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In their introduction to their edition of Democracy in America ( copyright 2000, originally written in 1835), prominent neoconservative intellectual Harvey C. Mansfield a nd his late wife Delba Winthrop observed that Alexis de Tocqueville’s predictive powers were “uncanny.”
With one exception: race.
If de Tocqueville really thought blacks and whites could never live together in harmony, he was wrong, they wrote.
Well, it’s time to slide that bead over to the “win” column, too.
If 2020 has a race relations lesson, it’s that the number of years out from the end of slavery m eans nothing. Or the numbers of years out from a black president. Or Civil Rights. Or Affirmative Action.
You get the picture. To adapt the famous Rodney King quote, blacks and whites just can’t “all get along.”
The riots, the rise of Antifa and BLM, the increasing murder of whites-as-whites and police officers—it all came as a shock to those white Americans who could have sworn the whole race thing was taken care of.
But 2020 would not have surprised de Tocqueville. The Norman-descended Frenchman is, of course, legendary for the elegance and perceptiveness of his writing. He’s claimed by both Right and Left (with some justification on either side).
His writings on race in Democracy in America are fascinating, though you wonder how often they’re assigned to college students. Your typical college student today would need a long convalescence in a safe space after reading them.
De Tocqueville:
- thought slavery was an abomination
- thought Indians were poorly treated by whites
- thought races (white, black and Indian) were radically and inherently different
- thought blacks and whites couldn’t live together
- thought that when starkly different races occupy the same space, you either have 1) one killing the other off or 2) one totally subjugating the other. There is no middle ground. Intermediate measures are doomed to fail.
You might say that America’s entire approach for the past 200 years has consisted of “intermediate measures.”
Race hits the visitor to America in the face, de Tocqueville reports:
The men spread over this space do not form, as in Europe, so many offshoots of the same family. From the first one finds in them three naturally distinct and, I could almost say, inimical races.
Almost 200 years later, little has changed. East New York and Gerritsen Beach remain “naturally distinct” and “inimical.”
Brace yourself for de Tocqueville’s take on a black man:
His countenance appears hideous to us, his intelligence seems limited to us, his tastes are base; we very nearly take him for a being intermediate between brute and man.
De Tocqueville made the point that slavery wasn’t the point. In ancient times, where a Greek was the slave of a Roman, the mere unshackling of the slave meant instant equality. The unshackled Greek could saunter into the marketplace and nobody would turn their head.
Sometimes, Greeks were the better sorts:
Among the ancients, the slave belonged to the same race as his master, and often he was superior to him in education and enlightenment.
Similarly, whether blacks in America were free or slave was of only slight importance. Said de Tocqueville:
If inequality created solely by the law is so difficult to uproot, how does one destroy that which seems, in addition, to have its immutable foundations in nature itself?
On the total impossibility of equality, de Tocqueville:
- “The Negro makes a thousand useless efforts to introduce himself into a society that repels him; he bows to the tastes of his oppressors, adopts their opinions, and in imitating them aspires to intermingle with them.”
- The distance between the races is “impassable space.”
- “Those who hope that the Europeans will one day intermingle with Negroes therefore appear to me to cherish a chimera.“
- “I do not think that the white race and the black race will come to live on a footing of equality anywhere.”
- “Until now, everywhere that whites have been most powerful, they have held Negroes in degradation or slavery. Everywhere that Negroes have been strongest, they have destroyed whites; this is the only account that has ever been opened between the two races.”
- “Intermediate measures appear to me to lead directly to the most horrible of all civil wars, and perhaps to the ruin of one of the two races.”
Black slavery may well have been the biggest mistake white Europeans ever made.
From the moment that the Europeans took their slaves from within a race of men different from theirs, which many of them considered inferior to the other human races, and to which all viewed with horror the idea of ever assimilating, they supposed slavery eternal; for, between the extreme inequality that servitude creates and the complete equality that independence naturally produces among men, there is no lasting intermediate state.
De Tocqueville offered no solution, but did mention the Liberian repatriation efforts.
And, needless to say, he has been proven dead right.
My conclusion is that only racial separation—what American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor is reportedly calling “The S-Word”—carries hope for the future. The reckoning might be painful, but it must be had. Everything else is a lie.
