John Derbyshire, VDARE, November 6, 2014

At the gathering of the Dissident Right group H.L. Mencken Club last weekend I overheard two attendees in conversation both refer to themselves as “stone-kickers.”

I didn’t interrupt to pursue etymologies with them, but I assume the derivation is from a famous passage in Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The date is August 6, 1763:

We stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”

If you are of the stone-kicking inclination, here’s a book suggestion for you: Face to Face with Race, edited by Jared Taylor and published by Jared’s white-identity New Century Foundation. (Not to be confused with the American Renaissance Foundation, which does not exist . . . not even if you are a Professor of Anthropology writing for Harvard University Press.)

Face to Face with Race [Kindle edition] is a collection of fourteen short chapters, a dozen or so pages each, that first appeared at Jared’s American Renaissance magazine/website between 1995 and 2014.

Each chapter is a first-person account by a white person (all different, and all but one male) who has dealt with blacks in quantity–in most cases with working-class and underclass blacks.

The range of situations described is wide. Three of the writers are lawyers, with black clients or colleagues. One, the lone female, is a social worker. Another taught at a mainly-black high school. Three are retired from hard and dangerous employments: soldier, fireman, “high steel” construction worker. One was a conductor on New York City subway trains. Two are jailbirds.

Of the remaining three chapters, one is a 1998 report from the then-new black-ruled South Africa; one vividly describes the adventures of a white New Orleans resident during and after the 2005 Hurricane Katrina; the third reminisces sadly about a white neighborhood laid waste by incoming blacks.

Reading these testimonies, I was struck by how odd it is that race-realist views like those expressed in Face to Face with Race are commonly tagged as “hateful.” These writers express themselves in cool, descriptive tones, with very little evidence of animosity towards blacks.

One, a public defender with a 90 percent black clientele, even declares himself a liberal.

I am a liberal. I believe that those of us who are able to produce abundance have a moral duty to provide basic food, shelter, and medical care for those who cannot care for themselves … My experience has taught me that we live in a nation in which a jury is more likely to convict a black defendant who has committed a crime against a white. Even the dullest of blacks know this. There would be a lot more black-on-white crime if this were not the case. However, my experience has also taught me that blacks are different by almost any measure to all other people. They cannot reason as well. They cannot communicate as well. They cannot control their impulses as well.

(My italics there.)

The nearest we get to white-on-black “hate” is in the chapter by the high-school teacher; and he, rather . . . whitely, finds it “tragic”:

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy–in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers–and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass. One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I know gave up fast food–not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job.

Even the two jailbirds, who have the most hair-raising stories about black behavior, evince nothing stronger than distaste and annoyance when describing the blacks they share their incarceration with:

What is it like to live in close quarters with underclass blacks? One of the greatest torments is constant noise. Blacks are always shouting at each other, banging around, making a din . . . The racket and incessant shouting of blacks is so loud that many whites and Hispanics (and a few blacks) wear earplugs 24 hours a day.

(Italics in original.)

The animosity, indeed, is all in the other direction.

And this is as one would expect from the fundamentals of human nature. The normal emotions felt by members of more socially successful groups towards less successful ones range from paternalistic concern, through pity and impatience, to dismissive contempt. The arrow of true, hot hatred most commonly points upwards, from the less to the more capable.

There is plenty of evidence here that large numbers of blacks hate whites. Nobody who has moved much in American society will be surprised at this, unless blinded by ideology or self-interest; although there is of course a mighty taboo against noticing it.

The subway conductor:

I was conducting a D train in the Bronx when I noticed a large group of black men gathered on the platform, just outside the conductor’s window. I felt their threatening presence instinctively, but the rules require that the conductor lean out the window and look down the platform in both direction before he closes the doors. I had no choice but to open my window and take the risk. As soon as I opened it, one of the men spat right into my eyes.

Where blacks can dominate whites–as in some of the office environments described here where black managers supervise white subordinates, or in prisons where blacks are numerically strong–they vent their hatred freely.

In civil settings the venting is done through petty acts of rudeness or humiliation; in prisons and the military, black hatred for whites can be expressed through violence or sexual domination, as opportunity presents itself.

