SolarGeneral Proudly Presents...
...by Dr. Robert S. Griffin
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To understand what Pierce has to say about the sexes— or anything else for that matter— his fundamental frame of reference has to be kept in mind. Pierce is first and foremost a racialist. He looks at the world through the lens of race; everything he says and does is grounded there. Pierce's concern as a racialist is with the history and current and future well-being of the white race in general and white Americans or, another term, European-Americans in particular. Whether or not he is misguided in the directions he takes, there is little doubt about Pierce's commitment to serve his race while he still has life in him; that is what William Pierce is about. I have never encountered anyone who is as focused in his life, as directed, as single-minded, as Pierce is in his. All to say, race is Pierce's context— and for all practical purposes his only context— and thus when he deals with matters related to men and women, the topic of this chapter, as with everything else, he does so from a racial angle.
Pierce's racial lens stands in stark contrast to the one typically used to view matters in this area: the one which has been established by modern feminism over the past almost-four decades. (I mark the advent of modern feminism with the publication in 1963 of the seminal book by Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique. 1 ) Modern feminism's fundamental unit of concern, of course, is not with race but rather with gender, and more particularly with the circumstance of women in contemporary society. It is a women's movement, not a racial movement.
In fact, feminism has effectively appropriated the term gender. That is, for most people, ‘gender'— which strictly speaking refers to both men and women— has come to mean women. These days, when people are informed that there will be a discussion of “gender issues,” they will naturally assume that it will be about women. If men are considered at all, it would be reasonable to think that it will be in terms of their relationship to women, e.g., how they have impeded or furthered women's progress in achieving fulfilling and productive lives in this society. Another illustration, one assumes that gender studies programs in university are women's studies in the first instance and that they are under the control of women and taught by them, not that they are studies of women and men equally and under the control of women and men and taught by them both. The point is that it is a women's movement, not a women-and-men's movement.
In contrast to a feminist-influenced orientation, Pierce focuses on both men and women as part of the larger whole of race. And we're talking about white men and women here. Pierce leaves it to other races to look out for themselves— which he believes they are in fact doing, and doing it better than whites are. Pierce sees other races as busily looking out for their own interests without the least bit of concern for how whites are faring, while guilt-ridden and do-gooder whites support their efforts and pay no mind to the fate of their own people. To Pierce's way of thinking, white men and women cannot be and should not be thought of as separate entities, and certainly they should not be seen as competing, antagonistic groups in the way he believes the feminist perspective portrays them. Rather, as Pierce looks at it, white men and women are parts of a larger reality, a living organism of sorts: their race. From Pierce's perspective, men and women can only be understood if their relationship to the survival and development of their race— this larger process, this larger reality— is the primary concern. Race and not gender must be the focus, insists Pierce. Men and women, at least if one accepts Pierce's line of thought, must above all else seek harmoniously and effectively to complement and support one another in carrying out their real purpose in life, a purpose they share and which is more important, more fundamental, more significant, than the fate of their individual lives or of their sex as a whole, and that is to ensure the existence and improve the state of their kind on this earth.
From Pierce's evolutionary perspective, he sees the white race, whether it realizes it or not, as being in a struggle to maintain and enhance itself. In order for the white race to do this effectively it must be strong, tough, protective, fierce, and rigorously rational— that is how Pierce looks at it. In a masculine-feminine dichotomy Pierce uses as a frame of reference, he associates the qualities just listed, toughness and strength and so on, with the masculine. While Pierce believes that both masculinity and femininity as he defines them are necessary to the welfare of the white race, he believes it particularly debilitating to his people if they lose their masculine character. It is this outlook that has led Pierce to give a great deal of attention to masculinity and men. In fact, Pierce shines the spotlight on men more than on women, and that in itself is a reversal of a pattern that has prevailed in recent times. Within that focus, he is particularly concerned with the ways boys are raised and the kind of men they become as a result.
