We are living in a time of all-out cultural war.
But you are not supposed to mention that or to talk about it, because you will at once be labelled "racist."
I will argue, though, that this is a dangerous rhetorical tactic to accept.
I will note that it is racist, in fact, not to face the fact that we are in a battle of cultures.
It is racist, I will argue, to pretend that we are all just bodies that can be moved harmlessly from place to place en masse, and that alien cultures are not threatening to us, and that, as Congresswoman Alexander Ocasio-Cortez put it in Munich, in her effort to rebut Secretary of State Marco Rubio's warnings about the loss of the West, culture is "thin".
It is racist to presume that when you transport bodies from Point A to Point B, you have solved the problem of radically and deeply felt, very diverse cultures — which often mean, radically diverse worldviews, gender relations, family organization, and attitudes toward violence.
You have not solved it, as different cultures bring with them radically diverse consciousnesses.
If you study recorded history, you know that most of it has been a war of cultures. Resources were usually at the root of the conflict or conquest, but culture was the mechanism for lasting dominance.
Why was the Roman Empire always suppressing the worship of non-Roman gods? Because of the lingering power of subjugated cultures and deities. When colonized peoples kept their own faith traditions, their own festivals, their own modes of education and dress, they were far more difficult to subdue, and it was far more difficult to maintain a common Empire spanning peoples, languages and geography.
Why were pagan Celtic sacred groves and hilltops in England, renamed for Roman deities, and then eventually renamed, in turn, for Christian saints?
Church of St Lawrence, Formerly the Pagan Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, in Rome:
Rulers knew that you had to diminish competing cultures in order to solidify political power.
Part of the Iberian peninsula was held by Islamic forces for 700 years; Jews and Christians lived there under restrictions.
When King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella secured control, in the 15th century, on behalf of the Catholic Church, of what would become modern Spain, they drove Muslims out. This was the "Reconquista" of 1492. They expelled Jews, forcing the ones who remained to convert, and violently enforced Catholic orthodoxy.
Literally all of history is the history of cultural conflict, and all victors' stories are the stories of their enforcement of some level of cultural hegemony.
In the modern period, European nations could comfortably strive for equality under law for citizens of all religions, because the cultures of post 1789 modern France or of post-1848 modern Switzerland or of post-1861 modern Italy were relatively homogenous and strong.
In all of this, America shone as an extraordinary example and exception among nations: we were founded not upon a native, ancient tribal identity such as "Italian" or "French", but upon an ideology of freedom and the rule of law. Nonetheless, our culture of liberty was so strong and unifying, that we could absorb people from many different countries and identities, and turn them all into — Americans.
Additionally, for most of our history, the people who sought to immigrate to America wanted deeply to join in that ideology of freedom, and longed above all to become truly American.
Then came the 21st century, and we witnessed and are witnessing an experiment in nation-altering that has never taken place before in human history.
It has certainly never taken place successfully.
Millions of people from other, very different cultures and ideologies — people who in these cases were not particularly motivated by an attraction to the ideals of Western Europe or of the United States; indeed, in many cases, who overtly stated that they hated those ideals, and who stood in warrior-like opposition to them — were airlifted into those nations, or shipped in wholesale; by globalist interests; to be resettled in Western Europe and Canada and in the United States.
Never, ever, ever has a nation in recorded history, ancient or modern, survived the wholesale importation of millions of outsiders from alien cultures that are hostile to the values of the host culture.
Can you name one?
Any Babylonian in the 7th century BCE; any Spartan or Athenian in the 5th Century BCE; any Christian living in Constantinople in the 4th century, or riding to the Holy Land for the Crusades in the 13th Century — would have looked on all of this with horror, knowing exactly what would happen.
He or she would have known what would happen, because this knowledge has been part of conflict in human history for as long as humans have walked the planet.
The host culture, of course, would be overrun, its nation altered beyond recognition, and it would soon collapse; its centers of worship, its houses, squares and walled cities, would all be inhabited and built over by the incomers; its statues would be toppled, its coins and artwork defaced, its cemeteries and altars would be given over to weeds and vines.
But somehow today you can't raise concerns about any of this, as you will be silenced with the epithet, "Racist."
It is urgent to reject this sneaky rhetorical framing, that is engineered to guarantee supineness in the host nations that are being deliberately overrun in order to collapse them.
