What Should White Americans Do?

Credit Image: © Mary Evans via ZUMA Press

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Throughout most of American history, the survival of whites was assured and taken for granted. The United States was founded by whites and our leaders believed it should remain white. The 1790 Naturalization Act, passed by the First Congress and signed into law by President George Washington, explicitly limited citizenship to whites.

Whites resented the non-whites who were already here. Indian attacks were a deadly reminder of the reality of racial conflict. These attacks lasted until the late 1800s and ended only after tribes were moved onto reservations. Indians did not become citizens of the US until 1924.

Slavery fractured the country in 1861. After Reconstruction, whites regrouped and continued building the United States. It seemed as if we had learned our lessons about the reality of race. Segregation in the South and freedom of association in the rest of the US protected whites from black crime and violence. Immigration actually boosted the percentage of whites as immigrants poured in from Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia and then Eastern and Southern Europe.

One hundred years ago, whites seemed to be secure. The Immigration Act of 1924 locked in the white and even Nordic character of the United States, but this lasted only 40 years. By the mid-1960s, whites had lost all the major civil rights cases and the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act opened up the country to Third World immigration. In the words of Jeremy Carl, white Americans are now an “Unprotected Class.” This means whites are in principle protected against racial discrimination by law, but in practice are despised and discriminated against by those who control every US institution.

American Renaissance has been documenting the decline of whites since November 1990. After 34 years of white advocacy, Jared Taylor has declared that America cannot be a home for white people:

All my life, I have watched the United States degenerate. It’s no longer my country and it can’t be saved. I do not believe that it can ever again become a home for white people.

Mr. Taylor offered a way forward:

Let’s make it official. Let us part, amicably, and go our own way.

There’s no other solution. Whether I live to see it or not, there will be an ingathering of our people on this continent, and we will finally succeed in building a new home in North America for Europeans and their civilization.

White people deserve to live in a country that does not tell them they are dirt.

This spurred a response from Scott Greer, who argued that America is not over and that we can still work within the system to rebuild an America that respects whites:

There are still glimmers of hope. Some schools in Virginia are restoring their old names to honor Confederate heroes. Affirmative action is being chipped away at in court. Donald Trump looks poised to win another term and can do great things on immigration, racial quotas, and anti-white indoctrination in the government and in schools. The Overton Window has shifted considerably in just a decade. These things won’t take back America overnight, but they do offer signs of resistance. They demonstrate that the historic American people still haven’t given up.

What should whites do? The way ahead is not clear, but some of the greatest thinkers of the past have wrestled with this problem. Looking at their thoughts may help whites as we prepare for an uncertain future, perhaps as scorned minorities in the nation we built.

American Colonization Society

The American Colonization Society (ACS) was established in 1816 with the goal of removing blacks from the United States. Bushrod Washington, a Supreme Court Justice and nephew of George Washington, served as its first president, and Henry Clay of Kentucky was its main spokesman. Officers of the group included James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, James Monroe, Stephen Douglas, John Randolph, William Seward, Francis Scott Key, General Winfield Scott, John Marshall, and Roger Taney. While Thomas Jefferson was not a member, he also supported repatriation.

Clay was blunt. Colonization would “rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not dangerous portion of its population.” He wanted to reduce blacks (free and slave) to 5 percent of the population through colonization and white immigration.

The ACS was neutral on slavery, but worked against extending it to new states and territories. Repatriation was voluntary, though it strongly encouraged blacks to leave. An American Renaissance article from August 1998 notes:

For three years, the society lobbied Congress for financial support. In 1817, Bushrod Washington first asked Congress for legislation to support creation of an African colony. When that request failed, the ACS sent a two-man expedition to Africa to gather and present more solidly researched data on the proposal. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, the ACS purchased land from local tribes, and in 1820 the society finally got the support it was seeking. Congress passed and President James Monroe approved a grant for $100,000 to set up a colony for free blacks. The colony was named Liberia meaning “free land,” and the first settlement was named Monrovia in appreciation of the support of President Monroe. It is the capital of Liberia to this day.

It is worth noting that in the American republic before the days of Lincoln, federal officials took the Constitutional limits placed on their authority very seriously and thus played a very limited role in running the country. It is therefore of great significance that Congress saw fit to help remove blacks from the United States. It not only reflected a widespread national desire but was an important step in federal involvement in matters traditionally left up to the states.