As for the raising of girls, Pierce has made it clear that he finds it unfortunate that girls are no longer being brought up to be mothers and homemakers but rather to become what he views as self-indulgent careerists. Beyond making this general point, however, Pierce hasn't given attention to the particulars of the ways girls are being brought up to the extent that he has with boys. With girls, it is more a matter of his offering comments and anecdotes here and there about what he sees going on with them. Almost always these remarks are referenced in Pierce's bottom-line concern: whether white girls someday will bring white children into the world and nurture them well and thereby contribute to the survival of the race and the achievement of what he believes to be its glorious destiny. For Pierce, it all comes down to that.
Another break in the prevailing pattern, Pierce's racialist orientation has led him to call attention to the state of marriage in contemporary times, with a special emphasis on how it is carrying out its childbearing and childraising functions. To Pierce, marriage is the institution that perpetuates the race. In Pierce's eyes, the marriage unit— father, mother, children— represents no less than the future of the race. Without healthy marriages, Pierce is convinced, there cannot be a healthy society or a healthy race. If marriages are sick, the society will be sick and the race will be sick and perhaps even perish; that is how Pierce looks at it. For Pierce, to talk about marriage is to talk about racial life and death.
I think it fair to say that the institution of marriage with an emphasis on its childbearing and childraising functions has not been as prominent in modern feminist thought and action as have been concerns for the personal fulfillment of women, solidarity among women, and the entry of women into the economic and political arenas of society. This is, of course, not to say that feminists don't care about families— they do. But it is to suggest that a concern for the nuclear family and advocacy directed at maintaining it have not been a central focus within the contemporary women's movement.
Pierce's racialist orientation shifts the concern relative to childbearing. Today, discussion tends to center around a woman's freedom to decide whether or not to bear a child— the abortion debate. Pierce, in contrast, zeroes in on what kind of child a woman bears. His concern is with whether a white woman gives birth to a white child or one of mixed race and with the quality of that child. He approaches the family planning issue not so much from the question of how many children are brought into the world but rather how good they are. This orientation has lead him to advocate eugenics as a social policy. Eugenics is the attempt to improve the quality of a population by managing who has children and with whom and in what numbers. I talked to Pierce about his thinking in this regard.
"I think that the white society that emerges from the chaos following the collapse of this society really needs to erect eugenics as one of the fundamental pillars in the new order,” Pierce told me. "It's going to have to try to undo some of the damage thousands of years of dysgenic [harmful breeding] practices have done. We are going to have to decide what qualities we want our descendants to have and then select for those qualities.
“You hear this argument: ‘But you are playing God. What makes you think you know that it is better to have this kind of people than that kind of people?' Well, in a certain sense somebody always makes the decision of what the quality of future human beings will be, whether or not they realize it or acknowledge it. As for me, I have a hard time believing that leaving something as important as that to the system we have now— which is pretty close to chance— is better than making a rational decision about what we want and then trying to achieve it.
"Back in the Stone Age, let's say, nature was very selective. We lived a much more rigorous life back then, both as individuals and as communities. We had to do things right or we didn't survive. Nature didn't tolerate many screw-ups, and that tended to push us up the evolutionary path. Human beings evolved, especially in the northern hemisphere with its severe weather changes during the year. The person who was too busy chasing butterflies during the summer to put away a sufficient supply of firewood and food for the winter never saw another summer again— simple as that. You had to be pretty tough and strong, both mentally and physically, back then.
"I think we reached our peak sometime around 10,000 B.C. when we moved into the Neolithic Age and lived a settled existence and farming became the basis of our subsistence rather than hunting and gathering. Before that, everything was on a very small scale, with small clans moving across the landscape with their animals from one area to another as the seasons and the hunting conditions changed. Now, however, we stayed in one place. We built more permanent dwellings and started living in settled communities and there was a much more elaborate division of labor and we began to see large-scale social and governmental structures and we accumulated surpluses. The result of all that was that those who would simply not have survived in Paleolithic times could now stay alive and breed. So I think that we began to see some dysgenics around that time, and evolution slowed down. I'd say that for roughly ten thousand years we've been going downhill as a species, and that this process has really speeded up in the last couple of hundred years.
“It is my basic feeling that whether we are going uphill or downhill is what life is all about when you get right down to it, and that we ought to be concerned about that and do something about it. Since we have short- circuited nature I think we need to start to make up for it, and that means eugenics. We need to put ourselves in nature's place. We need to assess the genetic impact a particular social institution or pattern or policy has on our race. We need to look at it from that angle. Does whatever-it-is make us more fit, or less? Does it contribute to our evolution toward higher intelligence and higher consciousness? And then, when we get answers to those questions, we need to act accordingly.
