Kevin MacDonald-Psychology & White Ethnocentrism

PSYCHOLOGY AND WHITE ETHNOCENTRISM

KEVIN MACDONALD

While growing up I would often read accounts of European heroes

who had battled for their people and for great causes. William

Wallace, Robert Bruce and the Scots against the English, Sir Francis

Drake leading the battle against the Spanish Armada, Charles Martel and

the Franks defending Europe against the Muslims, King Leonidas and the

Spartans at Thermopylae, and many others. Those days seem over now. Our

political leaders are actually managing the displacement of their own people,

and very few white people have the courage to do anything other than vote

them back into offi ce. Or they vote for the other party, which simply changes

the faces of the managers.

How can it have come to this? One might think that evolution would have

equipped us with powerful mechanisms of ethnocentrism and group identity

that would ensure that such a thing could never happen. We would naturally

stand up for our people and fi ght the good fi ght, even at great cost. We would

willingly die for our people—like William Wallace, whose death is described

as follows:

On 23 August 1305, following the trial, Wallace was taken from the hall,

stripped naked and dragged through the city at the heels of a horse to

Smithfi eld Market. He was drawn and quartered—strangled by hanging

but released near death, emasculated, eviscerated and his bowels burnt

before him, beheaded, then divided into four parts (the four horrors) at

the Elms in Smithfi eld. His preserved head was placed on a pike atop

London Bridge. It was later joined by the heads of his brother, John,

and Simon Fraser. His limbs were displayed, separately, in Newcastle,

Berwick, Stirling and Aberdeen.1

But there are no William Wallaces or mass movements of racial defense

for Europeans, and the question is why this is so. The even more important

question is how we can use our understanding of psychology to chart a path

to legitimizing and building a movement of racial defense.

This paper begins by describing the two worlds of psychology: the world

of automatic, unconscious mechanisms that form our ancient evolutionary

heritage, and the world of more recently evolved conscious processing that makes

us distinctively human. Ethnocentric tendencies are automatic, unconscious

mechanisms, but despite the power of these ancient mechanisms, they can be

suppressed or diverted from their original purpose by cultural programming

8 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

that takes advantage of some recently evolved cognitive machinery: the

conscious processing mechanisms of the human prefrontal cortex.

Nevertheless, ethnocentric tendencies continue to infl uence the behavior

of white people. Despite the current cultural programming, white people

are gradually coalescing into what I term “implicit white communities” in

multicultural America—that is, communities that refl ect their ethnocentrism

but that “cannot tell their name”—they cannot explicitly state that they are an

expression of white ethnocentrism. These implicit white communities are insuf-

fi cient for ethnic defense, however, and I conclude that progress in defending

the ethnic interests of whites will happen only by legitimizing explicit assertions

of ethnic identity and interests. A variety of obstacles to ethnic defense is

discussed, with particular attention paid to understanding the psychological

mechanisms underlying white guilt.

THE TWO WORLDS OF PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology has reached a consensus that the human mind has two kinds of

processing, implicit and explicit (see Table 1). Implicit and explicit mechanisms

may be contrasted on a number of dimensions.

Implicit Processing

Implicit processing is unconscious, automatic, effortless, relatively fast, and

involves parallel processing of large amounts of information.2 Most of the activities

going in our brains in our day-to-day life involve implicit processing.

Say you are negotiating with someone about buying a car. Without any

conscious effort on your part, your brain is processing an enormous amount

of data. It is processing the colors and shapes of the furniture and walls in the

room, and it is processing data from your own body to allow you to stand

upright without consciously thinking about it. More interesting, your brain

is also processing the facial expressions and posture of the person you are

negotiating with, and it is processing the age and sex of this person. If you are

a heterosexual man talking to a woman, your brain is assessing the woman’s

facial attractiveness and her body language as indicators of sexual availability

for a long-term or a short-term relationship, even though the conversation is

ostensibly about buying a car. And if you are a woman talking to a man, your

brain is making calculations that differ from those of a man due to the very

different interests that men and women have in sexual relationships, differences

that stem from our ancient evolutionary heritage.

Your brain is also assessing how similar this salesperson is to yourself, and,

without any conscious awareness on your part, it is making you trust the person

more if that person is more like yourself. Furthermore, if the person is from

a different race or ethnic group, it is fl agging that fact and it is coloring your

interactions with the person by stereotypes—whether negative or positive—that

your unconscious mind associates with that race or ethnic group.

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 9

You may not be paying conscious attention to these features, but if something

seems out of place, your conscious mind may well take notice. Perhaps the other

person’s facial expression seems shifty, or he blinks too much when he tells

you that the car was driven by a little old lady and has only 10,000 miles on it.

If so, you may simply feel a vague unconscious unease, or you may actually

notice that there is a major confl ict between the person’s facial expression and

what he or she is telling you. In either case, your brain is telling you that you

should back away from the deal.

What’s going on here is that there is a large number of what psychologist

Christof Koch calls “zombie mechanisms” whirring away deep in the recesses

of your mind. They act like zombies because we are completely unconscious

of their workings, much like a modern building in which we may be aware

that the temperature is a comfortable 72°F but are completely unaware of the

complexities of the climate control system that is humming away in the bowels

of the building. When we look around the room, our brain is making millions of

calculations about the appearance of objects that allow us to perceive the world.

We are not aware of these calculations, but we are aware of the product—our

visual world. In fact, we are not even consciously aware of most of our visual

world, only what we are paying attention to.

Most of these zombie mechanisms are the result of our evolutionary past.

Over thousands and millions of years, our ancestors had to solve the problems

of living. These problems were recurrent—they happened over and over again.

The result was that natural selection equipped people with a large number of

mental mechanisms for coping with these problems—mechanisms for recognizing

faces and facial expressions, cooperating with others, interpreting threats,

learning language, fi nding mates, and much else. Without this vast array of

evolved modules, we could never do so many of the things we do effortlessly

and routinely—literally without thinking about it.

But natural selection for modules specialized to solve particular problems

is not the only route to implicit processing. Another route is when we learn

something so well that we don’t have to think about it anymore. When children

are learning their multiplication tables, it takes great conscious effort to

remember that 3 x 4 = 12. But after a while, the answer to this problem comes

automatically, without any conscious effort.

It’s the same with driving a car or playing tennis. When one is learning

to drive as a teenager, it takes a great deal of conscious effort to monitor

the road, watch for crosswalks, pay attention to the dashboard dials, and

attempt to coordinate gas pedal and clutch in shifting gears. But after some

practice, these activities are performed easily and without much conscious

effort. The result is that experienced drivers have no diffi culty listening to

music or talking with a friend on the cell phone. (Of course, running on

autopilot does have its dangers. Talking on a cell phone while driving is

illegal in some states.)

10 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

Learning multiplication tables, driving a car, and playing tennis are not

innate activities. They are learned, but they become overlearned to the point

that we don’t have to pay much attention to the task when we are performing

it. This frees up our limited conscious processing space to do other—often

more important—things. As a general rule, the mind makes common mental

activities unconscious and automatic so that the limited resources available to

the conscious mind can be allocated to tasks requiring attention and cognitive

resources.3 The complicated motor routines involved in driving a car or playing

tennis gradually become implicit. In fact, it is part of the folk psychology of

tennis that a good way to make players play worse is to have them think about

what they are doing. Tennis coaches talk about “muscle memory”—the unconscious,

automatic mental processing that allows experienced tennis players to

react quickly to situations without having to think about them.

The automaticity resulting from overlearning is important because some

of people’s unconscious negative racial stereotypes may result from repeated

exposure to information on different groups. For example, repeatedly encountering

newspaper articles on school failure and dropout by African-American and

Latino children would be expected to result in an automatic stereotype of the

educational abilities of these children. This stereotype would then be automatically

activated when encountering these children or when contemplating sending

one’s children to a particular school with high percentages of these children.

These negative stereotypes may then become implicit and unconscious.

Table 1: Characteristics of Implicit and Explicit Cognitive Systems

IMPLICIT SYSTEM EXPLICIT SYSTEM

Unconscious Conscious

Automatic Controllable

Fast Relatively Slow

Evolved Early Evolved Late

Parallel Processing Sequential Processing

High Capacity Limited by Attentional and

Working Memory Resources

Effortless Effortful

Acquisition by Biology Acquisition by Culture

or Overlearning and Formal Tuition

It’s important to note that these implicit negative stereotypes may coexist

with explicit, conscious beliefs that there are no racial or ethnic differences in

academic achievement. As described below, research has shown that there are

often confl icts between implicit, unconscious attitudes held by whites on racial

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 11

issues and consciously asserted explicit attitudes. Explicitly asserted attitudes

are much more likely to be “politically correct”: That is, they are much more

likely to conform to the more or less offi cial racial ideology sanctioned by the

media and the academic and political establishment.

Explicit Processing

The opposite of implicit processing is explicit processing. Explicit processing

is conscious, controllable, and takes effort. A good example is solving a

problem that we haven’t encountered before—that is, one that can’t be solved

automatically like the multiplication tables we learned in the third grade. Say,

for example, we are taking an IQ test like the Raven’s Progressive Matrices

and we encounter the following problem:

Raven’s Progressive Matrices

The task is to fi nd which of the eight possible answers fi lls out the pattern

in a logical way. To solve the problem, one has to notice that as you go from

the top row to the bottom row, more horizontal lines being added. So the

missing piece must be fi lled with horizontal lines too—which means either

piece 2 or piece 8. You also need to notice that the diamond shape is growing

from left to right—from nothing in the left column, to the half-diamond in the

middle column, to the full diamond in the right column. Since we already

know the right piece must be fi lled with horizontal lines like piece 2 or piece

8, and the full diamond doesn’t appear in piece 8, we know that piece 2 is the

right choice.

12 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

Solving a problem like this requires that one keep a goal in mind, and it

requires that one systematically pay attention to how the patterns change in

two dimensions. This takes effort. The solution of the problem also involves

processing information in a sequence. Rather than being able to process a

vast amount of information in parallel as we do with implicit processing, we

approach a problem like this in a sequence, one step at a time. The sequential

processing of our conscious mind is always most obvious to me when I am

trying to do two things at once, such as reading my email and listening to a

comedy routine on TV. It simply can’t be done. Focusing on the email means

that you really can’t pay attention to the jokes.

