Studies. During what he calls a brief “vagabond” period that interrupted
both his undergraduate and later graduate college years, he traveled exten-
sively in West Africa learning about its people and improving his French
in Francophone regions of the continent. He is said to speak excellent
French. In the 1980s Taylor was the West Coast editor for PC Magazine
and worked as a business and finance consultant.1 Between 1978 and 1981
he worked as an international banker for Manufacturers Hanover Trust
Company in New York City. One could hardly imagine a background more
likely to turn a young man into a liberal, internationalist, cosmopolitan,
and defender of a globalist perspective.
Sometime in his early thirties, however, Taylor began to reassess the
cosmopolitan and liberal internationalist viewpoint that so many of the
people around him professed and that he had absorbed without serious
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reflection. We may all be children of God, and learning about cultures and
peoples different from one’s own can be life enriching, but Taylor came
to believe that a stubborn fact of human nature is that human beings are
tribal in their feelings and associations, and that they differ— often quite
substantially— in their talents, folkways, temperaments, and capacities for
different kinds of civilization. “The more one travels and really becomes
acquainted with people of different nations,” he would later write,
explaining his personal odyssey, “the more one begins to understand just
how different they actually are.”2 Much of these differences are the result
of differing cultural histories and differing patterns of social conditioning,
but in his later years Taylor came to believe that the differences also have a
large genetic component that is not easily changed. Reproductively isolated
continental populations (“races”) differ not just in their outward physical
features but also in many psychological and temperamental features as
well. Such differences, Taylor believes, can have profound effects on the
kinds of societies the different racial groups create.3
These new beliefs set Taylor apart not only from his earlier self but
from the dominant opinion among the European and American elites
with whom culturally, intellectually, and educationally he has so much
in common. His views are dismissed as wicked and dangerous with the
claim often made that they are the kinds of beliefs that led to slavery, the
Jim Crow system of segregation, and the racial views of the Nazis. Taylor
rejects these claims and believes much is to be gained from greater candor
and honesty in the public discussion of controversial racial issues. There
is often a contradiction, he claims, between what white elites and other
white people say in public and what they really believe; this state of affairs,
he contends, has prevented white- majority societies like the US from suc-
cessfully addressing their most pressing racial problems.4
White identitarianism and white racial advocacy
In November 1990 Taylor launched American Renaissance magazine,
which, together with its parent company, the New Century Foundation,
became the major vehicle for circulating his “identitarian” and “white ra-
cial advocacy” ideas. For more than twenty years American Renaissance
existed as a subscription- based monthly newsletter, ceasing publication in
its print format in 2012 to become a daily webzine that featured articles of
interest to white identitarians, most taken from other outlets, including
newspapers, periodicals, and other websites.
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139
From its inception, American Renaissance offered literate, highbrow,
and intelligently argued defenses of white racial advocacy and the view
that white people in America have legitimate racial interests in the same
way that black and Hispanic people do. The early newsletter typically
contained two or three extended feature articles, short descriptions of
current events which were generally ignored by the mainstream media
but likely to be of interest to white identitarians and white nationalists
(provocatively titled “O Tempora, O Mores!”), and a “letters to the editor”
column. Many of the early articles were written by Taylor himself, under
his own name or under several different pen names, and were intended
to put white racial advocacy on a higher intellectual plain than that of the
white skinheads and Klansmen who often dominated media images of
those speaking out on behalf of the racial interests of white people.
“Today in America, there are hundreds of organizations that speak
for blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and American Indians, but virtually no
one speaks for us,” Taylor proclaimed in the lead editorial of American
Renaissance’s first issue. White people, Taylor argued, have been engaging
in a kind of unilateral disarmament allowing other racial groups to or-
ganize in order to further their own racial interests while whites became
helpless victims of self- interested racial lobbies and racial pressure groups,
and the cowardly white liberals who give in to them. “While other racial
and ethnic groups work tirelessly to advance their group interests— often
at our expense— we alone,” he protested, “are not to think of ourselves as
a people with our own ideals and aspirations.”5 American Renaissance was
created to put an end to this, and since its inception Taylor has worked
tirelessly to further this goal.