“The elders in Sparta in ancient Greece, for example, would examine very young children. If the child seemed fit in every way, it was given back to the family to raise. But if the child was judged to be defective in some way, the child was killed. I guess you could call that a form of negative eugenics. Although that is an extreme example; you don't have to be nasty or bloodthirsty to get this done. And you don't have to compel people either, tell them that if they are an “alpha-plus” they must live in a particular neighborhood or something like that. What you can do is simply modify social arrangements so that the best people are encouraged, are more likely on the average, to get together and have more children than the less capable. You can alter the way you collect taxes or disburse tax revenues, for instance. You can pay attention to dysgenic influences like the welfare system, which for thirty years and more has encouraged the least fit among us to propagate, and the feminist ideology that has caught hold with so many of our best women and pushed careerism on them and downplayed the importance of family and children. You might not design a perfect system, but if you keep eugenics in mind you can make a positive impact on future generations. At least you are looking in the right direction."
"I assume you are particularly concerned about the effects of miscegenation on white people."
"Miscegenation is the worst kind of ‘no-no' for our race. That is one place where I would have compulsion. I run into problems with libertarians on this one, but I'm firm on it. But this is an exception; I think you can have 90% of the eugenic effect you want without being repressive at all. It comes down to how you structure society— the types of institutions you have, the values and ideas you promote, and so on— so that things tend to happen more the way you want them to rather than in a dysgenic way. People aren't absolutely compelled to do this or that, but rather they do because it is what happens naturally given the context that is created for them.”
In the material that follows, I sample Pierce's writings to give an indication of how he looks at issues related to men and women. First, there will be an example of his views on masculinity and men and how boys are raised today and how he thinks they ought to be. Then, second, comes an illustration of how he approaches the subject of marriage. Last, there is an example with how he deals with the upbringing of girls.
Pierce begins a Free Speech article entitled "The Feminization of America" with the observation that he has always been fond of women—“perhaps too much so, sometimes.” 2 About women Pierce writes, “I always have enjoyed their company greatly. I have really worshipped feminine beauty. I have admired and respected women when they have served their purpose in the life of our people, as much as I have admired and respected men who have served their purpose.” 3 Having said that, he wants it known that he believes that much of the pathology of present-day society— and by society he means white American society— is due to its feminization over the past century.
Pierce holds that American white culture has been weakened due to the loss of much of its masculine spirit and character. To get at what Pierce means by masculine spirit and character, it helps to understand the way he distinguishes the masculine from the feminine. To Pierce, the masculine is associated with honor, beauty, tradition, roots, the distant frontier, and, his phrase, "reverence and awe for Nature's majesty." 5 In contrast, the feminine in Pierce's conception emphasizes safety, comfort, and the tangible rather than the intangible. The feminine orientation and approach to life has, as he perceives it, a more limited horizon, “with the home and the hearth very much in sight.” 4 The feminine, says Pierce, is concerned with words as much as deeds. It favors equality over inequality: it is the view that "all of God's children are loved equally, all are considered cute and adorable." 5 To Pierce, aristocratic or elitist values are masculine, while democratic or egalitarian values are feminine. In the political realm, Pierce believes that as the feminine takes hold in a culture, "the role of government shifts from that of a father, who maintains an orderly and lawful environment in which men are free to strive for success as little or as much as suits them, to that of a mother, who wants to insure that all of her children will be supplied with whatever they need." 6
Pierce uses Timothy McVeigh's statement to the court at the time of his sentencing for the Oklahoma City bombing to make his point about the difference between the feminine and masculine orientation. Pierce says that nearly everyone was disappointed with what McVeigh chose to say in his first public utterance. People had expected and desired an apology from him for the suffering of the innocent victims of the bombing he had caused. They wanted him to show that he related to what the individuals and families who had lost their loved ones had gone though and to say that he was profoundly sorry for the pain and loss he had brought into their lives. Instead of that, McVeigh had used the occasion to point out that the government is the teacher of the people, and that when the government breaks the law— he was referring to what happened in Waco during the siege of the Branch Davidian property— its citizens will not respect the law. He had given a speech on the issue of government lawlessness, and that had turned people off.