Whereas implicit mechanisms take in enormous amounts of information

and process it very quickly, explicit mechanisms are relatively slow and have

very limited capacity. For example, how good one is at solving problems like

this (and they can get much harder) depends on working memory capacity.

Working memory is the workspace of your mind. People with a strong working

memory are better able to focus their attention on problems and ignore interfering

information. In general, people with a high working memory processing are

better at solving these sorts of problems, and they have a higher IQ. But even

the smartest human can’t really keep very much in mind at once. Most people

can remember a number sequence of about 7–9 numbers—far fewer than a

computer, and much less information than our modular, implicit mechanisms

routinely process effortlessly.

As this example indicates, IQ is a critically important mechanism that

involves explicit processing. However, another important explicit processing

mechanism is the personality system of Conscientiousness, which will be the

focus of this paper.4 Conscientiousness refers to “socially prescribed impulse

control”—that is, the ability to control one’s behavior to conform to social

conventions and to pursue long-term goals.5 Conscientious people are able to

delay gratifi cation and to perform diffi cult, unpleasant tasks in pursuit of their

goals. In general, they behave in a responsible, dependable, and cooperative

manner.

Conscientiousness is often labeled effortful control. This emphasizes the

fact that Conscientiousness involves explicit, conscious processes. Simply put,

conscientious people try hard. In a test of this trait for children, the experimenter

places a piece of candy on a child’s tongue and asks him to not swallow until

instructed to do so. Or the experimenter asks the child not to peek at a gift

until the experimenter returns. For most fi ve-year-olds, these are really hard

things to do, because their natural tendency is to swallow the candy and look

at the gift. In general, girls are more conscientious than boys, and of course

Conscientiousness increases with age.

It’s not surprising that being low on Conscientiousness is a huge risk factor

in modern life. Such people do poorly in school and on the job. They are more

likely to become impulsive criminals—criminals whose crimes are due to lack

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 13

of impulse control: murderers who can’t control their temper, drug abusers

who can’t control their cravings, or rapists who can’t control their lust.

Notice that being conscientious means that we are better able to control our

natural tendencies. Five-year-olds who manage to not peek at the present or eat

the candy before the experimenter’s okay have to overcome powerful natural

urges. We all have a natural attraction to the pleasures of drugs like cocaine

(which mimic natural reinforcers) and the attractions of sexual desire. Most

of us have had fantasies in which we imagine murdering a rival or enemy.6

These tendencies are very adaptive, because they motivate us to seek mates

and other resources and to move up the social hierarchy.

But conscientious people can control these urges in order take account of the

wider context (for example, going to prison for murder, or becoming a dysfunctional

drug addict). They don’t allow their urges to interfere with long-term goals

(such as inhibiting the desire to party in order to get a good education).

Neurobiological research shows quite clearly how this works. The prefrontal

cortex is the seat of conscientiousness. It has inhibitory connections to subcortical

regions of the brain responsible for our natural urges (drugs, sex, and

rock–and roll, as I tell my students). The subcortical parts of the brain process

information implicitly, and they are evolutionarily ancient. The prefrontal

cortex processes information explicitly and is the crowning achievement of

human evolution.

Consider one of evolutionary psychologist David Buss’s examples. A man

is almost run over by a car; he responds by directing an obscene gesture at

the car. The car stops and men get out and beat him. Suffering the pain and

humiliation of being beaten enrages the man, and he responds by getting his

gun: “I had stone hatred for him, and I righteously couldn’t wait to see the

look on his face when I blew him away. As soon as he popped out of the liquor

store door, I charged right up to him, rammed the barrel in his chest, and

pulled the trigger.”7 This is an example of impulsive aggression—the man is

overwhelmed by rage stemming from his subcortex. It is a natural, refl exive

reaction. His prefrontal cortex is pretty much out of the loop.

If this man had a stronger Conscientiousness system, things might have

happened quite differently. The prefrontal cortex takes in information about

the wider context of our behavior, and it analyzes the situation explicitly. The

subcortical brain is responding in a refl exive, impulsive, angry manner, and the

only context it is sensitive to is the fact that another person has infl icted pain.

But a person with a strong PFC is able to control these urges, and take account

of the wider context. Such a person doesn’t simply respond with impulsive

aggression; he thinks about the big picture: If I kill this guy, will I get caught?

If I kill him with a gun, does it have a serial number that can be traced? Is there

any possibility of DNA evidence being left at the scene? If I do get caught, can I

plea-bargain it down to manslaughter? Will his friends come and get revenge?

Why not just call 911 and let the police deal with the beating?

14 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

Most of these issues have become relevant only in modern times and would

not have been relevant in the environments we evolved in. But the explicit

processing mechanisms of the PFC allow us to consider them and, if necessary,

inhibit our natural tendencies.

Research has shown that children with damage to the PFC have immature,

egocentric moral reasoning and are prone to stealing and aggression.8 Patients

with prefrontal damage originating in infancy exhibit a general lack of conscientiousness

(lack of dependability, inability to plan for the future, proneness to

immediate rewards rather than long-term goals). Their aggression is impulsive

rather than planned, and they lack a sense of guilt for transgressions against

others.

Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California has shown how this

works in the brain by contrasting impulsive murderers with predatory murderers.9

The brains of both impulsive murderers and predatory murderers have very

active areas in the subcortical areas of the brain responsible for aggression. The

difference is that predatory murderers also have normal levels of activation in

the prefrontal cortex. As a result, they are better able to control their murderous

tendencies. Their murders are planned, and because they are planned, it is often

quite diffi cult to catch them. Serial murderers can go for years without being

detected, while impulsive murderers are easily caught because they act on the

spur of the moment, without the precautions needed to hide their crime.

To sum up, the PFC is able to regulate the more evolutionarily ancient

parts of our brain responsible for many of our passions and desires. Another

example is sexuality. When male subjects were shown erotic photos, subcortical

areas of the brain responsible for sexual arousal were activated.10 However,

when the subjects were told to distance themselves from the erotic stimuli and

inhibit their arousal, they were able to do so. The fMRI (Functional Magnetic

Resonance Imaging) pictures of their brains showed that the prefrontal cortex

was activated when they inhibited their sexual arousal.

ETHNOCENTRISM AND ITS CONTROL

Why is this important for thinking about psychology and white ethnocentrism?

Just as conscientious people can inhibit their natural tendencies toward

aggression and sexual arousal, in the same way they able to inhibit their natural

tendencies toward ethnocentrism. The critical point in the following is that

cultural information is of vital importance for making people inhibit their

ethnocentric tendencies. This cultural information relies on explicit processing

and provides the basis for prefrontal inhibitory control of ethnocentrism. The

conclusion is that the control of ethnocentrism is a direct consequence of the

control of cultural information.

There is good evidence for several different evolved mechanisms related to

ethnocentrism: genetic similarity mechanisms,11 social identity mechanisms,12

individualism/collectivism,13 and a human kinds module (see Appendix I).14

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 15

In the following, the only assumption is that ethnocentrism exists. It is not

important whether ethnocentrism is the result of psychological mechanisms that

evolved for group defense or if it is the result of learned negative stereotypes

of other groups. The point is that in either case people tend to have negative

stereotypes of other races and they prefer people from their own race. The

evidence shows that this includes white people, although as mentioned in the

appendix below, there is also evidence that white people are less ethnocentric

than other human groups: Western cultures tend toward individualism,

whereas most of the rest of the world is much more collectivist in outlook.15

This implies that the control of ethnocentrism is easier for whites, because the

subcortical mechanisms responsible for ethnocentrism are weaker.

Research on ethnocentrism has shown much awareness of the distinction

between implicit and explicit processing. Implicit attitudes on race are assessed

by tests like the Implicit Attitudes Test. Subjects are presented with photos of

blacks and whites in succession and asked to pair positive or negative words

(e.g., “intelligent,” “law-abiding,” “poor,” “success”) with the photos. Eighty

percent of whites take longer to associate positive words with blacks than with

whites. This is interpreted as indicating that whites have implicit negative

stereotypes of blacks.

On the other hand, explicit attitudes on race are typically assessed by

fi lling out questionnaires.16 College student populations of whites typically

exhibit problack attitudes on these tests. For example, one study found that

whites scored 1.89 on a six-point scale, with 1 meaning strongly pro-black, and

6 being strongly anti-black.17

Another way to measure explicit attitudes is by interview. A recent representative

sample of 2000 households found that a surprising 74 percent of

whites thought that racial identity was very important (37 percent) or somewhat

important (37 percent).18 In general, people become more racially conscious

as they get older—only 53 percent claimed that racial identity was important

while growing up. (I have noticed this also as a feature of Jewish identity.19)

Even more surprising is the fi nding that 77 percent of whites thought that

whites had a culture that should be preserved. However, despite asserting the

legitimacy of white ethnic identity, only 4 percent of whites claimed to be a

member of an organization based on racial or ethnic identity. And 75 percent of

whites state that prejudice and discrimination are important or very important

to African-American disadvantage.

This study is therefore compatible with generally problack explicit

attitudes. In general, blacks and other minorities have much stronger explicit

ethnic identities than whites do. For example, this same survey found that 90

percent of blacks thought that racial identity was very important (72 percent)

or somewhat important (18 percent), and 91 percent felt that black culture

was worth preserving. Blacks also demonstrate a substantially larger explicit

ingroup preference than whites.20

16 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

The main point here is that there is a gap between whites’ explicitly

positive attitudes about blacks and their implicitly negative attitudes. Even

white liberals show implicit negative attitudes toward blacks, but their implicit

attitudes are less negative than those of conservatives. In fact, white liberals are

more hypocritical about race than conservatives: There is a larger gap between

implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes toward blacks among white liberals

than among white conservatives.21

Implicit attitudes on race impact actual behavior. For example, whites’

explicit attitudes toward blacks predicted their verbal friendliness and their

own perceptions of their behavior when interacting with a black. However, their

implicit attitudes were a better predictor of nonverbal friendliness as rated by

independent judges (higher rate of blinking and avoidance of eye contact).

The gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes is made possible

by the inhibitory mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex. Two studies show that

prefrontal control is able to inhibit negative implicit attitudes. In one study,

subjects were shown photos of blacks and whites while hooked up to an fMRI

machine that takes pictures of the brain in action.22 When the photos were shown

for very brief periods—too short to be consciously processed, the fMRI showed

that whites had a negative response to the photos of blacks. This procedure

therefore measures implicit negative attitudes toward blacks.

However, when the photos of blacks were presented for a much longer

period, so that they were consciously experienced, then the difference in reaction

to black and white faces decreased. This happened because the prefrontal region

was activated. In other words, people who are consciously aware that they are

seeing photos of blacks are able to inhibit the negative automatic responses from

the subcortex. Subjects who showed the most prefrontal activation showed the

lowest subcortical response. This implies that they were better able to inhibit

their automatic negative attitudes toward blacks.

Another study had black and white subjects scan photos of blacks and

whites. fMRI scans showed subcortical activation when scanning photos of

blacks but not when scanning photos of whites. This is interpreted as an implicit

fear response because the reaction is involuntary and unconscious. However,

when subjects were also given the verbal label “African American” along with

the photo of a black person, there was no subcortical fear response. This is

interpreted as resulting from prefrontal inhibitory control that suppresses the

implicit fear response. In other words, the moment you start thinking about

race in words, you know you’re thinking about it and can make decisions. Your

prefrontal inhibitory centers have been activated, and the negative thoughts

are suppressed.

Both these studies show the importance of prefrontal inhibitory control

over automatic negative attitudes of whites toward blacks. White ethnocentrism

exists, but it exists in a sort of underground world of unconscious, automatic

processing. But ethnocentric attitudes dare not say their name: As soon as the

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 17

explicit, conscious processor swings into action, it suppresses the negative

implicit attitudes coming from below.

This is nicely illustrated in a study that explains what happens when people

confront controversial issues related to race and ethnicity. White subjects

were shown pictures of a smiling interracial couple and then told that their

response to the photo indicated that they were prejudiced. After being told

this, subjects took much longer to respond to later photos. This is interpreted

as being due to subjects trying to consciously control their responses to the

photos. The photo serves as a “cue for control”—a warning that “the situation

is one in which prejudiced responses may occur and that the brakes need to

be applied to ongoing behavior.”23

Young children tend to have unabashedly explicit bias in favor of their own

race. Explicit race bias emerges early, as young as age three or four, peaks in

middle childhood, and then undergoes a gradual decline through adolescence,

and disappears in adulthood.24 However, there is no such decline in implicit

racial preferences, which remain strong into adulthood.25 There is also a decline

in crossracial friends and companions as children get older. White schoolchildren

are much more likely to have white friends than chance expectation

would account for, and this trend increases as they get older.26 This means that

at the same time that explicit racial preference in white children is declining,

children are becoming less and less likely to actually interact with and form

friendships with children from other races. In effect, schools undergo a process

of self-segregation. And among adults, whites are signifi cantly less likely than

other racial groups to report interracial friendships and contacts.27

The bottom line, then, is that as children get older they become increasingly

aware of the offi cial explicit racial ideology, and they conform to it.

Their prefrontal centers of inhibitory control are becoming stronger, so that

they are better able to inhibit their relatively positive attitudes about their

own group. At the explicit level, they are free from any negative attitudes

toward nonwhite groups and may even be politically liberal or radical. At the

same time, however, they are “voting with their feet” by choosing friends and

companions of the same race.

And their parents are doing the same thing. I have noted that liberals show

a greater gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes and behavior

than do conservatives. Indeed, while highly educated white parents tend to

have liberal explicit attitudes on racial issues, including the desirability of

school integration, a recent study shows that these same highly educated

whites seek out schools that are racially segregated and are more likely to live

in racially segregated neighborhoods.28 There is a positive correlation between

the average education of white parents and the likelihood that parents will

remove their children from public schools as the percentage of black students

increases. Michael Emerson, an author of the study, is quite aware of the gap

between explicit attitudes and behavior: “I do believe that white people are

18 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

being sincere when they claim that racial inequality is not a good thing and

that they’d like to see it eliminated. However, … their liberal attitudes about

race aren’t refl ected in their behavior.”

The fl ip side of this is that less affl uent whites are more likely to have

explicitly illiberal attitudes on racial issues that are condemned by elites.

Yet they are also more likely to actually live in racially integrated areas and

send their children to racially integrated schools, presumably due to fi nancial

constraints.

IMPLICIT WHITE COMMUNITIES

Children’s choice of friends and parents’ choice of schools and neighborhoods

refl ect the raw reality of racial hypocrisy in the United States. These

children and their parents are acting on their implicit attitudes, and there is

a profound gap between their implicit attitudes and their behavior (which

show ingroup racial preference), on the one hand, and their explicit attitudes

(which express the offi cial racial ideology of egalitarianism), on the other. In

effect, they are creating implicit white communities—implicit because even

though they are an expression of (implicit) racial preferences, they cannot tell

their name: They do not explicitly state that their friendship choices or their

choice in neighborhood or school derives from racial preference, because that

confl icts with their explicit racial attitudes and with the offi cial racial ideology

of the wider culture.

My hypothesis is that white Americans are gradually coalescing into a

political and cultural affi liation as whites, and that this trend will continue to

strengthen in the future. But at present, this political and cultural affi liation is

not yet consciously white, at least partly because conscious white affi liation

is a cultural taboo.

In the face of overwhelming sanctions on white racial identity in the post-

World War II world, whites have adopted a variety of explicit identities which

serve as the basis of white association and community. All of these identities

exist under the radar of the political correctness enforced by elites in academia,

politics, and the media. Considered here are several overlapping explicit white

identities: Republican political affi liation, NASCAR racing enthusiast, evangelical

Christian, and country music fan. Each of these identities allow white

people to associate with other whites and even to form a white political base

without any explicit acknowledgement that race plays a role.

Implicit white communities have become an increasingly important part of

the American landscape. The most important of these implicit white communities

is residential segregation resulting from white fl ight. As Kevin Kruse

notes, “at the dawn of the twenty-fi rst century, America found itself dominated

by suburbs and those suburbs dominated by the politics of white fl ight and

urban secession.”29 Part of this phenomenon stems from whites’ diminished

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 19

willingness to contribute to public goods, because the benefi ciaries are disproportionately

blacks and other nonwhite minorities: “In the past, the hostility

to the federal government, the welfare state, and taxation had been driven by

racial resentment, whether in the form of segregationists inside Atlanta or secessionist

suburbanites outside it. In the 1990s the new generation of suburban

Republicans simply took the politics of white fl ight to the national stage.”30

As Kruse notes, race is never part of the explicit rhetoric of white fl ight, which

tends to be expressed as opposition to the federal government, the welfare

state, taxation, and perceived moral issues like abortion and homosexuality.

But at the implicit level, the desire for white communities and the aversion to

contributing to public goods for nonwhites are the overriding motivations.

White fl ight is part of the fragmented future that lies in store for the U.S.

and other Western countries with high levels of non-European immigration.

It is a well-established fi nding that the more ethnically mixed a population

becomes, the greater is its resistance to redistributive policies.31 For example,

a study of donations to the United Way of America charity found that white

Americans give less when their communities are more than 10 per cent

nonwhite. Sociologist Robert D. Putnam recently showed that the greater the

racial diversity of a community, the greater the loss of trust.32 People living in

homogeneous areas like New Hampshire or Montana are more involved with

friends, the community, and politics than people in more diverse areas.33

At the political level, implicit whiteness is also refl ected in Howard Dean’s

famous comment that the Republican Party is the party of white Christians.34 In

2004 and 2006, white evangelical or born-again Christians made up a quarter of

the electorate, and 78 percent of them voted Republican.35 In fact, other ethnic

groups are coalescing into a nonwhite voting bloc centered in the Democratic

Party to an even greater extent than whites are gravitating to the Republican

Party. Over 90 percent of blacks typically vote Democrat, while Latinos vote

around 60–70 percent Democrat.36 Nonwhite ethnic groups tend to vote

Democratic even when they have relatively high socioeconomic status—a good

indication that this pattern results from identity politics rather than economics.

In the 2004 presidential election, John Kerry won fi rst-time Asian votes 78–20,

and among American-born Asians he won by 80–18.37 Despite the stridently

pro-Israel policies of George W. Bush, around 76 percent of Jews voted for Al

Gore in the 2000 presidential election, and Jews continue to form the fi nancial

backbone of the Democratic Party.38 In 2002, only 8 percent of Republican votes

came from nonwhites, and similar results occurred in 2006.39

Not only are whites voting Republican, but white Republican voters are

most likely to be married with children40 These are exactly the people for

whom white fl ight to safe neighborhoods, good schools, and predominant

white ethnic composition is most compelling. The best correlation with Bush’s

share of the vote by state in 2004 is the average years married by white women

between age 18 and 44 (r= .91). Bush carried 44 percent of single white females

20 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

but 61 percent of married white females; Bush also won 53 percent of single

white men and 66 percent of married white men. Bush carried 25 of the top

26 states in total white fertility, while Kerry won all 16 of the states with the

lowest white fertility. The correlation between total white fertility and Bush’s

share of the vote was .86.

The recent congressional elections show that white support for Republicans

is sensitive to issues such as the disastrous war in Iraq and the abysmal record of

the Bush administration—the fi rst neoconservative administration—in actually

delivering on white fl ight political issues. As noted by many, the history of

neoconservatism shows a strong support for core liberal issues (including

relatively unrestricted immigration) and a stridently pro-Israel foreign policy.41

Nevertheless, even in 2006, 78 percent of white evangelical Christians—who

are the most strongly identifi ed implicit white voting constituency—voted

Republican.42

Another implicit white community is NASCAR racing, which strongly

overlaps with evangelical Christianity, country music, and small town American

culture, particularly the culture of the South. A famous Mike Luckovich cartoon

that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution shows a black man and a white

man talking with a Confederate fl ag fl ying in the background. “We need a

fl ag that isn’t racist…but preserves white southern culture…” The next panel

shows a NASCAR checkered fl ag. The implicit/explicit distinction could not

be more obvious.

