Not long ago, the newspapers announced that according to some calculations,

by 1970 half of the population of Manhattan will be black, and that in the five
boroughs that make up the entire city of New York, 28 percent of the
inhabitants will be of colored race. Developments in the same direction have
been registered in other cities and areas of the United States. We are
witnessing a negrification, a mongrelization, and a decline of the white race in
the face of faster-breeding inferior races.
Of course, from the point of view of democracy, there is nothing wrong with
that, on the contrary. We are all acquainted with the zeal and intransigence of
American proponents of so-called “racial integration,” which can only further
speed the process. They not only advocate complete interracial social
fraternization and want the Negro to have free access to any public and
political office (so that we may even expect, in the future, a black president of
the United States), but also have no objection to Negroes mixing their blood
with that of white Americans. A characteristic example of propaganda for this
agenda is the play entitled “Deep Are the Roots” (in other words: of racial
“prejudice”), which Italian radio has felt the need to subject us to more than
once.
The “integrationists” who draw these conclusions – as logical as they are
aberrant – from the dogma of egalitarian democracy, and who, while talking at
full blast about freedom, are in fact advocating a truly coercive system (1), are
still opposed, especially in the South, by certain groups that have no intention
of giving a green light to the advance of the black race and the “negrification”
of their country. However, these latter groups fail to realize the extent of the
phenomenon, in the sense that they only notice it in its most material and
tangible form. They fail to see the extent to which America is “negrified” not
only racially and demographically, but above all in its civilization, in the
behavior, and tastes of Americans, even when there has been no actual mixing
with negro blood.
The US has been compared, not without justification, to a melting-pot. It
actually presents us with a case in which a human type was formed, with
characteristics that are to a large extent uniform and constant, from out of a
highly heterogeneous raw material. Emigrating to America, men of the most
diverse peoples receive the same imprint; after two generations, except in rare
cases, they lose almost all of their original characteristics, reproducing a fairly
homogeneous unit in terms of mentality, sensibility, and behavior: the
American type.
In this regard, theories such as those formulated by Frobenius and Spengler,
who have asserted that there is a close relationship between the forms of a
given culture and a kind of “soul” bound to the natural environment, to the
“landscape” and the original population, do not seem applicable. Otherwise,
an essential part of American culture would have been possessed by the
indigenous element, which consists of Amerindians, the redskins. The red
Indians were proud races with their own style, their own dignity, sensibility
and forms of religiosity; not without justification, a traditionalist writer, F.
Schuon, spoke of the presence in their being, of something “aquiline and
solar.” And we will not hesitate to assert that had it been their spirit that to an
appreciable extent had imbued – in its best aspects and on an appropriate
plane – the human material thrown into the “American melting pot,” the level
of American civilization would probably be higher.[2]
Instead, besides its Puritan-Protestant component (which, in turn, as a result of
its fetishistic emphasis on the Old Testament, possesses many judaized,
degenerate traits), it seems that it is precisely the negro element, in its
primitivism, that has set the tone in important aspects of the American psyche.
It is already characteristic that when speaking of American folklore, it is to the
Negroes one is referring, as if they were the original inhabitants of the
country. Thus, the famous Porgy and Bess by the Jew Gershwin, which deals
exclusively with blacks, is considered in the US to be a classic work inspired
by “American folklore.” The composer has declared that he lived for some
time among American blacks in preparation for this work.
But the phenomenon of popular and dance music is even more conspicuous
and general. Fitzgerald was not wrong when he said that in one of its main
aspects, American civilization can be called a civilization of jazz, i.e., of a
negrified music and dance. In this domain, very singular “elective affinities”
have led America, by way of a process of regression and primitivization, to
imitate the Negroes. Assuming there would be a need for frenzied rhythms
and forms as a legitimate compensation for the mechanical and materialistic
soullessness of modern civilization, one would have done much better to look
to the many sources available in Europe: we have elsewhere mentioned, for
example, the dance rhythms of South Eastern Europe, which often have
something truly Dionysian. But America has chosen to imitate the blacks and
the Afro-Cubans, and then from America the contagion has gradually spread
to all other countries.
