The Shimmering Unreality of Race Realism

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Introduction

Michael Spangler has written an introduction to Christian race realism, and I would like to take this opportunity to respond to one of his central claims, which I regard to be both manifestly and dangerously false. There were other things about his essay to be appreciated, particularly in his conclusion, where he was both strong and clear about the need for people who hold to his convictions not to do so in a way that excuses or minimizes obvious sin. That was all to the good, and I appreciated it—so I think we can talk about this without anybody freaking out.

But at the same time, we do need to talk about this in a spirit of genuine race realism. Because when you come down to it, reality is never optional, and it takes more than the mere use of the word realism to make something realistic.

Spangler did link to one of my articles from a couple years back on whiteness, but since he was simply using it to illustrate how a number of Christian leaders are really critical of what he is calling race realism, he didn’t really engage with my arguments. I am therefore not in a position to engage back. Nevertheless, the way he framed my position does mean that I will need to conclude this post with yet another summary of why I believe Western culture has been blessed with superiority over others, even though that culture has been (to date) characterized by a predominant color. That should baffle and discomfit everybody.

But the main thing I want to address first is the fatal flaw found in his definition of race realism. And so here goes.

Realistic Race Realism

As a matter of rhetoric, “race realism” really is a better way to try to sell this position, because of course nobody wants to be unrealistic. But as I said above, realism needs to line up with . . . reality. Race realism needs to get real. And with that said, here is his definition of what he intends by race realism:

And here is the place where I want to register my noisy dissent—against the claim that “the differences [are] . . . relatively permanent.” He comes back to this point again near the end of his article.

Not absolutely immutable, but relatively so. For all practical purposes, immutable.

Okay, but why?

What he “leaves open” here are all the things that lie right at the heart of the dispute. These issues do not lie beyond the scope of his series. They are the very things that are capable of flatly contradicting his central thesis. They are the very things which, if discussed fairly, would falsify it. If ethnogenesis is possible in the short term, and for every young earth creationist it mostly certainly is, then stick a fork in race realism. It’s done.

Notice that he says that “for all practical purposes, race is immutable.” “Relatively permanent.” “Permanently enough.” “Will remain so for our entire lifetime and beyond.” He is not saying that populations can be providentially stable, which is quite true, but rather that race as such is immutable.

But precisely who is he talking about? If he is talking about whites generally as a class, it is quite true that there is a relatively stable white population that is going to be around centuries from now. And the same thing is true of a relatively stable black population.

However, the reason for this stability is not because race is this immutable thing, but rather because what he is calling race rides on the back of location, geography, unsuccessful battles, proximity of marriage partners, history, language, religion, and so on, which are all pretty stubborn things. Friends of inertia all. All of these things are shapers of culture—and culture is the shaper of what he is calling race, and what I would call ethnic groups, tribes, or people groups. More about this below.

So this idea of immutability is, speaking frankly, entirely and completely wrong, which we can see immediately if we take it down to the individual level.

A black man could easily have a great-grandchild, bearing his last name and everything, within his lifetime, descended from his loins, who could easily pass for a native-born Norwegian. All it would take is for three men in a row, father, son, and grandson, to each marry a blonde Nordic lass. This child I am talking about could easily pass for a Norwegian because he could easily be a Norwegian. Not only that, but he could probably medal in the Olympics as a blue-eyed, blond-haired ski jumper.

I was telling a black friend about this point just a few days ago, and he volunteered that he had a blood cousin who was white. The extreme mutability of what Spangler is calling race is the reason why some black parents want their kids to marry black, and some white parents do the same, and some Jewish parents do the same. The reason these folks are so nervous about the threat of intermarriage to ethnic continuity is precisely because of how fragile that continuity is.

Now if a black man and a white woman, or vice versa, could only produce a human mule, sterile 99% of the time, then it would make some sense to say something like what Spangler is arguing. Horses are horses and donkeys are donkeys, and so when they mate it brings you to a cul de sac every time. We can be species realists about that. But that is not what happens with people. All of our cross cultural offspring are fertile.

And so if we put 500 single blacks and 500 single whites on a deserted island the size of Tahiti, and we ensured that they were all Christians, all spoke English, and were all demographically similar in other ways, and we left them there for some 500 years, when we came back to see what had happened, the thing most likely to have changed would this very thing that Spangler is calling immutable—what he calls race. They would still be speaking English, with their own accent certainly, they would still likely be Christian, at least formally, and they would all be a color that was not one of the two originals. Race is not immutable.

Culture, however, is pretty stubborn, and culture is what drives ethnic distinctives on the physical level.

