Letter to a Leftist Friend

I realize that you and I differ on some subjects such as race. Allow me to defend myself for a moment. First of all, the site is officially an anti-racist or non-racist site. However, we define that in our own way. We are race realists, that is we believe in the reality of race. But we don’t like to talk about this much. We regard this as a most unpleasant state of affairs, but it is a sad fact.

Our project is how to forge a progressive / Left / liberal response to reality of race, which right now just plays into the hands of the right. Race denial is factually incorrect and in the future increasingly won’t cut it. Can a Left society deal with race as a reality? Sure! Why not?

This is our project. My co-blogger is a Black woman who is a very strong anti-racist.

We don’t even like to talk about the race realist stuff on the blog too much because all it does is play into the hands of the Right.

Our main project is economic populism. I don’t know if you know what it is like over the pond here. We are fighting for bare survival against a vicious and uncompromising Right. This is literally a matter of life and death for a lot of folks over here. It’s no time to be fussing around over silly stuff about race, gender and orientation. Survival takes precedence over all of that.

The American people are deeply reactionary. This is a fact. However, even these rightwingers can be swayed to a sort of an economic populist project (Eat the rich!). This is what we are trying to do – make alliance with rightwingers and Centrists who may be swayed to economic populism.

The sad reality is that many working class Whites are racist. That’s just the way it goes. We allow them onto our site as long as they get behind economic populism. This is hard to do, as in the US racism goes along with rightwing economics. If working class people are racist, so be it. We will deal with that later on! We have more important matters to deal with right now, such as economic survival! Obviously, many of the Wobblies were racist, no? Whites were very racist in those days. No one was thrown out of the IWW for a few prejudices.

The extreme hardline anti-racism of the Left, lamentably, simply makes working class Whites vote Republican. That’s how things work in the real world in the US. That’s not productive. Racism is a side issue to economics anymore in the US anyway. Racism has been radically reduced since the 1960’s, and there are many structural changes in place to help fight racism at the corporate and state level. One needs to pick one’s fights. Right now, economics is fight #1. Racism is fight #whatever.

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23 thoughts on “Letter to a Leftist Friend”

  1. If the left categorically rejects the reality of race then the left will shrink into irrelevance. People are sick of pretending race doesn’t exist and white people should be offered more options than just the two options of: race denial or being a nazi.

    The nazis lack a nuanced view of race. I am not sure I condone all Latin American racial concepts but that region tends to have a more nuanced version of race I do not know a whole great deal though about their ideas, I just know they have historically rejected the one drop rule. Does anyone have any links to information or any information off the top of their head regarding racial idea in Latin America?

    One thing I don’t believe in is a racial hierarchy and if that idea is prevalent in Latin America then that is one idea of theirs I reject.

  2. I would be completely colorblind (race denialist) if I didn’t have to hear about race from the ultra PC crowd.

  3. I think ethnicity not race is the biggest determining factor in society and global politics today in our technocratic society which consists of forming strategic alliances of friendly ethnic groups and putting them into positions of power as essentially administrators over vital energy, trade and naval corridors and forming them into economic alliances/unions.

    The best example of this was Yugoslavia were different ethnic groups Croats, Turks and Bosnian Muslims each represented foreign power influence the Croats – Germany, Bosnian Muslims – Turkey, Iran and the Islamic world and the Serbs – Russia.

    The US and the EU supported the Bosnian Muslims and Croats against the Serbs because the Balkans serves as a transit route for Caspian pipelines that bypass Russia for Europe’s future dependency of Eurasian oil and gas coming through Turkey hence the push to have Turkey into the EU.

    This is why the US, EU and Turkey and Arab vassal states support Turkish ethnic linked Islamic separatist groups in Bosnia, the North Caucasus, Central Asia and China

    The problem they have so far is that they have been unsuccessful in supporting Turkish affiliated Chechen lead Islamic separatists in the North Caucasus to annex the North Caucasus from Russia and mainly Dagestan which comprises the largest land mass of viable Caspian oil transit routes that can produce enough oil and gas to make the Washington backed Nabucco pipeline possible.

    The current BTC (Baku-Tiblisi-Ceyhan) pipeline can only transport a fraction of what Russian pipelines can transport to the EU with the Russian backed separatist region of Abkhazia further limiting the pipeline route through Georgia that travels through Kurdish regions of Turkey making them susceptible to PKK attacks.

    No surprise to see the Brzezinski clan and the British network (Rothschild, Soros, Kissinger, etc) at the forefront supporting and directing US/western policy against Russia and Russian interests in the Balkans, Caucasus, Ukraine, Belarus, Central Asia, China and advocating and supporting greater influence for Turkey and alternative Russian dependent energy agreements.

    British interests mainly seem to be representative of the Democratic party in the US that want primarily Eurasia as their main focus of US foreign policy and strategic alliance with the Muslim world while the Republican party seems to represent Israeli interests who want US foreign policy primarily focused on the Mid East and Israel.

    If think Soros setting up an AIPAC alternative, Soros funded organisations declaring war on Fox News and Murdoch in US and Britain back in March, Obama pushing Israel on new peace agreements and the resent takedown of the Murdoch empire are all efforts to limit Israeli influence in the US.

  4. What gives John UK the impression that the Democratic party isn’t owned lock stock and barrel by the Zionist Lobby as well as the GOP? Way off, friend. Abbas accused Obama of betraying him three times already. Obama has about as bad an image on the Arab-Moslem street as Bush had.

