 Professor Hoppe asked me to give you a history of American race relations in a half an hour. That's not an easy thing to do. It would actually be easier to give you a history of American race relations in just one word. And that single word would be conflict. Conflict is the normal state of race relations anywhere in the world and for reasons that I believe are deeply biological. We human beings have an exquisite sensitivity to differences between our group and other groups. And group conflict is really as old as our species. We humans are prepared to fight each other for practically any reason at all, ethnicity or language, nationality, religion, and even occasionally for merely political reasons. Of all the kinds of conflict, racial conflict is the most chronic and the most difficult to control. It's because race is part of biology, race is immediately visible, and most of the time it's an indicator of differences in behavior and culture, not simply a difference in the way people look. So whenever you find people of more than one race attempting to share the same territory, you will find conflict. Now American race relations in the Anglo-American sense, they began in 1607 with the founding of the Jamestown Colony on the seacoast of Virginia. Jamestown is not only the beginning of American race relations, but it is a fascinating example of the inevitability of racial conflict. Now the purpose of the colony was to find gold. I think that's a goal with which many of you would sympathize, but the intentions of the colonists toward the Indians were entirely benevolent. In fact, the English at that time were aware of the Spanish reputation in the New World as brutal colonists, and they explicitly and consciously wanted to be different and better. In fact, the English had no preconceived notions of racial superiority, and they saw the Indians or the naturals as they called them as essentially no different than themselves, and this was in stark contrast to their view of moors or black Africans whom they did think of as aliens. Some of the Jamestown colonists even thought that the naturals were white people whose skin had become a little bit darker because they painted their bodies so frequently. In any case, the 100 or so men who started the colony, they deliberately sought out a piece of land that they thought was uninhabited and unclaimed because they did not want to step on anybody's toes. And the leader of the colony, a man named Edward Maria Wingfield, he decreed that because the English came in peace, they would build no fortifications and there would be no training in arms. Now there was contact with the Indians, mostly peaceful, but sometimes tense. But before the encampment was two weeks old, several hundred Indians attacked the camp with the idea of wiping out the colony. There were deaths on both sides and the English would have been completely massacred had someone not thought to fire off a cannon and this unaccustomed sound panicked the Indians and sent them flinging to the woods. Of course it was at that time that Wingfield decided to build the three-sided stockade that is now familiar to all American school children. The colony went through very hard times and it eventually survived. But despite this bad start before the walls went up, the English genuinely tried to have good relations with Indians. But to their disappointment, they found the Indians who lived most close by were the ones who liked them the least and it was the Indians far away who liked them and who were prepared to trade with them. And I think they discovered one of the general rules of race relations and that is that they are better at a distance. Now I don't know how much I can assume about this audience's knowledge of colonial American history but the chief of the neighboring Indians was a man named Powhatan and his favorite daughter Pocahontas converted to Christianity and married the English planter John Rolf. That was in 1614 and that inaugurated a period of real harmony. And the new head of the colony, a man named James John Thorpe, was especially solicitous of the Indians and tried to be as cooperative as possible. In fact, when English dogs barked at Indians, he had them publicly hanged. But four years after Pocahontas married John Rolf, Chief Powhatan died and his younger brother, Opa Chonkanaw, he became chief. Now Opa Chonkanaw did not have a marriage alliance with the English and he wanted to drive the invaders out. And so in 1622, four years after he became chief, Opa Chonkanaw struck. By then there were 1200 English in the colony and they were spread out in several locations. And every morning Indians would come to work alongside the English in workshops and in farms in a very peaceable way. But on March 22nd of that year, they were all to rise up and exterminate the colonists. Now as it happens, the main settlement at Jamestown was warned. And the men kept their weapons handy and nothing happened. But in the other areas, there was complete surprise. And the Indians succeeded in killing about 400 colonists, one third of the number. Interestingly, they were especially brutal in torturing John Thorpe, the man who was so solicitous to the Indians that he hanged the dogs that annoyed them. Of course, there was then war on Opa Chonkanaw and reprisals, but the two groups returned to just the kind of peaceful relations they had before. But, let's see, but amazingly in 1644, just 22 years later, Opa Chonkanaw launched an identical sneak attack. And this time he managed to kill between 400 and 500 people in yet another attempt to exterminate and drive out the English. But this time the English went on what amounted to their own extermination campaign and they killed a great many Indians including Opa Chonkanaw. And two years later, in 1646, the Virginia General Assembly noted that the natives were, quote, so routed and dispersed that they are no longer a nation. And we now suffer only from robbery by a few starved outlaws. But here we have what I would call the inherent tragedy