Whose Future?

By Samuel Francis
Volume 8, Number 4 (Summer 1998)
Issue theme: "Europhobia: the hostility toward Europian-descended Americans"

In 1992, the U.S. Census Bureau released a projection that by the year 2050, non-Hispanic whites will be on the eve of becoming a minority in the United States. Although the bureau's exact projections vary according to the assumptions used, its report argues that the transition to a non-white majority country for the first time in American history will be due to continuing high levels of non-white immigration coupled with the persistence of low fertility rates among whites and high rates among non-whites. The bureau's projections, reported as front page news in both The Washington Post and The New York Times, have excited little attention in the several years since they first appeared, and there has been virtually no expressed desire on the part of American political leaders to halt or slow the transition. Indeed, on both the right and the left, among both Republicans and Democrats, the transition appears to be inconsequential. Thus, on the right wing of the Republican Party, former Rep. Robert Dornan, who opposed illegal but supported legal immigration, commented in 1996 that the prospect of a non-white majority in the United States made no difference to him. "I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants," he remarked, "and if we lose our Northern European stock - your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair - tough!" Soon after his statement, Mr. Dornan lost his seat to a Democratic rival who emphasized her Hispanic identity.

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Samuel Francis, Ph.D., is a nationally-syndicated columnist and a frequent contributor to The Social Contract. While Mr. Dornan's views of immigration and the projected racial transformation of the country reflect the pro-immigration ideology common among libertarians and neo-conservatives, President Bill Clinton has actually expressed pleasure at the prospect of a non-white majority and the cultural changes it will bring. On June 11, 1997, Mr. Clinton stated in an interview with a group of black columnists that the change from a white to a non-white majority "will arguably be the third great revolution in America ... to prove that we literally can live without in effect having a dominant European culture. We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society. We're not going to disintegrate in the face of it."

The "so what" or actually positive response of both the right and the left to the prospect of a non-white majority proceeds from the underlying assumption shared by both shades of the political spectrum that race in itself is virtually meaningless, a matter of mere gross morphology and pigmentation, and that race carries no implications for personality, character, intelligence, or behavior. That, after all, has been the established scientific consensus about race since the early twentieth century, although an increasing amount of scientific research publicized by scientists and scholars such as Charles Murray and the late Richard Herrnstein, J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, and others is beginning to challenge it. Yet even if their conclusions are not firmly established or accepted, race, at least in a subjective sense, does carry implications for culture, if only because most human beings acquire their culture through their biological parents, with whom they also share a genetic inheritance. Culture, then, even if it is not determined or directly shaped by race, is at least carried by race or to a large extent runs parallel to it, and the possibility cannot be ignored that a comparatively rapid and dramatic change in the racial composition of a society will also involve a major cultural change as well.

In the case of the United States, there can be little doubt that the racial transition projected for the middle of the next century will also be a significant cultural transition (as indeed, Mr. Clinton, if not his counterparts on the right, seems to appreciate). The history of the United States is intimately connected to racial conflict, perhaps more so than that of any other historically white society in the world, and the legacy of these conflicts - over black slavery, the conquest of the American Indians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the annexation of Mexican territory in the mid-nineteenth century, the importation of Asian labor and the mass immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century, the civil rights movement, and the current controversies over race, affirmative action, and immigration itself - will surely inform the relations among white, black, yellow, and brown Americans in the coming century.

Moreover, at least as significant as the racial transition itself is the perceptible emergence in the last decade or so of an explicitly racial consciousness among an increasing number of non-whites, even as white leaders like Mr. Clinton and Mr. Dornan renounce the meaning and importance of race and as white scientists and commentators who discuss it are ostracized or punished. But the late sociologist Robert A. Nisbet perceived the emergence of race as a vehicle of radical and revolutionary action as early as 1973 in his history of social thought, The Social Philosophers. "In our day," Nisbet wrote, "color has come close to replacing nationality and economic class as the major setting for revolutionary thrust, strategy, tactics, and also philosophy.... racial revolution as an aspiration is becoming increasingly separate from other philosophies or strategies of revolution."

