What is Racism?

by Dr. William L. Pierce (pictured)
originally published in Free Speech magazine, Volume I, Number 3, March 1995

TODAY LET’S TALK about “racism” and related matters. There’s hardly a subject the average White person is more uptight about, hardly a subject that makes him more uncomfortable. Fifty or 60 years ago people were really uptight about sex. Very few people could talk about it honestly and openly and comfortably. It embarrassed them. Whenever the subject came up people used all sorts of euphemisms and evasions to avoid having to mention things or use words that made them squirm and blush, things that they just couldn’t deal with straightforwardly. In polite conversation one could not even use the word leg in talking about a woman, for example. It was too risqué, bordering on the pornographic, because of the mental associations it evoked.

Why was that? Why did talking about sex make us uncomfortable? Well, of course, it was because sex was a taboo subject. There were a lot of social and religious prohibitions and restrictions associated with sex, and these prohibitions conflicted with our natural urges. We were taught that following these natural urges was sinful, and that terrible things would happen to us if we did. The result was that we felt guilty about our natural urges. To avoid the very unpleasant feeling of guilt, we tried to avoid the subject of sex. We swept it under the rug and tried not to think about it.

That’s the way it is with the subject of race today. Just as we were conditioned by religious teachings 50 or 60 years ago to feel guilty about our natural sexual inclinations, today we are conditioned — primarily by the controlled mass media — to feel guilty about our natural racial inclinations. We are conditioned to believe that they are sinful.

And what are our natural racial inclinations? We can get a pretty good answer by looking at the way we behaved and wrote and talked back in the era before race became a taboo subject, back in the time when we could still talk about it without feeling any pangs of guilt or embarrassment — back in the early part of this century, say. At that time we accepted the fact that people of a particular race preferred to live and work and play with other people like themselves. We certainly preferred the company of people of our own race, and that also was true of other races. We were often curious about or interested in the racial characteristics, the behavior, the lifestyles, the culture, and the histories of other races. We admired Japanese samurai swords and Chinese ceramic art, the Eskimo kayak, Hindu mythology, Mexican temples. In youth organizations like the Boy Scouts we studied the lore of the American Indians and tried to emulate their superb skills as stone-age hunters and woodsmen. Wherever another race had some real accomplishment, we were ready to study that accomplishment and to give credit where credit was due.

But at the same time we retained our feeling of separateness and exclusiveness and a pride in our own European culture, our own racial characteristics, our own history. We did not feel it necessary to apologize for teaching the history of our own race in our schools — that is, European history — and for not teaching Japanese history, say, or Tibetan history, except, of course, to those scholars in our universities who were studying exotic cultures. Especially, we did not feel the slightest inclination to invent a false Black history in order to magnify the self-esteem of young Blacks or to persuade young Whites that Blacks were their cultural equals.

Did we feel that our race is superior to other races? In general, yes — but we weren’t uptight about it, just realistic. That is, we acknowledged without the slightest feeling of envy or resentment that other races could do some things better than we could: Blacks, for example, could do work in a hot, humid environment that would kill a White man. And their peculiar skeletal and muscular structure made them better sprinters and jumpers, on the average, while their relatively thick skulls and long arms gave them an advantage at boxing.

But we knew what we were especially good at, and we tended to value those things most highly. Someone recruiting for a basketball team, of course, would have different standards and might very well look at Blacks as a superior race. That didn’t bother us. We were confident in our role as the pacesetters for everyone else, as the planet’s preeminent problem solvers and civilization builders, as the best thinkers and doers. And, of course, we liked our poetry, our art, our music, and our literature best. In that sense we believed that we had a superior culture and we were a superior race. Superior by our own standards, of course.

Because of that — because of our feelings about ourselves and our preference for our own kind and our own culture — we were all racists by today’s standards, of course. We were all White supremacists. But those terms were never used then. “racism” was never an issue. We just thought and behaved in a way that was natural for us. As long as other races didn’t get in our way, we felt no hostility toward them. But if they did get in our way, they usually regretted it pretty quickly.

And, of course, other races had pretty much the same attitude we did. They judged things by their standards. The Chinese believed — actually still believe — that they are superior to any foreign devils. Did that offend us in any way? Of course not. We didn’t agree with the Chinese, of course, but as long as everyone stayed on his own turf, we were able to get along reasonably well. The only time there was conflict between the races was when they were forced to occupy the same turf. When that happened there always was conflict and hostility.