It is urgent to embrace and defend the position that none of this concern has anything to do with race; and that indeed it is not racist to be "culturist." It is okay — it is even now, urgently necessary — to be culturist.
Here is what I mean:
I was lying, last summer, on a beach towel. I was wearing a bathing suit. I was resting on the green grassy slope that faces a still lake located about fifteen minutes from our house in the Hudson Valley.
The lake is in a little wilderness area, a public state park. Evergreens clothe the low hills that form a backdrop to the grassy slopes that surround the water. There is a little snack bar. There is a little brick set of changing rooms.
It is a bucolic little American setting, unchanged for decades.
I have gone to that state park for 23 years.
When I was a single mother, I often brought my kids, as it was so pleasant and safe. My then-small son would join other delighted little boys in chasing the schools of guppies, that flickered tantalizingly in the shallow wading area. My then-young daughter would quietly fill her bucket with sand, or work out the elaborate relationships between her stuffed animals, that we had brought from home.
Other parents and children rested or played near us. The lily pads swayed. The sun rippled on the deep green water.
Older people might chat briefly about the weather, as you passed by to and from the snack bar or the water, smiling at you from their lawn chairs.
Young couples shared beers after long weeks of hard work.
Sometimes in those days I would bring our dog, stubby-legged little Mushroom. He would lie next to us on the beach towel, and nap in the sun, or look solemnly at the birds rising and descending over the water.
It was utterly peaceful, there was no conflict, and I was afraid of nothing.
My children feared nothing. No one judged me. No one said, Where is your husband? No one disapproved of me, or approved of me. It was no one's job to control or monitor me.
We were all Americans together. We shared values so closely we hardly noticed what we were sharing. We did not have to discuss or defend it.
We were free.
The stillness and peace and calmness and safety of American freedom, shared among other Americans in a public setting, is something so precious and unique you scarcely notice it — until it is gone.
But there I was, as I say, last summer, sunbathing and reading, in my bright green bathing suit. It was a fairly modest, one-piece bathing suit.
My kids were grown now, and I was alone with Loki. Brian had left for a while to do an errand, and would pick me up later.
Suddenly I felt Loki tug at the leash. I looked up and saw that a four-year-old girl, in full Afghani dress — a long pink cotton gown with long sleeves, draped over white trousers — was pulling away from her father. She was enchanted at the sight of Loki.
To my left, I saw that there was a group of Afghani nationals who appeared to have recently arrived. They stood around a picnic table, the women working on setting up the meal.
Their clothing was all apparently hand-sewn, as if they had not been in this country long enough to change out of what they had brought with them.
There were three women; it was difficult to tell their ages, as they were heavily swaddled, in what must have been 90 degree heat.
The women's faces were covered with black Niqabs; their heads swathed in black; their long white and grey gowns revealed additional layers of fabric underneath. Their arms were covered down to the fingers.
They looked over at me and Loki — longingly? Resentfully? It was impossible to tell — as they set out food on the picnic table.
An elderly man in white trousers and a tunic, with a white beard, stood guard, as it seemed, over the women. A younger man — in his late thirties? The father of the little girl — and a second white-bearded man, were both, I saw, now standing at some distance from Loki and me.
The little girl pulled harder on her father's hand, as she, naturally, wanted to pet Loki. I sat up, prepared to say the pleasant things you say as a dog owner to a parent, when a child wants to pet your pup.
Then I saw the father drag his daughter angrily away from Loki, as she protested.
The white-bearded man, though, walked right up to me. He confronted me, standing at the very edge of my beach towel.
There was a weird moment in which we looked speechlessly into each other's eyes.
I waited. I wasn't moving. I wasn't leaving.
Then he looked at my legs, my bare arms, my entire body, and then at my dog, with absolutely undisguised hatred and contempt.
For what seemed like long minutes, he communicated wordlessly, standing now entirely in my physical space, glaring at me with a stony hostility, almost rage, a fury that I have never before experienced — that he thoroughly disapproved of everything about me at that moment.
Then he turned away, back to his better-behaved, more appropriately-clothed women.
I was shocked. His hostility had been so palpable and so intense — and had in it such a flavor of his sense of privilege to judge me, his sense of his own righteousness and my folly and shame — that I had a moment of disorientation and had to check in on myself.
Was I in fact behaving, and dressed, appropriately?