This racial consciousness is perhaps most apparent among black Americans, who in large numbers idolize leaders like Louis Farrakhan and the Rev. Al Sharpton that are regarded as extremists or crackpots by most whites. Black racial consciousness is also obvious in events such as the glamorization of O.J. Simpson after his acquittal in the trial for the murder of his white ex-wife; in black voting behavior; and in various manifestations of black popular culture and entertainment, as well as in an increasingly explicit rejection among blacks of the ostensibly integrationist and egalitarian ideals of the civil rights movement and in black support for segregated dormitories and student centers on college campuses; exclusively black clubs, fraternities, and professional associations; academic curricula like Afrocentrism and "critical race studies" that focus on blacks per se and their achievements and victimization by whites; and the popularization of explicitly racialist theories that identify blacks as a superior group and whites as inherently repressive, aggressive, and exploitative toward non-whites. In 1990, according to a CBS-New York Times poll, 25 percent of black Americans believed the U.S. government was deliberately supplying drugs to blacks to destroy them, while 30 percent believed the government had deliberately invented AIDS to kill blacks, and 80 percent believed there existed a racist plot to discredit black elected leaders or that such a plot was possible.

"...as significant as the racial transition itself is the perceptible emergence ... of an explicitly racial consciousness among an increasing number of non-whites..." Blacks, however, are not the only non-white minority to acquire, voice, and increasingly legitimize a racial consciousness. Hispanic Americans also appear to be following the same course, especially in increasingly Hispanic parts of the United States where Hispanics (largely of Mexican extraction) can expect to become the ethnic majority well before the middle of the next century. While the term "Hispanic" is properly a linguistic term, the Mexican and Amerindian background of most American Hispanics lends itself to a racial identity, and the very opposition to immigration manifested in the movement for Proposition 187 in California in 1994 appears to have helped instigate the articulation of an explicitly racial-nationalist ideology among Hispanics in that state and throughout the Southwestern United States.

Public statements from Hispanic political leaders frequently invoke an Hispanic racial-national solidarity. Thus, Joe Baca, a member of the California State Assembly, said in January, 1995, "We need more Latinos out there. We must stand up and be counted! We must be united! We must be together! We must be united! Because if we're not united, you know what's going to happen? We're like sticks, we're broken in pieces. Divided, we're not together." Similarly, Gloria Molina, Los Angeles County Supervisor, said in June, 1996, "Tonight Latinos across this country are coming together and they are shouting one thing - we are united. And we are united because we want to demand the kind of political respect that we should have." Richard Alatorre of the Los Angeles City Council also does not hesitate to broadcast his Hispanic identity and his political intentions. "Because our numbers are growing," he told an Hispanic audience in September, 1996, "they're afraid of what this great mass of minorities that now live in our communities - they're afraid that we're going to take over the governmental institutions and other institutions. They're right, we will take them over, and we are not going to go away, we are here to stay, and we are saying ya basta (enough now)...." The rise of Hispanic racial nationalism in the United States is in fact facilitated by the demographic transition predicted for the next century. Thus, Jose Angel Gutierrez, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and a founder of "Chicano nationalism," said in January, 1995, "Group ascendancy. Why in order for us to have a homeland must we give up our Mexican-ness and become white-like? Why? Hostages in our land. Prisoners of war. We are millions. We just have to survive. We have an aging White America. They are not making babies. They are dying. It's a matter of time. The explosion is in our population."

It is true that these kinds of sentiments may not reflect the views of most American Hispanics, and advocates of high levels of immigration often claim that those who voice them are merely extremists who will be isolated and shunned as Hispanic immigrants assimilate. In the 1960s, when "Mexican irredentism" and supporters of "Aztlan" first started appearing, that claim was perhaps arguable, but thirty years later the assertion of Hispanic racial nationalism and solidarity is stronger than ever. Moreover, as the statements cited above suggest, these sentiments are being voiced by elected officials in major local and state institutions of government. Presumably those who utter them believe that their expressions do not harm their political careers and goals, and thus far there is little to indicate that such statements have harmed them.

