Why Race Matters
A Refutation of the Belief that Culture Supersedes Race
Mass immigration has forced a conversation onto all of us. This conversation has been ongoing for at least 20 years, but it has particularly escalated over the past three or four. It has examined many sides of the issue: economic, social, political. Religions have even gotten into the mix, with groups like the Catholic church, Islam, and large Protestant denominations weighing in (unsurprisingly, always on the side of more immigration from ever more disparate lands). But ultimately the problems that arise stem from the same source: incompatible races being mixed together by our so-called leaders, and always in the same direction. Modern liberals and self-titled “classical liberals” recoil at putting things in explicitly racial terms, preferring instead to discuss sanitized concepts like culture or values. They like to pretend that race isn’t an issue, that in fact it is irrelevant. Their contention – something they’ve reached with no empirical evidence – is that these things, these frameworks by which we all live, have been constructed and brought into the world wholly outside of our physical beings. Their belief is that our race, our identity, our physiology, the very stuff that makes us in this world, has had no influence on how we order our societies. I want to show once and for all that this idea, while noble in its intent, is at least naïve; and now that we’ve attempted this global experiment in diversity for nigh on 60 years, I’d say that it is criminal.
Consistency
Why is every region with a predominately African population a madhouse of violence and chaos? Why are the lands to the south of the United States, comprised of a mixture of Amerindian and (vanishingly small) Spanish colonizers, in constant political turmoil? The lands of the Germans are comprised of stolid, hardworking, sober folk, and the communities they formed here in the United States held the same values for generations after they emigrated here. For every racial group these traits persist not only in their native lands, but they also follow them as they move about the globe. This is true in all cases, whether or not they’ve established a majority.
Obviously, these are traits, or what we might call general trends. These aren’t rules. Every single person from Iceland isn’t necessarily artistic, but their national contribution to the arts is undeniably out of proportion to their tiny population. Every African isn’t violent and dysfunctional, but regions with high African populations, even when left entirely to their own devices, never achieve anything remotely like stability or safety. Centuries after throwing off their French masters, the people of Haiti still struggle to even feed themselves, much less provide fresh water or medical care. Obviously the achievements of an advanced civilization, like a university system, mining, infrastructure, or a modern military, are completely beyond them. This is despite being blessed with a remarkably pleasant climate, an abundance of natural resources, and no military threats. A famous contrast to this benighted nation would be Japan. This nation was nearly destroyed in a war only 80 years ago, yet now it is considered one of the safest, cleanest, most well-ordered places on the planet. Japanese immigrants to America are almost uniformly successful, despite facing discrimination and being given no handouts.
This is what I mean when I say consistency. Plucking thousands of Nigerians up from their ancestral lands and displacing them to Switzerland does not make them act like the Swiss. They continue to exhibit the same qualities they did back home – both the good and the bad. Their culture is consistent. Similarly, you can see how the British who inhabit a tiny outpost like Gibraltar have maintained a slice of England despite being thousands of miles from their homeland, perched on the edge of Spain. Prior to the cultural atom bomb of mass immigration here in the United States, you could even see this consistency in the cultures of different regions. Areas settled by the French maintained peculiarities of their homeland, as did those settled by the British, Dutch, and Scandinavians.
Our Bodies Construct our Lives
Our cultures are a natural outpouring of our races. What forged our races? A combination of climate, shared histories, and warfare. Over the centuries a natural symbiosis arose between culture and race. The two are inextricably linked. Living on a small island nation undeniably impacted the culture of the peoples of the British Isles, as did the unique mixture of the successive invasions. But their race also came to suffuse their culture, driving them to unimaginable heights of exploration. By their race I mean the unique qualities of their physiology, and this is comprised by both their outward appearance as well as countless invisible, internal traits. For example , the climate and natural resources of the Congo obviously altered the physical appearance of the people from that region. Likewise, their physical traits impacted their culture. Thus, people with high testosterone and low cognitive abilities created a unique system of mores and traditions that were perfectly suited to themselves. This system only really works for them. Imagine the absurdity of forcing the people of Latvia to live by the culture of the Congolese! Why would you ever think that something like that would work? Why then would we assume that we can take the people from the Congo, place them amongst Italians and Australians, and think that we can force them to live by those people’s cultures? The culture of Italy has been forged over centuries by the people who live in Italy. It reflects their physical surroundings, shared cultural journey, and their physical traits.
