Is American Culture Racist Against Whites?
Recently, there has been an orgy of anti-white racism in the USA. The following is an enumeration of some examples, accompanied by a brief commentary.
On 21 May 2021, USA Today reported that Chicago’s mayor Lori Lightfoot had declared that
she [would] grant one-on-one interviews to mark the two-year anniversary of her inauguration solely to journalists of color.
This seems a shockingly racialised way of choosing whom to grant an interview, especially coming from a mayor, who, as such, should represent all the inhabitants of her city. In justification, the mayor commented that Chicago’s journalists were disproportionately white. While this may be the case, nothing about it seems obviously unjust. For a variety of cultural and sociological reasons, some jobs inevitably end up dominated by some ethnic groups, while others are dominated by others. In a 1983 interview with William F. Buckley Jr., economist Thomas Sowell offered the following reasoning: members of different ethnic groups tend to watch different programmes on television. In this context, their choice among alternatives is free, yet the outcomes are different nevertheless. So why should we assume that over- or underrepresentation of any ethnic group in any field of employment must be due to societal barriers?
Then there is critical race theory, whose application in schools has often yielded disturbing results. Several examples of this are provided on the Floridian Governor’s website. In these instances, divisions of people, including children, along racial lines were emphasised, and some were quite explicitly demeaning to whites in particular. Thus:
Seattle Public Schools told teachers that the education system is guilty of “spirit murder” against black children and that white teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of [their] thieved inheritance.”
San Diego Public Schools accused white teachers of being colonizers on stolen Native American land and told them “you are racist” and “you are upholding racist ideas, structures, and policies.” They recommended that the teachers undergo “antiracist therapy.”
A middle school in Springfield, Missouri, forced teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” claiming that white heterosexual Protestant males are inherently oppressors and must atone for their “covert white supremacy.”
Buffalo Public Schools taught students that “all white people” perpetuate systemic racism and forced kindergarteners to watch a video of dead black children warning them about “racist police and state-sanctioned violence” who might kill them at any time.
Note the recurring words “Public Schools”. Occurrences of this kind would have been bad enough in private schools, but policies enacted under the umbrella of public education naturally gain legitimacy from the state that sponsors them.
Recently, there was an eruption of criticism directed at actor and producer Lin-Manuel Miranda for his Broadway musical “In the Heights” because it was set in a largely Dominican neighbourhood but, by some people’s standards, included an insufficient number of Afro-Latino actors. Miranda issued an abject apology. Comedian Steven Crowder weighed in on the discussion during his programme “Louder With Crowder”. He used a clip from CNN in which journalist Mara Schiavocampo argued that the discontent was justified, since the neighbourhood portrayed was populated mainly by black people. In response, Crowder compared the casting of “In The Heights” to “making a play [about] the Founding Fathers with no white actors”.
Crowder was referring to Miranda’s musical “Hamilton”, which, according to the New York Post, “famously cast primarily actors of color to play white historical figures”. The Post also notes that criticism of “Hamilton” prompted Miranda to make an apologetic public statement. In that case, however, the show was not criticised for replacing white people with non-white people, but for its positive depiction of slaveowners like George Washington, as well as of Alexander Hamilton, who owned no slaves, but twice indirectly came in contact with slavery. Incidentally, George Washington’s personal history with slaves was much more benign than one might think from merely knowing that he owned some of them, as the aforementioned Dr. Thomas Sowell details in his book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”. The relevant passage can be heard here, recorded by means of a text-to-speech programme.
The case of Lin-Manuel Miranda therefore reflects a clear racist double standard in American popular culture. A musical that blackwashes the founding fathers is criticised not for that fact, but for being insufficiently harsh on the progenitors of the whole USA. Yet the media will ferociously tear into a project by the same creator for not making enough of its Latino characters Afro-Latino. Even if you are Hispanic, you are not safe if your skin is too light.
