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Notes -
Hanania’s “talk about race and crime” was fine with them. The problem is with his talk about eugenic sterilisation and justified racial discrimination and the necessity of getting Hispanic people to leave the US because of the inevitable antagonism between whites and racial minority groups with inferior intelligence, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera…
To be precise, all of those things would also be fine, if he just picked a different group as his target.
Nonsense. Coerced sterilisation would be a human rights violation no matter who the target was. Removing a specific racial group from America is well outside the Overton Window. And even affirmative action is generally framed in terms of helping minorities, rather than justifying it with invective against white people.
Even the examples you list aren’t as extreme as Hanania’s pseudonymous writing, though. “Decolonisation is not a metaphor” does not say “perhaps we could coercively sterilise the colonists and take our country back in a few generations,” and the authors probably aren’t secretly thinking it; note that I come from a country where giving back land is government policy. Metaphors about “whiteness” are still putatively about mindset rather than genetics, and the paper you list was by a white person, which isn’t a complete defence but it does complicate things. We don’t have to trust these people completely but it does matter that they don’t actually mirror Hanania’s pseudonym.
You might reasonably ask whether someone who had called for extremist anti-white policies that truly did mirror Hanania’s would be more easily forgiven if they repudiated their earlier stance. Probably. But I have never seen such policies advocated in the first place, and I think that extreme white supremacy is feared because it actually has a constituency. It certainly has one here on this website. OP of this thread calls it “nothing very shocking.” This person blithely refers to “implement[ing] a few eugenic policies” as a way of getting rid of a racial minority.This person thinks that Jim Crow and slavery were “sane, stable solutions to the problem of having a racial underclass.” At least that last one is getting pushback?
It remains to be seen whether this even will scuttle Hanania’s book deal. You’re right that it could, but it might not. I am not certain that it should, but I may as well admit that it scares me a little that it might not. Without the possibility of strong pushback, would Hanania have changed his mind in the first place? Even if he would have, others would not. You can see plenty of them right here.
Hanania should lose trust over this. He should lose status. I don’t think he should lose the opportunity to regain some trust, and his explanation does matter, but it’s important that he takes a hit for this. Moreover, we don’t have to trust him.
What exactly are you pushing me for, when it comes to using “whiteness” to describe the set of effects that being white in a racist society might have on people? I think it’s bad terminology and people should stop using it. Are you asking me to conclude that everyone who uses such terminology actually intends white people harm? Because, if so, I don’t think that’s true. Alternatively, you might be asking me to be outraged, in order to campaign more effectively for people to actually stop. I am not sure if my outrage would actually be helpful, though.
There are a lot of situations in which a more measured argument would be more persuasive. After all, most people who support such terminology believe that outraged people are mistaken about its meaning. By not being outraged and instead taking people at their word, I might well have a better chance of changing people’s minds. I’ve not tried to make this argument, but I am pondering whether I should engage more with people to my left, now that this place is becoming less interesting to me.
Hey, you know I’ll always hear you out on this subject. I didn’t think I was defending “whiteness” terminology, though, to be honest. My main concern, in this conversation, is the comparison with Hanania. This thread contains a lot of minimisation of his rhetoric. Establishing that Hanania’s pseudonymous writing is worse is important to me because to say otherwise is to misinform about Hanania.
See you in other parts of the internet!
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