A large part of the attraction of NASCAR is a desire for traditional American

culture. NASCAR events are permeated with sentimental patriotism, prayers,

military fl yovers, and postrace fi reworks. As sociologist Jim Wright notes, “just

about everything … you encounter in a day at the track drips with traditional

Americana.”43 However, “race is the skeleton in the NASCAR Family closet.

On the tracks and in the stands, stock-car racing remains a white-person’s

sport.”44 The whiteness of NASCAR races can be seen from a comment that,

after surveying the crowd at the 1999 Daytona 500, “there were probably about

as many Confederate fl ags here as black people”—i.e., fewer than forty out of a

crowd of approximately 200,000.45 Because the Confederate fl ag is the ultimate

in political incorrectness, their presence at NASCAR events is quite possibly

an act of rebellion. “The near-universal discrediting of the Stars and Bars as a

politically incorrect, if not racist, symbol has obviously not yet reached every

Winston Cup fan. Either that, or they just don’t care. And, as you might imagine,

there was no pussyfooting or self-fl agellation about the point among fans at

the Southern 500, which was adorned by a profusion of Confederate fl ags the

likes of which I had not witnessed at any other track.”46

Wright stresses the link of NASCAR to traditional small town and rural

American culture and its links to outdoor pursuits like hunting, fi shing,

camping, and guns.47 There is a large overlap between NASCAR fans and gun

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 21

ownership. There is also a strong Christian religious atmosphere: Races begin

with a benediction and a prayer. There is “a visible Christian fellowship” in

NASCAR, including entire teams that identify themselves publicly as Christian

teams; many of the drivers actively participate in Christian ministry.48 Other

values in evidence are courage in the face of danger—another throwback to

traditional American culture, deriving ultimately from the Scots-Irish culture

of the English borderlands: “As we enter the third decade of women’s liberation

and the second decade of the post communist era, we’ve come to expect,

even demand more sensitivity and empathy in our men than bravado or grit,

and the traditional manly virtues of courage, bravery, and ‘guts’ strike many

as anachronistic at best, even dangerous and moronic.”49

The only recent scientifi c survey on NASCAR fans is the Southern Focus Poll

of 1998, conducted by the Center for the Study of the South at the University

of North Carolina.50 26.1 percent of white Southerners had been to a NASCAR

race, compared to 4.4 percent of blacks. In the national sample using the same

questions, the percentages were 24.1 and 12.5 percent respectively. These

results undercount the total number of fans of non-NASCAR stock car racing

and other forms of auto racing. 18.1 percent of respondents with a high school

education had been to a NASCAR race, compared to 22.5 percent of high school

graduates, 27 percent with some college, and 18 percent of college graduates.

NASCAR also claims 75 million fans in America, 25 percent of the population.51

NASCAR racing is the fastest growing sport in America, second only to the NFL

in sports viewership.52 This is a very large implicit white community.

Being a NASCAR fan overlaps with other implicit white identities. A 1993

survey carried out by the National Opinion Research Center found a 3:1 ratio

in NASCAR attendance between small-town and large-city residents; almost

2:1 for gun owners vs. non-gun owners, 3:1 for hunters vs. nonhunters, and

almost 3:1 between people who like country music “very much” and those who

hate it (21.3 percent to 7.6 percent).53 Indeed, one survey found that 49 percent

of people who “listen to country music a lot” are fans of NASCAR, compared

to 31 percent of all respondents. The biggest disparity is in the other direction:

Only 24 percent of people who listen to country music a lot identify themselves

as fans of the NBA compared to 47 percent of all respondents.54

There is little doubt that country music is an implicit white community:

Over 90 percent of country music listeners are white.55 Although country music

remains the most common radio format, it is disappearing from major urban

areas where whites are becoming a minority.

While NASCAR is a white sport, the NBA is widely perceived to be a black

sport. Whites, especially nonurban whites, are a decreasing audience for the

NBA. Since the Michael Jordan era, television ratings for the NBA have been

on the decline. In 2005, ratings were down 7 percent on ESPN and TNT, 4

percent on ESPN, and more than 30 percent for the NBA fi nals.56 The audience

22 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

for NASCAR and the NBA are nonoverlapping, with the NBA appealing to

“a young, multicultural, urban market audience”57—the polar opposite of

the married, white, Republicans who have adopted implicit white identities.

NASCAR has enjoyed an increasingly dominant television audience position

during the portion of the year formerly controlled by the NBA.58

The NBA culture is seen as African-American, and the response of the NBA

has been to attempt to make the NBA look more like white America in order

to restore its fan base. Sports writer Gary Peterson notes that “for decades

there has been a racial divide between NBA players (mostly black) and the

paying customers (largely white). That divide has become a fl ashpoint over

the past 15 years…Never before have the players seemed so unlike the fans.

This divide is the top concern at the league offi ce—even ahead of declining

free throw shooting and baggy shorts. For proof you need look no further

than the league-wide dress code NBA commissioner David Stern imposed last

season. It was an extraordinary step—he might as well have told the players,

‘Quit dressing like typical young, urban African-Americans. You’re scaring

the fans.’”59 Besides banning ostentatious gold chains and mandating business

casual attire, the NBA has also handed out draconian penalties for fi ghting

among players, because fi ghting fi ts into the image of urban, African-American

culture.60 Another sportswriter, MSNBC’s Michael Ventre, opined that “the

terms ‘NBA’ and ‘thuggery’ have become inextricably linked in the minds of

basketball fans the world over.”61

The point is not that the NBA is more violent than, say, professional hockey;

it’s just that the NBA is conscious of racial stereotyping processes among

whites. Part of NASCAR’s attraction for whites is that it is an implicit white

community. By regulating dress and conduct, the NBA seems to be trying to

make the NBA an implicit white community despite the racial composition

of its players.

MANAGING WHITE ETHNOCENTRISM:

THE PROBLEM WITH NON-EXPLICIT WHITE IDENTITY

Thus far the argument has been that white people are gradually coalescing

into implicit white communities that refl ect their ethnocentrism but “cannot tell

their name.” They are doing so because of the operation of various mechanisms

that operate implicitly, below the level of conscious awareness. These white

communities cannot assert explicit white identities because the explicit cultural

space is deeply committed to an ideology in which any form of white identity

is anathema. Explicit culture operates in the conscious prefrontal centers able

to control the subcortical regions of the brain.

This implies that the control of culture is of critical importance. The story

of how this explicit cultural space came to be and whose interests it serves

is beyond the scope of this paper. My view is that these cultural transformations

are the result of a complex interaction between preexisting deep-rooted

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 23

tendencies of Europeans (individualism, moral universalism, and science)

and the rise of a Jewish elite hostile to the traditional peoples and culture of

Europe.62 The result has been a “culture of critique” that represents the triumph

of the leftist movements that have dominated twentieth-century intellectual

and political discourse in the West, especially since World War II. The fundamental

assumptions of these leftist movements, particularly as they relate to

race and ethnicity, permeate intellectual and political discourse among both

liberals and conservatives and defi ne a mainstream consensus among elites

in academia, the media, business, and government.

The explicit cultural space can be categorized into two components: social

controls and ideology.63 Social controls include penalties for explicit manifestations

of white ethnocentrism (e.g., hate crime statutes, ostracism, loss

of livelihood, and the legal infrastructure of massive nonwhite immigration

and affi rmative action). While most animals are sensitive only to contexts

that have repeatedly occurred in their evolutionary history, we humans

are exquisitely sensitive to the complex cultural milieu, which includes a

variety of subtle and not so subtle penalties for explicitly proclaiming a

white identity. Being aware of the wider cultural context of social controls

that structure the consequences of behavior requires input to the higher

brain centers situated in the prefrontal cortex and, as we have seen, this

input may result in inhibiting tendencies toward ethnocentrism originating

from lower in the brain.

Ideologies are explicit belief systems that structure attitudes and behavior

related to race and ethnicity. Because they are a manifestation of explicit

processing, they are products of higher cognitive processes located in the

prefrontal cortex. Because of the power of the prefrontal cortex over the lower

brain, these ideologies can have important infl uences on behavior. They

include ideologies of race and ethnicity (e.g., race doesn’t exist; assertions of

white identity and interests are an indication of psychopathology or moral

turpitude, while assertions of nonwhite identities and interests are legitimate

and praiseworthy; white achievement and the underachievement of blacks

and Latinos are the result of white racism and white privilege; there are no

biological differences between the races affecting intelligence and achievement);

ideologies promoting massive nonwhite immigration (e.g., diversity

is a strength; America is a country founded on a set of abstract principles

with no ethnic identity); counter-stereotypical media images (blacks are more

intelligent, wiser, and more responsible parents than whites).

Because implicit ethnocentrism is alive and well among whites and

affects their behavior in subtle ways, one might suppose that whites are in

fact able to pursue their interests even against the prevailing wind of the

explicit culture of powerful antiwhite social controls and ideologies. The

problem, however, is that white ethnic identity and interests can be managed

if they remain only at the implicit level. In general, implicit white communities

conform to the offi cial multicultural ideology and adopt conventional

24 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

attitudes and rhetoric on racial and ethnic issues. This allows them to escape

the scrutiny of the cultural elites that enforce conventional attitudes on racial

and ethnic issues. However, it renders them powerless to actively promote

issues that vitally affect their ethnic interests.

A good example is massive nonwhite immigration. In the past year, there

has been much discussion of illegal immigration that tapped into a very large

reservoir of public anger about the lack of control of our borders and, I think,

the transformations that immigration is unleashing. Although it was common

for proponents of illegal immigration to label their opponents “racists,” the

fact that illegal immigration is, after all, illegal made it easy for conservatives

to oppose without mentioning their racial interests.

This contrasts with no discussion at all in the mainstream media of the

nearly one million legal immigrants who come to the U.S. every year—no

discussion of their effect on the economy, social services, crime, and competition

at elite universities; no discussion of their effect on the long-term ethnic

composition of the U.S. and how this will affect the political interests of whites;

no discussion of the displacement of native populations in various sectors

of the economy; and no discussion of whether most Americans really want

all of this. (They don’t.)64 Indeed, it has been quite common for conservative

opponents of illegal immigration to assert their support for legal immigration

as a means of dodging the charge of “racism.” While assertions of ethnic

interests by nonwhites are a commonplace aspect of the American political

and intellectual scene, mainstream explicit assertions of ethnic interests by

whites have been missing since the 1920s.65

The result is that the leftist ideologies of race and ethnicity have become

part of conventional morality and intellectual discourse, even within implicitly

white communities. As a result, implicit white communities are impotent in

opposing the forces that are changing the country in ways that oppose their

long-term interest. Because there is no mainstream attempt by whites to

shape the explicit culture in ways that would legitimize white identity and

the pursuit of white ethnic interests, implicit white communities become

enclaves of retreating whites rather than communities able to consciously

pursue white interests.