I reminded myself that according to the mores and values of my American culture in that American place, everything I was doing — the way I was dressed, even my being alone and unescorted as a woman — even the presence of my pet dog - was perfectly culturally appropriate.
Then I saw his son or son-in-law, the younger man, who had by now walked into the water, where children were swimming and wading.
The younger man was wearing his white under-robe.
Since I had last looked his way, he had left the four-year-old girl back at the picnic table with the women, and he was now holding a six-month-old baby, who was wearing nothing but a diaper.
I braced myself: is he going to check the baby's diaper before he puts the baby into the water? I wondered.
He did not check the baby's diaper. There was no woman of his near enough to him, to remind him. But, enjoying the cool depths around him that were soaking his robe, sure enough, the man dipped the baby, full diaper or clean diaper, diaper and all, right into the water. All around him swam kids; they were ducking their heads underwater, taking water in their mouths and spewing it like little whales, and splashing about, as kids do.
Within minutes, the other parents had called their children out of the water, which may or may not at this point have been contaminated with fecal matter.
The man in his robe, and his baby, now had the lovely cool water entirely to themselves.
Neither of these men, it was clear, was thinking: "What are the norms of this place in which I now find myself? I will learn about them and conform to them."
I felt awful, and the kids lost their wading area.
There had been a silent clash of cultures.
The values of the newcomers had won out.
We, the Americans, had lost out.
This all was, of course, a metaphor.
Every day I bump up against the fact that many of the other cultures that are crowding en masse into our own culture, do not share our cultural values.
When I took a trip to DC by train, I paid for a purchase at the Moynihan Train Hall CVS. I asked politely for a bag.
The cashier ignored me. I asked again, politely.
"I heard you the first time," she snapped.
It was an unpleasant moment, and one that no courtesy of mine could have avoided.
In American culture, you acknowledge, even with a grunt, when you hear someone. By ignoring a request, though, a little moment that could have been pleasant or neutral, turned into a moment of conflict.
I have had many, many experiences of getting into Lyfts or Ubers and asking drivers who are immigrants from certain West African countries, to take a specific route. I am always braced now when I do so, as about 90 per cent of the time, there will be an argument.
Sometimes it is a scary argument, with gesticulating and shouting on the part of the driver; the gist of which is that the driver knows what he is doing, and who am I to tell him the better route?
I have come to the conclusion that men in certain West African cultures, do not culturally accept women giving them directions.
UN Women Africa, West and Central Africa, states that "while legal frameworks exist to empower women [in West and Central Africa], the daily reality for many remains a struggle against traditional power structures that limit their access to rights and decision-making roles."
UN Women declares further:
"Women's leadership and participation estimated by political representation in parliament averages at 11.6%. Women are excluded from issues and decisions that affect their lives, mainly due to high poverty levels, illiteracy and patriarchy. […] Women have limited access to productive assets and market opportunities. The religious and cultural context exhibits tension between customary law and formal legislation. In that context cases of VAWG [violence against women and girls] are widespread with little or no access to justice. […] Violence against women is still a serious problem with high prevalence of rape and harmful traditional practices. Incidence of FGM [female genital mutilation], early and forced marriages and torture of widows still occur (CAR, Cameroon, DRC, Gabon and Chad), denying young women and girls equality of opportunities, as well as leading to high rate of maternal mortality."
If women in Guinea Bessau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Guinea, Senegal and Sierra Leone do not have decision-making powers, or the effective legal right not to be beaten or raped in their own home nations, why should my stepping, with my American female self, into a man's cab, if he hails from these regions, change his entire world view and orientation about women and decisionmaking?
It is foolish, and kind of demeaning of the power and depth of his worldview, to assume that my mere Western presence changes everything that a man from these regions is likely to believe about the status of women in relation to his own right to dominate them.
I repeat that this concern of mine about the treatment of women by many men from West and Central African cultures — a concern that also preoccupies the UN, and NGOs led by Central and West African women themselves, in countries in that region — is not a racist one, but a "culturist" one. …
How can the treatment of many women by many West and Central African men be a racist concern if many Central and West African women and NGOs are also concerned about it?
Later on that same trip, I was seated in the food hall at Union Station in DC. A couple was about twenty feet away from me; the woman was listening to a loud conversation on her cellphone, at top volume. I was seated a few feet away and was trying to read.
