Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Paved with Good Intentions The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America by Jared Taylor. Paved with Good Intentions The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. 2004 edition by New Century Books, 421 pp., indexed, $15.95 (soft cover) This is the book that established Jared Taylor as an expert and commentator on race relations. The publishers of American Renaissance have reprinted this classic with a new preface for the 2004 edition by Jared Taylor. Race is the great American dilemma. This has always been so, and is likely to remain so. Race has marred our past and clouds our future. It is a particularly agonizing and even shameful dilemma because, in so many other ways, the has been a blessing to its people and a model for the world. The very discovery by Europeans of a continent inhabited by Indians was an enormous crisis in race relations — a crisis that led to catastrophe and dispossession for the Indians. The arrival of the first black slaves to Virginia in 1619 set in motion a series of crises that persist to the present. Indirectly, it brought about the bloodiest war America has ever fought, Reconstruction, segregation, the civil rights movement, and the seemingly intractable problems of today’s underclass. Despite enormous effort, especially in the latter half of this century, those two ancient crises remain unresolved. Neither Indians nor blacks are full participants in America; in many ways they lead lives that lie apart from the mainstream. After 1965, the United States began to add two more racial groups to the uneasy mix that, in the heady days of civil rights successes, seemed finally on the road to harmony. In that year, Congress passed a new immigration law that cut the flow of immigrants from Europe and dramatically increased the flow from Latin America and Asia. Now 90 percent of all legal immigrants are nonwhite, and Asians and Hispanics have joined the American mix in large numbers. The United States has embarked on a policy of multiracial nation-building that is without precedent in the history of the world. Race is therefore a prominent fact of national life, and if our immigration policies remain unchanged, it will become an increasingly central fact. Race, in ever more complex combinations, will continue to be the great American dilemma. Nevertheless, even as the nation becomes a mix of many races, the quintessential racial divide in America — the subject of this book — is between black and white. Blacks have been present in large numbers and have played an important part in American history ever since the nation began. Unlike recent immigrants, who are concentrated in Florida, California, New York, and the Southwest, blacks live in almost all parts of the country. Many of our major cities are now largely populated and even governed by blacks. Finally, for a host of reasons, black/white frictions are more obtrusive and damaging than any other racial cleavage in America. In our multiracial society, race lurks just below the surface of much that is not explicitly racial. Newspaper stories about other things — housing patterns, local elections, crime, antipoverty programs, law-school admissions, mortgage lending, employment rates — are also, sometimes only by implication, about race. When race is not in the foreground of American life, it does not usually take much searching to find it in the background. From the Preface to the 2004 Edition: Why read a book that first appeared in 1992? I believe there are two reasons. First, it is still an eye-opening account of a series of terrible mistakes we have made with regard to one of the most sensitive and difficult aspects of our nation’s history. Some of the characters in America’s continuing racial drama have changed since 1992, but a surprising number have not, and the empty sloganeering that passes for public discourse has slackened only a little. As we will see, I made a number of compromises in order to have this book published, but the compromises lie mainly in what I did not write. I think most of what I did write stands up well more than a decade later. Many readers of this book have told me it angered them, enlightened them, and in some cases shifted their thinking substantially. I would like to think it still has that power — but I am the book’s author. Readers will judge for themselves. The second reason to read this book is less important but of a certain historical interest. In its own modest way, I believe Paved With Good Intentions was part of a steady evolution in what it is permitted to say about race in the American “mainstream.” When it appeared in 1992, the obligatory “mainstream” view was that white “” causes black failure. If blacks are poor, commit crimes, have children out of wedlock, drop out of school, or take drugs, it is due to the accumulated oppression of slavery, lynching, segregation, and “institutional racism.” I wrote this book to refute this view, to show that American society as a whole does not oppress blacks and that, indeed, it often offers them race-based benefits of the kind that go under the name of “affirmative action.” From the Reviews: “The most important book to be published on the subject in many years.” , (read the full review) “A vitally important, shattering book.” Samuel Francis, Washington Times. “Easily the most comprehensive indictment of the race-conscious civil rights policies of the past three decades.” Clint Bolick, The Wall Street Journal. “This is a painful book to read, yet hard to put down. “The conspiracy of silence is part of Mr. Taylor’s tale as well, which in part explains why its impact is so unexpected and so profound. Let us hope that this important book