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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32825 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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The Rasmusen opinion poll in question found that 46% half of black people say that it's not OK to be white.

How was the question worded? Was it the one on this page?

1* Do you agree or disagree with this statement: “It’s OK to be white.”

Leftists have long claimed that the statement "It's OK to be white" doesn't mean only what it appears to based on a literal reading, but is in fact a white supremacist dog-whistle. Whether that's true or not, if the people answering the poll believe it, then I think Scott was a bit hasty to take their disagreement with it as a rejection of the literal meaning of the statement, rather than the white supremacist subtext they believe it to have.

We've gone from 'blacks' to 'leftists'. But that's rather besides the point, which would be to answer the question Adams supposedly thinks is being asked: Do black people in America like white people? I'd guess that a 50/50 split on the question is not beyond the realms of reason.

If we remove this question from the 'black' context and put it in a 'leftist' context then I think the red herring of 'white supremacist dog whistles' becomes even more clear. Western leftism has an entire doctrine specifically dedicated to verbalizing the hateful otherization of white people and everything that relates to them. I would hazard closer to a 80/20 split with the majority harboring wild anti-white sentiments.

Is my intuition completely off here?

No way in hell do 80% of leftists hold wild anti-white sentiments. Maybe 80% of the most terminally online activists? Even then, you are seriously underestimating how many people hold boring, milquetoast beliefs. Hating whites is not normalized to that level.

I will try to find sources once I’m off work.

What about Ibram Kendi's whole oeuvre?

Kendi's most famous book - How To Be an Antiracist - actually mentions anti-white hatred as one of the types of racism to be opposed, which of course would be far cry from whatever the Five Percenters were saying.

Uh huh. So you guys both swear I won't find him denying anti-white racism is a thing, in the paragraph after conceding the concept is theoretically possible, or things that would sound straightforwardly racist if the races were reversed, right?

He's got a whole chapter about the concept in the book. It's not exactly a hard book to obtain, you can indeed evaluate it yourself. Undoubtedly your average Motte-poster would still disagree with much of what he says in the chapter, since he is still a leftist, but he quite specifically talks of anti-white racism as an existing thing and lists multiple ways in which he says it's harmful.

Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example. Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. They are not one and the same, as the resistance within White nations shows, resistance admittedly often tempered by racist ideas.

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power. Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us.

We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people. For decades, racist power contributed to stagnating wages, destroying unions, deregulating banks and corporations, and steering funding for schools into prison and military budgets, policies that have often drawn a backlash from some White people. White economic inequality, for instance, soared to the point that the so-called “99 percenters” occupied Wall Street in 2011, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders ran a popular presidential campaign against the “billionaire class” in 2016.

Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids’ business-class schools could resemble the first-class prep schools of today’s superrich. Where high-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation.

And so on. It's not a particularly good book, in my opinion, but it's still a good exercise to read to know what the specific claims are.

The particular chapter actually got a bit of press since he detailed his momentary youthful, college-era belief about the NoI Yaqub thesis and the idea that melanin gives you superpowers and whatever as examples of anti-white racist beliefs that he believes it is good that he got rid of, which, at the very least, shows that he thinks it is more than theoretically possible to be an anti-white racist.

Big "Kill the Indian, save the man" energy there.

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