On the proper attitude of whites toward black people

One’s first thought is that it would be silly to have a single attitude toward a whole race of people. Within any race, some will be admirable, some scoundrels, most unremarkable, all created for eternal glory with God but not all achieving it. However, our culture and its institutions tell us that blacks are the innocent victims of white wickedness. If we were asked to pity them for their poverty and suffering, that would not be a problem. If we were asked to admire them for their courage and resilience, that would not be a problem. One group of people can pity or admire another without any unhealthy psychic stress. Instead, blacks are held up as a rebuke to whites; we are supposed to feel guilty and ashamed of our ancestors and ourselves on account of their/our mistreatment of blacks. Because of this “shameful past and present”, we are not allowed to venerate our ancestors and treasure our culture as all healthy peoples must. Faced with such a demand, the only natural responses from whites are either 1) submission, that is to accept one’s shame, become an “anti-racist” and renounce one’s own people, or 2) resentment, at its most extreme to hate blacks as those who have robbed us of our dignity. Both responses are unjust. Our ancestors are entitled to our pious devotion, and most blacks are decent people who have never done us any harm. The black race, or rather the idea of it, is a tool of the mostly-not black ruling class that indeed hates us. Furthermore, it’s worth remembering that the most faithful branches of the Catholic and Anglican Churches are in Africa, so in ecclesiastic battles, we support the black African bishops against the degenerate heretical bishops from Europe.

So, if we’re not to grovel before blacks, and we are not to resent them, and the culture insists that we not simply judge them as individuals (deciding to ignore race is now said to be itself “racist”, and even if you don’t agree about that, the fact that everyone else is screaming about race makes it impossible for it not to be the first thing you notice about someone), what sort of attitude should we take?

Thinking about the present

Everyone agrees that Black America has problems. They make less money, do worse in school, are victims and perpetrators of crime at higher rates, are less likely to have intact families and grow up with one’s father married to one’s mother than the other races. The explanations suggested are 1) white racism (meaning both the effects of slavery and the ongoing conspiracies whites allegedly continue to perpetrate against them)–this being the only officially allowed explanation, 2) genetic inferiority of blacks (that they’re naturally on average less intelligent, more prone to violence, or whatever), and 3) problems with the culture, meaning some combination of the culture of blacks and how the surrounding culture interacts with them–in what is admired, what is rewarded and punished (e.g. glorification of gang criminals, bullying of black kids who do well in school for “acting white”).

In fact, we know that 3 is the correct answer for the worst black problems, because their crime rates and family structure used to be so much better before the 1960s. The proximity of slavery, white racism, and black genes certainly haven’t gotten worse during that time, but the culture certainly has. No doubt some of other races dislike blacks, but anti-white bigotry is much more prevalent, whether one considers Regime propaganda, official discrimination against whites and in favor of blacks in businesses and colleges, or interracial violent crime (they attack us more often than we do them). Furthermore, when talking about “racism”, I think one should distinguish automatic hostility toward another race from simply having a preference for one’s own race and attachment to its culture. Both would fit the definition of “racial discrimination”, but only the first is usually immoral. In fact, the second is entirely healthy and is found among all peoples (except, to their discredit, liberal whites).

There is an unstated assumption that all sides of the argument about Black America’s problems make–namely that the state of white people, in particular liberal, college-educated, upper-class white people, is the healthy norm to which other groups should aspire. What should happen, everyone seems to agree, is that blacks should start going to college at the same rate as liberal whites, get the same kinds of jobs as liberal whites, be equally represented in liberal white hobbies, not be arrested for crimes any more often than liberal whites. The only point of disagreement is whose fault it is that blacks don’t have the social profile of liberal whites.

In fact, liberal white culture is profoundly unhealthy, and if blacks were to suddenly adopt the liberal white social profile in income, attitudes, and behavior, they would suffer profound losses in addition to making undeniable gains. It’s true that white liberals are very “well-educated” (if going to college and having credentials indeed constitute an education), very law-abiding, very conscientious in pursuing their careers, very good at avoiding things like teenage pregnancy and smoking. However, this is largely the result of their docility. Their same scrupulosity that leads them to work hard and follow rules also leads them to join internet and physical mobs, to believe everything they read in the newspapers, to despise useful trades and pursue useless college degrees, to turn against and denounce neighbors, parents, and children who run afoul of the official ideology. Conversely, the orneriness that enables one to defy public hysteria and be loyal to one’s own friends and family in defiance of a wider society also inclines one to get drunk and brawl in bars and to engage in other antisocial behavior like that. I sympathize more with characteristically “black” faults, which are at least normal human faults. Better an excessive loyalty to kith and kin that interferes with law enforcement than an ideological purity that abolishes loyalty and tolerance altogether.

In fact, the same downsides of urban black culture are somewhat present in rural conservative white culture as well. Liberals like to taunt us conservatives for being overweight and poorly “educated”, for breaking the law and having children out of wedlock. (I actually suspect that as a culturally lower class white I’m psychologically more similar to lower class blacks than to my white professional class peers.) Furthermore, white liberal conscientiousness and docility is historically anomalous even for our civilization. Ancient, medieval, and early modern whites were much more violent and criminal, much more difficult to control. True human excellence requires combining both docile and ornery sets of virtues, and while some individuals achieve this, no contemporary culture does a good job of fostering both.

