Auster on Race Consciousness
November 18, 2024
FROM Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism (2019) by Lawrence Auster:
By peoplehood or race consciousness, I do not mean an ideology in which race is seen as impermeable or as the determiner of moral values or as a substitute for fairness and humanity. Rather than expressing an ideology of race-supremacy or race-hatred, this race consciousness I speak of arises from the realization that European Americans are indeed threatened in their cultural, political, and ultimately physical existence by demographic dispossession and the ideology of anti-racism. In many cases, it is only by becoming aware of the mortal threat to their existence as a race that whites begin to become conscious of their race. Race, of course, is only one of the facets of our civilizational identity, but it is indispensable. A reawakening of racial and civilizational consciousness need not result in ideologies of race supremacy or race hatred. Rather it will restore European Americans to their rightful place, both as the heirs and representatives of America’s historic culture, and as an ethnocultural group in their own right, a people. I also suspect that far from making minorities hate whites, the assertion by whites of their peoplehood will make many minorities respect whites. Nonwhites don’t respect whites at present because whites have, in a collective sense, made themselves into nothing while still trying to protect their individual and class interests. Whites thus seem both weak and hypocritical and therefore despicable. But when whites begin to assert their own existence and their desire to preserve it, not in a hateful way but in a calm, intelligent and firm way, then non-whites will begin to respect whites. They will begin to see whites, not as the oppressor figures of anti-racist demonology, nor as cowardly saps, but as human beings who have the same basic concerns for their culture and peoplehood that the minorities have for theirs.”