Our outpourings of culture impact how we build our homes, our music, the literature we produce (if any), the clothing we fashion for ourselves; as I say in the subtitle for this section, it is how we construct our lives. What determines how well and how often you clean your home? How much or how little you choose to cover of your body? What music is pleasing to your ears and what is cacophonic? These things are not determined by our culture, they are our culture. But what determines them? The reason African tribes respond so fervently to drumbeats, repetitive chants, and exuberant physical displays in time with their music, is because their physiology is uniquely suited to this kind of music. It is a natural outpouring of their ethnos. This is precisely why music with the same qualities appeals to Africans no matter where they are scattered about the globe. Architecture is another natural outpouring of a people’s soul. Historically, it is a reflection of the local climate and readily-available building materials. Climate and terrain also impact our physiology; so again, we see the symbiosis between world and body. Consider the clean, natural lines of a Japanese building with thin interior walls, sliding paper doors, with seating on or near the floor: how does this reflect the Japanese climate and the physiology of the Japanese people? Then contrast this with a Norwegian coastal town: orderly rows of sturdy wooden houses, painted with brilliant colors, solid, heavy doors, rooms centered around small wood stoves. Is this a reflection of Norwegian culture, a natural expression of the Norwegian physiology, or both?
You Must Believe What You See
My final argument in favor of how race and culture are intrinsically linked is at once simple and complex. First I must state that the idea that race and culture are separate and distinct, is a belief. In fact, I’d even categorize it as an aspirational belief. Ironically, it is also unique and distinct to Western culture. It is what we wish to be true. We wish it to be true with such fervor, such conviction, that we have managed to convince ourselves that it is true in the face of all reality. This belief is not born out in reality, indeed our senses show that the two are inextricably linked. What happened when we crushed the Saddam regime and “brought democracy” to the Iraqi people? The people of Liberia were granted their own nation with a constitution that mirrors our own almost to the letter, yet within a generation they fell to anarchy and brutality. When the Spanish sailed thousands of miles from their homelands and colonized the New World, what manner of government and culture did they carve out of the wilderness? In all of these cases, people were allowed the opportunity to create a new culture out of whole cloth, yet what they built was remarkably similar to what they had before.
We know that if left to their own devices, a crowd of men of different races will naturally separate out into different groups based on race. Their behavior and habits, while not exactly the same, will be similar and familiar enough to make this a perfectly natural tendency. Which came first? Did their race form their habits and customs, or did the two develop independently? My point is that this question is immaterial, because the two are always found together. It becomes a sort of cultural chicken vs the egg dilemma. Mashing these different groups together, over and over, does nothing to disprove this reality. All it does is immiserate the populations involved and degrade the natural cultures and mores that they would otherwise build amongst themselves.