By the start of the Civil War, the ACS had repatriated 11,000 blacks and had helped found Liberia. It did this despite scant government funding and opposition from both slave owners and some abolitionists. It is worth noting that relatively few blacks accepted the offer of colonization and remained instead in the “white supremacist” United States. Reparations advocates, please take note.

Lincoln referred to blacks as “a troublesome presence” and had appointed a minister to investigate sites in Central and South America for blacks to be resettled after the war. Whites lost another chance to remove blacks from society after he was assassinated. The ACS didn’t officially disband until 1912 but its influence waned greatly after the Civil War.

Lothrop Stoddard

In his classic work, The Rising Tide of Color, Lothrop Stoddard noted that the possible end of white global dominance, “never entered the head of one white man in a thousand,” at the time he was writing his book in 1920. But the first World War had just cost over 40,000,000 white lives. It also showed non-whites that whites were vulnerable through internal conflict.

Though the war was an example of “racial suicide,” Stoddard offered a plan to restore white unity and face the rising tide of color. He recognized that there were great differences among non-whites and that some — particularly Asians — were capable of advanced civilizations that could challenge white hegemony.

He divided the world into “dikes.” Outer dikes were European-colonized areas such as Egypt and India that were controlled by whites but where whites had not settled in large numbers. Inner dikes were the heart of the white world, marked off by flesh and blood. These included the United States, Canada, Australia, and Europe, which was the center of the white world. He considered South Africa and Algeria to be “enclaves.”

Stoddard believed many of the outer dikes should be given over to the natives as “men worthy of independence will sooner or later get it,” but the inner dikes should be guarded at all costs. Non-whites coveted and envied white civilization and would look for places where they could unload excess population. Whites in the inner dikes must have a strong racial consciousness and not let in any non-whites:

For white civilization is today conterminous with the white race . . . . It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe, and America. Not today, not tomorrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed.

Stoddard was pessimistic about the determination of whites to stop the rising tide of color, but his ideas succeeded. His books were respectably reviewed and he earned praise from President Harding. He and fellow writer Madison Grant lobbied for and helped pass the Johnson Act of 1924, which effectively halted non-white immigration. He was also active in the burgeoning eugenics movement, helping to organize the Second Eugenics Congress of 1921 in New York.

Stoddard died in 1950, but the aftermath of World War II — another internecine slaughter of whites — marked the end of his advocacy, as eugenics and white preservation became associated with Adolph Hitler.

Wilmot Robertson

The Dispossessed Majority (TDM) was published in 1972, and offers perhaps the best account of how whites lost control of the United States. Author Wilmot Robertson believed we had already been dispossessed by a new elite more than 50 years earlier, and his classic work chronicles the ways in which whites were pilloried, harassed, and targeted across all institutions. Things have gotten only worse since then.

Though not often discussed, Robertson proposed a solution. He called for a “Northern European ingathering” which would be “not merely a political and economic clustering cemented by military alliances but an ingathering of race consciousness, the most lasting and tenacious of all social binding forces.” This would be hard because not even the Roman or British empires accomplished this.

By the early 1990s, Robertson had given up on this idea and offered the solution for which he is better known: a white ethnostate, which he outlined in The Ethnostate (1992). By then, he was arguing that the U.S. was too multiracial to survive as a nation for whites. Robertson advocated dividing the country into homogeneous, independent regions, including one for whites. He was writing at a time when the Soviet Union was breaking up into ethnostates.

In their own ethnostate, whites could return to the political, economic, educational, moral, and artistic standards we have lost. A review of the book that appeared in the May 1993 issue of American Renaissance notes:

Many of the advantages of the ethnostate are nothing more than the absence of the terrible conflicts that weaken the United States. A mono-racial society would have no need for the tremendous apparatus of race relations officials who make up one of our few remaining growth industries. It would not have to cope with the frustrations that result when differently endowed groups face the daily consequences of those differences. Its citizens would not have conflicting foreign loyalties that hamstring its foreign policy. It would have an authentic history rather than the formless mush or ethnic cheerleading that now passes for American history. It could honestly discuss eugenics without raising racial animosity. It would not have a justice system riven by racial loyalties or standards of physical beauty that inevitably value one race over another.

Robertson stressed that an ethnostate was a project for the future because whites worldwide would eventually run out of places where they could escape diversity: “[T]he ideas being floated here are not concerned with the present but with the future, not with conditions as they exist today or tomorrow, but with those that will exist the day after tomorrow, when Americans — and perhaps Europeans — will have reached the point where they will have to choose between ethnostates or no states at all.”

