March 2011, The Palingenisus Project, Long Beach, California, 15 pages, foreword

This is the new foreword to a seminal work by T. Lothrop Stoddard, the French Revolution in San Domingo. Stoddard’s work was dedicated to what he perceived, 100 years ago, as a looming worldwide race war. As a microcosm he chose to study the emergence of Haiti, as it was a worse-case scenario where a large black population completely exterminated a small white population. Professor MacDonald clears the century-old record throughout the first half of the essay by demonstrating that Stoddard was not a racist, and was indeed a liberal man of his time. In so doing MacDonald paints a quick picture of a world straight-jacketed by racial division; a world Stoddard was intent on understanding even as he labored within its prejudicial constraints.

The Professor does mention that Stoddard was a man of a different age who believed in what was then a cutting edge science, eugenics, the study of racial differences in people. The problem with reading Stoddard, and people of his age, is that they habitually confused race with culture. Stoddard was less guilty of this than the rest, seeking to expand the bounds of knowledge. It is not surprising to me that Stoddard believed that people of certain races were genetically programmed to behave differently as groups, and usually as individuals, for the world then believed that our behaviors where all genetically programmed and predetermined. What was shocking to me was that Professor MacDonald declares in his essay that people are separated by a ‘gargantuan fault line’ of race that he appears to think is unbridgeable.

MacDonald’s essay ranges to European philosophy and some fairly bizarre modern American examples of political and academic behavior. He ends the piece seemingly convinced that the remaining people of European descent are doomed to be exterminated by the descendents of the races their ancestors oppressed in the past. That seems to be his take on the Haiti genocide as a distant mirror from the past that might shed light on our tomorrow. Permit me, below, to draw my own parallels between the Haiti of 1789 where 40,000 whites terrorized 500,000 blacks, until the whole rancid mess imploded.

1700s, Haiti: the minority white population [just less than 10%] is responsible for virtually all interracial violent crime, the majority blacks live in fear of them

2000s, U.S.: the minority black population [10-11%] is responsible for virtually all interracial violent crime, the majority whites live in fear of them

1700s, Haiti: the chief executive is white

2000s, U.S.: the chief executive is black [Stoddard would have disagreed]

1700s, Haiti: a large portion of the white population does not work, but rather lives off of income derived from the work of blacks and others

2000s, U.S.: a large portion of the black population does not work, but rather lives off of income derived from the work of whites and others

1700s, Haiti: the black population was not increasing in proportion to the whites. Indeed the only portion of the population that was on the increase was the brown, mixed race portion

2000s, U.S.: the white population is not increasing in proportion to the black population. Indeed, the only portions of the population that are increasing are the brown, yellow, and mixed race population

According to this little parallel race-war indication exercise above, it seems to me that if there is such an event in the U.S., that, in order for it to mirror the situation in 1789 San Domingo, it would have to involve the majority white population slaughtering the minority black population. Rather than suggest that, why don’t I really go out on the limb here and disagree with the conservative scholars like MacDonald and the many more numerous liberal scholars, and suggest that people are naturally miserable creatures with a low-risk predatory mindset, that always have and will seek to demarcate in-group out-group boundaries for the purposes of exploitation and protection.

It would be simple enough to check the viability of this theory. Ask some Mexicans why they despise Salvadorans. Ask some Peruvians why they despise Mexicans. Poll some black Antiguans as to their lack of love for black Jamaicans. Or just ask me, a white man, why I have such a dislike for members of the two white separatist organizations that attempted to kill my cousin and myself, counter to the ‘raw biological power of race separating humans into mutually antagonistic groups’ cited by the Good Professor.

Despite my disagreement with his conclusion I commend Professor MacDonald for his generally well done and iconoclastic foreword to a book I have already found to be quite valuable in my continued quest to understand the human condition.