In this column some months ago I wrote that there was a skeleton in the closet of race integrationists both left and right, and that was the social fact of racial self-segregation -that is, that members of races and ethnic groups tend by the exercise of freedom of association to select the company of members of their own group, all things being equal, and not that of individuals highly distinct from themselves. I further commented that this state of affairs must be deemed ultimately intolerable by those who view racial integrity as a flaw of nature, or some sort of social disease that has its cure in a sort of assimilation therapy conducted by the state and by extension industry. I am reminded of these comments by the recent speech by newly appointed Attorney General Eric Holder to employees of the Justice Department to mark the start of Black History Month, wherein he singles out the U.S. as a “nation of cowards” in failing to talk about race frankly. It will be instructive to quote him at some length.
“Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.” While admitting that race issues continue to be an item of political discussion, Holder argues that “we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.” Holder said the workplace is largely integrated but Americans still self-segregate on the weekends and in their private lives, adding that, “It is an issue we have never been at ease with and, given our nation’s history, this is in some ways understandable. If we are to make progress in this area, we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us.”
The cure to our racial ills, specifically, the disease of self-segregation in our private lives (that is, the exercise of the Constitutional guarantee of free association) we are to enter upon a frank discussion of race with one another. Psychoanalytical implications this “talking cure” aside, the idea of discussion as a remedy in social affairs is not new. Jim Kalb trenchantly observed of discussion of social mores that it is typically only permitted in situations where the issue has already been decided by other means. Certainly it is not anticipated by forced integrationists that the outcome of this discussion will be a just-as-frank admission that racial differences are culturally (if not biologically) non-trivial. When discussion leads to admission that the discriminatory impulses of nature are largely benign and often essential, then, having then been foreclosed in favor of the preordained conclusion, the discussion is revealed to be the perfunctory exercise it actually is, the de facto reality of how we are permitted to think about race having been long ago been fashioned. It is not a far walk from this “guiding” of ideas a la mode, to the notion that first they are the sine qua non of acceptable social discourse, and still later, a matter of mental hygiene itself. The “guidance” of the state then becomes the “therapy” of the state, ending in the “reformation” of the persona through penitence and absolution, to assimilation, and finally to advocacy. One who is sufficiently reformed is always an unselfconscious advocate, says the state, and the institutions it controls.
Race reconciliation is an absolute category of the understanding to the integrationist. As with the suppliers in the holocaust industry, all thought and action is in reference to the correct conception of racial relations. From the example of “Semitical Correctness” we then derive the notion of racial correctness. Notable in Holder’s remarks is the underlying assumption that “progress in this area” is constituted by resolving those things that “divide us.” Division, that is integrity and authenticity, are therefore ills to be remedied. More accurately, it is not “division” itself that is to be remedied, but rather those characteristics that make for white identity (the proximate cause of satanic division) that must be remedied, for it is assumed that it is not the black man, the ongoing and perpetual victim, who must change himself to facilitate unity, but rather the white man, the intractable “racist.” Presuppositions such as these do not constitute discussion, but rather the pretense of discussion, the false confessions of Soviet tribunals.
What parties would wish to participate in the pretense of discussions concerning what divides us racially? Why, those who are the victors in the de facto state of affairs, whose victory is at least partly realized in the capitulation and reformation of the patient. The victorious Northern section in the “irrepressible conflict” coined a term for it: reconstruction. Reconstruction in reality was the abject capitulation and self-recrimination expected of the unregenerate white, disenfranchised and dispossessed of property, culture, and a political voice. The last stronghold is that of the will, which must be broken, so that reconstruction might be fully realized. This process entails the psychic death and resurrection of the individual into the collective mind, where dissent is evidence of illness and incomplete regeneration -a “post-racial” Lazarus emerges from the tomb. But only one party to the discussion has had to die and be reborn into post-racial consciousness. The other parties, identities intact, protected by the state, are transformed into sadistic proselytes of the state messiah, shock troops who will finally impose the desideratum of equality through the machinery of a state manufactured self-esteem.
It is in this context that “discussions” of reconciliation (meaning the death of the individual persona of the white) must be rejected (the facts having already been established) in favor of the cultivation of the unregenerate consciousness, its fist raised to the false messiah of the state, and its clients, the greater among equals.
