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The poisonous bit of anti-wisdom that “race is a social construct” is one of the most common expressions of anti-“racism”. The truth is the opposite – society is a racial construct.
In Race and Jews – Part 6 we examined how the jews were for race before they were against it, how their stand on race has shifted over the past century, guided by the underlying principle that good is what’s good for the jews.
In The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity:
Goldstein describes the private communications between jewish leaders in America. In 1909 these leaders feared that race scientists were close to declaring the jews a non-White race, and so they conspired to:
enlist the help of an anthropologist in order to get “a very strongly worded declaration as to the practical identity of the white race,” one that would presumably leave no doubt as to the whiteness of Jews.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Columbia University Processor Franz Boas was the best known anthropologist of Jewish origin in the United States. Boas shared the concern of the Jewish communal elite about racial nativism, but his preference to identify as a German American rather than as a Jew prevented him from engaging too directly in Jewish defense efforts during these years. Instead, Boas worked to discredit the centrality of race in evaluating human capabilities, arguing that differences between groups–including those between blacks and whites–were heavily influenced by environmental factors. Because these ideas contradicted the overwhelming consensus about the importance of racial differences in the United States, however, they offered little to Jewish leaders hoping to win acceptance for their group in white America.
The other jewish scientist that jewish leaders enlisted was Maurice Fishberg. In a book published in 1911:
Fishberg argued that the jews were not a “race, creed or nation” but simply a “social phenomenon”.
The reception from jews was cold. Goldstein tried to explain the apparent conflict like so:
If Jews found that race was an increasing liability and threatened to lump them with nonwhites, they also found themselves unable to break the emotional commitment they had to a racial self-understanding. The result was a constant stuggle with these two powerful impulses for inclusion and distinctiveness, one that led many acculturated Jews to assert their status as a religious group in public while privately clinging to a much broader racial understanding of Jewishness.
In my assessment these “two powerful impulses for inclusion and distinctiveness” are not at odds but are instead exactly what a parasitic organism needs to succeed. The parasite must infiltrate, manipulate and exploit its host, and in doing so it must detect and disarm the host’s defenses while being mindful enough not to attack or destroy its own.
The topic here is an extension of information and arguments laid out in a previous series of installments on race science, including a 5-part series on Race and Genetics, a 5-part series on Race and Anthropology, and finally a half-dozen more parts focused on Franz Boas and his proteges, titled Race and Fraud.
Peter Frost is a contemporary physical anthropologist, a scientist who studies the evolutionary genetic nature of the most visible racial attributes of Whites, namely skin, eyes and hair. He describes his work like so:
My own research has focused on the sex difference in human complexion. In short, women are paler and men ruddier and browner because of differing amounts of hemoglobin and melanin in the skin’s outer layers.
This subject has also led me to the puzzle of European pigmentation, i.e., the highly visible facial and body hues that occur almost wholly in Europeans. How can we explain the wide range of hair colors, the equally wide range of eye colors, and the maximum lightening of the skin? These color traits are a puzzle, all the more so because they do not have a single genetic cause.
For example, see his articles Why do Europeans have so many hair and eye colors? and Why are Europeans so white?
Frost is a favorite among “human biodiversity” enthusiasts, especially the subset of the HBD-o-sphere which has coalesced around unz.com, a web site run by the anti-White jew Ron Unz. The discussion at unz.com is “race realist” in the sense that the false mainstream “race is a social construct” tenet of anti-“racism” does not prevail. Even jews come up for discussion. However, amongst HBD writers and commenters, at unz.com and elsewhere, there is a conspicuous preponderance of jews, part-jews, jew-firsters, and outright jew-worshippers. One of the consequences is that whenever the jews do come up for discussion, so do all the old evasions and excuses.
It is in this context that Frost published a series of articles, both at unz.com and on his personal blog “Evo and Proud”, concerning Franz Boas and the origins of anti-“racism”.
In the first article, The Franz Boas you never knew, Frost argues that early in his career Boas believed race differences were real, significant, and rooted in biology. But:
Something critical seems to have happened in the late 1930s. When Boas prepared the second edition of The Mind of Primitive Man (1938), he removed his earlier racialist statements. The reason was likely geopolitical. As a Jewish American seeing the rise of Nazi Germany, he may have felt that the fight against anti-Semitism would require a united front against all forms of “racism”—a word just starting to enter common use and initially a synonym for Nazism.
Boas died in 1942 and the leadership of his school of anthropology fell to Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. With the end of the war, both of them wished to pursue and even escalate the fight against racism.
