Andrew Joyce
Occidental Observer
June 13, 2015
“Make no mistake about it: we intend to keep bashing the dead white males, and the live ones, and the females too, until the social construct known as ‘the white race’ is destroyed—not ‘deconstructed’ but destroyed
Race Traitor
As a general rule, you can be fairly certain that any academic discipline that contains the word ‘studies’ within its title can be immediately dismissed on an intellectual level as involving very little studying and a great deal of leftist indoctrination. The relatively new discipline of ‘Whiteness Studies,’ however, is vastly more toxic than the average contemporary effusions of the bloated academic corpus. Indeed, its productions should be seen as nothing less than incitement to the genocide of our people. While many great thinkers in our ranks have explored and exposed the more subversive attempts to shape the ‘ways of seeing’ that continue to lead our people to extinction, I think some light should also be shed on the open, explicit, and unashamed hatred that seethes within this academic discipline. The hateful creed that motivates the new discipline’s leading ‘thinkers’ is shocking and yet somehow predictable in equal measure. Behind its ideological foundations we find phrases, traits, patterns and strategies that are sadly all-too-familiar to us. We are forced to acknowledge once more the pitiless ethnic warfare that is being waged upon us, and the enlistment of our own people in a suicidal crusade.
My own odyssey into this hateful miasma began recently when a friend sent me a link to the online ‘Whiteness Studies’ journal Race Traitor. The journal, formerly boasting the tag-line “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity,” was founded in print form back in 1992 by the Jewish academic Noel Ignatiev. Both Ignatiev and Race Traitor have been mentioned previously at TOO by Kevin MacDonald. As MacDonald noted back in 2008, Ignatiev only very thinly disguised the unrestrained hatred that his ‘discipline’ incites against Whites and their culture:
Ignatiev et al. have developed a story that goes as follows: A bunch of very bad people got together and created a category called “white” to which they belong but people with different colored skin can’t belong. Then they made laws that favored people in the white category, they colluded with other whites to dominate the economic and political process, and they invented baseless scientific theories in which whiteness had its roots in real biological differences. All Ignatiev’s written material that we’ve seen carries the same odd message with the same extreme wording…Ignative writes darkly and dramatically of “abolishing the white race,” “genocide of whites,” etc. When pressed, he emphasizes that that he doesn’t really mean killing people who call themselves white. He only wants to destroy the concept of whiteness. So he’s off the hook, right?
Not quite. Ignatiev is really just playing a game of bait and switch. While fully tuned-in to his own Jewish racial identity, he ostensibly follows the PC line that “races” are only “social constructs.” When pressed, he claims to be little more than an extreme egalitarian, against all social hierarchies but especially those in which he imagines Whites to be at the top. The true nature of the anti-White crusade thus concealed, Ignatiev and his protégés have been able to grow their disciple, and incite hatred against Whites without being accused of doing so. Their hatred assumes a surface legitimacy because the hated “whites” are just a “social construct.” So they are aiming to ‘kill’ a construct, not a people. The party line, therefore, is that it’s all about getting White people to stop thinking that they are White – for their own good of course. So while Black studies, women’s studies, Chicano studies etc. all aim to develop and nurture their relative identities and social agendas, ‘Whiteness Studies’ aims to utterly extinguish any sense of identity and awareness of group interests.
Seen in the context of ethnic competition, and education and culture as weapons in this struggle, it’s clear that there’s nothing remotely benign about stripping Whites of their ethnic awareness and identity. As Kevin MacDonald commented:
Notice that if Ignatiev were sincerely opposed to ethnic competition, he would have criticized all sorts of peoples and individuals around the world for thinking of themselves as belonging to a racial/ethnic category. After all, what’s left when there is no more category of whiteness? There will still be people with white skin who can trace their genetic ancestry to Europe but who have lost all sense of belonging to a racial category. And there will still be people who categorize themselves as Jews and Blacks and Asians and various subdivisions of Asians. These people will continue to have a sense of racial/ethnic identity and they will continue to act on the basis of this identity. Only Whites will be left without an identity and hence without weapons in the racial/ethnic struggle. … When only Whites are left without an identity and hence without weapons in the racial/ethnic struggle, it doesn’t take much imagination to suppose that actual genocide of Whites is the next step.
While Ignatiev and Race Traitor are important and highly visible cornerstones of the contemporary efforts to destroy White identity, and with it our genetic viability, in this article I want to further contextualize these efforts as well as explore some of the broader implications and ramifications of key individuals and their works.
