Introduction

Jared Taylor is a racial realist. He believes that racial differences are real and not merely a social construct. He has spent decades defending the White race, as distinct from the Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians who share his American citizenship.

But Taylor is not just a generic White man. He is also an Anglo-Saxon Protestant whose English ancestors arrived in America in the seventeenth century. Indeed, having married an Englishwoman, his children, too, are pure-bred WASPs, to use the snide acronym favoured if not invented by American Jews. Curiously, however, Taylor suffers from the pandemic WASP disease that I call Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia. Like most WASPs, he refuses to recognize his own people as a race with its own distinctive bioculture. Indeed, his recent book, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century, contains not a single reference to WASPs. Instead, he reduces America’s founding race to the lowest common denominator of Whiteness allegedly shared with sundry ethno-religious groups as disparate as Germans, Italians, Lebanese, Armenians, and Jews.

The higgledy-piggledy category of Whiteness sits oddly alongside Steve Sailer’s more finely-tuned definition of race as “a large, partly-inbred extended family.” Sailer’s approach is more sensitive to the socially-constructed element of racial identity. Accordingly, it is not just major, continental population groups such as Blacks, Whites, and Asians that count as “races;” even the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or Loyalists and Republicans in Northern Ireland fit into Sailer’s concept of race.

Sailer’s definition reminds me—a Canadian, indeed a natural-born British subject—of the two solitudes, once commonly described as “the two founding races” of the Dominion of Canada. The “British race” was the core population of English Canada. Moreover, until recently, tightly knit, wealthy WASP elites sat atop the ethnic and class hierarchies constituting Canada’s vertical mosaic. And, when applied to French Canadians, Sailer’s “partly-inbred” qualifier is a striking understatement. There were no more than sixty thousand colonists in New France at the time of the British conquest in 1759. This relatively small and isolated “founder population” has since produced about seven million descendants. Surely, the remarkably “thick” ethnic identity of the Québeçois nation deserves to be recognized as racial in character.

By comparison, White racial identity is a “thin” statistical abstraction. It masks real racial differences that distinguish (White) Anglo-Saxon Protestants from (White) Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics, (White) Orthodox Greeks, Serbians, and Russians, (White) Lebanese Maronites, (White) Bosnian Muslims, and, last but not least, (White) Jews.

Each of those large, partly-inbred European extended families still constitutes a lump of gristle in the American “melting pot.” By contrast, American WASPs have been “Whited-out;” they became the invisible race. As such, WASPs are the only ethno-racial group that refuses to take its own side in the inter-ethnic squabbles endemic to the American racial spoils system.

Albeit much more slowly than the reign of terror in Jacobin France or bloody Bolshevik purges in Russia, the extraordinarily long-lived and ever-escalating, radicalism of the American Revolution has devoured its own Anglo-Saxon Protestant children.

An Anglo-Saxon Century?

Two and a half centuries ago, the Anglo-Saxon civilization of Greater Britain was firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; it was split asunder by the colonial rebellion in America. The American Adam, Homo Americanus, was born in 1776 rejecting his ancestral allegiance to the King of England; he also formally renounced the blood faith of his Anglo-Saxon ancestors, embracing instead the civil religion of the American Republic.

The genetic foundation of the newly-independent White Republic was based not on blood but on the legal and political legitimacy of the Federalist Constitution of 1787. Until the abolition of Black slavery seventy-some years later, the ideal typical Homo Americanus was a White man. Even after Blacks were granted American citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment, however, the implicitly Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of the Republic was taken for granted.

Following America’s rise to world power at the turn of the twentieth century, the Republic achieved geopolitical equality with the British Empire. Many American and English writers therefore advocated that the governments and peoples of the two English-speaking great powers should work to restore the unity of the Anglo-Saxon race. In 1903 a prominent American corporate lawyer (of Madeiran Portugese ancestry), John Randolph Dos Passos, wrote a book based on the premise that “in a preponderating degree the future of mankind” belongs to the Anglo-Saxon race. Accordingly, he proposed an alliance designed to unite the English-speaking peoples of the USA and the British Empire. To make such a deal attractive to American opinion, he held out the tantalizing prospect of the eventual annexation of Canada to the USA. In return, America would recognize a common citizenship and establish a free trade zone incorporating every Anglo-Saxon country.

Another American author, Sinclair Kennedy, went one step further to advocate an outright political federation, or pan-Anglo-Saxon union, of all seven Anglo-Saxon countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Newfoundland alongside Great Britain and the USA.

