Vox Day: Response To John C. Wright

Editor’s Note: Vox Day’s response can be found here.

John C. Wright says:

“Never. One is either born Japanese or not at all. America is different. It is a nation with the soul of a Church. A Church is an institution that one joins when one joins spiritually, that is, when one learns and loves the truths she holds as dogma. …”

Did you know America is different?

If America is so different, why did President Theodore Roosevelt negotiate the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907 with Japan that restricted Japanese immigration? Why was Japanese immigration to the United States banned altogether under the Immigration Act of 1924? Why did the Supreme Court rule in Ozawa v. United States in 1922 that the Japanese were ineligible to become naturalized US citizens? Why did the Supreme Court rule in Takuji Yamashita v. Hinkle in 1922 that the Washington Supreme Court was justified in ruling that the Japanese were not eligible to become naturalized US citizens? Why did the Supreme Court rule in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind in 1923 that high caste Hindu Indians were ineligible to become naturalized US citizens?

Here are some of California’s Jim Crow laws:

1866-1947: Segregation, voting [Statute] Enacted 17 Jim Crow laws between 1866 and 1947 in the areas of miscegenation (6) and education (2), employment (1) and a residential ordinance passed by the city of San Francisco that required all Chinese inhabitants to live in one area of the city. Similarly, a miscegenation law passed in 1901 broadened an 1850 law, adding that it was unlawful for white persons to marry “Mongolians.”

1870: Education [Statute] African and Indian children must attend separate schools. A separate school would be established upon the written request by the parents of ten such children. “A less number may be provided for in separate schools in any other manner.”

1872: Alcohol sales [Statute] Prohibited the sale of liquor to Indians. The act remained legal until its repeal in 1920.

1879: Voter rights [Constitution] “No native of China” would ever have the right to vote in the state of California. Repealed in 1926.

1879: Employment [Constitution] Prohibited public bodies from employing Chinese and called upon the legislature to protect “the state…from the burdens and evils arising from” their presence. A statewide anti-Chinese referendum was passed by 99.4 percent of voters in 1879.

1880: Miscegenation [Statute] Made it illegal for white persons to marry a “Negro, mulatto, or Mongolian.”

1890: Residential [City Ordinance] The city of San Francisco ordered all Chinese inhabitants to move into a certain area of the city within six months or face imprisonment. The Bingham Ordinance was later found to be unconstitutional by a federal court.

1891: Residential [Statute] Required all Chinese to carry with them at all times a “certificate of residence.” Without it, a Chinese immigrant could be arrested and jailed.

1894: Voter rights [Constitution] Any person who could not read the Constitution in English or write his name would be disfranchised. An advisory referendum indicated that nearly 80 percent of voters supported an educational requirement.

1901: Miscegenation [Statute] The 1850 law prohibiting marriage between white persons and Negroes or mulattoes was amended, adding “Mongolian.”

1909: Miscegenation [Statute] Persons of Japanese descent were added to the list of undesirable marriage partners of white Californians as noted in the earlier 1880 statute.

1913: Property [Statute] Known as the “Alien Land Laws,” Asian immigrants were prohibited from owning or leasing property. The California Supreme Court struck down the Alien Land Laws in 1952.

1931: Miscegenation [State Code] Prohibited marriages between persons of the Caucasian and Asian races.

1933: Miscegenation [Statute] Broadened earlier miscegenation statute to also prohibit marriages between whites and Malays.

1945: Miscegenation [Statute] Prohibited marriage between whites and “Negroes, mulattos, Mongolians and Malays.”

1947: Miscegenation [Statute] Subjected U.S. servicemen and Japanese women who wanted to marry to rigorous background checks. Barred the marriage of Japanese women to white servicemen if they were employed in undesirable occupations.

“America has a dogma. America is based on the proposition that all men are created equal. Anyone learning and loving that dogma, who comes here, is a candidate for becoming an American, and, upon legal naturalization, will be as much an American as the man whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.”