“All right,” Judge Matsch had said. “Mr. McVeigh, you have the right to make any statement you wish to make. Do you wish to make a statement?”
“Yes, your honor,” McVeigh replied. “Briefly.”
McVeigh rose from his seat and walked to a lectern in the center of the courtroom. He was dressed in the cream-colored uniform of a federal prisoner. As he spoke, his hands were clasped behind his back and twitched nervously.
“If the court please,” McVeigh began, “I wish to use the words of [Supreme Court] Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, ‘Our government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.' That is all I have.”
Judge Matsch then sentenced McVeigh to die, and marshals took him out of the courtroom. 7
Pierce says McVeigh's focus on ideas and the larger impersonal context reflects a masculine orientation, and that contrasts with a focus on feelings and the personal which reflects a feminine orientation. As Pierce sees it, McVeigh's statement to the court was out of sync with the increasingly feminized world in which we live and thus was misunderstood and dismissed by the vast majority of those who heard or read about it. People couldn't relate to what McVeigh had to say, Pierce claims, because he was operating outside the feminine frame of reference that has become more and more prevalent in our society. 8
Another example of Pierce's point about the feminization of this culture may have been seen in the nation's response to the school shootings in recent years in Arkansas, Oregon, Colorado, Georgia, and elsewhere. Notably absent was outrage and anger that anyone would do such a terrible thing. (The first impulse of a vice-principal in Georgia was to hug the student who had just shot six of his classmates.) Absent too was moral condemnation of these vicious acts. And absent as well was the commitment to strike back hard at anyone who tries a cowardly and selfish stunt like that in the future. In Pierce's eyes those would have been masculine responses to those events. Instead, we grieved and we were afraid and we looked to the government and its gun control laws and metal detectors to protect us. We tried to understand. We sought to communicate. We commiserated. The answer to our problems, we affirmed, is for everybody to be nice to one another and to make sure we are all safe. All of this, as Pierce sees it, reflects a feminine orientation toward life, which is not to say that it is bad in itself. It is, however, to note the absence of its masculine complement, and particularly it is to ask the question, where were, and are, our men?
Pierce quotes Henry Adams, the brother of Brooks Adams, whose book had such a strong impact on him in his Oregon State years, as writing, “Our age has lost much of its ear for poetry, as it has its eye for color and line and its taste for war and worship, wine and women.” 9 Ear for poetry and the rest— masculine qualities all in Pierce's eyes.
It is the masculine spirit which appreciates women, which appreciates feminine qualities, and as this spirit declines, our taste for women loses its edge and becomes coarser. We move from an age in which women were not only appreciated but also treasured and protected into an age in which... feminine beauty is a mere commodity, like soybeans or crude oil; an age in which parents dump their daughters into the multiracial cesspool that America's schools and cities have become to let them fend for themselves. In an age in which materialism and feminism are ascendant, this is the only way it can be. To attempt to make it otherwise— to attempt to decommercialize sex, for example— would be a blow against the economy, against the materialist spirit. And to elevate women again to the protected status they had in a more masculine era would be fought tooth and nail by feminists as a limitation on women's freedom. 10
Not only has society lost its artistic sense and reverence, it has also lost much of its warrior spirit, argues Pierce. Pierce decries the large numbers of soft, dependent men he observes today. There have always been men like this around, he points out, but it seems that there are far more of them now than before. Pierce says that a true man has a firm sense of personal dignity and self-worth and is strongly self-reliant. In contrast to men of this sort, true men, real men, Pierce finds many of today's men given to self-abasement and to be “weepy and submissive”— which turns Pierce's stomach to see in any man. Pierce comes down particularly hard on today's male university students, whom he looks upon as timid and lacking in boldness and pride. Pierce sees too many university men who are short in the area of independence, whiny when confronting adversity, and unwilling to endure hardship or to challenge obstacles. 11
When getting at causes for this state of affairs among white men, Pierce points to the way boys are raised in contemporary times:
Most boys are not raised in a way which naturally strengthens and develops the manly virtues. Boys raised on a farm a century ago were given work to do from the time they could walk. Everyone was expected to pull his own weight. This helped a boy develop a sense of self-worth and self- reliance. And boys learned from a close working association with their fathers what was expected of a man. This association all too often is absent today and in nearly all cases is greatly attenuated in comparison to what it used to be. In very few families today does a boy have an opportunity to do any meaningful work with his father.... 12