does not become another victim of the conspiracy of silence and that it gains the visibility and attention it deserves.” Richard Herrnstein, Harvard University. “Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Paved With Good Intentions shows just how specious and hypocritical is the conventional wisdom on America’s race problem. As Mr. Taylor demonstrates, whites and blacks have deluded themselves into believing that black failure is invariably the result of white racism.” Robert R. Detlefsen, Hollins College. “The most outspoken book the Club has ever offered. And the most painful. Conservative Book Club. “The most scurrilous work about American blacks since Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman was published in 1905. Baltimore Sun. Jared Taylor. In his personal bearing and tone, Jared Taylor projects himself as a courtly presenter of ideas that most would describe as crudely white supremacist — a kind of modern-day version of the refined but racist colonialist of old. Extremist Info. Group. Location. Ideology. About Jared Taylor. Taylor is the founder of the New Century Foundation and edited its now-discontinued American Renaissance magazine, which, despite its pseudo- academic polish, regularly published proponents of eugenics and blatant anti-black and anti-Latino racists. After the last print issue of American Renaissance magazine was published in January 2012, Taylor concentrated entirely on the magazine’s website, Amren.com. Taylor also hosts the annual American Renaissance Conference, where racist intellectuals rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. In his own words. “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” — American Renaissance , 2005. “Our rulers and media executives will try to turn the story of Hurricane Katrina into yet another morality tale of downtrodden blacks and heartless whites. … [But] many whites will realize — some for the first time — that we have Africa in our midst, that utterly alien Africa of road-side corpses, cruelty, and anarchy that they thought could never wash up on our shores.” — American Renaissance , 2005. “At its most basic, racial consciousness has as its goal the preservation of a certain people. Its aim is to rekindle among whites what every previous generation until recently so took for granted they did not even give it a name: an instinctive preference for their own people and culture, and a strong desire that they should prosper. I note that every other racial group acts on this healthy instinct and desire. Race realism therefore has no theory of religion, the family, art, or the role of government, except in the very general sense that it expects whites to love, first and foremost, the infinite riches created by European man.” — American Renaissance website, July 3, 2008. “Europe is in a life-or-death struggle. Europe can’t remain Europe without Europeans. When we are being replaced by non-Europeans, it threatens our core way of life.” — Taylor at a white nationalist conference in Budapest, Hungary, October 2014. Background. Born to missionary parents in Japan, Taylor lived in that country until he was 16. He graduated from Yale University in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and graduated from Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) in 1978 with a master’s degree in international economics. Taylor speaks fluent Japanese and French. In the 1980s, Taylor was West Coast editor of PC Magazine and a consultant, particularly for companies working in Japan. Taylor also has taught Japanese to summer-school students at Harvard University. Taylor entered the active racist scene in 1990, when he founded the New Century Foundation, a pseudo-intellectual think tank that promotes “research” arguing for white superiority. A year later, he began publishing American Renaissance , a magazine that focused on the alleged links between race and intelligence, and on eugenics, the now discredited “science” of breeding better humans. The magazine has published dozens of racist articles by several different authors. “Never in the history of the world has a dominant people thrown open the gates to strangers, and poured its wealth out to aliens,” a “Thomas Jackson” wrote in 1991 in the second volume of the magazine. Jackson, a frequent contributor to the magazine who writes under a pseudonym according to Taylor, also said: All healthy people prefer the company of their own and it has nothing to do with hatred. All men love their families more than they love their neighbors, but this does not mean they hate their neighbors. Whites who love their racial family need bear no ill will towards non-whites. They wish only to be left alone to participate in the unfolding of their racial and cultural destinies. Jackson’s conclusion is that the current situation, where whites are expected to live with non-whites and devote themselves to non-white interests, is “utterly unnatural.” Taylor, whose 1992 Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America makes similar points in book format, went further out on the racist limb in 1993 by speaking at a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), a white supremacist group that has described black people as “a retrograde species of humanity.” Taylor’s New Century Foundation has been, according to the foundation’s tax forms, intimately related to the CCC through “common membership, governing bodies, trustees and officers.” In the late 1990s, Taylor came out with The Color of Crime , a booklet that tried to use crime statistics to “prove” that blacks are far more criminally prone than whites — and argued, based on a misunderstanding of what constitutes a , that black “hate crimes” against whites exponentially