Dear T,
Indians from India (henceforth: Indians) are a completely different story. With the exception of northern Asians such as the Japanese, no people on the planet have ever been more polite, or gentle, or accomplished in my experience: the women aren't loudmouths, or slutty; the men project a sense of professionalism and honest-dealing, and the idea of anyone hating or menacing these saints is incomprehensible to me, almost completely. They dress themselves respectably, reflect good will when it's given to them, and none of them bat an eye if you call them "brother." Well, not the men, anyway.
Let me be clear here: when I say Indians I mean from India. Of the so-called "Native Americans" I know little, except what I read in the papers -- which is to say, an assortment of liberal puff pieces which backfire and make Natives look criminal, corny, petty, and stupid. I've known two or three "Natives" pretty well, one of whom was an angel and the other two drunks and liberals and scoundrels, but I refuse to make these several a model for the whole. Their whole gamut of tribes, races, religions, and tongues is a mystery to me, and likely to remain so -- Black Elk Speaks is one of the only books I've ever read on them, and the "correct" opinion about them, that they're environmentalist sages and peaceniks, is absolutely unbelievable to me in every way. I'm keeping a blank slate for them to be written on by them -- not what they say about themselves or what the media says about them, but what they make themselves appear to me. Hopefully better than what I hear from the Alaskans.
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| Get a load of this confidence |
This, I admit, has always been a mystery to me. How is it that any group of people could be so full of winners? I've seen almost everyone else and the results of my findings are mixed -- at best. My own nation, a nation of a so-called "white majority,"* is filled maybe 30-60% with traitors, loafers, looters, half-wits, cowards, ignoramuses, degenerates, whiners, trailer trash, skanks, racist anti-racists, and a whole host of labels I'd rather not get into, but which fit us all too easily. The Mexicans are keeping up with us but fatter, God bless them, and there's no need to get into the blacks. It seems every race is Yin and Yang except the Asians and the Indians. And the Asians haven't been able to hide from me entirely: I'm well aware they have a redneck problem, but they haven't been able to get to us here. At least not yet.
What makes the Indians so miraculous is the fact that they were ground absolutely into the dust and still retain such dignity. First they were abused by their Mughals -- cruel, worthless emperors who hoarded the women and murdered and tortured and taxed their underlings into submission: not great men, but worthless men born into great power. Or maybe the great power made them all worthless. Then the Mughal empire began to collapse and barbarians made their incursions, not unlike the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Then the English came, beat the French in a quick fight for control of the region (read Macaulay's essay on Clive), and quickly found ways to pillage their victims (see Burke's depressing speeches against Hastings).
Once word got out that the wealth of India was a free-for-all, the worst of the British swooped in. It was so easy to bully the men and steal the women that suddenly some "Christians" were bragging about being polygamists, and the worst of the rednecks, heading off like pirates for plunder, were coming back years later as parvenus -- a widely envied lot known as "Nabobs" who got rich at the expense of the innocent, and had absolutely no talent or virtue to deserve it. Americans complain today that soldiers and teachers are paid worse than football players. But imagine being a business owner in 18th century England, and barely scraping by by your hard work and know-how, and seeing some scoundrel come back from India rich as a Pajah, and knowing it was because he screwed everybody. Bribes, threats, and corruption of the law made British citizens rich fast, and once the word spread, the most heartless and rotten spread themselves into India.
So here lies the question: how is it that a people so ground down for hundreds of years are able to produce, and keep producing, such talent? Isabel Wilkerson, in her must-read book Caste, admits in some sense it's because they'd been grinding themselves down for millennia. The caste system, which allotted you a place in life based on your family, and then said you were born there because you deserved it, placed some of them at the top and some of them at the bottom -- so far towards the bottom, in fact, that the Dalits were forced to call out in the streets so the Brahmin upper classes could stay far away from them; and if so much as a Dalit shadow fell on a Brahmin's foot, the Brahmin would have to clean himself in a religious ceremony. Seems a bit much, but how hard is it to clean off a shadow? Better to get help from the gods.