One of the seminal texts of the ‘Whiteness Studies’ clique is Ted Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race (1994 & 1997). Allen (1919–2005) strikes me as a profoundly strange character who circulated in a heavily Jewish milieu throughout his life. Allen was born into a middle-class family in Indianapolis, Indiana. In 1929 the family moved to Huntington, West Virginia, where he later claimed to have been “proletarianized by the Great Depression.” He had joined the thickly-Jewish Communist Party in the 1930s and, after moving to New York in 1948, he taught classes in economics at the Party’s Jefferson School at Union Square in Manhattan (1949–56). In the late 1950s the Communist Party came under government scrutiny and descended into internal struggle, prompting Allen to leave the Party in order to help establish a new organization, the Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Communist Party (POC). After sojourns in England and Ireland following the death of his wife, Allen returned to Brooklyn in the 1960s.
Drawing on the theories of W. E .B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction (1935) on America’s alleged ‘racial blindspot,’ and heavily influenced by close Jewish friends like Noel Ignatin (later Ignatiev), Allen began work on a historical study of three crises in United States history in which he perceived there to be general confrontations between the forces of capital and those from below — the crises of The Civil War and Reconstruction, the Populist Revolt of the 1890s, and the Great Depression of the 1930s. His work focused on the role of the theory and practice of what he perceived as “white supremacy” in shaping those outcomes. Together, Ignatiev and Allen provided the copy for an influential 70s pamphlet containing both “White Blindspot,” under Ignatiev’s name, and Allen’s article “Can White Radicals Be Radicalized.”
I think it speaks volumes about Allen’s own confused sense of racial identity that he published his own contribution to the pamphlet under the decidedly Jewish-sounding pseudonym J. H. Kagin. The Jewish pseudonym was fitting for an individual who throughout his life apparently strove for Jewishness, both in his annihilation and hatred for his own White identity, and in his perpetual association with Jews and their interests. When he finally published The Invention of the White Race in the early 90s, Allen contributed significantly to Ignatiev’s cause by challenging phenotypical definitions of race, challenging arguments that racism is an innate feature of human nature, and in denying the idea that the White working class benefits from a sense of racial awareness and identity. Allen died in poverty in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he lived for over forty years. His last job, it might be added, was rather fitting. He taught math at the ultra-Orthodox Crown Heights Yeshiva.
Another major figure in the development of whiteness studies was Alexander Saxton (1919–2012). Saxton, like Allen, came from a middle class family but cherished pipe-dreams of a life as a class warrior. His father was editor in chief of Harper & Brothers, the company that first published Edna St. Vincent Millay, Aldous and Julian Huxley, J.B. Priestley, and Thornton Wilder. His mother taught literature at a private girls’ school in Manhattan. Also like Allen, he later claimed to have been “radicalized by the Great Depression.” Saxton entered Harvard in 1936, but dropped out in his junior year to become a laborer in Chicago. The six-day-a-week job paid 25 cents an hour, leading Harvard’s dean to suggest that his parents get him psychiatric help. Saxton soon joined the Communist Party, eventually getting his bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago. His membership in the Communist Party, as well as his production of a number of dubious novels beginning in the late 40s, led to an appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-1950s. After decades of writing articles about ‘white supremacy’ a decrepit Saxton published The Rise and Fall of the White Republic in 2003, where he made the argument that ‘white racism’ was central to American politics and culture. It later become a key ‘Whiteness Studies’ text. Saxton shot himself at his home in 2012.
A younger figure in the development of ‘Whiteness Studies’ was Ruth Frankenberg (1958–2007). Frankenberg was born in England to a Jewish father and an English mother, both ardent leftists. After her parents divorced, Frankenberg was raised mainly by her father before moving to California at the end of the 70s, aged 21. Throughout the 70s she had devoted herself as a ‘socialist feminist’ (never as Jewish!) to opposing the National Front, an anti-immigration movement that had been gaining strength in England since the mid-1960s. After arriving in California, and declaring herself a lesbian, Frankenberg began working closely with Erica ‘Ricky’ Sherover-Marcuse and Terry Berman. In A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, author Becky Thompson writes that “From Ricky Marcuse and Terry Berman, both white antiracist consultants and teachers, Ruth learned that antiracist work for white people requires ‘doing the work from a place of self-love.’”[1] There are a number of problems with Thompson’s naive statement. Firstly, both Marcuse and Berman were not White, but were instead strongly identified Jewesses. In fact, Marcuse was the widow of Herbert Marcuse of Frankfurt School notoriety. Secondly, like the work against Whites pioneered by her husband, Ricky’s work may well have been motivated by self-love to the extent that she loved, and identified with, her Jewishness, but there was no love for whites.
