Racism: The New Witchcraft?

'The Love Charm': a young witch casts a spell 

which brings her beloved to the door

The late Larry Auster wrote,

As we all know by now, racism, like witchcraft, is a difficult accusation to defend oneself against. The reason is that the word no longer has a defined meaning. I was first struck by this phenomenon several years ago when New York City’s closing of a hospital in Harlem, as part of an economy move, was ferociously denounced as “racist” by black leaders. 

This was a new and startling use of a highly charged word that I had associated mainly with race hatred. “Racism” now apparently meant anything that, in the view of black people, hurt their interests or offended them or, indeed, anything they did not approve of. In recent years, this limitless definition has come to include the entire structure of our predominantly white society, as well as all white people.

Steve Browne at Taki Mag is even  blunter:

It has to be evident to all thinking people by now that racism is the new witchcraft. Once you’re branded with the Scarlet “R,” some people do not regard it as immoral to assault you…or worse.  Calling someone a racist is sufficient to brand them as outside the pale of civilized company. In academia, the accusation is a career-wrecker. Socially it is enough to get you dropped from the A-list of the best parties.

The comparison is bold--witches were pursued in large numbers in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, losing their assets, families, very often their lives. Are there any real parallels? Or are Messieurs Auster and Browne just blowing smoke?

Witches burning, 16th-century German woodcut

1)  An unhappy event

Yesterday as today, accusations sprang from misfortune no one was able to explain.

Paupers roamed the countryside during the Thirty Years' War: 

Beggar man and woman, 1630 (van Rijn)

a) An unhappy event: Witchcraft

Historian Henry Kamen:

The most intensive outbreaks of persecution were in times of agrarian disaster, when local communities blamed the evil influences at work among them. As a result of crop failures in the Schongau in Bavaria, sixty-three women were executed as witches in 1589-91 after petitions by the communities. In Mainz in 1593 a local official wrote that 'the common man has become so mad from the consequences of crop failures that he no longer holds them for the just punishment of God, but blames witches'. (1)

Famine, an ever-present danger (mural of Irish potato famine)

A magistrate in 1584 gives the typical case:

May it please you to weigh what accusations and crimes they lay to their charge, namely: She [my neighbor] was at my house of late, she would have had a pot of milke, she departed in a chafe because she had it not, she railed, she cursed, she mumbled and whispered, and finally she said she would be even with me: and soon after my child, my cow, my sow or my pullet [chicken] died, or was strangely taken. (1)

Not midwives but 'lying-in ladies' (post-birth ladies' maids) were often accused:

Strange signs were seen: nipples appeared all over the body of one infant, erupting into pussy sores. The legs of another were misshapen and bent. Repeatedly, witnesses stress the physical character of the victim's agony, incomprehensible suffering which cannot be alleviated by the onlookers or by the mother, and which excite hatred, revenge and guilt feelings in part because of the sufferer's innocence.  (2)

The source of these horrors was not understood.  A culprit had to be found, and that culprit was often as not an irascible neighbor or village outcast believed to practice the 'evil eye.'

Suffering from bubonic plague, 1411 illustration

The real reasons for children, cows, sows, and pullets dying, or crops failing, were not otherworldly. Diseases such as infantile diarrhea, ergotism, influenza, malaria ('the ague'), puerperal fever, smallpox, and typhoid ravaged the peasant populations.  Livestock were touched by rinderpest, swine fever, equine influenza, and a host of others.  Crops were attacked by fungi, mold, and pests, as well as flood and drought.

Ergot in rye, a fungus that causes 

 St. Anthony's Fire (painting by Grunewald, 1516)

But when the truth is unknowable, lies will rush in to take their place.  And for 'racists'?


b) An unhappy event: Racism

Like  the plagues or pests of yesteryear, today's 'racism' accusations come from the depressing or tragic circumstances in which so many Afros live.