Thinking about the past

Of course, the loudmouths in the media who are driving all of this are not primarily concerned with helping blacks; the movements they’ve promoted have been profoundly harmful to black communities. The main point is to demoralize whites. If slavery and segregation are such obvious and horrific evils, and our ancestors failed to recognize this, doesn’t that cast doubt on their wisdom and on the value of the traditions they’ve handed down to us?

The only way to know is to consider what they actually believed, give it a hearing and see how unreasonable it actually is. Slavery has been practiced by all peoples in most times; the ancients and Muslims practiced it extensively and never saw anything wrong with it; neither the Old Testament Jews nor the Church pronounced the ownership of slaves immoral. They were right not to, because the word “slavery” has been used for a wide range of arrangements of varying morality and moral hazard. Suppose you were presented two men of a foreign culture and unfamiliar language, and the first apparently is authorized to give orders to the second and to punish disobedience. Is the second man a slave, a serf, a vassal, a subject? Is the first man a master, a king, a commanding officer, a warden? It’s actually more difficult to tell than you might initially think. You may protest that slavery is clearly distinct from all these other forms of subordination because a slave is property, but the word “property” also lacks a cross-cultural univocal single meaning. Property even of an inanimate object like land was not, for most pre-modern peoples, stuff you could use or abuse in any way you liked, but something held in trust. Slave societies from pagan Rome to the Muslim Middle East to Catholic Brazil to the Protestant American South all recognized that slaves (meaning here those they called “slaves” or a word translated as “slaves”) were human beings with some rights that should be respected, however often they were violated in practice. (Among the stronger arguments of the abolitionists is that, regardless of the intrinsic morality of slavery, slave owners will often be tempted to abuse their power without much risk of consequences, and such situations are best avoided.) It could be argued that 18th-19th century bourgeois liberalism’s absolute ideas of private property, which poorly fit the relationship of slave ownership, inspired the abolitionist movement as much as liberalism’s devotion to freedom.

One can, it’s true, find “anti-slavery” statements from Church authorities (and presumably from Muslim authorities as well, but I know their history less well), because servitude was acknowledged as a misfortune analogous to poverty. It is a pious deed to give away one’s own possessions to alleviate another’s poverty, but it’s not a moral requirement. On the other hand, it would be a sin to make someone poor by stealing his possessions. Similarly, manumission was encouraged, humane treatment demanded, and kidnapping/enslavement condemned without asserting any inherent sinfulness in owning slaves.

In summary, the moral questions and human relations in slave societies (whether from our past or other cultures’) are more ambiguous than commonly thought; our ancestors–as well as the other peoples of the world, almost all of whom thought owning slaves acceptable–were not moral imbeciles for recognizing this. Nor is there anything remarkable about Western civilization in this regard. All the peoples who denounce whites (including, of course, black Africans) themselves were historically slave-owning peoples.

On the other hand, our ancestors were also surely right to regard slavery as a misfortune, so blacks are right to honor their ancestors for surviving terrible hardships. A healthy development would be to shift focus from the cruelty of slaveowners to the resilience of slaves, from what breeds resentment to what breeds pride, the sort of selective focus that allowed Roman Christians to honor the martyrs while being patriotic servants of the Empire.

I shall have even less to say about segregation–defined, as contemporary writers usually do, not as “legal” segregation but as whites having their own neighborhoods, schools, clubs, sports teams, or churches–because it is the historical norm for distinct peoples to live separately and preferentially mix with their own kind (that’s how they remain distinct), and I’ve never heard any moral argument against it except the unproven claim that what other people do naturally to preserve their culture, white people do out of malicious hatred for other peoples. I tend to assume that all peoples are pretty much alike. I see that Blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Native Americans like to have their own social clubs and organizations, their own college dorms, their own ceremonies. This seems entirely healthy to me, and I think it would be churlish for me to complain that I’m not invited and to try to take away something that makes them happy and does me no harm. I don’t see why the same attitude shouldn’t apply to whites.

What is a properly pious person to do when faced with the claim that his ancestors were wicked? First of all, he should never apologize for his ancestors. Never. Under no imaginable circumstances. That would be the most wicked betrayal imaginable, and anyone who does it is scum. Are we to imagine, then, that our ancestors were sinless? No, if we truly love them, we will not tell ourselves things that are gratifying to ourselves but do them no good. Although they are for us icons of God because of His use of them in our creation, in themselves they were (or are, in the case of living parents) sinners like us, although their sins are largely of the personal kind with which we are familiar, rather than sins of being oppressors. Furthermore, our deceased ancestors are by no means beyond the reach of our help, and they may be in great need of it. We remain connected to them by common membership in the Body of Christ, and this spiritual connection allows God to work His mercy for them through our prayers and penances. Anyone with true filial piety might consider devoting some time, perhaps fasting one day a week or offering extra prayers each day, for the poor souls in purgatory. In public, you stand by your ancestors by defending them from their detractors. In private, you stand by them by sharing their work of purgation.