Today such grandiose visions seem absurdly out of reach. Awesome Anglo-Saxon roosters have become wimpy WASP feather dusters. Just recently, GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney had to rush into damage control mode when one of his advisors had the gall to suggest that the USA and the UK were well placed to cooperate given their common Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Clearly, Anglo-Saxon Protestants are now the race that dares not speak its name. Indeed, American universities have begun to flush the history of Great Britain and the British overseas diaspora down the memory hole. Just recently, Peter Sayles complained of “The Closing-Down of British Studies in the American Mind.” He reports that it is becoming almost impossible for graduate students in British history to find jobs. Before long, it may be impossible to find graduate degree programs in the subject.

However disappointing, it is not surprising, therefore, to find that when Jared Taylor examines “The Crisis We Face” in the concluding chapter of White Identity, he does not address, or even mention, the large, partly-inbred, extended family which should have first claim to his racial loyalties.

Whaddya Mean “We,” White Man?

In order to understand how and why White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become the invisible race, we must unpack the “We” in the title of the concluding chapter of White Identity.

In Taylor’s usage, the meaning of the term is rather ambiguous. At times, his “we” seems to carry a civic connotation, as when he discusses the Hispanic gang problem exacerbated by “our proximity to Mexico, our porous southern border, and our burgeoning Hispanic population” (emphasis added). In that context, the collective “we” appears to include all American citizens, whatever their colour, creed, or national origin.

Mostly, however, his “we” implicitly denotes those belonging to the White race, as distinct from Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics, whose growth in numbers and influence now threatens to displace the founding people of the Constitutional Republic. Taylor contends that White Americans are a distinct race with a biological character, needs, and interests of its own.

Unfortunately, he argues, most White Americans value individualism and the material comforts of the consumer culture more than racial solidarity. They now face fierce competition from the other, far more ethnocentric, racial groups streaming into their homeland. In these circumstances, the collective survival of White Americans depends upon their capacity to develop a racial consciousness of their own.

Taylor invokes the authority of science and his own considerable powers of rational argument to persuade fellow Whites that race is a fundamental aspect of individual and collective identity—even for White folks who now “cheerfully contemplate their disappearance as a distinct people.”

But is it true that White Americans are a “distinct people”? Do Whites now constitute a race “in itself” which is capable of becoming a race “for itself” anytime in the foreseeable future? To answer that question, we must examine White identity along both the vertical and the horizontal dimension.

The Problem of Class

Along the vertical axis, White identity has always been comparatively shallow. White identity is relational rather than intrinsic or affective; it is, therefore, both flat and negative. Englishmen never thought of themselves as Whites until they encountered the Black races in the course of the African slave trade. When they did so, Whiteness was not about who they were; it drew attention to who they were not.

The more significance colonists in both the Caribbean and the American mainland attached to the blackness of the slaves, the more significant became the whiteness of Protestant Englishmen. According to historian Winthrop Jordan, “from time immemorial Englishmen had been born to a status, to a cultural role: now they were being born to an appearance, to a physical condition as well.”

Caribbean slave-owners were the first to discover the political utility of building a common front against the threat of a slave insurrection by sharing a “White” identity with other poor or landless colonists. According to Matthew Parker:

Planters, who had recently lumped together African slaves and ‘dissolute English, Scotch and [particularly] Irish,’ came to realise the usefulness to their security of ‘whiteness’. A pamphleteer writing at the time felt it necessary to explain to his readers in England that ‘white’ was the general name for Europeans. And just as the 1661 Acts were copied throughout the English West Indies and in South Carolina, so this new ideology of whiteness was spread from Barbados and carried around the empire.

On the North American mainland, in the course of the First (Federal) Republic (1787–1865), all Whites were created equal. Of course, White skin privilege was especially important to the politics and culture of the Southern slave states. Privately, however, more than a few wealthy planters ridiculed the notion that the “mere animal man, because he happens to wear a white skin” should be entitled to full and exclusive privileges of citizenship.”

Once the Confederacy lay in ruins, the Second (Bourgeois) Republic (1865–1933) enshrined the formal legal equality of Blacks in its newly-amended Constitution. At the same time, formal legal equality among Whites was overshadowed by the bitter class struggles which became the hallmark of newly-industrialized American society.

The rise of the big business corporation fatally undermined solidarity among White Americans. Shareholders and managers belong to the White race in body but not in soul. In the Gilded Age, the corporate bourgeoisie were conspicuously indifferent when not actively hostile to the collective needs and interests of working- and middle-class White Americans.

Under the stress of the Depression and World War II, the tide of class struggle shifted somewhat in favour of working class Whites. But, as the post-war era wore on, corporate and political elites of the Third (Managerial) Republic (1933–2008) were drawn increasingly from upwardly-mobile Jews and other ethnic groups more or less hostile to the founding race of the American Republic.

As the WASP ascendancy faded away, the political or the managerial class outside the Deep South offered little or no resistance to the forced integration of working and middle class Whites with Blacks. White flight became the only option for both ordinary WASPs and the hitherto unmeltable ethnics.