Darwinism and Scienciest of Minds

Because of the passion for “scientific” categorization in the early 20th century, and under the hegemonic sway of Darwinism, all the smart people began classifying us in “racial” categories. We had always known about tribes, but it was not until the 20th century that people started measuring the width of our foreheads with calipers.

Racialism and attacks on racism are both products of this mentality. One glorified the distinctions between the races, ranking them hierarchically like dutiful Darwinists, and the other attacked such distinctions as being at odds with the rising egalitarianism. But in the first half of the 20th century, the racialists were still riding high, a trend that continued until old Adolph kind of ruined the eugenics party.

And the classifiers actually had their filters set with a pretty fine mesh. “White” was way too general for them. They even divided European races up into Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean (Boot, p. 151). Good thing I was born into the very best one! If challenged on that point as perhaps sounding a little self-serving, I could just reply that we simply need to be race realists about these things.

But as our knowledge of genetics has grown, the very rudimentary conceits of the early 20th century racialists can now be found on that now overcrowded ash heap of history. Human beings from all ethnic backgrounds are 99.9% the same. And the differences that strike us as being so “total,” like skin color, are the result of differences in 0.01% of our DNA.

There are striking visible differences between American blacks and American whites, but these are subcultural differences. These differences exist alongside the obvious difference of skin color, thus setting the stage for a new logical fallacy. You have perhaps heard of post hoc ergo propter hoc, “after this therefore because of this,” like the fellow who believed that the rooster crowing made the sun rise because the latter always followed the former. But how about this new one—prope hoc ergo propter hoc, “alongside this therefore because of this?”

How All This Actually Happened

Between the Flood and the Tower of Babel, we didn’t have this problem. The human race was unified in all the ways.

Because God saw that we were up to no good with that unity, He came down and confused our language. As a result of that, everybody divided up and went this way and that way.

This resulted in the scattered people tending to marry within their linguistically-selected people groups, and so certain genetic traits started to appear, and which then were reinforced in the next generation. The text is very clear. The first differentiation was linguistic, and that was the driver of all the other downstream physiological distinctives that came into existence after that.

This is the same kind of thing that is done artificially by dog breeders and horse breeders. Certain traits are isolated and then reinforced. It can also happen with animals as the result of natural divisions, as when one population is separated from another—when a peninsula becomes an island, say, and the turtles on the island develop a distinctive spot on their shells. I would tell you which turtles are the superior ones, but I don’t want to start any new ethnic disputes.

With people, the linguistic separation was also going to be the cause of other cultural barriers going up—geographical distance, rivalries and wars, differences in religion, and so on. What we see here is that all of these things can and did result in striking visual differences, but the initial driving engine was language. And then, later, if the cultural differences were overcome somehow—as happens in cosmopolitan merchant cities—all the offspring born there are still fertile. They are mutts, not mules.

The Scriptural Short Term

Everyone on earth is descended from Noah and his wife. The Flood occurred at approximately 2400 B.C., and the genesis of all our modern people groups began shortly thereafter, at the Tower of Babel (2242–2206 BC). When God confused the languages of men, they all scattered accordingly. As just discussed, they naturally began to marry within their new people groups, thus reinforcing the ethnic traits that had begun to develop.

Now consider this:

Between the Tower of Babel and the time when Jeremiah made his observation about the Ethiopian, there were approximately 1600 years. In order to make the math simpler, let us specify that 20 years of age is the time of begetting, and so this means we have 80 generations from Babel to Jeremiah. The normal length of a biblical generation is usually counted as 40 years, which would give us 40 generations, but I want to “steel man” Spangler’s argument here.

In any case, the ethnic presentation of the Ethiopian’s darker skin was already set up and in place by the time of Jeremiah, and we don’t exactly know how soon after Babel that trait first appeared. It is likely that these ethnic divisions developed very early because they are all anticipated in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, the preview chapter for the Babel story in Genesis 11. More about that in a minute.

But the very latest time it could have have appeared is 79 generations, and that is short term, not long term. And if Ethiopians came into existence around 10 generations after Babel, that is really short term, and Spangler’s argument is in shambles.

Now Spangler might want to point to this verse as one that makes his point. The Ethiopian is incapable of changing the color of his skin, right? That’s permanent, right? Right, but that is not Spangler’s claim in his article. He is not saying that an individual’s race is permanent, because that would be uncontroversial. Of course we can’t change that. But any man can (rather easily) affect the race of his descendants.

