Extracting the Poison From White Racism: How to defuse white nationalism's growing appeal

Carol M. Swain, a professor of both political science and law at Vanderbilt University, has studied racial attitudes for more than a decade. Her latest book, "The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration" (Cambridge University Press, 2002), argues that white nationalism is on the rise. To defuse its appeal, she counsels African-Americans to stop supporting affirmative action and reparations. Felicia R. Lee spoke with her.

You argue that an energized white separatist movement exists, despite polls that show more racial tolerance and an increasingly diverse popular culture. Why?

A lot of white people feel that diversity is being forced on them and it comes at their expense.

For example, in one of my focus groups with whites from the New York area — men and women of different ages — they were very angry. One person said employers will not take white males when they have to take blacks, Hispanics and Chinese; that there were quotas; that blacks could go to schools like Yale before whites; that blacks were lazy.

Blacks saw quotas as a ceiling and were angry about affirmative action, too. They said affirmative action was the receptionist out front and the guy who fixes the copy machine.

Racial extremists have a long history in this country. Why sound alarm bells now?

A constellation of forces are coming together at this point in time that we've never had before. There is the projection that non-Hispanic whites will be the minority around the year 2050. There's economic uncertainty, with a recession and globalization and loss of jobs. An immigration policy that means that some immigrants do compete with Americans for jobs. Racial preferences, a policy never accepted by the majority of whites. Continued white fear of black crime. And the ability of the Internet to reach people who want information about white nationalism.

Historically, rapid demographic changes and economic uncertainty put people on a collision course and lead to social ills.

Senator Trent Lott is under fire for saying that the United States would be better off if Strom Thurmond had won the presidency on the segregationist platform in 1948. Should he resign?

I think Trent Lott should lead the national debate on race. If we're going to have a serious discussion, we need people to say what's on their minds. I don't think he should step down. If we attack these people when they put their feet in their mouths, we can never get to the root of the problem.

Is the specter of whites as a minority the biggest race card the racists play?

Yes. They say that your children and grandchildren will be submerged in these teeming masses of people that don't share your values, don't share your culture. It's very dangerous that white nationalists are the only ones talking in open forums about what it might mean for white people being a minority in America.

You yourself overcame the disadvantages of being black, poor, a high-school dropout. And now you advocate restrictions on immigration and the end of race-based affirmative action as big steps toward creating a better racial climate.

We can neutralize white nationalists by taking away two of their best issues. One is affirmative action as racial preferences and another is liberal immigration policies. One of the concerns that many people have about immigration is that new immigrants, who don't have a shared history of discrimination in the same way as African-Americans, can be eligible for racial preferences; it works against the interests of African-Americans and other people who have a history in this country. Some of them are illegal immigrants, who tend to depress the wages of native workers.

We need to move toward race-neutral affirmative-action policies and guarantee people a working wage. I believe that affirmative action never reached down to the people who were most disadvantaged.

The house is on fire for African-Americans, but the black leadership is more focused on the easier, symbolic issues. Some of those issues that the black leaders champion push some white people into the neo-conservative movement as a reaction. Like the focus on slave reparations at this time in history — the timing could not be worse. If whites don't support affirmative action, why would they support reparations? I think it comes at an enormous cost of resentments being stirred.

Black leadership needs to focus still on issues like black crime. Even though crime has dropped nationwide, it's still a pattern that separates African-Americans from other groups. There are cultural things that need to be addressed, like the high rate of illegitimacy. Close to 70 percent of black children are born illegitimate. AIDS is the leading cause of death of African-Americans under the age of 55, and that is not really being discussed by the leading black spokespeople.

Liberals, you say, are not any better in turning back white nationalists because they have no new ideas about race, immigration, poverty.

I think the left is very much focused on maintaining and defending the status quo of things put into place 30 years ago. They're not strategic at all.

How in the world is the average white person, who maybe doesn't like affirmative action, turned into a white nationalist?

To reach the mainstream white population, the group they'd like to politicize, white nationalists have very skillfully adopted the language of multiculturalism and the language of civil rights. The language of multiculturalism says it's O.K. for groups to organize for self-determination and self-pride. The white nationalists say if it's O.K. for blacks and Hispanics, then why not whites? And they say that white Americans are the group that is most discriminated against in America and that there's no one protecting their interests. They are talking about racial preferences, immigration, job loss. The K.K.K. is a dying organization, not because its views and hatred are not out there, but because people have other avenues, and white intellectuals, people who are well educated, are not going to be in any of those organizations.

We need to move toward race-neutral affirmative-action policies and guarantee people a working wage.

"Guarantee people a living wage". Definitely a liberal socialist, but the points brought out in this article indicate that blacks finally are seeing the damage the law of unintended consequences has provided to them as a result of the race-consciousness and victimhood inherent in affirmative action. This day had to come.

The author seems to be overly concerned, I believe, with the danger to blacks from white nationalism, when the real damage is wreaked on the black populace through the acceptance of victimhood, and the severe psychological limitations victimhood inflicts.

I think Trent Lott should lead the national debate on race. If we're going to have a serious discussion, we need people to say what's on their minds.

This is one of the more perceptive points in the interview. I think the single greatest obstacle to progress in race relations in the United States is a lack of honesty, on both sides, in the debate. When whites are almost uniformly afraid to state their view candidly, how can minorities know how to react or interact? And many minorities long have used different strategies of masking behavior in dealing with whites.