The creation of an explicit white culture legitimizing white identity and

interests is a prerequisite to the successful pursuit of the interests of whites

as a group.

PSYCHOLOGICAL CHALLENGES TO DEVELOPING AN

EXPLICIT CULTURE OF WHITE IDENTITY AND INTERESTS

My view, then, is that in the absence of changes in the explicit cultural

space on issues related to the legitimacy of white racial identity and interests,

whites will continue to simply retreat into implicit white communities. There

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 25

are obviously a great many obstacles to developing such a mainstream culture,

the main one being opposition by elites in the media, academia, business, and

political cultures. As is well known, there is a major gap between popular and

elite opinion on critical issues such as massive nonwhite immigration.66

A large part of the problem is that for many in these elites, economic

and professional self-interest coincides with support for antiwhite policies.

Particularly egregious examples are companies that directly benefi t from immigration

via cheap labor, or companies, such as First Data Corporation, which

benefi t from remittances sent by immigrants to relatives in other countries.67 A

noteworthy example is Mary Sue Coleman, who earns $742,148 as the president

of the University of Michigan and has been a leader in attempting to preserve

racial preferences and in promoting the educational benefi ts of diversity.68

Another example is knee-jerk assumptions by faculty and administrators when

three Duke University lacrosse players were accused of raping and assaulting a

black woman.69 Because the leftist political cultural of the university has become

conventionalized, expressions deploring the racism and sexism of the players

could be counted on as good career moves, even when they turned out to be

false. Adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity is a sine qua non for

a career as a mainstream intellectual or in the political arena.

As Frank Salter has pointed out, whites who fail to attend to the interests of

their wider kinship group benefi t themselves and their families at the expense

of their own ethnic interests.70 This is especially true for elite whites—people

whose intelligence, power, and wealth could make a very large difference in

culture and politics. They are in effect sacrifi cing millions of ethnic kin for the

benefi t of themselves and their immediate family.

This is a disastrously wrongheaded choice by the standard measures of

evolutionary success. However, because our evolved psychology is much

more attuned to individual and family interests than to the interests of the

ethnic group or race, whites who benefi t economically or professionally from

adopting conventional views on race and ethnicity are unlikely to feel unease

at the psychological level.

Another problem is that part of our evolved psychology is designed to

emulate and look up to socially dominant people, especially if they look like us.

A critical component of the success of the culture of critique is that it achieved

control of the most prestigious and infl uential institutions of the West, and

it became a consensus among elites, Jewish and non-Jewish alike.71 Once this

happened, it is not surprising that this culture became widely accepted among

people of very different levels of education and among people of different

social classes.

Although changing the structure of material benefi ts is doubtless critical

for advancing white ethnic interests, we should also pay attention to the

psychological level, because this also plays an important role. Adopting

26 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

conventional views on race and ethnicity not only confers material benefi ts, it

confers psychological benefi ts. On the other hand, dissenting from these views

carries huge costs. White elites who turn their back on their own ethnic group

are likely to be massively reinforced within the contemporary explicit culture,

while those who attempt to advance white interests can expect to suffer rather

intense psychological costs. The massive social approval University of Michigan

president Mary Sue Coleman receives within the culture of the university for her

positions on diversity issues is doubtless a positive component of her job.

In large measure, the reason for this lies in the same psychological system

discussed previously—Conscientiousness. Thus far, I have stressed the importance

of Conscientiousness for inhibiting our natural tendencies in the service

of long-term payoffs and fi tting into the wider cultural context. However,

people who are high on Conscientiousness also tend to be deeply concerned

about their reputation.

This is no accident. In fact, developing a good reputation is an important

way for conscientious people to get long-term payoffs. Think of it this way.

If I cheat someone, I get a short-term gain at the expense of developing a bad

reputation. The only way I can continue to survive is to prey on others who don’t

know my reputation, and that means moving on and interacting with strangers,

not friends and allies. On the other hand, if I cooperate with someone we both

gain and I develop a reputation as a cooperator that may last a lifetime. In the

long run, therefore, I will be better off. Conscientious people are cooperators,

and as a result they are vitally concerned about their reputation.

Recent theoretical work has shown that having access to people’s reputation

is likely to be a necessary condition for the evolution of cooperation.72

Information on the reputation of individuals constitutes a collective memory

of the past history of individuals and is made possible by language—that is,

explicit representations of the past history of individuals in cooperative situations.

73 Without such explicit information on reputation, cooperators would

be at an evolutionary disadvantage and vulnerable to a strategy of short-term

exploitation rather than long-term cooperation with like-minded others. This

explicit information on reputation is therefore processed by the higher brain

centers located in the prefrontal cortex linked to Conscientiousness.

I am suggesting, therefore, that evolutionary pressure for cooperation is a

critical adaptive function accounting for the evolution of Conscientiousness.

Psychological research shows that people high in Conscientiousness are responsible,

dependable, dutiful, and reliable. Indeed, responsibility emerges as a

facet (i.e., subcategory) of Conscientiousness defi ned as cooperative, dependable,

being of service to others, and contributing to community and group

projects.74 These traits are also highly correlated with honesty, morality, and

behavior as a moral exemplar.

Thus Conscientiousness not only makes us better able to inhibit natural

impulses like ethnocentrism, it also makes us more concerned about our

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 27

reputation. We want to fi t into the community and we want to be known

as cooperators, not cheaters. At the opposite end are sociopaths. Sociopaths

are at the low end of Conscientiousness. They take advantage of people for

short-term gains and care nothing about developing a reputation as honest

and trustworthy. After they prey on one victim, they must move on to an area

where their reputation is not known.

Obviously, Conscientiousness as defi ned above is a pillar of human civilization

and cultural life. Perhaps paradoxically, this is especially so in the individualistic

cultures of the West. Western cultures tend toward individualism,

whereas most of the rest of the world is much more collectivist and oriented

toward the extended family (see appendix).75 Individualism is associated with

all of the markers of modernism in the West—the nuclear family, economic

individualism, science, democratic and republican forms of governments, and

moral universalism.76 To this set of traits, Francis Fukuyama also adds trust as

a critical virtue of individualist societies.77

Trust is really a way of emphasizing the importance of moral universalism

as a trait of individualist societies. In collectivist, family-oriented societies, trust

ends at the border of the family and kinship group. Social organization, whether

in political culture or in economic enterprise, tends to be a family affair. Morality

is defi ned as what is good for the group—typically the kinship group (e.g., the

notorious line, “Is it good for the Jews?”). This lack of ability to develop a civil

society is the fundamental problem of societies in the Middle East and Africa,

where divisions into opposing religious and ultimately kinship groups defi ne

the political landscape. The movement of the West toward multiculturalism

really means the end of individualist Western culture.78

In individualist cultures, on the other hand, organizations include nonfamily

members in positions of trust. Morality is defi ned in terms of universal moral

principles that are independent of kinship connections or group membership.

Trust therefore is of critical importance to individualist society.

And fundamentally trust is about building a trustworthy reputation—for

example, a reputation for honest dealing not only with fellow kinsmen, but

with others as well. It follows that European-derived people are particularly

prone to being concerned with reputation. In the individualistic societies in

which they evolved, cooperation (and therefore success) resulted from having

a good reputation, not from having extensive kinship relations.

There are obviously great benefi ts to trust and to the wider psychological

system of Conscientiousness. The suite of traits associated with individualism

is the basis of Western modernism. Relying on the good reputation of others is

a key ingredient to building cooperative civil societies capable of rising above

amoral familism.

The downside, however, is that conscientious people become so concerned

about their reputation that they become conformists. Once the intellectual and

political left had won the day, a large part of its success was that it dominated the

28 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

moral and intellectual high ground related on issues of race and ethnicity. The

culture of critique had become conventionalized and a pillar of the intellectual

establishment. People who dissented from this leftist consensus were faced with

a disastrous loss of reputation—nothing less than psychological agony.

There are many examples showing the power of this mechanism. Over

60 years ago Anne Morrow Lindbergh became one of the fi rst victims of the

modern version of political correctness when her husband, Charles Lindbergh,

stated that Jews were one of the forces attempting to get the United States to

enter World War II. Shortly after his speech, she wrote:

The storm is beginning to blow up hard…I sense that this is the beginning

of a fi ght and consequent loneliness and isolation that we have not known

before… For I am really much more attached to the worldly things than

he is, mind more giving up friends, popularity, etc., mind much more

criticism and coldness and loneliness…Will I be able to shop in New

York at all now? I am always stared at—but now to be stared at with

hate, to walk through aisles of hate!79

What is striking and perhaps counterintuitive, is that the guilt and shame

remain even when she is completely satisfi ed at an intellectual level that her

beliefs are based on good evidence and reasonable inferences, and are morally

justifi able. Anne Morrow Lindbergh writes,

I cannot explain my revulsion of feeling by logic. Is it my lack of courage

to face the problem? Is it my lack of vision and seeing the thing through?

Or is my intuition founded on something profound and valid? I do not

know and am only very disturbed, which is upsetting for him. I have

the greatest faith in him as a person—in his integrity, his courage, and

his essential goodness, fairness, and kindness—his nobility really…How

then explain my profound feeling of grief about what he is doing? If

what he said is the truth (and I am inclined to think it is), why was it

wrong to state it?

Her reaction is involuntary and irrational—beyond the reach of logical

analysis. Charles Lindbergh was exactly right in what he said, but a rational

understanding of the correctness of his analysis cannot lessen the psychological

trauma to his wife, who must face the hostile stares of others. The trauma

is the result of the power of the Conscientiousness system in leading to loss

of reputation resulting from breaching the cultural taboo against discussing

Jewish infl uence.

