Imagine we’re not talking about America. Imagine we’re talking about Hindu treatment of Muslims in India. And India is on track to become majority Muslim. But people decide to remediate past imbalances by attaching negative characteristics to “Hinduness.” A small minority of Hindus, who control the media and universities, pipe this message to to Hindu households. “The challenges we face dealing with our Muslim immigrants are due to our Hinduness.” What happens? Like millions of people die in a civil war. Obviously. Americans can’t see how obviously wrong this approach is because they’re the fish inside the fishbowl.
The use of “whiteness” as a pejorative is rooted in an odd psychological phenomenon of liberal whites: https://us-central1-spirit-fish-function.cloudfunctions.net/.... They are the only demographic group to express an out-group ethnic bias. Black, Hispanic, and Asian people, along with non-liberal whites all display a moderate (and about equal) in-group preference for people of the same ethnicity. So attaching negative connotations to “whiteness” doesn’t bother them. They view white people as the out-group. They understand that you can be white but not “white” and have a range of other identities: liberal, Democrat, New Yorker, etc. But for non-liberal whites, the same rhetoric serves to reinforce the moderate in-group bias.
Put differently: if you draw a circle on the floor and call it “whiteness” and say it’s bad, liberal whites will happily step out of the circle. But for non-liberal whites (the majority) they will feel attacked on the basis of their skin color, exactly the same as if you did the same thing with “Blackness” or “Asianness.”
To get people to disassociate from something bad, you need to attach it to an identity they can reject, while embracing some other, shared identity. When you say “this is not how we do things in America” people can all come together around that shared identity and reject the bad thing. If you attach it to some characteristic they think they can’t change, you force them to double down on it.
A great example of this is George W. Bush versus versus Macron. When Muslim terrorists hit the twin towers, Bush gave a speech where he said brought Muslims into the fold: https://qz.com/1074258/911-video-and-text-of-george-w-bushs-.... He said we all watched the planes crash into the towers and we Muslims condemned it all around the world. (Which of course wasn’t strictly true.) It worked. If you were a Muslim and you heard that speech, you had no reason to feel attacked. You were being invited into a group where you could condemn this bad thing while doubling down on your identity. As someone with a Muslim last name during that time, I’m eternally grateful for that. I wasn’t thankful then, because at the time, I just assumed this was how America did things. I didn’t realize appeal to universal values would one day be on the chopping block.
Contrast what’s happening in France with Charlie Hebdo and subsequent events. Macron responded by making Islam the issue. He’s giving speeches about radicalization of Islam, etc. He’s not strictly wrong. Almost 1 in 5 French Muslims polled said the didn’t condemn the killings. But the other 80% now feel attacked and forced to maintain group solidarity.
This is happening right now in America and it’s bad. When my aunt in law (who is a sweet woman but a Trump supporter) reads on Breitbart the New York Times tweets blaming the Capitol insurrection on “whiteness” how does she react? “Yes, I condemn the lawlessness and I will strive to be less white!” She doesn’t even think of herself as “white” but she knows she is white as a factual matter, and she doesn’t have a college degree and doesn’t understand how we can “get rid of whiteness” without getting rid of white people. She would absolutely condemn what happened. She votes Republican because she doesn’t believe in abortion. But now she feels attacked based on her skin color. And what other identity would she latch onto anyway? She’s not a New York lawyer who has a plethora of other identity groups to fall back on, and the media shits on those too. She lives in rural Oregon, she’s white and so is almost everyone around her (except her grandkids and us, which include a range of brown and Black), and she works a service job.
White people who aren’t privileged don’t feel privileged. Liberals do not understand this and it’s a dangerous misconception about our reality. Normal white people don’t believe in this “punch up versus punch down stuff.” Those are ideas that exist in books, not in peoples’ heads. All you’re doing when you use “whiteness” is attacking people for something they can’t control and creating a white identity that didn’t exist before. And that’s a recipe for disaster.
What's going to destroy the country is respectable news outlets running headlines like "The Unbearable Whiteness of Storming the Capitol." It's language that's designed to make college-educated elite feel like they're in the in-group, while enraging normal people who don't see the term any differently than if you had inserted any other race in there.