Boys no longer are raised to be strong-willed, independent, and resourceful. That requires hardness and self- denial; it requires masculine rule during the formative years. A disciplined environment has given way to a permissive one, and so the child does not learn self-discipline....The child is not punished for disobedience, nor is he given the opportunity to fail and learn from the penalties that the real world holds for those who are not strong enough to succeed. And so boys grow up to be whiny and ineffective young men, who believe that a plausible excuse is an acceptable substitute for performance and who never can understand why the gratification they seek eludes them.... 13
On top of this, a Politically Correct education system makes things much worse by de-emphasizing everything which used to contribute to a boy's sense of identity and to help him acquire a strong set of standards and values. Take a close look at the old McGuffey's Readers, which were used 100 years ago to teach young Americans in our elementary schools how to read and to build their vocabulary and sense of style while strengthening their understanding of grammar and the rules of spelling. Nearly every story also taught a moral lesson, beginning with very simple lessons, of the sort found in Aesop's fables, and progressing to stories which illustrated and praised the virtues of courage, truthfulness, courtesy, honesty, diligence, chivalry, loyalty, and industry. Personal dignity too. Many of the stories were based on historical incidents, ranging from Roman times to the American Revolution. By the time a boy had progressed through the whole series of readers and finished elementary school he had been exposed to dozens of historical role models and had developed a strong sense of who his people were and what they were like, what they had gone through during their history, what their values were, and what they believed. And he had acquired at least a rudimentary concept of personal honor. He might still grow up to be a crook or a bum, but at least he knew the difference between honorable and dishonorable behavior.
Now, of course, to modern educators the McGuffey Readers are intolerably racist and sexist. The values they teach are European values, White values, and that just won't do in a multiracial society. The concept of proper behavior is one thing for Europeans and something quite different for Africans or Chinese. The same objection is raised against the historical lessons. Why should boys learn from anecdotes about Romans or Germans instead of Zulus or Ubangis? And to teach boys bravery and chivalry really gets the feminists steamed. So the McGuffey Readers and everything like them were tossed out long ago, our schools have become what they are today, and it is no wonder that a great many of the young men who pass through them are confused and disoriented— not to mention the young women. 14
Pierce says that people counter his argument that our society has become more effeminate by pointing out that masculinized women are more prominent now— female lawyers, executives, military officers, and the like. What these observers fail to comprehend, Pierce believes, is that as men become less masculine, women become less feminine. If you don't see how what men are like affects what woman are like (and vice versa), says Pierce, you are missing an important part of the explanation for why women (and men) are as they are. 15
In a Free Speech article called “Marriage and White Survival,” Pierce takes note of the alarmingly high divorce rate in our society. He mentions that a friend of his is going through a traumatic divorce and that three small children are involved— he is obviously talking about Kevin Strom's situation. Pierce says that over half the people he knows have had at least one failed marriage. Pierce says that it is getting harder and harder to hold marriages together in modern times. There are economic, social, and psychological reasons for this phenomenon, he tells his readers, and sketches out what he thinks they are. 16
Pierce says that historically marriages have been grounded in the "bedrock economic fact" that a well-defined division of labor increases the survival chances of the people involved. “If a man and woman worked together as a team,” Pierce writes, “with the woman keeping the homefront under control while the man brought home the bacon and chased the wolves away from the door, both gained a competitive advantage over unattached singles and were more likely to survive and prosper— not to mention the fact that their children were far more likely to survive than those engendered by unattached individuals.” 17 Societal changes during the past half-century, however, have altered that circumstance. For one thing, increasingly women have been recruited into the workforce. The percentage of married women working outside the home has gone from virtually zero to seventy percent. 18 Pierce offers some of the reasons for this:
Other factors for the breakdown of marriages that Pierce lists include:
The feminists asserted that women were essentially the same as men, except for a few minor anatomical details, and that women didn't need men in order to live a complete and fulfilling life. They insisted on being treated just like men. And of course, their cause was taken up by the government and by the Jewish media, which resulted in their doctrines influencing many otherwise sensible women.