As we have already seen above, Boas was hard at work against race science long before the national socialists rose to power. As early as 1909 jewish leaders saw race science as a problem for the jews and were looking for a way to co-opt it, to establish that jews were White, so they wouldn’t be excluded.
They won by attacking on multiple fronts. Today “race is a social construct” prevails, and “there is no such thing as the White race”, at least in the judaized mainstream. The recognition that jews are not White, in body or mind, but are instead the hostile enemies of Whites, is considered just as scandalous among the jewy “race realists” as it is in the judaized mainstream.
Frost’s conclusion contains his thesis:
Boas had sought to strike a new balance between nature and nurture in the study of Man. The war intervened, however, and Boasian anthropology was conscripted to fight not only the Axis but also racism in any form. Today, three-quarters of a century later, we’re still fighting that war.
It is Frost who is seeking to strike a new balance. The current thoroughly judaized, anti-White regime sees Boas as a hero, a champion. Pro-White jew-wise dissidents properly finger Boas as an enemy and villain. Both sides agree that Boas was the earliest, most prominent, and most prolific proponent of what eventually became anti-“racism”.
Frost is trying to argue that Boas is somewhere in the middle, just a guy trying to strike a balance – who only sided with his own race when pushed into it by the evil “nazis”. In fact, Frost takes that argument a step farther by trying to argue that the jews as a group are not responsible for anti-“racism”. In other words, he’s excusing the jews.
I think Frost is White. I don’t know. He thinks more like a White man than a jew. His view comes across as objective rather than emotional, especially regarding the jews. He calls the stuggle between “racism” and anti-“racism” a war – and though he’s actually engaged in it, a soldier in the ongoing battle over the idea of race rooted in science, he doesn’t seem to want to take it seriously as a war and side with his own team, against the aggressors. He sees and understands the racial identification and concerns of the jews, but does not feel his own.
Frost’s argument has been challenged by the pseudononymous blogger n/a (not applicable?) who writes at “race/history/evolution notes”. n/a has a deep understanding of race – genetics, history, and the jews. I think n/a is a he, an American, a logical thinker, probably a scientist of some sort. He identifies very strongly with “WASP”s, to the point of recognizing and disliking that term as an enemy slur, in much the way national socialists dislike “nazi”.
n/a often takes issue with someone, like Frost, who misunderstands or misrepresents history, especially regarding WASPs, America’s founding stock, and especially when it involves the jews.
n/a’s appreciation of European history and the jews was visible when he identified the spirit of neo-reaction (AKA judeo-reaction) in 2009, before it had even had adopted a name, mocking the mindset of it’s part-jew guru Moldbug: “Bring back Monarchy so I can live out my dream of becoming a court Jew”.
n/a took issue with a comment Frost made where he let slip the argument behind his argument.
Reply to Peter Frost’s most recent bizarre attempt at rewriting history (part 1):
Peter Frost has previously claimed:
Anti-racism was neither solely nor primarily a Jewish invention. It initially arose through a radicalization of the abolitionist movement in the early to mid 19th century, its adherents being overwhelmingly of WASP origin. It then fell into decline, largely in response to the failure of black emancipation and the growing influence of Darwinian thinking in the social sciences. It was this half-discredited antiracism that Jewish immigrants, like Franz Boas, encountered in the late 19th century and the early 20th. With the rise of Nazi Germany, antiracism made a resurgence, and Jewish intellectuals certainly contributed to this resurgence for obvious reasons. But it was at all times as much a northeastern WASP cultural trait as a Jewish one.
He’s now back with more of this:
How did [Franz Boas’s] views on race evolve over the next twenty years? This evolution is described by Williams (1996), who sees his views beginning to change at the turn of the century. After getting tenure at Columbia University in 1899, he became immersed in the elite liberal culture of the American northeast and began to express his views on race accordingly. [. . .]
From 1900 to 1930, Boas seemed to become increasingly liberal in his views on race, but this trend was hesitant at best and reflected, at least in part, a change in the audience he was addressing. As a professor at Columbia, he was dealing with a regional WASP culture that still preserved the radical abolitionism of the previous century. A good example was Mary White Ovington, whose Unitarian parents had been involved in the anti-slavery movement and who in 1910 helped found the NAACP. Boas was also dealing with the city’s growing African American community and, through Ovington’s contacts, wrote articles for the NAACP. Finally, he was also dealing with the growing Jewish community, who identified with antiracism partly out of self-interest and partly out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture.
It’s an outrageous distortion of history to suggest Jews supported antiracism “out of a desire to assimilate into northeastern WASP culture”.