The Negro component of the American psyche was already noticed, in his
time, by the psychoanalyst C. G. Jung. A few of his observations are worth
quoting:
Another thing that struck me [in the American] was the great influence of the
Negro, a psychological influence naturally, not due to the mixing of blood.
The emotional way an American expresses himself, especially the way he
laughs, can best be studied in the illustrated supplements of the American
papers; the inimitable Teddy Roosevelt laugh is found in its primordial form
in the American Negro. The peculiar walk with loose joints, or the swinging
of the hips so frequently observed in Americans, also comes from the Negro.
[3] American music draws its main inspiration from the Negro, and so does
the dance. The expression of religious feeling, the revival meetings, the Holy
Rollers and other abnormalities are strongly influenced by the Negro. The
vivacity of the average American, which shows itself not only at baseball
games but quite particularly in his extraordinary love of talking – the ceaseless
gabble of American papers is an eloquent example of this – is scarcely to be
derived from his Germanic forefathers, but is far more like the chattering of a
Negro village. The almost total lack of privacy and the all-devouring mass
sociability remind one of primitive life in open huts, where there is complete
identity with all members of the tribe.
The passage continues along the same lines, and Jung ends up wondering if
the inhabitants of the new continent could still be considered to be Europeans.
But his observations can be further developed.
The brutality that unquestionably is a characteristic of Americans can well be
said to have a negro character. In the happy days of what Eisenhower was not
ashamed to call the “Crusade in Europe,” as well as in the early days of the
occupation, we had the occasion to observe the typical forms of that brutality,
but we also saw that at times, American “whites” went even farther in this
respect than their negro comrades, whose infantilism, however, they often
shared.
Generally speaking, the taste for brutality now seems to be ingrained in the
American mindset. It is true that the most brutal of all sports, boxing,
originated in England, but it is in the United States that its most aberrant
forms have developed, and it is there that it has become the object of a
collective obsession, soon transmitted to other nations. Concerning the taste
for getting into fights and coming to blows in the most savage manner it is
enough, though, to consider the greater part of American films and popular
detective stories: vulgar fist-fighting is a constant theme, evidently because it
corresponds to the tastes of American audiences and readers, for whom it
seems to be the symbol of true masculinity. America, the world leader, has, on
the other hand, more than any other nation relegated the traditional duel to the
status of ridiculous European antiquated rubbish. The duel is a method of
settling disputes, following strict rules, without resorting to the primitive brute
force of the mere arm and fist. There is no need to point out the striking
contrast between this American trait and the ideal behavior of the English
gentleman, despite the fact that the English made up a component of the
original people of the United States.
Modern Western man, to a large extent a regressive type, is in various respects
comparable to a crustacean; he is as “hard” on the outside – as a man of
action, as an unscrupulous entrepreneur, as an organizer, and so forth – as he
is “soft” and formless in his internal substance. Now, this is true to the highest
degree of Americans, who represent the degenerate Western type carried to
the extreme. But here we find another of their affinities with the Negro.
Inconsistent sentimentality, banal pathos, especially in love affairs, put
Americans much closer to Negroes than to truly civilized Europeans. Of this,
observers can easily find clear evidence in a number of typical American
novels and again, songs, as well as in cinema and everyday life.
That American eroticism is as pandemic as it is – technically speaking –
primitive, has also been deplored by American girls and women. Which
brings us to yet another convergence with what is characteristic of the negro
races, in which the at times obsessive part always played by eroticism and
sexuality is associated with primitivism; thus, these races – unlike orientals,
the ancient Western world and certain other peoples – have never known
an ars amatoria worthy of the name. The much-vaunted high sexual
performance of Negroes is really only of a crudely quantitative priapic
character.
