The woke embrace white identity
Razib Khan has an excellent post discussing the recent trend of woke private schools setting up white affinity groups:
But the real problem I have is the white affinity groups. I am not happy with the “people of color” affinity groups either, but in some way, these have been around since the 1960’s. The emergence of white affinity groups seems a nod to the re-racialization of society as the explicit text. The fundamental issue is simple: I do not want white people to think about their race. I do not want white people to think of themselves in racial terms. The history of white Americans thinking in racialized terms is not good for people who look like me. These fools are going to get us killed!
Taking activists who are nonwhite at their word rather than self-interest, they believe white examination and embrace of their racial identity will allow for true anti-racism and justice. My rejoinder is simple: you put far too much faith in the innate goodness of these white people. My wife’s grandparents were good people, yes, but I know for a fact they were opposed to integration. They were good people, but of their time. Most people conform and follow the spirit of the times. Don’t tempt fate to think you can tame the snake of racial identity. It’s evil among all races and all people. It is always with us, but it is sin. As a brown-skinned minority in a majority-white country, I do not want white people to think in racial terms.
Read the whole thing.
It’s a bit depressing when minority groups engage in identity politics. It’s downright scary when the majority group does so.
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15. April 2021 at 15:26
Identity politics is a race to the bottom. The time to act was a decade ago.
15. April 2021 at 18:34
I am not sure that this is an adequate analysis. Wokeness itself seems to me to spring from White people thinking in racial and class terms, with the woke being horrified at recognizing that they themselves are part of the same racial group as déclassé Whites. People who are comfortable with being White aren’t woke. The intention of the Woke seems to me never to have been to actually include non-white people on an equal footing with “the right kind of White people”. So maybe the danger comes from making “the wrong kind of White people” think that minorities are a fifth column of folks like Jeff Bezos?
16. April 2021 at 05:50
The real issue for me is, why does the melting pot of the world, America, have some of the deepest problems with race? Anywhere else, one the surface, race relations are worse, there is less promised equality, there are less legal protections, more outright spite. But it happens on a more harmless level, and in day to day terms, people find a way and actually get along, intermarry, and no one raises an eyebrow. Not in the US. That’s the real mystery to me.
16. April 2021 at 08:03
mbka, Yes, it’s a puzzle to me as well.
16. April 2021 at 08:20
@mbka,
I’m not sure I get your point. I think we have the “deepest problems with race” because we’ve chosen to have a reckoning with race. Whenever I travel abroad I always reach to conclusion that America is the most racist country on earth, except for every other country. It’ not clear to me that inter-racial marriage is more common or more accepted in other countries. Is that your experience?
16. April 2021 at 08:51
bb,
I was stunned to discover that in 90’s LA, personal experience, the races actually didn’t seem to mix at all, that in both TV and in lived reality, interracial couples seemed to be an eyebrow-raising exceptional thing (if it even happened), and that even recent African immigrants didn’t seem to get along with “African-Americans” (meaning, descendants of former slaves). Basically, resentment of every kind, wherever you look.
True, on the surface, the US has the least institutionally racist society compared to anywhere else in the world. True, every day racism can be found anywhere in the world. And on the surface, Europe is so much more racist than America, both privately and institutionally. People blurt out all sorts of ugly things in Paris that they wouldn’t blurt out in San Francisco. Except that in Paris, you see black and white couples or white and Asian couples happily kissing in public, while in LA they wouldn’t want to be caught dead doing that. Private Truths, Public Lies, following Timur Kuran. People profess the holy gospel of equality in America, a lot. But they don’t live it. People really don’t like other races or religions, in Europe. But good ol’ Mamadou from Senegal, of course he’s a good guy, why, he’s your daughter’s boyfriend, in Europe.
16. April 2021 at 09:17
@mbka:
The 90s were ages ago in terms of the racial culture in the US. Today interracial couples are pretty unremarkable, especially in pop culture.
White and Asian couples? Dude, well over half of the Asian females I see are with a white guy (or girl even), including my wife and ssumner’s 🙂 And other interracial couples are pretty unremarkable now. You really think they have a problem with interracial dating in LA in 2021?
You need to move your cultural antennae about 30 years forward.
16. April 2021 at 09:18
Why does the smiley appear at the beginning of the line when I typed it after ‘ssumner’s’? Changes my meaning…
16. April 2021 at 10:01
100%. The difference between depressing & scary. White “affinity” groups in US, painful to consider.