I have tried to explain these academic terms to my dad. He eventually got it, but says "well if it stays in academia it's fine." My mom doesn't get it at all. She's got a graduate degree, but has a language gap. My in laws in exurban and rural America mostly think it's a racial attack on them. If they're somewhat right-leaning to begin with, to them it's as if respectable media has normalized overt racism against white people.
Normalizing this will provoke something very ugly for no reason. There are shared premises that exist when you use terminology like that among educated people. In particular, most people have internalized the idea that "you can't be racist against white people" and things like that (or at least won't complain about it too loudly). Those shared assumptions do not exist when you're talking to the public at large, in a context that's already adversarial and charged.
The problem I keep having with these arguments is that it's easy for me to accept that Kendi and DiAngelo are grifters, but the people pointing that out also want me to swallow a bunch of other less tenable stuff.
This happened with the vaccine prioritization at the CDC. I understand the arguments for it. Most Americans do not believe that life saving vaccines should be allocated based on peoples’ skin color. They would call that unambiguously racist. Thankfully for the CDC, the media barely covered it. Imagine what would have happened if the CDC had prioritized vaccines to white people? All of these people are operating with assumptions that are not universally shared by the public.
Ditto the riots this summer. Most people in the media have internalized this notion that whether violent rioting is okay depends on context. Most Americans do not see it that way. That distorted their coverage of what happened this summer, and burned credibility when it came time to cover the Capitol Hill riot.
I think Biden handled it okay, though I don’t think this was the time to inject the issue. But what if we’d had a President Elizabeth Warren? I shudder to think. Folks like her have really internalized this “they need to hear it for their own good” approach and are apt to use language that ordinary people aren’t familiar with. My in laws in Oregon don’t understand what any of this stuff means, and scolding them won’t help. They don’t feel “privileged” and you’ll only make them feel attacked. Which is fine if your intent is to bring about some sort of reckoning where the bad people are vanquished and the good prevail, but I don’t think that’s a great way to run a country.
The stuff she complained about really highlighted for me how the media isn't speaking language she understands anymore. For example:
> Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.
> Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
> $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
> If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
> killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.
These complaints all rest on completely conventional beliefs and assumptions. Increasingly, folks in news media and liberal policy circles not only don't hold any of these beliefs, but can't even talk to someone who does. For them, these things are axiomatic, and they can't explain their beliefs by reference to universal principles my wife's grandma shares. And when she reads a steady stream of their tweets, its alarming for her. When people don't share a basic framework of how to see the world, they can't trust each other or have meaningful policy discussions.
I'm also not sure what several of them have to do with anti-whiteness.
> > Universities that advocate equality, discriminate against Asian-Americans in favor of African-Americans.
There is a pretty fundamental divergence between most people and the left about how to define "discrimination" (a critical thing in a multi-ethnic society). To most people, the absence of "discrimination" means race-neutrality. Most people on the left have embraced the idea that discrimination between groups can be justified to achieve more equal outcomes.
> Some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, and other people are not held responsible for what they are doing right now.
This is how my wife's grandmother perceives a lot of the discussion of "white privilege" and "whiteness."
> $5 billion for border security is too expensive, but $1.5 trillion for “free” health care is not.
I think there is an increasing number of people on the left don't care about defending the border. They may not be fully "open borders" but within their intellectual framework, they really can't articulate what the legitimate purpose of controlling the border would be and thus aren't willing to spend money on it.
> If you cheat to get into college you go to prison, but if you cheat to get into the country you go to college for free.
There is a major push to offer tuition-discounted or tuition-free community college to undocumented immigrants, including in Oregon. A number of states that offer tuition-free community college are extending those programs to undocumented immigrants.
Traditionally, the view was that welfare benefits should be for those here legally. There is a great discomfort about the idea of extending those benefits to people here illegally. On the left, and in much of the liberal media circle, the prevailing view is opposed to distinguishing between Americans and non-Americans in provision of welfare benefits.
> killing murderers is wrong, but killing innocent babies is right.
There is again been a real shift in how abortion is conceptualized. Roe was justified on universal principles of bodily autonomy. Today, the right to an abortion is treated as axiomatic. And increasingly, there is a push to conceptualize it as "healthcare."
