On May 31, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, an adjunct of The Smithsonian, in a forum on issues of Race in America, suggested the defining characteristics of White Culture to be a propensity for rational thinking, objectivity, the scientific method, individualism, self-reliance, the nuclear family, private property, the work ethic, delayed gratification, etc., etc. While my first instinct was to be impressed with something that had a good deal of historical merit to it, I quickly discovered the list to have been compiled in the context of Judy Katz’ 1978 work “White Awareness: Handbook for Anti Racism Training,” a book which contended that the normalization of these qualities in American life tended to marginalize non-Whites, indeed was an adjunct of White Privilege if not overt Racism. Oprah would no doubt agree.
People, the Democracies of Canada and The United States were founded by White, Christian, Western Europeans who by and large believed in every value postulated in the aforementioned chart. That those values became the norms of North American culture is not the product of some racist conspiracy but the result of the irrefutable facts of History. I have read a thousand times that the social critique of the Left is based upon a rational appreciation of the empirical evidence, but the empirical evidence of 2500 years of recorded human history has either been completely deleted or rendered irrelevant by the magical elixirs of Determinism and Relativism in the pathologically delusional perspective of the Left.
Among the characteristics attributed to Whites was their need to always win. It’s a not very subtle twist on the Neo-Marxist principle that Western Colonialists were generally successful in their endeavors not because they were significantly more advanced than their opposition but because they were more vicious; not because guns invariably beat knives and spears, but because White people are just plain Evil. That was, of course, the theme of Nick Cannon’s rant.
Since the ascendancy of the Woodstock generation, values such as “delayed gratification” and “hard work” have been under relentless attack by those on the hyper-sensitive Left, the proud inventors of the “micro-aggression,” a slight so insignificant that the average mature adult might fail to note its existence. Hence the Smithsonian’s inclusion of the fact that White Men tend to like blonds, an aesthetic standard apparently unfair to every Black girl ever born!
Life is so cruel here in the callously racist West which has the audacity to value rational thought, hard work and cute blonds!
Certainly the rational, scientific perspective launched in Ancient Greece and brought to fruition in Enlightenment Europe was evident to varying degrees in other cultures as well. Ming China, as I believe I have already mentioned, was in many ways more advanced than 15th Century Europe. Yet some ethnic groups, from the perspective of the values cited in the Smithsonian study, unequivocally failed to achieve. This is a simple historical fact. It is, however, a fact which entitles no one to assume anything about another on the basis of ethnicity, the fundamental precept of “conservatism” being the right of every Individual to be treated as an autonomous, conscious, volitional Being.
For “progressives,” respecting both the Truths of History and the integrity of the Individual would seem to be impossible. For a person of Western European heritage to suggest that the Indigenous of the Americas were decidedly more primitive than their White contemporaries 500 years ago is, apparently, to stereotype every contemporary Indigenous as a “primitive.” It is a conclusion without merit, a conclusion born of the Left’s compulsion to view everything through the narrow lens of Identity. It was through that lens that Judy Katz saw the world. When the “anti-racist” Ibram X. Kendi refers to the “assimilationist” tactics of the White Culture, he is clearly saying he is less interested in the efficacy of the Values of that culture than in resisting it as an alien force. He is in fact displaying his own racial animus. Black “conservative” Larry Elder, on the other hand, unconcerned with the fact that the nuclear family is a White construct, never stops lamenting the proliferation of fatherless homes within Black urban America, declaring it rather than Systemic White Racism to be the cancer destroying the well-being of so many of his people. Unlike the ideologues at the Smithsonian, he is interested not in the racial origin of Principles and Values but in their efficacy, in the extent to which they actually promote human integrity and well-being.