When greedy businessmen brought shiploads of Chinese coolies to this country to provide cheap labor for building railroads, so they wouldn’t have to pay the prevailing wage rate to White workers, there was hostility between Whites and Chinese.

A much greater conflict was caused by importing African slaves to America. Profit-hungry slave merchants brought millions of them into this country and gave plantation owners an offer they couldn’t refuse. The economic conditions of the 18th century made the use of slave labor very profitable. But the use of Black slaves by wealthy White landowners left small White farmers and craftsmen in the southern United States at a great disadvantage, with resultant hostility and conflict. After the slaves were freed and turned loose in White society, the conflict between Blacks and Whites became much, much worse, of course.

The conflict between the races eventually was limited by the practices of segregation, which established, in essence, separate societies in the United States for Whites and for Blacks. Whites lived in one part of town; Blacks in another. Whites went to White schools; Blacks to Black schools. There were White recreational areas and Black recreational areas, White restaurants and Black restaurants. The races mixed as little as they could, and each race was able to maintain its own standards and its own culture, more or less. In most cases the institutions of segregation were sanctified by law. Wherever there was a sizable population of Blacks, for example, there were laws against miscegenation.

Segregation was not really an ideal solution for the long term, for either race, but in the short term it was infinitely better than racial mixing. The only good long term solution would have been complete geographical separation, in this case by repatriating freed slaves back to Africa and Chinese coolies back to China. But economic considerations — plus the regrettable shortsightedness which characterizes public policy in a democracy — resulted in repatriation being put on the back burner.

And so we lived with segregation as best we could, despite its shortcomings. We still had our turf and our society, and Blacks had theirs. In our society most of us could still talk about our own race and about other races without becoming embarrassed or feeling guilty. There was, of course, a great difference between the cultural and economic levels of White society and those of Black society. Standards in Black schools were far below those in White schools; Black incomes were lower; Black neighborhoods were poorer, dirtier, and more violent. A few Blacks overcame these conditions and prospered, but most lived rather squalidly.

A few Whites — and others — with extra time on their hands patronized the Blacks, even in those days before “racism” became a cause celebre, and attributed Black ignorance and poverty to White “oppression.” Of course, it was nothing of the sort. The great majority of Whites did not concern themselves at all with Blacks and certainly wasted no time in trying to oppress them. Most Whites did not care what Blacks did, so long as they did it among themselves and did not threaten Whites. One merely had to look at the vastly greater difference which existed between the levels of civilization in Europe and in Black Africa to understand that the difference between the levels of White and Black society in America was merely a reflection of the difference in racial quality, and that Blacks in America would be living at an even lower level were it not for the benefits bestowed on them by their proximity to White society.

Nevertheless, the do-gooders persisted in blaming White society for the shortcomings of Black society, though without making much of an impact on White society. During the 1920s and 1930s the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People — the NAACP — lobbied for an end to segregation. Interestingly enough, all the presidents of the NAACP during this period were Jews, not Blacks, and the organization also received nearly all its financing from Jews. It was really the Second World War that changed things. The enormous buildup of wartime industry in America changed the composition of the U.S. work force radically. With millions of White males in uniform, women and Blacks were recruited into the factory work force in unprecedented numbers. The war had the net effect of moving large numbers of Blacks from rural areas into the cities and giving them more money than they had ever had before. Much more important was the psychological impact of the war. The war propagandists in America painted the war as a crusade for democracy and equality. We were told that the Germans believed themselves a “master race.” It was very wicked for any one group of people to believe that they were superior to any other group, we were told, over and over again. Well, after we had killed millions of our fellow Europeans and had lost 300,000 of our own soldiers proving that the Germans were not a “master race” after all, it was much easier for the propagandists of the controlled media to persuade us that Whites and Blacks were innately equal, and that the lower socioeconomic level of Blacks therefore must be our fault. If Blacks were ignorant and poor, we had made them that way. It was segregation that was holding them down. The result was White guilt: it first began to take hold in the White consciousness in the 1950s.

