In literature. In all cases, emphasis added.
I am focusing on fiction in this post; therefore, I will not discuss the non-fiction (although often fanciful) works by Grant and Stoddard and that ilk, but will briefly mention Stoddard where appropriate. I will also pass over fiction works like The Great Gatsby that mock Grant and Stoddard. Instead I will briefly mention a small sample (not a comprehensive survey) of fiction of the 19th and 20th centuries that focus on the racial anxiety of Whites facing the rising tide of color and various forms of racial and cultural/civilizational dispossession.
I am sure all of my readers are familiar with what is the best and most “in-your-face” direct example of racial anxiety literature – Jean Raspail’s classic The Camp of the Saints, reviewed at Amren here. And also here. To call that novel prophetic would be an understatement, given today’s madness of de facto open borders, migrant crises, mass immigration both legal and illegal, and pitiful White surrender. Raspail’s comments about his book’s bleak ending:
[T]he West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level — nations, race, cultures as well as individuals — it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles.
Kendall’s Hold Back This Day looks forward to what the world would be like some time post-Camp; you can read something about it here.
Let’s consider some older works that the reader may be less familiar with. For example, Melville’s Benito Cereno is based upon the racial anxiety that White dominance is built on a house of cards and can collapse at any time:
…Delano finally grasps the truth: it is not Cereno, but Babo who has murderous intentions. Looking up at the slaves on the San Dominick, who are now protesting in rage, Delano understands that a slave revolt has taken place on the ship and that, throughout his time on the ship, the black slaves, not the Spanish sailors, were secretly in control. Over the next few hours, Delano’s crew succeeds in subduing the slaves and recapturing the San Dominick.
The narrator then provides excerpts from Benito Cereno’s testimony at the trial that took place in Lima against the rebellious slaves. Cereno explains that Babo was the leader of the slave revolt, assisted by Atufal, an imposing black slave who pretended to be kept in chains. Instead of being the passive, docile slave who confirmed Delano’s racist stereotypes, Babo is in fact a highly intelligent leader capable of extreme cruelty. Babo and Atufal ordered Spanish sailors to be thrown overboard alive and fed to the sharks. Babo also ordered Cereno’s best friend, slave-owner Alexandro Aranda, to be killed and his skeleton placed as the ship’s figure-head. Babo used this corpse as a reminder to the Spanish sailors that, if they rebelled, they would “follow their leader”—that is, die.
Although in this case the slave rebellion is crushed, it is a dark foreboding of the future, indicative of an innate racial anxiety about the rising tide of color and White vulnerability. The behavioral control, the mental dominance, of the slaves over Cereno and the other Spaniards is particularly striking in this story. One can reflect on today’s situation, in which a superficial sense of White leadership in what used to be the “West” is a mask behind which lurks Colored, non-Western (including Jewish) mental dominance, emotional control, and behavioral puppet-mastery.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness definitely raises issues of racial anxiety and the malign influence of the natives of Kurtz:
One possible interpretation of “exterminate all the brutes” could be that Kurtz, in a final moment of clarity, has recognized the unspeakable barbarism of the natives among whom he has lived and has ruled as their undisputed tribal chieftain. He has seen at first hand the darkness, the savagery and the sheer moral degradation of the natives; worse still, he has succumbed to their atavistic bloodlust. Although the natives worship Kurtz like a god, he is the one whose soul has been corrupted by contact with a strange, exotic culture; in a sense, the natives have ruled over him.
On this reading, then, Kurtz’s final postscript serves as a warning for white Europeans not to become too deeply involved with the natives lest they lose their souls.
