unconstrained by any inherited nature or tradition.

In a discussion at View from the Right, the American traditionalist, Jim Kalb, offered a similar explanation for the double standard:

My guess is that it’s a consequence of the nature of the liberal individual, which is the same as the Cartesian ego—a disembodied subject with no qualities at all other than the free-floating ability to have experiences and make choices.... The Cartesian ego isn’t really part of the world of experience. How, after all, could something with no qualities be embodied? So perhaps there’s a feeling that it’s more legitimate for Third World types, who don’t seem to be free floating Cartesian egos, to be embodied and thus part of the world of experience. The feeling then is that white people are Cartesian abstractions while nonwhites are vibrant concrete realities. [Emphasis added.]

If Jim Kalb is right, it would help to explain why some liberals are so willing to accept the demise of the West. For instance, Jens Orback, the Swedish Democracy Minister, said earlier this year,

We must be open and tolerant towards Islam and Muslims because when we become a minority, they will be so towards us.

Orback has already accepted the future dominance of Islam and a Muslim population in his own country. Perhaps he does so because he can only conceive of the existing Swedish population as being disembodied liberal subjects, whereas the non-Western immigrants carry a real, embodied tradition and identity – and therefore represent something of greater weight and worth in the world.

Could there be a clue to a strategy for Western survival in this? Perhaps what the Western remnant needs to do is to emphasise strongly that they do not belong within the category of “liberal subject”. If the remnant were to insist clearly enough on a separate identity as an embodied subject, then perhaps Western liberals would accept that we too belong in a different category to the liberal individual, just as non-whites do.

This would mean asserting, as a matter of course, that we embody qualities which we have not chosen for ourselves: it would mean, for instance, recognising the importance to us of our manhood or womanhood and of our particular national or ethnic traditions.

There was a time when we did do this as a matter of course. The further back in time you go, the less the influence of liberalism, and the more clearly you find expressions of European ‘embodiment’.

Let me give just two examples. Jorgen Jorgenson and Elizabeth Fenton were both settlers in Tasmania in the 1820s and 30s. Jorgenson had already had a colourful career. He was born and raised a Dane, but in 1809, when Denmark and England were at war, he led a coup against the Danish administration in Iceland, with the support of some English merchants. He ruled the country for two months, before being deposed.

Whilst in power, Jorgenson wrote letters to Icelandic officials, demanding that they pledge their loyalty. Here is how one Icelandic official, Jon Guthmundsson, replied to Jorgenson:

Who are you? You are born a Danish subject … But what are you now? You have not become a British subject, yet you have ceased to be what you were and should be, and also ceased to be a human being. Whoever and whatever you are, you have insulted me by assuming me foolish enough to be seduced, cowardly enough to be fearful, and dishonest enough to ignore honour and duty.

The Icelandic official berates Jorgenson for his betrayal of his native country and for the ambiguous status of his identity. He does not see such ambiguity as a liberation from the “prison of ethnicity”, but as a loss of an essential human quality. The Icelandic official is a fully embodied white subject.

Jorgenson was already living in Tasmania when Elizabeth Fenton set sail in 1828 to become a settler there. Her husband had served as a soldier in India, so she began her journey from India in a Muslim vessel, the Hamoud Shaw. After praising the Arab captain she wrote,

He has one European on board who holds the office of chief mate. He makes me quite melancholy. He is English by name and complexion, but his tastes, manners and his scruples, not to say his religion, are Arab.

He is the son of a Scotch clergyman, but for many years has been leading his present life, trading between Muscat and Mozambique. Muscat is, in his imagination, what Paris is to a Frenchman ... His converse turns on murders, executions, shipwrecks, his reading is the works of Voltaire and Paine, of which he has read just enough to unsettle his belief.

Poor fellow! though it always makes me nervous to hear him speak, I pity him too; he may not always have been what he now is; has he been made this [way] by disappointment or alienation from the humanising relationships of life?

Elizabeth Fenton was similarly disconcerted by the existence of a Greek convert amongst the crew:

The crew are a mixture of Bengalees, Arabs and negro slaves. Among this crowd there is, - Oh! sad to write it! – a Greek, a native of Athens, a Moslem now by adopted faith and practice.

Little reckons he of past time; Marathon is no more to him than Mozambique. He would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors.

Couldn’t we apply this last sentence to your average disembodied modern liberal: “he would rather have a curry than all the fame of his ancestors”? Elizabeth Fenton, though, pre-dates this mentality; for her, a connection to ancestry and to homeland is the natural condition of man, disrupted only by “alienation from the humanising relationships of life”.

She too associates the human with the embodied subject, and she does so with the confidence which we need to return to if we are to clearly distinguish ourselves from the suicidal category of “disembodied liberal subject”.

Anthony Browne on immigration

A few years ago, Anthony Browne, an environment editor of the Times, wrote a most interesting article The folly of mass immigration.

Browne's article is a very effective rebuttal of a pro-immigration report, People Flow. He challenges the following four assumptions made in this report:

1) The People Flow report claims that mass immigration is normal. Browne points out that only 3% of people on the planet live outside the land of their birth, and that the current scale of migration from developing countries to the west is historically unprecedented rather than being a normal occurrence.

2) The report assumes that the migration flows which are now taking place cannot be stopped. Browne cites successful immigration restrictions enacted in the US in 1924 and more recently in Denmark and the Netherlands as evidence that migration flows can be deterred.

3) Browne also challenges the assumption that mass immigration is to be mostly regarded as beneficial. He notes that mass immigration adds to overcrowding in European countries and deprives developing countries of much of their educated class (with Africa having lost a third of its professionals to the west).

He points out too that the option of mass emigration can discourage poorer nations from adopting policies designed to create a self-sustaining society and economy. For instance, in 2000 the then president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was asked how her country planned to feed, clothe, house and employ the many millions being added to the rapidly growing population. She replied: "We'll send them to America."

4) Browne also takes issue with the assumption that immigration is a right of individuals. He believes instead that it's a privilege and that those who profess to believe in democracy ought to allow a population to have democratic control over immigration policy.

Finally, Browne writes at some length on the question of hypocrisy; namely, that it is only Western populations who are expected to give up their own distinct existence through the process of mass migration.

For instance, in 2002, the British government gave full UK passports to 200,000 people living in British overseas territories, such as Montserrat. The inhabitants were allowed to live in Britain, but there was no right for the British to live in the territories.

How was this justified? The foreign office minister stated that giving British citizens the right to live in the territories would "risk fundamentally altering the social, cultural and economic fabric of the territories."

Here is a classic double standard: it's thought wrong for Britons to migrate somewhere and change the "social, cultural and economic fabric" of the host country, but right for the same process to occur within Britain itself.

I've only skimmed the surface of what's in Browne's article; I encourage readers to look through the entire piece.