With every news cycle bringing us a racially inflected incident—such as the recent racial rampage in Buffalo—the media leaps at the opportunity to blame all the usual targets of elite scorn: Fox News, Tucker Carlson, the Republican Party, and Donald Trump. The mirror is the last place the race-baiters ever look to account for the toxic race-consciousness burgeoning in all of us, white people included. But that is squarely where the finger of blame should be pointed.
Headline notwithstanding, this isn’t meant as a blueprint for actual white supremacists. I would not be writing this had the identity politickers on the woke Left not already followed this step-by-step guide perfectly. Perhaps they didn’t know any better. But they couldn’t have done any worse.
With that said, imagine we had the goal of taking a nation in which race relations had been steadily improving for decades and plunging it back into the racial maelstrom from which a new wellspring of white supremacy could emerge. Here’s what we’d do:
Step 1: Dismantle the Idea of Race-Blindness. If our goal is more white supremacy, our big obstacle is that lots of people don’t dwell on race, and when they do notice themselves thinking about race, they try to tamp down the thought. With several generations weaned on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ideal of a colorblind society, we need to begin by reviving race-consciousness. We start by seeding a bunch of articles and videos in high-circulation channels telling us race-blindness is racism.
We might hear a reaction like this: Huh? Haven’t we been working hard for ages to get racists to stop judging others, particularly black people, based on race? And haven’t we succeeded spectacularly in gradually turning this country into a place where black people can get a fair shake?
Here’s our response, to be delivered by a bespectacled, young, black graduate of a university racial grievance department speaking in an aggressively sententious tone to make the audience feel like subhuman troglodytes:
“Um, actually, our race-blindness has both negated and decentered the lived experience of people of color and also masked from the perpetrators of race-blindness the myriad ways in which they judge others by race. It’s a form of white privilege to go around saying ‘I don’t see race.’ White people can afford to ignore race. People of color don’t have that luxury. Racism is their daily reality.”
Step 2: Get Children to See Race Early and Often. Next, let’s get kids while they’re still young. It’s “never too early to learn,” contends the aptly titled EmbraceRace organization. Even toddlers and babies can detect race, a Boston University publication informs us, but because naïve kids might not make much of superficial skin-tone differences, let’s make clear, starting in preschool, that what they’re seeing is this big bugaboo we call “race.” Indoctrinating the future influencers in elite private preschools will have the most impact. By the time they’re 6 years old, we can start teaching white kids that they are born privileged racist oppressors. As one fawning story about such education puts it,
For white people, [it] means eventually coming to the understanding that they’re white—and . . . what white privilege actually means to them. White people are raised to believe they have no race, that they are “normal.” . . . But a historically white school . . . can’t say it wants diversity without dealing with the fact that its culture is white.
The problem—at least if one were actually trying to make white people less racist—is that there’s no particular reason to think rousing up race-consciousness is going to lead people to identify less, or less positively, with their racial identity. The proposition that we’ll somehow get formerly “raceless” whites to identify more as “white” but to identify less with their own newfound whiteness is absurd on its face.
Long-standing social psychology research concerning “in-group bias” confirms that even when we create totally arbitrary distinctions—like randomly assigning kids to a “green” or “orange” group—kids begin to form positive associations with their own group (the “in-group”) and negative associations with others (the “out-group”). Mere membership in the group is enough, without more. If this is what happens with arbitrary, meaningless color groups, why would we expect white kids made conscious of their non-arbitrary membership in a meaningful social group not to develop more in-group, i.e., pro-white, bias than they previously had? Even if we succeed in drumming the “white = evil” equation and actual out-group bias into the confused little heads of elite white kids in their liberal monoculture, children of the less educated/indoctrinated white working class are likely to stick with their more consistently conservative political views.
But recall that what we’re trying to do here is make white people more racist. From that standpoint, in-group bias is dandy.
Step 3: Invent Race-Based Insults to Target Whites. We’ve given whites a clear racial identity; now, we have to antagonize them. How about calling them “racist” on the slightest pretext? No need for fine distinctions. Grand Wizard of the KKK? Racist. Trump supporter? Just as racist. Republican? Racist, too. Married to or friends with a Republican? Racist enabler. Born white? Born racist! Clear enough?
