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The Racial Revolution

“No people can long survive when common sense becomes a crime.”

By Jared Taylor

Everyone knows that during the last 50 years or so there have been fundamental changes in the ways Americans think about race. In fact, what has occurred is nothing short of a revolution, a complete rejection of what earlier generations of
Americans – from Colonial times until perhaps the 1950s – took for granted.
Although contemporary racial thinking is so monolithic it has become hard to imagine how Americans could have thought
otherwise, we can get a sense of how radical the change has been if we try to imagine equally far-reaching changes: What would it be like for America to reverse the sexual revolution completely and return to Victorian propriety in just a few generations? Or for a country suddenly to stop being deeply and universally religious and become atheist? Or to abandon the principle of private property and switch to hippy-style communal living?
The United States has gone through a revolution that is not only just as dramatic, but astonishing in another respect: What was once taken for granted about race has become not just outmoded but immoral. Only revolutions bring such sweeping, back-to-front moral changes.

Yesterday’s Assumptions

The best way to gauge the extent of the revolution is to compare the present to the past. The contrast is staggering.
Practically every historical American figure was by today’s standards an unregenerate white supremacist.
Until just a few years ago virtually all Americans believed that race was a profoundly important aspect of individual and national identity. They believed that people of different races differed in temperament and ability, and that whites built societies that were superior to those built by non-whites. They were repelled by miscegenation–which they called “amalgamation”–because it would dilute the unique characteristics of whites. They took it for granted that America must be peopled with Europeans, and that American civilization could not continue without whites. Many saw the presence of non-whites in the United States as a terrible burden.
Among the founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote at greatest length about race. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites, and though he thought slavery was a great injustice he did not want free blacks in American society: “When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Jefferson was, therefore, one of the first and most influential advocates of “colonization,” or sending blacks back to Africa.
He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially conscious people. In 1786 he wrote, “Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.” In 1801 he looked forward to the day “when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface.” The empire was to be homogeneous.