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I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:
I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.
And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.
I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.
You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.
If other people are racist against me how does it help me to unilaterally stop being racist against them? We already tried the race blind thing and every group except white people kept relentlessly advocating for their racial interests. South Africa tried the same thing with identical results. No truce is possible because the other side will shoot you in the face the instant you lay down your gun.
Being racist mostly imposes costs on you. Not being racist is better for you. If other people are racist against you, they are assuming costs they need not pay. (This is a standard argument re: the fictitious "women's pay gap." If women actually accepted less money to do the same work, then non-sexist companies would out-compete by hiring less-expensive female employees instead of more-expensive male employees. The same is true of racism; if you're a racist company, you're leaving money on the table.)
We still mostly do the race blind thing. It mostly works fine. The people relentless advocating for their racial interests (whether they are white, black, or otherwise) need to be told, as clearly and repeatedly as possible, that they are wrong.
No, South Africa is a disaster today because black identitarianism was allowed to overwhelm a liberal status quo that was actually working to everyone's benefit, for a little while.
I'm not saying we should surrender to the identitarians on the left. Of course not! I am very critical of leftist identitarians. But in this thread I am saying that surrendering to the identitarians on the right is in the end the same basic mistake.
I don't think that's true (assuming we're talking about a net cost). When racists in the US government diverted vaccines away from white people to black people did that hurt black people? I think it helped them. When Harvard gives black people an advantage in admissions does that hurt or help them?
If I own a store and exclude people of race X because I think they shoplift a lot and are a net drain on the business then that is racist and illegal whether or not I'm correct about how often race X shoplifts. Shoplifting rates by race are a factual question and I may or may not be losing money based on the numbers, but the numbers are irrelevant to whether I'm being racist.
To use your example, if I own a business and I think women are worse workers and hire them with a lower starting salary then I'm being sexist. I may or may not also be economically rational based on the facts but that's a separate question. If my workers are doing hard manual labor all day then I'm probably being economically rational because women are worse at that type of work on average. If my workers are caring for young children then I'm probably factually incorrect and I'm leaving money on the table. But either way I'm a sexist.
Or another example, if I know race X commits crime at a high rate and I find myself walking around an unfamiliar city at night in an area with a lot of X, what should I do? Leaving the area is racist because I'm making assumptions about people based on the color of their skin. But instead of imposing a cost on me it may very well save my life or at least my wallet.
Identitarianism is always going to win in a democracy because embracing identitarianism gives you a bloc of perfectly loyal voters. It's not a coincidence that the liberal status quo always gives way to racial strife in diverse societies. You can have a dictator keep the peace by force or you can have a dominant ethnicity holding the reins or you can do the Jordanian thing where you explicitly divide up power ahead of time but you can't have race blindness because sooner or later one political party is going to learn that they can win by abandoning it.
Sure. So we should complain about racism, not divert vaccines away from black people instead.
To hear Clarence Thomas tell, it hurts them. But perhaps more importantly, trying to judge "hurt" and "help" in terms of who gets to be a Supreme Court justice or Yale law professor, and who is instead relegated to graduating from a top-10 law school and making millions of dollars as a partner at a top law firm (but who doesn't get to tell her friends she went to Harvard) seems like piss-poor reckoning. It's not as though the Asians "harmed" by Harvard's racism (whites actually appear to benefit very slightly, or at least not be harmed, by Harvard's preferences) are facing a choice between Harvard and never going to college. The real harm is so slight as to be essentially invisible, except for the part where we decide to reject racism on principle instead of on the basis of who gets to have the most desirable status signals. Rejecting racism on principle is good.
It's not racist to see facts. If there is an ethnic propensity for antisocial behavior, there's nothing wrong with taking reasonable action as a result.
Right, you can't just say "because black people are more likely to shoplift, all black people are excluded." Instead you should say "we need to construct a law enforcement system which makes it easier to detain and punish shoplifters." There's nothing racist about that. Oh, sure, an identitarian will say there's something racist about that when it turns out that a bunch of mostly non-white kids are the ones who end up actually doing time, but I am not an identitarian, I'm the one arguing against identitarianism.
No, that's wrong! This is exactly my point. To call that sexist is the problem with identitarianism! Pay people whatever you want! As a job creator you don't owe it to anyone to pay a penny more than they are worth! And if they are worth more than that, someone else will pay them more. But if you're sexist, you're at a disadvantage versus others who are gauging merit instead. There are of course inefficiencies in the market, this won't work perfectly, but your responses to me are completely mis-targeted because I'm the one arguing against identitarianism! You're criticizing certain bad social practices and telling me "to combat racism and sexism I have to be racist and sexist" but all you've done is accepted the wrong definitions of racism and sexism. Once you do that, it's just "ingroup versus outgroup" all the way down, you lose the ability to complain persuasively about racial and sexual preferences because you've shown that you want racial and sexual preferences for yourself. A black-hating racist and a white-hating racist are just engaged in a game of power, there's no principle to appeal to, just pure in-group preference. But very often it is cooperation, not competition, that we need to coordinate if we're going to get stag.
I cannot emphasize this enough: you are just buying the wrong definition of racist here. If you disagree with left-identitarians, why would you let them define your key terms? This is what makes me crazy about the alt-right: they allow their enemies to set the poles of the debate--and that means they are destined to lose. They have lost the game before they have even begun to fight.
I agree that democracy is mostly bad and even the small protections of minority rights built into the U.S. system (Supreme Court, Bill of Rights, the original selection method for senators, the Great Compromise, the electoral college) have been much eroded by identitarianism. Proposing to fight fire with fire, however, too often just ends up getting you burned.
This is a different problem, though. You're no longer arguing for "the good kind of racism," now you're arguing against the practice of democracy. Because if political parties can't divide people along racial lines, they will just divide people along some other lines. The blues and the greens of the Roman chariot races are the canonical example, I think.
The United States began as an uneasy alliance between a bunch of "white" abolitionists and a bunch of "white" slavers. Later came Germans (now "white"), Irishmen (now "white"), Chinese immigrants (now "white adjacent" for purposes of college admissions), Hispanics (usually "white" within two or three generations)... Native Americans who don't maintain sufficient blood or cultural purity become "white," many blacks "pass" as "white," the way these lines get drawn is political.
And sure, you can say "I would like these lines to be drawn to my benefit," but then you're just doing the same stupid thing the people you're complaining about (indirectly, in your selection of examples) are doing, in reverse. And intelligence is not reversed stupidity.
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