Racial identity, Taylor says, is something that comes naturally to almost
all people, and there is nothing wrong or evil about this. “Members of a
race do not need objective reasons to prefer their own group,” he writes
in his book White Identity, published in 2011. “They prefer it because it
is theirs.”6 Taylor goes on to explain that preferences for one’s own race
need not imply hostility toward other races any more than a parent’s af-
fection for his own child implies hostility to the children of others. One’s
own children, however, must come first in the hierarchy of affection and
concern.
Black and Hispanic people understand all this, Taylor says, as seen in
blacks calling each other “brothers” and Latinos la raza (the race). White
people too understand this, Taylor claims, at least if they are judged by
how they act rather than by what they say. Whites, he notes, often leave
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long- established neighborhoods when the proportion of whites drops
below a certain comfort level— and when they move, it is usually to
neighborhoods or regions of the country where whites dominate.7 Whites
and nonwhites, Taylor says, differ only in that it is socially permissible for
the nonwhites to express preferences to live and interact primarily among
their own racial kind, but not for whites. When whites, he explains, do ex-
press feelings of racial solidarity akin to that of blacks and Hispanics, they
are often deno
unced in the harshest of terms. Taylor’s white racial advo-
cacy and white identitarianism is intended to open up space in America’s
public discourse where white people can express their true feelings about
themselves and their race without being demonized or penalized for
doing so.8
A related theme in Taylor’s writings is the importance of racial, lin-
guistic, and cultural homogeneity for a nation’s stability. “For a nation
to be a nation— and not just a crowd— it must,” he observed just before
the breakup of the Soviet Union, “consist of people that share the same
culture, language, history, and aspirations. It is in this sense that Norway,
France, and Japan are nations, and that the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia are
not.”9 From its inception and throughout the 1950s, America was a nation,
Taylor says, as it was fairly homogeneous in language and culture and had
an overwhelming white majority. The two historical exceptions to this ho-
mogeneity, he adds, were the Native Americans and the former African
slave population, members of whom were rarely accepted by the whites as
citizens or people like themselves.10
The ongoing challenge these groups have posed to the creation of
an integrated America, Taylor believes, confirms his fundamental claim
that for a nation’s internal harmony and stability, racial and ethnic di-
versity is a curse, not a blessing. “We’re all now more or less obliged to
say,” he writes, “ ‘Oh! Diversity is a wonderful thing for the country,’
whereas practically every example of tension, bloodshed, and civil un-
rest around the world is due [precisely to diversity].”11 He reasons from
this that America’s top priority today should be limiting— or ending—
all nonwhite immigration to American shores, which has increased
exponentially since the changes in the country’s immigration laws in
1965. Multiracial, multiethnic, multilinguistic societies are inherently
unstable and more conflict- ridden than more demographically ho-
mogeneous ones, Taylor believes, and a major goal of Taylor’s white
identitarian efforts is to get this idea widely circulated. It is an invid-
ious double standard, Taylor charges, when liberal intellectuals think it
14
Jared Taylor and White Identity
141
legitimate for nonwhite- majority countries like Japan to oppose massive
immigration that would fundamentally alter the demographics of their
nations, while denying the same choice to countries like the US where
whites have always been in the majority. Not surprisingly, in virtue of
Donald Trump’s strong immigration restrictionist stance during his
2016 presidential campaign, Taylor enthusiastically supported Trump,
even though he usually disliked the presidential candidates of both
major political parties.12
Group Differences: Japanese, Africans, Europeans, and Jews
In the 1980s, Jared Taylor became known as a “Japan expert” at a time
when much of the world was focused on the extraordinary rise of Japan
to economic dominance in Asia. Taylor published at this time Shadows
of the Rising Sun, a widely acclaimed book on Japanese culture, business
practices, and folkways. While highly critical of certain aspects of Japanese
culture—
especially its excessive conformism and rigid hierarchical
attitudes— Taylor left no doubt about his admiration for the Japanese and
the modern society they created after the Second World War. Indeed, he
saw Japanese society, which he had come to know so intimately, as su-
perior in many ways to other modern societies, and more successful in
solving most of the social problems that afflict America and the West.