In addition, Hispanic racial-national solidarity is not confined to academic blowhards and political windbags. A recent series in The Washington Post quoted a working-class Mexican immigrant, Maria Jacinto, who acknowledged that she does not regard herself as an American. "I think I'm still a Mexican," she told reporter William Branigin. "When my skin turns white and my hair turns blonde, then I'll be an American," and she refers to Americans in general as the "gueros," a Spanish slang word that means "blondies." The racial content of her national identity is obvious.

This kind of Hispanic racial nationalism is also embedded in the multiculturalist curricula of many schools, pushed by radical Hispanic organizations like MEChA (an explicitly separatist organization, Movemiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, or "Chicano Student Movement of Aztlan"), and taught by racially conscious teachers to their students. Last winter, two teachers in New Mexico, Patsy and Nadine Cordova, were fired by the local school board for teaching what the board called "racism" and which was in fact a view of American history that portrayed whites as exploiters and tyrants and "Chicanos" as innocent victims. As Eduardo Hernandez Chavez, director of Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico, remarked to The Washington Post (February 6, 1998) in defending the Cordova sisters' teaching, "How can you teach about Chicanos and our culture and our place in American society without teaching about conquest and repression and subjugation?" The idea of white repression and subjugation of Hispanics is thus inherent to Hispanic studies as it is taught in American education today. At least one of the Cordova sisters' students seems to have taken her lessons to heart. "I'm a Chicano," she told the Post. "I consider myself to be more than just an American."

The ethnic identity that is emerging among Hispanic immigrants as well as among black Americans is not the same sort of identity that leads Irish-Americans to celebrate St. Patrick's Day or Polish-Americans to dance polkas. It is not merely an enthusiasm for ethnic roots and the observance of traditional customs, but rather a militant and all-encompassing identity that excludes and conflicts with traditional American allegiances, institutions, and values and explicitly identifies whites as a racially alien enemy, an oppressor, whose institutions are to be taken over and whose race is to be expelled from territories that whites stole in the Mexican-American War.

"...there is every reason to believe that the new non-white majority will emerge as a racially conscious population and that its outspoken and transparent animosity to whites will remain a major component of its consciousness in the future." While some contemporary exponents of these racial ideologies may sound extreme, the basic assumptions of the ideology seem to be widely shared by many non-whites, and it is predictable that the leaders who formulate and voice these views will have no compelling reason to abandon them as white leaders express indulgence or indifference and as non-white numbers continue to rise. Racial consciousness and political and cultural solidarity vastly augment the political power of both black and Hispanic minorities and have been responsible for most of the political gains of these communities. Hispanic solidarity against immigration reform has already played a major role in causing even conservative Republicans to back away from the issue entirely, to reverse their earlier congressional votes against welfare and food stamps eligibility for immigrants, and to pass legislation for making Puerto Rico a state. Black opposition to ending affirmative action has also induced Republicans to avoid that issue and actually to defeat legislation abolishing affirmative action in federal education policy.

Given the prospect of a non-white demographic majority emerging at some point in the next fifty to sixty years, given the rewards that racial consciousness and solidarity have already brought non-white minorities, and given the unwillingness of white leaders of either the left or the right to resist non-white solidarity (let alone invoke white racial consciousness as a counter-balance), there is every reason to believe that the new non-white majority will emerge as a racially conscious population and that its outspoken and transparent animosity to whites will remain a major component of its consciousness in the future.