The Horizontal Dimension of “Whiteness”

In the golden age of the First Republic, all Whites were equal in the eyes of the law. Nonetheless, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were still politically, culturally, and economically dominant. Only against both slave and free Blacks was the founding race of British colonists united as Whites with other European settler groups, such as Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and latterly, Irish Catholic. Otherwise, significant horizontal cleavages existed within the White population. Since then, ethno-religious divisions among White Americans have multiplied and deepened. Under the broad umbrella of White hegemony, a new ethnic hierarchy was established within which Anglo-Saxon Protestants lost their accustomed place at the top of the heap.

Symptomatic of that cultural revolution, British Studies are being closed down in the American mind while the intellectual and cultural hegemony of Jewish writers and academics is ever-more deeply entrenched both in American universities and in the mainstream media. When I sought (in vain) to interest academic publishers in my manuscript on The WASP Question, I could but envy the lucky authors of the flood of books on Jewish Studies pouring out of virtually every university press.

Taylor worries greatly over the negative impact that Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have on American culture while devoting separate chapters to the racial consciousness of each of those groups. Nowhere, however, does he discuss the nature of Jewish racial consciousness or the enormously corrosive and degrading impact Jews have had upon the common culture of Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.

Of course, Jews were not the only sub-set of Whites determined to deconstruct the WASP ascendancy. The Irish along with the ethnic alliance that Catholic writer Michael Novak dubbed the PIGS—Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slovaks—also played supporting roles in “unWASPing” Homo Americanus. Each of these groups (again, to varying degrees) has been able to enjoy the benefits of “Whiteness”—without sharing equally in its burdens.

Taylor also worries about the negative impact of miscegenation—but only the racial mixing of Whites with Blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. He is not concerned that the Anglo-Saxon race is being “denatured” by mixing with other phenotypically White ethnic groups. He is not alone in this unconcern. Greg Johnson of Counter-Currents Publishing is especially blasé. Indeed, he celebrates the “blending” of European ethnicities into “White Americans.”

But, speaking as someone concerned with the decline of the Anglo-Saxon race, the difference between “blending” and “mongrelisation” is not at all clear. Johnson suggests that the only solution to deeply entrenched inter-European racial animosities requires the elimination of inter-European racial differences. There should be little doubt that, by producing a mulatto child, a White/Black couple violates the commandment to honour one’s father and mother. But must that commandment be suspended when, say, a WASP man and a Jewish woman produce hybrid offspring?

I still vividly recall primary school teachers during my childhood in small town Ontario who warned us against the perils of mixed marriages. And they were not talking about White/Black couplings but rather the social divide between (White) Protestants and Catholics. Were they wrong to be concerned? What are the social costs of mixed marriages for the individuals concerned, for the children of such unions, and for the wider community?

Surely, homogenized “White” individuals who straddle and blur established ethno-religious boundaries should be objects of pity rather than models to be emulated. Are not such people detached, spiritually and genetically, from any really existing European race?

Germans, Italians, and Englishmen: all can and should reproduce, each according to its own kind. Blending together different White racial groups in a quest to breed generic Europeans is to create a deracinated population of ethno-hermaphrodites.

The thin, attenuated nature of such a rootless White identity reinforces its essentially negative character. To be White mostly means that one is not Black, Asian, or Hispanic. Small wonder then that, as Taylor observes, many Whites believe that their race has “no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as Whites.”

Most of the allegedly White writers Taylor cites to establish the widespread currency of such ethno-masochistic views happen to be Jews. Taylor appears not to notice. Taylor treats Jews as fellow Whites even when they stand outside the tent pissing inwards.

One wonders: Why do Jews figure so prominently among those denouncing “white skin privilege”? Perhaps it is because (like Irishmen, Italians, Poles, and Greeks—only more so) Jews have a thick ethnic identity rooted in a powerful sense of affinity with their own kith and kin. Whiteness is a secondary, optional, identity for members of many White immigrant groups.

WASPs alone are discouraged from parading under their own colours. Accordingly, WASPs alone bear the unalloyed shame of the universally reviled White racial identity. Blended White “ethnics” remain free to wallow in the Ellis Island Syndrome as they identify with their immigrant forbears allegedly victimized by snobbish, arrogant WASPs.

Having become the race that everyone, including its own children, loves to hate, Anglo-Saxon Protestants now find themselves in exile from the New World garden of earthly delights (implicitly) deeded to their Patriot ancestors by the revolutionary religion of the Republic.

End of Part 1 of 2. Go to Part 2.

Andrew Fraser was born in Canada and educated there and in the USA before moving to Australia where he taught law at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is the author of The WASP Question: An Essay on the Biocultural Evolution, Present Predicament, and Future Prospects of the Invisible Race (Arktos, 2011)