Race Is Family, So Why Is Racism a Sin?

How racism, the default position for humanity, became the biggest sin in the world (for white people) and why.

For a quarter century now, pattern-noticer, Steve Sailer, has been pointing out that race is just a very large, very extended family. That’s it. My siblings and I share more ancestors in common, and more recently, than any one of us does with anyone else on the planet. That makes us family. Another white person and I share more ancestors in common, and more recently, than either of us does with any other person of another race anywhere on the planet. Race is family.

So, with that in mind, try this thought experiment, white man.

Imagine you come around a corner and see a man beating a woman. The woman is crying for help. What is your first instinct?

You come to the aid of the woman.

Now imagine you come around the corner and see two men beating two women. Both women are crying for help, but one of the women is black, the other is white. Everything else being equal, what’s your first instinct?

Your first instinct is to come to the aid of the white woman, but that would be racist, so your actual response, if not outright paralysis, is unpredictable.

Now imagine you come around the corner and see two men beating two women. Both women are crying for help. They are both white, but one of them is your mother. What’s your first instinct?

You come to the aid of your mother first, of course, and you would be seen as something of a monster (even by the other woman) if you didn’t. Your mother is “closer” to you than the other woman—she is family—so you help her first. It doesn’t mean—and this is important—you “hate” the other woman. You have no ill will towards her at all. You will help her as soon as you are sure your mother is safe. But your mother comes first. This makes you (and everyone else in the world) a familyist.

Since this is what you see everywhere you look, there are probably good evolutionary reasons for favoring family over non-family, in-group over out-group. The only exception is white people. And even among white people it’s only a recent development that whites favoring whites is considered a sin—a very great sin—called “racism.”

While I was teaching English in China in 1995-1997, some controversy arose among the Chinese having to do with the massive influx into the large cities of nóng chǎng rén, farm people, i.e., rural peasants, seeking a better life. This internal migration was in violation of China’s hùkǒu system, which required government approval to move one’s registered permanent address. In their illegal status, the nóng chǎng were mightily abused by both unscrupulous employers and the cops, scrupulous or otherwise, but they received little sympathy from my students in Beijing. In a class discussion, the conversation grew to include China’s tight restrictions on immigrants from Africa and some of the abuses of that population, for whom they also had little sympathy. So, I pointed out the disconnect between their harsh stance toward immigrants and their own frequent complaints of the difficulty or expense of obtaining an immigrant visa for the United States. That’s different, they said. China belongs to the Chinese. America belongs to the world. That stung, but I didn’t know why it stung, and I had no grounds on which to object. Their position regarding immigration to China was justified by their ethnocentrism. As a good anti-racist white American, I didn’t have that ethnocentric defense.

The Chinese tend to be far more practical, clear-eyed, and blunt on these matters than Americans. My students also knew more about US immigration policy than 99 percent of Americans. I remember a long conversation I had with one of my students in which I was defending the idealistic purity of the US allowing mass nonwhite immigration into the US. “But,” she said, finally, with a bit of exasperation, “that’s how we’ll take over.” And, again, as I had no real permanent “we” of my own, I had no response.

By the time I left China, I had begun to see the world differently. My students had taught me.

So, how did this happen? How did whites become so defenseless?

To answer that, try another thought experiment. Imagine you are a member of a group that is small in number but has an indissoluble obligation to exterminate or enslave every other group in the world. Hideous obligation, no? Now imagine most of those in your group are scattered among the planet’s most powerful group, which massively outnumbers yours, how would you go about fulfilling your obligation to destroy or enslave it? Unless you could come up with a virus that targeted that group, or could trick them into accepting some sort of harmful vaccination, or could trigger a nuclear exchange between them and another nuclear-armed group, you would have to use poisonous ideas to destroy them.

Wouldn’t it be a poisonous idea of the first rank if you could implant in the members of that group the idea that “groupism,” that is to say, in-group favoritism, is the very worst sin? Make it seem evil to, say, oppose demographic transformation through mass immigration? And, if you were trying to convince the members of that much larger group to disregard the well-being of the other group members, thus removing their vast numerical advantage, wouldn’t it greatly help your argument if you could come up with a way to excuse your own group’s blatant in-group favoritism?

Undermining, then pathologizing, in-group favoritism among Western peoples has long been a project of Jewish intellectuals (just as it was in Bolshevik Russia, where it went so far as honoring children who reported their own parents to the Jewish-run secret police).

One Jewish intellectual who made a deep impact in the West was French ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss, who influenced Michel Foucault and many others. From Prof. Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique:

Like many Jewish intellectuals…Lévi-Strauss’s writings were aimed at enshrining cultural differences and subverting the universalist Western approaches to science, a position that validates the position of Judaism as a non-assimilating group. Western universalism and ideas of human rights were viewed as masks for ethnocentrism, colonialism, and genocide:¹

and quotes M. Lilla from a 1995 New York Review of Books article:

Lévi-Strauss’s most significant works were all published during the breakup of the French colonial empire and contributed enormously to the way it was understood by intellectuals. . . . [H]is elegant writings worked an aesthetic transformation on his readers, who were subtly made to feel ashamed to be Europeans. . . . [H]e evoked the beauty, dignity, and irreducible strangeness of Third World cultures that were simply trying to preserve their difference. . . . [H]is writings would soon feed the suspicion among the new left . . . that all the universal ideas to which Europe claimed allegiance—reason, science, progress, liberal democracy—were culturally specific weapons fashioned to rob the non-European Other of his difference.²

Lévi-Strauss was deeply influenced by another Jewish intellectual, Franz Boas, the founder of Boasian anthropology. MacDonald, quoting Carl Degler:

“Boas’s influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated.” Boas engaged in a “life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups. He accomplished his mission largely through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture.” “Boas, almost single-handedly, developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science.”