Most northeasterners, of any class, were never abolitionists (antislavery does not equal abolitionist), and even most abolitionists did not advocate anything approaching modern anti-racism.
No major constituency in America denied the existence of biological differences between blacks and whites when Boas immigrated, and advocating such views provided no quick path to social advancement (though obviously, at a deeper level, Boas was no doubt motivated by a desire to eliminate “anti-semitism”).
It would have been very strange indeed for a physical anthropologist in 1890s America to outright deny the existence of race or obvious racial differences. What matters is the direction in which Boas differed from his contemporaries. And there’s no question Boas was promoting “anti-racism” from the outset.
The sneer quotes n/a puts around enemy propaganda terms demonstrates his awareness of and disdain for them as such.
Reply to Peter Frost (part 2): Boas was a product of German(-Jewish) culture, not American culture:
The version of history in which Franz Boas was a dispassionate purveyor of real talk who picked up anti-racism from “liberal WASPs” is of course wholly Peter Frost’s own invention. This scenario finds no support outside of Frost’s imagination.
Boas’s agenda remained consistent over his entire career, and it’s not an agenda he picked up in America. Boas was born in Germany, studied anthropology in Germany, brought his fully-formed worldview with him from Germany, and continued to identify with Germany throughout his life.
Nor was it “liberal WASPs” Boas primarily affiliated himself with in America.
n/a excerpts parts of an academic anthropology paper from 1982, titled Types Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimiliation, by Leonard Glick. The synopsis reads:
Boas’s published writings on assimilation were deeply influenced by his German Jewish background. In particular, his unwillingness to recognize Jewish cultural identity as a reality was central to his persistent emphasis on human plasticity and his insistence that people not be “classified” in groups.
Boas’s work is marked with the deepest irony, in that his position on these questions was shaped – far more deeply, it would seem, than he recognized – by his own heritage as a German Jew and by formative years which coincided precisely with an eruption of the most explicit and virulent anti-Semitism in Germany prior to Hitler.
In other words, Boas’ outward anti-“racism” sprang from his inner jewishness.
The paper concerns, from a jewish point of view, an interesting period in German history, after the emancipation of the jews and prior to the rise of national socialism. Those who trace anti-“racism” back to abolitionism, including Frost, usually neglect to consider the connection between the emancipation of jews and negroes, and that the one preceded and undoubtedly influenced the other.
Reply to Peter Frost (part 3): The founding of the NAACP.
Reply to Peter Frost (part 4): Grant vs. Boas:
From Jonathan Spiro’s Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant:
. . .
If, as we delve into these complicated and long-forgotten controversies, the issues sometimes seem arcane if not downright petty, it will be good to bear in mind that, like the Cold War battles over Quemoy and Matsu, a great deal more was at stake then met the eye. The lives of millions of persons depended on the struggle over the validity of scientific racism.
For years, however, Boas had been diligently training a cadre of professional anthropologists who shared his revulsion for the theories of Grant, so that by the end of the 1910s Boas was surrounded and supported by a growing group of scholars well positioned to use their expertise to join in the assault on eugenics. Some of the more important anthropologists who received their Ph.D. from Boas were A. L. Kroeber (who earned his degree in 1901), Robert Lowie (1908), Edward Sapir (1909), Alexander Goldenweiser (1910), Paul Radin (1911), Leslie Spier (1920), Ruth Benedict (1923), Melville Herskovits (1923), Margaret Mead (1929), and Ashley Montagu (1937). With the exception of Kroeber, Benedict, and Mead, all were Jews, many were immigrants, and several were both. (It was a poorly kept secret that Ashley Montagu, the son of a Polish-born Jewish tailor, had been Moses Israel Ehrenberg before metamorphosing into Montagu Francis Ashley-Montagu.)
The old name game.
On a theoretical level the debate between the Grantians and the Boasians pitted the defenders of heredity against the proponents of environment. Intellectually, the split was a disagreement between adherents of polygenesis, who were obsessed with the classification of races, and adherents of monogenesis, who were fairly certain that races were socially constructed myths. And professionally, it was a conflict between an older generation of physical anthropologists (often gentleman amateurs with no academic affiliation or perhaps an association with a museum) and the newer generation of cultural anthropologists (usually trained professionals with full-time positions in academia). But for all that, it was difficult not to notice that at heart it was a confrontation between the ethos of native Protestants and the zeitgeist of immigrant Jews.
The older generation of amateurs were aristocratic WASPs with the money and leisure time to ponder fossils as an avocation, whereas the younger generation of professionals were immigrant Jews who saw higher education as a route to social respectability and jobs in academia as a means of economic survival.