Whites therefore need to ask themselves what will be their own future in a country in which for the first time they will be a minority. The logical projection of that future is that whites will increasingly find themselves subjected to discrimination and even persecution by a non-white majority raised to believe - through education, through political and other public rhetoric, and through their own folklore - that whites are an evil enemy who at least in the past dominated and exploited non-whites. We can anticipate, on the basis of contemporary trends, what some of the forms of anti-white discrimination and persecution might be.

Courtroom Discrimination

It is increasingly common among black jurors to acquit black defendants because of their common racial identity, a habit that became notorious after the acquittal of O.J. Simpson in 1995, when blacks throughout the United States fervently expressed their belief that Simpson was innocent of the murder of his white ex-wife and her white friend, Ron Goldman. Public opinion polls showed that some 60 percent of black Americans believed in Simpson's innocence, despite the presentation of evidence of his guilt that most whites found convincing, and the indications are that at least one black juror was swayed to vote for his acquittal simply out of racial identity and animosity toward whites. Thus, juror Brenda Moran, in an interview with the press just after the verdict, was quick to dismiss any evidence deriving from police detective Mark Fuhrman because she "couldn't believe anything" he said after he was accused of racial prejudice against blacks. She also dismissed evidence of Simpson's beating of his wife as a motive for the murder on the grounds that "this is a murder trial, not domestic abuse." Though she was quick to dismiss evidence from Detective Fuhrman, she told the press, "I know O.J. Simpson didn't do it."

The Simpson case is not an isolated one. In 1992, a white aide to U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama was murdered in the District of Columbia, and a black suspect, Edward Evans, was arrested and tried. Evans received a mistrial when a black juror refused to convict him and rejected all evidence against the defendant, whom she publicly embraced afterwards. Similarly, in 1994, black defendant Davon Neverdon was acquitted of murder by a Baltimore jury containing 11 blacks despite the testimony of four eye witnesses that they saw him kill the victim. The twelfth juror, an Asian-American, told the judge afterwards, "Race may be playing some part" in the jury's decision.

Soon after the Simpson verdict, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy front-page story detailing many similar cases across the country in which black jurors have apparently voted for acquittal on the basis of the race of the defendant. Indeed, some advocates of "critical race theory," like Professor Paul Butler of George Washington Law School, argue that black drug defendants should be acquitted because "criminal conduct among African Americans is often a predictable reaction to oppression" and therefore not really a crime.

The converse of acquitting black defendants on the basis of their race is convicting white defendants on the basis of theirs, and this too is not unknown today. Detroit police officers Larry Nevers and Walter Budzyn were sentenced to prison terms after the death of black suspect Malice Green in their custody, and racial animosity appears to have played a strong role in their trial and conviction. Yale sociology professor Wendell Bell argues that since there are more blacks in prisons than there are whites, we need to lock up more whites to balance the prison population. "More whites and middle- and upper-class persons must be sent to prison to correct the existing disproportionality, while members of groups now overrepresented in prison must be allowed to leave or be admitted at lower rates of entry," he writes.

Crime

At the present time, some 25 percent of the federal prison population is composed of immigrants, suggesting a fairly high level of crime among the immigrant population in general, while blacks commit more than half of all rapes and robberies and 60 percent of all murders in the United States, despite the fact that blacks presently compose only 12 percent of the total population and Hispanics approximately 9 percent. There seems to be no reason to suppose that such disproportionate crime rates will diminish as the respective ethnic groups increase in number relative to whites. Moreover, statistical evidence indicates that blacks are more likely to victimize whites as crime targets than other blacks, and it is arguable that this tendency is intentional on the part of black criminals. It is therefore hardly unreasonable to believe that a non-white majority United States will be a country in which merely being white invites criminal attack and that in a court system dominated by non-white juries and judges and perhaps animated by active anti-white racial animosity, white victims will find justice far more difficult to obtain than they do today.