  5. I seriously have never been prejudiced because my parents **Did Not Teach Me** to be that way.
    I grew up in Alabama.
    I went to school with all races, and my college car pool was filled with assorted skin colors.
    Racial Hatred is taught at home, or learned at school if the children have not had teachings against bigotry of any sort..
    My children, as I do, have friends of all colors. The soul and spirit of a person is what the heart sees in someone, not their skin color.

    1. I was quite the little bigot for a while, but I sure didn’t learn it at home. I was raised in a nonracist, left-liberal family. What taught me to be prejudiced against blacks was going to an elementary school that was 95 percent black and then a junior high school that was 85 percent black. Later, I outgrew that bigotry.

      I don’t have much patience for the idea that interracial contact reduces racism. With blacks and whites at least, familiarity more often breeds contempt.

        1. I don’t have much patience for the idea that interracial contact reduces racism. With blacks and whites at least, familiarity more often breeds contempt.

          Exactly.

          I just find it silly how so many liberals believe that by interacting with people of different races, your brain will magically absorb racial tolerance through osmosis.

          It presumes that all black people are wonderful, and that simply having contact with them will ensure that you like them.

          I do agree that with whites and blacks, familiarity breeds contempt.

          Political patterns seem to indicate this. During the 2008 Democratic primary, Obama did very well in states such as Iowa and Oregon, both mostly homogenous white states. Whereas in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, which had more blacks, he didn’t do quite as well among white voters.

          Similarly, when Jesse Jackson ran for president, he did best among white voters living in states with virtually no blacks.

          Of course, it’s easy for white people in states like Oregon and Iowa (though after events such as “beat whitey” night, I think your average white Iowan has probably become less tolerant) to be relatively tolerant of blacks, because they don’t have to actually tolerate them.

          That’s why I get annoyed when self-righteous liberals in mostly white neighborhoods lecture other white Americans for their “racism,” when racial diversity is not directly in their own backyard.

          Ditto for Europeans. As Wade pointed out, this is why race riots and mayhem in France, and now Britain, or high levels of Muslim violence in Sweden are bittersweet moments for white Americans like me.

          On the one hand, I don’t like the fact that those areas now have “diversity,” and I don’t like what’s happening to European natives.

          At the same time, Europeans have always been so damned self-righteous about lecturing white Americans on race (think Gunnar Myrdal and Soviet propaganda), that it’s a bit satisfying to see them have to deal with racial problems of their own.

          Europeans were basically the global version of SWPL’s. Now it’s in their own backyard, and they’re not enjoying it very much either.

      1. Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed contempt, not even between Blacks and Whites. It sometimes depends on when (and how) the familiarity began.

        1. Yeah, that’s why I qualified it with a “more often.”

          One thing I didn’t mention is that familiarity might also have had something to do with my becoming less prejudiced later. Almost all the blacks I knew as a child had moved into my area from “the ghetto,” as it was called un-ironically back then. Then we moved away, to a white neighborhood that was like paradise. After I grew up and got a real job, I was working at an almost all-white place that had a couple middle-class black women working there (one of whom I had kind of a crush on). That was when I first realized intuitively, as opposed to rationally, that many blacks really didn’t hate white people.

          You might not agree that it’s a happy ending, though. I don’t consider myself a racist, but most Americans today probably would. Robert has described me as a white nationalist, though I strongly reject that label. But if I am a racist white nationalist, at least I’m a nice one.

          1. Sure. I realize that you qualified your statement. What I remembered was that familiarity often does not breed contempt. It also breeds fondness or affection for the other group of people, so I don’t know if you can really generalize about familiarity. I suppose it’s why we talk about people being Judeophiles, Negrophiles, Anglophiles, and all those other things.

            Maybe you were trying to make a larger point, though. 🙂

        2. It’s a truism that some ethnies get along with each other better than others. I think blacks/whites are pretty much towards the not-getting-along end of the spectrum, as you suggested here (“not even”). Jews/Italians seem to be closer to the get-along-great end of the spectrum. It goes without saying, there are lots of exceptions.

          With all the caveats and exceptions, if someone asked me to recommend a general policy to improve black/white race relations in America, I’d say, “Separate them!”

          1. It was actually your suggestion that Blacks and Whites are a special case, and I referred to it. Anyway, I’ve heard before that the only real solution to the Black/White problem is separation. What’s remarkable is that people seem to say it as if there’s actually a chance that it could happen.

  6. I also believe that people with a poor self image will look for something against others to help bolster their own poor self-esteem.
    The bigots I have known had poor self esteem and were generally poorly educated. They had also learned racial hatred at the feet of their parents.
    This mind set can be changed with open discussions about exactly what racial hatred really is, and why it is so useless and hurtful to all involved.
    To abuse a person just due to their skin color or religion is just wrong.
    I’m a woman, and my children are not racists because I taught them better than that.
    The world is smaller now thanks to air travel and television so we can be exposed to more than we may see in our small towns and rural settings.

  7. Soozidoozie
    “Racial Hatred is taught at home, or learned at school if the children
    have not had teachings against bigotry of any sort..”

    The masses of blacks at my high school, who shut the thing down for a month with race riots in 1970 sure must have had a finely-tuned bigoted anti-White home life.

  8. By the way, good letter by Robert. I wonder, what proportion of self-identified American leftists feel this way? I’d guess it’s less than 1 in 10.

  9. The main problem with black-white relations is that whites want to conceptualize black-white relations based on the demographics that existed in the late 1960’s. White Nationalist leaning whites refuse to base their conception of black white relations on the current demographics because that would mean that whites should look at blacks as potential allies or wild-cards in stemming hispanic and asian demographic expansion. Blacks want race relations with whites to be based on the current demographics not on those of 45 years ago.

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