The Coming Racial Crack-Up

It’s not to say everything’s going to be fine and peaceful - South Africa surely isn’t - but it’s to say we’re not going to turn into the post-Yugoslavia Balkans, either.

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Culture isn’t my forte; there are plenty of other people out there who do a better job of it and I prefer to keep my personal forum focused on more practical matters. However, culture isn’t frivolous, either. It defines our existence and sense of who we are as a people. If there’s any lesson you ought to have learned in the craziness of the last several years, it’s that the culture wars do matter and that cultural issues have tangible, real-world impact.

For example, consider the impact anti-racism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and LGBTQ+ (transgenderism in particular) have had on our society. Just because it hasn’t impacted you personally doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. If anything, it has impacted you, just in ways you don’t notice or are in complete denial about. Are there things you’re not willing to say aloud, even in polite company? I’m not talking about having the better sense to not tell someone they’re ugly right to their face, but whether you feel comfortable making simple observations about the world we live in. If you feel uncomfortable sharing what are obvious facts, then you are affected, whether you want to admit it or not. Not speaking up because you’re uncomfortable doing so isn’t the same as not speaking up because you’re disinterested.

Besides, aren’t we always being told what we’re supposed to care about and how exactly we’re supposed to care? A perfect example of this is race - America is a super-racialized (distinct from “racist”) country and we are allowed to think about race only in pre-approved ways. It’s funny because I remember when we were constantly told the country needed to have a “national conversation on race,” but that conversation seemed to go in only one direction.

For example, take a look at this report that says mass shootings tend to involve Blacks more than any other race:

Mass shootings in major metropolitan areas in the United States disproportionately affect Black people, and structural racism may play a role, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Surgery.

Researchers at Tulane University analyzed data relating to the 51 largest metropolitan areas, including demographic and income data as well as reports of mass shootings from 2015 to 2019 compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit organization that tracks gun violence in the US.

CNN and the Gun Violence Archive define a mass shooting as a shooting that injured or killed four or more people, not including the shooter.

The study found that in areas with higher Black populations, mass shootings are likelier to occur compared to communities with higher White populations. There are also more Black people injured and killed when mass shootings take place, the findings say.

Clearly missing from the story is who’s doing the shooting. Instead, they simply conclude racism is to blame, all because there exists a disparity between Blacks and Whites with regards to victimization rates by mass shooting. Of course, they wouldn’t hesitate to draw a link between a mass shooter and their race if they were White. The unwillingness to identify the race of the perpetrator in one instance and the immediacy of identifying it in another is a key feature in our culture and politics: there are some things you’re allowed to notice, other things you can never notice. Somehow, we’ve come to accept it quietly as normal. What are you, racist?

Rod Dreher talked last week on his Substack about how the rhetoric from Black voices with access to mainstream forums has become all but genocidal (my word, not his) in nature. Dreher’s Substack is paid subscription-only and I want to be careful about giving too much away out of respect for his labor. However, I do want to share these passages because they’re what I want to address in this here entry:

Thirteen percent of the country is not going to rise up and forcibly expropriate the money of more than half the country. What’s interesting to me, though, is the hatred and despair in this essay, and how this kind of thing is strongly present, perhaps dominant, in the public discourse of black intellectuals and other leaders. If you check in from time to time on the discussions about reparations in public hearings, you will be left goggle-eyed by the unreality of the claims. It has nothing to do with the world as it is, or even a world that could possibly be. It has everything to do with hysterical despair.

What worries me is not that Michael Harriot is going to come take away my retirement account to punish me for being descended from racists, and for being white. What worries me is his reduction of human beings to their racial characteristic, and then condemning all people of that race as parasites and exploiters. This is what the black philosopher Tommy Curry has done — and when I called him out for it, leftist academia came down on me as a racist who endangered poor Dr. Curry, who should, I guess, have the right to fantasize about deadly violence against whites as part of a revolutionary strategy, without being criticized for it.

Dreher’s speaking of an essay where a writer named Michael Harriot, who is Black, calls for forcibly seizing the assets of Whites as retribution. As you can see above, Dreher doesn’t see it happening and neither do I. But what is worrisome is that the rhetoric is as hot as it is. It’s nothing new - we’ve been hearing this kind of thing for at least a decade - but it’s not going away and, at the very least, isn’t getting any better. In the post-George Floyd era, such fiery Black voices may have greater power than ever before.

More from Dreher:

It cannot be said often enough: you can’t call for black power without legitimizing white power. I get mocked often by the white alt-right for being a cuck, and all the rest, because I stand on a Christian belief in treating people on the basis of our shared humanity, not on the basis of race. These angry, racist whites are a mirror image of the angry, racist blacks. They are all going to drag us to hell, if we let them.

Here’s my deepest fear: that the West is going back to blood. Meaning that with the collapse of Christianity and classical liberalism (the latter of which depends on the former), people are going to revert to pagan ways of thinking, regarding racial solidarity. It is in our broken human nature, and as Nazi Germany and the American South during apartheid times showed, not even over a millennium of Christianization could fully eradicate it.