Accusations of racism make people defensive and angry. That’s perfect for driving up white supremacy. Making a big deal of this defensive reaction, in fact, is precisely what made race-grifter extraordinaire Robin DiAngelo’s career. Her solution: pretend such defensiveness is a uniquely white reaction, coin a still more inflammatory race-based insult—“white fragility”—and use it as a derisive label for anyone white who doesn’t love being called a racist.
The derisive racial label of “white privilege” is even better because there’s no escape: if you’re white, you’ve got white privilege, period. Do “white privilege” callouts decrease racism or increase empathy for blacks? No, of course not. According to research, if you’re a white conservative, your attitudes don’t shift, and the most likely shift for white liberals is decreased empathy for their poor white cousins. For spreading white supremacy, this is ideal: the more elite whites treat less “privileged” whites with contempt, attacking them as racists possessing “white privilege,” the more white supremacy we’re likely to sow.
At the very root of race-consciousness, there is the concept of “whiteness” itself. “Whiteness studies” is an offshoot of critical race theory and, thus, sheds roughly the same light on “whiteness” as Nazi race “science” does on “Jewishness.” Unlike other identity affiliations of which one is supposed to be proud, “whiteness” is touted as a “dangerous idea,” a mark of shame. More than that, as a Harvard professor argued in Harvard Magazine as early as 2002, in an op-ed titled “Abolish the White Race,” “[t]he goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists.” If you oppose abolishing the white race, you’re a white supremacist! Hmm . . . there must be a whole lot of those running around.
Add to these assaults making whites feel like second-class citizens the following rule of good journalism (instituted right after the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots) at our foremost publications: capitalize “Black,” but keep “white” lowercase. The explanation: “white doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does, and also has been long capitalized by hate groups.” So, white people need to be jolted out their raceless default mentality at Step 1 above but are now told that they—people with European roots—are a race and yet do not “represent a shared culture and history” in the way black people—people with African roots—do . . . and besides, we shouldn’t capitalize “white” because of racial guilt by association with hate groups, apparently another uniquely white phenomenon.
Translation: white people are a race but not a very good one. White supremacists, take heed!
Step 4: Spread Black-and-White Thinking About Race. Racial issues are often complex. Accounting for present-day racial disparities takes us into a tangled cultural and historical web, including the history of postwar government policies enabling dysfunction. We cannot allow such complexity to get in the way of spreading white supremacy, however. We have to polarize people by offering a dumbed-down version of history in which everything is either racist or anti-racist and in which, to account for every single racial disparity that exists today, we either have to believe that black people are inherently inferior or else that contemporary disparities are universally products of racism, with no other alternative.
Alas, such a binary outlook seems so facially absurd no serious thinker would ever embrace it, right? Well, fortunately for those wishing to create white supremacy, exactly this binary approach is being actively propagated by another leading race-grifter among us—perhaps our most influential contemporary thinker on race—author of such classics as How to Be an Antiracist (2019) and Antiracist Baby (2020), Boston University professor and director of its Center for Antiracist Research, Ibram X. Kendi. Here’s how the Washington Post summarized some of Kendi’s views: “[A]ny racial gap simply is racist by definition; any policy that maintains such a gap is a racist policy; and . . . any intellectual explanation of its existence (sociological, cultural and so on) is also racist . . . . [A]nything that is not anti-racist is perforce racist.” Befitting its place as a publication critical to fomenting white supremacy in America and which previously housed such race industry luminaries as race-based reparations champion Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic has given Kendi a platform to sow his thinly veiled antiwhite bigotry far and wide. We are in good hands.
Step 5: Institute Double Standards in Every Walk of Life. Seeding racist ideas in woke publications is nice, but for all those “deplorables” who don’t read the far-left Atlantic, we need to take more concrete action. Promising examples are legion.
