"My race is just nothing": Some thoughts on the political psychology
of women

Kevin MacDonald

February 19, 2009

It seems that the signs of white dispossession are everywhere these
days. Edmund Connelly describes how non-Jewish whites are being pushed
out of elite institutions like Harvard. An article titled “The end of
white America” catalogues the lack of cultural confidence of whites
these days. It quotes a student who says “To be white is to be
culturally broke."

Writing in vdare.com, David A. Yeagley quotes one of his female
students saying “Look ... I don’t see anything about my culture to be
proud of. It’s all nothing. My race is just nothing.” Yeagley notes
the Cheyenne saying, “A nation is never defeated until the hearts of
its women are on the ground.” And he places this in the context of the
recent election in which 46% of white women voted for Obama compared
to 41% of white men.

These percentages are somewhat inflated because they include Jews and
immigrants, such as South Asians, who are classified as white but do
not identify with the European-American majority. Nevertheless, they
do point to a significant gender gap. While it is certainly true that
voting for McCain-Palin is not a sign of white consciousness — even
implicitly, it is also the case that voting for Obama is a good sign
of a lack of racial consciousness for European Americans.

The good news, of course, is that a majority of white women did not
vote for Obama. And, as Steve Sailer has shown for the 2004 election,
if one separated out women who are married and have children, the
results would show an even greater tendency to vote against Obama.

Nevertheless, there is a real problem. Those of us with some
acquaintance with European-Americans who do have an explicit ethnic
identity and a sense of their ethnic interests are quite aware that
there is a very large sex ratio imbalance at gatherings of like-minded
people. The attendees are almost all male — an exception being the
redoubtable Virginia Abernethy. And there are stories of men who have
stopped attending meetings or who provide support only in the most
furtive manner, mainly because their wives are afraid that the
attitudes of their husbands could become public and ruin their social
life. Making such things public is just the sort of thing that
organizations like the SPLC and the ADL love to do.

Judith Warner of the New York Times describes the result of an
informal "email inquiry" on women's reactions to Obama. Some imagined
having sex with Obama and replacing Michelle Obama as First Lady.
Others imagined themselves at social engagements with Obama. All
wanted deeply to have some of the Obama aura rub off on them. Warner's
email contacts doubtless reflect her liberal readership, but I
wouldn't be at all surprised if they are quite general, especially
among white women who voted for Obama.

What does an evolutionary psychologist say about all this?
Parenthetically, I realize that the great majority of Americans do not
believe in evolution. Nevertheless, evolutionary theory is a very
powerful and scientifically credible way of looking at human behavior.
It is no accident that one of the main strands of Jewish intellectual
activism over the last century has been to oppose evolutionary theory
as an explanatory tool in the social sciences. Darwin did indeed have
a dangerous idea — dangerous to Jews because it provides a rational
grounding for the ethnic identity and interests of European-derived
peoples.

Evolution is also dangerous to Jews because it provides a compelling
account of Judaism as an ethnic phenomenon. It is also capable of
explaining the main instances of historical anti-Semitism as involving
ethnic conflict and competition between Jews and non-Jews rather than
simply as Jewish victimization. And it sheds light on Jewish
intellectual and political activity in Western societies since the
Enlightenment. It also points up the glaring hypocrisy in contemporary
Jewish life between the triumph of racial Zionism in Israel and Jewish
activism in Western societies in opposition to the ethnic identities
and interests of European-derived peoples.

In view of all this, it is not at all surprising that Jewish
intellectual activists would regard evolutionary thinking as a
dangerous idea indeed.

The evolutionary theory of sex is one of the bedrocks of evolutionary
psychology — probably accounting for half of all the research in the
field. The basic idea is simple: Females invest a relatively large
amount of time and energy in reproduction. In the world we evolved in,
the only way for women to reproduce was to endure a 38-week pregnancy
and then nurse the child for an even longer period. Even after
nursing, child care was mainly a female responsibility.

Because women are committed to this very large investment, they become
very valuable in the mating game. And because they are valuable, they
become discriminating maters: Just as a worker who puts in more time
and energy is in a better bargaining position than one who puts in
little time and energy, women become the choosers in the mating game.

And what do women want? Women are expected to want men who have high
social status. From an evolutionary perspective, such men are
attractive because they may be willing to provide valuable resources
that would help in supporting the mother and raising the children.
(When men do contribute resources, they also become choosy, but that's
another story.) And even if a wealthy man does not provide resources,
he is likely to have good genes — genes that predispose his children
to be successful.

