Update: They removed the affinity groups from the public page.
I don’t write much about the culture war because it seems that one side won, and it’s not my side. If my side is going to win, it won’t be through arguing. In the early 9th century the Patriarch of the Church of the East in Bagdhad had to defend Christianity in the court of the Caliph Harun al-Rashid. Obviously, he had to tread lightly. This was not a debate he was going to win. The goal was not to lose too badly. This is where I feel the ‘non-woke’ faction among cultural elites is. Just not losing is the victory. But in the long run, the Church of the East went into decline. If you even feign the shahada, the punishment for apostasy is social death.
So I don’t try to argue in public. Resistance needs to be in private because public attention is an invitation to get targeted.
But sometimes something so ridiculous comes on my radar that it warrants public comment.
Over at Bari Weiss’ Substack, she posted a piece from a teacher at an elite private school, I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated. This part jumped out at me:
Recently, I raised questions about this ideology at a mandatory, whites-only student and faculty Zoom meeting. (Such racially segregated sessions are now commonplace at my school.)
This seems crazy to me. Racial segregation? I wondered on Twitter how common this sort of thing is. It must be an aberration, no? Well, a friend who is faculty at Michigan State screenshotted an email he received (this is on a public page too).
I’m going to blockquote a portion if you don’t want to click to enlarge:
We invite attendees to participate in an affinity group during the Student Success Spring Conference. Affinity (or caucus) groups provide spaces for people to work within their own identity groups. To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. For white people, an affinity group provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation.
If you are “woke” you see nothing wrong with this I assume. And that’s fine, we understand each other. On the Last Day, we’re on different sides. There’s no possibility of meeting in the middle. No compromise. I’m marked as to who I am. You know me as an enemy or friend, and there’s really no ambiguity about that. And I will know some of you too! I call you friend now sincerely, but on the Last Day I’ll show you as much loyalty as I’ve received from you.
But what about the rest? There are many academics who find these racial affinity groups disturbing. But they are busy with research. Do they need the hassle of speaking out about these things? Enough. As my friend who sent me the screenshot said: this is being complicit. Other academic friends tell me there is a “hidden majority.” If there is, you are all weak cowards. You count for nothing. The insanity marches and you avert your eyes. Why are you devoting your life to truth, while not confronting the abomination suffocating your institutions? This is evil.
Evil is a strong word. Some of you who are not woke, but moderate, may argue like Abraham haggling with the angels that there is some righteousness in Sodom and Gomorrah. My feelings here are quite personal. I have small children of mixed racial backgrounds. Though the infractions are minor, we’ve encountered strange things in regards to the race of my children. Both my wife and I have been disturbed by requests to clarify our children’s racial identity by school authorities. The only way I can explain what’s going on is it’s like being a Jew in 1980’s Northern Ireland and being asked if your children are Protestant or Catholic. We’re not Christian, and race isn’t super important to our identities (unlike some people). Being asked even implicitly is an imposition and we don’t appreciate our children be asked to racialize themselves (I’m being politic, we were enraged).
But the real problem I have is the white affinity groups. I am not happy with the “people of color” affinity groups either, but in some way, these have been around since the 1960’s. The emergence of white affinity groups seems a nod to the re-racialization of society as the explicit text. The fundamental issue is simple: I do not want white people to think about their race. I do not want white people to think of themselves in racial terms. The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!
Taking activists who are nonwhite at their word rather than self-interest, they believe white examination and embrace of their racial identity will allow for true anti-racism and justice. My rejoinder is simple: you put far too much faith in the innate goodness of these white people. My wife’s grandparents were good people, yes, but I know for a fact they were opposed to integration. They were good people, but of their time. Most people conform and follow the spirit of the times. Don’t tempt fate to think you can tame the snake of racial identity. It’s evil among all races and all people. It is always with us, but it is sin. As a brown-skinned minority in a majority-white country, I do not want white people to think in racial terms.
