“Don’t Call Me White!”

As a White German-American grandmother, I find it so utterly disgusting for those of the younger White generation who are not proud of who they are. Let us give the blame to the public schools who teach everything but the 3 R’s, and through the liberal education of what IS taught, a whole generation has had their heads emptied of anything worthwhile….of course, there are exceptions..especially those with parents who still have some intellect and common sense…but they seem to be few and far between. The idiocy on television and in the movies does not help. It is dreary to think that these youngsters are going to be in charge within l0-20 years when they have nothing to offer but self-flaggelation! Shame on you young people! You are living in what is still, mildly, a country where your freedoms are still here…and you need to roll up your sleeves to make sure that the tyranny that stalks the land does not put you in detention camps! You are serving a purpose now with your danagerous and ridiculous attitudes, but it will backfire once your rebellion has done its job. I’m sorry you weren’t born in China or South America or South Africa. You are a spoiled and lazy generation. May you enjoy your life in the Hell to come if you don’t wake up.

In a world gone completely MAD a sane voice comes to us in the name of Helen, well said young lady! Oh sorry, I mean you go girl!

The biggest shock for Europeans (including US American whites) who are proud of the immense and unique achievements of European civilization is not the hatred of other races who compensate for feelings of inferiority with resentment and rage, but instead the self-loathing of so many Europeans.

This emotion is a perversion of the sentiments of altruism, universalism, tolerance, and equality which are, as far as I know, unique to European culture.

Required are crystal clear principles free of any taint of racism which everyone can remember and which anyone sane can agree with.

I am working on a sketch of these principles, which will not please either liberals nor the often embittered “race realists” who frequent this site.

Among them are mutual respect for all cultures, including white European culture, respect for the rule of law, merit as the sole criteria for hiring and school admissions, the universality of human intelligence and the validity of intelligence testing, the right of ethnic nationalism and the right to limit immigration.

On the good side, the band addresses labels used insidiously to create categories of discourse. On the bad side, I rather suspect that there were two songs being sung with the invisible version centered on being circumsized, an otherwise strange thing to mention in a song about being white. One particular white ethnic group resists being called white under most circumstances — I think that’s well known. So it is impossible to say that this band and this song represent some widespread belief system among all the diverse young white American peoples.

There is nothing wrong with the label “white” except that, standing alone, it is a reductionist label. We find “the diverse white American peoples” to be more descriptive inasmuch as it emphasizes our diversity, our nationality, and our nations of origin.

Calling some group “the whites” or “the blacks” is pretty much the same as calling people “the illegals” or “the homeless.” While part of the label is correct, it smothers all the other elements that go to make up a whole person, and thus render those designated more easily subject to hate caricatures.

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Regarding the closing comments by “elitist,” it was very interesting to me how he or she included “respect for the rule of law” as a critical element among the six outlined. Lawrence Auster recently outlined how the phrase “a propositional nation,” which was so famous over the past two decades, is being replaced with “the rule of law” as a fulcrum to mount discussions featuring displays of categories of discourse to advance various agendas in American society.

Elitist’s remarks also mention “universalism” twice, and this is a very serious problem from a philosophical point of view. Any nation, principate, or tribe that celebrates “universalism” might as well bare their collective necks to the executioner and say, “Kindly cut here, and there’s a dollar in it for you if you do it in one stroke.” It is universalism as yet another insidious category of discourse that blinds us to the real nature of the world and its peoples.

Stanley,

Since I’ve said that the rule of law is a defining element of Western culture, I responded to Auster here and in the comments that follow.

As for the racial makeup of the band, they once put out an album called “White Trash, Two Heebs, and a Bean,” meaning the there is one white Gentile guy in the band, two Jews, and a Hispanic. The singer, Mike Burkett, is Jewish. Nevertheless, your interpretation of the matter is bogus. Burkett makes clear that he is a Jew who self-identifies as white. He never says, “I’m not white, I’m Jewish!” or anything like that. That said, it is undeniable that there is a strong liberal and leukophobic strain in American Jewish thinking, and this song may reflect that. But I’d want to know how many of the adoring fans in the audience singing along are Jewish. Probably not many. Leukophobia certainly is not confined to Jews.

