Skip to main content
Categories
Features

The War on the West

Douglas Murray, The War on the West, Broadside Books, 2022, 320 pages, $27.99 hardcover

Like Douglas Murray’s previous books, The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and The Madness of Crowds (2019) — both reviewed for American Renaissance by Jared Taylor — The War on the West is valuable reportage on contemporary racial lunacy. The author almost entirely avoids race realism, but does have some insight into the kind of resentment that motivates anti-racists.

Rhodes Must Fall

Some of the most informative material is about moral panics in the author’s native Britain that have not been widely reported in the United States. A good example is the Rhodes Must Fall movement, which began in South Africa in 2015 before spreading to Britain.

Cecil John Rhodes (1853–1902) was a mining magnate who served as the seventh prime minister of Britain’s Cape Colony. In his will, he donated land for building the University of Cape Town, and the university put up a statue in his honor. He also established the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, stipulating that “no student shall be qualified or disqualified for election . . . on account of race or religious opinion.” A black student was first awarded a Rhodes scholarship within five years of his death. Rhodes also left money for a new building at Oxford; it was completed in 1911 and adorned with statues, including one of Rhodes.

By the early 21st century, Cecil Rhodes’ services to the British Empire were being treated as a source of embarrassment. Black students at the University of Cape Town began protesting the presence of his statue on campus, in part by throwing buckets of feces at it. In April 2015, the University agreed to take it down.

The movement quickly spread to Oxford, spearheaded by a South African Rhodes scholar named Ntokozo Qwabe, who described the Rhodes statue at Oxford as “structural violence” and part of a “toxic culture of domination and oppression.” A petition for its removal was submitted to the university authorities. The petition cited a number of anti-black remarks Rhodes had supposedly made, including “I prefer land to niggers” and “one should kill as many niggers as possible.”

The first quote comes from a now largely forgotten 1897 novel called Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner. It supposedly recounts something Rhodes said in a speech to the Cape Parliament, but it has been shown that the novelist was probably misremembering a different speech in which Rhodes said: “You want to annex land rather than natives. Hitherto we have been annexing natives rather than land.”

Credit Image: © PPI via ZUMA Wire

The second quote comes from an unnamed officer’s recollection of something Rhodes supposedly said during the Matabele War of 1896. Upon learning that the Matabele were planning renewed attacks, Rhodes asked how many had been killed in a previous battle. He was told very few, because they had thrown down their arms and begged for mercy. He recommended a less forgiving policy the next time around: “Well, you should not spare them. You should kill all you can, as it serves as a lesson to them when they talk things over at their fires at night.”

There is no evidence Rhodes used the term “nigger” on either occasion. “One should kill as many niggers as possible” is an especially dishonest piece of propaganda because, removed from the military context, it sounds like a call for extermination.

Perhaps even more striking is the treatment meted out to one man who responded thoughtfully to the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Nigel Biggar, Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, is described by the author as “deeply unassuming and polite” and “a famously rigorous scholar.” As the anti-Rhodes movement gathered steam, he read up on the man. Mr. Murray writes:

[H]e suggested that the university could best respond to current turmoils by doing what universities are meant to be best at: scholarship. He proposed that the university should set up a project dedicated to looking into the ethics of empire. . . . One reason the Rhodes Must Fall campaign went so far so fast was that the study of empire had become unfashionable and so institutional, and individual knowledge of what had happened had been slipping away for more than a generation. If the university was interested in working out its attitude toward the past, then it should study the past.

He noted how ignorant the public has become:

A poll of young British people in 2016 found that 50 percent had never heard of Lenin, while 70 percent had no idea who Mao was. When you are speaking into a great vacuum of ignorance, people with malign intent can run an awfully long way awfully fast. They can tell their listeners things that they will simply believe and tell them what they should not question.

This is exactly what the “postcolonialists” want to do. In response to Prof. Biggar’s proposal, over 50 of his fellow academics wrote a letter to the Times condemning the initiative. Some people associated with the project were pressured into resigning.

The statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town being removed. (Credit Image: Desmond Bowles via Wikipedia)

But this was not all. Another open letter signed by more than 170 scholars from around the world denounced Oxford for even considering such a project, calling Biggar “a long-time apologist for colonialism” who wanted “a rehabilitation of the British Empire.”

An academic at Cambridge referred to him as a “gnarled old racist” and . . . declared on social media with great academic rigor: “OMG, this is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN.” Elsewhere Biggar’s scholarship was dismissed as “supremacist shite;” he was called a “racist” and a “bigot” and told that whatever came out of his mouth was “vomit.”

Oriel College kept its Rhodes statue, but “contextualized” it with a plaque, explaining that it wanted to take Rhodes down, but decided it could not after getting “legal and regulatory advice.”

The Rex Whistler moral panic

Here is another incident, this one from the art world.

In 1926, a 21-year-old artist named Rex Whistler was commissioned by London’s Tate Gallery to produce a mural to cover the walls of its restaurant. Paid at a rate of just five pounds a week, Whistler and an assistant devoted 18 months to the project. The result was The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, a whimsical portrayal of the “Duke of Epicurania” and his court, heading out to find morsels across an imaginary land.

The fantastic, idyllic, occasionally macabre scenes were packed with what would become [Whistler’s] signature touches. Great trompe l’oeil columns around doorways and windows, great lakes and seas with mermaids, and a landscape scattered with deserted arcadian temples.

The detail was stunning. One newspaper called it “the most amusing room in Europe.” George Bernard Shaw spoke at the unveiling in December 1927.

Part of The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats by Rex Whistler.

The following month saw heavy rains and the Thames overflowed its banks. On the night of January 6, the lower floors of the Tate were flooded, and the whole room — mural, floor and furnishings — was a total loss. Almost immediately, Whistler got to work repainting the entire thing. The author writes:

I have always thought there was something deeply touching about the character as well as the work of Rex Whistler. He was astoundingly talented, had more technical ability than almost anyone of his generation, and possessed an invention and ease that made everything he painted instantly recognizable. He was also loved by everyone who knew him.

When World War II broke out, Whistler volunteered.

And while he could have got a comparatively cushy job as a war artist, he seemed to feel that wouldn’t be right and instead joined up with the Welsh Guards, eventually training to become a tank commander. [In July 1944,] as Whistler attempted to dash from one of his tanks to another, he was killed by enemy fire. It was his first day of action. He was just thirty-nine.

The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats entertained generations of visitors to the Tate Gallery. Restoration work was carried out as recently as a decade ago, and when the room reopened in 2013, the Guardian’s restaurant critic noted the immersive “fairground ride” and “sylvan beauty” of Whistler’s work.

Self-Portrait in Welsh Guards Uniform by Rex Whistler (1940)

Then, in 2018, the Tate began getting complaints about the mural. In the beginning, all could be traced to a single Instagram account called The White Pube run by Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad. They charged that Whistler had portrayed Chinese people in one tiny corner of the mural in a “stereotypical” way (i.e., made them look Chinese). And one of the mural’s fanciful hunting parties included a woman in a frilly frock apparently dragging along a black child. Clearly, she must have been dragging him into slavery!

There is also a black boy chained to the back of a horse-drawn cart.

The Tate agreed that some of the scenes were “unacceptable,” and posted the following statement online and near the mural: “These depictions demonstrate attitudes to racial identity prevalent in Britain in the 1920s. The weakening of the British Empire around this time paradoxically prompted cultural expressions of the superiority of the ‘British race.’”

The antiracist industry smelled blood, and soon whipped up the national media. An online petition was started called “Remove the Racist and Harmful Pursuit of Rare Meats Mural at Tate Britain’s Rex Whistler” (sic). Black Labour MP Diane Abbott tweeted: “I have eaten in Rex Whistler restaurant at Tate Britain. Had no idea famous mural had repellent images of black slaves.” Of course, neither had anyone else. For their part, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad contributed to the ensuing discussion with a post reading: “Fuck the Police, Fuck the State, Fuck the Tate: Riots and Reform.”

A spokesman announced that “Tate has been open and transparent about the deeply problematic imagery in the Rex Whistler mural” and spoke of “championing a more inclusive story of British art and identity today.” Not good enough. A Tate Ethics Committee “unequivocally condemned the mural, insisted that the gallery had not dealt with the situation adequately, and concluded that the only possible options were for the room to be closed or for the mural to be removed.” The room is closed and the mural’s fate has yet to be decided.

