Paved With Good Intentions: 25 Years Later

Paved With Good Intentions (PWGI) is Jared Taylor’s groundbreaking book on race relations published in late 1992. It was my introduction to race realism — and sanity.

In the early 1990s, I was a college student at a leftist (what other kind is there?) New England university. Though not a conservative, I questioned the version of politics and race that I was served by my professors and the media.

A stint in the military had already taught me racial realities. I knew that the anti-white messages I heard were backwards. It was whites — not blacks — who suffered racial hostility. In every institution, whites bent over backwards to accommodate and favor blacks. Yet I could find no forum for my forbidden thoughts and views. I soon discovered Rush Limbaugh, and the school library took National Review, but I wanted more than mild critiques of affirmative action and other PC nonsense.

I became, for lack of a better word, a conservative. Of course, I had no conservative professors. The College Republicans were the closest thing to a conservative group on campus, but they never seemed to meet, and letters I dropped in their mailbox went unanswered. I surprised myself by offering some tepid resistance to my professors in class, though only on relatively safe subjects such as racial quotas. A few classmates said they agreed with me, but did not want to speak out and risk bad grades or being called a racist. Most seemed passively to agree with the leftism they were being taught.

Am I the only one who sees it?

I knew I was not insane. But I also wondered why there were no academics, reporters, politicians or other leaders who spoke up for whites. We might grumble in private about blacks and double standards, but why didn’t whites publicly speak up for themselves?

PWGI was my first experience of a white man defending whites and breaking taboos, and it opened my eyes. This was before the Internet, and I learned about PWGI the old fashioned way: I saw a review of it by Sam Francis in my local newspaper, which was one of the few papers that carried his dissident column.

Just this month, I decided to reread the book to see how it holds up after a quarter century, and I was able to relive my experience of so long ago. The first thing that struck me in the book was the amount of racially motivated black violence. Here are just a few examples from the book:

• Danny Gilmore was a 23-year-old white man driving through a black neighborhood in Cleveland in 1988. He was involved in a fender-bender with a black driver. When he got out of his truck he was beaten by a mob of 40 blacks and collapsed in the street. One man got in his truck and ran him over, killing Gilmore. The editors of the Cleveland Plain Dealer suppressed the racial angle (over the objections of a black reporter), and the city leadership covered up the crime. The homicide detective who handled the case explained: “The mayor’s office doesn’t want us to have racial killings in this town, so Danny Gilmore’s death wasn’t a racial crime. And I’m the tooth fairy.”
• In January 1991, a group of black men in Boston decided to kill the first white person they saw. They stabbed Northeastern University student Mark Belmore to death.
• In February 1991, a black man named Christopher Peterson was arrested for killing seven whites with a shotgun. He admitted that he killed them for purely racial reasons.
• A black cult called Yahweh taught its members that whites were literally devils. They killed seven white devils from 1986 to 1990. Members had to bring back a finger or ear of the white victim as proof of the murder.

Of course, I had never heard of any of these murders since they provoked no media outrage. Nor did whites commit similar racial violence against blacks. There were celebrated white-on-black killings in Brooklyn’s mostly white Howard Beach (1986) and Bensonhurst (1989) neighborhoods that were cited as evidence of white racism. Yet, as Mr. Taylor showed in the book, they were racial fights started by blacks (Howard Beach) or incidents with no clear racial motive (Bensonhurst).

So why were there so many black-on-white murders and attacks? Mr. Taylor wrote:

At every turn, blacks are told that whites are responsible for their problems. At every opportunity blacks are reminded of slavery. Virtually every failure by blacks — be it crime, poverty, drug-taking, or even cigarette smoking — is said to be the work of white people. . . . it would be difficult to find whites who openly hate blacks with the visceral, consuming intensity with which these black people hate whites.

Blacks could also get away with saying fiercely hateful things.