Separation need not involve violence or unfairness, as many might imagine it would. You might be surprised how open black folks are to the idea. It might end up being whites who need the most convincing.
And Mel Gibson-astride-his-horse fantasies aside, you might even succeed in making separation the boring stuff of commissions, government forms, long-winded meetings, and snooze-inducing bureaucracy. At which point you know you’re in business.
Who needs another 200 years of blood and suffering as evidence?
The author [Email him] is an Attorney somewhere in America.
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“Black slavery may well have been the biggest mistake white Europeans ever made.”
Ah, there you are dead wrong. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a willful short-term grab for the easy profits of cheap labor and damn the consequences by a relatively small number of rich people.
They didn’t care that centuries later their decision to import black slaves would continue to have such serious repercussions. THEY DID NOT CARE and so it can’t – technically – have been a mistake.
I am reminded of the following section from Joseph Heller’s book Catch 22. Nately had been shot while on a bombing mission with Yossarian, and when Yossarian opened the medical kit, he found that it was empty: Milo Minderbinder had stolen the supplies and left behind paper shares of stock in his syndicate.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian: What difference does that make? He’s dead.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his family will get it.
Yossarian: He didn’t have time to have a family.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his parents will get it.
Yossarian: They don’t need it, they’re rich.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then they’ll understand.
It seems like unfair sarcasm. But considering the centuries of damage that slavery has done to this nation, just so a few plantation owners could sit on their porches and sip mint juleps without themselves having to do any work, well, I think it fits.
There’s the ‘Miscegenation Option’ – with that, both races (now one!) would become more-or-less homogeneous: Sure, IQ (and who knows what else) would reduce but, on the other hand, there’d be more good runners and boxers. Truly, if you look at Brazil, Peru, Colombia etc. you don’t see ONE race but MANY: Very few, if any, almost unmixed Blacks, lots (tons, really) of varying degrees of mixture, and some almost pure-blooded Europeans (for Brazil, I estimate ’em between 15% to around 35% of the total population – depending on how ‘Nordicist’ your definion of ‘White’ is)… But don’t despair! Give these countries some more centuries and I assure you an undifferentiated brownish blob will emerge, sooner or later!
(However… perhaps that could be called ‘genocide’? I’m not sure.)
It’s time to re-enslave this criminally violent race. The Constitution allows it; to iterate the 13th Amendment, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime…”
I don’t doubt that but since they are rather stupid and shortsighted they fail to see that if separation is ever achieved it won’t be long before they run out of jobs, money, food, tech gadgets like iphones and government services. Everything they currently have and enjoy is courtesy of the hated white man.
Then when their ethnostates turn into Haiti and Detroit they will demand to live with whitey again and the process will start anew especially if Jews still have power.
Funny how the race relation narrative has been reanimated since 2016. Do you actually think that the opinions of a two hundred year old Frenchman are indicative of 2020 America? Do you not see what is evident, that 200 years of blood and suffering has created a community of unity, not just between European and African Americans.? Africans have been civil rightly integrated into society as Americans. The distance between the “races” can only be determined in yards or meters. People of color abound. America is dedicated to living on a footing of equality; the entire civil rights movement was revolutionized to impress upon America’s moral responsibility to uphold this truth. Slavery, Jim Crow and segregation ended. Equal voting rights were attained. Housing discrimination stopped, and eventually,discriminatory incarceration will also end. And another civil war in America? If the one side attempts to base a civil armed conflict on non-existent “racism”, they won’t have a cold chance in hell.
When President Obama was in office, everything was cool. But now it is as if someone pushed a red button to make race relations en vogue again, only to be used as a political weapon to foment hate and disunity.
My hunch is DeT’s views on race relations were designed for French domestic consumption. They had been massacred in Haiti and were laying the groundwork for a massive punitive strike. This explains DeT’s line about “wherever Negroes have been strongest…” What other example existed in the 1830s besides Haiti?
Haiti was very much a raw wound for the French. Making the sting even worse, after they kicked the French out Haitians annexed the Dominican Republic. Their project seemed to be succeeding. Haitians were also importing freed slaves from the U.S. I’m sure DeT’s visit to America had nothing to do with investigating that.
