White people are finding it "difficult to adjust" to becoming a minority, goes the premise of a new AP history textbook – with the implication that this reflects some kind of character defect.  Responding to this, conservative writers have generally denied the claim, sometimes calling it a "Marxist lie."  But a different point should be made.

Imagine that a history book presented European colonization of North America by asserting, with the same character-defect implication, that Indians found it "difficult to adjust" to becoming a minority.  Would people be left scratching their heads?  Might this even be called offensive?  I think the only response really necessary would be "duh."

So a question for libs: Can you cite for me one group, in all of history, that was happy about becoming a minority in what had been its homeland?  Just one.  I'll be waiting.

Did the Ainus, the Japanese islands' original inhabitants, jump for joy when being overrun and say, "Yay, now we can become a minority!  Maybe we'll even be subsumed!" (which did happen, for the most part)?

Did the Formosan aborigines cheer when the Chinese began outnumbering them and exclaim, "Yippee!  Perhaps one day we'll be just two percent of this island's inhabitants" (which they are now)?

Did the population of Byzantine North Africa, faced with seventh-century Muslim invasion, declare, "Oh, joyous times!  Maybe we can look forward to the day when these lands are entirely Arab and Muslim!" (which came to pass)?

We could go on forever.  European history alone is replete with tribes – Alamanni, Franks, Angles, Vandals, Gepids, Burgundians, Lombards, etc. – that no longer exist as distinct peoples.

Now, I always fancied myself as having a keen grasp of man's nature, but maybe I'm out of touch.  Perhaps all these groups really did make merry over coming minority status or, even, exult at possible extinguishment.  I've never heard of such a case, though.

Why would a group not be alarmed at the prospect of being reduced to minority status?  Leftists themselves never tire of stressing how minorities have ever been persecuted; "progressive" histories are narratives of minority struggle against majority oppression (though liberals love impugning the West on this score, they do sometimes speak of the same phenomenon occurring elsewhere).

As usual, the reality is precisely the opposite of what leftists claim: sleepwalking into cultural and demographic irrelevancy, there has never been a group less concerned about movement toward minority status than whites.

This is partially explainable by the fact that there has never before been a civilization as just as the West.  For example, whites probably weren't the first to practice slavery.

But they certainly were the first to end it.

Whites might not have been the first to violate human rights.

They are, however, the only reason we even talk about such violation – because they birthed our whole modern concept of human rights to begin with.

The West is unique.  There simply has never been a civilization that has secured so much prosperity and so many rights for all its citizens, including minorities.  In fact, it now often subordinates majority well-being to minority whim (e.g., that of the sexual "devolutionaries").  Thus, you truly might see no reason to fear becoming a minority if the modern West is your only frame of reference.

Yet this is an area where we actually should listen to the left and be mindful of their warnings about minorities' historical plight.  If whites were more concerned about being reduced to minority status, their nations – gradually losing their Western character due to multiculturalism and the influx of unassimilable, non-Western foreigners – wouldn't be so imperiled (though our growing immorality would still plague us).

The reality expressed in this article eludes most because of conditioning: the double standard, the prejudice, is ingrained.  Whites are simultaneously portrayed as uniquely inhuman and something more than human, in that they're supposed to be above normal human concerns (desire to retain one's own culture, etc.).  They're cast as singularly oppressive for exhibiting the same moral failings as every other group, such as having practiced slavery, but as strikingly unexceptional despite taking unprecedented steps to mitigate those moral failings.  They're condemned as "cultural appropriators" merely for using foreigners' food recipes but given no credit for birthing a recipe for civilizational success copied the world over (which is why Western technology and economic practices are ubiquitous).

Lamentably, though, whites are uniquely successful in another way as well.  Those most effectively peddling the anti-white propaganda – and most efficiently destroying the West – are white themselves.

Whoever guessed that modern Westerners' perhaps final triumph would be reaching the very heights of self-flagellation?

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter, or log on to SelwynDuke.com.