Nos Ancêtres, Les Gaulois

I’d be interested to know how Murray was able to tell they were “African blacks”, as opposed to what I suppose he’d call “Caribbean blacks”, given that France still has many departments and territories there. Anyway, this passage clearly supports the contention that Murray isn’t at all racist.

Oh, come on–everyone knows how to recognize the native French: they wear striped low-collar shirts, funny little mustaches, and berets, and they carry a baguette and keep saying things like ‘Zut alors!’ and laughing like Maurice Chevalier. If it hadn’t been for those copycat white people ‘Brits and other Europeans’ Murray’s sample would have been clean.

St Denis isn’t, strictly speaking, an “area of Paris”, of course, nor is it a suburb where you’d expect to find many tourists. On his next visit to Europe, I suggest that Murray visits “Southall”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southall and the extrapolates general conclusions about the UK based on the people he sees there. In fact, he could reproduce this feat for just about any country you care to mention.

In my copy of _Time and Change_ (p.27) it is “Nos Ancêtres, Les Gaulois”.

I wonder what Murray would have concluded if he had walked around pre-independence Congo, Senegal or Guinea. No doubt he would have been alarmed by the paucity of white faces there as well.

Christ, the comments on that FP article are depressing…

Murray must have a real problem in the U. S. Out on a walk on the town in any major American city, you might not see a Native American at all!

“I collected data as I walked along….” Yep, that’s Charles Murray all right.

Incidentally, has any of these guys ever got to grips with the idea that a Muslim France would have to stop consuming alcohol and pork? They obviously have vivid imaginations, but can they really imagine that?

confined mostly to North Americans like Murray and Steyn

Sadly, it’s rather popular in Italy as well. See Magda “Cristiano” Allam etc.

I wonder if by ‘St Denis’ he means the rue Saint-Denis? because as every man-of-the-world knows, there’s only one thing one goes wandering down there looking for…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rue_Saint-Denis_%28Paris%29

Murray was probably wandering round assuming that anyone darker-complexioned than Catherine Deneuve was a terrifying foreigner.

Ajay wins.

P O’Neill:

Sorry to disappoint you but the insult has always been relative. It was always worse for Kerry to “look” French rather than American, but better to be French than Middle Eastern. And, in the mind of Murray et al., while the French are stinky, arrogant, socialistic, and post-heroic at least they are not dark-skinned.

This totally at all doesn’t make Charles Murray sound like a weird racist old monomaniacal crank, no, no, that would be a horrible way of reading his own words.

We should ask Zizou to stick a header in ‘im.

You all protest too much, I think. (What really worries you?) Seems that merely observing and reporting on racial matters is verboten .To deduce from the quoted text (an excerpt of an excerpt) that Murray is a racist is incorrect as well as it is unjust. It is his wont to synthesize sociological observations into statistical categories. Has anybody impeached his use of statistics?

Murray is one of your own – a true liberal, committed to multicultural ism (whatever that is) , and how you can turn on him.

Here is Murray,
“I am not impressed by worries about losing America’s Anglo-European identity. Some of the most American people I know are immigrants from other parts of the world. And I’d a hell of a lot rather live in a Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala neighborhood, even if I couldn’t read the store signs, than in many white-bread communities I can think of.”

But the truth is you should all be worried, very worried over the browning of Europe as well as of America. If trends continue, neither is likely to endure.

Murray’s not a racist — sure, no, of course not. He just wrote a really shitty, fraudulent, pseudo-scientific book on how we just got to admit that brown and black people are dumber.

Other non-blonde French citizens: Jews, Portuguese, Georgians, Armenians…he really doesn’t know anything about 20th century France, does he?

That reads like any conversation with my mother. Every time I ring her I am treated to a breakdown of the latest racial makeup of Adelaide, South Australia. And the demography I get from her pales in comparison to what I get from my grandmother, who is proud to tell me that “them blacks will get what’s coming to them”. They’re both British, and both very worried about the browning of everywhere.