But Wait, There’s More

So if we go from the time to Noah to Jeremiah, that gives us 80 20-year generations to work with. But the Tower of Babel happens in Genesis 11, and the Table of Nations preview is given to us in the previous chapter. Now Babel caused all the divisions in Genesis 10, so that chapter is clearly out of place chronologically. But Genesis 10 does not come after the life of Moses, who edited the book, and so if we take the early date for the Exodus, Moses lived around 1400 B.C.

Taking our 20-year generation, that gives us 40 generations. This is significant because of how certain ethnic groups are already described and set up in Genesis 10. We have the Greeks, for example (the sons of Javan), in vv. 4-5. And we have Cush, the son of Ham, the father of the Ethiopians mentioned there (vv. 6-7). These distinct people groups and more had already taken shape by the time of Moses.

But the normal stability of these people groups was a function of cultural inertia, not a function of genetic destiny. With a dramatic intervention like Babel, it is not at all surprising that distinctive ethnic traits on the physical level began to take shape immediately after, in all the places where these linguistic tribes went.

So, Impossible Tangles

About 10% of American blacks have more than 50% white ancestry. That is almost 5 million people, which means they need to be included as major contributors to this whole white supremacy problem we are hearing so much about.

Among blacks, the average proportion of white ancestry is 18%, which means that if you run it out to 128 ancestors, 22 of them were white.

And in one survey of over 5,000 white Americans (23 and me customers), around 3.5% of them had at least 1% black ancestry. And in the South, these percentages are significantly higher—across the South, about 10% of whites had African DNA in their systems.

This presents no problem at all for normal people, but it poses a great problem for the “not one drop” approach to permanent racial categories. The “not one drop” system of racial classification was something that developed in the 20th century in various Southern states, and defined as black anyone who had a black ancestor anywhere. This seems ludicrous to us now, but the hard racialization of all cultural issues made it necessary. This approach was eventually struck down by the Supreme Court in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia. For context, I was 14 when that court case happened. This happened in our history, but it was not exactly ancient history.

Researchers have also found that when people have less than 28% African ancestry, they tend to identify as European-American. And this is not all that hard to do, depending. I have an acquaintance whose grandfather was born a black Roman Catholic in New Orleans, and died a white Lutheran in Ohio.

This Cultural Crisis & the Sons of Japeth

The great Thomas Sowell summed up multiculturalism in this way. “What multiculturalism boils down to is that you can praise any culture in the world except Western culture—and you cannot blame any culture in the world except Western culture.” This is because the multi-cultural commies are driven by envy, and Western culture is replete with the kind of blessings that make the envious just froth and bubble. Now, as it happens, notwithstanding such shining lights as Sowell, this Western culture has been overwhelmingly white. Not entirely white, but an awful lot of white.

This has led some to confuse the effect with the cause, but that’s all right. They want to treat whiteness as the gospel, while their counterparts, the dumb people on the other side, want to treat whiteness as though it were the devil. Both of them are making exactly the same mistake, and are refusing to heed the warning that Christ gave us.

This is truly an interesting time, or at least a time that has gotten my full attention. The center is not holding, and the worst really are full of passionate intensity. The old cultural center has lost its grip, and everything has been thrown in chaos and disarray. In this moment, the CRT commies are preaching their false universal, while the race realists are telling us that we can find secure footing in our tribal particularities. But the reason people are pitching their wares in this way at all is because of a massive cultural insecurity that appears to have everyone by the throat. Nobody knows what to hang onto anymore, and so the merchants of carnal solutions are hawking their wares. “Try this.” “No, not that, try this,”

The psalmist asks the question, when the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do (Ps. 11:3)? The only answer to that question is to preach Christ the cornerstone, and the prophets who told us He would come, and the apostles who told us He had come (Eph. 2:20).

But because of my understanding of the gospel of the kingdom, I find myself treated as a leader of the radical right by the commies, and as a race traitor by some on the sclerotic right—because for some strange reason I don’t ground the manifest superiority of Western culture in a shared susceptibility to sunburn.

In the providence of God, the gospel spread from Jerusalem to the north and west, taking deepest root there. There were Christian influences elsewhere, but the impact of the gospel on the culture of the West was massive in comparison. The West and the Kingdom of God are NOT synonyms, of course not, but it must be insisted that they are so closely intertwined that the history of the one cannot be told without reference to the history of the other. This is simply an historical fact, and those whining about it should just stop. It is the gospel that shaped the blessings of the West, and not the skin color of those who were so blessed.

