Our topic today is “Is race an important topic or a fiction?” And so, I’d like to begin our discussion of the concept of race with a reminder that historically race referred to ethnicity as well as physical characteristics. But before I do that I’d like to explain the difference between categories of the mind and categories of nature or reality by describing the biggest crisis to hit Indiana since the Civil War. I’m talking about the decision to put Indiana on daylight saving time:

On April 29, 2005, with heavy backing from Governor Mitch Daniels’ economic development plan, and after years of controversy, the Indiana General Assembly passed a law stating that, effective April 2, 2006, the entire state of Indiana would become the 48th state to observe daylight saving time.

What no one knew at the time is that Indiana had weathered a similar crisis in the 1970s by refusing to reset their clocks twice a year. The unsung heroine in the time change battle of the 1970s was a woman who called in to a talk show and opined that her lawn was already brown, and one more hour of sunlight would kill it completely. That argument carried the day in Indiana for almost 40 years, and it was in that woman’s honor that I wrote what is probably the only song in existence on Daylight Saving Time.
The more philosophically minded among you may have noticed that there is a flaw in her argument. She made a category mistake by confusing categories of nature or reality with categories of the mind.
In order to bring out the difference, I would like to ask the following question: does the legislature of the state of Indiana have the power to create a 25-hour day? The answer to that question is yes. Next question: will that 25-hour day have an adverse effect on a lawn that is already brown? The answer to that question is no, because any number of hours will never be anything but a category of the mind imposed on a category of nature, which is the daily rotation of the earth on its axis or, if, you’re a geocentrist, the rotation of the firmament around a stationary earth. The day is divided into 24 hours because 24 is divisible by more numbers than 25. It is next to impossible to divide a cake into 25 equally sized pieces, whereas it is relatively easy to divide it into 2, 4, 8, 16 or 32 pieces.
Next question, can the state of Indiana decree that there are 360 days in a year? The answer is no because the year, by which we mean the earth’s annual journey around the sun is a category of reality made up of a fixed number of rotations of the earth which the humane mind cannot change. The number 360 is also an eminently divisible number. Granting each month an equal number of days would simplify things considerably, but it would also have far-reaching, long-term consequences, like snow in July, which is why the year has to be 365 and ¼ days long.
What does all this have to do with race? Race, as we now understand the term, is a conflation of categories of reality and categories of the mind. I have been asked to defend the proposition that race is a fiction, as opposed to an “important reality.” Those of us who have studied philosophy will recognize that the topic of this debate is based on what philosophers would call a false dichotomy.
In order to demonstrate what I mean I would ask you to contemplate what I am now holding in my hand. It is a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. It is what you would call “a piece of fiction.” It is, in other words, real. Fiction, in other words, is not a fiction. If you think about characters like Hamlet or Shylock or Hester Prynne, the fact that we know their names after centuries and can write books about them, as I did when I wrote The Angel and the Machine, means that these fictions are in some sense more real than any Jew, prince, or Puritan lady you ever met in the real world even though they are categories of the mind and Shylock et al never existed as real people. Fiction in this instance means category of the mind, and that brings me to my thesis: race is a fiction, by which I mean that race category of the mind which gets imposed for political purposes. To be more specific, race, as we now understand the term, is a category of the mind which gets imposed on subject peoples as a form of marginalization and control.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), race refers to “a group of persons, animals, or plants, connected by common descent or origin. The offspring or posterity of a person; a set of children or descendants. A limited group of persons descended from a common ancestor; a house, family, kindred. A tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock.”
In Europe in the Middle Ages, everyone belonged to one “limited group of persons descended from a common ancestor” or another, but “the white race” was a completely unknown concept. The earliest example of a European author referring to fellow Europeans as ‘white people’ didn’t occur until 1613 when an African King in Thomas Middleton’s play The Triumphs of Truth looks out on an English audience and declares, “I see amazement set upon the faces/Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes.”2
When I refer to myself as bi-racial, meaning that I come from Irish and German stock, I am simply making use of what was once the accepted meaning of the term according to the OED, which defines race as “A group of several tribes or peoples, forming a distinct ethnical stock.” The OED goes on to list several examples. In 1774 Goldsmith wrote in his Natural History (Animal, xxxiii,) that “The second great variety in human species seems to be that of the Tartar race.” In 1842, Prichard wrote in his Natural History (“Man,” p. 150) that: “No two races of Men can be more strongly contrasted than were the ancient Egyptians and the Syro-Arabian races.” In 1868 in Heroes, Kingsley described “different tribes and peoples of the one great Hellenic race.” In 1883 Green wrote in his Conquest of England that “Courage was a heritage of the whole German race.”
The term “race” was also used to describe “One of the great divisions of mankind.” Race, in this instance meant “having certain physical peculiarities in common.” In 1861 Blumenbach grouped those “physical peculiarities” into “five races: 1st The Caucasian; 2nd The Mongolian; 3rd the Ethiopian; 4th the American; 5th the Malay.” But this was only one use of the term.
So what do we mean when we say that race is “real?” We mean that ethnicity has always been a category of reality. We also mean that physical characteristics are real and that they differ depending on what part of the planet you come from. The shape of your nose and the color of your skin are categories of reality. The virtues or vices associated with them, however, are categories of the mind, which get applied for political reasons.
So, to get back to our original example, does the fact that the 24-hour day is a category of the mind mean that there is no difference between night and day? No, of course not. The 24-hour day organizes night and day; it does not replace them. Similarly, categories like “the white race,” whether they are cited by Jared Taylor or Noel Ignatiev, mobilize biological characteristics for political purposes in a way that is independent of the characteristics themselves.
Had “the white race” been known in the Middle Ages, it would have been called a universal. A universal is something outside of nature which is brought to nature in order to organize nature and make it, as a result, comprehensible. Universals can also be used to weaponize nature for political purposes.
To give recent example of the manipulation of universals for political purposes, there is a group of people, and I happen to be one of them, who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. This is a category of reality. These people have real identities; they have names and addresses, and presumably all of them are registered voters, and if they’re not they should be.
Hillary Clinton, who lost that election, described this group of people as “a basket of deplorables.” Now what type of term is that? I think everyone here would agree that it is a weaponized category of the mind. More specifically “deplorables” is a word which describes a category of Hillary Clinton’s mind which has no relation to anything else but Hillary Clinton’s mind. Are those people deplorable? Only in Hillary Clinton’s mind. Deplorable is a category of the mind based on a category of nature. It is similar to the term feminism, another term which is based on a category of nature, namely, woman, but which has been weaponized for political purposes. This becomes apparent when we move from “women” to “women’s rights” and from “women’s rights” to abortion. By commandeering the term “woman,” which is a category of nature, feminists hope to coerce agreement to propositions which are nothing but categories of the mind.