outnumbered the reverse. That racist booklet is now a staple in white supremacist circles. Taylor’s New Century Foundation also plays host to American Renaissance conferences, suit-and-tie affairs that have attracted a broad spectrum of participants from the racist right, including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers and eugenicists. The conferences nearly always have an international presence. Speakers have included such prominent figures in the European as , leader of the racist , and Bruno Gollnisch, at one time the second-in-command of the immigrant-bashing French National Front. More recently, Taylor has sounded off against all black culture, writing in a 2005 article in American Renaissance , “Africa in our Midst: Lessons from Katrina” that “the barbaric behavior” of the city’s black population after the hurricane revealed a key truth: “Blacks and whites are different. When blacks are left entirely to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” One thing that separates Taylor from much of the radical right, however, is his lack of . He told MSNBC interviewer Phil Donahue in 2003 that Jews “are fine by me” and “look white to me.” Taking this position, however, has proven problematic for Taylor. Although he once banned discussion of the so-called “Jewish question” from American Renaissance venues and, in 1997, kicked Holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis off his email list, Taylor still continued to allow people like Don Black, the former Klan leader who runs the neo-Nazi .org web forum, and Jamie Kelso, a onetime Stormfront moderator, to attend his conferences. The problem for Taylor is that many of the most active participants at his conferences and the most committed members of the American radical right are passionately antisemitic. To ban them for their antisemitic views would be a devastating blow to Taylor’s efforts to make his journal and conferences the flagship institutions of the American radical right. Despite Taylor’s best efforts to keep the internal peace, this long-smoldering issue finally burst into the open when , the former Klan leader and author of an antisemitic autobiography, My Awakening , grabbed the microphone at the 2006 American Renaissance conference and went on a thinly veiled antisemitic rant about “a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit.” In response, Michael Hart, a Jewish astrophysicist and longtime American Renaissance conference attendee, leaped from his seat and declared, “You f ------Nazi, you’ve disgraced this meeting.” What ensued was a donnybrook in which Duke supporters, including Black and Kelso, jeered Hart’s comments while others who backed Hart denounced Duke. This incident set off a months-long battle of words, with each side declaring that the other was undermining the broader efforts of the movement. Taylor issued a nonsectarian statement in which he said that all sorts of extremists would be welcome at his conferences as long as they acted appropriately. That didn’t sit well with some of his racist Jewish supporters, such as Hart, who had hoped for a more declarative statement banning antisemites from the conferences. Such former associates of Taylor as onetime American Renaissance webmaster Ian Jobling and well-known anti- black commentator Lawrence Auster have spoken out against Taylor’s refusal to clearly condemn antisemitism. (Jobling left the movement and in 2012 spoke about his experiences in an interview with the Southern Poverty Law Center.) The 2006 dispute had the look of a major split in the group. In one email, Shawn Mercer, co-founder and moderator of AR List, an American Renaissance email group, warned, “These are the makings of a major schism.” But the 2008 American Renaissance conference was held and drew a substantial crowd, even as the “Jewish question” remained unresolved. Taylor has some support from far-right organizations. In 2008, he was invited to speak at Michigan State University by the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom. In ensuing years, he continued to network effectively with white nationalists and wrote regularly for the racist, anti- immigrant website VDARE and others. In 2011, Taylor spoke at the National Policy Institute (NPI), a racist think-tank whose mission statement says it aims “to elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights,” as well as to “study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity.” Taylor has spoken at additional NPI conferences since then. Taylor suspended publication of his magazine after the January 2012 issue, concentrating instead on building up his website, Amren.com. The site makes several posts on weekdays about racial issues and features a lively comment section filled with white nationalists. On Sept. 29, 2014, Taylor and other white nationalists began to arrive in Hungary to attend an international conference of anti-immigrant and far- right extremists. Co-hosted by Taylor and Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute (NPI), the symposium was intended to link white nationalists from around the world. (Most of the attendees were from America and Europe.) Taylor and Spencer may have chosen Hungary because of what they anticipated would be a politically hospitable environment, given the far-right political ideology of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party. If so, that was a miscalculation; Orbán not only banned the conference but ordered some attendees to return immediately to their countries of origin. Some, including Spencer, were jailed for several days. (Spencer was released and departed Hungary on Oct. 7.) During Spencer’s brief incarceration, Taylor took charge of the conference and a gathering of about 70 