• Congressman Gus Savage of Chicago responded to a white reporter who had asked him a question just steps from the House floor with, “I don’t talk to you white motherf******s.”
• Black musician Miles Davis said, “If somebody told me I only had an hour to live, I’d spend it choking a white man.”
• Rapper Ice Cube said the following to Asians in his 1991 album Death Certificate:

So, don’t follow me up and down your market

Or your little chop suey ass will be a target

So, pay your respects to the black fist

Or we’ll burn your store right down to a crisp.

Spike Lee, Bill Cosby, Ossie Davis and other black celebrities openly spoke of white conspiracies to make blacks use drugs and give them AIDS. Of course, nothing happened to them, while whites such as Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder and Al Campanis famously lost their jobs for saying far less insulting things about blacks.

PWGI showed me there was scarcely an institution in the United States that didn’t give preference or handouts to blacks. A few examples:

• In 1991, Coca-Cola spent up to $2 million to support Black Expo USA, designed to give special help to black entrepreneurs.
• Whites testing for jobs in the US diplomatic service had to score over 70 for a passing grade while blacks had to score only in the mid-50s.
• The provost of San Francisco State University approved two new slots in the school’s English department with the condition that, “candidates recommended to me must be non-white.”
• Only black colleges get federal money for operating expenses. This is required by federal law, and in 1990, black colleges got more than $800 million in federal aid.
• The average black student admitted to the University of Virginia in 1988 scored 246 points lower on SATs than the average white student. At UCLA, it was 250 points lower.
• Nearly 90 percent of private colleges offered race-based scholarships that were off limits to whites. The average award was $6,800 a year.

Mr. Taylor noted:

The entire apparatus of government, industry, and education is painfully conscious of race and treats the races differently at every turn. Blacks now demand special treatment as a matter of course. In its befuddled way, society is trying to do what is right. But to favor blacks systematically and then call this sorry charade “equal opportunity” is self-delusion of the worst kind.

PWGI contains a brief, persuasive chapter on Asians. Though they have suffered discrimination, they often outperform whites in school and business, and are less likely to commit crimes or end up in jail. If white racism is responsible for the failings of blacks, why doesn’t it stop Asians from succeeding?

What is to be done?

The last chapter in PWGI is devoted to solutions to America’s racial dilemma. Ending welfare or at least requiring Norplant for women on the dole would help control America’s growing underclass. Middle-class blacks should take responsibility for their own lives and stop blaming whites for their problems. White elites could help by halting special privileges given to blacks in the name of “equality.”

If these steps were not taken, how would whites respond to being always on the receiving end of racial injustice and double standards? “White Americans will eventually lose patience. . . . Only for so long will whites watch blacks use race as a weapon before they forge racial weapons of their own.”

The problems Jared Taylor wrote about 25 years ago are still acute. Black-on-white violence, crime, hate speech, and hate crime hoaxes are as big a problem today as in 1992. Whites continue to live with a system of preferences for blacks. Now, other groups are demanding them. As whites head toward minority status, these problems will get worse. And wherever whites run, non-whites will follow them.

It took nearly a quarter of a century, but whites have indeed started to fight back. The rapid growth of the Alt-Right and even the election of Donald Trump in 2016 are signs of racial consciousness among whites. A majority of whites — 55 percent, according to a recent survey — now agree that discrimination against them is as big a problem as discrimination against blacks. A November 2015 Reuters poll showed that over half of Americans feel like “strangers in their own country” and that 58 percent “don’t identify with what America has become.” Whites are indeed losing patience.

Paved With Good Intentions is as timely as ever. The double standards, self-delusion, excuse-making, and hypocrisy it describes are just as common today as they were a quarter century ago. Some of the names of the villains have changed, but the dynamic of black failure/white guilt and the folly that flows from it were as clear in 1992 as in 2018.

Though no mainstream publisher would touch PWGI today, it is now easy to find taboo books through the Internet and social media, and even self-published books can reach broad audiences. Young racial dissidents therefore have a much easier time finding race-realist information than I did 25 years ago. If you have not read this book, you should. May it be a guide and inspiration to coming generations of whites who bear the increasingly heavy burden of America’s race problem.

 * * *

Jared Taylor’s Afterword to the 2013, 20th-Anniversary Kindle Edition

I begin with thanks to the people who made this edition possible. They have asked that I not mention them by name and I have reluctantly complied, but it is they and they alone who have kept this book alive.

Sadly, preservation of older books may be more important than ever. In the preface to the 2004 edition of Paved With Good Intentions, I mentioned half a dozen books that had appeared after mine in the 1990s and that seemed to presage a breakthrough on race. That breakthrough never came. The new century has seen an almost complete retreat by the mainstream press from anything but orthodoxy. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending’s 2009 book, The 10,000 Year Explosion, is a startling exception.

Why did publishers show the white feather? It is part of the new Dark Age that has fallen across the entire Western world. Doctrinaire egalitarians are now so desperate and vindictive — and still so powerful — that few people dare challenge them openly, and race and nationalism are not the only fields in which dissent is banned. We are to believe that not only are races equal but that religions, cultures, nations, sexes, and “lifestyles” are equal. Merely to point out objective differences is dangerous; to state preferences is scandalous.

Today’s orthodoxy is not enforced by state censors — it would be better if it were. When the government officially suppresses dissent, the enemy is clear. What we have is a system of self-censorship, in which everyone knows the rules and censors himself. High-profile, ritual shaming of dissidents reminds us where the boundaries lie.

In the area of race alone, there have been many shamings. Jason Richwine, Jack Hunter, Sam Francis, Scott McConnell, John Derbyshire, Joseph Sobran, Robert Weissberg, Kevin Lamb, Frank Borzellieri, Leif Parsell, and many others have lost their jobs because of “racism.” John O’Sullivan, Peter Brimelow, Patrick Buchanan, and James Watson have all suffered professionally for excessive truth telling.

The case of James Watson vividly demonstrates the tyrannical power of the egalitarian establishment. In 2007, he told The Sunday Times newspaper that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa,” adding that “[all] our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.” Dr. Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix and Nobel laureate, was probably the most famous scientist in the world. He scraped and backtracked, even cravenly saying that “there is no scientific basis for such a belief,” yet these few dissident words ended his 39-year career at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Sex differences are quicksand. In 2006, Lawrence Summers resigned as president of Harvard after fury over his suggestion that one reason so few women are in science is that their minds may not be identical to those of men. He offered this merely as a conjecture and hoped to be proven wrong, but even as a conjecture this was too much for Harvard University.

Just this year, outgoing Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that America will put women in combat. Do American soldiers think this is a good idea? I know from personal communication with people in the military that many think this is insanity, but I am not aware of a single serving officer who publicly opposed Mr. Panetta. That would be career suicide.

In today’s atmosphere, therefore, Paved With Good Intentions could not be published, and even if only for historical reasons it is instructive to read what could be published in 1992.

Twenty years ago, I thought that the evils and absurdities I was pointing out in this book would be reformed within my lifetime. Now, I’m not so sure. This is not to say that Americans are blind to these evils and absurdities. As I note below, more Americans than ever have a clear understanding of race. However, American institutions continue to ignore the obvious, and Congress, the courts, major media, and universities have the combined power to suppress common sense.

It was the suppression of common sense that prompted outrage over New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. Police questioned people they thought looked suspicious, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg believed this stopped a great deal of crime. The New York Civil Liberties Union and other groups charged discrimination, however, because blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be stopped than whites. Curiously, it did not seem to bother them that the police were stopping men — young men. There was sharper sex and age discrimination than race discrimination. No one cared about that, because everyone knows that young men are vastly more criminal than old women, and that it is a waste of time to stop grandmothers.

And yet, the statistical basis for stopping blacks and Hispanics was exactly the same as for stopping young men: They commit the most crime. People understand basic probability about age or sex, but their minds stop working when it comes to race. I pointed this out in 1992; there has been no progress in 20 years.

Congress has made no progress either. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was supposed to close the racial gaps in school achievement and ensure that every student in America could read and do math at the “proficient” level by 2014. These ridiculous goals — and stiff penalties for not meeting them — prompted widespread cheating on tests that led to criminal indictments of 35 teachers in the heavily-black Atlanta school district. By 2013, the Department of Education had granted waivers to no fewer than 39 states and the District of Columbia because they had no hope of meeting the act’s foolish requirements.

It finally dawned on the state of Florida that if not a single school in the whole country can eliminate racial gaps, it is wrong to punish teachers who cannot achieve the impossible. In 2013, the state set more realistic goals: highest for Asians, lowest for blacks — and the Southern Poverty Law Center promptly filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice, claiming that the new goals “violate fundamental civil rights.” Any glimmering of race realism must be snuffed out.

One of the arguments I made in 1992 was that whites are terrified of being thought “racist.” Twenty years later nothing has changed. In 2010, former President George W. Bush said that the worst moment in his eight years in office was a tossed-off remark by a black rapper named Kanye West, who said the President did not send enough relief to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina because he didn’t “care about black people.” Mr. Bush had some bad patches in his presidency — the September 11 terrorist attacks, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the crash of 2008 — but being called a racist by a black entertainer was the worst thing that happened to him as president. How much do whites trim their actions — even their thoughts — for fear of being called names? What honest, useful things might President Bush have done if he were not a mental hostage to blacks?

As I noted in 1992, even absurd accusations of “racism” have power only because whites give them that power. Twenty years later, George Bush still doesn’t understand that.

In 1992, I gave many examples of ordinary people — not even dissidents — who had lost their jobs on account of “racism.” They still lose their jobs. In 2013, celebrity cook Paula Deen’s program was scrubbed from the Food Network because she admitted that in the 1980s she had used the word “nigger.” Likewise in 2013, two white contestants in a “reality” television program called “Big Brother 15” were fired from their day jobs for such things as referring to a homosexual as a “queer,” and telling an Asian girl to “shut up and make some rice.”

I noted in 1992 that it is only whites who must always govern their tongues. In 2012, there were no repercussions when Jamie Foxx promoted his new movie, Django Unchained, by saying, “I save my wife, and I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that? And how black is that?” In 2013, the black congressman Charles Rangel said that the Tea Party “is the same group we faced in the South with those white crackers and the dogs and the police.” I’m sure Mr. Foxx meant to glory in the fantasy of killing whites, and Mr. Rangel meant to offend Tea Party members, but their remarks caused barely a ripple.

This book is full of examples of double standards. Whites — but only whites — must avoid the faintest hint of “insensitivity.” Whites — but only whites — must never be proud of their race. Whites — but only whites — must never act as if they have legitimate group interests, even though other groups openly organize in opposition to those interests There has been no change in 20 years.

How long will this go on? Another 20 years? The great contradiction of American race relations is that it is whites who still make the rules. Blacks could have howled themselves hoarse over Paula Deen, but they would have quickly stopped howling if the white people who run the Food Network had ignored them. It was white people who fired James Watson, Jason Richwine, and John Derbyshire; not blacks. It was not even blacks who most loudly criticized these dissidents; it was whites. If whites wanted to, they could make life very hard for Charles Rangel and Jamie Foxx, but they do not dare. And we have to listen to Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Janet Murguia only because white media executives give them a microphone.

Whites do not lack the power to defend their interests. They lack the will, and it is unprecedented in human history that a majority people should abandon its interests. Sometime in the mid- to late 20th century, almost all white governments capitulated. The most striking change was their willingness to accept displacement of their people by non-white immigrants. In the United States, whites are now expected to become a minority by 2042. Western Europe, Australia, and Canada, are headed the same way. Only Eastern Europe, which the Cold War protected from the egalitarian folly of the West, has retained an instinctive sense of ethnic and national interests. But for how long?