of race relations. The English, although we have only their word for it, they appeared to have bought with them genuinely cooperative intentions. They were unaggressive, they were trusting, and they had no sense of racial differences in superiority. And I would add this is in complete contrast to their views of blacks, who first appeared in 1619, whom the English considered definitely alien and inferior. And as we look back on the Jamestown Colony, I think it's possible to conclude that this was as promising an attempt to establish race relations as could be imagined for those times. And yet, the very presence of the English was an act of aggression. The Indians were there first, someone's always there first. And we may deplore this series of Pearl Harbors that Opa Chonkanaw loosed on the English, but that was his only way of driving out the English so that the Indians could remain masters in their own house. These attacks failed and the Indians were destroyed. Now this is the story of the conquest of the continent. The intentions of whites, sometimes good, often bad, really don't matter that much. The fundamental fact is that one people had the land and another more advanced and powerful people wanted that land. And the result was dispossession. Even 400 years after the first contact, American Indians are a distinct people, the distinct consciousness. And this just goes to show you how difficult it is to assimilate across racial lines. In a way, it was just plain bad luck for the Indians that Columbus couldn't have waited 500 years. Let's imagine if Chris had showed up in 1992 rather than 1492. Well, then the whole hemisphere would have been set aside as some sort of world cultural preservation area with maybe a little limited ecotourism, but certainly no immigration. Let me turn now to the vexed question of black slavery. I would emphasize, first of all, that there were huge variations in this institution. Most generalizations about it are likely to be wrong. The practice of slavery differed enormously from state to state and from slave owner to slave owner. Some states, for example, did not tolerate free blacks, but expelled free slaves beyond their borders. Other states accepted free slaves. And some states changed their laws from one period to another. Some masters were unquestionably cruel and drove their slaves very hard. But others treated them almost like family members. Jefferson Davis was a Mississippi platter who became president of the Confederate States of America. And when he had to leave his home in Mississippi to take up his post with the Confederacy, when he took leave of his slaves, he wept. And his slaves wept. Jefferson Davis' older brother, Joseph Davis, ran what he considered a kind of model plantation in which no slave was disciplined unless discipline was agreed upon by a council of older slaves. And you may not be aware of this, but there are more than 2,300 accounts by slaves of their experiences as slaves. This was our oral history project from the 1930s. Well, one of the reasons that you don't hear very much about these slave narratives is because many of the former slaves show a very surprising kind of nostalgia for slavery. I recall one in particular in which a former slave, he looks forward to meeting his master in heaven so that he can go serve him again, quote, just like in slavery days. Southerners often claim that their treatment of slaves, whom they cared for from birth until old age, was better than the way Yankee capitalists treated the working class. And although we can deplore that as some kind of exaggeration, I'm sure that in some cases it was true. And let me also touch briefly on the little discussed question of black slave owners, not all blacks in the South were slaves. And quite a number of free blacks actually owned slaves themselves. According to the census of 1830, nearly 4,000 blacks were slave owners. And in 1860 there were at least six blacks in the state of Louisiana who owned 65 or more slaves. And the largest black slave owner had 152 slaves. In this rival, the largest holdings of the white slave holders. And I would point out that in the pre-Confederate states, only about 20% of white householders even had a single slave. Now you can say that slavery is a means of trying to control racial conflict. And in certain respects, it was a success, but obviously, it is based on the threat and the willingness to use brute force. Now I'd like to turn to the abolition movement, which I think is one of the least understood or most misunderstood movements in all of American history. Most Americans today think that the goal of the abolitionists was to free the slaves and make them the equals of whites. This is not at all the case. The huge majority wanted to free the slaves and then send them outside the United States in a process that they called colonization. I assume you've all heard of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the great anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is sometimes credited as being part of the North's resolve to fight the war against the South. Well, her brother was a famous Brooklyn preacher named Henry Ward Beecher. And his view was very much the majority view. And I quote, he said, do your duty first to the colored people here, educate them, Christianize them, and then colonize them. In other words, send them away. Most abolitionist activism, therefore, reflected a deep conviction that slavery was wrong, but it was coupled with a desire to expel free blacks from the United States. Abraham Lincoln, as you know, is referred to as the great emancipator. And most Americans believe that he too wanted to set black people up as the social and political equals of whites. Again, this is completely untrue. Like the abolitionists, he did want to free the slaves, but once free, he wanted to send them away. In August of 1862, this is while the Union is in mortal combat with the Confederacy, and you'd think he had other things on his mind. But Abraham Lincoln in that year