White Identity Ten Years On

I published White Identity in 2011, which means it is now 10 years old. For the Amazon description of the book, I wrote that it was “20 years in the making,” as a bolder and better sequel to Paved With Good Intentions, which was the last book I published with a “respectable” house.

A lot of awful things have happened in the 30 years since Paved and the 10 years since White Identity. I don’t believe that worse-is-better — worse is usually just worse — but the outrages piling up might just push a critical mass of white people past the point of no psychological return.

As the great Sam Francis noted when it appeared in 1992, Paved was a “neo-con” book. Its main message was that “racism” does not explain black failure, and that when you compare similar populations of blacks and whites, they almost always get the same treatment. Whether it’s thrice-convicted felons up for sentencing or tech grads looking for jobs, blacks may even come out better. The problem is that there are a lot more black felons than tech grads.

That was something you could say in the early 1990s, so long as you didn’t explain why there are so few black tech grads. My editor at Carroll and Graf (sold to Avalon Publishing in 1998) didn’t want to bring out a book about race differences in IQ. Nor was Paved a call for racial consciousness — if anything, it was the reverse. It was frank about the rise of what we would now call BIPOC “identity politics,” and warned that if non-whites kept slashing at whites, whites would “forge racial weapons of their own.” I refrained from saying that that would be a good thing.

It was probably the right decision. Paved sold well, Peter Brimelow reviewed it for National Review, and it was even the top selection for the Conservative Book Club, which called it “the most outspoken book the club has ever offered. And the most painful.” The club has since scrubbed the book from its website.

I must have done hundreds of radio interviews — mostly with hostile hosts and audiences who thought it was heresy to downplay “racism” — but I think I helped push the debate on race towards sanity. My last gasp as a “respectable” author even got me an invitation to speak at Hillsdale College, though with surprising results.

My book was part of an Indian summer for race books. Commercial publishers brought out The Bell Curve (1994) by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The End of Racism (1995) by Dinesh D’Souza, Race, Evolution and Behavior (1995) by Philippe Rushton, Why Race Matters (1997) by Michael Levin, and The g Factor (1998) by Arthur Jensen. Today, those books would probably have to be self-published.

American Renaissance kept me busy for 15 years, but I finally wrote what became White Identity. I badly wanted a mainstream publisher. I thought a brave New York editor could raise a tremendous stink and make tons of money with a book that explained why multi-racialism is doomed and why whites have group interests just like everyone else.

I went back to Carroll and Graf. My editor told me the company had made money on Paved, but that there was more to publishing than money. It’s a tight web of agents, editors, book shows, and author parties that scorns pariahs, and even my mild, neo-con book had nearly made Carroll and Graf a pariah.

My literary agent for Paved had faith in the new book, though, and worked his way through a score of rejection letters before he gave up. I found another agent who gave it a try, but he failed, too, so AmRen’s parent organization, New Century Foundation, published the book.

We rubbed along, selling very nicely, especially on Amazon, where White Identity got close to 200 reviews with an average of four stars — despite a clutch of shrieking one-star reviews. Then, in 2019, the world’s largest bookseller lit the world’s largest bonfire and banned White Identity along with hundreds of other dissident books. Twitter had banned me 15 months earlier, and I thought those 15 months of survival meant I was safe on Amazon, but White Identity went up in the holocaust.

The Amazon ban — along with other bans and algorithmic assaults on AmRen too many to list — was part of a slide into censorship and anti-white hysteria that picked up speed during the 2010s and reached a sickening climax after George Floyd’s death in May 2020.

That was the year millions of white people really seemed to think that they, personally, cause black (and let’s throw in “brown,” too) degeneracy. That was the year mobs followed anti-white logic to the end and tore down statues of Columbus to appease blacks. American companies rewarded black looters and arsonists with billions in handouts. The new breed of race swindlers — Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi — showed Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson where the real money was. We got a President who promised to put every government department to work rooting out something a lot of Americans had never heard of: “systemic racism.” And that was the year Critical Race Theory built up so much momentum it crashed into the K-12 curriculum.

Let’s face it: It was a bad year. It was a terrible year. It set the new decade on a nasty course that some think will maim the First Amendment, criminalize dissent, and put us all in camps for “domestic terrorists.” I don’t think so, but I can see why they do.

I have been taking America’s racial temperature for more than 30 years, and 2020 nearly broke the thermometer. I like to think we hit rock bottom. I cheerfully admit I have been saying this for years, but I think the berserkers really have poked the poor, bloody white man one too many times. White people are refusing to pay taxes (or private-school tuition) to have their children taught they were born bad.

The fight against CRT is a good start, but it’s only defense. There’s no sign yet of whites going on offense, but they are finally taking their own side in the argument. This could be momentous. I believe many whites are wondering just what the last 50 to 70 years have been all about, and a lot of them are learning that we are ready to tell them. Last month, AmRen.com hit a new record of one million visits. We served up 4.5 million pages to inquiring minds — despite YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook blocking our URLs, and Google making us nearly impossible to find. Whites are starving for answers, and we have the only ones that make sense.

And that, I believe, is why White Identity is useful. If it were still on Amazon, it would be leaping out of the warehouse. As I noted, I thought it could be a mainstream book. I wrote it for people just beginning to explore dissident views on race. It’s calm and factual, and I think it is an unmatched explanation of why diversity is suicide. But it is not just a compilation of examples. The chapter of which I may be most proud summarizes the science of how humans see race. Babies who can’t even talk see race. Adults perceive race more quickly and vividly than they perceive sex — and there isn’t much that’s more important than telling a potential mate from a dud. As the hippies used to say, “Just get in touch with your feelings.” They won’t steer you wrong.

So, yes: It’s been a grim 10 years since 2011, but I believe white advocacy is broader and stronger than ever, and there is nothing more exhilarating than the fight for our people, and we are lucky to be part of it.

One of our speakers for the upcoming 2021 American Renaissance conference is Dries Van Langenhove, a fierce identitarian who was elected in 2019 as the youngest member of the Belgian parliament. The title of his talk is “The Greatest Time to be Alive.” Yes, yes, and yes!

These are the times that try men’s souls, but these are times when our duty has never been clearer.

Editor’s Note: You can buy a copy of White Identity here.