DeT had no sympathy for white America but gullible commentators fell for his schtick. His goal was to advance French interests. As for the mistakes white Europeans have made, wouldn’t WW1 be right up there? White Europeans have a fantastic predilection for self-destruction.
My whole life the elites at the top have been pushing this idea that we all should want to live together. Actual individuals don’t seem to really want this at all. The elites are forcing the issue these days… basically they demand a sort of Fanaticism in the Kantian sense, viz. Not only do you have a duty to be a good neighbor and citizen even in the face of absolutely anti-social criminal behavior from black people but you also have to want to be around and include black people in your civic (and even personal) endeavors in spite of their anti-social, criminal behavior. The point is that morality can impose a duty (e.g. to be neighborly and accept that every citizen has equal rights) but it cannot require that we fanatically want to do that duty. The clearest example of this morality vs fanaticism dichotomy is that I don’t want to die in combat but I understand that I have a duty to fight for our country. The Left has become fanatical about anti-racism. They want us to want to not be racist. It’s not good enough that we have instituted constitutional protections for everyone regardless of race (even though our having done so is practically unique in human history). We are supposed to want to be black apparently. It’s horrific that our government, the one that is supposed to represent us, is forcing this mass breeding program on us.
But black people don’t really want to be included in white people activities so far as I have ever experienced. They want money. They seem to think that by being around us and literally torturing us socially will somehow guilt trip us all into wanting to give them money. I have never been in a situation where a black person wanted to participate because they have something valuable to offer. They just seem to like the social status of being around white people and pantomiming white behavior when they see that there is some benefit to doing so.
My whole life black people have been given preferential treatment for practically everything: school admission, starting a business, getting a home loan, etc. There is basically no barrier to success for any black person who studies in school and avoids being convicted of a felony. And yet, even in those auspicious life circumstances, black people insist that the standards for excellence need to be lowered to accommodate them even more. Practically every city seems to have all black leadership from top to bottom and yet somehow they claim they are still lacking representation. Etc etc.
This entire situation with race in America is disgusting. I would gladly accept that we have stain on our civilization that makes being “united” impossible if it meant that we could hold a referendum to split the country into smaller countries where we can all decide what kind of country we want to live in without having this bizarre black supremacist, globalist-socialist agenda being crammed down our throat. Our political class seems to be trying to make us all equally destitute so that we mate and form a new racial consciousness. A disgusting sort of eugenics is being forced on us. I do not want to mate with a black person or be around black people. I don’t want to listen to Hip Hop or celebrate black achievement or be involved with black people in any way. Nothing in our political system will allow anyone to speak out about their true feelings about all of this but my experience is that black people want to have their own segregated spaces where they have huge advantages so that they can exclude white people and feel superior and that the government indulges this fantasy to make black people feel better. I don’t want to keep playing this game politically. We need a way out.
Yes actually.
Is this sarcasm? It was cool like when an economic disaster is papered over through “Quantitative Easing”. In other words, it will become a superfund site, just a bit later.
Remember BLM (and its subsequent shutdown after Palestine came out) comes out of the Obama years. Blacks going bust in the suburbs and the inner city decay comes out of the Obama years. So does Gentle Giant, Good Guy Trayvon, Nice Guy Kimani and I can’t remember what else. Basically, elevation of Blacks to Holy status came out of the Obama years. That’s not a formula for success, especially for people who are not always fully in control of themselves as the liberal plantation owners themselves admit.
Not insane lefties have taken over the asylum to the point where you must spell black as Black and He may harangue you as to your systemic, latent racism. What a world.
Separation Reparations: 10K to permanently move to a majority-black country. Perhaps, we can sweeten the deal with a voucher for a year’s salary.
Wise of you not to name names of those who control the flow of entertainment/information/news. Ever heard of Jimmy the Greek? He made the mistake of calling attention to the obvious.
This had been going on for many years, promoted and most importantly, financed, by the same people who today control the flow of information in the progressive west. Remember Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior? He was just one of many.
There is a reason why the talking heads of all the television news reporters dwell incessantly on things like the police arresting certain people. It supports what they truly believe. And they believe what they believe because their paychecks depend on that belief. Never touch the third rail.
Selective quoting by Anonymous Attorney:
Tocqueville contradicts himself later in the book: