RACIAL PRESTIGE WARRIORS

by James Lawrence

The recent scenes of campus insurrection, violent intimidation and property damage at Evergreen State College in Washington were strikingly reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, in which a comparably self-righteous horde of students was exempted from the rule of law to unleash their savagery on a cowering society. They should also provide the last nail in the coffin of this "racial reconciliation" bullshit that Americans are always droning on about - albeit for very different reasons, with conservatives wringing their hands and looking to heaven, and progressives aggressively holding out their own hands while looking to the conservatives' wallets.

It should be pretty clear by now that America, and the Western world as a whole, passed Peak Prosperity some time ago and is now on the way down. Ergo, Peak Tolerance For Unreasonable Minority Demands has also been passed. This, in turn, means that it can only be downhill from here as regards "racial reconciliation".

And what glorious heights were ascended during those vanished fat years since the Civil Rights Movement? Having acquiesced to massive anti-white discrimination, and thrown untold trillions of taxpayer dollars at blacks and their problems, white America decided that it might finally pacify the unhinged insurrectionary ranting of blacks by electing a poorly-qualified black President. This ultimate gesture of goodwill was met by reparations demands, the cult of Saint Trayvon of MMA, proposals to make blacks a de facto aristocracy, violent pro-crime riots and protests, and a general escalation of anti-white black rhetoric. And now, with everyone in America who doesn't have an Imaginary Knapsack of Privilege supposedly hiding from Donald Trump in the attic, the "threatened" black youth have decided to take a good whack at the white progressive Boomers who have coddled and enabled them up to now.

So obviously this shows us that paying the Danegeld never gets rid of the Dane. But there is more to all of this sound and fury than mere opportunism, the minstrel's dance of ritualised outrage in return for a few guilty pennies from Whitey, which may or may not be puppeteered by self-interested elites at any given time. There is, in truth, a real and massive grievance underpinning black anti-whitism (and, to a lesser extent, that of other non-whites). And it is a grievance that admits of no prospects for "reconciliation".

Perusing lists of black demands does little to point us towards this underlying grievance: the list of demands issued by Black Lives Matter, for example, was clearly an afterthought full of copy-pasted clichés. List of black demands would have us believe that the root problem is economic in nature: blacks just want their "due repayment" for losses incurred in the past, or more "opportunities" (to make money), or an end to "discrimination" (that impedes the making of money). All of this comes from the minstrel dance, the paradoxical need for blacks to conceive of their own anti-whitism according to mainstream white ideology, in order to be rewarded for it by whites. This white ideology, whether it is bourgeois conservatism or revolutionary Marxism, reduces everything to a crude and narrow economic materialism - which is one of the reasons why American whites still throw money at screaming blacks and expect it to produce some sort of good.

But once basic standards of living are accounted for, as they are throughout the Western world, prestige or status arguably becomes much more important than economic gain. The footage of the Evergreen State College students points strongly to such a motive.

It's not the economy, stupid.

Note that the students attacked the school faculty in order to demand the resignation of a Jewish professor, Bret Weinstein, who refused to comply with a "day of absence" on which white people were to be made to leave the campus. Note the loud interruptions, demands for apologies, and physical intimidation tactics directed at the faculty members, and the fact that all of this seems to overshadow the somewhat nebulous substance of the actual demands. Most strikingly, note the students' treatment of the college president George Bridges: forbidding him to go to the toilet on his own, forcing him to precede a statement of capitulation with his gender pronouns, making him put his hands behind his back and then bursting out laughing as he complied like a meek little cuck.

It seems obvious from this that the whole point of the "day of absence" and the following campus takeover was simply to inflict ritual status humiliations on whites.

The absurdity of leftist ideology makes it extremely useful for purposes of ritual humiliation. The neoreactionary blogger Spandrell has a "status points theory" of the Left, in which progressive ideas amount to no rational sense at all, but are simply used by the ambitious to raise their personal status at the expense of social stability. Well, I would add that these ridiculous ideas also serve the double purpose of slapping around the low-status types and keeping them in their place. If you can get some déclassé rube to address you with outlandish gender pronouns, or point at a man and call him a woman, or say that 2 + 2 = 5, you have visibly exerted power over him; and if he refuses to go along, you can start up with the offence-bullying, providing you with further opportunities to demonstrate your power. (Mainstream conservatives, like the autist at the back of the class, are always good targets for this sort of thing: they never fight back, and will always open their mouths and stammeringly attempt to reason with their tormentors.)

