Alt-Right and "race realism" taken with a dose of history

The Diane Rehm show had a terrific discussion about race and immigration this week.  You can find it here.  Of particular interest to me is the conversation began by Jared Taylor, editor of American Renaissance magazine, a self-described "race-realist, white advocacy organization".  This particular exchange, early in the conversation, is particularly revealing:

REHM
Help me to understand what the term race realism means.

TAYLOR
Well, this has to do with the central element that does unite the alt-right. Among the many positions held by the alt-right, we reject the notion that race is some sort of sociological optical illusion. Race is a biological fact, whether we wish to recognize that or not, and we completely reject the idea that all races are exactly equal and equivalent and in effect interchangeable. 

TAYLOR
It's obvious that if a nation goes through substantial racial demographic change, many aspects of it will change, and a majority has the right to remain a majority. This is taken for granted in all non-white countries. You would never expect the Japanese or the Nigerians or the Mexicans to countenance some kind of immigration or other program that reduced them to a minority within a period of decades. They would laugh at it. 

REHM
Of course the United States has, from its very beginnings, taken in far more of a variety of races, some voluntarily and some otherwise. 

TAYLOR
Yes, but the very first immigration law established in 1790 by the very first Congress of the United States, when these fellows were sitting around trying to decide what sort of nation they are going to be, the very first naturalization law was going to restrict naturalizations to free, white persons of good character. 

REHM
And that's how you'd like to keep it. Is that correct? 

TAYLOR
Nations have a right to maintain some kind of cultural, racial and historical homogeneity, yes indeed. Furthermore we had an immigration policy, up until 1965, that was explicitly designed to keep the nation majority European. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this. The United States, people like to call it the American experiment. I don't like to think of my country as an experiment, a bunch of chemicals sitting over a Bunsen burner. 

TAYLOR
We have not suspended the laws of human nature in the United States of America. We are a nation like any other, and the extent to which we lose any kind of cultural, racial homogeneity, the extent that we become a multi-culti mishmash, we will become an ungovernable place...

This is breathtakingly refreshing.  It is a testament to Diane Rehm and her wonderful show.  I am particularly intrigued by Mr. Taylor’s gloss on the past.

Mr. Taylor argues that the white majority has a “right” to remain a majority.  Diane Rehm pushes back, and rightly so: the US has admitted a multitude of races and nationalities from the beginning of the country, “some voluntarily and some otherwise.” Taylor responds with the 1790 Naturalization Act, which reserved U.S. citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.”  Mr. Taylor appears to read this language as a hardened racial classification.  One need not do so, of course; instead, this language could reflect a racialized baseline that accounted for the reality of slavery as it existed in the late 18^th Century.  In other words, the language of “free white person” is simply to draw a line between black people and everyone else.

Note that this second reading is much kinder to the founding generation and their conflicted views about race.  In contrast, Mr. Taylor’s reading sides with Dred Scott and the reading of our founding generation as racist and white supremacist.  He further ascribes this view to subsequent generations, up to 1965 and the Immigration and Nationality Act, which replaced the national origins quota system with a preference system.

So there you have it.  Mr. Taylor is essentially calling into question the First Reconstruction, which overruled Dred Scott and extended rights of citizenship to the former slaves, and the Second Reconstruction, which continued the earlier struggle.  Mr. Taylor objects to racial progress, diversity and multiculturalism.  He objects to the very things that many of us see as what makes the United States an exceptional country. 

More generally, what I find most interesting about Mr. Taylor’s views is how he deploys history and his reading of our shared past in order to tell a story of where we should be as a nation.  But of course, Mr. Taylor is telling you the story he wants you to hear.  I wonder what he would say, for example, about the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and its treatment of those living in the annexed Mexican territory.  I also wonder how he would fit Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood within his narrative, or the 1917 Jones Act, which extended US citizenship to the people of Puerto Rico, or the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, which conferred US citizenship to American Indians born in the US.  Or the McCarran Walter Act of 1952, which removed race as an exclusionary category in immigration.

I imagine he would revert back to his view of the founding generation as racist and white supremacist.

Refreshing indeed.