I’ve had similar experiences, on a much smaller scale, resulting from attacks on

me at the university where I work.80 As with Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s concern

about going shopping in New York, the most diffi cult thing is dealing with loss

of reputation in my face-to-face world at the university. And it’s not just that it’s

in the face-to-face world of everyday life. It’s that the areas of nonconformity on

race and ethnicity have huge moral overtones. If one dissents from the reigning

theory of macroeconomics or the main infl uences on nineteenth-century French

Romanticism, one may be viewed as a bit eccentric or perhaps none too smart.

But one is not likely to be subjected to torrents of moral outrage.

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 29

Given that academics tend to be Conscientious types, it’s not surprising

that academics are generally loath to do or say things that might endanger

their reputation. This is at least ironic, because it confl icts with the image of

academics as fearless seekers of truth. Unlike politicians, who must continue to

curry favor with the public in order to be reelected, and unlike media fi gures,

who have no job protection, academics with tenure have no excuse for not being

willing to endure labels such as “anti-Semite” or “racist” in order to pursue

truth. Part of the job—and a large part of the rationale for tenure in the fi rst

place—is that they are supposed to be willing to take unpopular positions: to

forge ahead using all that brain power and expertise to chart new territories

that challenge the popular wisdom.

But that image of academia is simply not based in reality. Consider, for

example, an article that appeared almost two months after the publication

of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s famous essay on the Israel lobby,81

appropriately titled “A hot paper muzzles academia.”82

Instead of a roiling debate, most professors not only agreed to disagree

but agreed to pretend publicly that there was no disagreement at all. At

Harvard and other schools, the Mearsheimer-Walt paper proved simply

too hot to handle—and it revealed an academia deeply split yet lamentably

afraid to engage itself on one of the hottest political issues of our

time. Call it the academic Cold War: distrustful factions rendered timid

by the prospect of mutually assured career destruction.

Professors refused to take a stand on the paper, either in favor or against.

As one Ivy League professor noted, “A lot of [my colleagues] were more

concerned about the academic politics of it, and where they should come

down, in that sense.”

Sadly, there is now a great deal of evidence that academics in general are

careful to avoid controversy or do much of anything that will create hostility.

In fact, some researchers are pointing to this fact to question whether tenure

is justifi ed. A recent survey of the attitudes of 1,004 professors at elite universities

illustrates this quite clearly.83 Regardless of their rank, professors rated

their colleagues as

reluctant to engage in activities that ran counter to the wishes of

colleagues. Even tenured full professors believed [other full professors]

would invoke academic freedom only “sometimes” rather than “usually”

or “always”; they chose confrontational options “rarely,” albeit more

often than did lower ranked colleagues…Their willingness to self-limit

may be due to a desire for harmony and/or respect for the criticisms of

colleagues whose opinions they value. Thus, the data did not support

the depiction of Professorus Americanus as unleashed renegade.

Seen in this context, the reaction to the Mearsheimer and Walt paper makes

a lot of sense. As one professor noted, “People might debate it if you gave

everyone a get-out-of-jail-free card and promised that afterward everyone

would be friends.” 84 This intense desire to be accepted and liked by one’s

30 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

colleagues is certainly understandable. Striving for a good reputation is part

of our nature, especially for the conscientious among us.

Ostracism and moral condemnation from others in one’s face-to-face world

trigger guilt feelings. These are automatic responses resulting ultimately from

the importance of fi tting into a group that were developed over evolutionary

time. This is especially so in the individualistic cultures of the West, where

having a good reputation beyond the borders of the kinship group forms the

basis of trust and civil society, and where having a poor reputation would

have resulted in ostracism and evolutionary death.

As shown by the example of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, being able to

defend rationally the ideas and attitudes that bring moral condemnation is

not suffi cient to defuse the complex negative emotions brought on by this

form of ostracism. One might think that just as the prefrontal control areas can

inhibit ethnocentric impulses originating in the subcortex, we should be able

to inhibit these primitive guilt feelings. After all, the guilt feelings ultimately

result from absolutely normal attitudes of ethnic identity and interests that

have been delegitimized as a result of the erection of the culture of critique in

the West. It should be therapeutic to understand that this culture was instituted

by people who typically retained a strong sense of their own ethnic identity

and interests. And it should help assuage guilt feelings if we understand that

this culture is now maintained by people seeking material advantages and

psychological approval at the expense of their own ethnic interests. The guilt

feelings are nothing more than the end result of ethnic warfare, pursued at the

level of ideology and culture instead of on the battlefi eld.

Getting rid of guilt and shame, however, is certainly not an easy process.

Psychotherapy for white people begins with an explicit understanding of the

issues that allows us to act in our interests, even if we can’t entirely control

the negative feelings engendered by those actions.

Evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers has proposed that the emotion of

guilt is a sign to the group that a person will mend his ways and behave in

the future. Shame, on the other hand, functions as a display of submission to

people higher in the dominance hierarchy. From that perspective, a person

who is incapable of shame or guilt even for obvious transgressions is literally a

sociopath—someone who has no desire to fi t into group norms. As noted above,

sociopaths are at the low end of Conscientiousness, and there was doubtless

strong selection against sociopathy in the small groups that we evolved in,

especially among the individualistic peoples of the West. The trustworthy

cooperators with excellent reputations won the day.

CONCLUSION

I think that evolutionists have not been properly sensitive to the enormous

gulf between humans and animals resulting from human general intelligence

and the Conscientiousness system. At a very broad level, the Conscientiousness

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 31

system allows our behavior to come under the control of the surrounding

culture. We make complex appraisals of how our behavior will affect us given

the current cultural milieu. Potential murderers may think about the possibility

of leaving DNA evidence and what types of plea bargains might be possible

if they are caught. Potential thought criminals must assess the risks to their

livelihood and their reputation in their face-to-face world.

But it gets more complicated than that. Modern humans are exposed to

an often bewildering array of cultural messages that affect how they see the

world. These messages are often directed at the explicit processing system and

they may be infl uenced by a wide range of competing interests. For example,

it is a commonplace that media images have important effects on behavior

even though people are often unaware that their behavior is infl uenced by the

images.85 These images are often engineered by advertisers who are consciously

attempting to infl uence the recipients of the messages in ways that conform

to the advertisers’ interests, not those of the audience.

More important, media messages shape the discussion of issues related

to white identity and interests. The culture of critique has become the explicit

culture of the West, endlessly repeated in media messages but packaged differently

for people of different levels of intelligence and education, and for people

with different interests and from different subcultures.86 The message of this

paper is that by programming the higher areas of the brain, this explicit culture

is able to control the implicit ethnocentric tendencies of white people.

In attempting to fi nd a way out of this morass, therefore, changing the

explicit culture is critical. To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign

slogan, it’s the explicit culture, stupid. Changing the explicit culture won’t be

easy, but I suggest that the fi rst step is a psychological one: Proud and confi dent

explicit assertions of ethnic identity and interests among white people, and the

creation of communities where such explicit assertions are considered normal

and natural rather than a reason for ostracism. The fact that such assertions

appeal to our implicit psychology is certainly an asset. It’s always easier to

go with a natural tendency than to oppose it. And in this case, opposing our

natural ethnocentric tendencies by using our quintessentially human prefrontal

inhibitory control against our own ethnic interests is nothing less than a

death sentence.

APPENDIX: BIOLOGICAL ROOTS OF ETHNOCENTRISM

Frank Salter presents a powerful case for the adaptiveness of ethnocentrism.

87 Different human ethnic groups and races have been separated for

thousands of years, and during this period they have evolved some genetic

distinctiveness. This genetic distinctiveness constitutes a storehouse of genetic

interest.

In other words, people have an interest in their ethnic group in exactly

the same way that parents have a genetic interest in raising their children:

32 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

In raising their children, parents ensure that their unique genes are passed

on to the next generation. But in defending ethnic interests, people are doing

the same thing—ensuring that the genetic uniqueness of their ethnic group

is passed into the next generation. When parents of a particular ethnicity

succeed in rearing their children, their ethnic group also succeeds because

the genetic uniqueness of their ethnic group is perpetuated as part of their

child’s genetic inheritance. But when an ethnic group succeeds in defending

its interests, individual members of the ethnic group also succeed because the

genetic uniqueness that they share with other members of the ethnic group is

passed on. This is the case even for people who don’t have children: A person

succeeds genetically when his ethnic group as a whole prospers.

A quick look at the historical record shows that confl ict between tribal

groups has been common throughout human history. Cooperative defense

by tribal peoples is universal and ancient and it is bound to have boosted

the genetic fi tness of those who acted to further the interests of their group.

Under such circumstances it would be odd indeed if natural selection did not

mold the human mind to be predisposed to ethnocentrism. Of course, this fact

does not tell us what psychological mechanisms actually evolved to promote

ethnocentrism or how these mechanisms can be controlled by inhibitory

mechanisms located in the prefrontal cortex. For that, we will have to turn to

the empirical research.

Genetic Similarity Theory: Birds of a Feather Flock Together

J. Philippe Rushton’s Genetic Similarity Theory (GST) is a biological/

genetic theory aimed at explaining positive assortment on a variety of traits

in friendships, marriage, and alliance formation.88 Friends, spouses, and the

other people we make alliances with are more like us than people selected at

random. At the psychological level, the same mechanisms that infl uence these

choices may well also be involved in positive attitudes toward people in the

same ethnic group.

People not only assort positively for a wide variety of traits, they do so

most on traits that are more heritable—that is, the traits that have a relatively

strong genetic infl uence. This means that when you select a genetically similar

spouse, your children are more similar to you than they would be if (God

forbid!) you had chosen your spouse at random. Moreover, identical twins have

more similar spouses and friends than do fraternal twins. Genetic differences

therefore infl uence the tendency to assort with similar others.89 In other words,

some of us are more attracted to genetically similar spouses and friends than

others, and this tendency is infl uenced genetically.

The implication is that when there is a choice to be made whether in

marriage, friendship, or other type of alliance, all things being equal, we are

more likely to choose similar others as a way of enhancing the benefi ts of

relationships and lessening the risks. Obviously, being of the same race is a

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 33

very important basis of similarity. In the body of this paper, I describe what I

call implicit white communities: communities, such as NASCAR and country

music fandom in the United States, where the vast majority of participants are

white but not necessarily self-consciously so. That is, white people choose to

be among people who are white like themselves, but they don’t necessarily

think of their choice as resulting from a conscious desire to be part of a white

community. At the psychological level, GST is probably the best explanation

for this phenomenon.