Conrad’s Lord Jim is a more subtle, but equally powerful in its own way, manifestation of racial anxiety about the precariousness of White dominance and the moral courage of Western man:
Recovering from an injury, Jim seeks a position on the Patna, a steamer serving the transport of 800 “pilgrims of an exacting belief” to a port on the Red Sea. He is hired as first mate. After some days of smooth sailing, the ship hits something in the night and the bulkhead begins bulging under the waterline. Captain Gustav thinks the ship will quickly sink, and Jim agrees but wants to put the passengers on the few boats before that can happen. The captain and two other crewmen think only to save themselves, and prepare to lower a boat. The helmsmen remain, as no order has been given to do otherwise. In a crucial moment, Jim jumps into the boat with the captain. A few days later, they are picked up by an outbound steamer. When they reach port, they learn that the Patna and its passengers were brought in safely by a crew from a French navy ship. The captain’s actions in abandoning both ship and passengers are against the code of the sea, and the crew is publicly vilified. When the other men leave town before the magistrate’s court can be convened, Jim is the only crew member left to testify. All lose their certificates to sail. Brierly, a captain of perfect reputation who is on the panel of the court, inexplicably commits suicide days after the trial.
Thus: A small of White men run a ship full of Colored pilgrims for whom they have undisguised racial contempt. However, upon a maritime accident, the cowardly Whites jump ship, leaving the Coloreds to their fate, while the Colored helmsmen, who do not panic, stoically stay with the ship until they are rescued. The cowardly Whites are vilified and Jim, one of them, is personally humiliated. Brierly presumably commits suicide because his faith in the established order – including White racial and moral superiority – is shattered and because he may see his own hidden personal failings reflected in Jim (who is portrayed as a young, good-looking, impressive, Nordic Englishmen – albeit whose character proves “unsound”). We see the racial anxieties at play here – Whites losing their nerve while Coloreds do not, Whites losing racial prestige in front of Coloreds, White humiliation and loss of faith in their own ascendance over the World of Color, leading to personal disgrace (Jim) or self-destruction (Brierly).
Then:
Marlow realises that Jim needs a new situation, something that will take him far away from modern ports and keep him occupied so that he can finally forget his guilt. Marlow consults his friend Stein, who sees that Jim is a romantic and considers his situation. Stein offers Jim to be his trade representative or factor in Patusan, a village on a remote island shut off from most commerce, which Jim finds to be exactly what he needs.
Jim is helped because he is perceived as “one of us” despite his unsound character – in the undying struggle of The West Against the Rest, Jim’s fellow White men instinctively assist him, as Jim’s moral failing reflects their own fears and anxieties about the White man’s place in a changing world.
After his initial challenge of entering the settlement of native Malay and Bugis people, Jim manages to earn their respect by relieving them of the depredations of the bandit Sherif Ali and protecting them from the corrupt local Malay chief, Rajah Tunku Allang. He builds a solid link with Doramin, the Bugis friend of Stein, and his son Dain Waris. For his leadership, the people call him “Tuan Jim”, or Lord Jim. Jim also wins the love of Jewel, a young woman of mixed race, and is “satisfied… nearly.”
Jim is mortified when he receives word of the death of his good friend Waris. He resigns himself to his earlier commitment that no villagers would be harmed and chooses not to flee. Jewel, who had wanted Jim to attack Brown and his ship, is distraught and begs him to defend himself and never leave her. Jim then goes directly to Doramin and in front of the village takes responsibility for the death of his only son. Devastated, Doramin uses his flintlock pistols, given him by Stein, to execute Jim by shooting him in the chest.
Jim’s redemption involves becoming a “Big Daddy” – “Lord Jim” – to Coloreds and half-breeds, but he ends up being destroyed by this involvement, just like the “unsound” Kurtz was in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The text of Lord Jim can be found online here. A White character’s perspective:
You had said you knew so well “that kind of thing,” its illusory satisfaction, its unavoidable deception. You said also—I call to mind—that “giving your life up to them” (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) “was like selling your soul to a brute.” You contended that “that kind of thing” was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress. “We want its strength at our backs,” you had said. “We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives. Without it the sacrifice is only forgetfulness, the way of offering is no better than the way to perdition.” In other words, you maintained that we must fight in the ranks or our lives don’t count. Possibly!