Another fact is that almost all the people involved in receiving this undeserved gift in the first wave of gospel expansion were white, from which some deep thinkers concluded that it was the winsomeness of our whiteness that drew the gospel to us as our due reward—which grossly misunderstands the nature of true gospel. The gospel is only for wretches, which the Europe of that day was full of—wretched savages. Being proud of whiteness on that account is like somebody noticing that the first six people who went forward at a Billy Graham crusade all had blue eyes, and concluding from this that blue eyes were the key factor, and not the prayer of repentance.

And the people who hate whites, envying them their cultural blessings, are like the tenth drunk getting saved at that crusade being upset because a drunk up ahead of him got saved first. It is all beyond ridiculous.

But all of it was the grace of God, promised centuries before, and not one ounce of it deserved.

And so we see that God is immutable, and the grace of God is immutable. Race? Not so much.

Important Postscript

I thought Jeremy Carl’s book The Unprotected Class was marvelous. He documented and navigated the whole hellscape of our generation’s formal hostility to whites without falling into the victim/identity trap. The victim game is a leftist ploy, which means that whites will never be allowed to play it, and they shouldn’t play it anyway, even if they could.

At the same time, his book highlighted one distinction about this white plight that I have not made in all my discussions of this so far, and so I would like to make it now. I don’t believe that whites should think of themselves as a tribe, because we really aren’t one. At the same time, here in North America, we are a readily identifiable demographic group. By this I mean that that if you were looking over a crowd in a stadium, you would be able to tell at a glance who the white people were.

You would not be able to identify the German tourists, however, or the second-generation children of Finnish immigrants, or Jews, or the white suburbanites rooting for the home team. You couldn’t tell anything at a glance about foundational loyalties that had shaped all these people.

But by dint of ceaseless propaganda, we have inflamed the tensions between whites and blacks, and even if you haven’t believed a bit of that propaganda yourself, you still need to budget for the fact that a lot of other people have bought into it. I call this thinking like an insurance company.

If you lived in a city where the whites and blacks were at daggers drawn, and then one day riots broke out, you don’t have to choose up sides. The other side does that for you.

It matters not that your mind is full of nuance regarding your Scots/Irish background, which is the only ethnicity (other than American) that you feel any affection for. You need to budget for the fact that other people care very much what color you are, and so it is frankly irrelevant that you don’t feel any solidarity with the Dutch, who are the same color as you, and who are hiding in the alley behind the same dumpster that you are.

In applying to college, you need to think about your whiteness. Applying for jobs, the same. Submitting a manuscript to some New York publishing house? You white, hetero male, you? Is your story about a protagonist that is up against incredible odds? Good, because that means you should be emotionally prepared for what is going to happen to you. In short, because our public discourse on ethnicity is being managed by “fools and blind”—to borrow one of the Lord’s phrases—you do have to think like an insurance company. But budgeting for the world that men like Neil Shenvi have made—he being a representative of the woke center right—does not mean you have permission to start thinking like Neil Shenvi. You do have permission to start thinking like Jeremy Carl, and so I suggest you hop to it.

I am very grateful for my ethnic heritage, and this gratitude is no less freely rendered because it is mandated in the Decalogue. I love the places I have lived the longest (Maryland and Idaho), and I love the places my ancestors used to live (Scotland and Ireland). I love the English language and all of its weirdness, including the history of that word wyrd. I am grateful for the culture that shaped me. These attachments are all part of our natural affections, and are subsumed under patterns given us in Scripture. We are commanded to honor father and mother (Ex. 20:12), and grandfather and grandmother (Prov. 17:6). Jesus lamented over Jerusalem (Matt. 23:37), and can we not lament over the cities we are ruining?

But this gratitude is not pride . . . just simple gratitude. And my principal ethnic affections are best described as American—football, apple pie, Calvinist legacy, guns, road trips, music, markets, and a boatload more—all of which I share with Chocolate Knox, who is not the same color I am, while at the same time I have virtually nothing in common with a resident of Sheki, a city of 68,000 in the Caucasus Mountains, after which my entire racial category is named. And that guy, with whom I have so little in common, has a moral obligation to be grateful for a whole list of things that I wouldn’t even be able to understand. We sit down at a table together, his eyes lighting up with delight at the dish we are being served, and from the looks of it, I would rather be dead in a ditch than eat whatever it is. So I look at him and say, “Well, at least we are both Caucasians.” At which he beams and hands me the ladle.

Being loyal to whiteness in itself (apart from those stipulated insurance company issues stated above) is an odd and very superficial move. Not realistic at all.

Not surprisingly, all of this blends very nicely into the issues surrounding Christian nationalism. And so if you just want to deal with sensible CNs, those who are not “race realists,” then (with a hat tip here to Josh Daws), all you need to do is find those who think about America the same way Tim Keller thought about the city.