How Demonizing "Whiteness" Spreads White Nationalism

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If you can't understand how identity politics that demonizes white people having widespread acceptance might make more people turn to identity politics that are in favour of white peoople then you're really not thinking very hard about the subject at all.

Technically the only people it wouldn't significantly ill-impact are those with the money, means, and power to fall back on... ie. the ruling political class.

hard thinking isn't high on the priorities of white folk drawn toward racial identity politics....

ROFL!!

Not simple minded at all. It's silly but seemingly accepted that every straight white man is an archetype among a pantheon of fellow "privileged" straight white males. It's rubbish. Look around you. There are many straight white males that are low income, homeless, unemployed, incarcerated, disabled or otherwise struggling. There are many straight white males that don't have a high school diploma let alone a college degree. When people paint an all encompassing brush of "white male privilege" to apply to all white males, it's truly insulting to those who fall into any of the above categories or a score of similar categories that result in struggle, hardship and failure. Include white women by just saying "white privilege" and add scores of additional people to the fallacy (ie white women who are disadvantaged in the same ways as I've described above). It's wrong. It's an example of stereotyping at its worst.

This would be funny except that it's a cartoon of something that doesn't happen and doesn't resemble the details well enough to be proper satire.

That's because it's a parody

A parody of what? Political comics?

MAGA people who can't quite articulate why they think they are reclaiming their identity

Not relatable but ok, I'll take that as the intent.

I'm trying to think of how it comes to bear on the points Bret Weinstein was making. Usually if something's off-point enough I'll let it slide under but the traction it was getting interested me.

Brett Weinstein is a evolutionary biologist not a psychologist. He doesn't understand intergenerational trauma of the fairly vicious racism and discrimination that Black americans have suffered over multiple generations which is fairly unique in world history when you think of its duration (slavery existed in the middle east and south america but the slaves there have assimilated into mainstream society) and pretends reciprocity only requires black Americans simply understanding intersectionality where poor whites are in the same predicament (this despite poor whites not having any no empathy hating/resenting blacks more than they hate rich whites)

Thinking isn't the purview of anyone drawn in by identity politics period, but my point was that acting as though white nationalists spring forth from a vaccuum fully formed and untouched by outside influence is myopic and intellectually lazy.

I look at it another way. Trump and Nigel Farage scratched the surface and found that white nationalist philosophy was always there ready to be used again like an untapped oil well....

I don't think anyone can deny the trauma black Americans have been through and I don't think his point in any way displayed a lack of understanding of that.

What he was saying is that if you relay to any group that they're in a zero sum game not just for prominence but winner-take-all and that they must lose, and worse it's not for their own sins but the sins of what might have a 10 to 15% chance of being ancestors, it will end with that group accordingly jumping in to that zero sum game just as hard as everyone else. What Bret's saying is this is made far more dangerous when this group happens to be so much larger that the slightest faltering of the group who instigated their entry into that battle starts to waver or fall apart because once that switch has been clicked on it's got possibly millions of components worth of inertia, to be switched back off. It's a completely pragmatic point and it's one that holds true no matter what history has been.

I can't remember who I was listening to who said this recently but this is the other reason why I think meting this out purely on race is incredibly corrupt - the 'white liberals' (regressives IMHO) and elites who are suggesting that we universally embrace this are also the same who financially wouldn't take that much of a hit. On the other side of it I'm not talking about hurt feelings, a smaller house, less expensive college for the kids, I'm thinking about the rust belt, Appalachia, the sprawling planes of the US where people go from making it paycheck to paycheck to not making it at all. If you have an economic and social system that's already pushing them toward opioids, their trucking and service station jobs are going to be going away thanks to automation, and then on top of that they need to give up whatever privilege they gained by being beaten in a trailor and effectively going to inner-city quality schools, I think it's quite obvious that the suggestion that one race as a whole needs to surrender not just the world that the achievements of 'their race' and their philosophies (secular humanism, etc.) need to be washed and that they need to then take not an equal seat but now a significantly inferior seat at the table primed for abuse - you have to admit that 'woke' is an urbanite socialite role-playing game. It's upper-middle class people LARPing, largely - this is me inserting personal opinion - because they're worthless and they know it and rather than trying to do the hard work of trying to work on solving the harder problems it's way easier to virtue signal.

It's also quite possible that the points above I just made won't make any sense if someone's interpretation is that this reaction or this circumstance is simply what would happen if white people 'stopped oppressing black people and gave them an even place at the table' - that's not what we're talking about and that's not the signal that's going out. The signal that's really dangerous is not 'make true race equality happen and do your part', the dangerous message is 'if you're white - gauge yourself for being white, whether it helps anyone or not, and accept a boot on the back of your head because people of your color - related or unrelated - did x, y, and z', that's a masochism game that again - can be fine for people who are LARPing and cushioned from consequences, the rural and urban poor won't play it because they don't have the space or lost contact with reality to follow in kind.

So I think it's really quite fair to say that you can split white people up into may very different categories, many of which have no place in the intersectional D&D game and you can understand I think that.

I have both agreements and disagreements with Bret.

1. In his video; Bret claims the purpose of intersectionality is to rank people on score cards. This is false. The purpose of intersectionality is to gain a understanding of how different forms of oppression interlock with each other.

2. Bret seems to understand the fact that "whiteness" was an invention (like borders for example), and disagrees with people who categorize it as concrete and innate. I agree with him on this.

3. Bret claims attacking "whiteness" will push "white" people towards white nationalism. My answer would be both yes and no. It depends on how people go about it.

I think people need to target "whiteness" as an institution, rather than people with bright skin.

I went back and listened to his first few sentences defining intersectionalism and he seemed to do okay, if he went into the score card scenario later I think he was talking about the colloquial results of what happened when the theory got mangled in application and popular agenda.


I'd think a lot of is is luck. Upbringing, socioeconomic status (the more money you have the more 'woke' and anti-racist buffering you have), family and surrounding community, degree of constructive/destructive competition you're embedded in, how much they themselves are or aren't suffering and whether they can keep their humanity above water or whether it's somewhere in the underworld between healthy-enough and deep mental illness (far more people seem to be here than we have any proper account of).


Fully agree on that.

We have to be open to the possibility as well that even if it turns out that great philosophers, historians, and inventors do turn out to be significantly or qualitatively outnumbered by Europeans (ie. Greek, Roman, Renaissance to Enlightenment European, etc.) this has more to do with flukes of luck where nature and massive invasion didn't wipe everything out. I often hear that if Genghis Khan hadn't died within the time that the Mongol hordes were planning a full invasion of Europe that there would have been no Renaissance, Enlightenment, or anything else. In 2019 under that regime there might not have even been an industrial revolution yet.