An anecdote from my time in the Navy might help to illustrate my point. When I attended boot camp, it was 10 weeks long. Ten weeks for our company commanders (Naval boot camp equivalent to drill sergeants) to take a group of civilians from wildly different backgrounds and forge us into a cohesive unit of sailors. Almost immediately we formed friendships and cliques based on race. Still, the system they have in place has been honed over centuries and is amazingly effective. For the most part we were genuinely able to put aside our differences in order to complete tasks and function as a group. Towards the end of boot camp our company commanders wanted to reward us for completing some goal, the particulars of which I’ve long forgotten. They decided to order a huge number of pizzas and have them delivered to our barracks. This was to us an incredible treat, as we had eaten nothing but galley food for weeks. The icing on the cake was that the company commanders would leave us alone and unsupervised for the duration of the pizza party. We were strictly forbidden from leaving our barracks compartment, but otherwise we were free to sleep, write letters, and generally hang out. Repeatedly we were warned to not leave the compartment and go to any other parts of the building. Within 20 minutes of being unsupervised, the Black men started talking about entering what they thought were vacant areas in the building. Some Whites in the company tried to talk them out of it, while the Latinos kept completely out of the argument. Despite our best efforts to dissuade them, a group of six or seven Black men struck out to explore. At first they were stealthy, but quickly their vibrant and exuberant nature got the better of them. They ran up and down passageways, whooping and hollering. They discovered some vending machines, but this being boot camp none of them had any money, so they tried rocking and pounding on them to get treats. They went into a free weight room and started horsing around, banging the weights on the ground and showing off. Their antics got the attention of other companies and their commanders, who quickly shut everything down. The pizza party was cancelled, all leftovers were ostentatiously thrown away, and the entire company was punished with PT (or “beat” in boot camp parlance) long into the night.
Why is this story significant? Because in this example we strip away all the usual excuses granted to different races to explain their behavior. We all came from different walks of life. Not all of the Blacks were from poor backgrounds; indeed, not all of them from even the core group of troublemakers were from poor backgrounds. We enlisted White men weren’t exactly from privileged backgrounds, either. The Latinos in my company were likewise a mix of poor and middle-class men. In the Navy we were all granted the same privileges, all given the same restrictions, all allowed the same choices. And at the first opportunity, which of us chose to use their freedom to indulge in stupidity and self-destruction? Which of us seemed wholly incapable of predicting the second or third-degree outcomes of their behavior?
This is reality. It defies wishes and beliefs and ideals. Crushing reality will have its way in the end. As the old saying goes, blood will out. This is why I have long said that culture is a natural expression of race. Where there is one, you find the other. Whether we wish it to be so is irrelevant. When I say I love my race and my culture, this is what I mean. I love them both, because they are both inextricably linked. If you took a group of 100 White Americans and allowed us to build a lunar colony, were you to visit that colony in 20 years you’d find a tiny representation of America. Does anyone think that if you allowed 100 Africans an opportunity to build their own lunar colony that what you found in two decades wouldn’t be utter degradation and despair? We build what we are. As humans we bridge the gap between the animal and the divine. While we are tied to earth by our mortal forms, our minds are so great that we are able to form our immediate reality to suit our will. This formation is our culture, and this culture is a natural expression of our stuff, our bodies. So no more of the nonsense of trying to differentiate between culture and race, the two are one and the same.
To take this one step further, the sooner we recognize these tangible differences, the sooner we might solve the problem — if it can be solved. There are DNA differences among the races, and having taught people from all over the world, clear differences in aptitude. Clearly coming from a continent where reaching up and plucking fruit is possible all year long would affect one’s propensity for stealing in a society where goods must be produced. In a horrible essay submitted for discussion by some grad students a couple of years ago, “Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons,” the black authors argued that whites are poison because they created agriculture and therefore unnecessarily altered the landscape. In other words, they see development as “poison.” I saw an intriguing lecture on youtube years ago by a scholar of African languages who argued that language reveals much about the race that speaks it. The African languages he described have no future tense (some Asian languages don’t either — and certainly no hypothetical tense). There aren’t specific names for fruits; it’s “tree fruit” or “bush fruit” which I found fascinating given decades out of Africa, speaking English, we get similar constructions like “ink pen.” Anyway, with no future tense, then that lends itself to an absence of cause and effect thinking.
Well said sir. It’s beyond tiresome when some “on the right” who could be a powerful voice for us (Tucker Carlson and others) continue to gaze starry-eyed into the abyss of “one race, the human race” and bemoan the “tragedy of identity politics.” Racial identities include cultures, values, morals and I.Q. averages. Every race but ours is automatically granted the right to group preference. We must speak up for ourselves in everyday life whenever possible. Never apologizing for our civilization; for our very existence, is only the beginning of reclaiming what is ours.