This is, to me, the tragedy and mystery of our age. Why have whites given up the will to survive as a distinct people? There is no lack of theories: the demoralizing effect of two world wars, the machinations of Jews, the universalist doctrine of Christianity, materialism, individualism. I do not believe any or all of them fully explain why whites abandoned so basic, so ancient, so legitimate, and so noble an instinct as the preservation of their own people.

One of the consequences of displacement, of course, is that whites will stop making the rules. In America, the 2012 Presidential elections were an unmistakable sign of what is to come. Although Mitt Romney won 60 percent of the white vote — more than enough to win if whites still dominated the electorate — he lost because the 26 percent of the electorate that is non-white voted overwhelmingly for the non-white candidate. In other words, because they had admitted millions of non-whites into their country, whites did not get the president they wanted.

What will America be like when whites stop making the rules? This is a pressing question that few ask and even fewer answer, but let me try. The government already requires discrimination against whites, and calls it “affirmative action.” The government already bans race-neutral job qualifications that have a “disparate impact” on protected minorities. Universities already encourage every race but whites to start student unions and activist groups. We already have a media that agonizes over white misbehavior but ignores brutal anti-white crime.

When blacks and Hispanics start making the rules, they will not end “affirmative action;” they will expand it. They might well correct the problem of “white privilege” with a tax that only whites must pay. White jurors obviously cannot make fair decisions — look at the mess they made of George Zimmerman’s trial — so there could be rules to ensure that juries never have white majorities. Leadership roles in Congress could be reserved for non-whites to ensure fairness. Tax-exemptions help maintain white privilege, so all non-profits could be made to show how they benefit non-whites. The “racism” of capitalism could be curbed by making sure no company has a majority-white board of directors. Residential segregation could be solved by giving non-white home buyers an automatic bidding advantage, like the advantage the Small Business Administration already gives non-whites who bid on government contracts. I have every confidence that Sonia Sotomayor and her fellow justices of the future would find these measures Constitutional — if, indeed, our new rulers still bother with such Caucasian niceties as constitutionality.

Is this paranoid raving? Just imagine how the Black or Hispanic Congressional Caucuses would vote on any of these things today, and ask yourself why a majority-black and -Hispanic Congress would vote any differently. And for the rest of us, far from Washington, life will become darker, more violent, and more corrupt, as whites flee to the dwindling patches of land where they are still a desperate majority.

This will be our future unless whites regain a sense of identity. I have spent the last 25 years trying to rekindle that identity, trying to awaken whites to this looming crisis. For more than 20 years, I published the dissident monthly magazine American Renaissance, which has now moved to the web at AmRen.com. In 2011, I also published a book called White Identity, which is more explicit than this one about the need for — well — white identity. If you found Paved With Good Intentions useful I think you will find White Identity useful, too.

There has been unquestionable progress in the development of white identity. Twenty-five years ago, anyone who doubted racial orthodoxy had to look in dusty corners of libraries or write off to obscure post office boxes to find undeceived information. Now, the internet has scores of dissident websites, there are organizations that hold public conferences about the interests of whites, and there are racially-oriented publishing houses that bring out the excellent books commercial publishers are afraid to touch.

What encourages me most is the number of young people who, by their 20s, have a fully developed understanding of race. I was in my 40s before I saw what they see. Likewise, the public comments on “mainstream” websites are proof that a huge number of Americans are not fooled by the media. Nothing better demonstrates the difference between elite or published opinion and public opinion. This is why our rulers are so desperate to punish dissenters. This is why the publishing breakthrough of the 1990s had to be stopped.

Orthodoxy is still immensely powerful, but it has no moral and intellectual foundations. Whenever there is real debate between dissidents and apparatchiks, the apparatchiks lose — and more and more people know it. That is why our rulers never permit debate. That is why, ultimately, they will fall even if there is no debate.

The French author Guillaume Faye has written that if the whites now in their 20s fail to act, they and their civilization are doomed. I am confident they will act.

San Francisco,
August 18, 2013