There’s a deep need for certain instincts to have a mascot. Black people are mascots for one kind of instinct, white people for another. I think Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell have thoroughly covered what forces of the collective consciousness and collective unconscious black people are a mascot for. It’s a religious role, an iconic and emblematic role in the modern mythological narrative. You can’t get rid of the narrative, but you can shuffle around who plays the parts and performs the functions.
Whiteness is a newer mascot. Tracking down what instinctive roles it is assuming isn’t quite as easy. The best guesses come from practice, seeing how the idea of whiteness is being used. Mythology isn’t about theory, after all, it’s about practice, it’s about enacting a kind of ritual that deals with the innate pressures and urges we as humans feel. Zeus and Odin differ from one another just as the many gods of war and love and order differ from one another across cultures in their specifics. But they all serve similar functions and embody similar dimensions of human behavior.
What functions does “whiteness” serve? Well, it certainly plays the role of a disease, an impurity, an infection, something that must be expunged and cured from the body of society. It also plays the role (a sort of Cain and Abel role) of a recipient of undeserved merit. It’s a parasite. It hasn’t succeeded by doing what is good, its competitors have done just as much, and it has stolen the results for itself. This was very much the Soviet narrative about the bourgeois, the Nazi argument about the Jews, the Malay argument about the Chinese, the Hutu argument about the Tutsis, etc etc. It’s a common trope.
The Soviet narrative was the most abstract, since it didn’t rely on familial or racial solidarity or animosity to function but expected to supplant those loyalties of land, city, blood, and history with a purely economic or class distinction. But because that kind of distinction is much less obvious and tangible than other kinds of difference, it got very vague and messy in its application, and it also didn’t really work very efficiently as a way to seperate the sheep from the goats. And people very much need to be able to do that.
People need to know who is safe and good and part of the family and who belongs within the circle, and who is dangerous and predatory and bad and who belongs outside the circle. We need to know the difference to survive, not just practically but also psychologically. It’s a distinction we literally can’t live without. It’s a human universal. You can change the players, but the roles persist. Someone has to play the parts.
Identifying whiteness with immorality, with the embodiment of the negative, predatory human social entity, is a nice compromise between modern abstract distinctions and archaic familial distinctions. It’s broad enough that you can apply it to just about anything (even black people, if need be) but tangible enough to be easy to apply and to carry with it the forces of familial solidarity and suspicion of predatory outsiders. You can see white people, and you can conceptualize whiteness.
White people also essentially play the role of Satan in our society. A powerful, hidden figure that is responsible for all the evil that exists in the world. They are a container for all evil, a universal explanation. And a container for evil is useful, because it keeps the evil inside it and outside you. Evil can be localized. It can be explained. And if the container can be addressed, then evil can be addressed. And if the vessel can be eliminated, then evil can be eliminated, and happiness and paradise would be possible, perhaps inevitable, with no further action or change on our own part to produce it. Goodness, then, does not suffer from being difficult to produce, but only suffers from a vulnerability to being stolen. If it was not being stolen by evil, our innate goodness would flourish by its nature.
Of course, giving white people the role of Satan ascribes far more power and coordination and singularity of identity and purpose than is really reasonable to grant any group, much less one so vague and internally divergent. But that’s not the point. One alternative to such magical thinking that also accounts for existing historical disparities is the theory that white people are, in some way, the actual favored children of God (or reality, or rationality or some universal determining force), the sons who have made the proper sacrifices and so been granted victory and blessing. White supremacy is the most extreme and exaggerated version of this theory existing at the opposite end from the Satanistic theory. But even if they don’t claim innate superiority, the argument that white people are simply following God’s laws, or the natural currents of a practical universe, and owe their success entirely to that, isn’t a popular position.
The Jews basically said that this is exactly who they were, and it didn’t win them many friends. Their success and influence on world history only made their claims more annoying. It begs for other explanations. Theft, distortion, dark dealings, parasitism, infection, deceit, manipulation. And all these were attributed to them.
The fact that the Jews (or at least their scriptures) made it perfectly clear that they could break their bargain with God at any moment and be cast down and destroyed if they stopped following him (meaning that they didn’t possess God but rather that he possessed them), and that choosing to follow him was sufficient to become a part of his people (again reinforcing that he doesn’t belong to you but you to him, and choice was sufficient for both inclusion and exclusion from his people), did not make Jewish identity any easier to accept.
It doesn’t really matter that the blessings of the Jews were contingent on their behavior, or that those blessings were essentially open universally to all comers who truly wished to possess them. The Jews served as reminder of our own finitude and sin, regardless. Their claim was of such import that it had to be answered or eliminated.
I don’t think white people are the “new” Jews, although I have heard some Jews complaining about being tarred with the same brush for their whiteness as they have in the past for their Jewishness. Being treated similarly and receiving similar accusations. But it’s not quite that simple, in part because our culture is so complex and contains so many novelties. And “white” itself is a far newer and wider blanket term containing a vast quantity of heterogenous elements compared to the close kinship and historical and religious unity of the Jews.
However, attitudes toward groups that succeed in distinction from other groups are similar across cultures and circumstances. On seeing someone who is succeeding, you can either revere them and practice imitation (often blindly, through hero worship) or you can resent them and practice defenestration (also, often blindly). This isn’t unique to the Jews, it’s a worldwide historical phenomenon. And because people and the world are complex, there’s always enough evidence available to take either position. And people have, and they have gone to both extremes with whiteness.
Whiteness is clearly playing some pretty weird roles in society right now. So weird that many white (and nonwhite) people are feeling very confused, surprised that things like being on time, logic, evidence, restraint, and math are declared uniquely “white” possessions and cultural artifacts, along with slavery, injustice, capitalism, gender roles, family structure, war, expansion, government, and inequality. It’s not clear if they should feel like lowly parasites or like gods, capable of anything. Or whether we should revere and imitate them or resent and defenestrate them. So much is attributed to them and to witness that it gives one pause. Just who are these people and how in earth have they done all this?
The empirical question, I suppose, is what to do about whiteness. We could begin by asking what other societies that have appended such magical and mythological properties to specific racial or cultural groups in the past have done, and how things went. Genocide has, of course, been a popular option, but isn’t always practical. The obvious, more reasonable thing to do is to find some way to simply take away the Satanic, parasitic, unjustified gains of the offending group and get them back into the hands of the righteous. Hopefully without too much fuss. Ideally, by free consent, but the historical precedent for that is about as rare as self-immolation.
The annoying ability of certain groups (like the Jews, but there are many others) to succeed and have influence despite our best efforts to level the playing field only increases the need to use direct force against them. Our inability to remove their pernicious influence sufficiently to allow all others to rise to their level just goes to show how deep their distortion of the fabric of reality must be, how thoroughly and fundamentally it is baked into all the structures of society, and how necessary direct efforts to bring them down (not just bring others up) truly are, to the point that a wholesale restructuring of society may be necessary. The revolution, as the French and the Russians and Chinese and Cambodians discovered, never goes far enough. Perpetual revolution may be a moral necessity.
I’ve certainly heard that argument from both the right and the left. And there is a grain of truth in it. Righteousness isn’t a moment or a structure, but an ongoing process of self-evaluation and individual practice. But if you’re using the dawning of utopian justice as the justification for individual injustices and the use of revolutionary deconstructive force to “correct the scales”, but the scales can never be corrected and the utopia can never really be reached or the perfect and pure structure built, what then? At some point you have to build something. You can’t spend your whole life in criticism, correction, redistribution, and deconstruction. Or maybe you could, but only in academia.
Making Nobody Happy 