The Rebirth of Race

by Douglas Mercer

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED on the way to a post-racial color-blind future. Against all expectations, race was reborn. And it’s no surprise for anyone who has been paying attention: Race is both the oldest and the newest aspect of Life, and the thin gruel of a “content of your character” worldview will never satisfy. When we speak of civilization or culture or politics, we speak of the flowers on the surface; but when we begin to talk about race we go down into the mines.

In the decades following the Second World War they really thought they had finally stuck the stake in the heart of race and that it would never be heard from again on this side of the vale. They were drooling over their newfound bogeyman Adolf Hitler: He had made racial thinking central to his movement, so now race thinking had been discredited — or at least that’s what they told themselves to soothe the demon of doubt away. Many dupes truly thought that ideology had trumped race, that they had put an end to the concept of race, had put the supposedly evil genie back in the bottle. But a funny thing happened on the way to the “one race, the human race” future: Race was reborn.

It was the era of desegregation; it was the era of pressure to end Apartheid; they had their UNESCO “statement on race” which said there were no races, and certainly no superior ones; it was the high-water mark of “natural equality,” of no innate differences, of countries based on paper and citizenship and never on blood. It was we-are-the-worldism run amok. It was a time when, they say, we had “put the racism of the past behind us,” when a Mulatto could ascend to the Presidency and magically make the world “post-racial.” It was a time when “diversity” was trumpeted as a universal cure-all, and when White homelands became a lot less White. It was a time when Coca-Cola could have a cult-like gaggle of mixed-race youngsters tell us that they “wanted the world to sing in perfect harmony.” It was the time of bussing; it was the time when they got George Wallace to apologize; it was the time of the New South and of cities that were “too busy to hate.” It was the time of “coming together,” and a time when the White race learned to be humble.

They were so sure that race was a thing of the past. They tried to consign race to oblivion. But it waited and it brooded and it bided its time; and it has now returned with a vengeance, with all of its old fury.

A funny thing happened on the road to “equality.” Race was reborn.

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When the races were largely separate, no one talked that much about race. Race was something which we simply had. We lived in the perfect, primal innocence of race. There was almost no language for race because none was needed. Like the fish in water, race was something we swam in but hardly thought about. This dearth of speaking about race leads race-deniers today to say that the ancients were not interested in race — this is quite wrong, for what they had instead of tomes on race was race itself, through and through.

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The birth of a strong White American racial consciousness happened in roughly the 1830s. In America the abolition movement began to get more fanatical, and though the seat-of-the-pants defense of slavery and White supremacy had a long tradition, the intellectuals of the South realized that more was needed. It was no longer enough just to dig in, and being gentleman they realized that a moral justification for White supremacy was required. Following the lead of the always brilliant John Calhoun, they wrote and argued that slavery was a positive good. This was predicated on the obvious and important point that Whites and Blacks were different, would always be different, and that this vast chasm of difference was based in Nature. After this, the fallacy of “natural equality” would never hold real water. In the Naturalization Act of 1790, passed by the first Congress and signed by George Washington, it was specified that only Whites could become citizens. But in the following three decades or so, no literature arose around this issue. But then White southerners became voluble on the subject; so much so that a few decades later, Stephen Douglas could say what everyone knew all along but had not been willing or able to put in so many words: that America was a White country, formed on a White basis; created by and for White people — and was for White people alone and should be so for all time. Not only was it “no one else need apply,” it was “no one else has any rights the White man need ever respect.”

Whiteness, of course, had always existed — but, as is said nowadays, the intellectual “construction” of Whiteness (really, its discovery and the understanding of it) had taken wing, and a glorious day it was.

Simultaneously, in Europe, the landmark book by Count Gobineau (his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races) was published. In one fell swoop, the author cut though the morass of historical analysis. Economy, ideology, great men, climate, political structure — all were swept into secondary or tertiary roles as historical factors; and in their place came the linchpin: race. He was a race essentialist and a racial reductionist. He argued that race was the bedrock of everything; that race was the master key to the master class of history, the Rosetta stone of Life, the prism through which everything on Earth could be understood when it cast its all-encompassing and golden light. When his former mentor, the weak-minded Alexis de Tocqueville, read this seminal book he said that Gobineau would go very far and do much harm. In his former judgement he was correct; in his latter he could not have been more wrong.