The United States may have reached that point.

Samuel Francis

Sam Francis was a frequent contributor to American Renaissance. He has now reached a level of popularity that he did not enjoy in his lifetime. Though it is nearly 20 years since his death, it is common to hear his name mentioned in podcasts and articles in the Dissident Right and even among mainstream journalists. Scott Greer referred to Francis in his reply to Jared Taylor and noted that Francis was against partition.

Francis’s solution was to work within the system and eventually to control it. His aim was to galvanize “Middle American Radicals (MARS)” as a force in American politics. He defined MARS voters in his 1997 book Revolution from the Middle, and they sound a lot like Donald Trump’s MAGA voters:

Middle American Radicals are essentially middle-income, white, often ethnic voters who see themselves as an exploited and dispossessed group, excluded from meaningful political participation, threatened by the tax and trade policies of the government, victimized by its tolerance of crime, immigration, and social deviance, and ignored or ridiculed by the major cultural institutions of the media and education.

Unlike conservatives, MARS represented a real constituency that could win political victories. Francis was a friend and advisor to Pat Buchanan, and he explained how Mr. Buchanan was able to represent MARS in his now famous Chronicles article, “From Household to Nation.”

But he also criticized Mr. Buchanan for buckling under charges of racism when one of his supporters was linked to David Duke:

[T]he blunt truth is that there can be no serious national campaign of the populist right without former Duke supporters, militia members, and other inhabitants of the margins of national politics, and it is not possible to organize a real campaign without them. Those who lead and run a populist campaign of the right have to face that truth and to figure out how to deal with it when confronted with their “links” to such “extremists.” They can do what the Buchanan campaign did, which was to purge the marginal elements and cuddle up in denial, or they can go on the offensive, exposing how the Ruling Class and its pet media use charges of “racism” and “extremism” to delegitimize and suppress any challenge to their power from the right. If they do the former, they will merely reconfirm the legitimacy of the imposed political boundaries; if they do the latter, they will retain their own support and use the occasion for a further challenge to the powers they claim to be opposing.

Francis was saying that no politician was ready fully to implement his MARS strategy because none would stand up clearly for whites. Francis spent the last decade of his life working with the Council of Conservative Citizens (CofCC) to generate MARS activism. He was editor of the group’s newspaper and a frequent speaker at CofCC conferences.

If a MARS strategy were to work, it would have to speak clearly for whites. This is a point often misunderstood by Francis’s new generation of admirers. He explained this in his 1994 American Renaissance speech, which got him fired as a columnist at The Washington Times.

The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people. If the people or race who created and sustained the civilization of the West should die, then the civilization also will die. A merely cultural consciousness, then, that emphasizes only social and cultural factors as the roots of our civilization is not enough, because a merely cultural consciousness will not by itself conserve the race and people that were necessary for the creation of the culture and who remain necessary for its survival. We need not only to understand the role of race in creating our civilization but also to incorporate that understanding in our defense of our civilization. Until we do so, we can expect only to keep on losing the war we are in.

Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson is the editor of Counter-Currents, an online publication that has helped popularize little-known or forgotten anti-liberal thinkers. He, too, outlined a solution for whites facing dispossession in his 2019 book, The White Nationalist Manifesto. First, Dr. Johnson says whites must practice identity politics, meaning “that whites think of ourselves as members of an ethnic group, with collective interests, and defend those interests against conflicting groups in the political realm.”

Whites must play identity politics because the current system is anti-white. Whites are not only declining as a percentage of the population in the US and nearly every other white nation; our fertility rates are below replacement. Dr. Johnson thinks anti-white practices cause declining life expectancy, drug use, overdoses, loneliness, suicides, childlessness, and lives marked by hedonism. Combined with mass immigration of non-whites, this puts us on the road to extinction and possibly genocide. He writes:

Authoritative voices declare that White demographic decline is inevitable and hail it as a triumph of racial justice. Multiculturalists try to paint a rosy picture of a rainbow-tinted future in which whites are a minority. But Whites are increasingly skeptical. Leftists and non-whites are already partying like its 2042 [the year whites are officially predicted to become a minority in the US] openly gloating about White decline and even extinction, eager to dance on the grave of White America. It is increasingly obvious that these people really hate us.

Whites deserve a nation where they are valued and protected. This will not happen in the current US, where whites have no future. We must restore or create a white homeland. Dr. Johnson advocates what is now known as remigration, or the return of most non-whites to their original homelands. Millions of non-whites come to live in white nations each year. Why can’t they just go home? These transfers need not be violent and can take place over years or decades. Elderly non-whites beyond child-bearing age can stay, and land can be set aside for natives in the US and Australia and, in the United States, for black descendants of slaves.