Over the years, I have heard several blacks make this point, albeit not in a general way. As one black woman put it: "I'll take a Southerner over a Northerner any day. If the Southerner doesn't like you, he says so to your face. If he invites you in through the front door, he means it. With most Southerners, you know where you stand. You may not always like it, but you can deal with it. Up North, folks make nice to your face and call you [N-word] behind your back. You never know who's your friend and who'll stab your back."

The fundamental conditions to improved race relations, IMHO, are honesty and mutual respect. Without honesty, even candor, in discussions, mutual respect is probably impossible. The problem is our culture of victimization and desire to avoid offense. The truth is what blacks here from whites will sometimes be as unpleasant and offensive as what whites hear from blacks. To acknowledge feelings, which are complex and change over time, helps. To suppress and deny feelings in this context is only to let them fester and breed more resentment.

What's basically occurring now is the culmination of liberal desires to replace American liberty with a socialist, centralized, one-party state.

The two main prongs of attack for destroying the American system of government have been judicial activism and immigration. The liberals decided many decades ago that the American people will never voluntarily vote for the one-party dictatorship the liberals desire. So phase one was to transfer as much power as possible out of the hands of the elected branches of government, and into the hands of liberal judges. The liberal media solidified liberal judicial power by declaring all their rulings to be holy scripture, landmarks that can never be overturned. Thus we had things such as busing, abortion, bans on school prayer, and many other liberal agenda items simply imposed upon us by judicial fiat.

But judical aggression would only get liberals so far. They knew that in the long run, they would simply have to replace the American people with another population, one which has no traditions of ordered liberty or Western concepts of the rule of law.

That's why the 1965 immigration law was passed. The goal of that law was to displace the existing population of the United States, and replace it with a different population. Once the third world immigration began to flow, the liberals replaced the old immigrant ideal of the melting pot and assimilation with one of multi-culturalism and diversity. In other words, new immigrants aren't supposed to assimilate. Rather, they're supposed to retain their national identities, languages, customs, etc.. They aren't supposed to adopt American ways and admire American traditions. Instead, they're taught that America has been an evil, oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic regime. Our country, over time, will be Balkanized into racial and ethnic factions, which is exactly what liberals want.

California is the prototype for what the liberals want the entire country to become. The goal is very simple: Replace the existing population of the U.S. with a third world population which retains its identity, language, customs, and thus finds itself at odds with America itself. The assimilation ideals of the Ellis Island era are now gone, replaced by multi-culturalism and diversity. Unless something is done to stop this, the entire country will be Balkanized by 2050, and half the U.S. population will be people who hate our traditions and values.

"There is the projection that non-Hispanic whites will be the minority around the year 2050"

This angers me the most. It is the span of my lifetime. It reminds me of the Biblical story of Esau selling his birthright to Jacob for a bowl of Pottage.

The white minority after 2050 will continue to drop drastically from that point on. By 2100, when the population is projected to be about 800 million to one billion, the white population will be miniscule.

Try as I might to believe otherwise, I believe this is our likely fate. Calls for "tolerance" and "duh-versity" fall flat when you see places like Israel (which is slated to be demographically overwhelmed within its own borders), Kosovo (ethnic conflict aided by turning a blind eye to massive illegal immigration), Zimbabwe (where whites for all practical purposes are becoming an actively hunted minority), and South Africa (which isn't too far behind Zimbabwe). Europe is in its pre-Islamic period right now, since they're going to be demographically overwhelmed like Israel. From the looks of it, Western Civ is going down and likely for good, due to sheer numbers, if nothing else.

With this in mind, I believe this professor is right when she says that whites increasingly feel like an embattled group. The real danger will come in ignoring their concerns, especially if we see the beginnings of ethnic violence in this country and we see that the government can't or won't do anything about it. If whites feel that literally every non-white is out to get them, chances are that they'll turn to a leadership that will tell them exactly what they want to hear. How does the prospect of a mega-Yugoslavia with nuclear weapons sound? Especially if you've got a group that listens to a demagogic figure that has some of them as a trump card? And even worse, they're in a situation that won't allow otherwise level-headed, well-meaning people to defuse this, because of the racial animosity that's been building up?

As for me personally, this is the reason why I believe that we have to stop illegal immigration, like yesterday. This is also why the pro-illegal crowd calling people racists for wanting to control our borders cut no ice with me. If we don't have an honest discussion and action to stop this soon, it'll give the real racists the opening they need to exploit, and a bitter, embattled populace that will listen seriously to them. May G-d help us, and non-whites, if that backlash turns violent.

I agree with most of what the professor has to say here. However, in the last Q&A, the suggestion is that non-Blacks (sick of incessant whining/race-baiting/hate speech by leftist blacks) are somehow overall morphing into the KKK is wrong.

It's clear to most non-blacks in America that the Congressional Black Caucus and the NAACP consist mainly of black racists and bigots who regularly engage in hate speech and are never held accountable. It's that kind of stridency in politics that's fostered a new kind of "racism" by non-blacks which is NOT based on skin color, but the result of open hostility and contempt shown by black leaders and politicians towards non-blacks who don't march in lock-step with their extremist agenda.

Plus, I'm sorry to say, blacks as an ethnic group overall have morphed into a terrible stereotype that happens to be true: 70% illegitimacy rate, 12% of the population responsible for 40% of all abortions, 12% of the population representing 35%-40% of the welfare rolls, etc. I know I've reached a point of exasperation where I just shrug my shoulders and think "Let Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson, Maxine Waters and their followers scream all they want. Most of the problems blacks face today are due to a lack of personal responsibility. Until they begin to acknowledge their own role in the sorry state of their community, I just don't give a d@mn anymore."

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