Women consequently lost their special status. When they asserted that they no longer needed the protection or the support of men, many men took them at face value. Men decided that they no longer had a special obligation or responsibility to support and protect a woman. Deciding to shed a wife became much like deciding to change roommates. Feminism has eroded the traditional complementary relationship between men and women, which was a relationship based on their natural differences, and tried to replace it with equality, which is not in accord with reality. The result of this failed effort has been very traumatic for both men and women. In many cases it has turned natural affection to hostility on both sides. Just as many women have responded by becoming less feminine, many men have become less masculine. It has played havoc with the institution of marriage. 19
If that is the situation with marriage in our time, what are we to do about it according to Pierce? He proposes both short-run and long-run remedies.
As for short-run solutions to the problem, he is brief and to the point. “Unfortunately," he advises, "about all we can do in the short run is try to minimize the trauma for ourselves as individuals. If you are a man and looking for a mate, steer clear of women who have been tainted by feminism; and if you're a woman, be on your guard against men who have been ‘sensitized' by the feminists." 20
And in the long run:
One of the easiest things we can do is simply to stop promoting the false and destructive doctrine of feminism. When our government, our schools, and our media recognize that men and women are different and complementary members of our society and have fundamentally different roles to fill, we'll be a long way ahead.
Fixing the economic problems which beset marriage will be more difficult. It is hard to take women out of factories and offices and put them back in the home when most families have become accustomed to a life-style which requires two incomes to maintain. One of the reasons our grandmothers were able to stay at home and raise their children instead of dropping them off at a day-care center on the way to work was that our grandparents managed to do without many things that have come to be thought of as necessities today, so one income was sufficient for them. Outlawing credit cards and other forms of borrowing certainly would cut consumption and help more people get by on one income, but that probably would cause a revolution in itself, because our people have forgotten the old way of paying for things first and then having them.
We don't need to go back to using washing boards and washtubs, but we can look forward to building a society in which economic policy and employment policy are made subordinate to the primary goal of promoting the racial and spiritual health of our people. One thing we can do is get rid of government welfare programs— no food stamps, no subsidized rents, no welfare checks, nothing. If churches want to set up soup kitchens or flop houses for the homeless, that's their business, but no one should be forced to pay for the support of those who won't work, male or female— nor should the dole be an attractive alternative to working or to keeping a marriage together.
And a career should not be quite as attractive or available an alternative to marriage for young women as it is now. Simply doing away with the government-imposed requirements for hiring and promoting women and leaving employers free to hire whom they choose will help a lot in this direction. And women could just forget about being soldiers.
We don't need governmental coercion to make marriage healthy again. We just need an end to the governmental programs which have made it unhealthy. Without feminist propaganda and without government interference, the instincts of men and women will do most of what needs to be done to get things back on track again. Perhaps we can't make things quite as sound as they were a century ago when most of us lived in much smaller communities, but we can make them a lot better than they are now.
The enemies of our people have convinced many women that being a housewife is a fate worse than death. Many of them believe that they absolutely have to be fighter pilots or corporate executives. And I'm not proposing making a law that they can't be corporate executives if they want to. I'm just saying that we shouldn't pump them full of propaganda to convince them that they should be. And we shouldn't have laws which give them an artificial advantage in becoming corporate executives. I believe that the institution of marriage can tolerate a few female executives; just not as many as today....
If we do nothing, then our people will die. Our race will become extinct, and the earth will be inherited by the savages and degenerates of the non-White world. The birthrate for White women is far below the replacement level. There are fewer White Americans with each passing year. The White birthrate has fallen below the level necessary for replacement for pretty much the same reasons the divorce rate has gone up. As more women have left the home and joined the work force, they have decided to have fewer children. Children are a hardship on mothers who are obliged to hold down a full-time job outside the home. Children can lower a father's standard of living. Worse, the women most susceptible to feminist propaganda, the ones most likely to choose a career instead of motherhood, tend to be the brightest and most capable, the ones who most need to have children and pass on their genes to the next generation.