Contra Frost, it was “difficult not to notice” that the conflict was between White racialists and jewish anti-“racists”.
Polygenesis is the theory that the continental races evolved separately and crossed the threshold to become “human”, capable of art, culture, civilization, separately. Monogenesis is the theory which has been popularized as “out of Africa”, summed up in the poisonous aphorism, “we’re all one race, the human race”.
In this next part n/a cites an anthropology book published in 2004 which argues for the biological reality of race. Here we see an argument for the longer-term and decidedly jew-driven nature of the anti-“racist” war.
Reply to Peter Frost (part 5): anthropology as the science of race:
In discussing the history of anthropology, Sarich and Miele (in Race: The Reality of Human Differences) find it useful to:
highlight three critical junctures in which science, politics, and personality interacted: the disputes between Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow, between Franz Boas and Madison Grant, and finally between Carleton Coon and Ashley Montagu.
Of the two cases that played out in America, both involve race-denialist Jewish immigrants opposing “northeastern WASPs” with colonial roots (Coon’s ancestry is 3/4 colonial New England and 1/4 Cornish; all of Grant’s ancestors were in America before 1790, at least half of Grant’s ancestry can be traced back to New England).
. . .
Haeckel and all he came to champion were opposed by his former professor, the distinguished biologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902). The conflict between them was both personal and political.
Virchow, whose name and appearance betrayed a Slavic ancestry
Haeckel was a strong supporter of the German Volk and Reich; Virchow was a radical advocate of social reform who fought at the barricades in the revolution of 1848.
Eugenics is applied race science – helping to guide politics, shaping government policies.
When Galton died in 1911, eugenics was widely accepted not only in Britain and Germany but in the United States as well. Raymond Pearl, professor of biology at Johns Hopkins University (then a supporter of eugenics but later an opponent), noted that by 1912, “eugenics was catching on to an extraordinary degree with radical and conservative alike.” [. . .]
At the start of the twentieth century, most American anthropologists came from wealthy Brahmin families and were educated at Harvard University. They were solidly in the eugenics camp, agreeing with [Francis] Galton on both individual and race differences. And then, as one author put it, Along Came Boas. His name is hardly a household word, but it is no exaggeration to say that Franz Boas (1858-1942) remade American anthropology in his own image. Through the works of his students Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament in Three Societies), Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture), and Ashley Montagu (innumerable titles, especially the countless editions of Man’s Most Dangerous Myth), Boas would have more effect on American intellectual thought than Darwin did. For generations, hardly anyone graduated from an American college or university without having read at least one of these books. They all drew their inspiration from Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man.
. . .
Before Boas, anthropology was the study of race. After Boas, anthropology in America became the study of culture
. . .
Franz Boas was a dark-haired Jewish immigrant from a leftist milieu, educated at German universities steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment. Madison Grant, an archetypal Nordic, was a lawyer turned amateur biologist and a pillar of America’s WASP establishment. Grant claimed that his fellow American Nordics were committing racial suicide, allowing themselves to be “elbowed out” of their own land by ruthless, self-interested Jewish immigrants, who were behind the campaign to discredit racial research.
. . .
Coon vs. Montagu:
The Boasians were outsiders. Papa Franz and many of his students were Jews, though “the preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of anthropologists in subsequent generations has been downplayed in standard histories of the discipline.” Some, like Boas himself, were immigrants to boot. Montagu was born Israel Ehrenberg in the working-class East End district of London, England. He was so leery of anti-Semitism (“If you’re brought up as a Jew, you know that all non-Jews are anti-Semitic . . . It’s a good working hypothesis”) that he reinvented himself as Montague Francis Ashley-Montagu from London’s well-to-do West End financial district, complete with a posh public school accent. When he came to the United States, Montagu played the role of the British headmaster, lecturing American audiences before a receptive media on the foolishness of their prejudices. Later he dropped the hyphen and became simply Ashley Montagu.
Mead and Benedict could point to WASP pedigrees as pure as Madison Grant’s, but Mead was bisexual and Benedict a lesbian. At that time, those sexual orientations were far more stigmatized than they are today. Their sexual preferences are relevant, be cause developing a critique of traditional American values was as much a part of the Boasian program in anthropology as was their attack on eugenics and nativism. [. . .]
Whatever their individual origin, the Boasians felt deeply estranged from mainstream American society and the male WASP elites they were displacing in anthropology.
. . .