Another obvious aspect of American primitivism concerns the concept of
“bigness.” Werner Sombart has successfully put his finger on it in saying that
“they mistake bigness for greatness.” Now, this trait is not found in all non-
European peoples or peoples of color. For example, an authentic Arab of the
old race, a redskin, an East Asian are not overly impressed by merely material,
quantitative, ostentatious size, including that related to machinery, technology
and the economy (apart, of course, from already Europeanized individuals). It
is a trait found only in truly primitive and childish races like the Negro. It is
no exaggeration to assert that the foolish pride of Americans in spectacular
“bigness,” in the “achievements” of their civilization, reek of the Negro
psyche.
Here, we ought to mention the oft-repeated nonsense about Americans being a
“young race,” with the tacit corollary that they are the race of the future. It is
true that a myopic gaze easily mistakes regressive infantilism for true youth.
Strictly speaking, according to the traditional conception, this perspective
must be inverted. Despite appearances, recent peoples, since they came last,
are the most removed from their origins, and as such must be considered to be
the most senile and decadent peoples. This view, moreover, corresponds to the
organic world.[4]. It explains how paradoxically, the similarities of
supposedly “young” peoples, in the above sense of late-comers, with
genuinely primitive races that have remained outside of world history, and
explains the taste for primitivism and the return to primitivism. We have
already remarked upon the American predilection, from an elective affinity,
for Negro and sub-tropical music; but the same phenomenon is apparent in
other domains of more recent culture and art. We could consider, for example,
the glorification of “négritude” by existentialists, intellectuals, and
“progressive” artists in France.
It follows that Europeans, including the imitators of the higher non-European
civilizations, demonstrate, in turn, the same primitive and provincial mentality
when they admire America, when they let themselves be impressed by
America, when they stupidly allow themselves to be Americanized and
enthusiastically believe that this means catching up with the march of
progress, and that it is a sign of being liberated and open-minded.
This “catching up” includes the social and cultural “integration” of the negro,
which is spreading in Europe itself and even in Italy, and promoted through
the subliminal effects of imported films (where blacks and whites are shown
mixing in social functions, as judges, police officers, lawyers, etc.) and
television, in spectacles showing black dancers and singers mixed up with
white ones, so that the general public is gradually accustomed to interracial
fraternization and loses every remaining natural sense of race and every
feeling of distance. The hysteria caused by the shapeless, screaming mass of
flesh that is the negress Ella Fitzgerald during her performances in Italy is a
phenomenon that is as sad as it is indicative. As is the fact that the most
blatant glorification of negro “culture,” of négritude, comes from a German,
Janheinz Jahn, in a book published by Munti, a venerable old publishing
house in Germany (the homeland of Aryan racism!). A well-known left-wing
Italian publisher, Einaudi, was quick to spread it in our country as well, in a
translation in two editions. This ranting book goes to the point of claiming that
negro “culture” would be a excellent means of reviving and restoring the
“materialistic civilization” of the West . . .
