The Real American Dilemma
Race, Immigration, and the Future of America
1998, New Century Foundation, Softcover, 152 pages, ISBN: 0-9656383-0-8, 8.3 × 5.4 inches
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This book answers the question: Why is race the problem that will not go away? Crime, poverty, illegitimacy, welfare dependence, school failure, immigration—all these burning issues of our time revolve around race. And yet, race is the subject about which Americans are most reluctant to speak honestly. We must not let the fear of being called “racist” stifle debate about America’s oldest problem—for without courage and honesty no solutions are possible.
This is a book that will make you think. If you care about America it will make you act. It is a collection that brings together the work of eight of the most thoughtful people writing about race today—Prof. Phillippe Rushton, Dr. Samuel Francis, Prof. Michael Levin, Prof. Glayde Whitney, Jared Taylor, Dr. Wayne Lutton, Fr. James Thornton, and Prof. Michael Hart.
From the Introduction
More and more Americans believe that the liberal approach to race relations has been a catastrophe, but they are loathe to say so openly. This is because the liberal analysis has been an accepted part of the intellectual landscape for so long that it is essentially unassailable. Race is, in fact, the great taboo. There is no other subject on which private opinion diverges so widely from public pronouncement.
Conventional thinking about race has become a little like a religion, complete with dogma and excommunication of free—thinkers. People know that certain views about race will prompt damaging accusations of “racism,” so they keep their opinions to themselves.
The tragedy is that if there is any subject about which America needs the greatest possible candor and freedom of expression it is race. Race relations have always been the nation’s greatest challenge, and are the backdrop to nearly every worrying front-page story about crime, illegitimacy, illiteracy, school failure, or welfare dependency. If we are not free to question current assumptions about race we will continue to blunder down a path that shows no sign of leading to a better future.
This book is a volume of dissent. Its contributors have thought very carefully about the vital questions of our time and have reached conclusions that violate intellectual orthodoxy. All have, to some degree, paid a price for doing so.
Every chapter of this book except the last is based on a presentation given at a conference on race and immigration held from May 25th through 27th, 1996, in Louisville, Kentucky. When Louisville’s guardians of orthodoxy learned that we planned to hold a conference in their town, they immediately set out to sabotage it. Activists first alerted the Louisville Courier-Journal to our plans, and the newspaper obliged with a long article about “white supremacists.” The local leftist weekly headlined its story, “Racists Without a Klu.”
The Courier-Journal ran several more worried articles about the conference and denounced it in editorials. “Purveyors of racial division are, at heart, scared people,” it observed, preferring to speculate about the mental state of dissenters rather than examine their views.
Activists visited the hotel where we planned to hold the conference, and put pressure on the general manager to cancel his contract with us. When he politely declined, demonstrators held daily “prayer vigils” in front of the hotel, asking God to interfere with our plans. They arranged for their vigils to be reported on the nightly television news.
Two local high schools had planned proms at the same hotel on the same weekend. They were caught up in the hysteria about “white supremacy” and joined the chorus demanding that we be ejected. When the hotel once again said it would abide by its contract, the schools broke theirs. The proms had been planned for a completely different part of the hotel, ten floors away from the conference, and the students would not have even known we were there. One prom was scheduled for Friday night whereas the conference did not begin until Saturday night, but some ideas, it seems, are so loathsome they can contaminate an entire building 24 hours before the people who hold those views even arrive. It is hard to imagine a meeting on any other subject causing such a panic.
The conference itself was met with demonstrations, teach—ins, and more worried news coverage, none of which disrupted a marvelous series of lectures and discussions. Two of the speeches, mine and Samuel Francis,’ were broadcast repeatedly by C-SPAN.
I am sure that the proceedings would have been a great disappointment to the demonstrators, who no doubt imagined all manner of fantastic goings-on. In fact, this moral ordeal for the city of Louisville amounted to nothing more than a few middle-aged men exchanging ideas — interesting and rarely articulated ideas, to be sure — but just a few men with ideas. We are pleased, in this volume, to offer these ideas to the judgment of the general public.
ISBN: 0-9656383-0-8