Persecution

If the political system of the U.S. in the next century continues to reflect majority rule, then we can expect not only state and local governments but also the national government to be dominated by the non-white majority. No doubt there will be white enclaves in some parts of the country that will continue to consist of white majorities and may actually send white representatives to Congress, but white congressional leaders would probably be a minority. Given the unabashed racial nationalism now commonplace among Hispanic and black political leaders and the animosity exhibited toward whites, it would not be unreasonable to predict the outright political and racial persecution of whites as the political power of non-whites becomes en-trenched. Indeed, historian William McNeill has argued that what he calls "ethnic hierarchy" - the domination of some ethnic groups by another - has been the norm throughout most of human history, and only in the white majority United States of the late 20th century has a dominant ethnic group (whites) expressed any concern for the political equality of other ethnicities. The emergence of outright ethnic, national, religious, and racial conflicts in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa since the end of the Cold War suggests an impending return to "ethnic hierarchy" and an abandonment of the American deviation from it in the last few decades. Whatever the degree of non-white dispossession and persecution in a non-white future, it is clear that the white minority will be entirely dependent on the non-white majority for continued respect for its constitutional rights and liberties.

Culture

As suggested at the beginning of this article, race at least tends to carry culture if it does not determine or shape it, and already the indications of anti-white rejection of traditional American cultural symbols and the construction of non-white symbols in their place is obvious. The rejection of traditional normative English is apparent in the emergence of "Black English" and "Ebonics," while Hispanics and other immigrant communities increasingly seem to reject and resent having to learn English as a means of assimilating into American society. As Peter Brimelow has reported in Forbes, the 1990 census found that there are nearly five million individuals under the age of five in the country who say they cannot speak English well, and these are not immigrants but native-born Americans who are children of immigrants. "As they move up the age pyramid," Brimelow writes, "development of permanent foreign-language enclaves appears inevitable." Language, of course, is one of the primary bonds of a nation-state, but the cultural bonds of nationhood extend well beyond it.

In 1997 a largely black public school in New Orleans removed the name of George Washington from its building on the grounds that the first President of the United States was a slaveowner. While Washington was a slaveowner and a Southerner, he is also clearly a national icon as well, and the decision to remove his name represents a movement to a new stage in the reconstruction of the nation from one confined to attacking explicitly Confederate symbols to attacking national ones."...development

of permanent language enclaves appears inevitable."

- Peter Brimelow

In any case, the black-engineered attack on Southern symbols is paralleled by Hispanic attacks on analogous symbols of white American culture in California and the Southwest. In 1994 the city of San Jose, California, voted to construct a large statue of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl in its public square and rejected a proposal to build a statue to Col. Thomas Fallon, who claimed the city for the United States in 1846. "I think it's going to be part of the blend that we Mexican people really are," the city Housing Commissioner, Sofia Mendoza, stated with regard to the statue. The "blend," apparently, is of Mexican and Aztec and not American. In San Francisco, a statue showing an Indian kneeling before a Franciscan friar that had stood in front of the City Hall for nearly a century was removed, and its placement in another location was protested by American Indians on the grounds that it failed to show the truth about white Christian exploitation of the Indians in the history of the state. The American Indian Movement Confederation complained that the statue "symbolizes the humiliation, degradation, genocide and sorrow inflicted upon this country's indigenous people by a foreign invader, through religious persecution and ethnic prejudice." In Espanola, New Mexico, a statue of Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Onate was bombed in 1998 by Indian activists because it symbolized Spanish (European) conquest of the Indian population. Among the lessons that the Cordova sisters were teaching in their courses on Chicano history in New Mexico were that California and the Southwest were illegally and aggressively seized from Mexico by the United States, that the Texas Rangers had "tortured and killed thousands of Mexicans," and that David Crockett, hero of the Alamo, boasted of eating potatoes "fried in fat from Indian bodies." The obvious purpose of such teaching is to inculcate in students hostility toward the United States as a nation and its majority white population. The teaching, moreover, is not confined to non-white students; it is also directed at white students in order to induce guilt, and discredit any positive association with their own racial and national identities. In a country in which whites will be a minority, there is no reason to expect that symbols, statues, songs, heroes, historic events, or language associated with the new minority race will continue to be accorded special respect or observance. Since these symbols and icons provide a significant amount of the cultural cohesion on which the American nation is built, their disappearance and discrediting will in itself constitute a deliberate destruction of the American national identity as it has been known throughout its history. While this kind of deliberate attack on traditional American symbols was controversial briefly in the 1980s and early 1990s, it seems to be so no longer. Indeed, conservative and Republican leaders, who voiced most of the criticism of these trends, are now silent, and last spring the chairman of the Republican Party in California, Michael Schroeder, told The Washington Times, "If we get into a debate about the superiority of one culture over another, then we end up being perceived as harsh, racist and out of touch." As immigration continues to alter the national population and as immigrants continue to develop and mobilize on the basis of their own national and racial identity, political and public resistance to the demands of their racial nationalism will become increasingly difficult.

