The Racist Without A Race
June 26, 2011
ROHAN SWEE writes:
I’m afraid that Robert B., whom you quoted in this post on race, is correct and that Mrs. Johnson, who argued there is no such thing as “the white race,” is indulging in “presentism” – that is, imposing current notions onto the past. The popular denial of “white identity,” or the assertion that “‘whiteness’ is an artificial or arbitrary construct” is a particularly wrong-headed example of this phenomenon, as will be clear to anybody who has bothered to read the dead in their own words on the subject. It is the worst sort of ham-handed revisionism to pretend that white Americans in the past did not self-consciously identity as members both of a distinct human racial grouping, and of that coherent abstraction known as “European civilization.” I know this because they said so, in black and white, and I take them at their word.
Also, I am old enough to have intimately known older whites, with a very strong, not to say belligerent and aggrieved, sense of ethnic identity, who would have been astonished to be informed that they never conceived of themselves as “white men.” The confusion arises from the odd refusal to notice here a quotidian feature of human existence that would never be overlooked in any other context – that is, that an individual lives at the center of a concentric set of expanding circles of identity. That someone self-labels as Scots-Irish- or Italian- or Norwegian-American tells you nothing about how he conceives his wider identity. Also, no white person thinks about being “white” in a place full of white people; his identity will be finer-grained, regional, religious, etc.
Like the Pashtun says, “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousins, my cousins and I against the clan, my clan against the tribe,” etc. It shows how far our brains have been scrambled by “anti-racism” that this universal feature of human existence is so often put forth as “proof” that higher-order identities do not and never have existed – but only among Europeans. Does anybody believe that because, just like Europeans, Asians have strong ethnic identities, and long histories of conflict and bloodshed, that a Chinese considers a Korean as far distant, identity-wise, as Frenchman? My travels, at least, don’t support that view.
If “white” is meaningless as an identity marker, then we can predict that there will be no increase in “white consciousness” or sense of European identity as whites rapidly move into minority status in the U.S. I guess we’re gonna find out how that shakes out, probably within our own lifetimes.
Now, I am surely willing to concede that race, being genetically based, is a temporally fluid phenomenon, and hence not something eternal and “essential.” If East Asians and Europeans interbred freely over time in North America, their offspring would come to constitute a distinct and identifiable genetic family (with fuzzy borders), just as current races are distinct and identifiable genetic families (with fuzzy borders) due to inbreeding and geographic isolation. But that is an entirely different thing than claiming that race doesn’t exist. (Just as the morality or desirability of categorizing by race is a different thing than recognizing that most people do tend to divvy up the world that way, for good or ill, especially when the going gets rough.)
I note in passing that some who go down the path of not taking the past on its own terms have ended up in the absurd position of damning apparitions: they want to beat whites over the head with the cudgel of “white racism” with one arm, while busily writing “whites” out of existence with the other. And what a fantastical chimera they produce – the bigot who prides himself on an identity he doesn’t identify with, a magician who can mystically exclude on the basis of categorical distinctions he knows not of, the racist without a race!