More concretely I cannot tolerate resegregation in this country. It would separate me from those who I care about most in the world. It would possibly separate my own children from each other. Today their differences of complexion are matters of happenstance. Perhaps in the future, it would be more important? When on Sesame Street a character says “The color of our skin is an important part of who we are” I feel a cold wind blowing. The context is much more innocuous than some have made it out to be, but for some of us, skin color is an accident.
As a quick aside, this is where some white nationalists freak out and declare “see, his mask has slipped, he’s anti-white!” Fools, I’m brown. My opposition to your kind is on my skin. I was always against you, just like I’m against the Critical Race Theory Bolsheviks. I see you two as the same thing. I always have. I’m a brown-skinned man whose ancestors took the alien name Khan and adopted a foreign religion. I have relatives across the world as we scatter. My whole lineage screams cosmopolitan. It has for hundreds of years. This is my nature, constitutive to me. Since the Axial Age there have been symbol-manipulators who transcend nations and bind peoples together ideologically. That is me and my kind.
The way I differ from some of my kind is I do not expect most humans to be like this, nor do I think it is feasible that we should force others to be like us. Human societies need to operate at some sort of equilibrium so that extreme cosmopolitans (like me) and extreme localists can coexist. The liberal democratic compromises of the late 20th century were good. They established an equipoise for a pluralistic society. What is happening now is cultural radicalism is destroying the social capital and trust that liberalism needs to survive and persist. Once the capital is exhausted people will fall back on other identities. Religion is one possibility. But race is another.
And that is why I think complicity with racially segregated groups is horrible and evil. Most people have no deep beliefs. They have shallow conformities. It’s best not to reawaken affinities and identities that have been submerged and sublimated.
Finally, the universities need to account for themselves. The public fisc will face more stress in the near future. Those of us who feel persecuted by the radicalism bred on these campuses need to stop arguing with the new commissars and ask why we’re subsidizing their livelihood. We need change the course of history or it will run us over. This is not a plea. This is a fact.
some quotes by Verwoerd (plus one from a classic liberal)
You cannot have integration without being prepared to see it through to its logical conclusion… The majority, whoever they may be will find the rule. There is no democracy of one big mixed nation possible without at some stage or another the Bantu being in complete control of South Africa. Full stop. You may make it difficult for a constitution to be revised constitutionally but the lesson of Africa is clear – constitutions are cast aside sooner than a boot grows old… Have no illusions, in the black dominated society it is the white man who is discriminated against. HF Verwoerd : MS. collection verbatim copy of speech held in Durban, 26 August 1963
Well you clearly don’t understand black privilege. It is being able to loot a country and steal hundreds of billions and get re-elected. If ppl (ie the people) want permanent poverty for the masses they are going about it the right way. #BlackPrivilege — Helen Zille (@helenzille) May 17, 2019 Tweet by Former leader of the Democratic Alliance
“My point is this that, if mixed development is to be the policy of the future of South Africa, it will lead to the most terrific clash of interests imaginable. The endeavours and desires of the Bantu and the endeavours and objectives of all Europeans will be antagonistic. Such a clash can only bring unhappiness and misery to both. Both Bantu and European must, therefore, consider in good time how this misery can be averted from themselves and from their descendants…..They must find a plan to provide the two population groups with opportunities for the full development of their respective powers and ambitions without coming into conflict. The only possible way out is the second alternative, namely, that both adopt a development divorced from each other. That is all that the word apartheid means.”
Verwoerd Speech as Minister of Native Affairs, 5 December 1950
Hendrik Verwoerd, the third Nationalist prime minister and mastermind of Grand apartheid, also ascribed to these views and some of speeches were lifted straight from Fichte where he described “The white tree is already very large in size and laden with marvellous fruits, but the black tree is only now being planted and has yet to grow. If the blacks wish to emulate the whites, they must not gaze with jealous eyes at their neighbour’s garden; rather, they must tend their own garden, and perhaps someday (but not too soon) their tree might become large in size as well, bearing its own (but obviously quite different) fruit”.
