Ingroup and Outgroup

Identity.

One can observe a large degree of nonsense in the “movement” and in social media (including “movement”-related accounts) about race and identity and, of course, the “Who is White?” question is always obsessed about. Associated with this are individuals who post bizarre interpretations of racial history, attack particular European ethnies (primarily Southern European groups), and who display “home-brewed” “genetic analyses” designed to support their biased views on these issues. In addition, we observe “population geneticists” who are more akin to politicians than scientists, constantly attempting to delegitimize European identity. Then there is the status of Jews in the “Whiteness” question and the attempts of pathological fetishists to equate Jews with certain European ethnies, linking their respective “Whiteness” (or lack thereof) together.

One approach to this is to focus instead on ingroup vs. outgroup. What is your chosen ingroup, who do you say are “my people” and why, and who are outside of that circle, who are in the outgroup? And, no, just saying “White” vs. “non-White” is not sufficient if that is going to lead to the same endless debates. Define those groups better and in a way that fits your perception of in/out.

Many people on the Far Right reject Jews as part of their ingroup – rightfully so, in my opinion – but struggle to find a logically coherent reason to do so. They focus on individual parts of group identity – such as genetics, phenotypes, religion, and so forth – but miss the forest for the trees. Yockey in Imperium was correct when he labeled Jews as the “Jewish Culture-State-Nation-Race.”

It is not just their religion and overall “Magian” civilizational history (“Culture”). It is not only their ethnocentric group loyalty and sense as a separate chosen people (“State” and “Nation”) and it is not only their genetics, physical appearance and other phenotypic traits (“Race”). It is ALL of those things together, forming an integrated entity.

Ultimately, Jews are an outgroup because they themselves have historically perceived themselves to be one as opposed to their hosts, while seeing their own ingroup, from their own perspective, as being Jews. That view has been for the most part historically shared by the hosts.

If you want to drill down deeper into questions of the origins of peoplehood and the ethnogenesis of ingroups, my definition of “indigenous” helps define the “Nation/State” and “Race” questions better.

The Jews are a Diaspora group; Ashkenazi Jews may have significant European ancestry and had their final ethnogenesis generally within Europe, but not in any particular territory of Europe. They have no “blood and soil” connection to any specific European area. Originating in the Classical Middle East, they then absorbed Italian genes in Italy, moved to Northern and Eastern Europe absorbing genes there and then undergoing their final ethnogenesis scattered around places like Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, etc., with strong selective pressures for particular phenotypes. In some ways this mirrors the Roma, except the Jews took a more k-selected high IQ selective path while the Roma took a more r-selected low IQ path. Neither group has a defined “blood and soil” connection to any specific European territory; they wandered in from the outside, then wandered around the inside of Europe, absorbing bits and pieces of “Europeaness,” but they are not indigenous Europeans. Nor do they consider themselves to be the same as us, regardless of what a particular Jewish or Roma genome or physical appearance may be like. In both cases, they constitute a Culture-State-Nation-Race different from Europeans.

Identity is more than the sum of its parts.

See this.

What about Jews, Gypsies, and Turks? Turkey is Asian, not European. Jews and Gypsies, who entered an already-occupied Europe in historical times, are not indigenous to any specific territory in Europe. Is there a nation or region of Europe which is the homeland of Jews or Gypsies? No, there is not. They are Diaspora peoples, scattered throughout Europe. Even if one wanted to assert some sort of vague, generally European ethnogenesis for the Ashkenazim and Roma, that does not work, since every place in Europe where they are found there has always been an extant, older, “host” population of indigenous Europeans already present. Thus, intrusive elements into a land occupied by extant, original peoples cannot be indigenous to that land - whether the land is a continent, nation, or region.

So, we can – just like the Jews and Roma do - choose our ingroup and outgroup. We do not need to agonize over the fine details of why a distinct Culture-State-Nation-Race is an outgroup compared to our ingroup. It is an emergent phenomenon from each component of Culture-State-Nation-Race and cannot be reductively shrunken down to a PCA plot, Fst value, cephalic index, IQ score, historical incident, a set of physical features, etc.

Ingroup vs. Outgroup is based on the totality of Identity, on Culture-State-Nation-Race.

Whether or not “Jews are White” is not the relevant question. The relevant question is ingroup vs. outgroup. And we all have the right to decide who is who without endlessly being called to justify every data point making up that decision. Do the Jews do that? Do Jews feel the need to justify why Gentiles are their outgroup? To them, it is what it is. Do ethnocentric Jews worry about genetic closeness to any Europeans or anything else? Or do they recognize their own peoplehood as a Jewish Culture-State-Nation-Race and then ACT on that in defense of their ingroup?

Of course, decisions of ingroup vs. outgroup have to have some criteria, I am not saying that it does not. What I am saying is that it is not some sort of single data point, nor something that needs to be rationally dissected in a quantitative sense down to the last decimal point. Ultimately it is about Identity, an emergent property of several factors, and that emergent property and its consequences represent reasonable criteria upon which the decision can be made.

Identity and the Ingroup is not random; the choice of Ingroup is not a random irrational act. It is based on real facts and real values. But these facts and values are not single data points; they are not atomized individual entities. They are correlated and synergistic.

Confusion about The Ingroup and how to justify it only occurs when it is reduced to some type of disjunctive single factor, which is not realistic in complex human history.