Mid-nineteenth-century German racial moralism

Posted by Jimmy Marr on February 10, 2011, 08:08 PM | #

What can the blackamoor do,
that he is not so white as you?

While it would seem unfair to exclude the blackamoor for reasons over which he has no control, the alternative is even crueler:

Invite him and his kin into our society and later, after they have had time to express their extended phenotype, condemn them on moral grounds.

Posted by Guessedworker on February 10, 2011, 08:17 PM | #

Interesting.

My father’s grandparents kept a pub in Towcester:

http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/tdlhs/places/plaques/Studio.html

... and as a boy my father often stayed with them (acquiring a dislike for drunkenness, it has to be said).  A travelling fair occasionally visited the town when the Towcester races were held, and at one of these my father set eyes for the first time in his life on an African.  He didn’t see another one until he was driving home from work in central London in the late 1950s - a journey that took him through the nascent West Indian settlement around Railton Road, Brixton.

One summer’s evening, when I was maybe seven or eight, we were driving home from a visit to my grandparents in North Bucks to our home on the southern outskirts of the city.  Dad drove us through the West Indian area, and for the first time in my life I, too, saw eight or ten of these strange men and women in the flesh.  They were socialising on the steps of the old Victorian terraces they occupied, and the impression they left on me was one of complete otherness.

Would that we could turn the clock back in that respect.

Posted by Wandrin on February 10, 2011, 10:26 PM | #

I think there’s a natural spectrum from extreme xenophobe at one end to extreme xenophile at the other and the extreme xenophiles will always exist as a small minority.

Posted by Man on February 11, 2011, 12:15 PM | #

What can the blackamoor do,
that he is not so white as you?

I like this quote. As Mr Marr noted above, men do not have control over which race they are born into.
That being said, today’s state of affairs are a completely different matter.

Posted by Leon Haller on February 11, 2011, 07:24 PM | #

Dasein,

Thanks for posting this (I also acknowledge my tremendous envy at your literacy in German, a huge deficiency in my abilities I shall never be able to remedy).

Assuming Hoffman was not Jewish (I knew a Hoffman who was, and Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable, a rare step backwards, like race denial, in the growth and dissemination of knowledge), this is an excellent, concrete example of the white man’s superior innate moral sentiments - that the Moor above is human, as we are, and thus has feelings which properly ought to be respected (though the presumption that he has the same feelings we have, or in the same proportion, is rarely examined) - and how those sentiments must be properly disciplined by extra-moral empirical facts if they are not to result in negative ultimate effects.

The real issue, however, is whether or to what extent any course of action can ever be moral without regard to future effects, but then also how far out along the chain of expected effects one must project the presently contemplated action. This is a fundamental problem of moral philosophy, as well as obviously a particular concern for racialists.

The paradigmatic example concerns (genuine) refugees. Simply put, the West opens up its arms to the persecuted, ands ends up destroying itself. Each person is not merely an individual moral agent, as liberalism in all its varieties presumes, but also the bearer of a collective genome which expresses itself over time in statistically significant and predictable ways. When contemplating granting shelter to an alien refugee, therefore, it is morally improper towards one’s own people merely to think of the refugee as an individual case, needing succor. However deserving he may be, he contains within himself the probability of harming the host population, if not through his own future actions, then through those of his children.

It is not kind to mock the blackamoor, but neither is it proper to accept his presence. The mockery could be seen as a healthy immune response on the part of a (through time) morally superior host.

Posted by PM on February 11, 2011, 10:36 PM | #

Maybe the author was able to acknowledge something about whites that people today would wish to deny—that whites have an innate feeling of racial superiority. But the fact that whites also reject pride means that there is a cognitive dissonance created that is the true meaning of ‘white guilt.’ The dying of the children black is like the liberal white desire to race-mix—to rid us of that pride in the only way possible, by destroying the whiteness that causes the pride.
Tha this is the only way that they can rid themselves of the pride would suggest that they themselves think that the pride is also justified.

Posted by Armor on February 11, 2011, 10:42 PM | #

If White people realized that many Blacks feel superior to the White man, they wouldn’t take offense at all. It would make them laugh.

Posted by PM on February 12, 2011, 12:40 AM | #

Armor, don’t you think that the dismissive attitude of whites to black feelings of superiority is also a part of that white sense of superiority? Our racism is worse, because we know it is justified. Maybe this is what you were driving at, I’m not sure.

Posted by Armor on February 12, 2011, 01:08 AM | #

“is also a part of that white sense of superiority”

Exactly so. I was trying to express my agreement: Liberals would like to feel morally superior to the White “racists”, but they are no better. They cannot help feeling superior to the Blacks!