But while this is a matter of class snobbery among whites, it runs much deeper among blacks and other nonwhites. Following the Western obsession with objective material gain, it is easy enough for us to point out that colonialism was not nearly as bad as it has been painted, and that the descendants of slaves in America are far better off than they would be in any part of Africa. But it is undeniable that European colonialism was a traumatic blow to the subjective prestige of non-white peoples, and that black status anxieties are constantly being stoked by the experience of living with whites in America.

It would be a mistake to try to preserve the materialist view by subsuming prestige into economic gain. Non-whites have gained materially from Western civilisation, but they have gained none of the attendant prestige, and so they would rather wallow in fantasies about their own historical achievements than give the white devil his due. Blacks in America can be said to have reversed the material class relations of the slavery era, in the sense that a majority-white pool of overworked taxpayers now subsidises the idle lifestyle of 54.6% of black households; but they do not gain the attendant prestige of seeing impoverished whites directly offering tribute and addressing them as master, and so they continue to feel and act as if the whip is on their own backs.

'Soul On Ice'

A careful reading of (rapist and Black Panther leader) Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice shows that it is a sense of affronted prestige, and not an economic grudge stoked by the inferiority of chitterlings to beefsteaks, that is the source of the author's profound sense of anger towards white America. He mentions, for example, that blacks used to walk around "in a state of novocain" until the ruling against school segregation in 1954, which whipped them into an instant fury over their social status. That an attempt to improve black status was the catalyst for blacks beginning to "curse everything American" should not, in fact, come as a surprise: it is possible to bury a trauma and go on with life, but not if everyone else is constantly raking over it and talking about it. So when political grandstanding over segregation became a thing, thanks initially to liberal moralist stupidity and later the open fracturing of 'white' society (between managers and residual bourgeoisie, Jews and WASPs, and Boomers and the older generation), it was more or less inevitable that blacks would exhume their prestige grievances and seek vengeance for them. After all, what else could they do?

There are several curious passages in Cleaver's book in which he spends one moment furiously castigating the injustice and greed of white America, and switches the next moment to effusive praise of various leftist butchers and oppressors: people like Mao Zedong, who starved his own people to death, Fidel Castro, who viciously repressed any hint of subversion in his country, and Patrice Lumumba, who contributed to the Congo's post-independence slide into anarchy. But while Cleaver's heroes sucked up their people's economic resources more assiduously than any monopolist robber-baron, they did manage to collectivise racial and social prestige through nationalist and socialist myths. Prestige also looms large in what can only be called the central grievance of Soul On Ice, the perversion of relations between black women and black men. An extended dialogue near the end of the book paints a picture in which black women hypergamously fantasise about the "white Jesus" while having sex with their own men, and black men lust after the "white Jezebel" as a symbol of high status and freedom to defy the wishes of white men.

But now you've established that it's all about prestige, surely "we" can get on with achieving "racial reconciliation" by stamping out white racism and inaugurating programmes movements blah blah blah to raise the self-esteem of blacks...right? Wrong. As I said, "racial reconciliation" is exposed as an impossible chimaera when we admit the importance of racial prestige.

First of all, affronts to racial prestige do not have to come from "racism" or any other kind of foul play. The disparities in IQ between races are bound to generate disparate outcomes by themselves, and yet these disparities remain no less humiliating than if they had been generated by formal subjugation. It is difficult to understand how conservatives like Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray can present reams of evidence establishing the IQ gap, and then blithely assume that this should somehow put an end to the ferocious demands for "redress" from blacks, simply by establishing that their low place in white society does not result from racial discrimination. If a 900-page book packed with citations and evidence says that blacks aren't really suited to gaining wealth and status through the channels established by whites, then why should they not resort to the time-honoured expedient of tribal raiding - which is how young black men in Africa get wealth and status anyway? In fact, if Americans insist against all sense on pursuing racial integration, they would probably do better to allow blacks to openly frame their redistributive demands as raids for loot and glory, rather than forcing them to adopt the low-status minstrel dance of "oppression" in order to gain economic tribute from whites.

This brings us to a second point, which really ought to be hammered into white progressives: in prestige terms, benevolence is just as humiliating as subjugation, and perhaps even more so because one literally has to smile and take it. This is why there is so much anxiety in black circles over "white saviours" getting above themselves, and so much talk and effort aimed at imposing ritual status checks upon them so as to keep them in the subordinate position of "allies".

