White Identity and "woke right"

An update from the hills I'm dying on

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By

James Pew

In a previous post filed with the Department of Dying Hills, I contended that many online influencers of the self-described classical liberal type have been using a nonsensical term, “woke right” (coined and promulgated by James Lindsay) to, among other things, associate tribalism with Nazism. But they focus far too much on the tribalism of white people. In my view, tribalism, like race, is a neutral concept. It makes little sense to think that any consideration given to race, or any behaviour deemed tribal, is necessarily negative. There is no law that makes this so. Maybe, we just need a positive form of race relations, where white people are not made to feel bad for their colour, and black and brown people are not made to feel victimized for theirs. And maybe we can be tribal, but still be good people, who don’t hate those outside of our tribes.

Another classical liberal online influencer who uses the term “woke right” is Colin Wright. Similar to James Lindsay, Wright is a very well known figure with a large social media following. And, also similar to Lindsay, I admire much of the work he has done in the past and still continues to do. It is not just the use of the unnecessarily confusing term, “woke right,” that bothers me about Wright. It is his particular focus on white identitarianism in combination with moralizing about a “woke right,” that I find irksome. To be clear, there are racists on the far-right, but Wright and Lindsay have made themselves the police of “Woke Right,” and they seem to speak over, or unfairly berate a lot of white people who talk about or advocate for white interests or white identities.

Sweeping white identitarianism under the carpet is not going to work. Lecturing those who take an interest in white people groups, or the dynamics of white majorities, or who feel white ethnic groups should not be something simply allowed to disappear, is also not going to work. Why won’t those things work? That is easy. It is always easy to answer such questions concerning the race described as white. The answer, this time, and every other time, involves no more than simply reaching into that magic tool box of imagination in which all human beings are so miraculously endowed. If you can do that, then next apply that clever imagination in the following fashion: whatever the issue may be, substitute black people (or indigenous people) for white people. After imagining that black/indigenous people are at the center of the situation, if then your previous assessment (when you were considering only white people), now seems off, a little wrong in some way, perhaps even racist, then it’s fair to conclude that it is also off, a little wrong, and perhaps even racist when white people are at the center of a similar situation.

Do the above exercise over and over. Do it every time. I promise if you do, and if everyone else does too, we can do away with all thoughts of race relations. We won’t need that crap. We will be a harmonious brotherhood of man, like we were on our way to becoming before the radical leftists hi-jacked the culture.

So, we don’t need social media eggheads calling white people “woke right,” for things they would ignore if done by non-white people. And, there is no woke right. As discussed previously, the term lacks face validity; it does not make sense. And further, it is unnecessary. We already call it “far right” when illiberalism or things like racism emanate from the political right. In James Lindsay’s efforts to gain the clout of coining a popular term and leading the discourse around it, he has done little more than confuse the distinction between far-right racists, and liberal minded white people who are sick of the anti-white racism and wish to exist in the same liberalism that permits non-whites to fully explore, celebrate and connect with their ethnic heritages.

I think both Lindsay and Wright, and many other self-described classical liberals, are completely short-sighted and reductive when talking about ethnicity (which includes race as a component). Ethnic tribalism is the default mode of human existence. Why is that so scary? It is not the tribalism which attaches to ethnicities that we should fear, not when those things are just as likely expressed benevolently as they can be expressed violently. And further, does being a classical liberal today mean working for the division of humans from their tribes and their ethno-traditional culture? Or does being a classical liberal mean only dividing white people from their ethno-traditional culture? Should not liberalism be about a pro-human approach that maximizes freedom? Clearly people want to be tribal, we are that way naturally, so if one has concerns with this, I suggest they advocate for the peaceful, prosperous, community oriented, liberal type of tribalism found most often in the modern West. And in addition, throughout the Western world, discourage the types of tribalism that are not compatible with Western culture.

In addition, there should be no confusion about the following. White people are tribal and ethnic too. White people are human; fully human. I know this is hard for many people to take, including many white people, because we were born into an environment of pervasive anti-white propaganda, and have thoroughly incorporated it into our own subconscious. It manifests in the things white people do and say all the time. We are alone among all the people groups as the one utterly terrified to contend with the fact that we indeed are a unique race of people with absolutely beautiful physical features (not just pale skin, but a wide variety of eye and hair colours far less often found in non-white races).

