Anti-racist backlash

On John McWhorter’s fears of a backlash against anti-white sentiment

I think this could have been put more simply. If you convince someone that everything they ever did for you voluntarily meant absolutely nothing, then there’s at least some chance that they’ll decide to stop doing things for you. And if you make it clear that you hate them and think they’re the worst, there’s a chance they might stop feeling like they’re obligated to be nice to you too. These are things everyone should know just from basic experience with other humans.

You can only tell someone who is trying to be nice to you how much you hate them and how little any of their efforts mean for so long. And when they do finally get frustrated and lose their cool, it will be fueled by a deep resentment. There are few resentments deeper than that forged by being dismissive and abusive toward someone who was genuinely trying to do right by you, be nice to you, and help you. Their rebounding attitude won’t be indifference, it will be contempt. I’m not saying this is the most ideal, elevated, or morally and historically wise thing for them to do, but that is what people are like. It’s a natural, normal reaction. And by and large most white people are fairly average, ordinary people. Some Hispanics and Asians (often labeled as white-adjacent) are also likely to develop similar feelings.

Of course this argument depends on two premises. First, that white people have actually been trying to do right on race and have been making a positive effort, a good portion of them, most of the time. Second, that they have done so voluntarily, out of their own beliefs, not merely as acts of compulsion or hypocrisy or deceit.

There is good evidence that the civil rights movement constituted a deliberate surrender of power on the part of white people, for the sake of racial justice and out of solidarity with black Americans, because exceptional leaders like MLK actually convinced them that it was the right thing to do and was a necessary moral step. It was a voluntary humbling and repentance.

But the current anti-racist movement is very different. For one thing, it frames all the previous actions white people took during the civil rights era as mere hypocrisy. And, for all that racism is a human universal and kept existing after the Civil War, there were some very big actions that white people undertook for the sake of black people for hundreds of years before 1960. America voluntarily fought the most destructive war in its history and burnt half the country to the ground over the issue of slavery. That wasn’t nothing.

And the war wasn’t the only thing whites did. The British used extensive military (naval power especially) and diplomatic power to fight the worldwide slave trade. Religious believers especially fought for an end to slavery, and many helped slaves escape their bondage. There were decades of disagreements between the colonies over slavery long before the Civil War, and even before America existed, long before any of those colonies lacked the political, military, or economic power to influence the laws and actions of one another.

But white people, instead of being viewed as a heterogenous group with some better and some worse, and all of them humans, are just lumped together en masse by anti-racism and told that they are all the same, all bad, all almost infinitely guilty, so guilty that nothing they or their ancestors ever did was anything but corrupt, no matter what their individual or family story is, and no matter what they as a person have lived like. White people are all bad and everything they do is bad and everything they’ve ever done is bad. And they need to be punished. And this time the humbling is going to happen, whether white people want it or not. And if they don’t, it’s because they’re racist, and that proves even more surely that they need to be humbled.

This narrative reframes all the previous actions white people ever voluntarily took on behalf of blacks as mere hypocrisy and deceit. All the history before the Civil War, the Civil War itself, all efforts after the war, and even the previous civil rights movement of the 60s. That whole thing, right down to MLK himself, was a trick, a false flag, the merest hypocrisy. None of it was good enough. None of it was real.

The problem is, if (just as a theory, if) it is true that white people are actually largely unconscious of themselves as a common racial group (instead of a heterogenous category of widely differing cultures and histories), and you keep pushing them to view themselves as a single group, and a group with interests they could directly and openly advocate and compete for in the way that other groups do, then they would be able to do so in a completely dominant way. On the basis of demographics alone. And if it is true that what restraint they have shown, whatwver initiative, and the past occasions of giving up power and using their power for justice that they have undertaken in the past really were voluntary and based around a belief in a principle of a higher good, but you convince them that was all bullshit, what then?

If you actually convince white people that all the efforts of abolitionists and the civil war and civil rights were all hypocrisy, and it’s really all just a zero sum game for power, and they actually believe you, and they realize that you’re asking them to voluntarily lose the game, just how long and how far do you think you can push them before they realize how stupid that is, and they give up on all the submission to higher principles and start playing the power game for keeps?

If white America, America as a whole, had truly believed in racism and wanted to subjugate or exterminate the black race, then that would have been the historical reality. You’re kidding yourself if you think anything else. If the fundamental goal of America had been slavery and the subjugation of the black race, blacks would still be living on plantations today and none of the history I just mentioned would ever have happened. Black people didn’t revolt and defeat white people. The goodness in some white people defeated the evil in other white people, and in themselves. Some wonderful black leaders helped them, but ultimately the whites were overcome by their own consciences or their own countrymen or the demands of God and country.

If you then go to white people now and say thay it was all a lie, everything they ever did, and that they’re just the worst people in the world who are to blame for everything and need to step aside or be put down, well, try doing that to someone in your family and see how they react. It’s not going to inspire them toward future positive action toward you.

None of this is going to end well. Not because white people are so awful. But because they’re human.and black people are inviting them to play a game you don’t want them to start playing. If white people begin playing identity politics in any serious way, it’s a danger for everyone. You can convince someone to play a game like that and expect them to be content with being assigned the losing role, for whatever moral justification. You can’t beat them on that basis.

Europeans were quite happy to fight one another and obliterate one another for centuries over identity differences among what probably appear to blacks to be homogenous groups. They only stopped doing it fairly recently because they conceived of a better way. If you successfully convince them that there is no better way and it was all a lie and it all needs to be undone, you’ll just throw the world back into what it was before America came along, not into some utopian future. And in that world of open conflict, who will suffer, and who will win? And how awful it would be to see it. If you convince people that life is really just a race war, then that’s what it will become. And it’s foolish to assume that you can control or determine the outcome.