In Europe in the wake of Gobineau came Wagner, Chamberlain, de Lapouge. Back in America came the advent of Jim Crow, the eugenicists, the racially motivated 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, and the Virginia Racial Integrity Act of the same year. Everywhere in the White world, Whites were waking up to the perils in their midst and were taking massive precautions to preserve their race — and doing it explicitly. Then, of course, came the Germans, the great masters of racial thinking. Alfred Rosenberg went so far as to say that, in its essence, National Socialism was nothing more than applied biology.

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So vexed, spooked, and troubled by the race idea was the new and illegitimate Jewish regime that they pulled out every stop to stop it. With Hitler out of the way (so they thought), massive propaganda was poured into the ideas that there were no races and that racial thinking was evil. Ideology and the reign of the “last man” (ie, the end of race history) was put forth as the prevailing norm.

It was a house of cards built on a sinking pile of sand, destined to be blown over by the first good breeze.

And so it came that a funny thing happened on the way to the post-racial color-blind world: Race was reborn.

Of course epochal and seminal thinkers like Revilo P. Oliver and William Pierce plied their noble trade; the inheritors and perfecters of the ideas of Gobineau, Grant, Stoddard, and Hitler, they sat atop the very apex of philosophy, with a totalizing and bird’s-eye view of the world. Sitting at the pinnacle, they cannot be surpassed. But considering the demonization they underwent, one might think that their ideas were never going to pierce the public sphere, save by secret osmosis. The irony is that their ideas were smuggled back to prominence by their enemies, the “critical race theorists.” Both they and we are what the color-blind ideologists cannot abide: race essentialists.

Race is essential. And its time has come again.

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Recently researchers at Brown and the University of Wisconsin did a study called “Who Agrees With Hitler?” What they did was present participants with unattributed quotes about race from Hitler, Stephen Douglas, and from White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo. All three were in basic agreement on a great number of things. In certain ways, our implacable enemies in the CRT crowd are simultaneously our secret sharers. We all believe that not only does race matter, but that it is the thing that matters most. We are two sides of the same coin, one good (us) and one evil (them) — but the same coin nevertheless.

The researchers found that sweeping claims about all members of certain demographic groups seem to be on the rise in some circles.

Indeed they are; it’s what happens when the truth comes calling. So all those articles that talk about “racism,” all those seminars on “holding the weight of Whiteness,” all those references to “White supremacy,” all the Whiteness Studies papers that come out, all the schools that teach ethnic studies or Critical Race Theory, all those mugs that go on television and bewail “White privilege,” all the books and papers on “anti-racism” — we should welcome them, for all of them are, paradoxically, good for us. They force the dialectic and heighten the contradictions. In a word, they put the word White on everyone’s lips and in everyone’s ears and get people to begin to think of that magic word.

This is just the prelude to our inevitable victory, to the time when Oliver and Pierce finally prevail as prevail they must, for having heralded the truth.

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The conservatives and the middle-of-the-road liberals who cling to the worn-out theory of “one race, the human race,” of color-blindness, of a post-racial utopia, are all out of their minds. They are fighting a rear-guard action. Race is the hard rock and bedrock of reality; it masters everything because it is behind everything; it rules ideology, politics, culture, and civilization; everything is downstream from it. In the long future, the last seventy-odd years will be seen as an aberration; a time when people were duped into thinking that the most basic part of biological reality (race) was not only a fiction but an evil fiction.

Nothing which ignores what is actual can ever survive, or ever deserves to survive; at long last it will be the “anti-racists” and the racialists who will rise to the top for the final battle, and anyone paying attention has to like our chances. For our final enemies make the signal error of thinking that Whiteness is the cause of all problems, that it is the cancer of the world; when in fact it is the elixir that will usher us into halcyon and glory days beyond any seen before; when our race, the White race, will take once again its proper and preeminent position from which it shall never be dislodged.

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