By Wayne Allensworth
For some time now, the powers-that-be have denied the American ethnos, what we call “the American Remnant,” any positive identity. They acknowledge only a negative identity for our people: We are slandered as a pack of “racists” who, even without being conscious of it, supposedly cause stress, anxiety, and even premature death among “people of color.” The left has fetishized blacks as eternal victims, granting them sacred status. The message of Black Lives Matter is that black lives count more than white ones. Stating that all lives matter is a grievous sin in the post-American landscape of 2021.
The reasons blacks have been accorded special status and weaponized by the enemies of the American Remnant have deep roots. For now, suffice to say that the left has used blacks in white guilt propaganda as a battering ram to break down resistance among our people to globalism, which is projected by those who despise us as the end of History with a capital “H.” Both the neo-liberals and hard left agree on that.
In my lifetime, the key historical moment in undermining our people’s sense of positive identity was the “civil rights revolution” of the 1960s. Integration, particularly of our schools, was a key aim of that revolution, and it facilitated the erosion of the American Remnant’s sense of positive identity.
In the past, pundits on the right spent a lot of time and energy attacking relativism, the idea that there is no objective right or wrong, truth or untruth, only varying perspectives, varying situations. In the post-modern world, the language and symbols that express those various perspectives are instruments of power.
The left was not entirely wrong about that.
Take the teaching of history in integrated schools, which pointed out a flaw in the mainstream right’s argument.
At one time, American students learned about a pantheon of heroes that included a number of slaveholders and certainly some hard-nosed, even ruthless men. Now, none of them can pass muster under the ideological precepts of today’s globalists and their hard left shock troops. Iconoclastic attacks on monuments to our heroes bear this out.
In permitting the left to rewrite history textbooks, what the right forgot was that education was not merely about passing tests or mastering “the material.” Education originated as a means of socializing members of tribe and nation. It was a means of transmitting a heritage and confirming a positive identity. Under the old view of education, the fact that Andrew Jackson owned slaves was not the most important thing about him. What was most important was “Old Hickory’s” heroism in battle, and his role in the building of our country. Now, it appears that Jackson will eventually be replaced by Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
Something similar can be said about any number of American heroes from Washington to Charles Lindbergh. When whites and blacks were taught in segregated schools, there was no controversy over how such heroes were portrayed. Then came the civil rights revolution. The inculcation of white guilt, which focused on putative American failings, followed. Given the circumstances, it was inevitable that American history would eventually be portrayed through the prism of the so-called “1619 Project.”
Under the new rules of integrated, anti-American education, the only point that really mattered about Washington was that he owned black slaves, while Lindbergh was tagged as an anti-Semitic isolationist.
White guilt was effective in beginning the transformation of how the children of the American ethnos were taught and what they were taught. The old ways did not last long in an integrated school environment. They could not.
Integration meant that whites had to give up their positive heritage. The very act of forcing the two races together was meant as an acknowledgement of wrongdoing by whites. Blacks were cast as the victims, whites the sinners asking for forgiveness.
Two narratives, one white, one black, could not co-exist. One would prevail. As in all black-white mutual relationships since the 1960s, it is whites who are expected to yield—and widely prevalent “virtue signaling” means that many whites happily do so.
I do not begrudge blacks their heroes. Malcom X was a proud black man who called on his people to stand up for themselves. MLK was the inspirational leader of the civil rights revolution. There are other aspects of the character of both men black people would rather ignore.
That’s the way of the world. People need their heroes.
We should remember that as we consider how our people might survive and preserve their heritage in what will likely be an increasingly hostile future.
Wayne Allensworth is a Corresponding Editor of Chronicles magazine. He is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