Afros commit crime at high rates (source: Color of Crime)

Compared to Euros, Afro-Americans have:

• lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates;

• more unwed motherhood and  fatherless children;

• children with lower high school and college graduation rates and more school discipline problems;

• lower credit ratings,

• commission of much more violent crime than Euros,

• higher rates of obesity, HIV, and STDs;

• lower performance on grade school testing, the  SAT, the ACT, medical school exams (MCAT), law school exams (LSAT), the bar exam, police and fire exams, the military entrance exam, and teachers' exams.

This litany of misfortune's true cause is mainly natural selection (thank you JayMan). Our ancestral environments selected us for different levels of future orientation, impulse control, organizing ability, etc.

Rushton's R-k theory in a nutshell

But admitting this today is as inconceivable as germ theory was to our witch-hunting ancestors, so we are left to point the finger at the handiest bogeyman we know--subconscious mass 'racism.'




2)  Investigation and Trial

Witch trial, Salem, Massachusetts, 1690s

The witch trial was a deadly serious thing, run by the highest jurists and supported by the weight of the wisest witchery scholars.  How did one presume to find out guilt?

a) Investigation and Trial: Witches

Trials by ordeal were revived in early modern witchcraft investigations, following their censure and decline since the thirteenth century, because, like the medieval cases in which they had previously been adopted, witchcraft was another 'opaque' crime. ...The application of red-hot irons, the tests to see whether witches could say the Lord's Prayer or the Creed correctly or shed tears, even the pricking of them with needles to see if they bled... (3)

Thumbscrews

Wiki on witch trials:

Although Europe's witch-frenzy did not begin until the late 15th century—long after the formal abolition of "trial by ordeal" in 1215—brutal techniques were routinely used to extract the required admission of guilt. They included hot pincers, the thumbscrew, and the "swimming" of suspects (an old superstition whereby innocence was established by immersing the accused in water for a sufficiently long period of time).

Wiki on witches' marks:

Finding the witch's mark

The entire body was suspect as a canvas for a mark, an indicator of a pact with Satan. Witches’ marks were commonly believed to include moles, scars, birthmarks, skin tags, supernumerary nipples, natural blemishes and insensitive patches of skin. Experts, or inquisitors, firmly believed that a witches’ mark could be easily identified from a natural mark; in light of this belief, protests from the victims that the marks were natural were often ignored.

b) Investigation and Trial: Racism


Is it still possible to prove the unproveable?  If a wart means witchery, then something just as innocent--'disparate impact'--means racism. Trials by ordeal may seem silly to us, but the principle is alive and well.  How does Head Inquisitor Eric Holder prove your organization is racist?  With a turn of the screws:

The Head Inquisitor will find your racism, 

intentional or not

Dayton, OH:

The U.S. Department of Justice, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, rejected the results of Dayton's Civil Service examination because not enough blacks passed. The DOJ has ordered the city to lower the passing score. ... The DOJ-approved scoring policy requires potential police officers to earn the equivalent of an "F" on the first part and a "D" on the second.

New Haven, CT:

The city proclaimed the New Haven test must have been biased, given the results. An amicus brief for the International Association of Professional Black Firefighters declared flatly that it was "widely known and accepted that cognitive examinations, such as used here, have a demonstrated adverse impact on blacks and other minorities." The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has a "four-fifths rule," which holds that a job-related test in which the passing rate of a racial minority is less than 80% of the white rate is presumptively flawed.

NYPD 2010 graduating class

Virginia Beach:

The U.S. Justice Department has found that the math portion of the Virginia Beach Police Department’s entrance exam discriminates against black and Hispanic applicants.  

... Between 2002 and mid-2005, about 59 percent of black applicants and 66 percent of Hispanic applicants passed the math test, compared with 85 percent of white applicants, according to the Justice Department letter. ... The Justice Department said it will sue the city if Virginia Beach does not take appropriate measures to end discrimination and provide “sufficient remedial relief” to previous job applicants.

Such inquisitorial practices have befallen many a fire and police department of late, from New York to Chicago to Boston to Jacksonville, FL to the state of New Jersey.

