As I see that whiteness is in the news again, or perhaps still, it seems time once again to marshal some observations that might be helpful to some of my fellow pale faces.
As I have also gathered that I am from time to time read by critics who have the discerning eye of a five gallon wet/dry vac, who snatch at things I say in order to put them on a skeery black and white background photo of me, I can only say that today’s installment will be a treasure trove for them. We can start with the fact that white babies are a blessing from the Lord.
In normal times, this could have been taken as part of an exercise in a logic text. All babies are a blessing from the Lord. White babies are in fact babies. White babies are a blessing from the Lord. QED. Kind of like “all men are mortal, Socrates is a man,” and so on. But alas, these are not normal times and so people who are willing to say that white babies are a blessing from the Lord are regarded with a rancorous suspicion. “Are you saying that black babies are not a blessing from the Lord?” No, and I cheerfully grant that Alcibiades was also mortal.
The more judicious among us urge me to leave this topic entirely alone. Why don’t I just leave the subject alone? The answer to that question is that we are being manipulated into framing ethnic issues in a way that is frequently a stalking horse in the cause of fomenting ethnic animosity—an exercise that never ends well. Consequently, if we don’t want to die, it is necessary to show the doctor the worrisome splotch.
If I say “white babies matter,” and someone checks me with “all babies matter,” the response they will get from me is amen. But if an activist from a couple years back came into a big corporation in order to conduct some mandatory training on how to resist whiteness in the workplace, and started in with his Black Lives Matter mantra, and a recalcitrant employee said something outrageous in response, such as his sentiment that “All Lives Matter,” he would get HRed hard. This is why that employee is working for a different corporation now, in a state not nearly so blue.
“Diversity, equity, inclusion” is the kind of tag line you find painted on the tops of guillotines.
Now being descended from Adam as they are, white people have been guilty of many sins. One of their stupidest sins, among many others, is the sin of feeling guilty for being white. It is a sin of the basest ingratitude. It is not a sin to be white. But it is a sin, and a very big one, to look or act sheepish about it.
Whites find ourselves frequently harangued over the sheer injustice of our glaring white privilege. One response, as represented by the embedded meme above, is to deny that there is really such a thing as white privilege at all. Plenty of whites, millions of them in fact, have lived out their hardscrabble days in hardscrabble ways. So the riposte goes, and that retort is true enough in countless cases. The slaves who erected Stonehenge would like to have a word with you, not to mention the men down in the belly of the triremes at Actium.
But there really is another level to this, and so we still need to account for the fact that there is another group of whites, among whom I number myself and my kin, who genuinely do have an enormous amount of privilege—simply because of our whiteness in a white world and the concomitant blessings that brings. The problem with this problem is that it is not a problem. It is not even a little problem. And not surprisingly, the fact that I don’t think it is a problem is, for some, a problem.
For them it is such a big problem that they feel the need to burn down Western Civilization as a way of settling the grievance. But if that were to happen, there will be no one to bring them snacks, and that realization would dawn on them far too late. Their dismay will be genuine, but genuine or not, there still won’t be any snacks.
Another name for all these privileges is blessings, and we are supposed to be grateful for all our blessings, not resentful of them. We even have a national holiday dedicated to the idea of thanking God for this white privilege. We should thank God for the white privilege we know about, and include in the prayer all the white privilege that we don’t know about. In fact, this coming Thanksgiving, all white people with a sense of propriety should raise a fork before the Lord, with a slab of some white meat on it, laden with typological significance, and render hearty thanks.
People of darker hue could raise a drumstick, but that’s their look out. Everybody should be grateful for something, some for this and some for that. All Christians everywhere are called to be thankful for all things and in all things (1 Thess. 5:18; Eph. 5:20). White babies, black babies. Grow where you are planted.
Of course, if your grandfather stole a bunch of stuff from a brown guy and got away with it because of the color of the jury, that would be different. Steps should be taken to put that sort of thing right (Ex. 22:12). But if the headwaters were of a different nature, e.g. your grandfather worked really hard, went to church, stayed married to one woman, and they had a passel of white babies who grew up to stay faithful to their spouses, anybody who feels guilty about the resultant downstream blessings, however white they are, is a cad, a bounder, and an idiot.
So of course we say that privileges, advantages, benefits, and opportunities are good things, for which we must be grateful. All Christians naturally add the qualification that such things must be honestly come by, that is, not acquired by dishonest or unlawful means. But because this whole issue is a debate with commies, it has to be realized that in their lexicon, any privilege, or advantage, or benefit, or opportunity is prima facie evidence that the privilege was acquired and held in a way that was injustice itself. For them, inequity is the injustice. They are levelers, and will not rest content until everything is flattened.
Advantages can only be conferred by the god of the system. For them, this is the state. For us, it is the God who made Heaven and earth. For the living God, the rationale for doing what He does is His sovereign good pleasure. For them, the rationale requires them to level everything, and they are just as content with leveling down as leveling up. And this is how their current push came about, which is not to liberate blacks, but rather to enslave whites, making them wards of the state as has largely been done with blacks. Then everyone can be equally miserable.
