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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?

bothers with the throat-clearing and fig leaf

Again, it's a whole chapter in his book, argued at length and referring straightforwardly to his own life in an embarrassing sense (as I said, the whole book is structured like some sort of an confession at length, a personal casting out of the sins of racism in Kendi's own personal life). He could have just as easily not written the chapter, and I suspect few would be any the wiser; considering how few people in general I've seen who have even noted that Kendi has a chapter on anti-white racism, expect for lazy dunks about the fact that he mentions his college-era belief in NoI crap in this chapter (precisely in the self-confessional sense), I doubt that many people have even bothered to read the book in even a cursory way, whether supporters or opponents.