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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Complaints about "race mixing" are a dead end for the white nationalist movement, but I guess that goes with the territory. You can't be a white advocate and also be ok with marrying Indians, but they're not going to convince anyone than JD + Usha is anything other than a lovely couple. This is just one of those things that people have moved on from.

Going off of memory here, but I think as a simple baseline White Women have the highest levels of endogamy compared to other races. It is not a dead-end to provide social or ideological signals to retain, promote, or strengthen that behavior. Judaism does this, although exogamy among Jews is and basically always has been one of their chief concerns, event their current level of endogamy given their small population pool relative to the population is proof of very strong social pressure for endogamy.

It certainly isn't a dead end- anywhere in the world. There needs to be a subtle or esoteric celebration of or pressure for endogamy.

The subtle and esoteric approach is better not only because it's more effective because it does incorporate more people into the fold.

Let's suppose that Trumpism is succeeded by "Vanceism" and there are going to be some major radical reforms to the Right Wing movement. I don't think Vance would oppose elements of a new Right Wing culture that esoterically promote White endogamy just because he married an Indian, in the same way I bet Jews who marry non-Jews are still more sympathetic to the Jewish effort for promoting endogamy. Does anybody think Jared Kushner is opposed to Jewish endogamy just because he married outside? Of course not.

The title "White Advocacy Is for All of Us" is an interesting one, but an Inclusive White Nationalist movement is not as contradictory as it sounds. Think of how strong the support of non-Jews is for Jewish nationalism- Zionism is for Everyone. The cultural and political levers that have accomplished that feat are available to White people as well if they learn how to use them.

Edit:

We're off to a definitional start, but I'd like to see Johnson define "white" in the American context. For example, does he include mixed-race people? Arab Americans? Are Polish Americans as white as those with German ancestry from North Dakota? Is there an argument to be made that certain non-white Americans are more "white" than certain groups of white Americans?

I always find this question to be pretty dishonest because it's never invoked for the advocacy of any other ethnic group. It's only when somebody talks about White Advocacy that everyone pretends they don't know what White is.

Just like "who is Black" or "who is Jewish" would be complicated if you drilled down to the nitty-gritty and tried to provide a comprehensive racial categorization, you just need to look at a PCA plot of human genes to quite clearly see where a "white person" belongs. White Nationalists will even crassly tap the PCA plots when others try to invoke ambiguity over who the Aryans were for example. Even the Nazis had a fairly comprehensive definition of "Aryan" that included all of the identified "six races of Europe" Nordic, Falish, Western, East-Baltic, Eastern, Dinaric as Aryan, and their own map of Europe is remarkably consistent with modern genetic clustering within Europe.

It's simply not a huge obstacle to White Advocacy, you can put the borderline cases in either category, just like the NAACP isn't crippled by being able to unambiguously identify the classification of every single person as black or not black. It's not some intractable problem.

Many White Nationalists do acknowledge racial differentiation within White people, so did the Nazis to various extents. The most common strain is Nordicism, which was held by some Nazi theorists but rejected by Hitler because he wanted to avoided causing racial conflict within Germans who are stratified among different European races. Point being, even Hitler understood "German" as a mixed-race concept, which many people don't know- although all the constituent races were considered Aryan.

I always find this question to be pretty dishonest because it's never invoked for the advocacy of any other ethnic group.

This simply isn’t true. For example, during the discussions about reparations which have taken place at both the state and federal levels in the U.S. over the last few years, a major undercurrent is the desire to avoid having to face the inevitable controversy over who counts as “black” for the purposes of reparations. Are they only for descendants of American slaves? Could they be offered to descendants of slaves from, say, Caribbean countries? (Even though those slaves were never the property of Americans, but rather other colonial powers?) What about African immigrants, or the descendants of African immigrants who were never enslaved? (Could some wealthy second-generation Igbo-American get the same reparations check as a sixth-generation ADOS person?) And then how mixed-race could somebody be — How diluted can their black ancestry be? How white-passing? — before they no longer make the cut for the reparations check?