A class action suit has even been brought against the State of Iowa's civil service for 'implicit' (unconscious) racism, but has not prevailed (for now):

[Judge Robert Blink's] ruling, coming after a three-week class action trial in Pippen v. Iowa (2012), is a stunner.  Judge Blink entered judgment for Defendants and against a class of African-American employees who claimed class-wide bias in hiring and promotion within 37 departments of the executive branch of the State of Iowa. 

Judge Blink also rejected the centerpiece of Plaintiffs’ class claim — their “implicit bias” theory. Plaintiffs presented testimony from Dr. Anthony Greenwald in support of this theory. Implicit bias, according to Dr. Greenwald, is a person’s “automatic preference for one race over another” that leads the person to unintentionally discriminate.

Pippen v. Iowa: A test case to see if 'implicit bias' can be used 

to prosecute Whites for unconscious crimes

Dr. Greenwald is a psychology professor who claims to have invented the famous (some would say infamous) Implicit Association Test (IAT). The IAT is a computerized test that requires a subject to associate a verbal or visual stimulus viewed on a monitor with either “pleasant” or “unpleasant” words and then measures the relative response time to complete the associations. [...] Dr. Greenwald has concluded, based on his use of IAT, that 70% of white persons have an automatic preference for whites over blacks. Under his theory, the inherent racial preference demonstrated by the IAT must affect employment decision-making...

3) Authoritative Texts

'The Witches' Hammer,' 1486

Every crusade needs its sacred text, and the witch hunters were no exception.


a) Authoritative texts: Witches

The learned theory of the witches’ Sabbath arose in the fourteenth century. In the 1480s, it was fully incorporated into the first comprehensive handbook for the battle against witches, the Malleus Maleficarum (1486; the title means “Hammer of Witches”), written by two Dominicans, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Institoris. Thereafter, it engaged the energies of a host of demonologists in various European countries. In the sixteenth and even for most of the seventeenth century, the academic discussion of theological, philosophical, and legal aspects of witchcraft was a recognized branch of university studies. (4)

Sorcerer surfing:  Scholars believed water 'repulsed' witches,

 so they were able to sail over it easily.

Like so many other contemporary matters of natural philosophical interest, demonism was held to be intelligible in its effects but not in its causes, something real and manifest as an 'experienced' matter of fact but as yet unexplained. As late as 1737, William Whiston, Newton's disciple and his successor in the Lucasian chair of mathematics, wrote that the assaults of invisible demons, as long as they were well attested, were 'no more to be denied, because we cannot, at present, give a direct solution of them, than are Mr. Boyle's experiments about the elasticity of the air; or Sir Isaac Newton's demonstrations about the power of gravity, are to be denied, because neither of them are to be solved by mechanical causes.' (3)

b) Authoritative texts: Racism


'Structural racism,' too, has its holy writ.  One of its high priests is Derrick Bell, and his doctrine is known as 'Critical Race Theory.' J.J. Pyle:

All Critical Race Theory writers believe, in varying degrees, that "racism is endemic to American life."  While mainstream civil rights reformers assume that racism is a product of ignorance and can be overcome by education, critical race theorists insist that racism is pervasive and immutable, and "lies at the very heart of American--and western--culture."  To critical race theorists, white racism is a "defect in the collective unconscious," a cultural phenomenon that automatically "reproduces hierarchy" even in the absence of conscious discrimination.  In a racist society, everyone is either an "outsider" or an "insider," a "victim" or a "perpetrator."

Derrick Bell

Or, as Bell himself put it:

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary "peaks of progress," short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies.

Some legal solutions proposed by Bell and his acolytes are a tax on white people to be distributed to Blacks as reparations, jury nullification by Blacks for black defendents, and race (but not sex) affirmative action for prison populations.

The fox and the stork: Disparate impact?

Another founding text of 'structural racism' is the 1971 legal decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971).  It has been interpreted thus:

...The disparate impact doctrine under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits employers "from using a facially neutral employment practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. A facially neutral employment practice is one that does not appear to be discriminatory on its face; rather it is one that is discriminatory in its application or effect." Where a disparate impact is shown, the plaintiff can prevail without the necessity of showing intentional discrimination ... 

