White People

Righty: White people created Western Civilization and all its wonders. We built everything of note from the Parthenon to the personal computer. We explored the world from top to bottom, delivered most of it from ignorance and savagery, spread the Gospel, advanced the frontiers of science, discovered cures for dreaded diseases, and founded numerous great nations, including, of course, the United States. White people were designed by nature to rule. Why shouldn’t we band together and resist the steady erosion of our culture by foreign elements? Why is it OK for black people to celebrate black power when we’re not allowed to promote white power? We detect a double standard here, and we’d better do something about it before white societies are completely overrun by hostile dark-skinned immigrants who breed like mosquitoes. White people are already an endangered species, and the world won’t realize it until it’s too late. Self-hating white liberals like Lefty are probably our worst enemy. Two hundred years from now, Lefty, your coffee-colored great-great grandchildren will probably have to visit Iceland or Iowa to see actual specimens of white people.

Lefty: White racism has given us slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism and the Holocaust. Quite a legacy there! White supremacists are almost without exception moronic, malevolent, impotent psychopaths. (How could anyone believe in the notion of white superiority after watching these clowns in action?) What do white people have to celebrate other than a heritage of greed, exploitation, war, materialism and bad dancing (Fred Astaire and a few others excepted)? African Americans and other minorities are entitled to celebrate their cultures because they’ve been the victims of systematic white oppression. They must be given a chance to undo centuries of forced hypnosis that essentially told them "White is right." There has never been a white pride movement capable of divorcing itself from racism. It is a poisonous issue that must be banished from every forum of civilized discourse.

The New Moderate:

The New Moderate must acknowledge Righty’s gripe about a double standard that allows dark-skinned minorities, but not white people, to celebrate their race-based cultures. I must also support Lefty’s contention that every "white pride" movement that has ever existed seems to have been tainted with obnoxious strains of racism. Why can’t white people simply look after their interests without bashing their darker brethren? Until they can, anyone who espouses white power or even white rights will be condemned (and justifiably so) as racist. (It might be that all ethnic "pride" celebrations are essentially racist or chauvinistic, regardless of who is doing the celebrating.)

Why would The New Moderate suggest that white people might want to "look after their interests"? Aren’t we slowly sinking into the bottomless bog of racism here? Stay with me for a moment. If current demographic trends continue unchecked, whites of European ancestry will account for less than half the population in both North America and Western Europe within half a century. In other words, white people will officially be a minority group. This revolutionary shift in population will forever alter the nature of Western societies and their cultures. (Forever is a LONG time, in case you’re not convinced.) It is not unreasonable to assume that the United States will eventually be speaking Spanish as its primary language, or that minarets will be sprouting alongside the abandoned cathedrals of France and England. And there is nothing wrong -- repeat, NOTHING WRONG -- with expressing dismay at this development. In fact, it might be desirable and even heroic to prevent it from happening. We’ve become so sensitized to leftist accusations of racism, and so bankrupt as a civilization, that we’re willing to just roll over and let the forces of history have their way with us.

There is nothing racist about simple self-preservation. I’m not even of European stock (my ancestors were Armenian Christians from the Ottoman Empire), and yet I’d mourn the disappearance of blond hair, blue eyes and freckles from our midst. I’d hate to see fine old languages like Dutch and Danish frittered into extinction. As much as I love Middle Eastern food, I’d never want it to replace the meaty succulence of German cooking or the epicurean delights of French. The New Moderate loves all nationalities in their infinite variety and would be loath to see any of them go the way of the dodo. I’d be just as unhappy if Americans settled en masse in the Middle East, reproduced out of control and festooned the stark landscape with golf courses and endless rows of McMansions.