The most significant aspect of this entire sordid affair, in Mr. Murray’s view, is not the mobbing behavior by a small bunch of shrill activists. “Nor that a work of art should suffer such a stratospheric context collapse. Rather it is that the trustees of the Tate — whose job it is to safeguard a historic national collection — should instead have stood judgment over a work in its care and misrepresented it so obscenely.”

The dangers of self-abasement

There is no shortage of whites in positions of authority eager to collaborate in the war on the West. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, gave a speech to the General Synod of the Church of England in 2020 in which he said: “I am sorry and ashamed. I’m ashamed of our history and I’m ashamed of our failure. There is no doubt when we look at our own Church that we are still deeply institutionally racist.”

Most of us understand that such statements are not to be taken at face value. Everyone in the Archbishop’s audience was well aware that the number-two man in the Church at that very moment was a Ugandan named John Mugabi Sentamu. Rather, the Archbishop’s self-abasement amounted to the liturgy of a new antiracist religion that has displaced Christianity within the Church of England — having piggybacked on the Christian virtue of humility. But as Mr. Murray notes, not everyone can be expected to understand this. Many outsiders are likely to think that if the Archbishop of Canterbury says the Church of England is awash in racism, it must be true.

John Mugabi Sentamu (Credit Image: © David Wimsett / UPPA / ZUMAPRESS.com)

In Canada last year, it was announced that mass graves had been detected at residential schools run by the Catholic Church for “First Nations” children. No bodies were found and nothing was ever excavated, but it did not matter. Antiracists were so sure the Catholic Church must have been murdering indigenous children that they began setting fire to churches: more than 30 in one week alone, some built by “First Nations” people themselves. Christians’ own hand-wringing over their supposed racism probably contributed to this moral panic.

Others will not be slow to use our self-abasement against us. The Chinese Communist Party has long since learned to cast Western “racism” in the teeth of any white man who brings up the persecution of the Uighurs. As Mr. Murray puts it: “So long as the West is in the masochism business, it will always find a willing sadist in Beijing.”

Critical race theory

The slogans and jargon of racial activists are derived from a way of thinking now commonly called Critical Race Theory, or CRT. Other terms, including “Cultural Marxism” and “political correctness,” refer approximately to the same thing. Although it has deeper roots in Frankfurt-School Marxism, CRT first gained respectability at American law schools during the 1970s under the name “critical legal studies.” An important early promoter was Harvard’s first tenured black law professor, Derrick Bell. In a characteristic statement, he claimed that “progress in race relations is largely a mirage obscuring the fact that whites continue, consciously or unconsciously, to do all in their power to ensure their dominion and maintain their control.”

Derrick Bell (Credit Image: David Shankbone via Wikipedia)

The major practical demand of this movement in its early days amounted to a form of academic self-interest: calls to appoint and grant tenure to more non-white professors — the friends and allies of the movement’s own promoters. Prof. Bell and his pals staged protests and sit-ins when they failed to get what they wanted, and soon discovered the effectiveness of such tactics. As the author notes, the academy is “a corner of society not known for its heroism.”

By the beginning of the 1990s, such thinking and activism had spread through humanities departments and into schools of education. Eventually it poisoned even the hard sciences.

One widely publicized book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Delgado and Stefancic, 2001) explains that CRT “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of law.” In fact, CRT does more than “question” these things: it interprets them all as smokescreens for white supremacy and exploitation. CRT cites no evidence; it is pure interpretation, unverifiable and unfalsifiable. For this reason, there can be no reasoned debate with proponents of CRT, who freely admit their interpretive style is based on such inherently private sources as “lived experience . . . feelings and the unconscious.” Mr. Murray remarks:

At best, the shift from evidence to “me” allowed a stalemate: You have your views and reality, I have mine. At worst, it left any exchange of ideas vulnerable to being taken over by bad-faith actors who simply insisted that things were as they say they are.

