The majority according to the Northern idea, which will then be the all-pervading, all powerful one, have the right to control. It will be in keeping particularly with the principles of the abolitionists that the majority, no matter of what, shall rule. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand that? It is not a supposable case. Although not half so numerous, we may readily assume that war will break out everywhere like hidden fire from the earth, and it is probable that the white race, being superior in every respect, may push the other back. They will then call upon the authorities at Washington, to aid them in putting down servile insurrection, and they will send a standing army down upon us, and the volunteers and Wide-Awakes will come in thousands, and we will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. That is the fate which Abolition will bring upon the white race.

"The central question that emerges," the National Review's founding editor, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote in 1957, amid congressional debate over the first Civil Rights of the modern era, "is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is yes-the white community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." He continued: "It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority." It was a strikingly blunt defense of Jim Crow and affirmation of white supremacy from the father of the conservative movement. Later, when key civil rights questions had been settled by law, Buckley would essentially renounce these views, praising the movement and criticizing race-baiting demagogues like George C. Wallace. Still, his initial impulse-to give white political minorities a veto not just over policy but over democracy itself-reflected a tendency that would express itself again and again in the conservative politics he ushered into the mainstream, emerging when political, cultural, and demographic change threatened a narrow, exclusionary vision of American democracy.

The white people of the South do not have race prejudice. They have race consciousness, and they are proud to possess this awareness of the significance of race. Had they not possessed it, the South would have been mongrelized and southern civilization destroyed long ago.

Sooner or later this country must face the problem of the Negro. It is simple enough in New York. It is not so simple in Mississippi, where the Negroes almost equal the whites in number, or in Georgia, where Negroes outnumber whites in probably half the counties of the state. White supremacy is a phrase encrusted with unpleasant connotations in the North.

White supremacy is more than just a set of ideas or prejudices. It is national oppression. Yet to most white people, the term conjures up images of the Nazis or Ku Klux Klan rather than the system of white skin privileges that really undergrids the Capitalist system in the U.S. Most white people, Anarchists included, believe in essence that Black people are "the same" as whites, and that we should just fight around "common issues" rather than deal with "racial matters," if they see any urgency in dealing with the matter at all. Some will not raise it in such a blunt fashion, they will say that "class issues should take precedence," but it means the same thing. They believe it's possible to put off the struggle against white supremacy until after the revolution, when in fact there will be no revolution if white supremacy is not attacked and defeated first. They won't win a revolution in the U.S. until they fight to improve the lot of Blacks and oppressed people who are being deprived of their democratic rights, as well as being super-exploited as workers.

The question of the silent majority, I think that the demographic that that phrase is invoking exists, but I don’t think they’ve ever been silent. I think they’ve probably been pretty loud in the chorus of what people think America can or should be. But a key part, at least in there, that demographics’ identity of the last 50 years ago, since the 70s, is this idea that they are somehow on the defensive, that they’re somehow oppressed, which is super interesting. I think if there’s anything that is different about white supremacy in this moment than it has been in the past in American culture is that it’s very much invested in the idea of whiteness as victimhood and less sort of whiteness under attack, which are two slightly different things. The older version of white supremacy is whiteness under attack, but always triumphant. And this version is very much whiteness as a marginalized identity, somehow, in this country.

Experience tells us that sometimes, when minorities insist on their rights, they ultimately prevail.

When they return to take over, they desire more than anything else to see the integrity of the social institutions of the South unimpaired. They desire to see white supremacy maintained. Above all things, they do not desire to see the election laws of the South or the powers of the States in defining the qualifications of electors tampered with. Those boys are fighting to maintain the rights of the States. Those boys are fighting to maintain white supremacy and the control of our election machinery.

Our whites are southern, like me. Even if they spent some time in places north and west, to become white in the South is to absorb some large part of its particular iteration of the U.S. racial hierarchy.

Now, you might think that when the old majority becomes a minority, it would then get minority rights. But that’s not how it works. Whites can’t become a certified minority; they will always be the legacy majority. The closer we get to the future when whites are a minority, the more we hear about their ancestors’ sins, their ineradicable hereditary guilt, their corruption of blood.

Let us not forget that our object here is to try ultimately to bring about full democracy in Northern Rhodesia. We know that that will take a little time. We know that it must involve an acceptance by the white minority themselves of an African State which will be under the control of the African people. We believe that the white minority have an important part to play there, but they must accept the fact that we must get over this hump or past this watershed—whatever the metaphor may be—and that with the pace of events moving as it is in Africa, the time has long since gone when white supremacy can possibly be a viable policy.

To challenge a particular policy is one thing; to challenge the government's right to set that policy is another--for this denies the process of freedom itself. Lately, however, a great many people have become impatient with this democratic process. Some of the more extreme even argue, with a rather curious logic, that there is no majority, because the majority has no right to hold opinions that they disagree with. Scorning persuasion they prefer coercion. Awarding themselves what they call a higher morality, they try to bully authorities into yielding to their "demands." On college campuses they draw support from faculty members who should know better; in the larger community, they find the usual apologists ready to excuse any tactic in the name of "progress." It should be self-evident that this sort of self-righteous moral arrogance has no place in a free community in America, because it denies the most fundamental of all the values we hold--respect for the rights of others. This principle of mutual respect is the keystone of the entire structure of ordered liberty that makes freedom possible.

(White supremacy) is a fundamentally mythological state. Human beings are not supreme to each other based on the vagina we came out of. That’s not what determines our worth and our well-being or miraculousness.

The principle that the majority have a right to rule the minority, practically resolves all government into a mere contest between two bodies of men, as to which of them shall be masters, and which of them slaves; a contest, that—however bloody—can, in the nature of things, never be finally closed, so long as man refuses to be a slave.