How can white people "look after their interests"? Definitely not by mobilizing into fascist brigades, spouting racist diatribes or rounding up everyone who doesn’t fit the desired mold. No, if the white residents of North America and Western Europe don’t want to see their societies changed beyond recognition, they should simply do everything in their power to reverse the internal rot that has put them in this melancholy predicament. That means encouraging their own people to work at jobs they’ve been content to assign to immigrants. It means restricting immigration and downsizing the cushy welfare systems that attract foreigners who choose not to work. It means creating a vigorous culture that shuns cheap values and empty materialism. It means daring to sacrifice a little comfort for the scary proposition of having children. You can’t expect a race to survive when it lacks the resolve to reproduce.

The gods have always favored the hardy over the refined, in nations as well as individuals. The nations of the West (and especially Western Europe) are looking dangerously anemic right now. It might be that today’s white-dominated societies won’t survive in any form unless they receive an infusion of vitality from darker-hued populations. If those populations absorb Western values along the way, the darkening of Europe and America might actually be something to celebrate. But if those alien populations continue to multiply while remaining hostile to their host societies, the entire West can look forward to joining the Hittites, Babylonians, Phoenicians and Carthaginians in history’s dustbin.

Summary: White people of European stock have a right to look after their interests, especially in light of current demographic trends in the U.S. and Western Europe. Unfortunately, virtually every "white rights" movement has been laden with racism. What to do? Western societies need to shun decadence, depend less on foreign labor, and resolve to reproduce!

Affirmative Action

Righty: We’re looking at reverse discrimination, plain and simple. Why should today’s white males be victimized because of so-called bias against blacks and women in the past? ("So-called" because most blacks were unqualified for professional jobs and most women left the workforce after a few years to raise kids. How was it discriminatory not to hire them?) We’re all poorer when key professional positions are filled by marginally competent individuals who got hired because they had the right skin color or gender. And who is suffering most? Just your average working-class white boys, who never enjoyed special privileges in the past and will never be given a break now that all the opportunities go to minorities and women. How could this country have sanctioned a policy that singles out white males for ill-treatment, as if they were a kind of legally designated pincushion for the grievances of irate special-interest groups? How does it help society to penalize several generations of talented individuals simply because they were born as white guys? Affirmative Action MUST be scrapped once and for all.

Lefty: Affirmative Action finally created the level playing field we needed to give minorities and women a chance to share in the American Dream. How can any decent person begrudge them the opportunities that were denied them for so long simply because they weren’t white males? Affirmative Action was instrumental in the growth of the black middle class, and it continues to rescue talented, underprivileged young people from lives of chronic poverty and frustration. Affirmative Action helped women break through the age-old prejudicial barriers that kept them out of contention for high-level jobs in business and the professions. As for the complaints of reverse discrimination, there is still so much natural bias in favor of white males that they hardly suffer under Affirmative Action. They have no idea how privileged they are simply as a result of being born with light skin and male genitals.

The New Moderate:

Discrimination seems to be as American as Velveeta, whether it’s directed at minorities, women or "overprivileged" white males. Yes, women and blacks were encumbered in the past by prejudices that kept them conveniently subservient. So naturally the U.S. corrected the old injustice by instituting a new one in its place.

The name of the program is a dead giveaway: they couldn’t call it "Reverse Discrimination," because that would have been too honest and unpalatable; it never would have played in Peoria. So they had to do what ideologues always do to push a potentially unpopular agenda: they disguised it with a candy coating of euphemism. Affirmative Action. Sounds upbeat, progressive and vague enough to whiz right by the majority of Americans without ruffling too many feathers. They didn’t even capitalize it, probably in the hope that we wouldn’t notice it. (I capitalize it here.) Were we ever allowed to vote on whether we wanted Affirmative Action? Nope, it was simply foisted on us from above by high-minded social liberals (including President Johnson) whose feel-good impulses apparently exceeded their capacity for objective fairness.

