Racism and the Anti-White Left

In contemporary America, professors openly say things like “All I want for Christmas is white genocide” or “OK, officially, I now hate white people,”. Teaching assistants claim that “some white people may need to die” so that Black people can get what they deserve. Editors at the New York Times assert that “White men are bullshit”, use the hashtag “CancelWhitePeople” and complain about “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” .

This is the same New York Times which published a piece entitled “Can my Children be Friends with White people?“, a question which the author answers largely in the negative: “As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible. When they ask, I will teach my sons that their beautiful hue is a fault line. Spare me platitudes of how we are all the same on the inside. I first have to keep my boys safe, and so I will teach them before the world shows them this particular brand of rending, violent, often fatal betrayal.”

Sometimes, white people don’t like this sort of stuff. For instance, a few complained about the New York Times editor I mentioned, but writers for NBC News explained that “white people getting mad — or publicly performing anger, at least — about white people jokes is actually white people getting mad about threats to white power. Threats like a woman of color joining the editorial board of the New York Times after telling smarter and funnier jokes than them on Twitter. Racism is a mechanism of maintaining an imbalance of power — making it literally impossible, by definition, to be racist against white people, or to tell a racist joke about a white person”. Similarly, The Chicago Tribune has stated that “American racism is a uniquely white trait“.

USA Today has made this point too, that only white people can be racist. They’ve also noted that “A majority of white Americans believe discrimination exists against them in the United States” but have explained that this is not to be taken seriously, arguing that “America’s newest class of victims — i.e., white men — is on the warpath again. They complain that they can’t get into college because of affirmative action, can’t get a job because of diversity hiring, and can’t keep a job because of factories closing due to unfair trade deals. Now we can add to the “whine list” the fact that many white men feel they can no longer get ahead or get an advantage because of identity politics.”

CNN has published material explaining that white people who disagree with non-whites about racism are often engaging in “Whitesplaining”. This term was defined as follows: ““Whitesplaining” is an affliction that’s triggered when some white people hear a person of color complain about racism. They will immediately explain in a condescending tone why the person is wrong, “getting too emotional” or “seeing race in everything.”” The article went on to cite telltale signs of whitesplaining, such as when white people say things like “But I’m not a racist”.

Other times, white people agree with these narratives and devote themselves to fighting white supremacy. This can take an emotional toll on white people as a kind of racial self hatred. The New York Times has noted this in an advice column responding to a woman whose sense of white guilt caused them to have a mental breakdown. As they explain, white suffering is ultimately unimportant: “You have to relinquish your privilege. And part of learning how to do that is accepting that feelings of shame, anger and the sense that people are perceiving you in ways that you believe aren’t accurate or fair are part of the process that you and I and all white people must endure in order to dismantle a toxic system that has perpetuated white supremacy for centuries. That, in fact, those painful and uncomfortable feelings are not the problems to be solved or the wounds to be tended to. Racism is.”

NBC has also acknowledged the psychological toll of their ideology, telling white people that “you’re going to have to take a side. And yes, you have to do it now. It’s very likely, and understandable if you feel this is unfair, this is inconvenient, it’s frustrating, it’s difficult, it’s embarrassing, it’s going to alienate you from people you know, love, work with, watch the game with. That’s privilege. Someone once said, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” This is a taste of equality.”

And Forbes too has said that white people need to stop caring so much about their own suffering: “If you are not Black, your pain and hurt is not the priority right now. This may be an anomaly for you – it is not an anomaly for Black folks who live this life, everyday”.

In the political realm, Joe Biden has talked about how white people becoming a minority is not only not-bad, but in fact a positive good which will improve the country.

These news outlets, CNN, the NYT, USA Today, Forbes, and NBC, are not seen as organizations of the radical left. Like Joe Biden, they are seen as center left or moderate.

If we looked further to the left, we’d find things like Bernie Sanders saying “when you’re white … you don’t know what it’s like to be poor“, Buzz Feed running articles like “37 Things White People Need To Stop Ruining In 2018” (the first of which, apparently, is America), Vice positively covering vacations non-whites take just to get away from white people, and The Root publishing articles with titles like “White people are cowards” which conclude “I thought white people were evil. I was right.”