In any case, women do indeed prefer wealthy, high-status men. For
example, a recent study found that wealthy men give women more
orgasms: "The pleasure women get from making love is directly linked
to the size of their partner’s bank balance." Other research shows
that women are likely to choose higher status men than their husbands
when they have affairs, resulting in the possibility of a lower status
male helping to raise the children of a higher-status male.

What about the idea that evolutionary theory implies that people
should be attracted to people who are genetically like themselves?
Evolutionary theory predicts that women will be attracted to men who
are genetically similar to themselves compared to men who are from a
different race or ethnic group. For one thing, this makes them more
closely related to their own children.

The problem is that this attraction to genetically similar mates is
only part of the story. It must compete with the tendency to be
attracted to wealthy, powerful men. And quite clearly, the phenomenon
where large numbers of white women fantasize about having a
relationship with Obama reflects his power and social status, not
attraction to a genetically similar person.

The media is a major part of the hostile elite, so it is not
surprising that it has played a leading role in the idolization of
Obama — the slobbering love affair between the mainstream media and
Obama. It's the same role that Edmund Connelly has called attention to
in his writing on the images of blacks created by Hollywood in recent
decades. Black action heroes are now household names, and more than
one commentator has pointed out that there were several black
presidents in the movies and on television long before Obama was
elected.

These images from the media tap into women's psychological attraction
to high-status males. It was probably fairly common for white women to
fantasize about having sex with Will Smith or Denzel Washington or
even the "wise and saintly" Morgan Freeman long before the world had
ever heard of Barack Obama.

Another sex difference that contributes to women's political behavior
is that women are generally more nurturant, affectionate, empathic,
and caring than men. This is another aspect of female psychology that
can easily be derived from evolutionary thinking — the vital
importance of nurturing children and developing close family
relationships in our evolutionary past. Thus it is not surprising that
many of Judith Warner's women not only fantasize about having sex with
Obama, they see themselves married to him and becoming First Lady.
They develop a close and caring relationship with him, or they see him
as a good friend. I suppose this is also the reason why women are more
likely than men to support social programs that promise to aid
children and poor people.

This relatively greater empathy and nurturance was certainly adaptive
in a world of family groups and close relatives. But in the modern
world, it can easily lead to maladaptive altruism and ignoring real
dangers. For example, white women enamored of images of sexy, high-
status black males are not informed by the mainstream media of the
very large racial imbalance in crime, particularly black men raping
white women.

Another problem with women being relatively high in nurturance and
empathy is that these traits are linked to greater compliance and
greater inclination to seek the approval and affection of others.
Again, these are very adaptive traits in the world of small groups and
close relatives. But in a world dominated by elites that are hostile
to the interests of whites, these traits can lead to mindless
acceptance of anti-white cultural norms. Challenging social norms —
even ones that are obviously against one's interests — carries a very
high psychological cost to people who seek the approval and affection
of others.

This implies that once the intellectual and political movements
described in The Culture of Critique had seized the intellectual and
moral high ground, they became difficult indeed to dislodge.
Challenging these norms brings accusations of moral turpitude ringing
down from the most prestigious political, media and academic
institutions of the society. People who seek the approval and
affection of others are definitely not inclined to go there. This in
turn may well be a large part of the explanation for why there are so
few women at gatherings of European-Americans concerned about the
future of their people and culture.

This paints a fairly bleak picture. But there are some rays of hope.
It is likely that at some point the gap between rhetoric and reality
in American life will be so large that no one will believe what they
are hearing from the hostile elites that dominate public discourse —
much like the Soviet Union in the decades before its fall. When that
happens, the cultural icons promoted by the media will lose their
credibility and allure as well.

And because of the internet, the opportunity to hear divergent
opinions and become aware of information that is suppressed by the
mainstream media has never been greater. All around us we can see the
collapse and increasing irrelevance of the old media. The internet has
already created communities where prestige and social approval can be
obtained completely outside the norms created by our hostile elites.
And at least some of these communities are dedicated to transforming
America by asserting the legitimacy of white identities and interests.

The dispossession of whites is already substantial, but it promises to
be a whole lot more obvious as time goes on. As whites become a
minority, it is difficult to imagine that they won't develop more of a
group consciousness and challenge the prevailing anti-white norms. And
that includes even the more nurturant and empathic among us.

Kevin MacDonald is a professor of psychology at California State
University–Long Beach.

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