Psychopathology and Racial Self-Hate Among Whites

Kevin MacDonald
Occidental Observer
October 7, 2014

A prominent feature of the Frankfurt School was the ideology that ethnocentrism among Whites (but not Jews) was a psychopathology. This weapon was taken up by the organized Jewish community which claimed that pro-White and anti-Jewish attitudes were literally public health problems and popularized  phrases like “virulent anti-Semitism,” analogizing anti-Jewish attitudes to the spread of a virus.

This campaign has been incredibly successful among Whites. Whites who have internalized this pathogen naturally suppress such attitudes, and they do so despite their universality, and despite the reality that ethnic self-interest is eminently rational from an evolutionary perspective. And even despite the fact that many of those promoting this pathogen are proudly ethnocentric themselves. But the campaign has been very effective: No one wants to publicly express attitudes that mark one as a psychiatric case.

Given the rationality and the evolutionary imperative of ethnic interests, there is the opposite suggestion — that at least some of the Whites who express such attitudes are suffering from a psychopathology. After all, the great majority of humanity is, to varying degrees, ethnocentric. and proud of it. What’s wrong with Whites?

This suggests that we should look for signs of psychopathology among Whites who are virulently (to borrow the ADL’s term) anti-White. This is not to suggest that all or even most Whites who express anti-White attitudes are suffering from psychopathology. In fact, the anti-White revolution is massively incentivized, so that a great many normal Whites, from university presidents and corporate executives, to media figures, politicians, and diversity entrepreneurs, personally benefit from White dispossession, both financially as well as in terms of having access to elite positions.

Such people are short-sighted: In the long run, their descendants will suffer incalculably from their sins. But they are definitely living the good life for now. 

And of course, many Whites are simply tuned out of their racial dispossession, especially if they don’t live near the areas inundated by non-Whites. They are enjoying their hobbies, raising their kids, and trying to live a good life. They are well aware that publicly expressing pro-White attitudes will lead to job loss and social ostracism. And they are pacified because nothing they see in the mainstream media is likely to make them feel that they ought to care about their impending dispossession.

Nevertheless, as the previous link shows, Whites are not happy about becoming a minority — despite the best efforts of the media to lull White America to sleep about their dispossession. And if things get dicey when their communities change, there’s still time and space to move away.

One obvious place to look for psychopathology is pathological empathy/altruism, common enough among Whites (and more common among Whites than any other group—the Northwest Europe culture of guilt and empathy). Pathological empathy facilitated by the media (which is forever promoting altruism by Whites toward suffering non-Whites) is doubtless important for many of the extreme anti-White statements and behaviors that are so common these days. Such people are at the extreme of a normal psychological trait— what is termed Nurturance/Love in personality psychology (here, p. 281ff). Too much of a good thing.

But here I want to discuss another form of the psychopathology of White racial self-hate, on display in a Huffpo op-ed by one Pastor Renita Marie, M.Div. (“White Privilege on the Streets of Ferguson“). Rev. Marie is overflowing with White guilt:

Being white is not all it is cracked up to be — at least not for those who are really aware. There’s no escaping the ugly history of those who look like me, those who have historically terrorized and dehumanized some part of nearly every culture including our own. In the past I carried much shame and embarrassment about being white.

When Michael Brown was murdered I found myself sobbing while unconsciously rubbing my skin until it started to hurt. Was I trying to rub away my whiteness?

Rev. Marie has not only suffered tremendous guilt and shame because of her Whiteness, she destroyed the Whiteness of her children by having two Black children. It must have seemed the only moral thing to do given the evil of Whiteness So this puts her in the upper reaches of liberal goodness — just the sort to be posted by Huffpo. She is what Theodor Adorno termed a “genuine liberal.”

The reference to Adorno and the Frankfurt School is relevant here because a major part of their program was to find the origins of White ethnocentrism in disturbed parent-child relations (reviewed in Chapter 5 of Culture of Critique). In my review I concluded that the Frankfurt School had used psychoanalysis, which is infinitely pliable, to create an upside-down world where ethnocentric Whites had parents who didn’t love them. In fact, based on their own data, I concluded the opposite.

