White and Woke Supremacy

The forgotten white supremacists whose descendants pretend to be woke and virtuous.   

Below are vile, racist comments spoken by white supremacists about minorities. The supremacists and minorities will be identified after the comments.

These races have “crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws, and low foreheads.”

They “lack the conveniences for thinking” and are “a degenerate class.”

They are “uncleanly, intemperate, quarrelsome, ignorant, and hard on women and children.”

The distinctive shape of their nose arises from “the habitual use of the quadratus muscle, the muscle of disgust, contempt, and disdain, which lead to scorn, acknowledging guilt.”

They are “vast masses of filth.”

We are imperiled by “multitudes of men of the lowest class, men out of the ranks where there was neither skill nor energy, nor any initiative of quick intelligence.”

The “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of low mentality clearly belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.”

Note: The source of the above and much of what follows is the outstanding book, The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent.

Clearly, the foregoing disgusting comments were said by Southern rednecks and right-wing extremists. Just as clearly, they were said about African Americans, Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans, and other minorities of color. And they were spoken in the dark recesses of the internet.

Wrong, wrong, wrong!

The comments were uttered in the early twentieth century and beyond by New England intellectuals, academics, politicians, and other members of high society—all of whom were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, most of whom were progressives, and many of whom claimed that their lineage went back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The comments were about Jews, Catholics, eastern Europeans, and southern Europeans, especially Italians—all of whom were seen as non-white and genetically inferior.

Such comments were published and/or praised by leading publications and universities. The publications included the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Review, the Saturday Evening Post, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, and the American Economic Review. The universities included Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern, and Carnegie Mellon. Even the American Museum of Natural History joined the bandwagon.

Leading politicians and influencers also agreed with the sentiments, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge, Eleanor Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Charles Scribner of publishing fame, and J.H. Kellogg of cereal fame. Others included Walter Lippmann, the famous journalist and founder of the New Republic; and Mary Harriman, the wealthiest woman in America, who had inherited her wealth from her father, E.H. Harriman, the baron of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroads.

Supremacist thinking was especially rife in the early decades of the twentieth century but also extended into later decades. For example, Look Magazine, which was a popular and widely circulated periodical, wrote that baseball great Joe DiMaggio was not a typical Italian, in that he didn’t reek of garlic and put bear grease on his hair. Another baseball great, Yogi Berra, was compared to an ape in appearance.

Incidentally, my dad and uncle grew up with Yogi in the Italian section of St. Louis, which was known as Dago Hill when I was a kid.

Return to the early twentieth century, the Breeders Association was an influential organization at the time. Its mission was not to breed better dogs but to breed better people—namely, people who were like WASPs and not people who were like Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Greeks, and so on. The organization dovetailed with the eugenics movement.

This was white supremacy for sure, or more accurately, WASP supremacy.

Another WASP supremacist was Madison Grant, the author of a popular book, The Passing of the Great Race. The book’s theme was that Americans of Nordic blood were being overrun by the “barbaric blood” of non-Nordics.

The San Francisco Chronicle said that Grant was “a thoroughly qualified ethnologist.” The Nation editorialized that his book gave “a historical concept of truths of racial evolution which as a whole is unanswerable.” The New York Times featured the book over two pages of its Sunday magazine. The National Research Council honored Grant with an appointment to its Anthropology Committee, and he was lauded by the Association for the Advancement of Science.

Another book of the same genre was Applied Eugenics, which became a leading textbook that went through four printings in six years. Its authors, diehard progressives, wrote that suitable eugenic material couldn’t be found in the “fecund stocks” of people marked by “illiteracy, squalor and tuberculosis, their high death rates, their economic straits.”

The epitome of white supremacy was William Earl Dodge, a Manhattanite, heir to three large fortunes, and breeder of horses. He authored the book, The Right to Be Well Born, which, among other supremacist themes, contended that the lower classes should have their own registry, like Clydesdales, so that potential mates could see where each other ranked on a eugenics scale.

Today, many of the descendants of the foregoing white supremacists are no doubt privileged, progressive, and well-off, having used their inherited advantages to become leaders in business, academia, the arts, and government. They are also probably woke, due to knowing their ancestral history and feeling guilty about it. As such, they embrace critical race theory, diversity and inclusion initiatives for non-whites, as well as reeducation workshops in which white students and white corporate employees are forced to confront their privilege and subconscious racism—inanities that don’t affect the privileged progeny of white supremacists, because, from their lofty heights, they are above the fray.

It’s a double travesty that the progeny are projecting their guilt and penance on the descendants of those who suffered at the hands of the progeny’s forebears. And to make it worse, today’s media, academia, and industry let them get by with it.