From White Guilt to White Backlash
From a speech at the National Conservatism Convention
At the end of October, I was a featured speaker at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. My speech, “Whose Fourth of July?: Black Patriotism and Racial Inequality in America,” is available right now to paid subscribers and will be made available to everyone else on Friday.
In the speech, I lay out what I call some “unspeakable truths” about race in America today. One of the most ominous is what I and many others view as a potential white backlash against BLM-style wokeness of the kind that prioritizes the purported interests of black people above those of other groups. If we insist that black people deserve privileged treatment simply because of their race, I fear it is only a matter of time before whites in large numbers start to regard themselves as a special class as well, and try to “take back” what they perceive to be theirs.
The only solution is for black people to recognize themselves as what I believe we are: Americans, first and foremost. That’s one part of my case for Black Patriotism. Stay tuned for more!
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Which brings me to yet another unspeakable truth: an ideology dominated by the terms “white guilt,” “white apologia,” and “white privilege” cannot exist except also to give birth to a “white pride” backlash, even if the latter is seldom expressed overtly—it being politically incorrect to do so.
Confronted by someone who constantly bludgeons me about the evils of colonialism, who urges me to tear down the statues of “dead white men,” who insists that I apologize for what my white forebears did to various “peoples of color” in years past, who demands that I settle my historical indebtedness via racial reparations, I well might begin to ask myself, were I one of these “white oppressors”: on exactly what foundations does human civilization in the twenty-first century stand? I might begin to enumerate the great works of philosophy, mathematics, and science that ushered in the “Age of Enlightenment” that allowed modern medicine to exist, that gave rise to the core of what we human beings know about the origin of the species, and the origin of the universe. I might begin to tick off the great artistic achievements of European culture: the books, the paintings, the symphonies. And then, were I in a particularly agitated mood, I might even ask these “people of color” who think that they can simply bully me into a state of guilt-ridden self-loathing: “Where is ‘your’ civilization?”
Now, everything I just said exemplifies “racist” and “white supremacist” rhetoric. I wish to stipulate that I would never actually say something like that myself. Neither am I attempting here to justify that position. I am simply noticing that, if I were a white person, this reasoning might tempt me. And I suspect it is tempting a great many white people. We can wag our fingers at them all we want, but they are a part of the racism-monger’s package. For how can we make “whiteness” into a site of unrelenting moral indictment without also occasioning it to become the basis of pride, of identity, and, ultimately, of self-affirmation?
The right idea here is the ethic of transracial humanism which Gandhi and Martin King, Jr. propounded: we, as citizens of this great republic, must strive to transcend racial particularism and stress the universality of our humanity and the commonality of our interests as Americans. The only way to effectively address a legacy of historical racism without running into a reactionary racial chauvinism is to march on —if only fitfully and by degrees—toward the goal of creating a world where no person’s worth is seen to be contingent upon racial inheritance, a world where racial identity fades in significance, a world where we learn how to “unlearn race,” as the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams has put it. Promoting anti-whiteness (and Black Lives Matter can often be found doing precisely that) will cause those advocates to reap what they sow in a backlash of pro-whiteness. The folks who think they can insist on spelling “Black” with a capital “B” while keeping the word “white” in the lower case are likely in for a very rude awakening.
I’m paraphrasing, in parts, a longer comment I posted to the YouTube clip very shortly after it went up earlier this afternoon. It was thoughtful and polite, if pointed, and it was removed. It’s getting harder and harder to trust that Big Tech won’t simply quash opinions it doesn’t like.
I’m a lifelong liberal who has literally never voted for a Republican. But if I’d been voting in Virginia last week I’d have voted for Republicans for all of the major statewide offices. One of the crowning moral commitments that attracted me to the Democratic Party from the time I was a teenager was its focus on equal rights and fairness (equal standing, dignity, and opportunity for all). I remember Lee Atwater; I know what actual “dog whistle politics” is. And I also know gaslighting when I hear it. The cultural left that now dominates our major institutions as well as the Democratic Party has turned that commitment to equality absolutely on its head. And is lying about it and trying to intimidate, censor, bait, smear, and ruin anyone who says that the emperor has no clothes.
Great post. I'm very sympathetic to some of the left's goals.
For example, I would like to end the drug war. I do believe we have a problem with over incarceration. I would eliminate or at least greatly reform qualified immunity. And I think it's a travesty that a black man is 8 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than a white person.
In fact, even though I'm former military, I thought the taking a knee during the national anthem was a perfectly ok way to protest (opinions were pretty evenly split with my former military friends).
But the rhetoric and the narrative that the woke are pushing totally turns me off. Talking about white privledged or alleging racism because I don't agree with whatever the latest socialist policy is will not make us allies, and will make it WAY less likely for us to work together on things we do agree on.
I object to the narrative that the woke seems to be pushing. That we are a evil racist country to the core. Instead I believe the narrative should be a good country that has failed to live up to its ideals but is constantly trying to do better. In fact, a country that millions of people of all colors try to immigrate to each year, many of them literally risking their lives to get here.
That's the narrative that we should tell about ourselves, and that's the narrative that you can get bi-partisan agreement on.
Finally, I continue to believe that the society we should be striving for is one where people are judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Dividing people up into racial affinity groups etc seems to be the exact opposite of what we are trying to achieve.