These are going to be very live and very sensitive issues if reparations ever become a serious policy proposal at the national level. It’ll become very clear how non-unified people of African ancestry in America are, once it’s no longer politically expedient to present a veneer of solidarity.

Reparations as a policy fails on so many fronts it's useless to point to as an example of political advocacy being made impossible or impractical by ambiguous cases of group identity. As you noted, the controversy isn't even who is "black" it is who is owed reparations and who is not. All of those groups are considered black for the purposes of political advocacy, but when assessing damages to some perceived harm that is a different entirely question. It's also just not a popular policy, a lot of Americans do not like handouts. Also, if we made an attempt to objectively settle the financial costs of harms caused by social relations between blacks and whites, then certainly the reparations would be owed to White people and not the other way around.

I don’t think you addressed the core of my point. I’m saying that the extent to which a given racial group has common interests worth coordinating around is extremely context-dependent. White advocacy potentially makes sense in a context in which white people are being systematically acted against, regardless of a given white person’s other characteristics.

To some extent, this is true of the current American political context. It does not appear to be remotely applicable to Europe. Hood wants Europeans to coalesce around a shared supranational White identity, but the current political and racial conditions in Europe simply do not seem conducive to this. Whites are not under attack as whites in Europe. There is nothing like the DEI edifice, the mass affirmative action disfavoring whites, etc. If current demographic trends persist in Europe, that could certainly change, but as of right now there is no strong external pressure compelling Europeans to defensively adopt a shared white identity.

The comparison to reparations is instructive, I think, because it reveals the cracks in the “black” racial coalition. When blacks feel collectively besieged, as though their collective destiny hinges on remaining in solidarity, then “blackness” is a meaningful identity to them. This has certainly been the case throughout the entire history of the black American experience. When things like affirmative action were introduced, it introduced another vector incentivizing blacks to stick together and to adopt a “big tent” understanding of blackness. However, reparations introduce a countervailing incentive: the reparations money is a finite resource, and the more people qualify for it and split the pie, the less each individual black person has to gain. Suddenly solidarity is the wrong approach. Suddenly the question of whether someone like Kamala Harris is black becomes very relevant. The question of whether Obama was black was at one point a live-wire question; once he became elevated as a figure around which blacks could politically coordinate in order to secure power and resources, it ceased being a question. But if he’d been trying to claim a limited resource to which another more “authentically black” person could have credibly laid claim, it would have stayed a potentially divisive issue.

Many whites in America understandably feel that way about the issue of who counts as white. Different camps of whites recognize political sovereignty as a limited resource which cannot be shared between groups of whites with radically different political and cultural sensibilities. There isn’t enough political and economic power to go around, such that every subset of white people gets an acceptably large share. That’s a recipe for division among whites, not solidarity, and people like Hood need to present a compelling case why white people should sacrifice their more local interests in order to secure resources for other whites whom they don’t even like.

It does not appear to be remotely applicable to Europe. Hood wants Europeans to coalesce around a shared supranational White identity, but the current political and racial conditions in Europe simply do not seem conducive to this.

Historically, the superordinate European identity wasn't whiteness, it was Christendom. Arguably it still is* - even though few culturally Christian Europeans actually believe in Christ. The near outgroup has historically included Jews, but is mostly physiologically-white Muslims (Albanians, Turks, North African Arabs), and increasingly extends to Muslims in general now that non-white Muslims are here in sufficient numbers. Christian Africa is fargroup, as is anywhere with a non-Abrahamic religion.

Also, critically, the superordinate identity is weak. The people who don't like non-white immigrants mostly don't like Polish immigrants either. If you really want to see British Brexit-supporting xenophobes get their hate on, the preferred target is still Ze Jermans.

* Things get complicated with the FSU and Yugoslavia.