Posted by PM on February 12, 2011, 01:58 AM | #

The true modern anti-racist feels that our superiority is such that there is a simple choice between our own annihilation and everyone elses. Any self-love leads straight to Auschwitz.
I have sometimes wondered if maybe the anti-racists are actually the biggest natural racists, whether in another time and place it is they who would have been the most fervent Nazis. I mean, what drives their obsession with racism, and their obsession with whiteness? Is anti-racism the only way for them to connect in some way with their whiteness, for their race to still be a part of their personal narrative in a way that they crave? Are they ‘self loathing’ as we sometimes claim, or is it that they hate the fact that they love their race? Is this what makes their vehemence for racists so strong?
The ‘anti-racist’ who wrote this story is clearly racist, and the whole story is racist—white racism is not refuted in this story, far from it. It is the same as someone laughing at a disabled person and then ending up in a wheelchair—‘don’t mock the afflicted.’

It’s interesting to hear people here talking of the fist blacks they saw. I also can remember mine (a grouo of them when on a day out in London, and I didn’t like it), and have heard similair stories from others. It is obviously a jarring and memorable moment for many, and one I suspect many people today retrospectively place more noble emotions onto. For example, on Desert Island Disks I heard Michael Caine talking about his East End childhood, when, apropos of nothing, he suddenly blurted out that he remembered as a very young boy seeing a black boy for the first time, and, says Michael, “I just thought that was wonderful!”

Whatever respect I had for the man vanished when I heard him say that. Can you imagine as a young boy that being your honest reaction to such a sight? What on earth could be wonderful about it? When in nature is the alien something we instinctively embrace? It was such a bullshit thing to say.

Posted by John on February 12, 2011, 05:04 AM | #

“Armor, don’t you think that the dismissive attitude of whites to black feelings of superiority is also a part of that white sense of superiority? Our racism is worse, because we know it is justified.”

This dynamic is also expressed in blacks being hypersensitive to racial slight and whites being nearly impossible to insult racially. Noone who appreciates classical music takes Snoop Doggy Dogg serious when he says, “Beethoven ain’t shit”.

Posted by Armor on February 12, 2011, 01:00 PM | #

“This dynamic is also expressed in blacks being hypersensitive to racial slight and whites being nearly impossible to insult racially.”

This is yet more proof that the Jews don’t see themselves are white.

Posted by Armor on February 12, 2011, 01:25 PM | #

I mean: Jews like Blacks like to take offense. I don’t care that their indignation is faked.

Posted by Frank on February 12, 2011, 02:21 PM | #

Have y’all been following CofCC? Israeli Parliament holds debate on miscegenation.

Israel’s right-wing ruling coalition is expected to endorse a government policy of discouraging mixed relationships between Jews and Arabs. Likud, the most powerful party, maintains that opposition to mixed marriages does not constitute “racism,” but simply a desire to preserve what is unique about ones’ own group.

Already Israel has passed a “deceit rape” law. A Jewish woman can have an Arab man charged with rape, if he pretended to be Jewish when they had relations. At least one Arab has been prosecuted already. Israel also makes guest workers sign an agreement not to have sexual relations with Israeli citizens.

Posted by John on February 12, 2011, 02:31 PM | #

Armor: “This is yet more proof that the Jews don’t see themselves are white. I mean: Jews like Blacks like to take offense. I don’t care that their indignation is faked.”

Jews probably mind being insulted as whites less than non-Jewish whites and as Jews probably as much as or not much less than blacks (though it was a Jew that told me some of the best Jew jokes I’ve ever heard).

Posted by Dasein on February 14, 2011, 03:29 PM | #

Leon,

I don’t think Hoffmann was Jewish (didn’t find anything to suggest that when I searched).  While Hoffmann is a name sometimes used by Jews, it’s common among Germans.  Hitler’s personal photographer was also named Heinrich Hoffmann.

Posted by Cpt. Swindle on February 14, 2011, 10:42 PM | #

If the guy is somehow distantly related to Dustin Hoffman that explains everything.

Posted by Hail on February 20, 2011, 02:57 AM | #

The “humiliating, terrible punishment” of the boys is to be blackened even darker than the “Moor”! It is hard to call this poem Pro-Black in any way, if you think about it.

To me it is just a clever morality tale (do as you’re told) using a black boy as a prop. Aggressive Anti-White-Racialism did not yet exist at that time.

Posted by Hail on February 20, 2011, 03:13 AM | #

In a similar spirit:

There are, of course, “certain” people who have called Shakespeare a heroic anti-racist luminary for creating the character Othello.

And what about the German Romantic Hauff, who wrote pseudo-Arab folktales? An early sign of Teutonic-Islamic friendship?

Or just literary devices?

Posted by Eumaios on June 16, 2011, 09:29 PM | #

There’s a modernized translation and re-illustration of this book; it was one of my favorites as a child:

From Bad to Worse: Silly Tales in Silly Verse

The revisioner is one Geraldine Richelson.  I can’t find my copy at the moment, but I don’t recall ever seeing the original attributed.  The story in question has been recast in a rather bizarre manner: it takes place in a 70s looking suburb, with a little black boy wearing sneakers.  The ubermensch who punishes the white boys looks a bit like this, and he has a tool belt filled with different colors of spray paint.  Throughout the first beat of the story, he’s spying on the goings-on from a nearby tree.

Posted by Eumaios on June 17, 2011, 04:09 PM | #

Found my copy of the book, and it does refer to the original German work on the copyright page.