I recommend subscribing to Dreher’s Substack: he’s truly one of the voices of our times. He’s one of the reasons I chose to start my own blog! That said, I’m not so sure it’s going to be quite as dramatic as he predicts. Not any time soon, anyway.

Longtime readers probably know I don’t see America as irreparably racially divided, nor do I believe race is the line that’d divide us in the event of major civil conflict. But there’s no question it’s going to be a part of it. It’s already such a big part of our daily lives. It’s this weird thing where it’s not going to be what drives us apart, yet somehow, it’ll manage to be at the center of everything we’d fight over. I don’t know if there’s a term for this sort of thing, but if there is, I’d love to hear it.

Dreher mentions apartheid - South Africa is the most notorious example of it outside the U.S. and the country has been a basket-case since the end of it. However, despite seemingly being perpetually just days away from collapse, the country is still standing in one piece, if barely. Even the race war predicted by many doomers has still yet to materialize and South Africa is a country that’s majority Black and minority White. South Africa is often cited, unfavorably, as an example of what the U.S. will become within our lifetimes, but from a glass half-full perspective, who knows: becoming South Africa might not be the worst thing in the world.

Okay, that’s going too far. If America becomes South Africa, we’ve effectively collapsed because going from a superpower to a country barely hanging onto second-world status would be a tremendous fall from grace. My point is that if South Africa can manage to avoid racial conflict, so can the U.S. It’s not to say everything’s going to be fine and peaceful - South Africa surely isn’t - but it’s to say we’re not going to turn into the post-Yugoslavia Balkans, either. There, divisions were much more well-defined: differences in things as basic as ethnicity, language, and religion. In America, some minorities define themselves along the lines of ethnicity, but the majorities don’t. We all speak English, even as we bristle at the thought of it becoming our official language. We ceased to have any strong faiths at any level, religion having been completely relegated to the individual and private spheres. Our divisions are entirely political, but even there, it doesn’t seem clear where the dividing line actually is. Maybe one day we’ll find out.

I do share Dreher’s concern that racial violence, by Blacks specifically, will become more prevalent simply because such violent rhetoric is already regarded as acceptable by those in power and by those who shape our norms, with little to no push-back in the mainstream. It’s just that I don’t see it becoming something that happens at a large scale. Maybe when you put all the hundreds and thousands of individual incidents together, it’ll amount to something big and worth addressing at the national level, but I still also don’t see it as something that’s going to mobilize the populace into two warring sides. Even at lower levels, Blacks live largely apart from other racial groups, so the geographic proximity required for mass racial violence isn’t there, either.

Perhaps my biggest disagreement with what Dreher said concerns the bit about a reversion to pagan ways of thinking. We definitely live in a post-Christian world and, for the most part, I don’t believe it’s been for the better, if only for Christianity’s being so central to the American founding. However, I don’t see us returning to paganism. For those of you who may not be aware of what Dreher’s getting at, despite the association between Christianity and right-wing politics, the far-right actually trends irreligious and many of the far-right’s most prominent thinkers tend to be outright hostile to Christianity and religion in general. There’s a saying by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat: If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right.

The thesis is that Christianity, contrary to popular opinion, actually restrains and tempers our worst proclivities, particularly that of the Right. The further right you go, however, the less of a role Christianity plays, and it becomes all about naked power and assuring not just your survival, but also your supremacy, over the other. Dreher fears these ideologies, which led to terrifying regimes like Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, are gaining traction, as a backlash to the Left’s racialization of everything.

I’m drifting outside my lane here, so I’ll just say this: I think it’s easy to overstate the prominence of these ideologies. Social media makes it seem like everyone’s a hardened ideologue who knows who Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, or even America’s greatest political scientist, Samuel Huntington, is. Then you get out into the real world and nobody knows what you’re talking about or who any of those people are. It’s reminiscent of the attempts to project all sorts of political beliefs on President Donald Trump, who’s arguably the emptiest suit ever to occupy the White House (I make no apologies for believing this!). Sure, he’s got some strong beliefs, as we all do, but for the most part, he just goes along with whatever keeps him relevant in the moment, the same way a stand-up comedian keeps telling the jokes people laugh at.

Maybe time is all we need, but even in the 1930s, a time when race relations were arguably worse than they are today, fascism, despite making inroads, never quite caught on. Some of that was certainly due to the U.S. getting dragged into World War II, but it’s also because fascism and other far-right ideologies aren’t compatible with American ideology. Even in the segregationist Jim Crow South, the prevailing sentiment was anti-Nazi, if only because Southern Americans, due to their predominantly Anglo ancestry, felt a strong affinity for Britain, for years the main European bulwark against Germany.

