This essay is the Introduction to Race and the American Prospect (2006), edited by Samuel T. Francis.

In the Victorian era, the Great Taboo was sex. Today, whatever the label we attach to our own age, the Great Taboo is race. The Victorians virtually denied that sex existed. Today, race is confidently said to be "merely a social construct," a product of the imagination, and of none too healthy imaginations at that, rather than a reality of nature. The Victorians severely punished people who talked about sex, made jokes about sex, or wrote too openly and frankly about sex. Today, journalists, disc jockeys, leading sports figures, public officials, distinguished academics, and major political leaders who violate the racial taboos of our age are fired from their newspapers, networks, or radio stations, forced to resign their positions, condemned by their own colleagues, and subjected to "investigations" of their "backgrounds" and their "links" to other individuals and groups that have also violated the race taboo. We have not, at least in this country so far, reached the point where violating the race taboo brings criminal prosecution and imprisonment, as in both Europe and Canada it may well do, but there are several cases of supposed "white supremacists" being arrested or harassed by law enforcement agencies largely because of their alleged beliefs about race, and the constant agitation for ever more stringent measures against "hate crimes" and "hate speech" seems to point toward the eventual official entrenchment of the race taboo in formal law. Meanwhile, if the government is still restricted in the action it can take to stifle and suppress "racism," the "anti-racist" political left seems to enjoy virtual carte blanche to denounce, vilify, spy on, demonstrate against, intimidate, and even occasionally assault and beat up individuals and organizations that have transgressed the racial Victorianism of our age.

If the analogy between the Victorian taboo on sex and the contemporary taboo on race is valid, then the essays in this book are logically the analogue of pornography, or what conventional Victorians regarded as pornography. Every one of these essays deals with race in a way that the dominant culture of the present day rejects, forbids, and indeed punishes by one means or another. Every one of them deals with aspects of race—its reality as a part of the biological and psychological nature of man and its importance as a social and historical force—that contemporary culture is at best reluctant to discuss at all and absolutely refuses to acknowledge as true. At the same time, in contradiction to the stereotype promoted by "anti-racist" forces, not one of these essays or their authors expresses here or anywhere else any desire to harm, exploit, dominate, or deny the legitimate rights of other races. This book is not a tract promoting "white supremacy" or the restoration of forced segregation.

All the contributors to this volume are white, well educated, and articulate; several are or have been academics or professional journalists and authors, and what unites and drives them as a group is a common concern that their race today faces a crisis that within the coming century and in the United States and Europe could easily lead to either its physical extinction, its subordination to and persecution by other races, or the destruction of its civilization.

Most readers who continue to believe what the dominant culture tells them about the meaning and significance of race will find this concern bizarre. They will at once respond that in the first place, as noted, race does not really exist or, if it does, that it consists of nothing more than superficial and socially irrelevant features of gross physical morphol-ogy—skin color, hair texture, height, perhaps skull shape, etc. Even if race does exist as a biological reality, it certainly has no meaning for behavior, culture, intelligence, or other traits that influence and shape social institutions. Moreover, any effort to take race more seriously is either a deliberate and covert attempt to justify racial hatred or injustice, or is at best a misguided enterprise that is all too likely to lead to hatred, injustice, and even genocide, as it has in the past. This is the conventional attitude toward race that the dominant culture in the West today promotes and enforces, and it is precisely from that attitude and its unspoken premises that the authors of these essays dissent.

The commonly held beliefs about race mentioned above—that it does not exist or is not important and that serious concern about race and racial identity leads to negative and undesirable consequences—are wrong, as these essays demonstrate, and yet it is precisely those beliefs that make it impossible for whites who accept them to preserve themselves as a race—as what scientist J. Philippe Rushton defines as "a group related by common descent, blood, or heredity”^[1]—and the civilization and political institutions their race has created. White racial consciousness, the shared awareness of whites that their racial identity and heritage are real and important and worth preserving, is by far the most taboo of all beliefs about race, a taboo that is not enforced consistently or at all against the consciousness of other races. As black historian Shelby Steele acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal (November 13, 2003), "Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil. Say I'm white and I'm proud' and you are a Nazi.” Mr. Steele, however, was certainly not pointing to the double standard in order to promote or legitimize white consciousness. Indeed, he made use of the widely shared (by non-whites as well as whites) demonic view of whites to reject and deny any white claim to their own racial identity:

No group in recent history has more aggressively seized power in the name of its racial superiority than Western whites. This race illustrated for all time—through colonialism, slavery, white racism, Nazism—the extraordinary human evil that follows when great power is joined to an atavistic sense of superiority and destiny. This is why today's whites, the world over, cannot openly have a racial identity.

Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson, as well as Hispanic leaders like Cruz Bustamante and Mario Obledo, have no problem exulting in their own racial identity and exhorting their people in support of racial solidarity and the political power they expect such solidarity to yield, exultations and exhortations that are often expressed in language that is explicitly anti-white, in the most primitive and threatening terms. Yet they are seldom called to account for it and are often rewarded, if not because of it, at least in spite of it. When Mr. Obledo, for example, proclaimed a few years ago, "California is going to be a Mexican state, we are going to control all the institutions. If people don't like it they should leave—go back to Europe," he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton soon afterward. It is not very likely that a prominent white leader today who said, as Senator Stephen Douglas in a debate with Abraham Lincoln in 1858 did say, "I believe this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever" would be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Douglas's comment (and many similar ones) expressed a sentiment more or less parallel to Mr. Obledo's, though Douglas did not go so far as to invite non-whites to leave the country (it was Lincoln himself who did that in his proposal for the expatriation of blacks a few years later; in any case the state of Illinois had already outlawed free black residency in its constitution, so it was not an issue in the election). Douglas in fact won the election and was the Democratic Party's national candidate for president two years later.

Indeed, in contrast to the rewards heaped on Mr. Obledo, when Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott in December 2002 made his casual remark that the country would have been better off had Strom Thurmond won the 1948 presidential election, he was denounced by more than a solid week of public obloquy from both the political right and left and hounded into resigning his leadership position in the U.S. Senate. Mr. Lott had said nothing about race or Mr. Thurmond's segregationist platform in that election, nor did he utter any racial epithets or insults, and there was no evidence he was even thinking about that aspect of the campaign; but he was obliged to engage in protracted and repeated retractions, explanations, and apologies anyway—all to no avail. The same is true of baseball player John Rocker, whose acerbic remarks in a 1999 interview in Sports Illustrated about riding the subway in New York City contained no racial allusions whatever but were widely interpreted as referring to race. Mr. Rocker was obliged to undergo psychiatric counseling because of his remarks and was fortunate in not being professionally ruined.

One main reason for the obvious double standard on the racial consciousness that is permitted for and even demanded of non-white racial groups but forbidden to whites is that non-whites are easily inflamed and mobilized by the slightest or merely apparent suggestions of white identity, consciousness, solidarity, or pride by eminent public figures like Sen. Lott or Mr. Rocker, and their mobilization can have disastrous consequences for institutions—the Republican Party, the Atlanta Braves— that seek or depend on non-white votes or market patronage. Non-white racial consciousness facilitates both mass political and economic mobilization against the white enemy and is almost unfailingly successful in intimidating such institutions into firing, demoting, or penalizing the white transgressors, and often in paying immense sums to compensate for any racial wrongs, real or imagined, inflicted (as did the restaurant chain Denny's because of class action lawsuits brought by black patrons who alleged racial discrimination in service). Yet non-white racial solidarity and antagonism are by no means the only reasons why whites "cannot openly have a racial identity."

The truth is that whites deny themselves a racial identity, and one major reason they do so is that many of them, especially in white elites, buy into or accept, consciously or unconsciously, premises that deny the reality and significance of race, as well as unquestioned beliefs about the evilness and worthlessness of whites themselves. Mr. Steele can utter sweeping generalizations about "the extraordinary human evil" that whites have exhibited throughout their history (entirely ignoring the long and brutal history of slavery, conquest, genocide, and repression by nonwhites in Africa and Asia that persists to this day) in a major newspaper owned and managed by whites simply because it does not occur to most members of the white elite to question the expression of this kind of anti-white opinion. To some extent white tolerance of such anti-white sentiments is due to the racial guilt that has been injected into white minds, but to a larger degree it is due simply to ignorance, indifference, and an intellectually lazy refusal to question the denial of race and the demoniza-tion of whites that have come to prevail in the Western world and to the conviction, promulgated by ideologically driven academics, the media, and almost all public figures, that race does not exist or is not important, at least for whites.