I don’t think this phenomenon is limited to North America; it is just not so much in vogue among the right-wing pseudo-intellectual class in the UK, instead being represented in the living room conversations of the working and lower middle class.

I rather think that the word that Murray was looking for here is “white.”

Daniel is right — it’s outrageous that all of you are accusing Murray of racism. He was simply collecting data on how many of the people he encountered that evening appeared to have cognitive capacities commensurate with his own, simple as that.

He was simply collecting data on how many of the people he encountered that evening appeared to have cognitive capacities commensurate with his own, simple as that.

Michael,

Then he should have been in the Bois de Vincennes.

Okay, crash course in French urban planning. We French practice spatial segregation except, unlike Americans, we prefer to put the poor (migrants, plus the end tail of the working class) in the suburbs, and keep the inner city and fancy restaurants to ourselves.

As a consequence, anything that is at the end of a Métro line has a 85% likelihood to be poor (the other 15% account for the few rich suburbs in Hauts-de-Seine). Saint-Denis is in the 85% p-value. Geographically, Saint-Denis stands right at the end of the shittiest Métro line of Paris.

It’s simply not Paris. If you live there and work in Paris, you are called a commuter. If you live there and want to go shopping in Paris, you tell your friends you are “going down to Paris.” If you’re an idiot, you might have booked your (cheap) hotel there, instead of booking intra muros. Charles, voyons…

Seine Saint-Denis is the emblem of French hip hop singers NTM. Their lyrics might help Murray with getting the context of his trip.

#39: Daniel is right—it’s outrageous that all of you are accusing Murray of racism.

Daniel is wrong and in a rather opportunistic fashion cherry picks a quote to add weight to his flimsy rebuttal. It’s not hard to understand why people might see racism in Murray’s oddball data gathering exercise.

It’s not that Murray is a capital R racist (and I don’t think he is) any more than Steyn or Amis are capital R racists. They’re conflicted white men who like Daniel feel threatened by the “browning of Europe”. Saying you’d rather live in Little Vietnam than in a white-bread neighborhood is easy in the American context, and in no way let’s Murray off the hook.

“I collected data as I walked along, counting people who looked like native French…”

Any white dude who walks around St Denis seeking out signs of the “native French” isn’t having fun. And what are the native French supposed to look like? Provided Murray doesn’t require lineage dating back to ancient Gaul, a great many citizens of N. African background go back a many generations in France. They are to all intents and purposes French, provided you don’t insist on “white”. On the other hand, my mate Jean-Marie – one of Charlie’s “white natives” – could pass just as easily for a local in Marrakesh. These things are never simple.

What Murray’s ad-hoc data-gathering reflects is the angst of the white guy who sees otherness where it doesn’t necessarily exist. Using racial signatures and cultural cues to place people into an alleged “non-French” category is symptomatic of the Mark Steyn disease. Behind the data lies menace, real and implied, because no matter how educated, how cool, how urbane…well good God… they’re not like “us” (former marriage to a one-handed Thai Buddhist notwithstanding).

He even ranks by-passers into something he describes as “the non-native French half”. Without interviewing these people how the fuck could he possibly divine that a person is from the Middle-East and not from Wolverhampton?

Anyone familiar with the laments and nostrums of Steyn, Amis, McEwan et al understand what it is they are afraid of, and from their perspective they have good reason to be afraid. When you look at what these people have in common, at least one thing becomes clear.

Writing in Commentary Magazine in 2007 Murray went on at length about the (alleged) superior intelligence of Jews and ended with “At this point, I take sanctuary in my remaining hypothesis, uniquely parsimonious and happily irrefutable. The Jews are God’s chosen people.”