people took place at a restaurant on Oct. 4. In 2015, Taylor became a media mainstay for a few days after massacred nine black people in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17. Roof’s manifesto cited the CCC’s propaganda on supposed black-on-white hate crimes as the motivation for his murders. After Roof’s manifesto came to light days after the crime, the CCC came under harsh attack. Taylor stepped up to the plate and served as the group’s spokesman, condemning the killings and stating: “Our site educated him. Our site told him the truth about interracial crime. What he then decided to do with that truth is absolutely not our responsibility.” There was an irony to Taylor’s role as CCC spokesman after the Roof massacre. Taylor’s New Century Foundation (NCF) first pushed the idea that black-on-white crime, all of which was wrongly deemed to be hate crimes, is an out-of-control problem. (A recent report by the SPLC proves this is untrue.) That was the main point of NCF’s 1999 pamphlet “The Color of Crime.” (A revised version came out in 2016.) Like many figures in the racist “alt-right,” Taylor praised Donald Trump’s victory in the Presidential election on Nov. 9, 2016. In an post-election interview with Vox.com, referring to Trump, he stated, “For those of us who have been trying to slow the dispossession of whites, all of his policies — at least, those pertaining to immigration — align very nicely with the sorts of things we’ve been saying for many years.” But Taylor was also realistic about the likelihood of Trump fulfilling his pledged campaign goals on immigration, saying: “I’m not convinced he’s going to build a wall. I’m not convinced he’s going to persuade 13 million illegal immigrants to leave the country. If he actually did those things, I’d very much applaud.” Only days after Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton, the NPI held its fall conference on Nov. 19, 2016, in Washington, D.C. In what he later described as a moment of exuberance, Spencer, flush with victory, offered the toast, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!” to the nearly 200 attendees. He was met with a handful of stiff-armed salutes from the crowd. The gesture electrified the more radical sectors of the movement while generating stern disappointment from some of its elder statesmen, including Taylor. When asked about the incident, Taylor told Kristoffer Ronneberg: “I was as shocked as anyone by all of that. The alt-right is a very broad movement. I have always known that there were at least anonymous Twitter accounts that are openly Nazi and anti-Semitic, but I did not think that Richard Spencer was that sort of person. I was shocked by these images that we’ve seen.” On Dec. 18, 2017, Taylor’s Twitter account, as well as the account for American Renaissance and other white nationalists, was suspended. This was part of Twitter’s new rules banning accounts promoting hate speech and violence. In February 2018, Taylor filed a lawsuit against Twitter on First Amendment grounds. He is being represented by Marc Randazza, who has represented other neo-Nazis including of . In June 2018, a state judge ruled that the lawsuit could proceed. Since 2012, Taylor and fellow American Renaissance members have held their annual conference at the Montgomery Bell State Park Inn and Conference Center in Burns, Tennessee, renting guest rooms and the facility’s 300-seat conference hall. When they attempted to reserve the facility for their May 2019 conference, they were informed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) that their contract would be revised from previous years. Specifically, Taylor was informed that American Renaissance would be responsible for both the cost of extra security guards and any property damage caused by protesters. (Anti-racist activists had appeared outside the April 2018 meeting, requiring the deployment of additional park rangers, police dogs and other resources.) In response to this new security fee, Taylor filed a federal lawsuit on Sept. 6, 2018, against TDEC, alleging that the state of Tennessee is imposing an “unconstitutional security fee” to ensure public safety and to cover any damages caused to park facilities. During the weekend of March 9-11, 2018, Taylor attended the first national conference of (IE), held in Nashville, Tennessee. Titled “Leading Our People Forward 2018,” the conference was led by IE Executive Director Patrick Casey and was also attended by former KKK lawyer Sam Dickson. IE describes itself as an “identitarian” group that advocates for the preservation of Western culture and the creation of a white ethno-state, and opposes . Taylor’s presence at the IE meeting was a clear indication of his endorsement of the group’s goals and strategies. Jared Taylor. Jared Taylor was born in Japan, and has taught Japanese at Harvard Summer School. Mr. Taylor has also done course work for advanced degree entirely in French. Also, he is an accomplished classical and jazz musician. Mr. Taylor’s Wikipedia page is subject to defacement, but here’s how it should read. College Speaking Engagements. University of Pennsylvania Northwestern George Mason University Temple University Law School Hillsdale College University of Louisville Howard University Montclair State College Anne Arundel Community College John A. Logan Community College Eastern Washington State University University of Texas Vanderbilt University Texas A&M. Mr. Taylor on social media. Visit his Facebook page View his Twitter feed Visit his Google+ page. The contents of this archived website are copyright © 1990-2016 New Century Foundation. All Rights Reserved. ISBN 13: 9780881848663. Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America. Taylor, Jared. This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. Examines the reasons for the ongoing tension in America and criticizes government programs for isolating and alienating Blacks. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Jared Taylor born in Japan, where he lived until age sixteen. He received a BA in Philosophy from Yale University in 1973 and an MA in international economics from the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris in 1978. He is the editor of American Renaissance and the author of the following books: Shadows of the Rising Sun: A Critical View of the Japanese Miracle (William Morrow & Co., 1983, 336 pp.) The Tyranny of the New and Other Essays (Kinseido Publishing, Tokyo, 1992, 89pp.) The Real American Dilemma, Editor (New Century Books, 1998, 144 pp.) A Race Against Time: Racial Heresies for the 21st Century (New Century Books, 2003, 347 pp.) Race — The Final Frontier. The late Sam Francis once observed that whereas during the Victorian age it was the subject of sex that was surrounded by taboos, today it is race that boosts sales of sal volatile . Objects of superstition may change, but love of mystique and a propensity for hypocrisy are omnipresent across centuries and cultures. Luckily for us, if less luckily for himself, Jared Taylor specializes in examining this cultural no-go zone without fear — although with favour. Since 1990, he has edited and issued American Renaissance , a monthly journal which offers information and opinions on racial matters not readily obtainable elsewhere. It is, in many ways, a unique publication, both a gazetteer of present pathologies and a rare outlet for counterintuitive views on some of the chief questions of our age. Not only that, but its respectable (and clubbable) editor has suffered persecution and contumely as a result of his activities. One might have imagined that leftists, with their frequently and loudly-expressed belief in a free press, would welcome the existence of a journal like American Renaissance , even if they did not agree with its views — that they might even nominate its editor for some kind of award, as they nominate dissidents in safely far-away countries. Not so. On the contrary, he is frequently caricatured as a suave Svengali whose erudition and amiability are mere hypocritical camouflage for the basest prejudices. His publications, conferences, associations, motives and modus operandi are minutely monitored and meddled with, to the extent that recent conferences have been cancelled and lucid, moderately-expressed books like White Identity simply cannot find a mainstream publisher (literary agents tried for two years to place it). White Identity is essentially an update of his 1992 book Paved With Good Intentions — The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America , the breakthrough work which simultaneously made his name and marked his banishment from mainstream to margins. As in 1992, the author expertly piles up a mountain range of awkward facts from the AR archives to demonstrate the flaws in the West’s presently preferred model of race relations. As before, but with even more evidence to draw upon, he tosses and gores such tired clichés as that there is no such thing as biological race, that immigration invariably benefits economies, and that immigration is necessary to preserve the welfare state. I had never heard of the so-called “Florida effect,” whereby elderly white retirees are notably reluctant to contribute to state welfare costs because the recipients mostly belong to a different race. It is interesting to consider whether there will ever be a Florida effect in reverse, whereby non-white taxpayers will be reluctant to support the burgeoning population of white retirees. In forensic paragraph after forensic paragraph, the author details the self-delusion and dishonesty that underlie the pleasant pabulum of ‘diversity’ — which new-coined concept has quietly “joined apple-pie, motherhood and the flag as a symbol of America.” This might sound like overstatement, but appears rather less so when one considers that around $8 billion is spent on “diversity training” every year in the United States, and that a former president of Columbia University can say, apparently in all seriousness, Diversity is as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international and of Shakespeare. This is just one of many quotes amassed by the author to demonstrate the perfervid nature of diversity-mongering. These sentiments are sometimes so lurid that they have the opposite effect from that intended, suggesting protesting too much. “Diversity” has such talismanic importance in America’s public culture that almost everything else is hazarded to accommodate its ever more outré demands — social cohesion, the interests of the majority population, free speech, fiscal responsibility, political accountability, academic excellence, environmental protection, immigration control, government effectiveness, police effectiveness, military effectiveness and sometimes even — in prisons where staff refuse to segregate racial gangs — human life. Even some conservatives now publicly defend “diversity,” either out of ignorance of its effects or because to condemn it would mean acknowledging that America has been pursuing a woefully wrong-headed policy for decades, under Republican as much as Democrat administrations. This leads to a paradoxical situation whereby perfectly sincere American patriots will defend a policy which is undercutting American unity — while others know the score but keep quiet out of a desire to avoid controversy. Taylor, like the son of missionaries he is, backs up his case with chapter and verse, and those from reputable sources. (I hope he