Like Bo Sears of Resisting Defamation, you focus on the reductionism of the term “white.” I think this is a red herring. Sure, no general category does justice to all of the particular elements that comprise it. Nevertheless, we need categories to understand the world, and the simplification they impose on the world is unavoidable. “White” is a good category because it names people with a great deal in common, not just skin color, but European ancestry, and a shared racial identity in America.

Besides, what’s wrong with the term “white” isn’t that doesn’t do justice to whites’ diversity, but that it contains implicit slurs, such as those I outlined in the article. We need to lay bare and answer the slurs, and your answer does nothing to achieve either goal.

Mr. Jobling, kindly allow me to tease out from our exchange two points on which we can agree, and possibly one point where we disagree.

The first point may be that left-wing racialist writers & theorists are constantly changing their preferred categories of discourse from one thing to another. When I read Mr. Auster’s point that “proposition nation” was disappearing, I had to review the various deep think pieces I had recently read, and surely enough, the category of discourse called “proposition nation” seems to have lost its use, its value, or its traction, and seems to be on the way out.

And “rule of law” seems a defensible substitute by the nation wreckers on the ground that, once one has the power, one will seek to enshrine one’s policies as “the law.” I’m not sure what Mr. Auster means by “rule of law,” but I view it as a meme to coerce behavior to make us conform to the left-wing racialist goals sealed into place at this time to rachet up their destructive successes into the law of the land, not just slogans for which one may be smeared and unemployed. But I think you will agree that staying abreast of the shifts and twists and turns in party line by the left-wing racialists is important so that we can hone new arguments and rebuttals as fast as they can turn out the new hate speeches dressed up as memes for us to swallow whole.

The second point is that public discourse is sometimes carried out on two or more levels. There is the more public level which is generally comprehensible language, and then there may be another level directed at people in the know, and maybe a third level for a much smaller third group. (Others call this “close reading” deconstruction.) We used to study this kind of thing at our daily newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News which serves the 10th largest metropolitan region in the USA and which is located in the 5th most important manufacturing county in the USA. There would often be deep think stories about this or that multicultural event, a “first” story, or a foreign relations news item which would easily be three levels deep. Oddly enough, the second level story was often betrayed by remarks in the penultimate paragraph. Why that paragraph, I don’t know, but we all took to reading the end of such a story first and then to counting the number of confidential sources who couldn’t be identified — a sure sign of secret designs by the writer and publisher. (Another give-away is the group listed in the center of any listing of any three groups — invariably the group the writer really cares about or is a member of.)

Anyway I daresay we agree on that point, that written, spoken, or sung discourse is easily susceptible to interpretation on two or more levels. We call the undercover discourses, “remarks in an invisible language” — just our name for it.

For a slight disagreement, I do disagree with your statement,

“White” is a good category because it names people with a great deal in common, not just skin color, but European ancestry, and a shared racial identity in America.

The fact is that the US Census Bureau insists that “whites” include all the descendants of the indigenous Europeans, indigenous North Africans (meaning Arabs & Berbers), and indigenous Southwest Asians (meaning Turks, Syrians, Iraqis, Israelis, Lebanese, Arabs, Egyptians, Persians, Afganis, Pakistanis, and at least the northern portion of India). (The US Census Bureau uses the terms “North Africans” and “Southwest Asians.”) This is roughly anyone of the so-called Caucasian race.

For that reason, for quite awhile my friends and I supported the use of “European American” which would, of course, include European-origin Jews, but it never caught on except, if you noticed, Rev. Wright who used it in remarks delivered at the Press Club in Washington, DC, a few weeks ago. Thus, “the diverse white American peoples” to emphasize our own diversity, our nationality, and our multiple-national origins — qualities that the term, “whites,” doesn’t emphasize.

In fact, “the diverse white American peoples” does a great deal to overcome implicit slurs planted in the term “whites.” First, it demands recognition of our diversity, and the idea that we lack diversity within out numbers is a major slur. Second, it demands recognition that we have a nationality, namely “American,” which is usually left off the description in print or electronic media even when African American or Asian American or American Indian are in the list. Third, it emphasizes our remarkably large numbers of ethnic backgrounds and national origin backgrounds. So it does do battle with at least three of the implicit slurs presently situated in the term “whites.”