appointed a man by the name of James Mitchell as commissioner of emigration. Mitchell's job was to find a place to send the free blacks and to try to persuade them to go there. In fact, it was Mitchell who arranged the first meeting in the White House of blacks with a president on official business. He invited a group of free black preachers to whom Lincoln explained that this terrible war was going on on account of there being amongst them. As he said, you and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. And he went on to say, there is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us. He then told them that he had in mind for them a colony in Central America, and he asked them to go back to their congregations and preach emigration. In other words, the great irony is that the first time a delegation of blacks was invited to the White House on official business was to be asked to leave the country. I would add that what whites feared from the presence of blacks was not just conflict, but also miscegenation. Of the 50 states, no fewer than 44 had laws prohibiting interracial marriage at some point in their history. Even Massachusetts, which we think of as this liberal, extremely progressive state, from 1705 until 1843, it had a law that prohibited interracial marriage. But in 1843, they repealed the law. Why? Because they approve interracial marriage? No. As the repeal act noted, interracial relations were, quote, evidence of vicious feeling, taste, and personal degradation, so they thought there was no need to have a law to prevent something so abhorrent. Legal prohibitions against miscegenation lasted for many years. And in 1967, as recently as 67, when the American Supreme Court ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, 16 states still had these laws on the books. Now racial conflict in America cannot be separated from bad behavior by whites unquestionably. And lynching is often cited as a particularly vicious example of this kind of behavior. Well, there's been a careful count of all the lynchings that took place between 1882 and 1968. And that was a total of 4,743 people. Of that number, however, 1,297, or more than a quarter, were whites who were lynched. And there are actually a few cases of groups of blacks apprehending white criminals and lynching them. And although it's not possible to know the truth in a great many cases, chances are most people who were lynched probably had committed some kind of crime. It was not a matter of simply rounding up a black man that people wanted to torture. Of course, there were false accusations. There was mob hysteria. And most people think of the typical lynching would be of a black who was said truthfully or not to have raped a white woman. But actually, only about 25% of lynchings were of accused rapists. The most frequent accusation, 40%, was of murder. And murder is almost never an imaginary crime because there's usually a body to prove it. Now, I would say that the worst form of racial conflict, whether in the United States or elsewhere, is race riots. And the United States has certainly had some very bad ones. The first race riots were invariably attacks by whites against blacks, usually set off by some actual or alleged crime by a black person. And undoubtedly, the worst was the Tulsa riot of 1921. Whites simply attacked the entire black part of town, 35 blocks, 35 city blocks, and burned it to the ground. And no one knows how many blacks were killed. Some estimates are as low as 30 to 40. Some estimates as high as 300. But blacks did fight back. And 10 whites are known to have been killed. Another bad riot was the 1906 riot in Atlanta, which 25 or 40 blacks, again, were killed. And I think it's fair to say that these riots, in which basically any available black person was fair game, was an expression of outright hatred. But this is the kind of hatred against those who are different from one's selves that we still find quite routinely today in such examples as the Hindu, Muslim mass killings in India, Muslim Christian massacres in Nigeria, for example. This is a primitive and basic human emotion. However, I think it's very important to note that the last riot of the traditional kind in which blacks, the whites attacked blacks, took place in 1943. Whites went wild in Detroit and killed 25 blacks. Again, whites fought back and killed nine whites. But since that time, in other words, for the last 70 years, the meaning of a race riot has changed. And a race riot now means rioting by blacks and sometimes by Hispanics. You'll recall that in 1972, no, I'm sorry, 1992, after the police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted of criminal charges. There were riots in Los Angeles in which 58 people were killed. This rivals some of the largest race riots ever in American history. And this was almost all cases of whites being killed by blacks. And there have since been similar riots in Miami, Cincinnati, Cleveland, et cetera, in which blacks now attack whites. And more recently, there's been a phenomenon known as flash mobs in which groups of young blacks will descend on a white area and attack and rob people. Now, this is an important shift in the past. Whites used to attack blacks. Now it's blacks who attack whites. But this has to do with what I believe is an even more important shift. And that is the revolutionary change that has taken place in the way whites think about race. Mr. Gabb spoke yesterday about a revolution in British thinking, a revolution of which the Britons themselves are not even aware. Well, in America, we too have had a revolution. Until about the 1950s, I would say that this is what most whites believed when it came to questions of race. They believed that people of different races differed substantially in intelligence and temperament and ability. And that was why different races built different kinds of societies. They wanted America to be populated by whites and they thought that only people of European stock could maintain the kind of civilization that