also secretly enjoys being a martyr!) His painstaking work of amalgamation and ordering means that White Identity might become a powerful persuader, if it can penetrate the mainstream. Or then again perhaps not, because as Mark Twain said, “You can’t reason people out of something they weren’t reasoned into.” It is faith more than facts that moves people, and in the West “diversity” has become a kind of primitive religion, whose shamans move mysteriously among clouds of smoke from which ensue periodic gnomic assertions. It has become what one pastor cited by the author calls (admiringly!) “a theology of discomfort.” It shares with less attractive religions a simple-minded dualism, the possibility of doing penance, and the pleasing idea that reality can be overthrown if only people repeat mantras long and loudly enough. An age which can no longer believe in the Christian mysteries is perfectly happy to ingest (if not exactly digest) political pieties that have little more evidential basis. As with Christianity, the cult of “diversity” is often honoured more in the breach than the observance. Despite unremitting exhortations and all those billions of dollars, most Americans do not really relish “diversity” all that much — not even the likes of the Clintons, who forged lucrative careers out of parading their racial consciences yet opted to buy a retirement property in upstate New York rather than some of the more vibrant places they have so kindly created for other Americans to enjoy. In some usually unconfessed core, most Americans are aware that, all the propaganda to the contrary, “diversity” is not only not a strength, but actually a debilitating illness. As Taylor points out: If diversity were a strength Americans would practise it spontaneously. It would not require ‘diversity management’ or anti-discrimination laws. Nor would it require constant reminders of how wonderful it is. So far as the founding stock of the United States is concerned, “diversity” amounts to “a fatal form of unilateral disarmament.” It is unilateral disarmament because non-whites often think and organize corporately along overtly racial lines, and this gives them a major tactical advantage when dealing with opponents who try to see politics in terms of issues and individuals rather than ethnicity. In diverse societies, politics easily degenerates into ethnic angling and grudge-settling as groups battle for pole position. At its most basic level, politics is a sort of battle for spoils, and focused minorities will always do better in this game than individuals whose actions are characterized by aimlessness and angst. The $8 billion per annum question is why so many apparently support diversity, because after all, For whites to celebrate diversity is to celebrate their own declining numbers and influence, and the transformation of their society. Although successful civilizations have often attracted large-scale inward migration flows, this may be the first time in history that a host population has apparently desired to be replaced. Peer pressure may help to explain whites’ constant rationalizations and retreats in the face of non-white pressure, because most citizens in any country usually accommodate themselves to whatever is the dominant power (however much they may grumble in private). Most people believe they can do little to change the course of politics, and it takes sustained commitment and courage (always rare qualities) to stand against any orthodoxy. Lack of information also plays a part in white self-abnegation, because accurate information on racial matters is often misconstrued, scattered, or suppressed. For example, serious white-on-black crimes (like the notorious 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence in London) are given massive prominence, and the media are much readier to ascribe racist motivations to perpetrators than when the racial ratio is reversed. Educated, middle-class people also like to think of themselves as rising above vulgar prejudices. They admire fairness — the civilizing realization that people are first and foremost individuals, and only then representatives of groups — and distrust crude generalization. The difficulty with this is that macro-politics often requires a degree of aggregation, and a realization that howsoever sophisticated we may be, human beings are not immune from harsh realities or the baser instincts. Taylor quotes E. Raymond Hall, the highly-regarded author of Mammals of North America , one of whose “biological laws” has stark significance for multicultural visionaries: Two sub-species of the same species do not occur in the same geographic area. Few care to apply such bald logic to human affairs, but unfortunately the historical record bears out Hall’s plain-spoken assessment. Diverse societies are disastrously prone to periodic spasms of violence in which suppressed group loyalties suddenly surge unstoppably to the surface, even where peoples have lived alongside each other for hundreds of years. Even where there is not violence, there is perpetual low-level distrust of the kind documented by Harvard’s Robert Putnam in his much-reported studies. There is a growing body of research suggesting that racial awareness may be partly genetic in origin, a sort of prehistoric pack-memory of needing to be suspicious of strangers. This body of research is still small, partly because (as Taylor points out) scientists prefer to deal with easily quantifiable data rather than emotions, but it is gathering steam. Recent history is also a massive disincentive to thinking about race. Across almost all discussions about diversity lie the long shadows of Auschwitz and the other indelible stains of that ghastly regime, and an attendant fear