The disparate impact doctrine is controversial because it can require persons to intentionally discriminate against one group in order to avoid creating a disparate impact on another group, and that intentional discrimination can amount to illegal disparate treatment or a violation of the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection.

Turning the blameless into the guilty is thus as easy today as in the past. A stray wart meant you were ipso facto a sorcerer, and now the fact that one ethnic group performs less well on a test means you are ipso facto a racist--no causal chain needed.



4)  Confession


Torture was a marvellous incentive, bringing out all sorts of fanciful confessions.


a) Confession: Witches

Ducking a witch: 17th century American woodcut

From a 1618 witchcraft trial in Lincoln, England:

Margaret Flower confesseth, that she hath two familiar Spirits sucking on her, the one white, the other black spotted; the white sucked under her left breast, and the black spotted within the inward parts of her secrets. When she first entertained them she promised them her soul, and they covenanted to do all things which she commanded them. 

She further saith, that about the 30 of January, last past, being Saturday, four Devils appeared unto her in Lincolne Jail, at eleven or twelve a clock at midnight: The one stood at her bed's feet, with a black head like an Ape, and spake unto her; but what, she cannot well remember, at which she was very angry because he would speak no plainer, or let her understand his meaning: the other three were Rutterkin, Little Robin, and Spirit.

Witch and the devil on horseback, 1493 German woodcut

Or this 1662 confession of Agnes Murie, Scotland:

...Being coming from the Crook Mill, about Martinmas [Nov. 11] last, 1661, Satan did appear to you at the back of Tullibole yards, being on Monday, and said to you “will you be my servant and I will give you as much silver as will buy you as many corn as will serve you before Lammas [Aug. 1],” which you granted. Likeways he desired you to renounce and forsake your baptism, which ye did, and he gave to you a new name calling you Rossina, which ye yourself did freely confess, and likeways at the same time Satan had the use of your body at the foot of the round knoll at the back of the yards of Tulliebole, and knew not whether his body was hot or cold, which ye did also freely confess.

Witches' sabbat, undated woodcut

b) Confession: Racism

No thumbcrews or torture racks today.  Yet our Inquisitors manage to extract all manner of confessions from our latter-day sorcerers.

James Watson: Father of DNA double helix and 

publicly shamed racist

No less than James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, after being caught in an honest moment (“all our social policies are based on the fact that [Africans'] intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”), and despite being right, was forced to confess his sins:

"Science is no stranger to controversy and I am not one to shy away from tackling issues, however, difficult they might prove to be," he said. "I have had my share of controversy, as many of you know. But I am mortified about what has happened. 

"More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the ways they have.  To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly.  That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief."

Confessions of racism come from high and low, no hot pincers needed. Kim Radersma, white educator speaking at the (taxpayer-funded) White Privilege Conference in Madison, WI:

[Radersma] was the leader of a breakout session entitled “Stories from the Front Lines of Education: Confessions of a White, High School English Teacher.” During the session, she told the teachers and administrators that “being a white person who does anti-racist work is like being an alcoholic.” She went on to say, “I will never be recovered by my alcoholism, to use the metaphor. I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply imbedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way.” 

"We've been raised to be good. 'I'm a good white person,' and yet to realize I carry within me these dark, horrible thoughts and perceptions is hard to admit. And yet like the alcoholic, what's the first step? Admitting you have a problem," she told the session attendees.

The president of Western Washington University seeks to repent not just of his but of  his entire school's racism:

So racist, our very numbers must be shrunk

A school-wide questionnaire at Western Washington University (WWU) asked the community “How do we make sure that in future years ‘we are not as white as we are today?’” 

“Every year, from this stage and at this time, you have heard me say that, if in decades ahead, we are as white as we are today, we will have failed as university,” [President Bruce] Shepard said in the 2012 speech. “In the decades ahead, should we be as white as we are today, we will be relentlessly driven toward mediocrity; or, become a sad shadow of our current self,” he wrote.

