AGGRIEVED MAJORITY'S USE OF MINORITY TACTICS TROUBLING

Saturday, November 8, 2003

Carol Swain, a professor of law and political science at Vanderbilt University, is deeply concerned that the political strategies favored by minority groups to effect their advancement are spreading to white Americans who are becoming resentful of minority advancement at their expense.

Identity politics, ethnic solidarity, group entitlements and collective guilt -- they are counterproductive for minorities, she believes, but positively dangerous if adopted by the majority. That's the thesis she explores in her book, The New White Nationalism in America, published this year.

I think I have to stop here to tell you -- though I wish it weren't necessary -- that Swain is black, that she was raised in unrelieved poverty in the rural south, and that it took her many years to reshape her life from school dropout, then earner of a GED, a community college degree, a bachelor's degree and a doctorate, tenure at Princeton, and then a law degree at Yale. ``I have seen life in America from the bottom, from the middle and from the top,'' she writes, ``and I think I have learned something about just who is in need of special help and what sort of programs are likely to work.''

Why do you need to know that about her? Not because the academic trinity of ``race, class and gender'' determines what a person believes. Indeed, as an opponent of racial preferences Swain breaks with a large number of people who claim to speak for the race that she and they share. It's because what you, the reader, know about her influences how you respond to what she says. If she says, as she does, that the way elite colleges administer their affirmative action policies is damaging to many minority students' confidence, you can disagree with her. But you can't plausibly believe, as you might if the writer were an affluent white male, that her expressed views are only a false front for her real motive, which is to maintain privileges for affluent white males.

Swain uses the term ``white nationalists'' for people who want ``to protect what they believe is their God-given natural right to their distinct cultural, political and genetic identity as white Europeans.'' That right is threatened, they feel, by multiculturalism, affirmative action, immigration, intermarriage and other groups' identity politics. So they'll do identity politics too.

Some of these people are just old-fashioned white supremacists with a makeover. The former Klansman David Duke, she observes, now describes himself as a white nationalist. But others are more separatist than supremacist, and concerned that an America that no longer has a white majority (which eventually it won't, if current immigration patterns continue for many years) will come to resemble the unfortunate countries the immigrants fled.

Swain quotes Jared Taylor, founder and editor of American Renaissance magazine, who said European civilization is being destroyed in America. ``If we do nothing,'' Taylor wrote, ``the nation we leave our grandchildren will be a grim Third World failure, in which whites will be the minority'' and Western civilization ``will be a faint echo.''

Look, I'm not worrying about that possibility. Western civilization has proved to be quite adept at incorporating people who joined it from somewhere else, or who were originally thought to be outside it, including my German, Irish and Italian ancestors not all that long ago and my rather recently acquired Chinese stepfamily. But I can understand why some people might worry, without necessarily being racists in any socially relevant way. And furthermore, I can readily see how people might be sold on this thesis, especially if their own lives are marginal and their children's prospects limited.

``The new white nationalists,'' Swain writes, ``are skillfully using the rhetoric of civil rights, national self-determination, and ethnic identity politics as they make their case among the many aggrieved whites in America for a white, European-centered nation.''

If every other group has a hyphenated-American club or association and authorities -- at high schools or colleges, say -- think that's just fine, on what principled grounds do they inveigh against Caucasian-American clubs? I wouldn't join one -- I don't join women's associations either -- and I'm not sure I even know anybody who would, because most of the people I know aren't aggrieved, except maybe by Republicans.

But once people are recruited into the white nationalist movement, they get a steady stream of information, often over the Internet, that pushes them toward ever more radical views. And the more people are recruited, the more mainstream those views sound.

Swain worries about that. So do I.