To repeat, prestige motives cannot be crudely equated with economic ones. A previously impoverished man might be satisfied upon receiving enough to live on; but when you are suffering from an open, bleeding prestige wound, you do not salve it by going into remedial classes and being painstakingly dragged up to the same status level as everyone else. More likely, you develop a prickly and defensive posture of "insecure high self-esteem" (very much in evidence among American blacks) and then seek to confirm it by turning the tables on those above you - whether through the Knockout Game among dumb ghetto thugs, or the ritual humiliations seen in the Evergreen State College footage among (mis)educated black-bourgeois brats. Ultimately, the only way for blacks to salve their prestige wounds is to mete out to whites the sort of vengeful treatment seen in countries like Zimbabwe - which, in yet another illustration of the importance of prestige motives, purged its white farmers and bullied foreigners in clear violation of economic self-interest.

What it would take to salve black prestige.

Now, it would not surprise me if there were swivel-eyed hand-wringers in America willing to countenance even this fate in order to achieve their precious "racial reconciliation". Happily, they won't get to make this choice. Black prestige is not the only operative factor here; the issue of white prestige is potentially far more important, and it is changing in ways that force the interests and actions of the two races onto a collision course.

Just as we have conceded that the "horror of colonialism" makes far more sense in prestige terms than in economic terms, so we must also concede the same for "white privilege". The fabled Imaginary Knapsack does not contain any objective material benefits for whites, but it does contain a respectable stock of subjective white prestige inherited from five hundred years of white dominance in the world, and fifty years of soporific MLK-style lecturing have not exactly diminished it.

As this article explains, those still holding the largest stock of white prestige in the modern day are white progressives, who complain about "white supremacy" day and night and yet are utterly steeped in it. These people have inherited from history the assumption of white supremacy, but have rejected the history of the dangers and difficulties encountered in the making of it; therefore, their attitude is very similar to that of a spoiled heiress squandering her dead father's wealth in the belief that her position is unassailable. As these people are almost entirely focused on status competition against lower-class whites, and are generally well-off enough to avoid prolonged exposure to the angry non-white house pets whom they keep in order to set on these whites, they can afford to make ritualised and intermittent gestures of submission to non-whites that do not diminish their arrogant sense of themselves. Moreover, progressives increasingly identify not with the nations of the West (which are in decline), but with the globalist power structure (which is advancing despite recent setbacks), which means that their prestige is not going anywhere for the time being.

Among more-or-less ordinary, middle-class and conservative whites who identify with their nations, however, white prestige has worked as an incapacitating force. Like a "constitutional monarch" gradually being reduced to a rubber-stamp, most whites are resigned to the slow draining away of their actual power, and feel that they can retain a sense of control and a position buttressed by goodwill if they smile and sign off on non-white demands. (Resisting these, on the other hand, might lead to lost battles exposing the hollowness of their prestige, and a formalisation of the low prestige warranted by their diminished power.) That is why many normie whites, faced with screeds about Western decline from tactless Deplorables like ourselves, just want us to shut up and go away.

Thing is, though, this hollowing-out of white prestige cannot go on forever. Keep signalling, in response to prestige-driven minority demands, that whites aren't in charge anymore - for instance, by electing black Presidents - and most whites will start to feel ridiculous in holding onto a paper illusion of prestige that everyone else knows no longer exists. Ergo, they - or at least those among them who have felt this loss of prestige - will stop thinking of themselves as world-omnipotent saviours who are too good for self-defence, and start acting like every other group, which includes strengthening collective prestige through ethnic chauvinism and perceiving threats to this prestige from outsiders' demands. The election of President Trump was not a repudiation of the progressive campaign to stamp out "white supremacy"; it was the crowning testament to its success.

These are promising times for those of us who, for over fifty years, have drunk the bitter dregs of our own people's delusion and folly. Driven by their own prestige demands, and thus incapable of adopting a prudent tolerance for the saviour-fantasies of whites, the blacks and other minorities go on hacking away at the white man's pedestal in the imperial centre of the Western world. Knock out that pedestal for good, however, and it will be the white progressive saviour who falls to the ground, for it is he alone who is defined by white supremacy at the very core of his being. All that we in the Alt-Right need do is patiently stand behind the progressive and place a noose around his neck.

As for those still inclined to cling to the mirage of "racial reconciliation", it it high time you shook yourselves from your daydreams and chose a real solution. Option one: roll over and allow the affronted and vengeful non-whites to visit upon you everything that was once visited upon them in history, as well as whatever else the historians of flying pyramids care to dream up. Option two: somehow restore, against all the ideological momentum of the past five hundred years, the sort of Indian-style multiracial caste system praised by Alain Daniélou, in which everyone has his place and no-one would want to change caste any more than you or I would want to usurp the throne of the United Kingdom. Option three: draw up an appropriate division of territory and file for racial divorce. Failure to choose within the time limit will, of course, lead to the auto-selection of option one - for you if not for us.