Regarding the elective affinities of Americans, we would like to refer to one
more point. If in the United States of America there was one thing that seemed
to be positive and present some sort of hope, it was the phenomenon of a new
generation that had championed a kind of rebellious, anarchistic, nihilistic,
and anti-conformist existentialism: the so-called Beat generation, the Beats,
the hipsters and the like, which we will discuss more elsewhere. Well,
fraternizing with blacks and a veritable religion of negro jazz, deliberate race-
mixing, including white women having sexual relations with Negroes, are a
characteristic aspect of this movement. In a well-known essay, Norman
Mailer, who was one of its main exponents, actually established a kind of
equivalence between the negro and the human type of the generation in
question, even defining the latter as a “white negro.” Very rightly, Fausto
Gianfranceschi has written in this regard: “There is a parallel to the
fascination exerted by negro ‘culture,’ in the terms described by Mailer, in the
effect of the message of Friedrich Nietzsche at the turn of the century. The
starting point is the same concern with shattering fossilized conformity
through the immediate awareness of vital and existential facts; but what
confusion, what degradation, if the negro, as seen today with jazz and the
sexual orgasm, is placed on the pedestal of the ‘Superman’!”[5]
Pour la bonne bouche, we will conclude with a significant statement by a far
from superficial American author, James Burnham (in The Struggle for the
World): “There is in American life a strain of callow brutality. This betrays
itself no less in the lynching and gangsterism at home than in the arrogance
and hooliganism of soldiers or tourists abroad. The provincialism of the
American mind expresses itself in a lack of sensitivity toward other peoples
and other cultures. There is in many Americans an ignorant contempt for ideas
and tradition and history, a complacency with the trifles of merely material
triumph. Who, listening a few hours to the American radio, could repress a
shudder if he thought that the price of survival [of a non-communist society]
would be the Americanization of the world?” And unfortunately, to a certain
extent, this is already happening.
Notes
1. Forced “integration” is a blatant violation of the principle of freedom, and
that violation is only secondarily a matter of ”race.” No family has ever been
denied the right not to welcome strangers it dislikes into its home or to stay
apart from them (whatever the reason may be for such an dislike); but
fraternization with Negroes in public life is imposed — ironically in the name
of liberty, of a freedom that is unilateral. So-called segregation — apartheid
— is deplored, even though it is the only reasonable system, and one that
harms nobody: let each everyone remain in their own realm, among their own.
It is unbelievable what “progress” has brought about in the degenerate white
race: the British, who until recently were extreme practical racists, to the point
of believing that beyond the English Channel, there dwelled what was almost
a different humanity, and in their colonies to haughtily hold themselves apart
from even “colored” representatives of ancient civilizations superior to their
own (India, China, etc.), have at the time of this writing, as a result of the
“anti-colonialist” infatuation, forced their compatriots in Rhodesia to secede
from the Commonwealth, applying sanctions against them because they refuse
to yield to the imposition of granting the equal and indiscriminate democratic
vote to the mass of the black population, which would have forced them out of
the land that had been civilized only by them.
As for the US, if it is indeed the case, as some claim, that a guilt complex for
the wrongs done to blacks in the former regime of slavery are the motive of
the “anti-segregationists” — as if all the blood shed by whites in the fratricidal
civil war (officially fought for the freedom of the blacks) were not enough —
why do they not request that one of the fifty states of the Union be emptied
and ceded, so that all American blacks could be moved there, allowing them
to rule themselves and do whatever they want without bothering or
contaminating anyone? That would be the best solution.
2. A man of letters with intellectual pretensions, Salvatore Quasimodo, has
deplored the “racist” ideas expounded here, and has accused us, among other
things, of self-contradiction, because while we are against Negroes, we
nonetheless respect Amerindians. He has no suspicion of the fact that a
“healthy racism” has nothing to do with the prejudice of “white skin”; it is
essentially a matter of a hierarchy of values, according to which we say “no”
to Negroes, to all that pertains to them and to all Negro contamination (the
Negro races, in this hierarchy, are just above Australian primitives, and
according to a well-known morphology correspond mainly to the type of
“nocturnal” and “telluric” races, as opposed to the “diurnal” type), while on
the other hand, given what the white race has been reduced to in the age of
colonial mercantilist expansion, we would certainly be willing to concede
superiority over “whites” to the higher Hindu, Chinese, and Japanese types,
and to some Arabs strains, despite the fact that they do not have white skin.
3. One may add the absolutely Negro character of the movements of
American comedians and varieté dancers.
4. Of course, here only one aspect of Nietzscheanism is taken into
consideration. The degree of confusion that reigned in American
existentialism can be seen in the fact that while on the one hand making
common cause with the Negro, on the other hand, some were attracted by the
transcendence of the Far Eastern esoteric school of Zen.