Conservative commentator Michael Knowles has, in his usual fashion, assiduously spotlighted instances of “woke” anti-white racism. For instance, the organisers of an LGBT Pride parade in Seattle recently insisted on charging white attendees a surplus of $10-$50. This incident presumably speaks for itself. In addition, a Dr. David Moss published a paper in a peer-reviewed journal claiming that whiteness was a “disease” and asserting the need for a “permanent cure” to it. In his remarks on this incident, Knowles makes the obvious comparison between the words “permanent cure” and “final solution”. He also highlights the Washington Post’s promotion of “white accountability groups”, that is, groups of ordinary white people who feel so personally responsible for alleged “white supremacy” that they organise themselves to raise their consciousness of “systemic racism”.
As we have seen, there is a widespread demonisation of white people as morally abominable. This trend obviously carries within it a germ of oppression towards whites. Psychologist Nick Haslam notes:
According to research on ‘moral typecasting’ […], there is an inverse relationship between moral patiency and agency, such that people tend to be typecast either as victims who suffer harm but lack responsibility and the capacity to act intentionally, or as perpetrators who are blameworthy but lack the capacity to suffer (Haslam 2016: 14).
Beyond the examples we have seen, the left-wing media has, over the course of the 2010s, been spreading a countinuously reinforced narrative wherein whiteness is associated with racism, in addition to publishing ever more coverage of racism in its real and supposed instances and expanding the definition of what counts as racist. Zach Goldberg has documented this development through statistical analysis.
Thus, the stereotyping of whites as racist oppressors is likely to legitimise violence and oppression directed at them. The above examples illustrate this; for a more systemic form of this white-bashing, as well as an indication of what may be in store for the USA, we can look to Britain. According to an article published by the BBC, a British parliamentary committee has found that, among pupils who receive free meals (a mark of poverty), 16% of whites entered university, as opposed to 59% of black Africans, 59% of Bangladeshis and 32% of black Caribbeans. According to the committee’s chairman (as paraphrased in the article), “almost a million young people [had been] affected” by this problem. The committee recommends, among other things, “[f]ind[ing] a better way to talk about racial disparities”, and specifically advised against use of the term “white privilege”.
Furthermore, just as dividing pupils based on race seems unlikely to do any of them any good, stereotyping white people as wicked oppressors has the potential to harm black people as well. To go back to Haslam’s words (quoted above), stereotyping groups of people as victims robs them of autonomy. No wonder that, according to an article by Kenny Xu and Christian Watson,
[t]he Reverend Wyatt Tee Walker (1928-2018), a leading civil rights activist, and one of King’s closest confidants, spoke out against Critical Race Theory in 2015[…].
The American obsession with race seems to have reached boiling point: last year, a schoolgirl witnessed “[t]he last 90 minutes in math class [!] [one] day [being] spent discussing and arguing topics of sexuality, education, race, and white privilege”. One hopes that this monomania, which seems especially ingrained in the schools, can only cool from here on.
How to counteract this foolishness? Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has set an example by banishing critical race theory from his state’s civics curriculum, correctly noting that CRT “[t]each[es] kids to hate their country and to hate each other”. To return to Kenny Xu and Christian Watson’s article:
In its relentless focus on whites as the source of evil in society, in fact, CRT often blurs into a form of mystical conspiracism. Influential Critical Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, for instance, have claimed that racism is a tool maintained by “white elites” in unspoken alliance with the “working class” to keep non-whites oppressed.
Perhaps it will even be feasible to elect DeSantis president. Of course, there are many other issues which play into the question of who should be the next U.S. President. On this issue, at least, he seems fit to be better than Biden, who overturned Trump’s ban on critical race theory.
The examples showcased here are, in the grand scheme of things, but a few. Yet there was a time when they would have been astonishing. Now that time has passed. There really is, as Michael Knowles has put it, a widespread “anti-white ideology”. It is not wholly new. For instance, as long ago as 1966 — fifty-five years ago now — Susan Sontag claimed: “The white race is the cancer of human history” (emphasis in original). Still, the USA have fallen into its grasp to a probably unprecedented degree. For all his talk of unifying the country, Joe Biden still reintroduced critical race theory, dealing a frightful blow to American unity. One trembles, furthermore, at the thought of what form a backlash against this ideology might take.
Reference
Haslam, Nick. 2016. “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts
of Harm and Pathology.” Psychological Inquiry 27 (1): 1-17.