We need to get over it. Black people celebrate black beauty, and when they do they are celebrating the unique physical traits associated with Africans. They specifically, overtly say they are celebrating black beauty as they celebrate it. No one blinks an eye, everyone claps along and celebrates black beauty with them. There is a famous R&B tune called Black Gold which celebrates black beauty, another called Young, Gifted, and Black which celebrates all things blackness. Again, everyone thinks this is cool, supports it, buys into it, sings along.

And why? Because it is cool. Because the cultural dynamism that results from ethnic traditional customs and practices is cool. Not just cool, this stuff is the variety that assuages the dullness of existence. How boring the world would be if all the ethnic variety of humanity was socially engineered out of us. If the people of the West became convinced that the founding of our nations had nothing to do with any specific ethnic group (or closely knit cluster of groups), but only founding ideals, albeit brilliant ones based on Christian and classically liberal principles, then a disservice will have been done to truth, and a form of what leftist activists call “cultural genocide,” will have been committed – by erasing the facts of history concerning the white people who built the Western world.

White people are responsible for upholding Christianity for over a millennium, in spite of constant controversies and threats (including invasion from Jihadist Islam). On that note, a truthful and comprehensive reading of history illustrates Islam to be the world's most infamous oppressor and colonizer, but yet the people of white majority Western societies, have cruelly been fed a cherry-picked version of history that carefully selects the crimes of all past colonial pale skins, while skillfully maneuvering to avoid the more brutal and far-reaching crimes of Islam.

There is an element of virtue signalling to what Lindsay and Wright are doing – which, among other things, is to shame white people who think that maybe a little solidarity among whites, who so often share common values, and common vision for the Western countries they live in, might be a good thing seeing as an alarming form of accusatory anti-white racism has virtually exploded in the post-George Floyd DEI era. But there is also an element where Lindsay and Wright are genuine, where they truly believe they are doing the right thing. However, a high-level of popularity and online influence, as I discussed in the previous piece, comes with all sorts of pressures which exert their own influence on the thinking of the influencers.

Even so, the truth is they haven’t thought enough about it. For both Wright and Lindsay it is a subject outside what they normally deal with, and they have not dealt with it thoroughly enough. To be fair, in my view, most people have not. The best book on this subject matter is an academic volume which examines white majorities in a way that only Canadian professor of political science Eric Kaufmann does. The book of course, as I have recommended many times in these pages, is Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities.

Somewhere in the pages of this magisterial volume on white majorities a notion is expressed wherein it might be dangerous, and matters could be made worse, by the constant sweeping of the race issue under the carpet (especially concerning the white race). There, under that dusty old rug, things are unpleasant, and the longer one lingers the worse their mood becomes. If enough time passes the sour mood turns to a downright bad attitude. Then the real festering and seething begins. At this point, things are near a blowup.

Mark my words, if we get there, if things ever blow up, we will look back long after the destruction has set in, and wonder why the hell we swept the source of the explosion under a damp old mat for the world to walk all over. Did we really think the trampling would go on forever?

White voices swept under the rug, or otherwise silenced by internet influencer eggheads and the like, will only make race relations worse and delay the common acceptance of white people as full ethnic human beings who have unique racial features that they may find more beautiful and appealing and may prefer. We need to get there. White people must be permitted to express their complete humanity, even though not all of them will do so through ethno-traditional affinity. But the ones who do should be encouraged because they are keeping something special, historic and important alive.

Imagine telling an indigenous person that he is “woke right” because he feels connected to the ancestors who passed on their genes and tribal customs. It is ridiculous, and offensive, and no one would do that. That does not mean we should give indigenous people special rights and privileges because of their race (which we actually do), but instead allow them to discuss their genetic ancestry, and describe in their stories what their ancestors did and what they looked like, without having those stories labelled racist. And while we are at it, let us allow white people to do a similar thing in their own way.

A typical response to this piece will be to accuse or question it (or me) of having a disproportionate obsession with the topic of race. However, I do not. I will fight you on this, damn it. I will die on this hill. On the contrary, my dealing with this subject in the manner I do, at the frequency I do, has everything to do with responding to overt levels of extreme anti-white racism that have pervaded the society I live in since before I was born. So, thank you very much for the concern, but my response to illiberal treatment and blatant hatred is entirely proportional and expected. However, why others are so reluctant to join in is a question I’d like answered, if you could.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read From an air-conditioned office

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