that even thinking about race is but the first step towards such horrors. The recent wildly counter-productive actions of will reinforce this feeling. The author quotes James Traub of The New Yorker to show how many sensitive people react whenever race crops up: One’s hand is stayed by the knowledge of innumerable past hurts and misdeeds. The recognition of those wrongs . . . is a precondition to entering the discussion. But the most powerful reason whites do not react corporately is because most do not feel they have a corporate identity — or if they do it is so sublimated that they may not even be aware of it, at least until some crisis agitates those atavistic depths. Here, the author is on trickier ground and yet, given the title of the book, this is where he ought to have concentrated his fire. Rather than describing “White identity” Taylor concentrates on describing its absence. In some countries physicality plays a central role in national self-image and the way the nation is viewed by others. Collective nouns like English, Irish, Chinese or Samoan evoke immediate images of particular physical types. These stereotypes are rooted partly in popular culture but also in reality — the fact that the English have traditionally been white, and are still expected by the world to be white, Hugh Grant rather than Salman Rushdie, David Beckham rather than Rio Ferdinand. In such countries, there can be a potent nexus between physical type, tribal awareness, family life, customs, traditions, history, culture and geography. E. O. Wilson called this process “biocultural feedback,” whereby people of a certain type favor people of the same type because they are thought more likely to “carry” a valued culture. In these places, over long periods, biology may become sociobiology — sociobiology culture — culture history — and history a badge of belonging. But most nation-states are much newer, and there is not that same automatic association. America was founded on radical rejectionism and intellectual abstraction, and is thus easy to portray as a (literally bloodless) “proposition nation” — even though those propositions were first advanced by a tiny and interlinked elite stemming mostly from just one European country. The author recounts what now seem like the eye-watering views on race held by some of the greatest Americans, including some now remembered chiefly as racial egalitarians. It would in fact be surprising if a sense of being white had not existed in a new nation led by Enlightenment-era radicals inspired by Ancient Greek ideals as well as modernists like Blumenbach — a country whose pioneers were forcing their way across a dangerous continent populated by hostile autochthons of very different culture. Even now, the term “all American” evokes certain immediate images, and a knowledge of being white still lingers in America, emerging during times of severe stress such as when fighting Japan, or during the forced integrations of the 1960s. But it has rarely been a determinant in American history. Genetic similarity did not, for example, prevent Americans from slaughtering each other with considerable enthusiasm between 1861 and 1865. On a more everyday level, white Americans have always preferred to focus on narrower identities — their ancestral roots in particular European nations, regional American loyalties, religious affiliations and other foci of fellowship. Early America was more of a transplanted England than a transplanted Europe, and the English language and Protestantism were more important Americanizers than any notion of being overseas Europeans. (In Albion’s Seed , David Hackett Fisher advances the thesis that most early Americans were not just English, but almost entirely eastern English — making them even more ethnically specific.) Whenever white identity has existed in history, it has been usually as a defensive response to external existential threats. In the 19 th century, when tiny numbers of Europeans held vast districts of Africa or Asia under precarious sway, there was often considerable solidarity between all local whites, whatever their nationality. But such solidarity would be forgotten instantly whenever wars broke out back home. No doubt, there is strong white consciousness in Zimbabwe and South Africa — even if it does not appear to be helping those unlucky minorities much. It is also possible the author overstates the significance of black, Hispanic or Asian identity. Supposed black solidarity does not prevent blacks from preying on other blacks; do American blacks really feel much kinship with Haitians, let alone Nigerians? The long chapter on “Hispanic consciousness” is really only about Mexican consciousness; the author cites instances of Mexicans behaving disobligingly towards their Hispanic neighbors to the south. No doubt different Asian nationalities also distrust each other. Although Taylor provides one or two examples of trans- Asian cooperation, they do not amount to very much — yet, at any rate. Perhaps all the race-hustling will simply fizzle out, like other forms of 1960s radicalism. Then again, perhaps it will not. Perhaps white weakness will continue to encourage more and more explicit non-white agitation, until at some point the targeted population will have had enough and will find leadership under some charismatic Caucasian Congressman (or Congresswoman). Whites — whether they care to view themselves in this way or not — have already moved into minority status in some states, with more at or nearing the tipping point, and there is no respite in sight. However hollowed-out or cowed by conformity, at some level the founding population is still what and who it always was — and with its back to both oceans it may suddenly remember.