Because of their fundamentally political program of indicting gentile culture and especially gentiles who represent the most successful and culturally approved members of their society, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality were forced to adopt a psychodynamic perspective in which all of the relationships were inverted. Surface insecurity becomes [via psychoanalysis] a sign of deep-felt security and a realistic perspective on life. Surface security and self-confidence [via psychoanalysis] become signs of deep insecurities and unresolved hostilities symptomatic of a fear of “looking inside.” (p. 185)

My theory, in a nutshell (and ignoring genetic influences on ethnocentrism—probably irrelevant here anyway because her family of origin was quite ethnocentric) predicts that when parents have good relationships with their children, they identify with their parents and seek to emulate their values. This is one way that evolution shapes children’s attitudes (here, p. 43). Good parents are good transmitters of their culture. If the parents value their people and their culture and have loving, affectionate relationships with the children, the children will tend to adopt their attitudes, and if not, they won’t.

However, when there is hostility between parent and child, children reject the values of their parents. So if the parents are are pro-White, the children will reject them and end up hating their people and culture.

The Frankfurt School predicts the opposite: They claim that genuinely liberal Whites who reject any inkling of ethnocentrism are the product of loving and affectionate homes. They claimed this, even though their actual results showed that the families of children who rejected their parents values had a lot of surface hostility and estrangement. Indeed, they were rebelling against their conservative parents, just like Rev. Marie. But with the magic of psychoanalysis, this was interpreted as masking a loving relationship.

So how does Rev. Marie see her parents?

As a young white girl, I was raised in a very prejudiced environment. My grandmother tried very hard to teach me that being white was better than anyone else — especially black. Lessons came through getting the hell beat out of me for having my black friends discovered. Another time I was whipped until I bled for declaring that Jesus was black. After all, he hid in Egypt.

Pretty clearly, the ethnocentrism of the parents did not rub off on the daughter. The psychological research quite clearly shows that beatings and hostility are not recommended as ways of getting children to emulate parental values. Rev. Marie hates her parents and that means hating everything they stand for, including their ethnocentric attitudes. If her hated parents were horrified at her Black friends and her mixed-race children, so much the better. All the better to get back at them— to the point that her entire social world now consists of Blacks: “In nearly all of my familial and social settings I am the only white person.” The genuine liberal as hater — first and foremost, of her parents.

Rev. Marie has dropped out of the White race and has become a crusader against it. Of course, that means a good career and lots of praise from elites in the contemporary environment. But it’s pretty clear that her motivation is far deeper than merely taking advantage of all the opportunities available these days from hating Whites. A genuine race traitor. Noel Igantiev would be proud.

One moral is that if you want to impart healthy attitudes about race and culture to your children, you should embed them in a loving and trusting environment. Such an environment is not a panacea, given that children are quickly indoctrinated when they go to school and when they watch television and listen to music. But it is certainly a step in the right direction.

There are likely quite a large number of Whites that can be considered to be in this category. A major part of the strategy of the left has been to recruit people who are unhappy with the system for various reasons. The original strategy of the left was to recruit the White working class, but, apart from lip service aimed at getting working class Whites to join the rainbow coalition of the Democratic Party, the left has jettisoned the White working class in favor of importing millions of non-Whites and making alliances with other White groups, including psychiatrically disaffected Whites like Rev. Marie.

Sexual non-conformists come to mind. Parental and societal hostility toward homosexual children is entirely understandable from an evolutionary perspective. Parents, after all, want grandchildren, and traditional social attitudes reflected this concern. But it’s not surprising that a great many homosexuals completely reject the traditional culture of the West and have become foot soldiers in the dispossession of Whites.

The fact that homosexuals have become pillars of the cultural left is deplorable —and quite unnecessary. Homosexuals have ethnic interests just like everyone else, and they can promote those interests even if they don’t themselves have children. It seems to me that one way for homosexuals to promote their ethnic interests is to acknowledge heterosexual marriage as a specially protected cultural norm — its special status guaranteed because of its critical importance in creating and nurturing children.

This would be the rational thing to do.  However, I suspect that quite a few are blinded to their legitimate ethnic interests because of hostility they experienced in their families and elsewhere. Just like Rev. Marie, their hatred overwhelms their normal attachments to their people.