All the writers here are non-Hispanic whites, and most of what they are describing concerns their relations with blacks. This accords with the general principle that, to a good first approximation, there are just two races in the U.S.A.: blacks and non-blacks.

But Face to Face with Race does contain a few references to Hispanics. In the prisons, where racial fault lines are most starkly visible, Hispanics have their own gangs and are united, and to some degree protected, by language. In a crisis, however, they caucus with whites. As one of the jail birds says says:

Whites and Hispanics tend to have a lot in common and share a similar temperament. Hispanics appear to be a bit more emotional than whites, but blacks are very emotional and aggressive. Whites and Hispanics share an antipathy towards blacks and will work together when faced with a black threat.

The intermediate position of Hispanics–between blacks and whites, that is–was also noticed by the social worker. Employed at the daycare center of a domestic violence shelter in New York City, she observes that:

On the whole, the Hispanics were cleaner and quieter than the blacks. Their standards were below those of the average white, but higher than the average black.

However:

Even the more reasonable, friendly clients and staff constantly explained their failures by saying, “The white man keeps me down.” I learned that many blacks and Hispanics sincerely believe this cliché, no matter what their salary or station in life.

(The Hispanics here seem to be Puerto Ricans.)

Whether or not they believe that cliché, most blacks hold in another compartment of their minds the understanding that they are dependent on whites. Hence what the reporter from South Africa calls “the fundamental paradox of black-white relations.”

Blacks want to live in white neighborhoods [and of course countries—J.D.], go to white schools and hospitals because they are white. Yet these objects of their desire will remain desirable and superior only as long as they remain white.

Young minds, not yet socialized into the official lies, can be very frank about this dependence. Our high-school teacher:

One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me, ‘What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?’ ‘We screwed,’ a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed. I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment: ‘I cain’t do dis, Mr. Jackson. I black.’

Government policies on race have invariably had malign consequences. Section Eight housing for poor minorities has laid waste to once-tranquil working-class white neighborhoods; the forced integration of prisons has been a recipe for endless rioting and lockdowns; the hazards of firefighting have been multiplied by the lowering of standards so that blacks and women can be admitted.

The difficult, dangerous work of creating “high steel” frameworks for skyscrapers depended on a skilled, emotionally-bonded brotherhood to which blacks proved unsuited–not just intellectually and temperamentally, but even physically, according to this veteran of the craft:

I know it runs counter to the common view, but generally speaking, I’m not impressed with the strength or stamina of blacks. I’m sure many people will find this hard to understand, but blacks just give out sooner.

Goodthinkful white people will of course be appalled at all the realism expressed in Face to Face with Race. These aren’t the blacks they know from their mostly-white offices and churches, or from educated, articulate talking heads on TV.

They will have the usual excuses ready to hand: legacy of slavery, poverty, low self-esteem, racism . . . And are there not, they will ask, groups of whites just as dysfunctional?

Of course there are. I don’t need persuading: I grew up in public housing, and saw plenty of underclass behavior among white Britons.

As always with social topics, it’s a question of numbers and proportions.

Think of it like this: A man is walking along dragging a sack behind him. If the man is large and the sack small, it’s a nuisance but he can make progress. A small man dragging a large sack is, however, severely encumbered.

White populations of course have members with low scores on behavior, intelligence, and personality, but not so many that the more capable whites can’t “carry” them. Smart and well-socialized blacks, by contrast, are numerically far fewer in proportion to the great sullen lumpen-negretariat they drag behind them.

(HBD mavens will recognize the footprints of Smart Fraction Theory here. The anonymous author of that theory concentrates on IQ, though. It seems to me that personality factors–all now known to be heritable, and so displaying different frequencies in populations with different evolutionary histories–are also important.)

For most whites, most of the time, that great sullen mass is well out of sight. When it forces itself on our attention, we turn away in embarrassment, and console ourselves with recollections of that pleasant black store assistant we interacted with last week. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

The official lies might generate lousy social policy, but they provide great psychic comfort to whites, along with more obvious benefits to blacks. This is especially the case in an optimistic, upbeat nation like the U.S.A., still bathed in the spiritual warmth of Christian universalism.

I therefore don’t expect to see Face to Face with Race on the bestseller lists any time soon.

For those not afraid to kick the stone, however, it should be essential reading.