To understand this thing “culture,” was my stated reason for accepting the teaching position in China.

Boas did not arrive at that position from a disinterested, scientific inquiry into a vexed if controversial question. . . . ; There is no doubt that he had a deep interest in collecting evidence and designing arguments that would rebut or refute an ideological outlook—racism—which he considered restrictive upon individuals and undesirable for society. . . . Much evidence does come to light in [his] correspondence to suggest a persistent interest in pressing his social values upon the profession and the public.³

MacDonald notes Boas’ personal correspondence and associations reveal a strong Jewish identity and deep concern over “antisemitism.” But, quoting Geyla Frank:

The preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.⁴

MacDonald continues:

Jewish identifications and the pursuit of perceived Jewish interests, particularly in advocating an ideology of cultural pluralism as a model for Western societies, has been the “invisible subject” of American anthropology—invisible because the ethnic identifications and ethnic interests of its advocates have been masked by a language of science in which such identifications and interests were publicly illegitimate.

Indeed, Gershenhorn notes that “Boas was influenced by his liberal philosophy, his strict attachment to scientific accuracy, and perhaps most important, his Jewish identity”⁵—despite the fact that it’s obvious that a strong ethnic identity might well interfere with scientific objectivity. And as noted, Boas’s views were not the result of “disinterested, scientific inquiry.”

So, while he was busily attempting to melt down the ethnic identity of whites (with, as it turns out, a somewhat less than “strict attachment to scientific accuracy”), Franz Boas maintained a strong ethnic identity of his own. This, naturally, would tend to undermine the science of his anthropological claims against racism as well as the position of much of the work being done in the by-now-heavily-Jewish social sciences. About the time this “Jewish way of seeing” ourselves was on the verge of beginning its sweep through academia—the 1960s—the Jewish Boasians benefited from the lucky appearance of a ready-made excuse for their own ethnocentrism. The Holocaust.

Most readers are old enough to remember clearly the events of September 11, 2001 and the enormous impact they had on the whole country—even the world. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, if you will recall, they were the subject of every cable news channel as well as all national and local broadcast stations all day, every day. Then, after a few weeks, here and there, other unrelated news items began to reappear in the broadcasts, then a few regularly scheduled shows started making their reappearances. Life began to return to normal. The NFL games resumed, but with big American flag halftime shows, then the halftime shows disappeared and eventually the day came when 9/11 wasn’t mentioned even once during a whole day of news shows and broadcasts. I don’t think we even mark the anniversaries anymore after 20 years.

That’s the typical response of a people to some extraordinary and traumatizing event. In the immediate aftermath, it occupies all of our attention—it’s all we can talk about, then it slowly fades away until it’s just history. The trajectory of the Holocaust has been exactly opposite. From Ron Unz’s American Pravda piece, Holocaust Denial:

The six million Jews who died in the Holocaust certainly constituted a very substantial fraction of all the wartime casualties in the European Theater, outnumbering by a factor of 100 all the British who died during the Blitz, and being dozens of times more numerous than all the Americans who fell there in battle. Furthermore, the sheer monstrosity of the crime against innocent civilians would surely have provided the best possible justification for the Allied war effort. Yet for many, many years after the war, a very strange sort of amnesia seems to have gripped most of the leading political protagonists in that regard.

Robert Faurisson, a French academic who became a prominent Holocaust Denier in the 1970s, once made an extremely interesting observation regarding the memoirs of Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle:

Faurisson:

Three of the best known works on the Second World War are General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe (New York: Doubleday [Country Life Press], 1948), Winston Churchill’s The Second World War (London: Cassell, 6 vols., 1948-1954), and the Mémoires de guerre of General de Gaulle (Paris: Plon, 3 vols., 1954-1959). In these three works not the least mention of Nazi gas chambers is to be found.

Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe is a book of 559 pages; the six volumes of Churchill’s Second World War total 4,448 pages; and de Gaulle’s three-volume Mémoires de guerre is 2,054 pages. In this mass of writing, which altogether totals 7,061 pages (not including the introductory parts), published from 1948 to 1959, one will find no mention either of Nazi “gas chambers,” a “genocide” of the Jews, or of “six million” Jewish victims of the war.

Unz:

Given that the Holocaust would reasonably rank as the single most remarkable episode of the Second World War, such striking omissions must almost force us to place Eisenhower, Churchill, and De Gaulle among the ranks of “implicit Holocaust Deniers.”

It wasn’t until the 1961 publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews that the Holocaust began to enter the consciousness of the general public. Instead of public attention being highest in 1946 and then gradually fading away in the typical manner, the Holocaust rose from near total obscurity 16 years after the event and has steadily occupied a more central position in the public consciousness ever since. And under the Biden Administration’s new National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism (NSCA), taxpayers will be funding a massive “Holocaust education” bureaucracy, so this attention to the Holocaust is just going to keep growing. (This isn’t the first time by any means gentiles are funding their own indoctrination.)

The glowing victim halo over Jews, bright and getting brighter, can be and is misused. For the Boasians, the Holocaust story arrived just in time for the final assault on white ethnocentrism—providing the assailants with a very effective way of excusing their own ethnocentrism—the slogan, “Never Again.”

Every time a gentile decries racism, somewhere a Jew is smiling.

1. Kevin MacDonald, Culture of Critique, revised first part of Ch. 2

2. Lilla, M. (1995). “The riddle of Walter Benjamin.” New York Review of Books 42(9):37–42.

3. Degler, C. (1991). In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 61, 71, 82–83

4. Frank, G. (1997). Jews, multiculturalism, and Boasian anthropology. American Anthropologist 99:731.

5. Gershenhorn, J. (2004). Melville Herskovits and the Racial Politics of Knowledge. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. p.20