According to Degler, “Boas almost single-handedly developed in America the concept of culture, which, like a powerful solvent, would in time expunge race from the literature of social science.” In fact, Boas achieved his goal only with help, including a great deal from a most unwelcome source— Hitler and the Holocaust. After World War II, “race” and “eugenics” became very dirty words.
. . .
In 1949 the United Nations Educational, Social, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was called upon to adopt “a program of disseminating scientific facts designed to remove what is generally known as racial prejudice.” For the drafter of the first UNESCO statement, Ashley Montagu, this was an opportunity to deny the reality of race.
. . .
ASHLEY MONTAGU VERSUS CARLETON COON
The preliminary match in anthropology’s fight over race was Virchow versus Haeckel. Then there was Boas versus Madison Grant. The final match in anthropology’s dispute went the distance.
. . .
[Carleton Stevens] Coon believed that race was a central issue and his job as an anthropologist was to study race; Montagu felt his was to banish race to the periphery and replace it with the concept of “ethnic group.” He began his effort to have the word “race” replaced by “ethnic group” in his 1942 book, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. When he was selected to draft the initial (1950) UNESCO Statement on Race, Montagu was given a platform from which to present his view to a much larger, non-academic audience.
Carleton Coon‘s magnum opus was the physical anthropology textbook, The Origin of Races (1962). He was a proponent of polygenesis.
There is one other point about Frost’s narrative which he continues to repeat and which n/a does not address. In his third post on the subject, Age of reason, Frost reasserts:
The interwar years gave antiracism a new lease on life, thus reversing a long decline that had begun in the late 19th century. This reversal was driven largely by two events: the acrimonious debate over U.S. immigration in the mid-1920s and Hitler’s rise to power in the early 1930s. Many people, especially academics, were convinced of the need for an uncompromising war on “racism”—a word just entering use as a synonym for Nazism.
Frost’s insistence that “racism” was a synonym for “nazism” would appear to undermine his own argument that anti-“racism” was not primarily a jewish invention. He has at the same time implied that Boas and jews generally were, but of course, opposed to “nazism”, it’s synonym.
The fact that “nazism” remains a synonym for “racism” and both are slurs to this day, seven decades after the “nazis” were destroyed, is because the jews won that war and now more or less openly dominate Western culture and promote their narrative, their morality, via education and mass media.
The understanding is beginning to spread that anti-“racism” is really just anti-Whitism. The fact that the terms “racism” and “anti-semitism” so often appear together in political rhetoric is evidence that it is jews who are defining and driving the regime’s anti-White/pro-jew political agenda. The fact that the word “combat” is often attached to these terms – as in “combating racism and anti-semitism” – is evidence that it is a war, a one-sided war on Whites in which jews openly organize conferences, call for laws, and direct governments to dedicate funds for their benefit.
What has happened in the past century is quite different from the way Frost and other jew-excusers see it. As I put it in Race and Jews – Part 7:
During the 19th century and into the 20th Whites were just beginning to appreciate the depth and breadth of their roots, their biological relationship with each other, but also to recognize their common parasite. They were beginning to appreciate just how biologically and psychologically distinct and implacably alien and hostile the jews are and have always been. How the jews have in fact insisted upon being and remaining this way.
This growing understanding of their roots, this racial consciousness, was not fabricated out of nothing, but was based on evidence gathered from study and research – archeology, linguistics, biology. It was spreading not only among the elite, the intelligensia, but was beginning to trickle out to the masses too.
In the first half of the 20th century Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard’s Rising Tide of Color were popular books. White understanding of race was increasing.
In 1933 the national socialists took power in Germany, and for the first time a White European government officially and definitively answered the question, “who is us”, and pursued policies guided by the principle, “what’s best for us”, racially. Expressing a collective group-consciousness that for the first time approximated (and took into account the competitive and adversarial nature of) the kind of collective awareness of identity and interests that the jews had been practicing for millenia among Europeans.
Even before this, before this racial consciousness had fully coallesced into a national socialist government, those jews most aware of their collective interests recognized this burgeoning understanding among their host as a threat to the jews. They saw that jews embracing race was not going to be good for the jews in the long run.
By the time national socialism rose to power in Germany the jews had come to the consensus that race was definitely bad for the jews, and they were throwing all their efforts into an idea, a movement that would eventually be called “anti-racism”.
“Anti-racism” is a jewish contruct, though they have tried to generalize it and otherwise obscure this. As many Whites are beginning to realize, “anti-racism” is really just anti-Whitism. It is a movement, a perverse way of thinking about race that doesn’t abolish the idea of race, but simply inverts White consciousness – making White bad and non-White good. It was inspired and continues to be led and driven by jews who think that this is what’s best for the jews.