1.) President Thomas Jefferson wrote a book, Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he explained the concept of heritable racial differences. He was actually one of the pioneers of what is now called “scientific racism.” At the end of his life, he was still advocating the emancipation and deportation of the black population to tropical climes outside of the United States:

“Yet the day is not distant when it must bear and adopt it, or worse will follow. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers. If on the contrary it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up. We should in vain look for an example in the Spanish deportation or deletion of the Moors. This precedent would fall far short of our case.”
– President Thomas Jefferson, 1821

This is acknowledged on the Monticello website:

“Jefferson’s belief in the necessity of abolition was intertwined with his racial beliefs. He thought that white Americans and enslaved blacks constituted two “separate nations” who could not live together peacefully in the same country.14 Jefferson’s belief that blacks were racially inferior and “as incapable as children,”15 coupled with slaves’ presumed resentment of their former owners, made their removal from the United States an integral part of Jefferson’s emancipation scheme. Influenced by the Haitian Revolution and an aborted rebellion in Virginia in 1800, Jefferson believed that American slaves’ deportation—whether to Africa or the West Indies—was an essential followup to emancipation.”

2.) From the Naturalization Act of 1790 until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, whiteness was a necessary criterion to become eligible for US citizenship. This is why the state and federal courts ruled on the whiteness of the Japanese, Indians, Syrians, North Africans, etc. Congress passed dozens of naturalization laws which reaffirmed that whiteness was necessary to become an America. It wasn’t until the 1950s that this was changed.

Even in United States v. Sandoval in 1913, the Supreme Court ruled that “the people of the Pueblos, although sedentary rather than nomadic in their inclinations and disposed to peace and industry, are nevertheless Indians in race, culture, and domestic government … adhering to primitive modes of life, largely influenced by superstition and fetishism, and chiefly governed according to the crude customs inherited from their ancestors. They are essentially a simple, uninformed, and inferior people.” They were denied US citizenship.

3.) This is how the US State Department saw Haiti and Liberia a century ago:

“The experience of Liberia and Haiti show that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature. Of course, there are many exceptions to this racial weakness, but it is true of the mass, as we know from experience in this country. It is that which makes the negro problem practically unsolvable.”
– Secretary of State Robert Lansing, 1918

A century ago, President Woodrow Wilson segregated the federal government.

“The Left, in order to destroy this concept, wrote immigration laws and misinterpreted constitutional principles, to make it so that anyone with an anchor baby, or any relative, living here, could be welcomed here. This was done by enemies of American and is alien to our entire way of life.”

The real change here which was “alien to our entire way of life” was decoupling whiteness from Americanism. In 1912, for example, Texas restricted the right to own land to “members of the white race.” Indians didn’t gain the right to vote in New Mexico until Trujillo v. Garley in 1948.

“America is not a nation in the sense that nations in the Old World are. We are exceptional. We are a new concept.”

“American exceptionalism” is a concept that was popularized by Joseph Stalin in the late 1920s. This mythology that America is a raceless, cosmopolitan, proposition nation was created by the New York Intellectuals in the 1930s. It was popularized and mainstreamed over the next three decades.

“Why do I need to be explaining to you something we have both known since childhood?”

Just because you have been taught this since childhood doesn’t mean Americanism hasn’t changed over your lifetime. The concept of “racism,” for example, which we take for granted is the worst thing you can be in this society was introduced in the 1920s and popularized in the 1930s and 1940s.

“How can anyone American or not, who is aware of America, be unaware of how America works or what is the secret of our unparalleled success?”

The secret of our unparalleled success was that our European ancestors settled a virgin continent and pushed aside the nomadic and settled Indian tribes that were already here.

“Now, certain loudmouths on the Alt-Right heaps contempt on all these ideas, but never says anything that actually addresses or casts honest doubt on them. Aside from the emotion of scorn, there is no argument there. It is shouting, but no words underneath the noise.”

My response would be that these ideas are drawn from mainstream conservatism, which is a discourse which can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century, and that conservatism was heavily influenced by the ideas of the New York Intellectuals who redefined Americanism in between the Great Depression and Civil Rights Movement.