And here we see the viewpoint of a non-White half-caste girl Jim was in love with, who expresses her frustrated incomprehension about the White man thus:
Ah! you are hard, treacherous, without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it that you are all mad?”
To the Coloreds, the White man’s energy, dynamism, and ethics are all signs of wickedness or madness. And then we have this:
…it was Dain Waris who had directed the first repulse. That brave and intelligent youth (“who knew how to fight after the manner of white men”) wished to settle the business off-hand, but his people were too much for him. He had not Jim’s racial prestige and the reputation of invincible, supernatural power. He was not the visible, tangible incarnation of unfailing truth and of unfailing victory. Beloved, trusted, and admired as he was, he was still one of them, while Jim was one of us. Moreover, the white man, a tower of strength in himself, was invulnerable, while Dain Waris could be killed. Those unexpressed thoughts guided the opinions of the chief men of the town, who elected to assemble in Jim’s fort for deliberation upon the emergency, as if expecting to find wisdom and courage in the dwelling of the absent white man.
As Raspail made clear in The Camp of the Saints, the spell has been broken, the “racial prestige” of the White man is gone, and no doubt the insanity of the world wars – thanks to “ethnonationalism” – had much to do with that. Indeed, in The Rising Tide of Color, Stoddard makes clear the great damage done to White racial prestige by World War I, as the World of Color saw the White men engaging in suicidal, self-destructive conflict with each other, including the use of Colored troops against other Whites. In any case, given that Jim ends up being killed by a Colored elder, as a symbol of the end of White racial prestige, even Conrad’s ostensibly positive mention of that prestige, in the context of the larger story, can be seen as a form of racial anxiety. Note as well that the ultimate cause of the catastrophe at the end of Lord Jim was White-White conflict leading to the events resulting in Jim’s death; the similarity to 20th century history of White-White warfare is clear to us in retrospect.
Then we have this from Jack London’s The Mutiny of the Elsinore, that manifests racial anxiety from a more frankly Nordicist perspective:
I have made a discovery. Ninety per cent. of our crew is brunette. Aft, with the exception of Wada and the steward, who are our servants, we are all blonds. What led me to this discovery was Woodruff’s Effects of Tropical Light on White Men, which I am just reading. Major Woodruff’s thesis is that the white-skinned, blue-eyed Aryan, born to government and command, ever leaving his primeval, overcast and foggy home, ever commands and governs the rest of the world and ever perishes because of the too-white light he encounters. It is a very tenable hypothesis, and will bear looking into.
But to return. Every one of us who sits aft in the high place is a blond Aryan. For’ard, leavened with a ten per cent, of degenerate blonds, the remaining ninety per cent, of the slaves that toil for us are brunettes. They will not perish. According to Woodruff, they will inherit the earth, not because of their capacity for mastery and government, but because of their skin-pigmentation which enables their tissues to resist the ravages of the sun.
And I look at the four of us at table–Captain West, his daughter, Mr. Pike, and myself–all fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and perishing, yet mastering and commanding, like our fathers before us, to the end of our type on the earth. Ah, well, ours is a lordly history, and though we may be doomed to pass, in our time we shall have trod on the faces of all peoples, disciplined them to obedience, taught them government, and dwelt in the palaces we have compelled them by the weight of our own right arms to build for us.
The classic Nordicist pessimism is there – the Nordic Lords of the Earth, after a period of glorious mastery, are perishing and passing. The quote above is a perfect example of racial anxiety in literature.
Of course, what the work of London and others don’t tell us is that Nordic/WASP anxiety, anger, and frustration over this gets misdirected to the White ethnic target, even though the ethnics not only had nothing to do with the racial-cultural shifts causing the anxiety, anger, and frustration but, as the Benito Cereno story (and real life) indicates, are suffering from the same dilemma. It is not Nordics vs. The Rest, but The West Against the Rest, with “West” here meaning the world-wide population of Whites, of Europeans, of every type. Note that at the end of Kendall’s book, all Whites – “Mediterraneans” as well as “Nordics” – fight together against the Coloreds in the last battle to secure a White future (in that book, on another planet).