The consequences of this denial and demonization for whites and the civilization they have created and ruled for the last several centuries are what concerns the contributors to this collection of essays. The processes by which those consequences may come about are already apparent. For more than a decade it has been acknowledged (by the U.S. Census Bureau and leading demographers) that due to mass non-white immigration and the differential fertility rates between whites and non-whites, by approximately the year 2050 the United States will cease to be a majority white country for the first time in its history. As with other aspects of racial reality, most whites seem to be either ignorant of that projection or indifferent to it, but some—such as former President Bill Clinton—actually welcome it. In an interview with black journalists in the White House on June 11, 1997, Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson reported, President Clinton remarked that the coming racial transformation of the country "will arguably be the third great revolution in America," proving that we 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" (Boston Globe, June 13, 1997). Mr. Clinton's opinion is by no means confined to those of his liberal convictions. In 1996, in the course of the debate over immigration in California, U.S. Rep. Robert Dornan, one of the most conservative members of the Congress, boasted of his indifference to race and skin color in a campaign speech. "I want to see America stay a nation of immigrants," he intoned not long before election day, "and if we lose our Northern European stock—your coloring and mine, blue eyes and fair hair—tough!" Moreover, George W. Bush himself, campaigning in August 2000, proclaimed to a Hispanic audience in Miami his own vision of the coming multiracial, multicultural America:

America has one national creed, but many accents. We are now one of the largest Spanish-speaking nations in the world. We're a major source of Latin music, journalism and culture.

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey…and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.

For years our nation has debated this change—some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

All these white leaders and many others like them no doubt assume that the multiracial future of the country will not threaten whites or the country because all races accept or are coming to accept the rejections of race that are now prevalent in their own minds and in the culture and public policies they reflect and promote. But this assumption is demonstrably wrong. The evidence is that while whites are either publicly oblivious to their own racial identity and interests or are actually anti-white, non-whites, as Mr. Steele noted, are insistent on the importance of racial identity and consciousness and concerted public action based on racial identity. The policy of racial "color blindness" on which the "civil rights revolution" was supposedly founded has turned out to be a fraud and a failure. Like most revolutions, the one led by non-whites like Martin Luther King, Jr. moved from a moderate phase demanding merely equal treatment and the end of legal racial discrimination to a far more radical stage demanding outright racial privileges for non-whites (through affirmative action) and a myriad of special exemptions and policies designed to benefit and empower non-whites (e.g., allowing or encouraging exclusively black, Hispanic, or Indian clubs, associations, and political groups and not infrequently forcing whites to subsidize them, but rigorously forbidding and denouncing such racially distinctive groups for whites) and at the same time attacking and demonizing white institutions, icons, symbols, and heroes, and eventually whites themselves as a group. It is the radical phase of the revolution that has now become established and threatens to become even more radical as non-white numbers and power increase, as non-white racial consciousness evolves to higher and more aggressive levels of expression, and as a prohibited white racial consciousness continues to dwindle and the white capacity to mobilize resistance to racial aggression vanishes with it.

"Color blindness," in other words, has failed, if it was ever seriously intended in the first place, and the main reason it failed is that it denied a biological reality. Today, after decades of such denial, race has been rediscovered. It has been rediscovered in two ways. First, race has been rediscovered scientifically as a factual reality of nature. The work of scientists like Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, J. Philippe Rushton, H. J. Eysenck, Richard Lynn, Richard Herrnstein, and a number of others has established, contrary to the claims of the Franz Boas "environmentalist" or "social determinist" school of the social sciences, that race exists and is a significant factor in such human mental traits as intelligence. There is really little doubt about this today, and fewer and fewer scientists dispute it, though few also are willing to risk their careers by talking or writing about it in violation of the race taboo. Indeed, the reality of biologically based differences between the races has been known for decades, if not longer, and as long ago as 1981 Arthur Jensen could itemize a host of such differences:

Different races have evolved in somewhat different ways, making for many differences among them. A few of the many physical characteristics found to display genetic variation between different races are body size and proportions, hair form and distribution, head shape and facial features, cranial capacity and brain formation, blood types, number of vertebrae, size of genitalia, bone density, fingerprints, basic metabolic rate, body temperature, blood pressure, heat and cold tolerance, number and distribution of sweat glands, odor, consistency of ear wax, number of teeth, age at eruption of permanent teeth, fissural patterns on the surfaces of the teeth, length of gestation period, frequency of twin births, male-female birth ratio, physical maturity at birth, rate of infant development of alpha brain waves, colorblindness, visual and auditory acuity, intolerance of milk, galvanic skin resistance, chronic diseases, susceptibility to infectious diseases, genetic diseases (e.g., Tay-Sachs, sickle cell anemia), and pigmentation of the skin, hair, and eyes.^[2]