Present-day champions of CRT continue to think and behave like their predecessors in critical legal studies. Robin DiAngelo became a celebrity when her 2018 book White Fragility was heavily promoted during the BLM riots. The book’s great thesis is that any claim by a white person not to be racist, or even any objection to such name-calling, is the ultimate proof of racism. CRT is a doctrine under which — as was once said of Calvinism — you are “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.” To attempt to defend oneself from a critical theorist is to play a rigged game.

Robin DiAngelo (Credit Image: Unitarian Universalist Association via Wikimedia)

A black interviewer once challenged Miss DiAngelo: “Why do you say that, though? . . . Where’s your data?” Of course, she had none; being a critical race theorist means not having to have data. The interviewer had clearly internalized a white supremacist conception of scholarship.

Ibram X. Kendi is another critical theorist who rose to fame in the wake of the BLM riots. Appointed to a prestigious tenured chair at Boston University at the age of 38, and the recipient of a MacArthur Genius award, Dr. Kendi is best known for his book How to Be an Antiracist (2019). In what may be an attempt to appear scholarly, he begins every chapter with a definition or set of definitions. But as Mr. Murray notes, they are not always helpful. A “racist,” for example, is “one who is supporting a racist policy through their action or inaction or expressing a racist idea.”

Like other critical theorists, Dr. Kendi puts great weight on personal experience. As Mr. Murray notes, “he appears to believe that his personal story, . . . plus extrapolation of its political meaning, should be a sufficient base from which to reframe race relations in America.” The experiences he draws upon can be trivial:

At one point in How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi writes about an incident in third grade where a white teacher calls on an eager white student in the front of the class rather than a shy black girl who is sitting at the back. All these years later, Kendi gets almost a whole chapter out of it. He can recall every detail of the incident, as he shows the reader. But he stresses that he cannot remember the name of the white teacher. “Forgetting her may have been a coping mechanism,” he now says.

Dr. Kendi called the teacher’s failure to call on the black child “racist abuse.”


So how can one be antiracist? Apparently, by agreeing with Dr. Kendi on everything. Over the course of the book, he explains that it is racist to refer to a “post-racial society,” or to support voter ID laws, or to oppose reparations, or merely to have no opinion on reparations. It is even racist not to agree with him about climate change. As Mr. Murray points out, this is “enormously convenient for Kendi himself.” Such a doctrine makes it impossible to discuss any issue without getting sidetracked by ad hominem arguments. For Ibram X. Kendi, that may be the whole point.

In Mr. Murray’s native Britain, one celebrated anti-racist authority is Otegha Uwagbu, author of Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods (2020). Like Dr. Kendi, Miss Uwagbu has a great deal to tell us about the minutia of her own life. She describes, for example, how she once accepted an invitation to a Christmas party, but canceled at the last minute:

“because I know I’ll probably be the only black person in a room full of white ones.” She worries that after some of “the requisite hand-wringing” about racial issues, someone will suggest talking about something “less depressing ‘because its Christmas.’” Uwagba says that she will then “smash a plate against the wall because I don’t think there’s anything else we should be talking about, don’t think it’s fair that white people get to change the subject.” So instead, she says, “I stay at home and cry.”

Uwagbu appears to be a difficult friend to have. She complains bitterly when white friends don’t ask her how she is. And she complains bitterly when white friends do ask her how she is. After the death of George Floyd, she claims that her email inbox became “a dumping ground for white guilt.” “Everywhere white shame looms large,” she writes, “sucking the oxygen out of the room. Even at their most penitent, white people have a way of making it hard to breathe.”

Struggle sessions

White people can at least ignore such people, but most of us need jobs. Proponents of CRT are now using this vulnerability to block all escape from their ideas. For the past several years, under Mr. Trump as well as the current administration, US government agencies have required employees to take part in “intersectionality workshops” and other forms of CRT training. Participants are pressured into saying things they may not believe, with professional penalties for anyone who objects. Even scientists at Sandia National Laboratories must attend white-male-only reeducation retreats where they renounce their “white privilege” and write letters of apology to imaginary women of color. The author notes parallels with “struggle sessions” in Mao’s China.