“Japan has come the closest of any nation in the world to solving the
problems of crime, unemployment, inflation, and poverty,”13 he wrote in
1983, and his views have changed little in the decades since then. Japan’s
extraordinarily low crime rates, its stable political organizations, its high
standards of living, its success in international business, its high rates
of literacy, its outstanding transportation infrastructure, its high levels of
public health and long life expectancy, and its low levels of communal
strife and corruption— all these, Taylor says, are at least partially a conse-
quence of Japan’s racial and cultural homogeneity.14
“Linguistically, culturally, and racially, Japan is homogeneous,”
Taylor writes, and as a result it is spared a host of problems that trouble
America. Since there is only one race there is no racism, he says, and
no need for quota- hiring schemes, antidiscrimination laws, multicultural
curriculums, bilingual education, court- ordered busing, racial preferences
in universities, or the tyrannies of political correctness. And the Japanese
know, he writes, “that an American- style immigration policy would change
everything. They want Japan to remain Japanese.”15
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After completing Shadows of the Rising Sun Taylor came to believe
that while racial and cultural homogeneity, along with a generally ac-
cepted moral code encouraging dedication to the common good, were im-
portant factors in Japan’s postwar success story, there was much more
to Japan’s success story than these factors, critically important though
they were. Foremost among the missing pieces to the puzzle, he came
to believe, were genes. Starting in the mid- 1980s, Taylor began to take
a keen interest in the developing fields of evolutionary biology and ev-
olutionary psychology, especially in the work of three controversial aca-
demic psychologists: Richard Lynn (University of Exeter and University
of Ulster, United Kingdom), J. Philippe Rushton (University of Western
Ontario, Canada), and Helmuth Nyborg (University of Aarhus, Denmark).
Each of these would later be invited to speak at one of his American
Renaissance conferences. All three believe that as modern Homo sapiens
ventured forth out of Africa perhaps sixty or seventy thousand years ago,
they encountered challenges to survival and reproduction much more cog-
nitively demanding than life on the warm African savannah. The colder
climates of more northerly latitudes, where year- round plant foods were
no longer available, placed a premium on the ability to delay gratification,
to plan for a more distant future structured by extreme seasonal weather
changes, to develop thermally efficient clothing and shelters, and to de-
velop cooperative techniques for taking down large land animals for food.
These ecological challenges, they contend, had the effect of winnowing
out those of lesser cognitive capacities, future planning abilities, and the
ability to delay gratification. Those who survived these more challenging
environments passed on to their progeny the superior genes that enabled
them to succeed in the struggle for life.16
Taylor came to believe that this “cold- and- variable- climate” hypothesis
explains why Northern Asians, including the Japanese, have higher IQs
than Southern Asians a
nd most European populations. It also explains,
he believes, why African populations and their New World descendants—
most of whose ancestors were never subjected to the more cognitively
challenging environments of northern climes— lag so far behind both
Northern Asians and Europeans on such measures as IQ scores, eco-
nomic and scientific achievement, general economic development, and
the capacity for long- range planning. There may be other factors involved
in the difficulties African populations have in creating technologically
advanced civilizations, Taylor acknowledges, but evolutionary genetics,
he insists, is a big part of the story. The same is true, he believes, for
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143
the relative technological backwardness of Middle Eastern and South
American populations, though their general intelligence is usually placed
by the IQ sources Taylor relies upon considerably higher than that of Sub-
Saharan Africans.17
None of Taylor’s claims have proven more incendiary— especially to
liberal audiences— than these. But Taylor defends himself against charges
of white racial chauvinism or white supremacism. While he believes
Europeans may have a larger proportion of creative geniuses than Asians
(for reasons not entirely understood), he insists that they are clearly not
the smartest people on the planet in terms of what the psychometricians
call “g” or general intelligence. The rapid advance of Asian American
students at the most selective US universities, Taylor believes, partially
reflects this superiority. “I think Asians are objectively superior to whites
by just about any measure that you can come up with in terms of what
are the ingredients for a successful society,” he once said in an inter-
view.18 Taylor also seems to believe— although he hasn’t spoken about this
nearly as much as he has spoken about Asians— that the Ashkenazic Jews
stand at the top of the intelligence pecking order, above both whites and
Northern Asians. All of the academic psychologists who have influenced
his thinking report the IQs of the Ashkenazim above that of any other
ethnic group and believe superior intelligence explains the outstanding
Jewish achievement in such cognitively demanding fields as mathematics,
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right Page 25