As Kevin Lamb shows in his essay in this book, the scientific evidence for the natural reality and social significance of race is now overwhelming, despite the persistence and prevalence of race denial in public forums. And as Richard Lynn, one of the scientific pioneers in the discovery of racial differences, shows in his own essay, racial differences in intelligence and behavior patterns significantly affect such societal differences as levels of technological achievement, political stability and freedom, criminal violence, and standards of living. What kind of society and how much civilization a people creates is now clearly known to be related to what kind of race they are. Race—a concept that includes far more than skin color and encompasses the collective and distinctive genetic endowments of a people—by itself is certainly not sufficient to create civilization, but it is necessary to creating it. Take away the white race that created the civilization that has continued from ancient Egypt to today, and the civilization will wither. Non-whites may indeed create a different civilization of their own, but it will not be the same as the one we as whites created and live in, and most of us (or even most nonwhites today) would not want to live in it.

The recognition of the reality and significance of race does not imply or lead to "hate" or domination of one race by another, but racial differentiation does imply social differentiation—that is, the existence of significant biological differences between groups of human beings means there will probably be social differences between them: differences in educational and economic achievement, personal and political behavior, and social and cultural institutions. And if there is social differentiation between races, then competition and conflict between them is also likely, especially if they occupy the same territory. "Hatred," domination, and racial antagonism may therefore result, not as relationships to be desired or advocated, but as the consequence of the natural reality of racial differences and the effort to ignore or deny such differences by the delusions of "multiracialism," "multiculturalism," "universalism," and "egalitarianism."

The second way in which race has been rediscovered is as a social and political force, the racial consciousness and solidarity discussed above that in the last century has swept through the non-white populations of the United States and the world. This rediscovery constitutes what Lothrop Stoddard in the frank language of the 1920s called "The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy" and is identical to what the late Robert Nisbet termed the "racial revolution." While Marxism, Nisbet wrote, "has, on the whole, endeavored to persuade blacks and other races historically under white domination that they fall into the more general category of the proletariat," the "single fact…that stands out" is "that racial revolution as an aspiration is becoming increasingly separate from other philosophies or strategies of revolution."

The distinguishing feature of twentieth-century revolutionary behavior and thought has proved to be…precisely its racial character. The signal revolts of the past half-century, the major insurrections and mass liberations, have been precisely those buoyed up by appeal to race and color. The greatest single twentieth-century revolutionary movement has been that of the blacks, revolting against not capitalists primarily, but whites—in Africa and, to a modified degree, in the United States and other Western countries.

And ethnic revolt—whether black, Oriental, Chicano, or whatever—has commonly carried with it hostility to all manifestations of Western-white culture, not merely those identifiable as capitalist.^[3]

What has occurred in the last century, then, consists of two processes— first, the evisceration of white racial consciousness and identity (through the pseudoscientific denial of race, the political and cultural demoniza-tion of whites, and the political and legal destruction of white political and cultural power) and second, the development, around the same time, of the non-white and increasingly anti-white racial consciousness that animates the emerging national non-white majority and similar emerging majorities in other white countries. The scientific rediscovery of race as a socially and historically significant reality of nature is part of a reaction against the "racial revolution" and can be expected to assist in the revival and relegitimization of white racial identity, but by itself it remains largely an academic abstraction understood by only a handful of scientists and scholars. It is no doubt necessary to instigate a revived white racial consciousness but alone is not sufficient to ensure the survival of whites as a race or of their civilization.

What is necessary is an explicit revival of white racial consciousness, in opposition to the anti-white racial consciousness now engulfing whites and their societies and to the denial of race that is commonplace in white public rhetoric and the dominant public ideology. There are three general reasons why a revival of white racial consciousness and identity is needed.

In the first place, we now know enough about the biologically grounded cognitive and behavioral differences between the races to be able to say with confidence that race deeply affects and shapes cultural life. Certainly neither the modern West, with its scientific and technological achievements, nor the ancient West, with its vast political organization and sophisticated artistic, literary, and philosophical legacies, could have been produced by races with a lower level of cognitive capacity, nor is the dynamism characteristic of white Westerners—their inclinations to innovation, exploration, expansion, and conquest—apparent among most non-white races, even if their cognitive capacities are greater than those of whites. As noted above, what kind of society and how much civilization a people creates is now clearly known to be related to what kind of race they are, and the decline or disappearance of the white race can be anticipated to impoverish what remains of Western civilization, however much "evil" black apologists like Shelby Steele may attribute to it.