Book display of works on critical race theory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Credit Image: “college.library” via Wikipedia)

The private sector is no better. The author provides anecdotes from companies such as Disney, Coca-Cola, Cigna health insurance, Ernst & Young, and KPMG. Employees are told to “be less white,” to “donate to anti-white supremacy work such as your local Black Lives Matter Chapter,” and never to “question or debate Black colleagues’ lived experiences.”

Whether you’re a math teacher or a partner in a vast multinational firm, the cost of raising your head above the parapet can [include seeing] your whole career come crashing down around you. And it can happen from asking the simplest of questions, asserting a provable truth, or simply acknowledging a belief that everybody held until the day before yesterday.

Internal resistance is therefore rare. Occasionally, however, word of mandatory CRT has leaked. Companies may then claim the training is optional, or even deny it goes on at all. When Disney came under scrutiny last year, it hastily removed CRT training materials from the web and complained its policy had been “deliberately distorted.”

CRT activists also find captive audiences in schools:

In Buffalo, public schools have forced children in kindergarten to watch videos of dead black children in order to teach them about “police brutality.” In California, children in third grade have been taught that they should rank themselves in order of “power” and “privilege,” while a new ethnic studies curriculum calls for “counter-genocide” against white Christians. In Seattle, the public schools have claimed that white teachers are “spirit murdering” black children. At the East Side Community School in New York, white parents have been sent a “tool for action” that tells them they must become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition.”

Parents denouncing this sort of thing at school board meetings have been a hopeful sign in recent years, but the author does not cover this topic. School boards deny that CRT is taught or even exists, and explain that it is much too complex for parents to understand (though not for grade-schoolers, apparently).

November 12, 2021, New Mexico: A rally opposing teaching critical race theory in public schools. The rally was held outside the State Education Department in Santa Fe. (Credit Image: © Eddie Moore / Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA Press Wire)

Antiracist medicine

Critical theory is now flourishing in the world of medicine, where its effects become a matter of life and death. The American Medical Association has committed itself to dismantling “structural racism” and “white supremacy.” As the author observes:

Medicine is one of those areas in which some knowledge of racial background may be not be just useful but lifesaving. Different groups carry different vulnerabilities to particular diseases, as well as varying response to different drugs. This presents a problem . . . because it suggests that race is not just a “social construct.”

This passage is Mr. Murray’s closest flirtation with race realism.

A group of doctors with mostly non-European names recently published a letter in the New England Journal of Medicine in which — after some obligatory antiracist boilerplate — they begged permission to use genetic knowledge to better serve black patients.

In December 2020, America’s Center for Disease Control identified three “priority groups” to get Covid vaccines: essential workers, those over 65, and adults with underlying conditions. But they soon discovered that the over-65 group was disproportionately white, so they ended up recommending that essential workers be given priority over the elderly, “even though they acknowledged that this was expected to cost an extra fifty thousand lives per month.” A formal statement in support of such a policy appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association. One of the statement’s co-authors remarked: “Society is structured in a way that enables [whites] to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.” As Mr. Murray points out, that mean “letting more white people die” — 50,000 a month.

Resentment and gratitude

Mr. Murray is aware that resentment lies the heart of the war on the West and its people, citing Nietzsche’s remark that the effect of resentment is “to sanctify revenge with the term justice — as though justice were simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged” (as opposed to a disinterested weighing of claims). Nietzsche’s central insight, in the author’s view, is that such yearning for revenge is an attempt to “anaesthetize pain through emotion.” The resentful person needs the wildest possible emotion, Nietzsche notes, to motivate his crucial claim: “Someone must be to blame that I feel ill.” So the resentful rip at wounds that have closed “and make themselves bleed to death from scars long since healed.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (Credit Image: © Imago / ZUMA Wire)

Nietzsche’s insights help us understand and respond to racial resentment:

For just as we are not up against justice but rather against vengeance, so we are not truly up against proponents of equality but against those who hold a pathological desire for destruction. The men of resentment have had an easy time pointing to things the West has done, pointing to bills unpaid and outrages forgotten or insufficiently atoned for. Such people have enjoyed reopening ancient sores and claiming to feel hurt for wrongs done long before they were ever alive . . . demanding that people pity them as though they themselves were the victims. Because to do so is to place themselves at the center of all things, to expect recompense forever, and never have to look to themselves to address anything.