At the risk of being accused of being anti-Semitic ( I have friends, relatives and an accountant who are Jewish so eff off… ) what does “chosen” mean if not better-than-the-rest-of-you-rejects. Zionism, to varying degrees, endorses this bullshit and a great many of the defenders at Vienna’s gates dig it too. “Chosen people” claims don’t wash in 2010 especially when the distinction was allegedly bestowed by old Nobodaddy back in the hoary reaches of time. But weirdly enough even a few Atheist defenders of secularism peddle softly around this and related fallacies. And what I’m taking the long way round to say is that if old Charlie isn’t a racist, he certainly has skewed vision.

It always comes down to the same old shit when you scratch the surface, doesn’t it… no matter if the “concerns” are heavy with statistics, informed commentary and the civilization-under-threat drum roll.

It’s about which side you are on and what really throws members of this club is when people who look like them say “bring it on”.

Oh and that’s the least of it? Dream on.

Bongo Bains’s comment #45 is mostly sensible, but it’s discouraging that he or she seems to believe that Michael Bérubé was actually defending Murray. Did Bains pause for even a second to read what Bérubé actually said?

I’m still amazed that Christopher Caldwell got to write a whole buke about this after putting a six-page article in the NYT about how Robert Kilroy-Silk was going to revolutionise Europe.

If you didn’t know who Berube was, I don’t think you could point to what’s different between his comment and Daniel’s, other than brevity.

Icelandic blue eyes?

Here is Murray,
“I am not impressed by worries about losing America’s Anglo-European identity. Some of the most American people I know are immigrants from other parts of the world. And I’d a hell of a lot rather live in a Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala neighborhood, even if I couldn’t read the store signs, than in many white-bread communities I can think of.”

Murray lived for several years in Thailand in his youth, and says that he prefers Asian cultures to the West in some respects. His first wife was from Thailand, and two of his children are half-Thai. More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(author)#Peace_Corps_Service_in_Thailand

Despite his multiculturalist pronouncements , Murray lives in Burkittesville, Maryland, which is virtually all-white. In this respect he, of course, is very much like the core readership of Crooked Timber (at least those with children).

HF ADDENDUM – IF YOU KNOW THROUGH SOME MAGICAL PROCESS WHAT THE “CORE READERSHIP” OF CT IS, YOU KNOW AN AWFUL LOT MORE THAN WE BLOGGERS DO

“I can’t vouch for the representativeness of the sample…”

Sure, Charles Murray might include unquantifiably many false positives when he collects data while walking along. But let it not be said that he fails to frame his results rigorously.

Nothing creeps me out more than the homogenized streets and malls of rich man’s Orange County.

How are you in the equally homogenous (if not more so) streets of Hanoi, Beijing and Lusaka?

Tom: To me, that only sounds slightly more absurd than Daniel’s comment.

I agree with Gene. I grew up in an ethnically diverse city, so if I go to someplace that’s very ethnically homogeneous, then I find it disconcerting. I do have this reaction when I’m in Asia, though I expect to be disconcerted there, since it’s all foreign and shit.

“The Three Musketeers was written by a Caribbean black Frenchman”. Or, put another way, the author’s grandmother was mixed-race. You’re probably trying to help, but invoking the one-drop rule really doesn’t do it.

“Or, put another way, the author’s grandmother was mixed-race. … but invoking the one-drop rule really doesn’t do it.”

Be that as it may, Charles Murray would have considered Dumas to be “non-French”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas,_p%C3%A8re

I need to visit my optician – apparently my neighbours are white. Ta for telling me that this ain’t so, JL.

Lawrence Auster had a very different response.

One of the best takes I’ve read on this “Eurabia” business is Razib’s review of God’s Continent.

One wonders if similar nigger-counting expeditions in other European cities might yield similarly distressing results … I smell an AEI research grant for Murray!

45: I was taught over and over in Sunday school and by the “Judaism” section of Borders that “chosen” does not mean “better than the rest of you”: it means “saddled by the Lord with a poopload of responsibilities so that we might set an example for everybody” — “light unto the nations” and all that. Remember, when every Jew on Earth observes the Sabbath properly, Messiah comes to make things better for everyone.