The downside of this horrible system is you might get born to the bottom. But what about the people on top? The people at the top had instant self-esteem: they were born for command -- the religious scholars and philosophers -- and were thus the most cultivated and manicured in life, while many others were condemned to pilfering garbage cans and dealing with sewage. In many ways the system is still in place. I'm told a Dalit isn't usually taken seriously in positions of power, that you can recognize them by their bearing, that they have a hard time squeezing a word in when a Brahmin is speaking ex-cathedra, and that a conversation between two Indians almost always involves trying to sniff out one's jati, or, one's place in the caste scheme. (How true is all of this? Some of it undoubtedly, but whether this is universally Indian is anyone's guess. In America we have George Floyd and Thomas Sowell, a scoundrel and a straight-laced genius, and Sowell's perspective is almost always buried for George Floyd's).
This I believe is the key to my question. Wilkerson says in Caste that, so far from following the Statue of Liberty's stupid dictate, that we're a dumping ground for the world's rednecks and derelicts, India only gave us her best: Wilkerson says as little as 3% of the immigrants we get from India are Dalits, which means we get a disproportionate number of their upper and middle classes. If they have money to move and want to ruin their children, America's doors are relatively open -- unlike Central and South America and these days even Haiti, where all you need to become an American is a criminal record. 200,000 of the third-world's poor break through our border every month, and I doubt this will give anyone a better opinion of Hispanics**.
Yours,
-J
*Politically, there is no "white majority," and there hasn't been for my whole life. In fact, at least half of eligible white voters and their elected representatives are morally, intellectually, and spiritually incapable of voting in the "white interest." They're not only incapable of it, but openly against it, and most likely to undermine it. Except now what's known to be openly beneficial to whites is openly beneficial to the beautiful, to the competent, to the brilliant, to the cultured of all races -- in other words, to undermine so-called "white supremacy" in the United States means to throw away every form of meritocracy, and to sink the whole ship in order to save spoiled cargo. New York is booting high-achieving Asians out of their best schools to make room for low-achieving black kids. Oregon just threw their testing standards away altogether. How could this be good for anyone?
Leftists like to argue that affirmative action, so far from being new, has been in place for centuries here, and that the great difference between now and then is that back then it was used to promote lousy whites. This is certainly true in cases where blacks were better choices than whites, and I insist a total injustice in general. But the problem with affirmative action today isn't just the injustice of it, but the math. In a society that's 80% white, you can still have exceptionalism because you're still competing with 80%. Most positions in this case would have most competitors fighting for them. But when 13% of the public -- and the part of the public most poor, most starved for education, most statistically criminal -- is forced into promotion in 80% of the jobs and institutions? You're not headed for equality. You're headed for disaster.
**Regarding a nasty perspective, I have a left-wing British friend who absolutely misunderstands American racial politics. Mostly because he lacks empathy. He described Indians when he visited India as "the worst people in the world" -- always looking to mug or swindle him, and lacking class in general. I refuse to downplay his perspective, as it was based on his experience: I just wish that he'd had mine instead, and that if he could imagine having a negative opinion about British interracial experiences, he could have enough imagination and empathy to believe ours.
Every nation on earth has an underclass, locked in by their manners, their beauty standards, their levels of education, and their bearing. Wilkerson is a dark mirror to Jordan B Peterson here, and while he talks about the hierarchy of lobsters, and how both lobsters and humans with good posture are taken for dominant, Wilkerson talks about wolves -- how every pack has an underdog "omega," and it gets to eat last, and is constantly picked on -- and is mourned loudly and for a long time when it dies. Why? Because she argues that without an absolute and official bottom, nobody knows where they stand, and they worry they can sink there any minute.
She posits, brilliantly, I think, that the repositioning of our official bottom class is the reason white death rates have gone up. The news calls them "deaths of despair," and they usually result from drinking yourself to death, or choking on fentanyl, or blowing your brains out, or eating yourself into a heart attack. It makes sense to me. For centuries, no matter how low you got, at least you were still white. Even if you were poor, or stupid, or ugly, or just worthless in general, the white people thought that if a black person was on your side of the street, he'd have to move somewhere else -- a rotten system that lingers to this day, especially in the South. And as it disappears, it reminds people that God is watching, and he's weighing, and no matter what barriers were in place for how long, propping you up despite your own failures, there is a bottom, and you are becoming it. Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin.
My dream has never been that all the people of all the races will live together in harmony. It's that the best people of all the races, the peacemakers, the straight-thinkers, the hard workers, the patient, the understanding, the honest, the open-minded, the true lovers and the best warriors, will recognize one another across every artificial line the world has set for us, that we'll fight for each other, and that the refuse of humanity will be kept in line beneath us.
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Multiple good thoughts here. Better if not bundled together.
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