Race Lifts A Man Above Himself
“Nothing is so convincing as the consciousness of the possession of race. The man who belongs to a distinct, pure race, never loses the sense of it. The guardian angel of his lineage is ever at his side, supporting him where he loses his foothold, warning him like the Socratic Daemon where he is in danger of going astray, compelling obedience, and forcing him to undertakings which, deeming them impossible, he would never have dared to attempt. Weak and erring like all that is human, a man of this stamp recognizes himself, as others recognize him, by the sureness of his character, and by the fact that his actions are marked by a certain simple and peculiar greatness, which finds its explanation in his distinctly typical and super- personal qualities. Race lifts a man above himself: it endows him with extraordinary—I might almost say supernatural—powers, so entirely does it distinguish him from the individual who springs from the chaotic jumble of peoples drawn from all parts of the world: and should this man of pure origin be perchance gifted above his fellows, then the fact of race strengthens and elevates him on every hand, and he becomes a genius towering over the rest of mankind, not because he has been thrown upon the Earth like a flaming meteor by a freak of nature, but because he soars heavenward like some strong and stately tree, nourished by thousands and thousands of roots—no solitary individual, but the living sum of untold souls striving for the same goal.”
–Houston Steward Chamberlain
Continuity and solidarity! A sense of being a link in the continuity that stretches from one’s ancestors to one’s offspring, and therefore of indebtedness to one’s past and of obligation to the future. And growing out of this a profound sense of solidarity with all one’s own kind! It
is very necessary that we recognize, and above all feel, that we have roots, that we belong somewhere, to a part of the Earth; and that we are more than a collection of individuals, more than a congeries of atoms, that we belong to something, to a people, to a race, which in a sense is a living body, which has form and character, a record and a destiny, whose life has come down, as a successful type, out of the remotest past, and must struggle, by the very necessities of its being, to maintain itself into the remotest future.
I, William Gayley Simpson, am, to be sure, a human being, and beneath everything else that I may think or do, I would always remember this: there may even be times and levels of experience when this may seem the foremost fact of my consciousness. But certainly the world of time and space, to which history belongs and in which is rooted our life as individuals, with its bodily needs, is a warring world, a world of conflict and struggle. It always has been, and perhaps it will never cease to be. Refine the struggle all you can; push back the area of it as far as possible. You will only come at last to the point where it cannot be pushed back any further and be confronted with the stark realization that the basis of all life is struggle and fighting. Moreover, our worst enemies, striking at our very existence, come at us in groups. And alone we cannot meet them. For better or for worse, whether it be to survive or to go under, even to have any chance of survival, we must identify ourselves with some group, most advantageously with one to which we feel that we belong, whose life we somehow recognize as our own, out of whose blood, traditions and accumulated ways of doing and thinking we ourselves have come, and which yet includes, fortifies and transcends all our life as separate individuals, families and groups of one sort or another. And at this point it comes home to me that I am NOT a Negro, or a Jew, or a Chinese!
-William Gayley Simpson, excerpted from Which Way Western Man