Many of my friends say they don’t get racial pride. Why be proud of an accident of birth?
I get it. I too felt disgust for “white pride” and “black pride” and “brown pride” and “gay pride,” though I did get “Jewish pride” because, let’s face it, we’re awesome. We’re God’s Chosen People.
Then I read this Tom Wolfe lecture he gave in 2006 where he pointed out: “Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world – so ordained by some almighty force – would make not that individual but his group…the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.”
I saw truth in that. I remember when I was a believing Seventh-Day Adventist, I looked at the world through a prism where my group came out on top — because of our length of life, purity of living, Biblical knowledge, our heavenly salvation, our divine choseness.
Then I fell into marxism and I saw marxists intellectuals as humanity’s elite, the vanguard of a better future.
Then I fell for Dennis Prager and Judaism. I saw Dennis Prager as the greatest of all living intellectuals and I treasured that I knew him. I initially converted through Reform Judaism, and while I never saw Reform Judaism as the superior way of practicing Judaism, I tried to look at things as Dennis did and I tried to see all three Jewish denominations as having unique gifts.
By year 2000, I affiliated exclusively Orthodox and quickly saw Orthodoxy as the pinnacle of religious expression.
While working as a journalist, I saw that as the coolest possible profession because you get the inside goods on how the world works.
When I entered therapy and racked up years in it, I came to see that as essential to leading a conscious life.
So whether or not we come out and say we have white or black or Jewish or brown pride, most of us tend to see the world through the lens of what will make our group come out on top. People are more comfortable with their own kind. People choose to live among people who are most genetically similar to them (whites choose to live among whites, blacks among blacks, latinos among latinos, asians among asians) and people will generally make more sacrifices for people who are genetically similar to them than for those who are different (step-children are invariably treated worse, statistically, than biological children, etc).
The Japanese, for instance, have taken on many of the forms of democracy but they remain a uniquely Japanese nation completely different from western states.
Is race skin-deep? No. In 60 life history outcomes of things like IQ, athletic ability, STD rates, crime rates, credit scores, academic tests, income, complexity of social structure, brain size, body fat percentage, amount of sex you have, predisposition to monogamy and socializing, length of life, the three main races of Caucasian, Oriental and black always fall out the same way with blacks and Orientals on the extremes and whites in between but closer to Orientals.
There’s no superior race, but the different races are, on average, superior at different things. Different peoples have different gifts.
We can choose to be indifferent to evolution but evolution is never indifferent to us. Groups that adapt and reproduce and grow in power inevitably subjugate those who are less successful at these things, and it really does not matter how nice anyone is to out-groups. The Pilgrims came to America determined to treat the Indians well as opposed to the cruel Spaniards, but when they arrived and set up camp, the Indians grew suspicious and seeing accurately that they would be competing for the same land, repeatedly tried to exterminate the Pilgrims, who survived and eventually conquered the Indians, subjugated them, and took control of their land. It really didn’t matter how nice the Indians or the Pilgrims were to each other. In the end, one group was going to take control of the land and the other group was going to be largely wiped out. That’s how the world works.
Hundreds of whites who’ve never thought about being white are now thinking about being white in California because latinos are now the biggest group. When the country was 90% white, whites didn’t worry about themselves as whites. They just saw all the different types of whites — from Russians to Scots to Brits to Australians to Finns, etc, but now that whites are increasingly in the minority in many parts of America, whites are discovery what they have in common with other whites (an individualist bent for those of Northern European stock, obeying and respecting the law and one’s teachers at a much higher rate than do blacks and latinos, focusing on work, education and family, veneration for our country’s founders and for Christianity, stigmatizing welfare, STDs and out-of-wedlock births, the pursuit of books and intellectual interests, etc).
If two whites are at a party that is otherwise blacks acting black (on balance, blacks are more outgoing, social, voluble, loud, forthright, rhetorically skilled, better at improvisation and putting on a show, than non-blacks), they may well discover they have a lot in common solely on the basis of their race.
What do I think about gender-based pride? It seems really silly to me, but on the other hand, I thank God every morning, as required by Judaism, that I was not born a woman. The Torah commands me to take sex-based pride.
As Jared Taylor wrote:
Humans have an exquisite sensitivity to differences between their group and other groups. Group conflict is as old as our species. Humans are prepared to fight each other for all kinds of reasons: ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, and even for political reasons, but of all the kinds of conflict, racial conflict is the most chronic and difficult to control, and that’s because race is part of biology. It is immediately visible, and is usually an indicator of differences in behavior and culture and not just a difference in appearance.
Wherever you find people of more than one race trying to share the same territory, there is conflict.