Stanley,

As a former literary critic, I know all about deconstructive or psychoanalytic readings, and let me tell you, people who practice them are wont to find things in the text that aren’t there at all, but entirely in their own heads.

As I complained in my comment about Auster, linked to in my previous comment, I don’t know what he’s talking about because he doesn’t link to any source that has used the term “rule of law” in the way he describes. As I mean the term, the rule of law is a basic principle of society that has been a Western tradition since the days of the ancient Greeks, according to which no one is above the law, not even the ruler. See my What is the West? for more. Of course, we should fight bad laws, such as the ones you mention, but the rule of law is a principle that I entirely endorse.

My only objection to being called white is that it obscures my cultural heriatge which is Scottish. While I’m proud of my Scottish heritage and am caucasian, I’ve never been “proud to be white”.

When I’m called white, I point out that I’m actually pinkish-beige in color.

Proud of my heritage? Yes.

Proud of my skin colour? No more proud than I am of my t-shirt’s color!

Universal principles like human dignity and the rule of (the sole alternative to which is “might makes right” and tribal loyalty with no sense of justice) are the gift of the European Enlightenment to humanity as a whole.

I am proud of being EUROPEAN in the broad sense (the descendant of Europeans): whiteness is uninteresting.

The assertion of Europeans tribal rights is also uninteresting.

What is interesting is the process of internalizing, claiming, perpetuating, disseminating, and defending European values like the rule of law, justice, humanity, truth, and the value of scientific objectivity, transparent government, and progress.

Anyone from any “tribe” can endorse these values, and often does.

The breasbeating leftists who bemoan the evil of whiteness and the strident right wingers who brag about their superiority and mirror images:

One is self-critical to the point of masochism, the other has abandoned the higher values of his own culture to become a neo-barbarian.

Please memorize:

No matter who introduces a universally valid principle such as the rule of law, scientific objecivity, or the right to human dignity, it automatically becomes the property of anyone decent enough to embrace it - from Burma to Brazil to Botswana to the Baltics.

elitist,

I too share your distrust of tribalism. However, the crucial question is whether whites have a greater innate capacity for the ideals we both love than other races. I think that we do. Consequently, the importation of non-whites into our societies will likely erode the quality of white civilizations.

By the way, do you think I am a “strident right-winger”? If so, can you cite any examples of me bragging?

According to the govt classification system, I am identified as “White” or “Caucasian”. I self-identify as “Aryan” when pressed because I an sick and tired of these damnable classifications altogether. “Aryan” is also technically incorrect (no more so than “Caucasian) because my ancestry isnt Iranian or North Indian, but I use the term because it is a flashpoint, immediately identifiable expression of racial polarity. Sometimes I’ll use the term “Euro-American” to one up the negroes who like to be called “Afro&etc;”. In my case, racial thinking has arisen in protest to the anti-White attitudes in culture and society these days. Go figger, I take people as they are, not for what they look like.

Oh, progress! I’ve heard it well spoken of by progressives, Elitist. You might also want to re-think that love affair you have with the values of the so-called “European Enlightenment,” since the very form of racial or ethnic particularism which your presumably support is in stark contrast with the Enlightenment principles of universalism and egalitarianism. Your incipient “Objectivism” is simply a cover for the kind of scientistic materialism which has been a bane to the West. Yes, we all know you are a dogged supporter of Civilization with a capital “C.” The only problem is we are in a post-civilized age and the wonders of the “Enlightenment” have a great deal to do with our present state of barbarism.

The deployment of government issued, suitably gauzy abstractions such as “the right to human dignity,” make you sound like a UN policy “adivisor.” The West that really is the West and has value as the West is but the remnant of a dying civilization (one of many high civilizations that have existed), killed by the very universalist abstractions you glorify, and the very ones enforced by Madame Guillotine.

As for the much ballyhooed “scientific objectivity,” I can only say that you mistake technology and the progress of engineering for the activity of “science,” which today is primarily occupied with materialist pedagogy. The West you praise came into existence around 1400 and celebrated the completion of its hegemony in 1968. Good luck with that “West.”