Jewish ethnocentrism, or philosemitic bigotry, I would argue, is a different jar of herring altogether; but Murray doesn’t seem to get that.

Nobody has mentioned his faulty reasoning regarding December 22, so I’ll do so here. Living in another “touristy” city (Santa Fe, NM), I can tell you that our downtown about doubles in size come Christmastime. And I can’t imagine that there aren’t a lot of people who decide to do Christmas in Paris (in fact, I think this made a really lame joke in a Bond film once). So why, precisely, does he think that there won’t be tourists on December 22?

This may be moot given the previously discussed status of Saint-Denis as an outlying, poor suburb, but it would certainly apply if he were in a more “main” part of the city. It just shows one more failure of reasoning on his part.

Here’s a very good piece on immigration, Islam, and Europe, by Laila Lalami in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091214/lalami

@JoB

But still; why didn’t he (OK: He, if you insist) saddle me?

Because God does a lot of random weird shit that nobody understands. There are whole books of the bible about this fact; and anyway, if you both believe in God and take an honest look at the world around you, you can hardly help coming to this conclusion. Some are chosen to be rich and powerful; some are chosen to be skillful and knowledgeable; and some get dumped with a lot of ethical principles, nitpicking laws and stern injunctions, and get beaten up a lot. That’s just how things are. You just have to try to do the best you can with what you’re given.

A glance at the atlas reveals that Europe is actually in Asia, and pretty much right next to Africa. The French (of whom I take it Charles Murray is one) should be suspicious of foreigners from Antarctica and the Americas, who are clearly in the wrong hemisphere. Except for Quebec, of course. And Louisiana, obviously. And Martinique. Actually now I come think about it, what are all those Americans doing in the Americas? Isn’t that a bit worrying?

Provided Murray doesn’t require lineage dating back to ancient Gaul…

I’m sure he walked up to strangers and demanded to see their patents of nobility, and only counted those who could trace their lineage back six generations, though he weighted to account those who could go all the way back to Charlemagne. Very rigorous methodology, that. No thatcher’s sons need apply.

If you’re comfortable talking about ethnic groups at all, then presumably ‘native Fijiian’ is fine as an ethnic group (distinguished from ‘Indian Fijians, a large minority group in Fiji) and ‘native Taiwanese’ is also fine as an ethnic group, as distinguished from the Han majority in Taiwan.

If it’s fine to be picking out groups such as this as ‘natives’, when there’s another group of people also living in the same place who have also been there for quite a long time, why isn’t ‘native French’ OK as an ethnic group?

Of course, it’s not going to be possible to give necessary and sufficient conditions for counting as ‘native French’, ethnicity of course is very messy, we’re all related to one another, there aren’t any firm boundaries, it’s all cultural, etc. etc. But these considerations apply just as much to any other group of ‘natives’.

Being white would be to native French as having the polynesian nose and curly hair would be to a native Fijian. Not perhaps a necessary condition – there will be people who think of themselves with plenty of justification as being native Fijian who don’t possess the distinctive features, usually because they have other ancestry as well. But a distinctive feature associated with the ethnic group nonetheless. And it’s certainly not a sufficient condition: even Murray recognises this because he admits that he might have counted Brits (native Brits, I suppose) in with the native French.

It seems to me that refusing the notion of ‘native French’ tout court but accepting the notion of native Fijians is basically implying that people with brown skin can belong to ethnic groups but people with white skin can’t, which is as racist as any notion. I can see why good liberals get uncomfortable with ideas like ‘native French’, because of it’s nasty associations with racism and nationalism. But I think it just plays into the hands of racists and nationalists in the long run – people who think of themselves as native French find no home for their ethnic identity in liberal politics, and find liberals all enthusiastic about every ethnicity except any European ethnicity.