16. April 2021 at 13:33
@mbka
Which countries are you making the comparison to? Brazil had much higher intermarriage rates which I think helped moderate racial tensions. Outside of France, the European countries don’t have anywhere near the population density of blacks to make a good comparison to the US. And, France was much more slave trader than slaver. In a place where they lived en masse among those they oppressed, Algeria, race relations did not go well to say the least.
16. April 2021 at 19:38
msgkings, Not sure where that smiley face came from. Whenever I try to use it, it always ends up in the wrong place.
16. April 2021 at 20:44
@ssumner:
That’s precisely what happened to me LOL. I meant t6o put the smiley after the word ‘ssumners’ which would clearly indicate what I meant, I guess I have to use LOL like I just did. LOL.
But the point was, don’t you think mbka’s assertion that in modern LA there’s a problem with interracial dating is flabbergasting? That’s more 1980s than A Flock of Seagulls.
16. April 2021 at 22:02
Scott,
That’s what you get for supporting Biden and his fascist handlers.
16. April 2021 at 22:28
With all do respect, you are missing the whole point of Wokism.
Wokism & cancel culture are a derivation of critical race theory. The concept of promoting someone based upon merit, or the substructure of individualism is, in this German school of thought, deemed oppressive. CRT seeks to restructure society so that “whites” are destroyed (physically if needed) because society is a “class struggle” and “whites” are oppressing the world with their merit based system.
By turning every race against “whites” who dominate western culture; these people hope to dismantle the system of values that created the wealth of the western world. This is why the supreme court in America is such a “hot topic” with democrats, because the court, as it currently stands, upholds a persons inalienable rights. Adding additional states to rig the senate or congress, or packing the courts, is just one step in a direction that is designed to get radical judges onto every district of the court system. Once those radicals have been placed — for life — the U.S. constitution can be remade in the image of a new totalitarian government.
In the new government, which will be very similar to the CCP, the law will not serve the people; the people will serve the law.
There is a very easy way to stop this from happening. Take the red pill, and vote conservative. If you continue to vote for the democrats, you will continue to see this shift towards radical critical race theory, which is designed to uproot western values and replace them with CCP values.
16. April 2021 at 22:42
You have far too much faith in the minute differences between the major American parties. But you have too little faith in the power of the status quo.
17. April 2021 at 06:13
bb,
you would have a point about my outdated experiences if it wasn’t for the news coming to me from the US – which still sound exactly the same as it felt 30 years ago. To note, I came to LA straight from France, in 96, and it felt like stepping into a strange and very different world of race relations. To make it clear: LA felt way backwards compared to France, even though outward racism , especially institutional racism, was worse in France. But personal relation between actual people were way worse in the US. Later I moved to Hawai’i which is or course way better than LA and possibly anywhere else in the US in terms of racial mixing.
Carl,
see above, and now I live in Singapore. In Hawai’i, interracial mixing is the norm, it’s almost strange to see single race couples. In Singapore, mixed race couples are widespread too, although, due to the Chinese majority, if you were to look only at the Chinese it wouldn’t appear that way, simply due to distributional effects.
17. April 2021 at 08:39
dtoh, LOL, we never had a problem with Wokism when Trump was president? It all started on January 20th? This has nothing to do with Biden.
Ankh, You are confusing what Woke people “want” to do and what they are actually doing. They are functionally elitist.
19. April 2021 at 13:27
We will soon tire of wokism—–and I mean literally tire. It is very difficult to maintain belief in mental constructs based on a deconstructionist derivative idea. It is self-contradictory. What percent of people believe in this even now? My bet is 2-3% at most—and it is not a real belief. I think few truly believe in it, but rather believe they should believe in it—but that is what becomes mentally tiring. Also, some benefit directly from its promotion. But it does not have enough impact to keep it going. We will have all but forgotten about this within a few years. I compare it to the French Revolution. Even Mao’s or Pol Pot’s weird ideas barely had a five-year run. And they had the military behind them.
25. April 2021 at 00:12
IMHO Razib has nothing to worry about. People who look like him are immediately identified as “white”. Even immigrants from Africa are often pretty easy to identify as white. A cab driver from West Africa once told me, quite unselfconsciously, that he doesn’t take any black people in his cab.