Confessions are gushing forth unprompted on the internet.  Author Mary Robinette Kowal:

When we think of racism, there’s a tendency to think of just the overt, violent sort.  “Oh, no! I’m not racist.” But racism is often quieter and more insidious. So, here are some ways in which I have discovered that I am racist. It shames me. [...] 

   -I had food delivered and the Latino delivery guy spoke perfect English. I was stunned. 

   -Being unsurprised at the fact that my friend plays violin beautifully, because she’s Chinese.    They’re good at things like that. Right? 

[...] Oh, there’s more, but that’s all I can face at the moment.

Or Duke student Andy Chu:

I am one of the organizers of last week’s Race is not a Party protest. I am straight. I am male. I am white (mostly). I am comfortably middle-class. [...] It’s obvious. I am a racist. I am a sexist.  I wish I wasn’t. But I am. I understand racism—not completely, of course, but I have a good idea of what it means, what it looks like. I know it’s wrong. But I’m still a racist.

Racism confessions even come in theatrical form, as seen recently in Barbados where a group of Whites confessed their guilt to acts committed hundreds of years before they were born:

We caused your ancestors' pain--don't ask us how, but we did it.

Torture and threats can elicit confessions, but let us not forget that both yesterday and today, one finds true believers in the mix.  Historian Henry Kamen:

The testimonies show that many witches [in Essex] really believed in their own magical powers, and were convinced that they had been transported to Sabbats and had had sexual intercourse with the devil. (1)

5)  Punishment

Crime demands punishment. What was on the menu for witches?

a) Punishment: Witches

Punishments for witchcraft in 16th-century Germany:

 Impalement, hanging, beheading, and others

 Wiki on punishment:

In England, witches were usually hanged before having their bodies burned and their ashes scattered. In Scotland, the witches were usually strangled at the stake before having their bodies burned—though there are several instances where they were burned alive. ... Most of the victims were never given proper burials, since they had been convicted of witchcraft, they were no longer considered people. They were often laid in unmarked graves.

Woodcut of English witch hanging, 17th c.

Historian Brian Pavlac:

The favorite neo-pagan term for the period of the Witch Hunts is "the Burning Times." The most common form of execution, though, was hanging. Admittedly, burning was important in many of these cases also, since to further protect against any malevolence from the dead witch, authorities often burned the remains afterward. Other popular forms of execution for witches included beheading, drowning, and breaking on the wheel.  [...] Other punishments inflicted on convicted witches included mutilating (cutting off of a hand or ear for example), branding, whipping, dunking, locking in the the stocks, jailing, fining, banishing, or selling into slavery.

b) Punishment: Racism

Execution or mutilation? Certainly not. Jailing or fining?  As it turns out, our Euro cousins view the crime of 'racism' as a real and present danger, and see it everywhere--even in places where it is not.

French pundit Eric Zemmour:

Crime: 'Racial defamation', for stating that 'French immigrants are more closely monitored than others because most drug dealers are blacks or Arabs... It's a fact' [it is indeed].
Punishment risked: 1 year emprisonment, €45,000 fine.
Punishment given: €10,000 fine.

Austrian MP Susanne Winter:

Crime: 'Incitement,' for saying 'in today's system' the Islamic prophet Mohammed would be considered a 'child molester' (referring to Mohammed's marriage to nine-year-old Aisha), and for for saying that Austria faces an 'Islamic immigration tsunami.'
Punishment demanded: 2 years imprisonment.
Punishment given: €24,000 fine, suspended three-month prison sentence.

Late Canadian psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton:

Crime: 'Promoting hatred,' for hypothesizing that Asians, Whites, and Blacks differ in average intelligence.
Investigated:  By Ontario Provincial Police following a complaint; investigation later dropped due to complainants' abandonment.
Punishment risked: Two years imprisonment.

Multicult dissidents: Those investigated and/or prosecuted for crimethink in the West include  French pundit Eric Zemmour,  Danish journalist Lars Hedegaard ,  Austrian anti-jihad activist Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff,  Danish MP Jesper Langballe,  the late Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci,  French author Michel Houellebecq,  Finnish MP Jussi Kristian Halla-aho,  Austrian MP Susanne Winter,  the late Canadian psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton,  Dutch politician Geert Wilders.