Second, however, regardless of the role of biologically based racial differences in accounting for behavioral and cultural differences, whites, like any race, should wish to survive and flourish simply for their own sake, just as we would wish our family, our community, our country, our civilization to survive and flourish, whatever their merits or flaws. Even this minimal rationale for racial survival is denied to whites today because of the constant demonization of whites that non-whites and whites themselves heap on them and because of the blindness of whites—like Congressman Dornan, quoted above—to their own racial identity.

And third, white racial consciousness is necessary simply as a means of self-protection. White racial identity is an integral component of the historic identity of America as a culture and a nation. The emergence of an explicit racial consciousness among non-whites in a country that remains (so far) majority white and in which whites have constituted the culturally defining and dominant race creates tensions that are already obvious and threaten to become far more dangerous and destabilizing in the future. As Jared Taylor notes in his essay in this volume, explicit white racial consciousness has been a commonplace and important feature of American history, a belief that has shaped the events, leaders, institutions, and norms that have defined us as a people and a nation throughout our past and in all regions. As I noted some years ago, for white Americans today to abandon the concept of race and adopt "racial universalism" would mean "not simply an adjustment or a reform,' let alone a continuation of the proper direction of American history, but a revolutionary reconstruction of the American identity."

You cannot have it both ways: either you define the American nation as the product of its past and learn to live with the reality of race and the reality of the racial particularism and racial nationalism that in part defines our national history, or you reject race as meaningful and important, as anything more than skin color and gross morphology, and demand that anyone, past or present, who believes or believed that race means anything more than that be demonized and excluded from any positive status in our history or the formation of our identity. If you reject race, then you reject America as it has really existed throughout its history, and whatever you mean by "America" has to come from something other than its real past.^[4]

Even more dangerously, the absence of racial consciousness among whites disarms them as a group in confrontation with races that possess such a consciousness. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and other non-white racial and ethnic groups are able to act and react in highly unified patterns, political and cultural, to protect or advance what their leaders perceive as their racial interests and, in particular, to resist, denounce, and attack any manifestation of white racial solidarity.

Whites are unable to so act and react because they do not exist as a self-conscious racial group. Whites may be more or less unified with respect to objective material characteristics—income, educational achievement, patterns of residence, voting behavior, etc.—but they are not unified and indeed barely even exist with respect to subjective racial consciousness and identity, and are therefore at a disadvantage in meeting competitive challenges from groups that are unified by explicit racial consciousness and identity. Divided by various class, regional, political, ideological, religious, and other differences, whites will face a dangerous and uncertain future in a society dominated by racially unified non-whites. At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when that challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us as the Tutsis were slaughtered in Rwanda or as Robert Mugabe has threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are "Westerners" or "Americans" or "Christians" or "conservatives" or "liberals," but because we are white.

What political forms a new white racial consciousness might or should take is not yet clear, but at least it must be sufficiently strong and widespread to be able to resist and balance the anti-white tide that threatens whites. Given the intensity of non-white racial consciousness, the emergence of a counterbalancing white consciousness may well lead to violent conflict between the races. There is in fact an immense level of violent conflict against whites going on right now through interracial crime and terrorism, conflict that is abetted by judicial constraints imposed on law enforcement; by gun control measures that disarm law-abiding whites against armed non-white criminals; by mass immigration, legal and illegal; and by the deliberate refusal of ruling white elites to enforce their own laws and protect their own people and communities. Violent and authoritarian resolutions of the racial conflict of our age are certainly not desirable and are not advocated by anyone contributing to this collection, but violence and repression are sufficiently common in human history that they cannot be excluded as eventual consequences, despite our preferences.

Although, as historian William McNeill has pointed out, racial supremacy or what he calls "ethnic hierarchy" has been the norm in multiracial societies throughout history^[5], the restoration of white racial supremacy in the United States today is not desirable or probably even possible. As Sam G. Dickson notes in his essay in this volume on race and the South, the core of Robert E. Lee's personal objection to Southern slavery was that it encouraged the corruption of the whites, a corruption that cripples and weakens whites in creating free social orders and high civilizations. In multiracial societies in which significant cognitive differences between the races exist, the level of civilization that can be sustained tends to be limited. A race that dominates another needs to establish what is essentially an authoritarian system of political and social control that inhibits the dominant race almost as much as it restrains the subject race. It is hardly an accident that so many multiracial empires in human history have been authoritarian regimes in which the dominant race monopolizes power. A ruling race also needs to maintain constant vigilance and live in perpetual trepidation of racial revolt, violence, crime, and political destabilization, to guard against subversion of the racial order by its own disaffected members, and to worry about and prevent its own demographic displacement by the subject race through differential fertility rates and interracial breeding. Moreover, the racial supremacy of whites over other ethnic and racial groups rarely endures for long. Throughout their racial history from the prehistoric Indo-European invasions of Western Asia and India to the nineteenth century, whites have almost always conquered and dominated the peoples with whom they came in prolonged contact, at least until they themselves were displaced or absorbed by the very populations they conquered. What we are seeing today in countries like Zimbabwe and South Africa as well as more protractedly in Europe, Australia, and the United States and Canada—the revolt of once-subordinate non-whites against the once-dominant white race—is in essence merely a repetition on a grand scale of what seems to have happened to the Indo-European aristocracies of non-Indo-European peoples in antiquity, the ruling class of the Roman Empire, and the Frankish Crusaders who conquered the Near East in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