Did black Americans really need an extra boost after they finally won their full civil rights back in the 1960s? Absolutely. There was a small, aristocratic black middle class at the time, but the vast majority of African Americans had no tradition of literacy or professionalism to draw upon as they began to compete for admission to better schools and jobs. Shouldn’t we have discriminated in their favor, then? No. We should have stopped discriminating against them. We should have trained them, coached them and inspired them to compete. It would have meant creating a New Deal-style federal program to help minorities make the transition, and it wouldn’t have been cheap. But it would have been cheaper than the disastrous welfare system that inadvertently spawned a permanent black underclass in the U.S. More important, it would have been the honorable thing to do.

Instead, it was easier simply to favor blacks and other minorities, with minimal regard for their qualifications. So we admitted them to the Ivies with substandard test scores when they would have done better at good old State. Their dropout rate was alarming, and those who went on to graduate would forever be branded by many whites, consciously or subconsciously, as Affirmative Action babies: the undeserving beneficiaries of a blatantly preferential policy. Even worse, we gave preference to wealthy and middle-class blacks over working-class whites, while the poorest students of either race were simply bypassed. (If we need an Affirmative Action program at all, we should use it to benefit poor people regardless of race or gender.)

Affirmative Action has devalued the real accomplishments of blacks and other minorities who have made it by virtue of their own talents. (If I had been black and brilliant, I’d bristle at the suggestion that I succeeded only because of reverse discrimination.) Even more damaging, Affirmative Action has cast a pall of public doubt over the idea that blacks can succeed on their own. Guess what: if you treat people as if they’re handicapped, everyone -- including the beneficiaries of your largesse -- will start to assume that they are handicapped. This is not the image the black community needs or wants. In fact, many African American leaders oppose Affirmative Action for this reason.

If, after 40 years of equal rights, blacks still require Affirmative Action to compete with whites, something is seriously wrong somewhere. Lefty would blame racism while secretly harboring doubts about blacks’ abilities; Righty would probably harbor those same doubts, but not as secretly. I suspect that what’s holding blacks back isn’t primarily racism or lack of ability, but a miasma of social problems afflicting the African American community (and especially the young male African American community, which is a culture unto itself) like some virulent and endemic disease. No surprise here. We have to start attacking these problems at the elementary school level or even earlier -- not at the point of admission to college or the business world.

As for the upscale white women who have benefited from Affirmative Action at the expense of men, I’ll try to take the high road on this one. Let’s just say that if I were female and white today, I’d be mortified by the assumption that I required special consideration to compete equally with men. Yes, back in 1970 women needed to be taken seriously in the working world, and fast. It was still an era when older businessmen referred to their wives as "the little lady" and expected female employees to type, fetch coffee and occasionally "put out" for harried male executives like themselves. But those days are long gone, at least in the civilized world. So is the infamous "glass ceiling" that kept women from rising above middle-management positions. Yes, bastions of stubborn male supremacy still exist at scattered corporate and institutional outposts, but so do bastions of female supremacy (the publishing industry, corporate marketing departments, and the nonprofit sector are shining exemplars of feminine prowess).

The male establishment has transferred significant power to women in the space of a single generation. Given that we’re looking at a major realignment of the historic gender roles of our species, the pace of change has been amazingly swift. Now that women populate corporate boardrooms and significantly outnumber men at American colleges and graduate schools, no amount of feminist eloquence will persuade me that they still require a free pass. Affirmative Action for women in the job marketplace seemed fair enough back in the seventies, but it’s needlessly discriminatory today.

What about the lingering pay gap between men and women, you ask? If a disproportionate number of women still congregate in traditional "pink collar" jobs like secretarial or clerical work, discrimination isn’t the culprit. Most men abandoned those low-paying fields long ago for the chance to earn grown-up salaries (can you blame them?), and women filled the vacuum. The continuing social pressure on men to be high earners drives them to steer clear of ill-paid clerical jobs, while women are free to take them as a source of additional family income. Nobody snickers at a woman who earns only $20K for a year’s work. Men simply don’t enjoy that luxury, so they generally follow the money.

Summary: Affirmative Action may have been a necessary evil back in the 1970s, but it’s simply evil today. It’s unfair to blacks as well as whites, and women no longer need it. We could use coaching programs, not preference programs.