From White Guilt to White Backlash
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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.
From White Guilt to White Backlash
A monumental speech/ loved it! Must have been very hot there in Orlando that day
The following is really long and kind of a stream of consciousness mess, but I can’t think of a better place to put than than among the other comments to this important and inspiring speech and post. I originally wrote this as part of a thread below one of John McWhorter’s Substack posts this past Summer (edited slightly to remove people’s names and correct a few typos):
E.W.RJun 19
This is such a great sub-thread and digression into topics like the idealized and actual purpose of what used to be called “civics” in primary and secondary education (ideally, both the foundations of some the philosophically grounded critical thinking M teaches undergraduates, combined with a truly diverse but ultimately unifying sense of what it means to be a citizen - maybe things like common care and social responsibility, built around empathy, as well as inculcating some idea of how delicate the balance is between authoritarianism and anarchy (how does our society work when/to the extent it does?)
F and M and others started a really fascinating discussion, below a different article some weeks ago, about the current fetish in elite circles for a self-flattering often shallow cosmopolitanism and some of the ironies or hypocrisies involved in seeking to impose it is as universal good. So, what do we teach young students about what their community is and means? What do they belong to and what represents them? What do we have in common not just normatively as humans and as just one particularly, aggressively obtrusive species, but, more practically, as people within what used to be called nation-states (not very fashionable these days, I know.) Do we in most practical areas of life have a better or more relevant alternative than our own geographic home, our own polity? As diminished as the governments of actual countries (those distinctly-colored shapes between oceans on an old-fashioned classroom or living room globe) may be in power or elite fashion, I’d argue there is not a single more relevant generally shared political and geographic locus of belonging. As accidentally, badly, or even as cynically as borders may have been drawn, and as much as power predominated over principle in drawing most; as contested as physical space and national and other identities are; as much as deeper natural and cultural history might transcend political borders, they are still for most of us all around the world as viable a mostly unifying source of common meaning and belonging as we have. Degrade, demean, or diminish the mensing of countries and citizenship too much and the hole at the heart of business class, MNC, NGO cosmopolitanism becomes clearer. Where is the representation? Where is the sense of place - of home? Too often, MNCs hollow and sell you out from within, while NGOs seek to plan and dictate your priorities from without.
I had this sort of dumb discussion many years ago over beers with an old friend about how part of the glue of both countries and relationships is at least mostly shared founding myths. (I should stop before this begins to sound too much like one of the would-be thoughtful scenes from a dismally shallow rom-com - you get the point.) But I do still genuinely think even a slightly pat or corny notion like patriotism (not national chauvinism or jingoism) is a far better alternative to racial particularism. And, that a citizenship-based inclusive and positive nationalism like ours (one of the rare countries that, in some ways like France, was founded explicitly at least in principle on a civic rather than an ethnic or “blood-based” nationalism) which has been imperfectly but almost uniquely open to legal immigration and voluntary assimilation - is far, far better as a shared and unifying principle than tribalism.
Even if this life is in the most literal physical sense or more abstract academic sense all randomness and chaos, that randomness and chaos has nonetheless delivered us to a specific place and time. And while it’s probably best for most of us to not paralyze ourselves dwelling on these abstractions, we do have to share in a practical, quotidian sense enough of a common working understanding and orientation of who we are and what we belong to to function peacefully and productively in a sprawling, wildly diverse, and complex modern technological society.
My foundational insight came at five sitting with my back against the garage door of my parents’ basic ranch house in a charmless, mostly tree-less working class suburb immediately north of Detroit. My parents’ marriage was collapsing in violent chaos and I was trying to make sense of it within the world (did the world make sense? Was there any larger sense of fairness built into it?) No and no. I could immediately picture children my age starving, and even younger kids born with terrible disabilities, given no chance at all. My very first years were spent in the wildly diverse microcosm of a downtown Detroit high rise (Diana Ross lived in the penthouse for a time). We had neighbors who had fled brutal dictatorships in Iraq and Iran. Other neighbors my mom referred to affectionately like any married couple she’d befriended, though these men couldn’t be married. In the apartments and condos around our own cramped one bedroom, were black judges and physicians. My pediatrician was black. So was a regionally notorious drug kingpin who reportedly bought my sister and me gifts at holidays. Our super was black. We lived in an largely enclosed world in which black and white residents were civil, and mostly very friendly neighbors. Even as a kid there were no illusions about the broader, larger reality of racial discrimination in metro Detroit and the history of much worse in the story and experience of our country. But there was an air in the city around us mostly of getting on and getting along - of not judging nice people on a silly basis, even if frustrations and tensions sometimes sometimes surfaced. But the painful recent history and fraught present hung there as both a common backdrop and internal question.
In the mostly dreary suburb we relocated to immediately north of the city proper there were no black neighbors. Even the appearance of one darker-skinned South Asian family visiting a local school was all it took to send panicked rumors flying. So in that simplified palette of black and white there was an early lesson in sharing an ugly history and a complicated present with people both unlike us - in the most superficial yet sometimes experiencially profound ways - who were nonetheless every iota as American as we were. In a foundational sense, to me, America was about a deep pride in us being together, black and white, and finding our way, however imperfectly, united under one banner, united in a shared pride in local music and sports, in quotidian daily habits - the mundane ups and downs of parenting, marriage, punching the clock - all encapsulated within that one building. In comparison, the white flight suburb was culturally impoverished, no matter how many Southern or Eastern European ethnicities were represented. It was too much about denying others and living in denial.
Of course the actual American palette and its collection of stories and contributions, stirring triumphs and horrific wrongs, is much more varied than that chiaroscuro of black and white (how about class as well?) I don’t shy away from wanting both elements in our civic education: honesty, recognition, inclusion, wrestling with the worst of what’s shaped not just history but actual lives; and, more than a little bit of e pluribus unum - more than a little of those positive and unifying national myths: “our story”, warts and all. Frederick Douglass and MLK made the best case: the best values underlying this national experiment, claimed and amplified at great sacrifice not least by those originally most excluded, were what it took to begin to redeem and extend their promise.
We need unifying stories. We need some positive myths and shared crowd symbols. The soft particularism of a citizenship-based nationalism, enriched and broadened by an ongoing tradition of immigration does not have to be built on negative integration or on demeaning or diminishing the value of those born outside our national borders. But to be born within them or to have chosen to join us here and participate in this shared polity has to mean something unique and positive. What black Americans have overcome and carved out here and given to our shared American culture must not be diminished. What historically despised, exploited, or ignored and excluded, impoverished but unyielding, radically egalitarian Scots-Irish immigrants have contributed to our national culture and ethos is a major part of our national story. The list is goes on and on. Andrew Sullivan, as a proud naturalized American citizen, makes this point a lot: Americans who are white simply don’t realize how culturally black they are. Black culture is American culture. Black history is American history. Our country is flawed and messy, but great. Our citizenship is a gift and a responsibility to each other. We’ve seen the grimly reductive, paranoid zero-sum antagonisms of the alternatives to this not only in the literal Balkans of Europe or Great Lakes region of Africa, but all around us at home in sharper relief every day.