Marcuse was sufficiently in tune with her own Jewish identity to work on a kibbutz from 1959–1960/61, where she learned Hebrew. She worked with Herbert Marcuse at UC San Diego in the 1970s, and after Herbert’s second wife, Inge Neumann, died in 1972, Ricky and Herbert married on June 21, 1976. After Herbert died, Marcuse continued producing a large number of writings which simultaneously acting against White identity while boosting Jewish interests. These writings would go on to form the seedbed for the development of ‘Whiteness Studies.’ For example, in her article ‘Working Assumptions For White Activists On Eliminating Racism: Guidelines For Recruiting Other Whites As Allies,’ Marcuse wrote that activists should:
Assume that all white people have undergone some variety of systematic conditioning or ‘training’ to take on the ‘oppressor role’ in relation to people of color. Sometimes this training has been to participate in acts of violence, or to join in racial slurs or jokes; sometimes this training has been to keep silent in the face of injustice. Sometimes this training has been to be ‘extra nice’ towards people of color.
While all Whites are to be seen as ‘trained’ oppressors, Jews were always represented by Marcuse as the quintessential victim. Jews were to have all the rights to identify as Jews that ‘white oppressors’ were to be denied as Whites. In ‘A Working Perspective on Jewish Liberation,’ Marcuse wrote:
Jewish oppression is real; it affects the life of every Jew. As a people and as individuals Jews have been the targets of systematic mistreatment and of anti-Jewish attitudes. … Every Jew has and is entitled to have a unique (self-defined) relationship to Jewish traditions, Jewish cultures, Jewish religious practices, Jewish history, and to the state of Israel.
Before dying in 1988, Marcuse devoted much of her time to pushing her ideology through her ‘Unlearning Racism’ workshops, and indoctrinating White teenagers into supporting multiculturalism through her Oakland-based ‘New Bridges’ group. She also invested a lot of time in ‘Whiteness Studies’ protégés like Ruth Frankenberg, before dying of cancer aged 50 in 1988.
Taking her cue from Ignatiev, Marcuse, Berman, and the White Communists, Frankenberg published White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness in 1993. Frankenberg based her ‘study’ on the dogma of the discipline, which orbits around the belief that race is nothing more than a fluid social, political and historical construct. She argued that while Whites may deny that they are ‘racist,’ they cannot deny that they are White. Frankenberg proceeded to argue that Whites are implicitly racist by virtue of their ‘dominant’ position in western society, and contended that we should ‘critically reflect’ on this social position of dominance that White people occupy in our society. ‘Whiteness Studies’ to Frankenberg, like her predecessors, was therefore nothing more than an exercise in convincing Whites that they are oppressors, whether they wished to be or not, and whether they had actually personally taken part in any oppression or not.
It was this collection of cranks and activists that produced and disseminated the ‘white privilege’ cultural meme.
Frankenberg, like Allen, Saxton, and Marcuse, met a less than pleasant end when she died of lung cancer in 2007 aged 49. But by then enough momentum had been generated for the intellectual movement to survive without its chief architects. ‘Whiteness Studies’ began booming around 2002 when many Jewish and self-hating Leftist academics previously involved in vicariously attacking Whites via scurrilous histories of slavery started noticing new opportunities and drifted into the new field. One was Jewish slavery ‘expert’ Peter Kolchin, who wrote in a 2002 Journal of American History article that:
Suddenly whiteness studies are everywhere. The rapid proliferation of a genre that appears to have come out of nowhere is little short of astonishing: a recent keyword search on my university library’s electronic catalog yielded fifty-one books containing the word “whiteness” in their titles, almost all published in the past decade, and most published in the past five years. … Although the term “whiteness studies” might at first glance suggest works that promote white identity or constitute part of a racist backlash against multiculturalism and ‘political correctness’ virtually all whiteness studies authors seek to confront white privilege – that is, racism, and virtually all identify at some level with the political Left. Most of them see a close link between their scholarly efforts and the goal of creating a more humane social order.
Of course, the new genre hadn’t “come out of nowhere,” as Kolchin suggested. Both the genre itself, and several of its major architects and authors, had verifiable organic links to both Communism and the Frankfurt School — Marcuse being the very personification of such a lineage. And like the Frankfurt School, the ideology of the group is built more or less explicitly on the idea that a more ‘humane social order’ can be achieved only through the total annihilation of Whiteness.