Dr. Johnson continues:

For two or more generations now, Whites have been subjected to mass ethnic cleansing in our homelands. Millions of Whites have changed homes, schools and jobs millions of times because of the end of racially segregated neighborhoods, schools and businesses and the influx of millions of non-White immigrants who have destroyed White neighborhoods, schools, and jobs, forcing White families to move elsewhere in search of “better” (i.e., whiter) places to live and work. Despite the enormous human and financial costs of this ethnic cleansing, Whites have been “living with it” quite well.

Non-whites who are deported will be going back to racial homelands, which most identify with anyway. While The White Nationalist Manifesto doesn’t make this point, many of these immigrants come from places in Asia and Africa that kicked out whites during anti-colonial movements and wars.

Dr. Johnson writes that metapolitics can build the non-political preconditions for political change. This means educating whites about the dangers they face in multiracial societies and organizing real world white advocacy, not just online fulminating. He cites the Frankfurt School, which achieved cultural hegemony without firing a shot.

Recent political events in Europe and the rise of the Dissident Right in much of the West show that white identity politics are on the move. Dr. Johnson sees this as inevitable and ends The White Nationalist Manifesto on a positive note:

Anti-White ethnic cleansing can only be maintained by lies and moral blackmail — and when these fail, by intimidation and outright violence. One can flout reality for a long time, as long as you can make sure other people pay the price. But eventually, multicultural regimes lose their strength through division and chaos and their legitimacy through lies and broken promises. . . . White Nationalism will in essence feed off the system’s decline.

Jeremy Carl

The latest strategy for how whites can survive in a multiracial and anti-white America is being offered by writers who are not white nationalists. A series of books by mainstream authors over the last year or so have taken on anti-whiteness. Perhaps the best of these is The Unprotected Class by Jeremy Carl. The author lays out a depressingly familiar litany of whites targeted because of race by every institution in America. Mr. Carl notes that the Great Replacement is real. He consistently weaves the demographic decline of whites (just 57% of the US population in the 2020 Census) into his analysis of the anti-whiteness of the nation they bult.

The concluding chapter, “Finding Our Way Home,” is a plan to attack anti-whiteness. Mr. Carl hopes Hispanics will come to see themselves as white and that we can forge an alliance with Asians on crime and affirmative action. He also says blacks and white progressives must pay for their anti-white animus through boycotts, civil disobedience, and lawsuits. Civil rights laws must protect whites. DEI bureaucracies and affirmative action must end. Mr. Carl also proposes a “net-zero” immigration policy that ends the mass immigration that is replacing us.

Mr. Carl thinks this will work. He cites the activism and increasing success of people such as Chris Rufo and organizations such as America First Legal. He also believes non-whites can be allies:

Smart people of all backgrounds understand that the America built largely by Europeans and their descendants over several hundred years is the golden goose, and that to kill the golden goose in the name of obtaining a few additional short term eggs is unwise strategy. A civil conflict of some sort caused by a fundamental refusal to stop discriminating against white Americans serves nobody’s interests.

In a review of The Unprotected Class, Charles Haywood offers another consequence of unchecked anti-whiteness:

[T]he first man to explicitly defend whites in a concrete situation will gain immense and immediate power. I have been saying for years that eventually a political leader will arise who promises to represent white interests. There is no logical reason this has not happened already; it is only social and governmental pressure that has prevented it. In any other society in history, such a man would have arisen decades ago. A good deal of support for Donald Trump is in fact a proxy for this; voters understand that Trump supports white people. He supports black people and other people, too, just as much, but does not prioritize them over whites; this alone makes him unique among all Republican presidential candidates. After Trump, though, the floodgates of opportunity, if we choose to call it that, will open, and someone will step through them. He may be good, he may be bad, but he will be.

The solutions in this article represent some of the most carefully thought out ideas for how white Americans can respond to an increasingly multiracial and anti-white country. Jared Taylor says the country of our Founders is no longer ours. What whites do next will depend on the revival of white consciousness that existed throughout most of American history.

Today’s pervasive anti-whiteness may spur such a revival. Once enough whites take their own side, anything is possible: ethnostate, partition, free association — perhaps even taking the whole country back. Anything is better than slow decline and ultimate extinction.

Peter Bradley writes from northern Virginia.