Now the current anti-white vitriol is a proxy war. As it happened in the providence of God, in the centuries after Christ, the Christian gospel spread west and north, and took deepest root in Europe first. If there are certain cultural blessings that came from this—as Richard Dawkins has recently argued—this means that Europeans got a head start on such cultural blessings, that head start being about a millennium and a half or so.
So most white people, regardless of their personal quirks and beliefs, have a Christian legacy that goes back roughly to the time of King Arthur. This has had consequences. Among the cultural consequences would be the Christmas carols that Dawkins likes, and the cathedrals he so enjoys. So taking one thing with another, white people are generally Christian, or Christian adjacent, or Christian apostates, or Christian lite, or Christian dependent, or Judeo-Christian, or Christian Bale.
Two hundred years ago, most of our ruling elites believed that Jesus of Nazareth had actually risen from the dead, and this was connected to many of the cultural blessings that were being accrued by white people. Now most of our ruling elites don’t believe anything of the kind, and yet many of the blessings have not yet evaporated. This cultural apostasy has created what Samuel Rutherford used to call “a hot mess.”
When such a state of affairs comes to function on cruise control, apart from a living and robust faith in Christ, this provokes two reactions, one from insiders and the other from outsiders. From insiders, the privileges are taken for granted, as some sort of birthright, and this leads to a cycle of hubris and conquest, followed by guilt and self-loathing. For the outsiders, the cycle is craven acquiescence, followed in their turn by envy and malice.
The down side of this cycle, for insiders and outsiders both, is where we are now.
One of the consequences of this legacy is that white Eurocentric cultures are haunted by guilt. They are not haunted by guilt because they are any more guilty than other cultures, because they are not, but rather because guilt is our thing. Primitive cultures are haunted by fear, and Asian cultures are honor cultures, meaning they are haunted by shame. Fear, guilt, or shame are the general options. But when the mojo disappears from Western cultures, the general result is guilt—true guilt, false guilt, nonsense guilt, and jumbled guilt.
As Christopher Caldwell has shown, the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a constitutional and legal disaster. But the reason it had the initial success that it did was because an appeal was being made to a genuine sense of white unease and guilt over the way blacks were being treated. And that movement resulted in some positive changes initially, with whites and blacks making a genuine effort to get along in some places. But the cancer cells in that act were going to metastasize at some point, as they have now done, and the racist and vitriolic accusations now being leveled against whiteness as such, in all its manifestations, are only being received by the self-loathing commies. Everyone else is just staring at the hatred, somewhat stupefied.
When Christian cultures first form, they do so under the influence of law and gospel. When they go into decline and start to teeter on the edge of complete apostasy, as we are currently doing, the thing that departs first is gospel and the presence of Christ, but the law lingers a bit longer. And because of that, the law continues to speak a word of condemnation. The forgiveness departs before the law departs.
This also explains why secularists launch their manic and moralistic crusades, adopting them as means of atonement that have the disadvantage of never atoning for anything. This includes the racial reconciliation-mongers, and especially the soft evangelicals who drift along with the racial reconciliation-mongers.
Condemnation lies heavily on top of these white people, like a mattress soaked with a malaise that smells like turpentine, and this has resulted an army of self-loathing whites who looked in the mirror and decided that the problem was the color they saw reflected back. The actual problem was all the fornication, and drug use, and abortions, but it was nice to settle on something like the skin tint. It simplified things.
That way the whole thing could be turned around and aimed at Christians who were the same guilty color, but who were somehow not tied up into knots over it. So when the commies come for conservative white Christians, the proxy war becomes a real war. Everything latent comes out in the open.
We use the phrase that some people are “comfortable in their skin.” That saying takes on new meaning when we are dealing with this topic of skin color. Because white Christians are generally normies, and because they have believed in Jesus, they generally don’t have the impulse to blame their angst on their color. They don’t really have any deep bone-angst because they have a Christ who forgave them. This means they look genuinely puzzled when someone tells them it is time to repent of their whiteness. It seems to them to be the dumbest idea in the whole world.
This gives the commie whites, riddled with their guilt, an opportunity to feel superior, an opportunity they snatch at greedily. This is a moralistic crusade they can get behind. It is bad enough for you normies to be white, but to deny the guilt associated with that, and to go swanking around in suburbia, mowing your lawns, and grilling your burgers, and having tow-headed boys who play junior lacrosse, is a thing not to be borne. At least the whites who have acknowledged the insidiousness of their color are to be preferred to the unrepentant. Perhaps the color gods will forgive them if they spew enough hatred at their own skin matches.
So this war on whiteness started out as a proxy war, but the real villain is going to be named and attacked soon enough. That enemy is going to be named as the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ—the font of all hate speech.
The seedbed for this hostility to whites is actually white self-loathing. Some on the right have wanted to say that all of this is fomented or augmented or orchestrated by a cabal of Jews. If that were true, they would have to be self-loathing Jews, but if it is true, it is also entirely beside the point. This problem will not be fixed by reactionary whites persuading us that white people are stupid enough to be steered in that way. You can’t fix self-loathing by giving people additional reasons for the loathing. The self-loathing is only removed when a man humbles himself, repents of his sins, and kneels to worship the Jew at the right hand of the Father.
And Toby has some additional observations here.