Mainstream right wing media does not have material like this about minorities. That is because the American right is, for the most part, not racist. The American left, however, is significantly based on anti-white sentiment and behavior.

This statement is backed up by various studies which consistently show that liberals value white people less than non-white people. Most of this research also finds that conservatives exhibit no significant racial bias.

CitationFindingUlhamm et al. (2009)Liberals are more willing to murder someone for the greater good if that person has a white sounding name rather than a black sounding one.Winegard et al. (2019)Liberals think black people being genetically superior to white people with respect to intelligence is more plausible than the reverse.Cooley et al. (2019)Hearing about white privilege caused liberals to feel less sympathy for poor white people.Tetlock et al. (2000)Liberals feel non-whites should not pay more for home insurance due to living in a high-risk area but as neutral about whether white people should.Winegard et al. (2019)Liberals would support censoring research showing white genetic superiority with respect to intelligence more than they would support censoring evidence of black superiority.Goldberg (2019)White liberals are the only group who on net prefer other racial groups to their own.

While not directly concerning how liberals view whites, it is also worth noting that Heiphetz et al. (2020) found that Americans dehumanize racists (or, “see them as less than human”) more than they do groups which are traditionally seen as being dehumanized.

It’s worth noting that by accusing the left of being anti-white I am not accusing them of being genuinely pro-black. There is some reason to think that liberals, especially white ones, are often more concerned with being anti-white than they are with helping minorities.

For instance,  Cooley et al. (2019). found that exposing people to left wing messages about white privilege caused their sympathy for poor whites to decrease while their sympathy for poor blacks remained the same.

Similarly, Dupree et al. (2019) found that: “Across five experiments (total N = 2,157), White participants responded to a Black or White interaction partner… liberals—but not conservatives—presented less competence to Black interaction partners than to White ones… This possibly unintentional but ultimately patronizing competence downshift suggests that well-intentioned liberal Whites may draw on low-status/competence stereotypes to affiliate with minorities”. In other words, white liberals talk to black people like they’re children.

This may also explain why it is that leftists spend a great deal more time talking about white on black murder than they do on black on black murder even though the later is far more common.

Some people have trouble  accepting that the left is anti-white because so many white people are leftists. This should not be that confusing. We all know that people can internalize the narratives that justify discrimination against them. Leftists talk about this happening to racial minorities and women. There is no reason why this could not also happen to whites.

We also know that people can have a bias against themselves at the individual level. We normally call this low self-esteem and we know that liberals, on average, have lower self esteem than conservatives (Schlenker et al., 2012). Research has even suggested that people’s political opinions shift to the right if you boost their self esteem prior to having them take a political quiz (Belmi and Neal, 2014). Since we know that leftism has something to do with disliking yourself as an individual, it should be even less surprising that white liberals exhibit a dislike of their own ethnic group which is not typical of the members of any other group.

Intuitively, we might suspect that this kind of thing, what is often called “white guilt”, may be psychologically damaging. This intuition is supported by Fujushiro (2009) who found that thinking your race is given an unfair advantage doubled a person’s risk of poor mental health even after controlling for age, sex, education, income, and marital status.

There’s also research showing that white guilt has increased with time, and that leftist ideology has a causal impact on white guilt.

So far as I can tell,  research estimating the average degree of racial guilt among white college kids began in the 1970s (Bardis, 1973). Guilt was measured with questions like “Do you feel personally guilty about the American Negro’s present social inequality?”.

Back then, on a 5-point scale ranging from completely disagree to completely agree, whites averaged a score of less than 2 on most questions.

So far as I know, another paper quantifying white guilt wasn’t published until 1999 (Swim and Miller., 1999). Agreement with the same sorts of statements as before was rated on a 5 point scale, and the average response was 2.12, implying only slight guilt and that the mean level of guilt had not changed much since the 1970s. However, this slight guilt was pervasive with only 6% of the sample saying that they strongly disagreed with all five statements of guilt.

In 2007, this same scale was administered to another sample of white college kids (Case, 2007). This time, the mean response was 3.64. After these students took a diversity course, the mean score increased to 3.94, implying a good deal of guilt, and implying that leftism causes such guilt.

