Jared Taylor is the founder and editor of the American Renaissance website and monthly newsletter, offering news, reviews, and opinions from a race-realist perspective. AR‘s 2010 annual conference last February was sabotaged by leftists phoning in death threats to the conference hotel’s employees. Undaunted, Jared has scheduled the 2011 conference for this coming February 4-6 weekend at a to-be-announced location in Charlotte, NC. He kindly agreed to a Q&A with me ahead of the event.

Derb: Have you heard any rumblings from the group who sabotaged your 2010 conference?

Jared Taylor: Hardly any. In 2010, we publicly announced the venue, which gave the champions of “tolerance and diversity” months to gin up a campaign of intimidation. This time we will reveal the venue only 48 hours before the conference begins, so with no target to attack, the other side has lapsed into baffled silence.

The speakers at AR conferences are a respectable, well-educated, mild-mannered collection of writers and academics. (All male, I notice incidentally. Are there no female race realists?) Yet anyone can sign up to attend. The race topic notoriously attracts a lot of vicious and crazy people. Do you try to keep these types out? If not, how do you cope with them?

We have been holding AR conferences ever since 1994 and have established a certain (perhaps I flatter myself) elevated tone that discourages loonies. Gentlemen wear suits, ladies wear dresses, and the effect is like classical music at a shopping mall: It wards off undesirables. Readers of Takimag would find themselves quite at home.

It is true that all speakers heretofore have been men (though we have two mystery guests who remain sex-unspecified), but it is not by choice. Five years ago we invited Brigitte Bardot, who has been active in the movement to limit Muslim immigration to France. We have also invited Anke Vandermeersch, a prominent Flemish nationalist and former Miss Belgium, but both ladies, alas, sent their regrets.

Imagine that the US electorate were to be converted en masse to your views. How would public policy change?

First, there would be a return to the immigration policy that the nation had since its founding until the mischievous changes of 1965: one designed to keep the country majority-white.

Second, all anti-discrimination laws that apply to private citizens would be repealed. Governments and monopoly suppliers must not discriminate, but individuals should have the right to serve, patronize, and associate with the people of their choice. The government does not tell you whom you may or not marry; it has no more right to tell you whom you may or may not hire. A brilliantly irrefutable defense of this position, by the way, is Richard Epstein’s Forbidden Grounds, but like most subversive works, it sank without a bubble.

Third, illegal immigrants would all go home because there would be no jobs or handouts for them.

History suggests that the race topic may be too inflammatory to be openly aired without consequent disorder and violence. Isn’t there a Noble Lie argument to be made in favor of race denial, on better-safe-than-sorry grounds?

I see that even a professional truth-teller like you can take the Devil’s part when it suits you, but I oppose Noble Lies as a matter of principle”€”at least for anyone older than age seven or eight. Santa Claus and the baby stork are for unformed minds; adult opinion and government policy require a flinty-eyed view of the facts.

Take race and IQ: We do the country no favors by insisting that blacks are just as smart and hard-working as whites but are held back only by wicked whites. That only encourages blacks to hate whites, and many don’t need encouragement.

Plenty of whites think Asians are smarter than they are, certainly in math and science, but that doesn’t lead to the “disorder and violence” of your question. Let’s treat blacks like adults, not children. So long as they have some assurance they can rise to the level their individual talents permit, there will not be riots when it becomes widely accepted that a group average IQ of 85 will not produce the same group outcome as an average IQ of 100.

When that day comes, we will do away with this ghastly, bloated, futile national campaign to “close the gaps.” The country will get back to the business of improving everyone’s performance.

I once heard you say that when you speak to mixed-race audiences about race differences in IQ it’s the whites who yell and shake their fists at you. Blacks are more inclined to engage you with thoughtful questions. Why do you think that is (assuming I remember it correctly)?

Your recollection isn’t quite right. A small number of blacks start frothing when they hear the word “IQ,” but most don’t. Many see that they have broad opportunities and even enjoy certain preferences “€” yet, as a group, they are not succeeding. It’s just as reasonable for blacks as for whites to conclude that there must be differences in average ability.

In my experience”€”and I admit I didn’t anticipate this”€”most blacks are delighted to have a 100-percent honest conversation with a white man about race. Whites are always talking down to them, treating them like children or dangerous psychotics who must not be provoked. I am a refreshing and welcome change, and besides, I know a lot about this taboo topic, and blacks are just as fascinated by it as whites.

A lot of people who might otherwise be sympathetic to race realism are deterred by the whiff of anti-Semitism that seems to be present in all AR-style forums. Do you have the Jew thing? Does AR tolerate people who have it?

I’m not sure quite what an “AR-style” forum would be, since our conferences are unique, but we don’t screen people, because we don’t have to. AR‘s position on Jews is well-known: Jews have always been full participants in the work of race realism and have taken prominent roles in almost all of our events.

Hispanics now outnumber blacks in the USA, yet there has been surprisingly little black-Hispanic conflict”€”nothing beyond an occasional schoolyard or jailhouse rumble. I note that of the 38 members of the Congressional Black Caucus who voted on the DREAM Act, every single one voted Aye. Do you think the black-Hispanic alliance is stable, or will they turn on each other at some point?

I see that you will profit greatly from Chapters 2 and 3 of my forthcoming book, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century. There is a great deal of black-Hispanic conflict, but it tends to be reported only locally. As a sample, I will quote from a 2008 statement by Sheriff Lee Baca of Los Angeles:

We have a serious interracial violence problem in this county involving blacks and Latinos. Some people deny it….[but] some of L.A.‘s so-called gangs are really no more than loose-knit bands of blacks or Latinos roaming the streets looking for people of the other color to shoot.

“€”Lee Baca, “In L.A., race kills,”
Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2008

So why did blacks vote for the DREAM act? It is because they are just as out of touch with their constituents as white legislators. They are so fixated on whites as the enemy that they think anything that reduces white numbers and influence is good for blacks. They will wake up when Hispanic-majority city councils start changing the name of some of those Martin Luther King Boulevards to Cesar Chavez Street.