DM 2 / June 2014
White Fright
Nick Land
Racial fear is a complicated thing. It’s worth trying to break it down, without blinking too much.
As one regresses through history, and into pre-history, the pattern of encounters between large-scale
human groups of markedly distinct ancestry is modeled — with ever-greater fidelity — upon a genocidal
ideal. The ‘other’ needs to be killed, or at the very least broken in its otherness. To butcher all males,
beginning with those of military age, and then assimilate the females as breeding stock might suffice as
a solution (Yahweh specifically warns the ancient Hebrews against such half-hearted measures).
Anything less is sheer procrastination. When economic imperatives and high levels of civilizational
confidence start to overwhelm more primordial considerations, it is possible for the suppression of
other peoples to take the humanized form of social obliteration combined with mass enslavement, but
such softness is a comparatively recent phenomenon. For almost the entire period in which recognizably
‘human’ animals have existed on this planet, racial difference has been thought sufficient motive for
extermination, with limited contact and inadequacy of socio-technical means serving as the only
significant brakes upon inter-racial violence. The sole deep-historical alternative to racial oppression has
been racial eradication, except where geographical separation has postponed resolution. This is the
simple side of the ‘race problem’, but it too begins to get complicated . . . (we’ll pick it up again after a
detour).
For the moment, we need only note the archaic, subterranean ocean of racial animosity that laps upon
the sunless chasms of the brain, directed by genomes sculpted by aeons of genocidal war. Call it racial
terror. It’s not our principal concern here.
Racial horror is something else, although it is no doubt intricately inter-connected. Horror of the very
phenomenon of race — of race as such — is both a larger and a smaller topic. It is at once an expansive
affect that finds no comfort in biological identity, and a distinctively ethno-specific syndrome. When
positively elaborated, racial horror explodes into a ‘Lovecraftian’ cosmic revulsion directed at the
situation of human intelligence by its natural inheritance. The negative expression, far more common
today (among those of a very specific natural inheritance), takes the form of a blank denial that any such
reality as race even exists. We are fully entitled to describe this latter development as racial white-out.
Any Critical Whiteness Studies of even minimal seriousness would concentrate upon it unrelentingly.
HBD, or human biological diversity, is evidently not reducible to racial variation. It is at least equally
concerned with human sexual dimorphism, and is ultimately indistinguishable from an
eventual comparative human genomics. When considered as a provocation, however, the translation of
HBD into ‘race science’ or more pointedly ‘scientific racism’ drowns out every other dimension of
meaning. What is found appalling about HBD is the insistence that race exists. It is a ‘trigger’ for racial
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DM 2 / June 2014
horror. Social outrage, certainly, but beyond that cosmic distress, tilting into a panic without limit. HBD
subtracts the promise of universal humanity, so it must — at any cost — be stopped.
Because this is no more than a preliminary essay, I will restrict it to a single modest ambition: the
refoundation of Critical Whiteness Studies on a remorselessly Neoreactionary basis. White people
are odd. Some especially significant group of them, 1 in particular, have radically broken from the
archaic pattern of human racial identity, creating the modern world in consequence, and within it their
ethnic identity has become a dynamic paradox. Whiteness is an uncontrolled historical reaction which
nobody — least of all anybody from among the complementary anti-racists of Critical Whiteness Studies
and White Nationalism — has begun to understand. To begin to do so, one would have to comprehend
why the essay in which Mencius Moldbug most explicitly repudiates White Nationalism is the same as
the one in which he most unambiguously endorses human racial diversity. 2 It requires an
acknowledgement of difficulty, which — because it demolishes irresistibly attractive but hopelessly
facile solutions on both sides — few are motivated to make.
The signature of indissoluble White difference is precisely racial horror. HBD is uniquely horrible to
White people. Until you get that, you don’t get anything.
Play with this for a while, or for more than a while. To begin with:
(1) Critical Whiteness Studies, whatever its ethno-minoritarian pretensions, is all about ‘acting white’.
Insofar as it criticizes ‘white privilege’ essentially, it does so by reproducing an ethnically singular mode
of universal reason which no other people make any sense of whatsoever, except opportunistically, and
parasitically. ‘Whiteness’ tends to become a religious principle, exactly insofar as it lacks the
recognizable characteristics of racial group dominance (“race does not exist”) and sublimes into a mode
of cultural reproduction which only one ethnicity, ever, has manifested. To quote Alison Bailey — tilting
over into the raw psychosis of systematic ‘whiteness’ critique:
In its quest for certainty, Western philosophy continues to generate what it imagines to be
colorless and genderless accounts of knowledge, reality, morality, and human nature. Perhaps
this is because academic philosophy in the U.S. has been largely driven by analytic methods and
the legacy of Classic Greek and European thinkers, or because philosophy departments are white
social spaces where the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers are white men. In
either case, it’s likely that most members of the discipline have avoided racial topics because
they believe that philosophical thought transcends basic cultural, racial, ethnic, and social
differences, and that these differences are best addressed by historians, cultural studies scholars,
1
“Big Summary Post on the Hajnal Line,” by hbdchick. <http://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summarypost-on-the-hajnal-line/>
2
“Why I am not a White Nationalist,” by Mencius Moldbug.
<http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/11/22/why-i-am-not-a-white-nationalist/>
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DM 2 / June 2014
literary theorists, and social scientists. The absence of color talk in philosophy is a marker of its
whiteness. 3
Supremacist white racism goes so deep it is absolutely indistinguishable from a complete absence of
racism — quod erat demonstrandum.
(2) White Nationalism finds itself stymied at every turn by universalism, pathological altruism,ethnomasochism — all that yucky white stuff. If only you could do White Nationalism without white people, it
would sweep the planet. (Try not to understand this, I know you don’t want to.) Heartiste is picking up
on the pattern:
Where is this thought leading? The native stock of the West is clearly suffering from a mental
sickness caused by too much outbreeding. Universalism is the religion of liberal whites, and they
cleave so strongly to this secular religion that they are happy, nay overjoyed!, to throw the
borders open and bequeath their hard-won territory and culture to battalions of Third Worlders
and other temperamentally distant aliens, who of course given large enough numbers will
promptly, whether wittingly or consequentially, execute its destruction. 4
(3) All White people need is an identitarian religion. Is that not approximately the same as saying: a
counter-factual history?
(4) Those wacky libertarians, with their universal schema for human emancipation that’s so easily
confused with a washing-powder advertisement — it’s so dazzlingly white. Deny the whiteness and selfdestruct in bleeding-heart abasement and open-borders insanity, or affirm it and head into postlibertarian racial perplexity.
Destiny is difficult — not least racial destiny. I don’t think many people want to think about this, but I’m
determined to be as awkward about it as I can … (it’s probably a white thing).
Nick Land taught philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Thirst For
Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism and Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 19872007. He currently blogs at xenosystems.net.
3
Bailey, Alison. “Philosophy and Whiteness.” Towards a Bibliography of Critical Whiteness Studies. Illinois: CDMS.
2006. <http://nathanrtodd.netfirms.com/documents/Spanierman_Todd_Neville%282006%29Whiteness_Bib.pdf>.
4
“The Low Fertility of Urban Liberals,” by Heartiste. <http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/the-lowfertility-of-urban-liberals-is-a-feature-not-a-bug/>
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