Similarly, Powell et al. (2005) reported the following: “In Experiment 1 (N = 110), White American participants assessed 24 statements about racial inequality framed as either White privileges or Black disadvantages. In Experiment 2 (N = 122), White participants generated examples of White privileges or Black disadvantages. In both experiments, a White privilege framing resulted in greater collective guilt”.

Thus, over time white guilt is becoming more common and such guilt is caused by leftist rhetoric. We we’ve seen, this is potentially damaging to the mental health of the white people who internalize left wing narratives.

Such narratives are probably not only damaging to those who feel an active sense of white guilt. It is likely that they’ve also harmed white people who have responded to the modern political climate by simply de-identifying with their race or ethnic group. We have some reason to think that this is damaging, because, identifying with one’s race is generally correlated with higher self-esteem and this is especially true of white people.

White Americans failing to identify with their ethnic group despite the positive impact this may have on self-esteem may in turn partly explain why it is that, ever since the 1970’s, black Americans have scored higher than white Americans on measures of self-esteem.

White Americans Aren’t Racist

These observations naturally leads us into countering the most fundamental anti-white lie spread by the left: that racism on the part of white people is the primary explanation of racial inequality in the United States.

This idea is supported by many people in part because they feel that any other sort of explanation is inevitably racist. The implicit logic here, that it is morally problematic to accuse a non-white group of behavior which explains their life outcomes but it is not morally problematic to blame inequality on the racist behavior of white people, is itself obviously racist and anti-white.

A useful first observation towards dispelling this idea is to note that, unlike black Americans, white Americans generally don’t exhibit any racial bias in formal experiments measuring racism.

This data suggests that on average white people exhibit no racial bias. Of course, this does not mean that there are no racist white people. But the impact of such people is made up for by an equal effect from white people who are biased in favor of non-whites so that the net mean level of discrimination is zero.

Leftists sometimes deny this based on the results of implicit association tests which are supposed to measure subconscious biases which people may be totally unaware. However, IAT scores don’t predict actual racist behavior and so are not a valid measure of racial bias.

Some think racism is necessary to explain group differences in income. But blacks actually make as much or more money than whites when education, cognitive skill, marital status and other confounding variables are controlled for. Such has been shown multiple times.

Of course, racism may explain a group difference in one of these confounding variables, such as educational attainment, but it is important to note that group differences in income disappear or flip direction without directly controlling for any measure of racism.

With respect to educational opportunity, Murray and Rueben (2008) calculated spending per pupil for US schools between the years 1972 and 2002. They found the following: “In 1972, the ratio of nonwhite to white spending was .98; this trend had reversed by 1982, as spending per pupil for nonwhite students was slightly higher than for white students in most states and in the United States as a whole and has been for the past 20 years”. Thus, since 1982, spending on non-white students has been greater than spending on white students.

This issue was revisited by Richwine (2011) who found that spending on black students was 1% greater than spending on white students, while spending on Asian and Hispanic students was a few percentage points lower.

These difference in spending are reflected in school characteristics: on average, blacker schools have smaller classes more experienced teachers who have more formal education and who receive more pay (Cocoran et al., 2003).

This information may surprise some people as leftists often cite data showing that blacker school districts receive less funding than average. This is true but within school districts blacker schools receive more money and thus black students go to better funded schools than white students despite the headlines people sometimes see concerning district level disparities (Ejdemyr et al., 2017).

Once high-school is complete, students apply to college. Based on aggregated data from 20 previous studies, we can estimate that when comparing people of equal qualifications, Black applicants are roughly 21 times more likely than white applicants to be admitted, while Hispanics are 3 times as likely, and Asians are 6% less likely or 59% more likely depending on whether we use the mean or median estimate.

Similarly, it’s been estimated that the proportion of students attending selective colleges who are white would increase from 66% to 75% if admissions were based solely on test scores.

And once in college non-white students are more likely to receive grants and scholarships despite the fact that white students are no more likely to have their parents pay for their school (Kantrowitz, 2011; Brown, 2019)

As a whole then, resource allocation within the education system favors non-whites students over white ones. Obviously then, white racists have not inhibited black economic success by depriving them of the resources needed for educational success.