My point is that we're seeing quite a major divergence in basic assumptions about society, which has become particularly acute because most in the media have embraced these new axioms while most of the rest of the country have not. Whatever logical framework causes some people to view the term "unbearable whiteness" as not a racist term is just one example of that divergence.
Moreover, because, for the left these things are increasingly axiomatic, there is no way for them to talk to my wife's grandma about these issues. If you view abortion as a balance between bodily autonomy and the developmental advancement of a fetus, you can have a discussion between someone who supports abortion and someone who doesn't. If you view abortion as "healthcare" you can't have that conversation.
Or, if you have a diluted concept of "citizenship," you can't formulate a response to why anyone would oppose free college tuition for undocumented immigrants other than "bigotry."
Last thing first: Abortions are at their lowest rates since Roe. Abortions are health care. Frankly, the idea that people should be alarmed by a supposed reframing of abortions as health care is incoherent. People who oppose abortion should be happy that's how it's seen. I come from a very large, very Catholic family, I went to 12 years of Catholic school, my godmother aunt who has made multiple pilgrimages to Međugorje and pickets hospitals still gives me presents every year, and I will relate to you the previous conception pro-life culture had of abortion: a cosmetic convenience.
If our outlook on abortion has changed, it has empirically gotten more conservative. I agree that conservative white people are alarmed by change no matter what form it takes. But we can't reasonably discuss that here while suggesting that destabilizing conservative shifts are somehow attributable to elite left discourse.
(Also, next time you think about how people casually look at abortion as "health care", I'd ask you also to consider that Catholic organizations control huge chunks of the health care infrastructure in this country, and they deny routine medically necessary procedures and medications to women because the church has deemed them abortifacient. I'm a parent and a Catholic and I've seen this firsthand; it's a real problem in Chicago. There is more going on with the "reproductive health care" thing than you're acknowledging here.)
Moving along:
The tuition programs you're talking about build on the DACA framework. They don't reward adults who cross the border with free tuition. Instead, they seek to acknowledge that people brought here as children, a huge portion of whom have known no other life but that of an American, are for all intents and purposes American. This notion is wildly popular in the US; it gets something like 3/4 in favor in surveys. (Would it be more popular if it hadn't been set in motion by executive order? Sure. But that supports my point, which is that the concern you have about destabilization has more to do with partisan politics than it does with ideas).
One of the problems with our discourse on immigration --- surprised if you disagree --- is that we used to be proud of our inclusiveness. People don't pay enough attention to how strict European countries are about immigration. We have birthright citizenship! The left spends too much time rhetorically tearing down American institutions, and the right spends too much time tacitly conceding and expanding on the left's criticisms. That's a shift rightward.
I just don't see what health care costs have to do with border security costs. The problem with $5B for border security is that it's a joke; you can't physically secure the border with that much money. It's a grift, a jobs program for cronies and a monument for Trump. If immigration hawks were serious, their next move would have been nationwide mandatory E-Verify. But more to the point: I have trouble believing that your grandmother-in-law is really tallying up the Trump Wall against health care in the first place.
Nobody is being held responsible for things that happened before they were born. When your grandmother-in-law says that, do you ask her what, specifically, she means?
It’s not that they don’t understand it, it’s that they insist there is no such thing. They’re all in on Critical Race Theory fairy tales, and it’s career suicide at these companies to even question this.
I’m extremely liberal about social justice, I am. But this critical theory stuff is a powder keg. Building a multi-racial democracy that hasn’t descended into civil war is hard. Look at what’s happening in France right now. Trying to make these untested academic theory into what governs relationships between races in this country is a recipe for disaster.
And at the end of the day, most non-white people don’t want it. The majority of every minority racial demographic doesn’t even want to use race as a factor, even a small one, in college admissions. The recent California affirmative action ban failed miserably. It’s a boutique ideology.
But it’s a boutique ideology with a massive platform. Tomorrow a bunch of people will wake up and see the New York Times and CNN talking about how you can blame the Capitol breach on “whiteness.” And most will brush it off because Americans are good people. But for some it will make them feel attacked based on skin color harden their hearts against condemning something we should be able to condemn universally.