Social Identity Mechanisms: Our Team Is Better (and Smarter and

More Moral) Than Your Team

An early form of social identity theory was stated by William Graham

Sumner, a pioneer evolutionary anthropologist, in 1906:

Loyalty to the group, sacrifi ce for it, hatred and contempt for outsiders,

brotherhood within, warlikeness without—all grow together, common

products of the same situation. It is sanctifi ed by connection with religion.

Men of an others-group are outsiders with whose ancestors the ancestors

of the we-group waged war…Each group nourishes its own pride and

vanity, boasts itself superior, exalts its own divinities, and looks with

contempt on outsiders. Each group thinks its own folkways the only

right ones, and if it observes that other groups have other folkways,

these excite its scorn.90

Psychological research shows that people are highly prone to identifying

themselves with ingroups. And once in a group, people tend to exaggerate the

positive traits of ingroup members, and they exaggerate the homogeneity of

their ingroup on these positive traits (“we’re smart and we have high moral

standards”). On the other hand, people tend to have negative stereotypes of the

outgroup and are even more likely to exaggerate the extent to which outgroup

members share these negative traits (“they’re stupid and dishonest”).91 Of

course, in some cases, these stereotypes may have a lot of truth to them.

There is good evidence that social identity processes are a psychological adaptation

designed by natural selection for competition between groups. William

Graham Sumner would not be surprised that modern research shows that these

group dynamics are cross-cultural universals. Similar results are found across

subjects of different ages, nationalities, and social classes, and can even be seen

in very young children.92 Anthropological evidence indicates the universality of

the tendency to view one’s own group as superior93 and to denigrate outgroups.

As anthropologist Horowitz notes, “in one country after another, other ethnic

groups are described in unfl attering or disparaging terms.”94

Note that even though social identity processes are an evolutionary adaptation,

they do not work by assessing genetic differences between groups.

Instead, the important thing is that people be in different groups. A good

example would be WWII-era intraservice rivalries—as refl ected in barroom

brawls between soldiers and sailors. There may be no genetic differences at

34 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

all between the two teams or both teams may be a mixture of different ethnic

groups, but social identity mechanisms still make us think highly of our team

and not so highly of the opposition. In fact, some evolutionary psychologists

have proposed using this feature of our psychology to deemphasize the importance

of race as a category.95

Individualism/Collectivism:Individualism Is the Basis of Western

Modernism

Even though identifying with groups is a universal tendency, there are

some important differences. Western cultures tend toward individualism,

whereas most of the rest of the world is much more collectivist in its outlook.96

Individualist cultures show little emotional attachment to ingroups. Personal

goals are paramount, and socialization emphasizes the importance of selfreliance,

independence, individual responsibility, and “fi nding yourself.”97

Individualists have more positive attitudes toward strangers and outgroup

members and are more likely to behave in a prosocial, altruistic manner to

strangers (e.g., white medical missionaries to Africa).98

Individualism is linked to a suite of traits that together form the basis of

Western modernism: the nuclear family, bilateral kinship patterns, monogamy,

moral universalism, civil societies based on trust and reputation rather than

kinship connections, relative lack of ethnocentrism and group orientation, and

science.99 Collectivist cultures typical of the Middle East, China, India, and

African cultures have the opposite suite of traits. Most centrally these societies

are based on extended kinship and tribal relationships.

An illustrative contrast between individualist and collectivist societies is in

the area of moral reasoning. In collectivist societies, morality is defi ned in terms

of whether an action satisfi es obligations within the family or kinship group,

whereas in individualist societies, morality is thought of as satisfying abstract

notions of justice. The moral implications of the individualism/collectivism

distinction can be seen by a study contrasting India (a collectivist culture) and

the United States (an individualist culture). Young adults and children are asked

what they would do in the following situation:

Ben was in Los Angeles on business. When his meetings were over, he

went to the train station. Ben planned to travel to San Francisco in order

to attend the wedding of his best friend. He needed to catch the very next

train if he was to be n time for the ceremony, as he had to deliver the

wedding rings. However, Ben’s wallet was stolen in the train station. He

lost all of his money as well as his ticket to San Francisco. Ben approached

several offi cials as well as passengers at the train station and asked them

to loan him money to buy a new ticket. But, because he was a stranger,

no one was willing to lend him the money he needed. While Ben was

sitting on a bench trying to decide what to do next, a well-dressed man

sitting next to him walked away for a minute. Looking over at where the

man had been sitting, Ben noticed that the man had left his coat unatWinter

2006-2007 / MacDonald 35

tended. Sticking out of the man’s coat pocket was a train ticket to San

Francisco. Ben knew that he could take the ticket and use it to travel to

San Francisco on the next train. He also saw that the man had more than

enough money in his coat pocket to buy another train ticket. 100

Indian subjects were more than twice as likely to decide to take the ticket

in order to fulfi ll their family obligation (around 80 percent to 40 percent).

Children in the United States, on the other hand, tended to say that the man

should not steal the train ticket because stealing violates principles of justice that

apply to everyone. For children from India, morality is defi ned by the needs

of the family. For children in the United States, morality is defi ned more by

abstract principles of justice.

Individualism forms the basis of Western success, but it also implies that the

control of ethnocentrism among white people is relatively easy. As discussed

in the body of this paper, this does not imply that white people lack ethnocentrism.

But it does imply that controlling ethnocentrism among whites is easier

because they are relatively less attached to their people and culture than the

vast majority of other humans.

Individualism/collectivism is very likely to have a biological basis because

of its widespread ramifi cations in the areas of kinship relationships, marriage,

and the development of civil societies that defi ne Western modernism. My

theory is that this suite of traits is the result of a long history of evolution in

northern climates.101

Is There a “Human Kinds” Module?

People have a natural tendency to place themselves in groups and to think

highly of their ingroup and denigrate outgroups. These groups can range from

groups that are arbitrarily chosen by psychologists, to bowling leagues, football

teams, and religious groups. But in general, some groups seem to have much

more of an emotional pull than others. Psychologists may indeed fi nd discrimination

against outgroups in arbitrarily composed groups, but people are not

going to lay down their lives for an arbitrarily chosen group, or even for their

bowling team. College students identify with their college or fraternity and

denigrate other colleges and fraternities, but few students would incur a huge

cost in doing so. On the other hand, ethnic, religious, and patriotic emotions

run deep, and it is not at all uncommon for people make the ultimate sacrifi ce

on behalf of these groups.

This raises the question of whether race and ethnicity are natural categories.

If so, people would have a natural tendency to classify themselves into ingroups

and outgroups on the basis of these categories. And they would tend to have

stronger allegiance to these groups than, say, their stamp collecting club. These

mechanisms would also make these groups more emotionally compelling. People

would have more of a tendency to become emotionally involved in these groups

than in garden-variety groupings: For example, we would get more psychologi36

Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

cal satisfaction in being accepted by the racial or ethnic group, and we would

be more distressed at the possibility being ostracized from the racial or ethnic

group. The deep and seemingly ineradicable attachments that so many people

have to their ethnic groups strongly suggest that there is indeed a human kinds

module that automatically places people in racial categories. Such a module

might also result in automatic negative emotions toward racial outgroups. As

described below, even relatively nonethnocentric white people have an attachment

to their race, albeit rather rudimentary and unconscious.

To date, research has focused on whether race and ethnicity are natural

categories. Since the offi cial ideology is that race is nothing more than a social

construct, it is not surprising that there is a great deal of controversy on this

issue.102 In fact it often seems that a great deal of politically correct intellectual

energy is put into trying to prove that Mother Nature could not possibly have

made race or ethnicity a natural category. Some argue that people could not

possibly have a human kinds module, because prior to the modern world

of long- distance transportation they would not have come into contact with

other races or ethnic groups. 103 In fact, long distance migrations over several

generations did indeed bring people with different physical appearance into

contact with each other.104 This sort of repeated contact with outsiders would

allow the evolution of a module specialized to detect and respond to racial

and ethnic differences.

Another politically correct proposal is that people are “fooled” into thinking

that ethnic and racial groups are real because they superfi cially resemble animal

species.105 Like animal species, ethnic groups marry among themselves and

membership is by descent. (One can’t just decide to be, say, Japanese.) According

to this theory, the mistake is to think that races and ethnic groups really are like

animal species.

Another theory argues that there is a human kinds module that evolved

for categories like sex and age, but not race. Since all humans would have been

exposed to the categories of sex and age over evolutionary time, there would

be a module that these categories are essential to people’s identity and can’t be

changed. However, this module is “fooled” into thinking that different races

and ethnic groups are also natural human kinds.106

But of course, ethnic groups do show genetic differences from each other,

and they typically look different from each other. The mistake is to deny the

reality of genetically based racial and ethnic differences and to simply dismiss

the possibility that humans would have been repeatedly exposed to different

groups over evolutionary time so that indeed racial and ethnic differences would

be a natural trigger for this module.

My view is that in fact we do have a human kinds module designed not

simply to categorize people in terms of a variety of natural categories such as

men, women, and children, but to specifi cally categorize people as belonging

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 37

to different racial/ethnic groups.107

Even at very early ages children view race in more essentialist terms than either occupation or body build—that is, they

see it as inherited and an important part of a person’s identity. We can change

our body build or our occupation, but not our race. (Michael Jackson may be

an exception!)

Race and ethnicity have all the features of an evolved module. Processing

of racial and ethnic differences is rapid, unconscious, and automatic—all characteristics

of implicit processing and hallmarks of evolved modules.108 Social

psychology experiments show that subjects respond differently to faces of

racial ingroups and outgroups.109 For example, subjects are better able to recall

the faces of people from their own race.110 Subjects are also quicker to classify

pictures of racial outgroup members than ingroup members.111

There is good evidence that people have a natural fear of snakes and

spiders because of our evolutionary past. So it’s interesting that for white

people, looking at photos of blacks triggers a fear response in the same way

that pictures of snakes and spiders do.112 The basic procedure is to show, say,

a white subject various photos (fl owers, black people, white people, snakes,

automobiles), some of which are followed by a mild shock. After learning what

will happen when the photos are presented, subjects anticipate the shock by

showing a fear response as soon as the photo is presented. Then the shock is

discontinued. The results are that even after the shock is discontinued white

subjects show a fear reaction to photos of blacks and snakes, but not to whites

or photos of harmless things like fl owers that had been paired with shocks.