“As a premise, the question may be put: Must Bantu and European in future develop as intermixed communities, or as communities separated from one another in so far as this is practically possible? If the reply is ‘intermingled communities’, then the following must be understood. There will be competition and conflict everywhere. So long as the points of contact are still comparatively few, as is the case now, friction and conflict will be few and less evident. The more this intermixing develops, however, the stronger the conflict will become. In such a conflict, the Europeans will, at least for a long time, hold the stronger position, and the Bantu be the defeated party in every phase of the struggle. This must cause to rise in him an increasing sense of resentment and revenge.”
Speech as Minister of Native Affairs, 5 December 1950
[Coloureds and Indians] must not think that the colour of their skins will protect them. The minority groups will all have to contend with an unrestricted domination by the Bantu if a multi-racial state comes into being. I say this explicitly because it is self-evident that if one could follow the course of retaining one state in which the White man continued to exercise his historic rule (even if its limits had to be restricted to some extent) that course would be preferred. As far as we are concerned that is the easiest road; it is the most convenient, regard being had to the past.
And I say it unequivocally that the people of South Africa cannot accept the consequence of a multi-racial state unless the Whites, the Coloureds and the Indians are prepared to commit race suicide.”
Maybe the final word can be given to Mr Verwoerd who also made a prophecy about the western world that the
-“world spirit” of modern liberalism threatened to engulf not merely the Afrikaner nation but the whole of white civilization, ending in the disintegration, and indeed the final destruction, of the white race itself”.
Perhaps if Verwoerd and white South Africans had been willing to actually have apartness/separate development, it would have worked. But that would have meant whites would have to be the maids and gardeners and everything else to have a truly separate society/economy. Instead they had a half-assed, heads I wind tails you lose, separate when it pleases us mixed when it pleases us, impure hybrid.
The quotes suggest that the only possible alternatives are separateness or Bantu domination with White expropriation. But no one was willing to really do the first. Instead, they tried to find some middle way, and may now be getting the second.
The second point, and I think he is more agitated about this is that the intellectual class needs to come out of the safety of the closet and put an end to the madness before the madness puts an end to us.
yes
frawgs are idiots
Sweeney is right. To expand upon him: Every time a white nationalist claims to be working for all races, or merely being concerned about the survival of white people, they’re talking out of their ass.
If you’re afraid of becoming an oppressed minority, and see no way to appease the majority, mix or get out. White SA are only a small minority because their ancestors went out into the interior to conquer an overwhelmingly black country. If they had stayed in Cape Province – or been realistic about apartheid, and set aside a small portion of SA as Eurostan – they would still be in charge of their own country. But white domination of the totality of SA was always the main goal, regardless of propaganda, and white SA are dealing with the inevitable consequences of trying to push that at all costs. Don’t expect us to cry over your stupid farms.
“Maybe the final word can be given to Mr Verwoerd who also made a prophecy about the western world”
If the dumbass couldn’t even see the future of his own country, why should we care what he had to say about the rest of the world? Modern liberalism is destroying everything, but how is race segregation going to make anything better? Europeans are EEF-WHG-Yamnaya mutts, but they still conquered the world. America should close the borders, mix it all up, and then dominate the hemisphere with a united homogeneous nation 300 million+ strong. Race-brained retards can go back to Europe (I’m sure Ukraine will take you).
Culturally I guess that could happen, a short 10 year pause for culture sharing, though it tends not to please either constituency, wouldn’t please business etc, so not so much in the grammar of the possible. In terms of ancestry and genetic heritage, if it’s taking 30 years per generation, then it would take a long time to mix up, particularly in a way that’s not geographically structured, and by the time you unsealed the border, it would be pretty unlikely that the US would command much close to its current historical position or be able to extend back out again too much (unless you’re really bullish on the US; I expect it’ll regress to the mean quite a bit over that sort of timeframe, decades to a hundred years). If it ever happened within 100 years, admixture still running a wide gamut in Mexico, Brazil, etc as it does.
I don’t think ppl would go for it though; pleases no one and seems a bit contradictory to combine a really pro-cultural mixture ideology (not something that’s just meh on it) and close the borders completely.