There’s an alternative of refusing to talk or think about ethnicity at all, but it then becomes difficult to understand the world and other people when so many people do think of the world in these terms, are proud of their ethnicity.

It’s also hard to make sense of most of the comments here without that notion.

Also, re @91: If you go that way, why stop at “French” and “British”? Why not place individual UK citizens on the basis of whether their ancestry is Norman, or Celt, or Saxon . . . for example?

Why not place individual UK citizens on the basis of whether their ancestry is Norman, or Celt, or Saxon . . . for example?

This book claims to demonstrate, on the basis of RNA analysis, that the genes of their ancestors are sufficiently scrambled in the (light-skinned) modern inhabitants of England that the components are indistinguishable.

bianca:
I think we’re talking at cross purposes here. I don’t have any difficulty finding ethnic groups. I’m finding them all over the place. I’ve mentioned at least six in my last couple of posts. The reason I said “if anything is”, is not because I doubt the existence of ethnic groups (as messy culturally-defined categories) but because your questions about dividing up the English into Normans, Celts and Saxons seemed to be casting doubt on the English as an ethnic group, but they serve just as well for casting doubt on African American (accepting your correction) as an ethnic group.

What I mean by ethnic group are groups of people where both insiders and outsiders identify the members of the group as belonging to the group, and membership is broadly construed along (presumed) lines of descent, common history, appearance, language and cultural practices, roughly in that order of importance. I don’t think it’s possible to give necessary and sufficient conditions for being a member of an ethnic group, and obviously if you look closely, you can find all sorts of vagueness, corner cases, fuzziness, patchworks, people of multiple ethnic groups, ethnic groups within ethnic groups, things which look a bit like ethnic groups but aren’t quite, people who are treated as being members of an ethnic group but lack several (maybe all!) of the usual criteria, people who do meet the important criteria but aren’t treated as belonging to the group, &c. &c.

By these considerations, African Americans are most definitely an ethnic group, and that’s all to the good, because that’s the sort of grouping that the concept is supposed to cover.

Well, it’s not up to me to decide whether they’re an ethnic group or not, it depends on how they view themselves and how other people view them. I believe that Bretons do think of themselves as being a distinct ethnic group from everyone else in France, as distinct from other French groups as the Welsh are distinct from the English, their Celtic heritage would seem to be quite important here. At a guess I’d say that they’d be viewed by themselves and other French as more ethnically distinct from Burgundians and Champanois than the Burgundians and Champanois are considered to be from each other.

One possibility is that Burgundians, Champanois, and Bretons all consider themselves to be ‘native French’ as distinct from English or ‘north African French’, but within that group distinguish themselves from each other. Another possibility is that ‘native French’ is a category only ever used by outsiders like me and Murray, and Burgundians, Champanois and Bretons only view themselves as having certain cultural similarities with one another, just as the Scots would agree (when pushed) that the do share some cultural similarities with the English but insist on their ethnic distinctiveness, although I don’t think that’s very likely – my guess is that the French do believe in some kind of ‘native French’ ethnic group.

Anyone with more than a very cursory knowledge of French takes on their own ethnicities want to educate me?

I seem to be having a great deal of difficulty making myself understood here. I never asked anything about avoiding racism. What I did suggest is that we cannot make sense of the world of humanity without a notion of ethnicity. Ethnicity, for those of us who distinguish it from race, is a far more flexible concept free of the ontological preconceptions inherent in the notion of race, particularly the idea that it corresponds to a real biological division, and the related notion that humanity can somehow be broken down into a small number of distinct and disjoint races, each with a character stemming from biology.

Like it or not, people do identify themselves and are identified by others as Irish, Xhosa or Māori, and this identification is made partially on descent grounds. To understand how people think of themselves and how they relate to others one needs to understand this. It’s quite possible to use this notion without being racist (or ‘ethnicist’): you can think of yourself as Irish without thinking the Irish are best. Just as it’s possible to use the notion of culture without being a cultural supremacist, or the notion of nation without being a nationalist. If Liberalism can’t cope with this notion, then so much the worse for Liberalism (I take it this was kind of your point): people aren’t going to stop doing this just because a political theory doesn’t like it.

