Will Sexton Is Wrong About Race

Vrillium thinks Irish were not considered White

I think most of you are familiar with Will Sexton, a YouTuber in the DR sphere who has gotten famous over his takes on Israel related subjects. He is a quite talented communicator and I enjoy watching his videos time-to-time.

The reason I am even writing this article is because he recently stated that White-nationalism is useless because according to him culture can transcend race and since the Irish have initially belonged to an alien culture, they were not regarded as White (White is our culture™), but after they assimilated into our culture™ they became White.

Before I go ahead and debunk these arguments and this logic in general, it is important to remember that Will Sexton was a BLM supporting leftist in 2020. I’m not saying that in order to compromise him, but to emphasize that he missed the 2010s political moment when we engaged and dismantled these ideas. So because he, like many other people who have joined our ranks quite recently, is naturally not familiar with our discourse since the mid-2010s.

That is the good faith explanation for his reasoning. The bad faith explanation is that because he is in the anti-Zionist space, it would naturally tend to attract other people who also naturally hate Israel, and many of these people naturally tend to be Muslim, Brown, Black, or other non-White and oftentimes non-Western. Just take a look at Dan Bilzerian’s top donors to his congress campaign.

Therefore, you could interpret his tweets as him playing to his brown audience, either not wanting to alienate them or actively trying to build a coalition. I won’t comment on the strategic viability of that approach here, though it would certainly be a mistake in a European context; although the American case is quite different and perhaps that is a good strategic approach. Instead, I’d like to focus on the logical aspect of his argument.

I’d first start off with the “Irish were not considered as White” take. The origin of this argument can be traced back to Noel Ignatiev a Jewish race-marxist and self-professed “race traitor”, who called for the “abolition” of the White race. So right off the bat, we’re off to a great start.

And while you’re still considering the source, it’s important to understand what Noel Ignatiev, and by association Will Sexton, mean by “White” in this case. They mean the “default cultural identity”, not genetics. Consequently, the discrimination the Irish and Italians faced from the Anglo-dominant culture is interpreted as Whites (majority culture) discriminating against non-Whites (minority culture).

The reality is that White people are a biological phenomenon, not a cultural phenomenon. Historical records consistently show that the Irish were classified as white in census data, were never subject to anti-miscegenation laws targeting non-whites, were eligible for naturalization under the 1790 Naturalization Act (restricted to "free white persons"), and were never subjected to the racial caste systems imposed upon blacks and Native Americans. There was cultural discrimination against them because they were not Anglo, not because they were not White. To elevate this to the status of racial oppression is to fundamentally misunderstand both the nature of their experience and the nature of group hierarchy that existed in America.

But even if so, when non-Anglo White immigrants assimilated into American society, they were not adopting a culture foreign to them, they were integrating into a broader pan-European civilization with an Anglo tilt, that they already shared deep civilizational roots with. To compare this to the prospect of assimilating populations from entirely different civilizational spheres like the Islamic or the Sub-Saharan with completely different foundations is ridiculous. Why haven’t then Black Americans assimilated into White culture?

Anyways, this brings us to the crux of my argument, there are biological racial realities, and some groups are just foreign to us.

Besides a genetic distance and clearly clustering with themselves, these groups have a foreign phenotype and most importantly a foreign set of abilities. Middle Easterners cannot assimilate into “Whiteness” because they cannot emulate it, much like Indians and Blacks. They have a different biological drive that propels them towards achieving different life outcomes. And they don’t even want to!

When we’re talking about European assimilation into the American White identity we are talking about a mutual drive towards one-ness. There was a desire among the non-Anglo European immigrants to become White American. There is less of that desire among Jews and even less so among Arabs, Indians and etc.

So first, they’re not us, second, they don’t want to, and third, even if they wanted to, they couldn’t. At this point you can equate the entire world with White people and expect the same result.

Culture does not exist in a vacuum. It is the emergent property of a population’s genetic endowment interacting with its environment over time. The culture that Sexton wants to preserve and propagate is not a random assortment of customs that could have developed anywhere. To believe that this culture can be indefinitely sustained by populations with radically different evolutionary histories is to believe in a form of cultural magic that is typical of left-wing ideologues (which matches his past).

The Irish example actually proves the opposite of Sexton’s claim. The Irish assimilated successfully because they were white, not despite it. Their assimilation was possible precisely because the genetic and civilizational gap between them and the Anglo-Saxon majority was bridgeable. Meanwhile the Muslim population in Europe, despite decades of multicultural policy, remains largely segregated and culturally distinct.

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I think that most people are intuitively driven by “White=our cultural identity” mentality, which is why so many White nationalists are claiming that Jews are not White but South Italians or Greeks are. I dissect this argument here. This is not really their fault as much as our society's equation of Whiteness to a socially constructed in-group.

When we begin to view Whiteness as a biological category, there will be less confusions over who is White and what can be assimilated into it.

A conversation about assimilation should not be framed in ethnic terms, but in national terms, “yes these Arabs may not be White but they could be of X nationality” type of thing. Not that I agree (because there will still be massive biologically caused disparities), but at least that would be an honest approach to this question.

At the end of the day, an American identity does not really exist, there are multiple American identities, Black-American, Muslim-American, White-American and that will always be this way, an African migrant to American will not assimilate into the “American culture” or “White culture” he will assimilate into the Black American culture. There is no going beyond race.