I waited for the conversation to end. It didn't, so I caught her eye, smiled, made the universal "do you mind turning down the volume?" gesture, and smiled again. She smiled back, immediately turned down the volume, and made the universal "Sorry!" expression.
It was a completely pleasant and peaceful exchange.
The man she was with, however, a West African man, immediately started shouting at me, and gesticulating. "This is an exaggeration! You are exaggerating! The volume is not too loud! It is not up to you to decide the volume! There is plenty of room for you to move far away from us!" and so on. The woman, who was African-American, sought to shush her boyfriend, and then made the universal "Sorry my boyfriend is a jerk" face at me. I shrugged; we smiled at each another again — I made the universal
"hey, we've all been there" expression - and I went on my way.
The man was still shouting, and the woman was still trying to calm him down.
I tell this anecdote at some risk of venturing into taboo territory, because to me it shows clearly that worrying about these cultural incompatibilities of importing West African gender norms into America, is not racist.
The woman who reacted pleasantly to my request about her phone volume, was black. The man who was abusive to me, was also black. I am white.
But our respective races were, in my view at least, utterly not the point.
Her cultural choices about how to handle the moment, were American, as were mine. His choice about how to handle the moment, was not.
My point is that when every path-crossing, every request at an adjustment or every effort to compromise, turns into a moment of hostility or an escalated conflict, you immediately lose the coherent fabric of a society that has spent centuries developing ways to resolve conflict, and to adjust competing social requests and expectations, peaceably.
A day that had, in a coherent Western culture, previously been full of people pleasantly enough making way for one another, or reaching compromises, or at least working things out, turns into a minefield pitting one against one against one, territorially, forever.
And if you import into a Western context millions of men who immediately escalate conflict with women — because that is their culture — then immediately, the status of the women in that host society is downgraded; and they lose rights, scope and mobility, as they seek to get through their days avoiding explosions, conflicts, or worse.
Here is why it is racist to assume that you can simply put that furious Afghani patriarch on a plane and drop him in the middle of the Hudson valley, or put that irritable West African man on a plane to DC. It is racist to assume that they and their fellow Afghani or West African men will immediately become "evolved" American men, and will treat Western or American women with what we see as respect, no matter how we are dressed, or even if we have dogs with us, or even if we ask for a different taxi route or, Heaven forbid, even if we ask for a lower volume on a nearby phone.
It is racist to assume that simply being physically in the West dissolves alien cultures' home values and ideologies.
Clearly it does not.
It is racist to assume that Western cultures are so powerful and so "right" that they immediately or even quickly dilute the mores of Afghanistan, in which women have no right to education or property; that they dilute the values of Niger or Liberia or Sierra Leone. The latter is a country in which rape is so common that when I was there reporting on the end of the civil war, NGOs had invested a lot of money putting up billboards trying to persuade men in general not to rape women in general.
I think it is racist to assume that simply living suddenly in the Hudson Valley, will dissolve or erase decades of Afghani teachings presented to that stony-eyed white-bearded man that women are chattel, and that they must be covered from head to toe.
If you drop me in Afghanistan, I may soon acquire the dress and language skills, better to fit in. But in ten years, I will no doubt still believe in the rights of individuals; in religious freedom; and I will still believe that women have the same human rights as do men.
I will still believe in those things because that is my worldview, which is deeper than any site change or any change in language and dress.
Why should it be otherwise for the Afghani patriarch who finds himself and his family one day on a Hudson Valley lakeside? In ten years, he will probably still believe that it is his job to shame and police my body, my being accompanied by my dog, and my freedom to loll around on a beach towel as I choose, without a man nearby.
Why should I expect my views to be any longer or more deeply held than his own?
The world views of many men in Afghanistan, or in Central and West Africa, are deep, powerfully held world-views. They don't vanish simply because many of these men encounter the Constitution, or Hollywood movies, or meet Western career women, or find themselves and their families in Pennsylvania or Michigan or New York or Maine.
It is racist to assume that they will.
So I hope I have shown you — that we are in a battle for our lives.
There is nothing racist about waging this battle.
You can throw open the gates of the West to people who deeply believe that women are less, or that escalated conflict is a standard part of social negotiation; but there is no reason in history, to think that your own culture will survive all of this.
You will be the slaves and the chattel.
Your culture of equality, law, tolerance, good humor and civility, will become a memory.
Then the memory itself will die out.
And when that happens, and it will happen quickly —
It will have nothing to do with your race, either.