I thought it was obvious from my comments that I do distinguish culture from ethnicity, but in case it is not, let me make it clear I don’t think being ethnic French is essential to being a citizen of France or culturally French.

…we cannot make sense of the world of humanity without a notion of ethnicity.

Also, we can’t make sense of the world of humanity without the notion of gods. Like it or not, people do believe in supernatural beings.

So what?

arc,
If you go back and read your earlier comments, I think you’ll see that you were the one who introduced the term “ethnic” at @91, as distinguished from “race,” in a new sense, one that hasn’t been appropriate to what most people have been discussing so far. That may be the explanation for why people resist your attempt to, as it seems to them, change the subject.

The problem with “race” is that it appears to persist after other ethnic and cultural distinctions no longer are recognized. This is the case in both the US and France, though in different ways (in the US it is a matter of rights including rights of association, in France AIUI more a matter of culture).

Neither race nor ethnicity has anything to do with religion–obviously–and the intrawhite ethnic divisions in the US are not as stark as, for example, in Belgium–but there is a lot more diversity in (most places in) the US, diversity separate from class divisions, than within most European countries.

@ JoB (102): if and when everyone is like you and doesn’t identify with an ethnic group, and nor do they ever identify others as being in an ethnic group, then there would be no need for the concept, of course. This would entail that nothing of importance is ever hung on origins (descent, common history, etc) or appearance . The concept would still be necessary for historical understanding of how people interacted and thought when the concept was in active use.

Perhaps it would help if I compared the situation with money. Money is also a social convention, and it also has a very real connection with things that are important to people. You can’t understand human society without understanding money. If and when we cease to have money, then the concept is no longer needed to understand humanity.

@ Henri (103): I’m not really sure what your point is, apart from an offhanded dismissal of what I’ve been saying.

A better comparison than gods would be religion. You can’t understand humanity as it exists today without a concept of religion: people really do group themselves and others into religious groups. This may be based on a fiction, but the groups exist nevertheless. If people stop doing this, then the concept becomes unnecessary. I don’t see that happening in a hurry, either.

As it happens, religious groups aren’t entirely based on a fiction anyway, on any analysis. People really do read different books, have different religious practices, recognise different religious authorities, etc.

And the same is true of ethnic groups. There really are people who mutually identify each other as being the members of the same ethnic group, and are identified by outsiders as being members of the same ethnic group. While there’s some degree of arbitrariness, mythmaking, and often (I suppose) group essentialism going on here, which I suppose we could haughtily dismissed as being damned lies and superstition if we wanted to, generally speaking they really do have shared descent and a common history, and often really do look different from other people. You might not be interested in anyone’s ancestors or any group that’s defined in part on ancestry, nor in interactions between these groups. That just means you’re not interested in understanding this part of human interaction (I myself have pretty limited interest in football).

@ bianca (105):
Yes, I deliberately so introduced it because everyone was going around mocking Murray for his completely nonsensical racist notion of the ‘native French’. But the notion doesn’t seem nonsensical to me, nor necessarily racist. In fact, I suspect most French people whose ancestors have mostly lived in France for a few hundred years and have light skin think of themselves as a group distinct from both the English (so it can’t really be a racial notion or a notion purely based on similarity of appearance: they’re not merely classifying themselves as ‘white’) and from French North Africans. Of course that doesn’t mean that they necessarily think that people of North African extraction aren’t any less French, or that they’re worried about immigration of North Africans.

If Murray’s category is per force rubbish, it’s the same kind of rubbish that most people in the world buy into, and to be consistent you ought to also mock anyone who talks of ‘native Fijians’ or ‘African Americans’ or says they’re Irish when they were born and live in Boston.