This is consistent with the theory that whites have a natural fear of blacks

(and snakes). The fact that they quickly stop fearing the picture of a fl ower

when it is no longer paired with a shock means that we don’t have a natural

fear of fl owers.

In another study, photos of racial ingroup and outgroup members were

assessed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging recordings. The results

showed that the photos triggered responses in the amygdala, a subcortical region

responsible for fear.113 For example, white subjects had a stronger amygdala

response to photos of blacks than to whites when the photos were presented

too fast to be processed consciously. Under these circumstances, the photos

are processed unconsciously by triggering the amygdala.

These studies are evidence that there is a natural fear of racial outgroups.114

This evidence is not conclusive because it is conceivable that automatic negative

attitudes of whites toward blacks could be learned by repeated bad experiences

with blacks or because of repeated negative portrayals of blacks in the media.

The mechanism could also work via early socialization: The type of people I

see around me early in life are my racial ingroup. In fact, developmental data

shows that preference for own race occurs by three months, but is not present

at one month.115 Moreover, babies have less of a preference for their own race

38 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

if they are exposed to other races during this early period. If this is the case,

then people would have a same-race preference under typical natural conditions.

This mechanism could be “fooled” however, by exposure to other races

during early infancy.

Conclusion

The evolutionary roots of ethnocentrism are unsettled, but we should be

open to the idea that more than one mechanism is relevant.

1. Of the mechanisms reviewed here, Rushton’s genetic similarity

theory has the most unequivocal empirical support. As indicated above,

this mechanism is likely responsible for implicit white communities

discussed in the body of this paper.

2. There is also good evidence that social identity processes are a biological

adaptation. But since they don’t respond to genetic differences

between groups, they are not really of use in ethnic defense unless the

groups are already constituted on an ethnic basis.

3. Individualism/collectivism is also very likely to have a biological

basis because of its widespread ramifi cations in the areas of kinship

relationships, marriage, and the development of civil societies that

defi ne Western modernism. This suite of traits also makes sense as an

ecological response of northern hunter-gatherer peoples to the conditions

of the Ice Age.

4. The existence of a module sensitive to racial and ethnic ingroup and

outgroups remains controversial, but I think the evidence is persuasive

that such a module exists. Indeed, I think it’s the only way to explain

why ethnic emotions and allegiances are so intense and persistent, even in

the modern world. The best evidence is that this module is programmed

as a result of early experience during infancy.

In any case, whatever the strength of the mechanisms underlying ethnocentrism

reviewed here, these natural ethnocentric tendencies are insuffi cient to provide

for ethnic defense of whites in the contemporary world—the argument made

in the body of this paper.

Kevin MacDonald, Professor of Psychology, California State

University - Long Beach, is the author of a trilogy on Judaism as

an evolutionary strategy: A People That Shall Dwell Alone

(1994), Separation and its Discontents (1998), and The

Culture of Critique (1998). A revised edition of The Culture of

Critique (2002), with an expanded introduction, is available from

www.1stBooks.com or www.amazon.com.

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 39

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ENDNOTES

1. William Wallace entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_

Wallace; see also www.highlanderweb.co.uk/wallace/

2. See, for example, Geary, 2005; Stanovich, 1999.

3. Bargh & Chartrand, 1999.

4. Conscientiousness is capitalized here to indicate that it refers to the personality

trait of Conscientiousness as measured by personality tests. It is similar to what

people normally think of as conscientiousness.

5. John & Srivastava, 1999, 121.

6. Buss, 2005.

7. In Duntley & Buss, 2005, 291.

8. Anderson et al., 1999; Damasio (1994/2000).

9. Raine et al., 1998.

10. Beauregard, Lévesque, & Bourgouvin, 2001.

11. Rushton, 1989, 1999.

12. MacDonald, 2001; Tullberg & Tullberg, 1997; van der Dennen, 1999.

13. MacDonald, 2001.

14. Hirschfeld, 1996.

15. MacDonald, 2004a; MacDonald 1998/2002, preface to fi rst paperback edition.

16. For example, the Modern Racism Scale and the Motivation to Respond without

Prejudice Scale (see Cunningham, Nezlek, & Banaji, 2004).

17. Phelps et al., 2000.

18. Croll, Hartmann, & Gerteis, 2006.

19. I describe several cases in my trilogy on Judaism, for example, Heinrich Heine

(see MacDonald, 1998/2004, ch. 2, n. 9).

20. Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002; see also Ashburn-Nardo, Knowles, &

Monteith, 2003.

21. Nosek, Banaji, & Greenwald, 2002.

22. Cunningham, Johnson, et al., 2004.

23. Monteith et al., 2002, p, 1046.

24. Aboud, 1988; Augoustinos & Rosewarne, 2001.

25. Dunham, Baron, & Banaji, 2005.

26. Moody, 2002.

27. Emerson, Kimbro, & Yancey, 2002.

28. Emerson & Sikkink, 2006.

29. Kruse, 2005, 259.

30. Kruse, 2005, 263.

31. Salter (ed.), 2005.

32. Lloyd, 2006.

33. Sailer, 2007.

34. Murray, 2005.

35. For 2004: Cooperman, 2006. For 2006: Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=132&gclid=CMqetuKxqYkCFRCYAodt2pCMQ

36. Sailer, 2005c, 2006.

37. Sailer, 2004.

38. Jewish voting in presidential elections of 2004: Jewish Virtual Library (undated).

Winter 2006-2007 / MacDonald 45

www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/jewvote.html;

Jews and the Democratic Party: Goldberg, 1996.

39. For 2002: Sailer, 2005, 2006,

For 2006: Religion vs. race in 2006 voting and ideology. December 6, 2006. www.

plantingliberally.org

www.plantingliberally.org/node/

192?PHPSESSID=20de38bdd2cfc294c35b34a789535cf7

40. Sailer, 2005a, b.

41. For example, MacDonald, 2004a.

42. Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. http://pewforum.org/events/index.

php?EventID=132&gclid=CMqetuKxqYkCFR-CYAodt2pCMQ

43. Wright, 2002, 35.

44. Wright, 2002, 280.

45. Wright, 2002, 83.

46. Wright, 2002, 141.

47. Wright, 2002, 156.

48. Wright, 2002, 37.

49. Wright, 2002, 156.

50. Southern Focus Poll: Crosstabs, Non-Southern Sample, 1998. Durham, NC:

University of North Carolina Institute for the Study of the American South.

ftp://ftp.irss.unc.edu/pub/irss/southern/focus/fall98/nonsouth/xtabs.pdf

51. Miles, 2005.

52. Wright, 2002, 182.

53. Wright, 2002, 167–168.

54. Edison Media Research: www.crb.org/pdf/edison_research.pdf

55. Tucker, 2007.

56. Hollywood Reporter, July 12, 2005.

57. Sam Sussman, vp/media director at Starcom, quoted in MediaWeek, July 11, 2005.

www.mediaweek.com/mw/news/recent_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000976428

58. http://msn.foxsports.com/nascar/story/5575164 http://msn.foxsports.com/

nascar/story/5575164 After increasing 70 percent from 2000 to 2005, NASCAR

ratings were fl at in 2006 (Tucker, 2006). http://www.ajc.com/search/content/

shared/sports/stories/2006/10/CAR_NASCAR_TV_1027_COX.html

59. Peterson, 2006.

60. Peterson, 2006.

61. Ventre, 2006.

62. MacDonald, 1998/2002.

63. See MacDonald, 1983, 1994/2002.

64. Francis, 2002.

65. MacDonald, 1998/2002, 2004b.

66. Francis, 2002.

67. Guzzardi, 2004.

68. Coleman, 2006.

69. Skube, 2006.

70. Salter, 2003/2006.

71. See MacDonald, 1998/2002, Ch. 6.

72. Milinski, Semmann, & Krambeck, 2003; Mohtashemi & Mui, 2003; Semmann,

Krambeck, & Milinski, 2005; Smith, 2005.

46 Vol. 6, No. 4 THE OCCIDENTAL QUARTERLY

73. Mohtashemi & Mui, 2003; see also Panchanathan & Boyd, 2003.

74. Roberts et al., 2005.

75. MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

76. MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

77. Fukuyama, 1995.

78. MacDonald, 1998/2002, Ch. 8.

79. Lindbergh, 1980, 220–230; italics in text.

80. MacDonald, 2006.

81. Mearsheimer & Walt, 2006.

82. Fairbanks, 2006.

83. Ceci et al., 2006.

84. Fairbanks, 2006.

85. Wilson, 2002.

86. MacDonald 1998/2002, preface to fi rst paperback edition.

87. Salter, 2003/2006.

88. Rushton 1989, 1998.

89. Rushton & Bons, 2005.

90. Sumner, 1906, 13.

91. For example, Brewer & Brown, 1998; Fiske, 1998.

92. Bourhis, 1994.

93. Vine, 1987.

94. Horowitz, 1985, 7.

95. Cosmides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003.

96. MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald, 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

97. Triandis, 1991, 82.

98. Triandis, 1990, 61.

99. MacDonald, 2002; MacDonald, 1998/2002 (preface to the paperback edition of

The Culture of Critique).

100. Miller & Bersoff, 1992, p. 545.

101. MacDonald, 2002.

102. Discussed in MacDonald, 2001.

103. For example, Cosmides, Tooby, & Kurzban, 2003.

104. Henry Harpending, Department of Anthropology, University of Utah, personal

communication, June 28, 2002.

105. Gil-white, 2001.

106. Hirschfeld, 1996:197.

107. Macdonald, 2001.

108. Rothbart & Taylor, 2001.

109. Fiske, 1998.

110. Platz & Hosch, 1988; Bothwell, Brigham, & Malpass, 1989.

111. Levin, 1996; Valentine & Endo, 1992.

112. Olsson et al., 2005.

113. Cunningham et al., 2004.

114. Öhman, 2005.

115. Bar-Haim et al., 2006; Kelly et al., 2005.