The sentiment most directly opposed to resentment is gratitude, and nothing is more conspicuously lacking in those warring against the West today. The author thinks this was inevitable:

If you do not feel any gratitude for anything that has been passed onto you, all you can feel is bitterness over what you have not got. A life without gratitude is a life not properly lived. Incapable of realizing what you have to be thankful for, you are left with nothing but your resentments and can be contented with nothing but revenge.

The good things about being white

Toward the end of War Against the West, Mr. Murray writes about a white conservative interviewed by a black journalist for the Black News Channel. The interviewer asked what he liked about being white. The man was “no fool, and he knew that he had just been led onto a dangerous, potentially career-ending land mine,” so he fumbled for an answer.

The author then explains how the hapless man might have replied. The safest course would probably have been to claim he did not care about race, or that it was only “skin color,” or the like. But Mr. Murray also notes the possibility of what he calls “the nuclear option.” A real white man might have said:

The good things about being white include being born into a tradition that has given the world a disproportionate number, if not most, of the things the world currently benefits from. The list of things that white people have done may include many bad things, as with all peoples. But the good things . . . include almost every medical advance the world enjoys [and] almost every scientific advance the world now benefits from. No meaningful breakthrough in either of these areas has come from anywhere in Africa or from any Native American tribe.

White people founded most of the world’s oldest and longest-established educational institutions. They led the world in the promotion of the written word. [They] also developed all the world’s most successful means of commerce, including the free flow of capital. This system of free market capitalism has lifted more than one billion people out of extreme poverty just in the twenty-first century thus far. It did not originate in Africa or China, although people in those places benefited from it. It originated in the West. It is Western people who developed the principle of representative government . . . the principles and practice of political liberty, of freedom of thought and conscience, of freedom of speech and expression.

Almost alone among any peoples it was white people who took an interest in other cultures beyond their own. Indeed, they have taken such an interest in other peoples that they have searched for lost and dead civilizations as well as living ones to understand what these lost people did. This is not the case with most other peoples. No Aboriginal tribe helped make any advance in understanding the lost languages of the Indian subcontinent, Babylon, or ancient Egypt. . . .

The migrant ships across the Mediterranean go in one direction — north. The people-smuggling gangs’ boats do not . . . meet white Europeans heading south, desperate to escape France, Spain or Italy in order to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities of Africa. There is no mass movement of people wishing to live with the social norms of the Aboriginals or assimilate into the lifestyle of the Inuit, whether those groups would allow them in or not. America is still the world’s number one destination for migrants worldwide. And the next most desirable countries are Canada, Germany, France, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Mr. Murray does not say so, but the white man could then have said, “So, tell me what you like about being black.”

How to defend the West 

The author points out that one option open to the men of the West is “to fight and defend our own history along clear but exclusionary lines,” noting that “the steam building for this backlash is already starting to become visible.” Some whites are beginning to think: “If you do not respect my culture, why should I respect yours? If you do not respect my forebears, why should I respect yours? And if you do not like what my society has produced, then why should I agree to your having a place in it?”

He condemns this approach because it “concludes inevitably in conflict, solvable only by force.” Instead, he approvingly quotes the American author Thomas Chatterton Williams: “One way or another, we are going to have to figure out how to make our multi-ethnic realities work,” and implausibly calls the rise of non-whites to positions of power in the West as a “benefit” we enjoy thanks to our uniquely Western tolerance. He has a career he wants to hold on to.

It is obviously inadequate simply to wish we could “figure out” a way of making multi-ethnic societies work, “one way or another.” We have been trying to do that for a long time already. It is not obvious that the conflict and violence of an “exclusionary” strategy would be any greater than staying today’s futile course. Mr. Murray does not explain why Otegha Uwagbu deserves a place in a society she so clearly dislikes, or how her presence benefits us.

White advocates do not despise anyone else’s culture and forebears, but we know that people are happier — and can more easily keep racial resentment at bay — when they live among their racial fellows. Mr. Murray does not appear to have thought through the solution he is so hasty to condemn.