The open pursuance of ‘Whiteness Studies’ must be perceived as nothing less than an act of extreme, even violent, aggression against the White race. I am reminded of a particularly pertinent section from Savitri Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun. Devi wrote that the materialistic world’s view of violence enabled tremendous acts of aggression to slip by unchallenged. She pointed to:
Inconspicuous, slow, yet implacable persecution, both economic and cultural: the systematic suppression of all possibilities for the vanquished, without it ‘showing,’ the merciless ‘conditioning’ of children, all the more horrible that it is more impersonal, more indirect, more outwardly ‘gentle,’ the clever diffusion of soul-killing lies; violence under the cover of non-violence.
The ‘educational’ programs of the ADL, the obliteration of our national borders, the assassination of our racial identity, and the slow genocide of our people are being accomplished without the bullet, bomb or blades. But it is, and will be, tremendously violent in its implications. Whiteness studies are not part of an academic discipline in any true sense of that term. The genre is an act of inter-ethnic aggression.
Conclusion
Today, a quick search on amazon.com reveals more than six hundred hits for books with “whiteness” in the title. Jews are strongly represented both in numerical terms, and in the sense that their contributions appear even more venomous than the average. Take for example, George Lipsitz’s The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (2006), in which the author offers “an unflinching look at white supremacy…whiteness is a structured advantage that produced unfair gains and unearned rewards for whites while imposing impediments to asset accumulation, employment, housing, and health care for members of aggrieved racial groups.” Although Jews continue to be prominent, it remains a painful reality that young White academics continue to flock to a movement geared towards the destruction of their own people.
One major factor facilitating this ethnically suicidal behavior is the ongoing Jewish domination of academia and the constant mutation of what may loosely be termed ‘Frankfurt School’ ideologies into superficially novel intellectual movements. There is really nothing novel at all about ‘Whiteness studies.’ It is simply the latest guise for the radical critique of White culture and, all Talmudic logic about ‘race as a construct’ aside, the active promotion of White genocide. The hypocrisy of the Jewish architects of ‘Whiteness studies’ is self-evident — made clear in their total lack of identification with Whites, and in their very strong identification with Jewish culture and group interests. It is tragic, criminal in fact, that this corrupt cabal of ethnic activists and dysfunctional Communist wannabe-Jews has hijacked positions on faculty, has obtained access to elite publishing outlets, and with it, significant power and influence over culture.
The second factor at play in the success of ‘Whiteness studies’ is the ongoing problem of White pathology. One side of white pathology is altruism towards other races. The even more insidious side is the tendency towards self-hate. In my last article on that subject I wrote that:
This self-hatred can be relatively dormant, to the extent that it is often sub-conscious, but will spike when the media or other cultural influences discover a suitable issue and build a false narrative around it. When the false narrative goes mainstream, replete with emotive moral triggers, White self-hate translates into activism which then takes on a life and momentum of its own. The moral crusade quickly becomes fashionable, spreading on trend-facilitators like social media, gaining more and more blind followers. The true facts behind the original issue are by this point buried under layers of socially constructed debate, stunts, and protests of the ‘body-bag-on-a-beach’ variety. Counterarguments are at this stage designated as subversive, and as an extension of the folk devil of Europe’s ‘racist’ past. Even ‘indifference’ and any mention of the costs of immigration are treated with contempt. Those individuals who are alert to the ruse and actively organize behind a counterargument, such as PEGIDA or nationalist political parties, are designated as folk devils incarnate. Confronted with these folk devils, White moralism reaches its zenith.
The White Leftists currently conspiring with their Jewish academic gurus for the untergang of whiteness are dangerous and morally deluded zealots, and thus race traitors of the highest order. They fully believe that “Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity.” They have wilfully opted out of the struggle for life.
Surveying the turgid productions of this rabble, I was moved towards my own reflections on whiteness. It goes without saying, as a writer for TOO, that I reject outright any suggestion that race is merely a construct. Race, to me, is as concrete a natural reality as the rising of the sun and the blowing of the wind. I could wax lyrical for pages on the accomplishments of the White race and its place at the pinnacle of human progress, but would I reject any reduction of Whiteness to the merely material. More important than the inventions, discoveries, voyages, and battles that distinguish our race is the energy and spirit underlying all of them. I prefer to reflect on whiteness as being distilled in the Faustian spirit, and I believe it would therefore be no more possible to capture ‘Whiteness’ on paper, or an academic discipline for that matter, than to capture lightning in a bottle.
[1] B. Thompson, A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p.165.