Talking with liberals about race

Rachael S. writes:

I went to a Christmas party last night, and attempted to engage a group of people on the benefits of not being politically correct. We were talking about discrimination, and I asked “Why should we eliminate discrimination?” I said that I understood that there have been crimes against people based on their race, and that I didn’t condone it; but that in my experience, no matter where you live, people self-segregate; that they want to be around people who look like them, that we (the races) are different from each other, and that living in an homogeneous society causes less problems for people.

A woman said, “But we’re all God’s children.” I said I wasn’t disagreeing with that, but then she dropped out of the conversation and I overheard her telling someone that she just couldn’t be prejudiced, that where she came from they WERE prejudiced and she just couldn’t live that way.

Meanwhile, everyone at the party is white, and many are originally from Southern California, and complained at the party about how bad things were there, how there is so much crime, and they just love it here (southern Oregon). No one made the connection between immigration, different groups living together and not being able to coexist, etc., and the lack of minorities in the southern Oregon area.

Another thing I noticed was that people from my mother’s generation (who were teenagers in the late Sixties) will often mention the bad old days and generally eschew tradition, letting it drop in conversation about how they are NOT bigoted and they like people of different races. If you say things that are vaguely critical of the integrationist view that we can all live together in peace, they will respond like the woman at the party. For them there is no middle ground between KKK hatred and the full embracing of diversity. They have rebelled against their WWII-era parents, and as a result have helped to create a rootless society for their children. (I get into arguments with my mother about whether tradition is even important, and she is a conservative.)

LA replies:

The only way to get anywhere with people like that would be to have an extended conversation in which you could answer all their objections to your view and nail them down on their own view. Their convictions on this subject, which are automatic, unexamined, and deeply embedded, cannot be touched by ordinary conversation. When it comes to racial issues, they are not just in Plato’s Cave, where distorted images of reality are made to appear as reality. They are in the cave below Plato’s Cave, where there is no connection with reality at all, and they cannot even hear your ideas, let alone participate in any discussion about them. Bringing them out of that sub-cave cannot be done short of serious effort (or, alternatively, a trauma, like the O.J. Simpson verdict, for example, that pushes them to drop their liberal armature for maybe a few minutes).

David B. writes:

On page 842 of William Manchester’s biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, he describes Churchill’s racial prejudices, telling how Churchill walked out of the film Carmen Jones because he didn’t like “blackamoors.” In Cuba, fresh out of Sandhurst, he had distrusted “the negro element among the insurgents.” Manchester wrote, “He never outgrew this prejudice.”

Manchester, slightly defensive, wrote, “Today it would be called an expression of racism and he a racist. But neither word had been coined then; they would not appear in the Oxford English dictionary or Webster’s for another generation. Until recently-beginning in the late 1940’s-racial intolerance was not only accepted in polite society; it was fashionable, even assumed.”

Now, we would not talk like the British upper class of a century ago now, but it shows how Churchill was not like the neocons, who claim to be following his lead. Today’s British rulers aren’t “tolerant,” they are culturally suicidal.

LA replies:

I think that racial prejudice is absolutely useless as a force against liberalism. Prejudice has no principle behind it, and so cannot stand against the moral arguments of liberalism. In fact prejudice is worse than useless, because all it does is make the prejudiced ones fit the liberal script of the bigoted society that must be re-made. Without an intellectual conviction relating to the facts of racial differences, the naturalness of ethno-group preferences, and the basis of our own civilization in the white race, and without a moral conviction as to the normality of people, including white people, preferring people racially and culturally like themselves, organizing society on that basis, and maintaining Western societies as white majority societies, we cannot stand against the liberal orthodoxy on race.

Did Churchill ever have such convictions? I read recently that he did not like the post-war immigration influx into Britain. Did he ever make an intellectual argument against it?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 13, 2006 01:05 AM | Send