The term “deplorable” is also a form of identity theft of the sort which took place last summer in St. Louis, when Umar Lee, who started off life as a white boy, became a Negro when he went to high school, and ended up as a Muslim, described the people who wanted to prevent the removal of the statue of St. Louis as “white supremacists.” When they gathered around the statue, that group of people could be seen praying the Rosary, which indicates that they were Catholics. If Lee had identified them as Catholics, however, he would have lost that battle. In fact, when I identified them as Catholics in an article in Culture Wars, he did lose the battle because Catholics still have rights and white supremacists don’t. “White supremacist” was a category of the mind, but Catholic was a category of reality.
Critical Race Theory is based on sociology; white racism is based on biology, but both ideologies are forms of identity theft which manipulate categories of the mind for political purposes. The only difference between these two groups is the value judgments which they place on the categories of white and black. In both instances, what began as a description of physical characteristics based on a category of nature gets magically transformed into a category of the mind whose purpose was to justify economic injustice. This is true of 17th century Virginia, where the planter class decided to divide the working class according to skin color, thereby ensuring a docile workforce in which working class whites were considered superior to working class blacks. And it is equally true of Critical Race Theory in the 21st century, which simultaneously reversed and maintained the original good/bad dichotomy based on “race” and used it as a justification for Affirmative Action, which is also a form of economic injustice.
If I asked everyone watching this debate if they were white, most would agree. But if I asked them if they were a Mzungu, I would probably get a different response. If you ask me if I am a Mzungu, I would have to say yes, but only when I am in east Africa, because Mzungu is the Swahili word for white guy. You’re a Lithuanian if you speak Lithuanian and/or live in Lithuania, but you’re not a Mzungu until you arrive in East Africa.
This, mutatis mutandis, is precisely what happened to Europeans when they emigrated to America. Before their arrival, they had no understanding of themselves as white, because both black and white, as categories of the mind, are dependent on geography and culture even though the features that make up our understanding are categories of nature which are independent of context. Because there were no black people in Lithuania, Lithuanians did not consider themselves white. In Vilnius, they were known as Lithuanians, but when Martin Luther King showed up in the Lithuanian neighborhood in Chicago known as Marquette Park, they became white, largely because they dared to oppose King’s attempt to take over their neighborhood. “White” is a category of the mind, which even then in 1966 had been weaponized to dehumanize the people it got applied to in order to defeat them in an undeclared war.
Unlike race, which is based on characteristics which are undeniably real but insignificant, ethnicity is a universal which is based on man’s most important characteristic, the one which distinguishes him from every other animal on earth, namely, language, which is the commonest manifestation of logos and the essence of…

[…] This is just an excerpt from the June 2021 Issue of Culture Wars magazine. To read the full article, please purchase a digital download of the magazine, or become a subscriber!

(Endnotes Available by Request)