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Anyone remember that whole "HBD" thing? You don't hear much about it anymore. It makes sense. The new narrative on the Online Right is that there's a huge mass of white men without jobs who have no choice but to inject fentanyl because of "the border" and free trade sending the factories to China. The unemployment rate is only low because these people are so dispirited that they've given up looking for work. We need to drastically remake our economy to help these unfortunates, who are incapable of helping themselves. This worldview would seem to conflict with HBD theories. Indeed, one would have to conclude that whites are an inferior race. Guatemalans in their "third-world s***hole" don't just sit around despairing, they cross multiple borders and look for work in a country where they can't even speak the language, while white men who got laid off in their rust-belt factory towns twiddle their thumbs and inject fentanyl, unable to compete with said Guatemalans. They see whites like people have long seen the American Indians, a "noble" race who ought to "own" the country but who are ill-equipped to deal with the evils of modernity that more advanced peoples have introduced like liquor or fentanyl.[1] But where this worldview makes some sense in the case of the Indians, it is utterly nonsensical to apply it to whites, who all the statistics show have higher incomes, higher IQs, higher educational attainment, and lower unemployment. Even opioid overdose deaths, initially a "white" issue, are now highest for blacks and American Indians, as with most social problems. (Whites do die at higher rates than Hispanics or Asians.) Labor force participation rates have indeed declined, mostly because there are more students and retirees. 89.2% of men aged 25-54 are in the labor force, a figure that is likely higher for whites, and the 11% who aren't include students, prisoners, stay-at-home dads, and those who can't work because of legit disabilities.
The Online Right has often been compared to the woke left. The woke black looks at his race, disproportionately poor, uneducated, and working low-skill jobs, and demands affirmative action so that more blacks can work in medicine, law, business, and politics. The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain. Is that really what you want your political ideology to be?
Now, you may be asking, "what about the real unemployed drug addicts?" For one, this is a disproportionately non-white group. One study found that blacks are 3.5 times more likely to ever be homeless in their lifetimes than whites, while Hispanics are 1.7 times more likely. Still, while not as common as some of you think, they do exist. Tariffs aren't going to help them. Law enforcement, drug treatment, mental health care, and legalizing SROs might, though the real issue is that these people need to help themselves. If I believed, as many of you profess to, that my race was at risk of going extinct, I wouldn't be centering my politics around helping the least capable members of said race who refuse to help themselves. Don't you have bigger problems? It's not like you should feel any "political" loyalty to them, Trump's working-class base work, homeless people rarely vote.
In this post, you condemn and criticize the concept of white solidarity. This is a sentiment that you share with almost everyone else in the Western "first" world today, except for a tiny minority of self-conscious white advocates.
Your primary motivation for writing the post was your negative sentiment towards white solidarity, rather than your positive support of an alternative political program. We can tell this by the way you framed your post: almost the entirety of it is dedicated to criticisms of the white identitarian right. If your goal was to give people positive, substantive reasons for supporting your own preferred political program, you would have instead titled your post "why I think the right should support pure meritocracy / free trade neoliberalism / race blind Nietzschean will to power / whatever terms you would use to describe your own ideology".
Why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable? It can't be a purely "formal" concern like, "I think the Online Right is wasting their time pursuing a futile and unhelpful set of policies; they could instead be devoting their time and resources to my cause instead". The Online Right is small and powerless; you can't be that eager to enlist their help. Whatever your preferred political program is would probably find itself right at home in the agenda of Ramaswamy, or Musk, or Thiel, or the Koch brothers, or maybe even Trump himself. You have far more powerful and influential backers you could be appealing to, instead of wasting your time trying to persuade the "Online Right".
So, again, let's start with the heart of the issue: why does the concept of white solidarity make you uncomfortable?
I can't speak for him, but I think that in general the particular aversion to white solidarity comes from the understanding that ingroup preference necessarily induces outgroup hostility; it is impossible to love your neighbor without (at least somewhat) hating the outsider. Considering that whites are by far the most dangerous race on earth, with a proven track record of BTFOing everyone else, it's completely reasonable for white solidarity to be seen as more of a threat than other races' ingroup preferences; if you lived next door to an 800-pound gorilla, you wouldn't want to give it any ideas about how hungry he is and how tasty you look.
They're also outnumber 10:1 on the global scale. It's not at all reasonable for it to be seen as more of a threat.
And seeing only one kind of racial solidarity as unacceptable is A) illiberal and B) corrosive to multicultural societies.
Since when did population ratios matter? They certainly didn't matter to the British Raj or to the conquistadors. Sure, the power gap between whites and everyone else is smaller than it was in 1870, or even 1492, but most of the other ~7.2 billion people on Earth simply can't constitute a real existential threat to whites, you don't even need HBD to justify it. Even wrt China, they're a unproven upstart that lacks the proven track record of Europeans in global dominance.
I offer an explanation, not an excuse. As for multicultural societies, their myriad weaknesses have already been extensively detailed, what's one more?
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In common discourse, no one would say "white solidarity", they refer to this concept as "racism". I suppose most people would be uncomfortable with something they pattern match to open proud racism.
That's the catch, people don't pattern match their own proud racism to "racism"
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Or, alternatively, ‘racism’ is deployed as a pejorative to prevent white people from finding common ground in the same way that people from every other race are exhorted to do on a constant basis.