Television became a powerful, new weapon in the hands of the guilt-mongers. We were treated to television spectacles of inoffensive, well-dressed Blacks sitting quietly in White cafés, while White waitresses refused to serve them and White patrons jeered them. We saw Blacks being pulled off buses and beaten with baseball bats by White Klansmen. We saw police dogs and club-swinging White policemen attacking Black so-called “freedom marchers” in Alabama. I don’t mean to say that scenes such as these were typical of the so-called “civil rights” demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s. But they did happen occasionally. White working-class people, who were least able to protect themselves from the Black assault on White jobs, White neighborhoods, and White schools during the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes reacted in an intemperate and undignified way. Sometimes they even reacted violently. Whenever they did, the cameras of the controlled media were there to record it. And these few scenes were cleverly edited, put in a context carefully selected to appeal to the innate White sense of propriety and fairness, and then broadcast over and over and over again. The result was more White guilt — as intended.

By skilfully using selected scenes of White resistance to racial integration which were embarrassing to most White viewers, the controllers of the media were gradually able to make the whole idea of resistance to racial integration embarrassing to most White people. And then the media gave a name to White resistance to integration: Racism. And by repeatedly invoking this name in conjunction with scenes and actions and ideas which already had been made embarrassing, the name itself, the word itself, acquired the power to cause pangs of embarrassment and guilt — exactly as the sound of the dinner bell by itself caused Pavlov’s dogs to salivate. The media had established a conditioned reflexive reaction to the word “racism.” The very word itself now is sufficient to cause the trendiest among us to turn pale and run for cover, while it makes even fairly rugged individualists uncomfortable.

Now, this brief history of “racism” really is a gross over-simplification. The actual process was much more complicated and involved many details which we have insufficient time to describe today. The schools, for example, were recruited into the conditioning program. The content of school curricula was falsified in order to prevent White students from understanding the rationale for segregation in America — or more generally, for the separation of races anywhere in the world. At the same time, history courses were de-Europeanized and larded with all sorts of imaginary accomplishments of non-Whites. The aim of all of this was to make it seem to White students that any effort to maintain a White society was not only irrational but also unfair.

The only thing which has helped a few White students resist this teaching has been the actual, physical presence of real Blacks in their schools, so that they could see the glaring contradiction between the theory of racial equality and reality.

One of the consequences of this generally very successful program of conditioning by the controlled media, this program of brainwashing, has been to make it very difficult to discuss racial matters rationally. It’s like it must have been trying to discuss sex rationally among Presbyterians a century ago.

When I’m on television talk shows and I talk about race, I receive really hysterical calls from some people, who just can’t deal with it. And calls from the haters, too — people who tell me I ought to be killed for being in favor of separation of the races or for being opposed to miscegenation. And these people who scream out hatred and obscenities at me for daring to have Politically Incorrect opinions on race are White people — White people who have been conditioned by the controlled media to react that way.

But ordinary people used to get just as upset about sex a hundred years ago. They used to hate, despise, and even want to kill people who had unconventional ideas about sex — and I’m not talking about child molesters or homosexuals; I’m talking about healthy heterosexuals who simply weren’t as rigidly conventional in their ideas or practices as the rest of the population. Margaret Sanger, the pioneer of birth-control education in America, was thrown into prison for her views in 1917. Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church, scandalized conventional Christians by taking a number of wives, and he was lynched — murdered — by a mob in Illinois in 1844.

Nevertheless, race is something we must think about and talk about rationally and honestly. We must not be embarrassed by it. We must not feel guilty about it. We must understand that wanting to live and work with people of our own kind is a natural, healthy feeling that we are born with. Nature gave us this feeling so that we could evolve as a race, so that we could develop special characteristics and abilities, which set us apart from every other race. This feeling, this preference for our own kind, is essential for our continued survival. What is unnatural and destructive and truly hateful is enforced “multiculturalism,” as it’s called, enforced “diversity.” I will conclude today by pointing out that our natural feeling about race isn’t the only thing the brainwashers of the controlled media have worked hard to develop into a conditioned, reflexive guilt-and-fear mechanism. They’ve worked nearly as hard to confuse our natural understanding of the differences between men and women. When I say in public, as I often do, that the natural role for a man is that of provider and protector, and the natural role for a woman is that of a nurturer, I am subjected to the same kind of hysterical and hate-filled attacks as when I talk about race.

The media, the Jews, the egalitarians are intent on obscuring all distinctions, all structure in our society, all standards. We must resist their whole campaign of enforced Political Correctness. But most of all we must resist their effort to condition our thinking about race. We can survive feminism, no matter how neurotic and unhappy it may make us. We can survive other forms of egalitarianism, no matter how socially destructive they are.

But we cannot survive much longer unless we return to honesty in dealing with race.