Whites who today continue to harbor romantic images of the lost paradise of white supremacy should reflect that the civilization whites actually created usually originated in what were the largely racially homogeneous populations of Europe, not in those where racial oligarchies prevailed (and eventually failed to prevail). White supremacy was able to exist at all only because whites possessed a powerful racial consciousness, and non-whites did not. Today, that situation is reversed—with ominous implications for the dwindling white population.

Probably the most desirable and mutually satisfactory (if not the most likely) resolution of the escalating racial conflict would be the voluntary separation of races into distinct nations. There are obvious problems with such a division of the national territory—who would get which part, what would happen to those of one race who refused to leave the areas assigned to another race, who would be counted as part of a race and why, how would the separation be authorized, how would each section be governed, etc. Moreover, most white Americans would recoil from endorsing an actual territorial division of the nation for whatever reason. Racial separatism, far more than "white supremacy," is today favored by most whites advocating white racial consciousness, but there appears to be little prospect of the larger white population embracing it in the near future. Nor is "racial federalism," under which local communities or even whole states determine their own racial arrangements, laws, and policies, likely. The insistence by nationally dominant elites that race and immigration policies that are effectively anti-white be determined entirely by the centralized state under their own control means that localism and federalism are no more probable in race relations than in most other areas of American public life.

Nevertheless, if whites cannot expect a total, permanent, and mutually satisfactory resolution of the racial conflict through separation or federalism, they can at least work to achieve results that would protect or guarantee their own survival and that of their civilization. The political, legal, and cultural agenda on which whites should insist includes a permanent moratorium on all legal immigration into the United States, the expulsion of illegal aliens, the rigorous enforcement of laws against illegal immigration, and the removal of incentives to further illegal immigration (e.g., availability of welfare, education, and affirmative action for illegal aliens and of automatic birthright citizenship for their children); the end of all "affirmative action" programs and policies and of all "civil rights" laws that discriminate against whites and circumscribe their constitutional rights of association; the repeal of all "hate crime" laws and "Politically Correct" policies and regulations that penalize the peaceful expression of white racial consciousness and identity; and the abolition of all multicul-turalist curricula, "sensitivity training," and similar experiments in brainwashing in schools, universities, businesses, and government. At the same time whites must seek to rebuild their own institutions—schools, businesses, churches, media, etc.—in which their own heritage and identity as whites can be preserved, honored, and transmitted to their descendants, and they must encourage measures that will help raise their own birth rates to at least replacement levels. Even these policies, however, would pit racially conscious whites against the dominant elites that continue to demand white racial dispossession and their non-white allies. Moreover, none of these measures will be adopted unless and until white racial consciousness is far more developed than it is today. Neither conventional conservative nor liberal ideologues show any serious interest in these particular measures or the racial identity they reflect, nor do either of the major political parties.