So we really have no choice in the matter. We either start having and raising more healthy White babies or we die. Our race dies. We die. 21
An example of the kind of attention Pierce pays to the upbringing of girls is a Free Speech article called "Choosing a Barbie" in which he tells his readers about "a really disgusting” story he had read in a California newspaper. 22 A white staff-writer for the paper had written a column relating an experience she had had with her seven-year-old daughter after the little girl had gone shopping for a Barbie Doll with her aunt. The little girl had come home in tears. When the writer/mother asked her daughter what was wrong, the seven-year-old replied, "In the toy store today, Auntie let me pick out whatever Barbie I wanted. And I moved a Black Barbie on the shelf out of the way to reach the White Barbie behind her. Does that make me prejudiced?" The writer said that her daughter was very confused and frightened by what she had done.
The question, Pierce recounted, then became, how is the mother going to respond. Pierce gives his version of what happened next.
When the mother heard this question she herself froze in terror. She didn't know how to answer the question. She was afraid to answer simply, "No, dear, choosing the White doll instead of the Black doll doesn't mean that you're prejudiced." She couldn't give that answer because it would be dishonest. That answer would comfort her daughter at the moment, but it might lead the little girl into relaxing her vigilance and wandering even further down the path of Political Incorrectness. It might, heaven forbid, reinforce her preference for White over Black. On the other hand, if the mother answered the girl's question honestly— "Yes, you vicious, little White racist, by shoving aside the Black doll you revealed your horrible, racist prejudice in favor of your own race"— then her daughter might not be able to handle the psychic trauma.
The mother's own words in the newspaper were: "If I said yes, I feared I would scar her self-image for life. Her eyes pleaded with me not to confirm the worst.” Believe it or not, that's exactly what this silly woman wrote in the newspaper: "If I said yes, I feared I would scar her self-image for life." And yet, the mother was sure that "yes" was the honest answer, because she knew that all of us Whites have the original sin of racism in us, a sin which we are obliged to struggle all our lives to overcome and to pay all our lives in order to atone for. For the remainder of a long, hand-wringing article, the mother agonized over how to deal with this terrible dilemma.
The whole thing is surrealistic, like the sort of dream one might have after falling asleep with a really bad case of heartburn. But, unfortunately, that's the way a great many Americans think these days. They really do get torn up over such things as how to be sure that they are raising their children to be both Politically Correct and self-contented. 23
Pierce reports that the writer told of similar experiences other parents she knew had had with their children. Pierce says that what he finds revealing is it never entered the minds of the writer or any of these other parents to consider the possibility of affirming what were, at least in Pierce's eyes, the natural and healthy expressions of preference by their children for their own kind. Nor had any of them thought about what and who had made their children feel so guilty and frightened if they followed their own instincts. Instead, says Pierce, all of these parents “cringed and groveled.” Pierce says that the mother who wrote the column decided what her daughter needed was
…still more brainwashing— more children's books full of multiculturalism and diversity, more Steven Spielberg films, et cetera. She coaxes her daughter to believe that the only reason she reached for the White doll instead of the Black doll was not that the White doll was the one she could identify with because it looked like her, but that she liked the lipstick on the White doll more than the lipstick on the Black doll. That rationalization made the mother and daughter both feel much better. And then before the daughter could backslide, the mother went out and bought her a Black Barbie doll, a mestizo Barbie doll, an Indian Barbie doll, etc. The mother concludes: "I decided if my daughter was going to play with Barbies they at least would be diverse." Her play world now includes Arab, Native American, Latina, and African-American Barbies. 24
Pierce shares with his readers that while this mother obviously is proud of the way she dealt with her daughter's situation, he felt sick after reading the story. “It's easy to think ahead eight years or so,” writes Pierce, “to the time when this woman's daughter is in a racially integrated high school and begins dating. When she has a choice between dating Black boys or White boys, she will remember her mother's response to the Barbie doll dilemma. Her mother undoubtedly will be proud of her when she brings her first Black boyfriend home for dinner.” 25
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