Notes on the History of White Acculturation

Last fall Terry Morris opened the question of “Assimilation or Acculturation?” Terry noted:

Assimilation means that the immigrants reject the culture of their homeland and adopt the culture of their new home. Acculturation means the very opposite; the host country and culture adapts itself to the cultural characteristics of the migrants. It can’t not destroy Western and American culture.

What [Linda] Chavez and her ilk are talking about when they say that immigrants assimilate naturally, is not assimilation at all. It is, to the contrary, acculturation of Western and American culture to alien cultures. What Chavez fails to recognize (for whatever reason) is that American culture has already been turned on its head due to multiculturalism’s demand that we acculturate, rather than that the aliens assimilate.

It should be obvious, I hope, that assimilation and acculturation are two words for the same thing, but working in opposite directions. To use an analogy, heating and cooling are two words for the same process (transfer of heat), but we use the term “heating” if the object we are interested in is receiving the heat from the surroundings, and “cooling” if the object is shedding the heat to the surroundings. Let’s use a generic word, say, “culture change”, to encompass both assimilation and acculturation. Both involve one group trying to conform to the norms of the other, so that it is possible for the two groups to have shared norms. Culture change comes in two forms. If the immigrant or minority group conforms, we call it assimilation; if the native or majority group conforms, we call it acculturation.

Much of our problem, I’d like to argue, is that for a considerable length of time, WASPs have had a tendency to acculturate rather than require their opposite numbers to assimilate. Think of those few areas of life where whites and blacks (and often Hispanics) tend to work together the best. These tend to also be the ones where blacks have had the most success, such as sports and entertainment. These are also the areas where the successful whites tend to act the most unlike how we normally expect whites to behave.

Think about basketball for a moment. Even those who don’t remember how basketball was played fifty years ago can see that it continues to become more and more of a contact sport. The difference even between today and twenty years ago is noticeable. Basketball has become very much a black-dominated sport over the same time period, and the number of fouls has increased dramatically, even though probably at least 80% of the fouls that would have been called fifty years ago, are now excused.

How can the members of a modern basketball team work together? I don’t have inside knowledge, but it would seem to be the same way most other mixed groups with a strong and capable black presence function. Whites, assuming that blacks are not going to adjust their habits to suit the whites, know that to make the team work better, the easiest choice they can make is to behave more like their black teammates. Having adjusted their behavior in such a way as to impress the blacks around them, they minimize personal conflicts with black teammates. The modern basketball team can be considered very much like the liberal model for society. To minimize conflict, groups that are flexible yield; groups that are inflexible demand their way.

I would argue that whites have been acculturating to black norms at least since the race revolution of the Sixties, if not before. Whites tend to be open and prepared to cooperate with as many people as possible — values that are reinforced by the economic system, capitalism, that has historically characterized whites more than any other people. Economists generally proclaim that discrimination is economically irrational, causing a discriminatory business to lose a potential market or source of labor to a non-discriminatory one. Discrimination is the way we demand assimilation; as Larry G. wrote at VFR:

Assimilation means abandoning your identity and adopting another identity so as to blend in to a majority culture. While some people will adopt another identity out of enthusiasm for a culture–the way many Japanese in Japan have fallen in love with Western culture–it generally requires force on the part of the majority culture to trigger the change. That force is “discrimination”. Discrimination against ethnic groups caused many families, including my own, to Americanize their names or even totally change them. It was the incentive to learn English and abandon any ethnic practices that would mark you as different. Discrimination was the flame beneath the melting pot, and in the 1960’s we turned off the fire. Anti-discrimination laws mean there is nothing to force assimilation, thus the original cultures immigrants bring with them do not disappear but become nuclei for ethnic and racial communities, eventually resulting in multiculturalism and multilingualism. The only way to guarantee assimilation and avoid the problems of ethnic fragmentation is to repeal anti-discrimination laws.

Game theorists often talk about situations such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where one can choose a “cooperative” or “individualistic” option. When people of two different cultures meet, each person can choose the cooperative option (don’t discriminate: defer to the norms of the other person’s culture) or the individualistic option (discriminate: insist on the norms of one’s own culture, even if it impairs the ability to reap the benefits of cooperation). For whites and Mexicans, for instance, the cooperative option could be “learn the language of the other people” and the individualistic option could be “don’t learn the other language”. Acculturation is the outcome in which whites cooperate (learn Spanish) and Mexicans hold out (don’t learn English). Assimilation would be the outcome in which whites hold out (refuse to use Spanish) and Mexicans cooperate (learn English). If Mexicans hold out and whites cooperate, Mexicans get the best deal (they didn’t have to learn another language, and they still get a job in America) and whites get the worst deal (investing the time and money to learn Spanish, and still possibly being snubbed in favor of a Mexican). If Mexicans cooperate and whites hold out, whites get the best deal (not having to learn Spanish, and retaining a language advantage) and Mexicans get the worst possible deal. If both cooperate or both hold out, then neither gets as much of a payoff as if they had taken advantage of the other, but each does better than if they had been taken advantage of.

For whites and blacks, the form of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might be more like using “gangsta” slang vs. formal English. A white person who wants to cooperate with blacks at all cost will speak “gangsta” in any situation where it might confer an advantage. Soon he will probably slip into speaking gangsta regardless of whose company he is keeping on a particular day. Soon gangsta will take over, and those few who insist on using English will be presumed “racists” who never want to cooperate with blacks. In the popular mind, “racism” is the only cause that could explain a choice that deliberately upsets the social peace (presuming that the black person is going to hold out for his “language”).

A more subtle example might be criticizing unwed motherhood. I’m sure a psychologist could easily do a study confirming that whites are more reluctant to criticize unwed motherhood when they are in the presence of nonwhites. Everyone knows that mathematically, group cohesion will rise if the group agrees upon something, and will drop if the group disagrees. If there are many blacks in the group, chances are much higher that there will be unwed mothers, who will defend their choice and cause most of the group to try to eliminate the threat to group cohesion by purging the critic of promiscuity. If there are no unwed mothers, or those who are find themselves embarrassed to speak of their situation, the critic will be praised and everyone will find it helpful to join in the chorus to avoid being left out.

My point is that whites have demonstrated a strong preference to acculturate to others’ norms for a considerable time, rather than forgo any benefit that might be had from “playing the other person’s game”. Acculturation is nothing new. Until we can change whites’ behavior substantially, we can expect that whites, placed in contact with some other group, are going to acculturate to the other group’s norms. I suspect whites’ malleability in this area was one reason that segregationists were so adamant about keeping the races separate. They knew that whites were easily seduced or intimidated into backing down from applying their own standards. They knew the particular weakness of white people, stemming in large part from the gentle loyalty curve brought upon us by our insistence on near-maximum outbreeding. They also knew that white culture might prove so demanding that whites would give up any hope of asking blacks to assimilate to white culture (sensing deep down that they were not genetically capable of it). We would equalize white and black rates of “passing the test” in the only way possible: by lowering the standards so low that no one could fail. That’s what we face. In the long run, we should reduce our willingness to acculturate; but in the short term, we should be sure to reduce the temptation to do so. The best way to do that is to maintain maximum separation from the other races.

For that matter, we also need to investigate the history of acculturation. I often think that faced with large-scale immigration from southern and eastern Europe during the Great Wave of immigration, WASPs may have acculturated a lot more than we realize. A major theme of some white nationalist writers has also been the way that some whites become “useful idiots” manipulated by Jewish-dominated movements. It’s not only blacks who we strive to resemble at times.