Very clearly people are not allergic merely to race-consciousness or even racial hatred on a platonic level, or they would object strongly to it when black people (sorry, Black people) do it. Such genuinely principled race-blind people exist, of course, but I do not see them in sufficient numbers to account for the taboo.
Yes, this is selectively applied only to white people. I can walk by a huge "La Raza" mural and most people don't seem to mind. An equivalent "WHITE RACE" mural would never be tolerated.
And you will encounter no politics at all during, say, Black History Month?
How do you differentiate 'people who talk about witchcraft are witches, so they're tabooed' vs. 'if you taboo any discussion of witchcraft, only maniacal Satanists will talk about it'? See e.g. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservative-the-eternal-struggle/
unspecified "lots" of white people think white identity is silly too, and there isn't even a white identity month, nor explicit hiring/educational quotas for white people.
I don't think you have a consistent rubric for what racial politics actually looks like.
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Yes, discomfort with white solidarity often manifests as labeling it "racism," but it's not clear this can said to be a cause.
An example cause: Historically, white solidarity has lead to genocide, so people are uncomfortable with it.
The "leads to genocide" observation is hardly exclusive to white people, though. See also: Japan/China in WWII, Rwanda, any number of sectarian feuds in the third world. Realistically, it seems like it was largely the norm or at least not uncommon among almost any group with the power to do it until largely-European philosophy eventually decided it was a morally repugnant idea (to which I'd agree).
Sometimes it seems like "genocide" only applies if European-descended folks (er, Volks) are doing it, otherwise it's just "sparkling ethnic cleansing" or something.
We may take your "genocide" observation and ask: why discomfort with white solidarity manifests in calling its repugnant feuds "genocide."
I wonder if the focus on white solidarity truly is misguided. Indeed, as we have seen this year, accusations of genocide are not exclusive to white people. (Depending on if you think Jews are racial shapeshifters, I guess)
I still haven't a clue why specifically the discomfort some of the time. It probably is different for different people. For many, I imagine the colonialism and power imbalance really is a big deal. For someone like Toruk, obviously it isn't. Others still are surely just reciting tribal deepities.
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Very perceptive of you. Yes, Toruk is mixed I think, so any racial solidarity movement would exclude him.
Probably the reason he is obsessed with white identitarians is not that they are currently powerful, but that they are up-and-coming. Also, its probably the only actual racial identitarian movement in US politics that anyone talks about. I'm not even sure you can say woke is properly a racial identitarian movement, since it makes concessions to a long list of non-racial coalition groups.
Black identitarian movements are a thing.
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I'm a mischling, which "soft WN" is full of.(BAP, Yarvin, etc.)
Yep.
There is something endlessly entertaining about many of the thought leaders of the "soft WN"/dissident right/very online right having Jewish heritage (BAP, Yarvin, L0m3z, Peachy Keenan, and others I'm forgetting, I'm sure).
One of these things is not like the others
One of these things doesn't belong
Can you tell which thing is not like the other
By the time we finish our song?
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Ah! Well, that's certainly an important piece of information that was elided. You should have simply started there and been honest about your concerns and worries, instead of going for the "500 IQ pwn everyone with facts and logic" play. The dialogue is so much more insightful and constructive when we cut the bullshit and just talk about what's actually bothering us.
I'm not unsympathetic to you, because I'm not without my own anxieties about race. Although I've received 99.9% (non-Ashkenazi) European (and 0.1% SSA/MENA/etc) from multiple ancestry tests, my appearance is rather on the "swarthy" end by white standards, which lead to teachers and other kids at school asking me on multiple occasions if I was mixed with anything. It gave me doubts about what I actually was, or if other white people even saw me as white at all.
Combine that with the fact that I never knew my birth father, and I'll never be able to be truly certain about what I am and where I came from.
But in some sense none of that matters, because I believe that the way that white people are treated by modern wokeness is wrong, and I believe that they have the right to have their own political movement, on their own terms. Even if those terms were so strict that they excluded me. I'd still believe that regardless of whether I was black or Chinese or anything.
Now, my situation is different from someone who is knowingly and visibly mixed (especially someone whose "other half" is both non-white and non-Ashkenazi). But the point is, you're not the only one with anxieties, and honest political dialogue starts with facing those anxieties and putting them at the center of the conversation, because they're essentially the major determining factor of your political orientation.
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Not true. Google Marko Elez.
It doesn't. Nothing in the post was directed against white solidarity, which I have no problem with.
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Not the OP, but I'll bite too: I am uncomfortable with any powerful enough identity group whose membership is assigned rather than chosen trying to express solidarity in a way that excludes people not of the group. This tends to lead to very anti-meritocratic outcomes. "Whites" just seems to be the most powerful such group in the current day.
I would also be uncomfortable with the concept of solidarity for following identity groups in order:
though there's a significant drop-off in my level of worry each step down. This is also based on factual beliefs about the world that I could easily be convinced out of with the right evidence.
I would not be concerned with solidarity among Navajo. Sure this is bad in theory, but it's not really likely to have any significant material impacts to anyone so it's not worth wasting effort on. Maybe I would feel differently if I lived in northeastern Arizona however---I don't really know what the situation is like there.
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Speaking as a millennial who was raised to genuine colorblindness, complete with black and Jewish cousins... have you ever heard anyone else talk about anyone else?
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