…She continues to chatter, mentioning that her grandfather once owned a plantation with 200 slaves. Embarrassed, Julian comments that the days of slavery are over, to which she replies that blacks should be free to rise but should do so separately from whites. Both think about the grandfather’s house again, and Julian grows envious, despite the fact that he only saw the house in ruins as a boy. As his mother talks about her black nurse, Caroline, Julian resolves to sit next to a black person on the bus in reparation for his mother’s prejudices…
…Julian retreats deeper into his thoughts, daydreaming about bringing a black lawyer or professor home for dinner or about his mother becoming sick and requiring treatment from a black doctor. Though he would not want to give his mother a stroke, he fantasizes about bringing a black woman home and forcing his mother to accept her…
…The bus stops and a well-dressed African American man boards, sits down, and opens a newspaper. Julian imagines striking up conversation with him just to make his mother uncomfortable. Instead, he asks for a light, in spite of the no-smoking signs and the fact that he doesn’t have any cigarettes. He awkwardly returns the matches to the man, who glares at him. Julian dreams up new ways to teach his mother a lesson, imagining that he will ignore her as she gets off the bus, which would force her to worry that he may not pick her up after her exercise class.
Julian retreats deeper into his thoughts, daydreaming about bringing a black lawyer or professor home for dinner or about his mother becoming sick and requiring treatment from a black doctor. Though he would not want to give his mother a stroke, he fantasizes about bringing a black woman home and forcing his mother to accept her. Despite these fantasies, he remembers how he has failed to connect with the African Americans with whom he has struck up conversations in the past.
The bus stops again, and a stern-looking black woman boards with her young son in tow. Julian senses something familiar about her, but he doesn’t know why. The little boy clambers onto the seat next to Julian’s mother, while the black woman squeezes into the seat next to Julian. Julian’s mother likes all children regardless of race and smiles at the little boy. He then realizes with delight that the black woman seems so familiar because she wears the same ugly hat as his mother, and he hopes the coincidence will teach his mother a lesson. The black woman angrily calls out to her son, Carver, yanking him to her side. Julian’s mother tries to play peek-a-boo with the little boy, but the black woman ignores her and chastises her son instead.
Julian and the black woman both pull the signal cord at the same time to get off the bus. Julian realizes with horror that his mother will try to give Carver a nickel as she does with all little children. While they disembark, his mother searches through her purse but can find only a penny. Despite Julian’s warnings, his mother calls after Carver and tells him she has a shiny new penny for him. Carver’s mother explodes with rage, shouting “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” She swings her massive purse and knocks Julian’s mother down to the ground, then drags Carver away.
Julian berates his mother as he collects her items and pulls her up. Disoriented, she sways for a moment before stumbling off. Julian follows and lectures her, saying that she should learn from her encounter with the woman on the bus, who represents all African Americans and their distaste for condescending handouts. Reaching out to grab her arm, he sees a strange expression on her face. She tells him to call for Grandpa or her nurse, Caroline, to fetch her. Wresting herself from his grasp, she crumples to the pavement. Julian rushes to her and finds her face distorted, one eye rolling around and the other fixed on his face before finally closing. Julian starts to run for help but quickly returns to his mother’s side.
Note: “…their distaste for condescending handouts.” I laughed a lot at that.
Thus: The dispossessed WASP, having their nation stolen from the by the Jews, is reduced to being physically dominated and humiliated by their former slaves, the once proud WASP cowering before the Negro. To compensate, the WASP lashes out at the White ethnic (not depicted in this story of course, but the real life sequelae of the societal changes reflected in this story).
These examples of the racial anxiety genre should give us pause with respect to how relevant this is all to our current dilemma. The source of all of that anxiety is very clearly manifesting in our world; the fears actualized turn nightmare into reality.
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