In The Path to National Suicide, Lawrence Auster offers a fascinating deconstruction of the meaning of the word “racist.” Auster argues that, because we have not taken care to define the term precisely, it has become an instrument of thought control; and our uncritical acceptance of the notion that racism, when broadly defined and practiced by whites, is wrong leads to an intellectual justification for a totalitarian program to merge all the races and thereby purge human beings of their tendency to prefer others of the same race, class, and intelligence.
According to Auster, racism should be defined as the attitude that denies the humanity and intrinsic moral worth of members of a particular racial group based on nothing more than their race; it also includes the feeling of hatred or hostility toward another based solely on his race. Racism should not be defined as the simple acknowledgement that races differ from one another on particular traits because such differences are undeniable. We have a concept of race only because there are “plainly discernible physical groupings of the human family.”
When the term is properly defined, simply writing about and discussing the physical and intellectual differences between the races, without expressing animosity toward, or denying the humanity of, a particular racial group can’t be described as racist. But people have accepted a broad definition of the concept that deems as “racist” any statement that is offensive to members of a particular race; our society’s disapproval of racism has therefore become a “prescription for the massive repression of speech.”
The idea of racism has so run amok and grown so broad that it is now considered “racist” for whites to prefer the company of other people of like ethnicity, race, and class, since that preference means excluding people of other races. This preference for similar people exists among men and women of all races and few would accuse a black man of bigotry for joining a black church or marrying a black woman. Yet when it comes to white people, this preference for similarity is deemed “racist” and “xenophobic,” and the United States government seeks to prohibit whites from acting on it, at least when it comes to where they live and send their children to school.
The belief that racism is wrong implies the existence of a non-racist norm from which the racist person immorally deviates. But this non-racist norm has no basis in reality because all people have a preference for associating with others who are intellectually, racially, and ethnically similar to themselves. Auster suggests that, because everywhere people act on their preference for similar people, the norm of anti-racism leads to a justification for the “ultimate totalitarian project” whereby the government seeks to overturn the world as it exists and build in its place a non-racist world in which there are no racial differences and people cannot prefer members of their own race. Auster writes:
"… the only way the nations of the earth could truly cease being racist would be to institute a world-wide exchange of populations, creating an identical racial mix in every country, followed by several generations of scientifically planned and state-controlled intermarriages, resulting in a single perfectly blended human race. We may see, in the current efforts of government to enforce statistical racial balance in every area of life (based on the assumption that the absence of such balance must be due to racism), the beginnings of just such a global experiment."
Although Auster cautions in his essay that no one calls for a global program to merge all the races, his vision turned out to be prescient. In 2007, William Saletan in Slate called for higher rates of intermarriage between whites and blacks as a means of closing the IQ gap between the races. According to Saletan, if the racial intelligence gap has partially genetic roots, the best way to close it is to “reunite the genome.”
As scientists amass more and more evidence that race differences in psychological attributes have genetic origins, more liberal intellectuals will explicitly call for racial intermarriage as a means of eliminating those differences. Perhaps the 21st century will see the enactment of anti-anti-miscegenation laws designed to cap the percentage of whites who marry within their race each year.
Auster had good comments on Saletan's argument here:
http://www.amnation....ves/009262.html
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