The racial transition to a non-white majority country, what Peter Brimelow has called America's "ethnic revolution," will therefore be considerably more than an alteration in the national skin color. Every indication suggests that it will also be a profound political and cultural revolution, the consequences of which most white Americans have not even begun to think about or anticipate.

What kind of future?

A number of questions about the future of whites arise Will whites be able to receive a fair trial when charged with criminal acts against a non-white? Will they be able to gain justice against non-white criminals who victimize them and their homes and families? Will crime cartels based in Colombia, Mexico, or Macao be the powers behind the public thrones of the American future, dictating political, legal, and economic decisions according to their own interests? Will whites' rights to property and to freedom of expression, religion, assembly, and political participation be respected? Will they be able to teach their children according to the values and standards of their ancestors? Will those ancestors and their achievements be truthfully represented in education and the mass media, or will they be subjected to continuous debunking and ridicule as villains, tyrants, and fools? Will whites be able to compete in schools, colleges, universities and the job market with non-whites who enjoy special privileges through affirmative action, quotas, and set-asides? Will the aging white population receive the Social Security and Medicare benefits that a younger and less-white working population generates? Will non-whites continue to preserve the economic and technological infrastructure of the country and its natural environment and resources or will they, as most non-white societies do now, neglect and waste them? Will even the basic constitutional form of government and the moral norms on which it rests persist, or will a Latin American or Third World political pattern alternating between anarchy, corruption, and despotism become typical? Will immigrants from Third World societies leave their political allegiances and hostilities behind, or will they import them to shape American politics, with persistent antagonisms between Hutu and Tutsi, Arab and Jew, Hindu and Muslim, etc.? Will the work ethic, a cultural legacy of Northern European civilization, persist, or will it give way to a new economic ethic typical of undeveloped economies, of subsistence work habits by the poor and conspicuous consumption by the wealthy few? Will the immigrant population shun welfare or will it, as it has to date, become more dependent on welfare than native-born Americans? Will the aesthetic values of Western literature, art, and music persist in their traditional art forms, and will the Western scientific world-view persist, based on centuries of Western belief in the existence of objective truth, logical reasoning, and empirical verification, or will it vanish before the imported magical cults of Santeria, voodoo, and the fatalistic and often nihilistic religious systems of the East? Will even the basic political and territorial unity of the United States persist, or will it crumble as each distinct culture, race, ethnicity, and tribe stakes out its own territory as a separate state? White Americans - especially those who boast that unlimited immigration from the Third World will surely result in more fast food employees and more software companies - have not even begun to ask these questions, let alone answer them seriously.

Of course, these questions don't have to be asked and the "ethnic revolution" doesn't have to happen. If immigration were halted now, if political and public leaders would defend their own culture and their own people, if the calculated subversion of Western and traditional American civilization were simply forbidden, the transition to a non-white nation (if "nation" is the right word) could be stopped or at least slowed to the point where some degree of assimilation could take place. But until white Americans and those non-whites willing to support them have the courage to defend themselves and their future, the future they will get is unlikely to be theirs. TSC