they valued. They considered immigration of non-whites to be a threat to that civilization. And it was common to argue that if non-whites could not be removed from the borders of the United States, they should be separated socially and politically. And there was also, of course, this constant strong opposition to miscegenation. Well, what whites now are supposed to think about race represents a complete reversal. And I can think of very few examples in which thinking on an important question has so quickly gone from one extreme completely to the opposite. It's a little bit like the Islamic Revolution in Iran or a little bit like the disappearance of communism in the Soviet Union, a real radical transformation of thinking. What whites are now supposed to believe, I would summarize as follows. First and most important, the races are absolutely equal in every respect and as a consequence are really interchangeable. Race is therefore not a valid criterion for any purpose, except perhaps for redressing wrongs, perpetrated by whites against non-whites. Whites as a group have no valid interest, so it is illegitimate for them to organize themselves as whites. And racial diversity is a wonderful thing in and of itself and therefore whites should welcome large numbers of non-whites into their neighborhood, their schools, their institutions and into the country as a whole. The thinking is that immigration strengthens the United States and at the same time the reduction of whites to a minority is something to be celebrated, not just for the non-whites, but by whites themselves. As for miscegenation, we are not yet at the point when whites who marry each other are actively criticized, but whenever there is dating and marriage between the races that is celebrated as wonderfully progressive. Now something else that I think is equally important and that is that these prohibitions against racial solidarity, this prohibition against preferring one's own kind, prohibitions against wanting one's own numbers to increase, these prohibitions apply only to whites. All non-white groups take it for granted that they have collective interests that must band together to promote them at the expense of whites. Any white who is out of step with this thinking, by the way, who expresses a preference for European civilization and the company of other whites, such a person is not merely wrong, but evil and not fit for polite society. Every era has its unforgivable crimes and for American whites today, our unforgivable crime, it is what is known as racism. And let me illustrate this revolution in the thinking of whites with a few quotations as it happens from American presidents. James Garfield wrote, I have a strong feeling of repugnance when I think of the Negro being made our political equal and I would be glad if they could be colonized, sent to heaven or got rid of in any decent way. Theodore Roosevelt, he blamed Southerners for bringing blacks into America. He said, I have not been able to think out any solution of the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent. As for the Indian, I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of 10 are and I shouldn't inquire too closely into the health of the 10th. As recent to present as Harry Truman wrote, I am strongly of the opinion that Negroes should be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America. Now let me contrast these remarks with those of a more recent president, George W. Bush. In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the city of New Orleans, a black rapper by the name of Kanye West complained that the federal aid response was slow because New Orleans was heavily black and George Bush just didn't care about black people. Well, in 2010, after he left office, Mr. Bush said that being accused of not caring about blacks was the worst moment in his entire presidency, the worst moment. And this is a president who had some mighty bad moments. One was the September 11 attacks of 2001, the most crushing economic slump since the Great Depression. This catastrophic war launched on completely false pretenses, but for him, the worst moment in eight years of being president was being accused of racism by this two-bit Negro entertainer. This shows you just how utterly terrified Americans have become of race. And this terror leaves whites trapped in an impossible, really an intolerable position. Take the assumption, by the way, how many more minutes do I have? Two or three, all right. For the fact that all races are supposed to be equal in intelligence. So what happens when blacks and Hispanics do not succeed at the same level as whites? Because all the races are equal, this is the fault of whites. It is oppression and racism, and whites are made to feel guilty for the failures of others. Also, at the same time, what this means is that whites have no moral or intellectual foundation to say, no, I would prefer that my country be one in which whites remain the majority. That is blasphemy. That is a sin. And so, as the United States becomes increasingly non-white, I believe it will cease to be part of Western civilization and slide increasingly into the third world. Now, for some countries, that may be a good thing because I think I can summarize without too much exaggeration our current foreign policy, which is, if we invade a country and shoot enough people, then the survivors will all turn into Jeffersonian Democrats. Now, our power to do this will decline very rapidly in the decades to come. But still, for someone like myself whose ancestors have lived in what was this outpost of Western civilization for 350 years, it is to me an unspeakably grievous thing to watch my country dilute itself into what I see as a form of self-destruction. And I began by saying this, but you began this talk by saying that the history of race relations can be summarized in one word, conflict. I think I would conclude by saying it can be equally well summarized in yet another word, and that is tragedy. Thank you very much. Thank you.