Whatever the precise political form that a resurrected white racial consciousness might take, the future of whites without such a binding and animating identity looks bleak. Already whites are finding themselves denied admission to major universities and access to important upward career paths because of "affirmative action," a euphemism that masks the explicitly anti-white impact of such policies. The most obvious symbols and icons of the racially incorrect white past—those of the American South—have been demonized and largely removed from public display, often with the cooperation or even at the instigation of white leaders themselves. But the attack on white culture is by no means confined to the Confederate flag and Southern symbols. Presidents such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and even such liberal icons as Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson have all come under non-white attack for their racial beliefs and practices, as have the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Holidays such as Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Columbus Day are also denounced as commemorations of white repression, exploitation, and genocide of Indians and other non-whites, while Martin Luther King Day imports into our official national hagiography not only anon-white figure but King's entire ideology and agenda of white guilt and racial revolution. Non-white and non-Western holidays (Ramadan, Kwanzaa, Cinco de Mayo) are now observed in schools and by businesses and some local governments and national leaders (including President George W. Bush). In San Jose, California, a proposal to construct a public statue to Col. Thomas Fallon, who captured the city for the Americans in the Mexican-American War, was rejected, and a proposal to build a statue to the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl approved instead. Mexican-Americans at a soccer match in Los Angeles in 1998 booed and jeered the playing of the American national anthem before the game. The names of streets and bridges that commemorate white leaders are changed to honor nonwhites. "Hate crimes" against non-whites such as the brutal murder of a black man in Jasper, Texas, in 1998 by three white ex-convicts are national front page news for weeks, and national leaders descend upon the local community to show their solidarity with the victim and work to extirpate the institutionalized "hate" that supposedly caused the crime, while more federal laws against "hate crimes" are demanded. Yet even more brutal massacres of whites, like the rape, torture, kidnapping, and murder of four white men and women by two black criminals in Wichita, Kansas, in 2000, are seldom mentioned in the national news and excite no commentary whatsoever. O. J. Simpson, despite overwhelming evidence of his guilt in the murders of his white ex-wife and her friend, is acquitted by a racially mixed jury in which black jurors reject incriminating evidence as "racist," while the verdict is celebrated nationwide by blacks. Does anyone seriously believe that whites in a nation where they have become a numerical minority and are denied the racial consciousness that makes political mobilization and resistance possible could be secure in their own liberty, rights, and physical safety, let alone certain of the survival of their civilization? Whites even today, while they remain a majority, are facing unprecedented physical and political threats that a strong common consciousness would halt and, only a few years ago, would have made impossible.

Is there a realistic chance that whites will develop a common racial consciousness before they are swallowed by the rising tide of nonwhites? It is perhaps significant that Shelby Steele wrote that whites today "cannot openly have a racial identity." He perhaps knows or suspects that there persists a powerful hidden white racial identity. If white racial consciousness is forbidden and does not exist, there is certainly a powerful racial subconscious among whites, as evidenced by patterns of school attendance, housing, church membership, marriage, and even voting. The "color blindness" about which conservatives like to chirp does not exist wherever whites (or other races) are free to choose their own associations. Whites, of course, will often avoid explaining or defending their preferences for association with their own race in racial terms. They move to the suburbs because tax rates and crime rates are lower; they send their children to mainly white schools because these schools are better; they attend the churches they do because those are the churches of their parents and their friends. But all such explanations— lower taxes and less crime, better schools, the habits of one's parents and friends—have obvious racial dimensions and correlations. A recent study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project, the Washington Post reports, shows that today "schools are almost as segregated as they were when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated." The segregation is due not to legally enforced discrimination but to the voluntary residence and attendance preferences of whites, who simply abandon communities and schools when non-whites arrive.^[6] For much the same reason, Christian churches also remain racially exclusive. "Just 8 percent of Christian churches in the United States are multiracial, defined as one ethnic group making up no more than 80 percent of the membership, according to a 2002 study.”^[7]

Voting behavior shows the same racial patterns. In 2000, 54 percent of whites voted for the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, while only 42 percent voted for Vice President Al Gore, the Democrat. Bush received only 8 percent of the black vote and some 31 percent of Hispanic votes, while Gore won 90 percent of blacks and 67 percent of Hispanics. Nearly 20 percent of Gore's total vote came from blacks. No Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote since 1968, at the latest.^[8] In the 2004 election, Bush won even more of the white vote (58 percent), while receiving only a modest 3 percent increase in black support (to 11 percent) and (by some accounts) 44 percent of the Hispanic vote (though even according to these exit polls, a solid 56 percent majority of Hispanics supported Bush's Democratic opponent in 2004). A majority of Asian voters also supported the Democratic ticket in both 2000 (54 percent) and 2004 (58 percent).^[9] Just as whites separate themselves in neighborhoods, schools, and churches according to race, so they separate themselves by race in the parties, candidates, and (presumably) political ideologies they support.

Moreover, as non-white immigrants occupy more and more of the national territory, "white flight" extends not just from city to suburb and suburb to countryside but from region to region. As University of Michigan demographer William H. Frey and reporter Jonathan Tilove wrote in The New York Times Magazine (August 20, 1995):

For every immigrant who arrives [in large metropolitan areas], a white person leaves. Look collectively at the New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston and Boston metropolitan areas—5 of the top 11 immigration destinations. In the last half of the 80's, for every 10 immigrants who arrived, 9 residents left for points elsewhere. And most of those leaving were non-Hispanic whites…. The places that whites were leaving for were metro areas like Tampa-St. Petersburg, Seattle, Phoenix, Atlanta and Las Vegas, all of which attract relatively few immigrants.