*     *     *

'A most Certain, Strange, and true Discovery of a WITCH being taken by some of the Parliament Forces, as she was standing on a small planck-board and sayling on it over the River of Newbury, Together with the strange and true manner of her death, with the propheticall words and speeches she used at the same time.' (1643)

'Racism is the new witchcraft,' says Steve Browne.  Is it true?  In some ways.  The unhappy event for which no cause can be found, the accusation, the investigation, the confession, the punishment...

But let us not overlook the important differences:

• Witchcraft accusations were always leveled at individuals.  Racism charges, especially for 'structural racism,' are as often thrown at groups as at single people (police departments, universities).

• The use of physical torture to extract confessions is a thing of the past--today the 'confessors' seem to be a mix of

            1) those who are trying to keep their jobs (false confessors), and
            2) those who really do believe they are racist, though they are demonstrably not (true         believers)

• Punishments meted out are much lighter than in the past (fines or jail rather than execution or mutilation).

• While witchcraft does not in all likelihood exist, racism most certainly does.  Defining the latter, and deciding if it should be a crime or not, however, are tasks we seem to have abandoned. 

Larry Auster again:

Race hatred, which denies the humanity of an entire class of people because of their race, is a real evil. I think it is essential that we confine the word racism to behaviors and beliefs that are discrete and identifiable. If we extend it to include this hopelessly vague notion of structural discrimination, which becomes, in effect, a denial of the humanity of all white people [since they carry the 'original sin' of racism], then “racism” itself becomes a hate word, and the real racism escapes blame.

What flummoxed our ancestors were natural disasters for which they could find no cause. What perplexes us is the natural disaster that is many black peoples' lives.


We at Those Who Can See feel the strongest parallel between witchery and racism is that at its root, it is based on ignorance of the nature of reality.  The causes of swine flu and stillbirth are not a mystery to us today. We don't need far-fetched theories, such as witchcraft, to explain them.  In the future, the group differences in ability and intelligence caused by natural selection will be well understood, no longer a mystery to the mainstream.  On that day, our descendents will likely look back at our era as one of great intellectual darkness and confusion.

Matthew Hopkins, 'Witchfinder General' during the English civil war. 

'My Imps names are 1) Ilemauzar, 2) Pyewackett, 

3) Pecke in the Crowne, 4) Griezzell Greedigutt'

Let us not be a Matthew Hopkins, but a Johann Weyer, who wrote in 1563,

I fight with natural reason against the deceptions which proceed from Satan and the crazed imagination of the so-called witches. My object is also medical, in that I show that illnesses which are attributed to witches come from natural causes. (1)

Or mathematician Hermann Witekind, who said that

...witches were just “foolish, stubborn, miserable women,” “poor,” and “insane,” whom the Devil had deluded into thinking they could perform magic, and he advocated only moderate punishments for professional magicians. ...He concluded that “it would be much easier, milder, and also more Christian in rooting out magic for the preachers to educate the people about their devilish delusions.” (3)

Educating today's blank-slatists about their 'devilish delusions' has been taken up by scholars as well as simple bloggers such as the formidable Steve Sailer, HBD Chick, JayMan, SBPDL, and a slew of others. When future generations look back at the different 20th century 'witch hunts,' such as McCarthyism or Soviet show trials, today's 'racism hunts' will surely join the list. Though they are derided and insulted today, those on the side of reason will, one hopes, not be forgotten.

See also:

'Heretics, Kulaks, and Witches,'
'Bring Low the Enemy of Multiculturalism,'
Radish's excellent 'Black Magic'

REFERENCES:
(1) Kamen, Henry, Early Modern European Society. London, Routledge, 2000.
(2) Roper, Lyndal, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe. NY: Routledge, 1994.
(3) Clark, Stuart, Thinking with Demons:The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford University Press, 1999.
(4) Von Greyerz, Kaspar, Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800. NY: Oxford University Press, 2008.