Enough of the history lesson. If fascism and other far-right ideologies peaked in a far more racially contentious, reactionary society of the ‘30s and still failed to catch on, why would it catch on today, a day and age where “Blackness” is celebrated (just watch television), Blacks possess all the cultural power plus tremendous political power, and our social sentiments trend progressive? Even the alt-right movement of the last several years seems to have faded, at worst, and has tempered, at best. Surely, the Right has become more radical than it was a decade ago and some far-right figures (Nick Fuentes comes to mind) have achieved a level of popularity their predecessors could’ve only dreamed of.

Still, the Right becoming more radical isn’t all bad. It’s a much-needed corrective. After all, the Left has been nothing but radical and it’s going to take some radicalism by the Right to blunt it. More important, the American Right becoming more radical isn’t likely to produce fascism or Nazism. Think less Hitler and more Alex Jones for a extremely crude example of what you’re more likely to get. American history simply doesn’t have the foundation necessary for strong statism of the kind we saw in Europe, an absolute must for totalizing ideologies like communism and fascism. So much of the Left’s criticisms of the Right are based on ignorance - ignorance of American heritage and history, of what fascism is and isn’t, and much of that ignorance is willful.

If America does make a hard right turn, and I believe it will in our lifetimes, I don’t think we’re going to see a “post-Christian right,” per se, but rather a combination of different ideologies that share a strong aversion to leftism and the existing order. I have a lot more to say on this that I won’t get into in this entry, but it’ll be something that not only terrifies the Left, but will also concern many “normie” Americans because it’ll be a drastic departure from the norm, while remaining well short of fascism and even quite different in character from the European radical right. The wonderful YouTuber Whatifalthist had a good video explaining what this right-wing backlash might look like.

I won’t lie to you: part of me looks forward to this rebellion. Not because I want to see this country go up in flames (I think I spend a lot of time here talking about how we shouldn’t want that), but because things are going to get worse and, for this country to not go off the cliff and disintegrate, people who really love this country or at least don’t like what’s happening to it will need to step forth and do what needs to be done to restore order. When it does happen, it won’t be a bunch of angry men trying to ruin everyone’s good time - this isn’t why societies see these sorts of backlashes. These things happen because yes, things are that bad and the only way to avoid scenarios like collapse and national disintegration is for a motivated group of mostly men under the right leadership to emerge as a powerful force capable of establishing order. When it does, I think it’ll do so fairly bloodlessly, the same way the Left’s own revolution was mostly peaceful.

For some, what I talked about just now is scary stuff. I understand why. But it’s a possibility we’re going to need to confront going forward. The same way the LGBTQ+ movement seems to have plateaued this year (see the Bud Light backlash), history is full of cycles and reversions. Just as nothing good lasts forever, nothing bad lasts forever, either. What’s good and what’s bad depends on what side of history you’re on, of course.

Let’s back it up a bit: what does this say concerning the future of race relations in this country, especially for Blacks? Again, I don’t predict anything too dramatic - we’re not headed back to Jim Crow, nor are we headed back to slavery. However, the full-blown racialism of today, combined with Blacks being at something of a power peak, will eventually lead to, I believe, the increasing balkanization of Blacks. As they continue to regard their story as the defining characteristic, as opposed to a part of, the overall American story, as they continue to make demands intended to benefit their race specifically (like reparations), this will open a wide gulf between Blacks and the rest of America. Despite my use of the term “balkanization,” I’m not saying Blacks will come to comprise a distinct geographic nation within America. Instead, I’m saying Blacks, more so than any other race, will come to lead lives separate from the rest of the country. They already kind of do.

I realize this is one of my more controversial assertions, but the logical end result of the proto-genocidal rhetoric and 13% of the population making so many demands of this country will either be violence or the establishment of a modus vivendi where their demands are satisfied, if only in part, but they diverge from the rest of us because the state affirms that yes, they are different from the rest of us and should live apart from the rest of us. The irony, of course, is that this would be the reverse of what the civil rights movement was all about, but I don’t think that’s an appeal that’s going to work at this point.

The only reason such an absurd status quo holds at the moment is because the Regime has gone all-in on representing, or at least pretending to represent, Black interests. The Democratic Party owns the Black vote and this probably isn’t going to change within our lifetimes. But again, everything eventually hits a wall and constantly elevating Blacks above all other Americans could trigger a backlash just the same as Bud Light indulging in elevating transgenderism triggered a backlash that at one point, seemed like it’d never come. I can’t find it anymore, but there recently was a poll showing that Blacks feel good about their well-being, but are also becoming more concerned about racism. My translation of it is that during the Biden administration, they’re enjoying their prominence, but they also fear there’s a bill of sorts that may come due for the exuberance.

To reiterate, the backlash is likely to be fairly peaceful, but it’ll send a message: you can have your space, but you can’t encroach on mine. It’s a form of segregation, except it’s not institutionalized. It’ll probably resemble what we see in present-day Brazil and South Africa more than what we once saw in our own country in our elders’ lifetimes. Some people are understandably troubled by this, but compared to the alternatives, I’m not sure it’s the worst thing.

What do you think? What does America’s racial future look like? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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