The trend constitutes a new, larger form of white flight. Unlike in the old version, whites this time are not just fleeing the cities for the suburbs. They are leaving entire metropolitan areas and states—whole regions—for white destinations. And new census estimates indicate that this pattern of flight from big immigration destinations has become even more pronounced in the 90's.

And, in marriages, the most vital relationship of all for the survival of a race, the overwhelming fact, despite constant acclamation by racial liberals of increases in interracial unions, is that whites continue to marry outside their own race less than any other race, and they do so in negligible numbers. The 2000 Census reports that only 3.5 percent of whites marry non-whites. Given the ending of legal barriers to interracial marriages nearly forty years ago and the immense increase of the nation's non-white population since that time, this persistent preference of whites for marriage partners of their own race is strong evidence of their enduring racial identity as whites.

The clear existence of a white racial subconscious means that the problem for whites is mainly to bring what it contains into consciousness, that what the advocates of a revived and reinvigorated racial consciousness must work for is analogous to what Freudian psychoanalysts claim to be doing in treating neurotics—to bring what has been repressed into consciousness. Whites today are indeed neurotic, because such a major part of their nature has been denied and repressed so long. They need to learn that race, as much as sex, is part of human nature and the human condition, that it can no more be expelled or denied or excluded than any other important fact or force of nature. As with every other such fact and force, human beings need to construct their social and political arrangements with nature in mind, and not build on fantasies that ignore or deny nature. Whites need to learn also that racial consciousness is no more a license for repression, exploitation, hatred, and violence than recognition of the reality and importance of sex is a license for rape, seduction, and debauchery. Obviously there are criminal and pathological elements that will use sex and race for criminal and pathological ends, but their existence does nothing to diminish the legitimacy and urgency of what those who demand their recognition for healthy purposes are seeking.

Finally, whites need to form their racial consciousness in conformity not only with what we now know about the scientific reality of race but also with the moral and political traditions of Western Man—White Man. The purpose of white racial consciousness and identity is not simply to serve as a balance against the aggression and domination of other races but also to preserve, protect, and help revitalize the legacy of the civilization that our own ancestors created and handed down to us, for its own sake, because it is ours, and because, by the standards of the values and ideals we as a race and a civilization have articulated, it is better. After generations of denial and distortion, what we have permitted to be expelled and repressed now returns, and we now know again, as our ancestors once knew also, that in the absence of the race that created that legacy, it would never have existed at all. If the legacy is to pass on to our own descendants, it will be because we as white men and women understood who we were, what it was we created, how it came to exist, and how it will endure. The essays collected here are a first step toward that goal.

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1. J. Philippe Rushton, Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective (3rd ed.; Port Huron, Mich.: Charles Darwin Institute, 2000), p. 305. The rest of the definition should also be included: "A variety, a subspecies, a subdivision of a species characterized by a more or less distinctive combination of physical traits transmitted by descent. A genetically distinct inbreeding division within a species. Often used interchangeably with the term subspecies. In humans the three major races of Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid can be distinguished on the basis of skeletal morphology, hair and facial features, and molecular genetic information." ↩
2. Arthur R. Jensen, Straight Talk about Mental Tests (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 198. ↩
3. Robert Nisbet, The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), pp. 306-308. ↩
4. Samuel Francis, "Race and the American Identity (Part II)," American Renaissance (January 1999), p. 7. ↩
5. William H. McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History: The Donald G. Creighton Lectures, 1985 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), pp. 6-7, argues that "civilized" societies have been ethnically heterogeneous, as opposed to "barbarous" societies, which tend to be ethnically homogeneous. The ethnically heterogeneous "civilized societies have nearly always subordinated some human groups to others of a different ethnic background, thereby creating a laminated polyethnic structure." In his usage, the term "ethnic" refers to groups of distinctive culture and language as well as those of distinct biological descent (or race). ↩
6. "U.S. School Segregation Now at '69 Level," Washington Post, January 18, 2004. ↩
7. "Minority Pastors Preach Diversity," Washington Post, April 4, 2004. ↩
8. See Samuel Francis, Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American Political Future (Raleigh, N.C.: Representative Government Press, 2003), pp. 33-41, for these and similar data. ↩
9. "How Americans Voted: A Political Portrait," New York Times, November 7, 2004; for alternative estimates of Hispanic support for Bush, see the analysis by Steve Sailer, www.vdare.com/sailer/041205vindication.htmINTRODUCTION. ↩