On Monday, Tucker Carlson delivered a 20-minute monologue roasting President Trump’s lackluster response to the riots. Of the police officers taking a knee in multiple cities, Carlson says, “Well, now we know who’s in charge anyway.” But when we watch police officers take a knee in front of rioters, we wonder Do they really feel the looting and rioting is justified? Or is it a strategic move because they are afraid and outnumbered?

This idea comes from this chapter of Lawrence Auster’s Our Borders, Ourselves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism. (This month’s book club read—join us!)

Excerpt here (emphasis ours):

Chapter 7 — Why White Americans Accept Their Own Destruction, Fear of Black Vengeance

What the above suggests [the previous chapter concludes with “…a liberal is a person who sees his way of life being destroyed and concludes that he deserves it”] is that white surrender is based not on race-blindness, but on the race-conscious perception that power ought to shift—and has already shifted—to nonwhites. A racial surrender, which was initiated out of guilt, has been continued out of fear.

Around the time the Bell Curve was published in 1994, I was speaking with an intelligent, conventionally liberal woman about the question of race and IQ, when she came out with a remark that astonished me: She said that lower intelligence not racial discrimination was the cause of blacks’ lower achievements. If she believed that, I asked, how could she keep voting for liberals who blame all of blacks’ problems on whites? She answered: “I suppose I just don’t like to think about it… I guess it’s irrational of me.” But just as I was thinking I had a chance to convert her from her lifelong attachment to the Democratic Party, she came out with this non sequitur: “But I’m very worried that the blacks are going to make terrible trouble in New York because they don’t like Mayor Giuliani.” The conversation came to a halt. I saw that what made her support liberal politicians was not a positive belief in the liberal dogma about blacks’ equal abilities and white guilt over keeping blacks down (views from which I had been trying to dissuade her), but something much more basic: fear of black violence. Her liberal politics had nothing to do with the truth or falsity of her liberal claims. She was simply afraid of blacks. And what argument could change that?

Auster notes that the conversation above took place in 1994, when The Bell Curve had just been published, but the Rodney King riots of 1992 were still fresh in the nation’s collective memory. He continued:

In a similar conversation, an editor at the liberal New York Newsday who had previously published an article of mine on immigration and had seemed sympathetic to some of my views, told me he was voting for David Dinkins against Rudolph Giuliani in the 1993 mayoral race. When I asked why, he said he was afraid blacks would riot if Dinkins lost.

The existence of such feelings, which rest below the surface in all too many whites, suggests that any efforts to refute their egalitarian beliefs will prove futile since their positions on race are simply their way of rationalizing white racial surrender. Their views are formed not by conviction but by fear.

Of course, it’s not simply a fear of blacks, it’s a fear of blacks that is deliberately planted in whites by the white liberal media elite who themselves experience that fear, as indicated by the Newsday editor I quoted above. A correspondent described this phenomenon to me in graphic terms:

There is no other explanation: The elite whites who actually run the country and the entire Western world are cowards who have sold out middle and lower class whites to buy peace for the duration of their own lives from the big, bad, black men who scare them to death… White media intentionally put on a show of cravenness in the face of such things. They broadcast multitudes of images of big, bad, dangerous blacks scaring the hell out of terrified and apologetic whites (Don’t hit me! It’s my fault! I know! What did I do?)

(See Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz self-consciously acknowledging his whiteness here after five days of rioting and looting in Minneapolis.)

…in order to create fear and despair among whites, and to encourage “black rage.” They always rush to dramatize white on black hate crimes, and ignore or justify those in the other direction).

Beyond the specific fear of black violence and black vengeance, there is the larger, amorphous anxiety induced by racial diversification. Whites know they are outnumbered. They are outnumbered in the world, they are outnumbered in many American cities, and, if present trends continue, in a few decades they will be outnumbered in America. Even whites who are disturbed by this prospect feel it is futile to resist it. To resist it means standing against the tide of history and the tide of public opinion. When resistance is not only futile but dangerous to your career and social life, it seems so much less painful to turn off your mind, go with the flow, and drift gently into that good night. Instead of concentrating our minds, the prospect of our collective demise is making us lose all mental concentration.

What do you think? Write to us at witan@vdare.com, and join the VDARE.com Book Club here.