Most obvious is the implementation of antiwhite racial preferences in all walks of life, from university admissions to public and private employment. Universities admitting blacks with an average SAT score 200 points lower than comparable whites is a good start, but let’s also introduce an “adversity score” to give black students another leg up. Or why not eliminate standardized testing altogether? When a middle-class white girl from Texas with a 3.95 GPA and a 1550 SAT score can’t get into a single top university because the elimination of standardized testing requirements has brought a deluge of applications from unqualified students and left admissions officers with fewer objective criteria and more leeway to focus on factors like race, we know we’re doing something very, very right. When everyone, from our vice president to our newest Supreme Court justice to our new White House press secretary to our newest appointee to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is being unapologetically chosen for being the right race, we’re on message. When Joe Biden, on his very first day in office, issues an executive order titled “Advancing Equity and Racial Justice Through Federal Government” that requires “equity assessments” by all federal agencies to lessen racial disparities, we’re on our A-game.
Let’s not let up. Devise an entire false media-manufactured narrative that cops disproportionately kill unarmed blacks even if a full consideration of the evidence shows cops kill unarmed whites at a slightly higher rate. Tear down statues of founding fathers and presidents because of complicity in slavery and erect monuments to career criminal George Floyd. Make Floyd a cause célèbre while all but ignoring the strikingly similar case of white victim Tony Timpa. Allow the summer 2020 #BLM rioters to get away with impunity despite causing some $2 billion in damage and at least 19 deaths over the course of weeks of unrest, while prosecuting the largely white January 6 Capitol rioters to the max despite their having caused a comparatively minuscule $1.5 million in damage and a single death due to violence, viz., Ashli Babbit shot by police.
And here’s our ultimate double-standard: while white people cannot but be racist, black people cannot be racist at all. We learn, first, that all white people, even those who think themselves non-racist or anti-racist, suffer from “unconscious” or “implicit” bias. The tests purporting to show such bias are, in fact, junk science, with no correlation between this time and next time we take them and no ability to predict any correlation between test outcomes and real-world behaviors. But who cares about scientific rigor when we’re trying to spread white supremacy, right? Besides, even if “implicit bias” isn’t real, we can still claim racism is everywhere because it’s not just individual but “systemic,” “structural” and/or “institutional.” Meanwhile, we’re told, racism can only be exhibited by people with power, and since black people don’t have power in America, they cannot be racist. Tell that to Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Dean Baquet, or the many-tentacled institutional structures that stand behind them. Under cover of such sophistry, we can then project bare-faced antiwhite bigotry, and if white people dare to call out the obvious, we can deny it and throw in an accusation of “white fragility” to boot. Awesome.
Step 6: Mandate “Diversity” Training. To make sure white people don’t even think about stepping out of line, we have forced diversity training to remind them who’s in charge nowadays. Diversity training today serves roughly the same function as re-education camps did in 20th century Marxist states: re-shaping human clay into a new social mold. Roughly 90 percent of employees of large corporations have had to suffer through some sort of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” training. Where employers don’t compel our participation, professional or accreditation organizations, such as state bar associations governing attorneys, can pick up the slack. Universities and K-12 schools are likewise hopping aboard. This is great news for white supremacist recruiters because lots and lots of research shows diversity training pushes people away, makes them wary of interacting with minorities (the “walking on eggshells” effect), and ultimately makes them more prejudiced.
Step 7: Say You See Racism and White Supremacy Everywhere. We’ve summoned up white supremacy beyond our wildest dreams, but let’s not just sit back and enjoy. We should rub our ideological opponents’ noses in it.
Let’s take stock, first, that we are indeed succeeding. While the conventional left-wing narrative tells us white identity extremism, long on the wane, returned to prominence due to its alleged mainstreaming by President Trump, the data respectfully disagrees. As the New York Times reported in 2019, “hate group” membership had been consistently falling through 2014 but then began to rise in 2015, increasing 30 percent between 2014 and 2018. So what caused the shift from 2014 to 2015? Did something significant happen in the latter half of 2014 that set the stage for greater racial division and radicalization?
Recall a little thing that happened in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014? That’s when the Michael Brown “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” lie was etched into our consciousness, prompting the Ferguson riots, and the emergence of Black Lives Matter on the national scene. Our media’s obsessive focus on race and “racism” has continued unabated even since. Ferguson prompted the current revival of race riots, a spate of anti-cop rhetoric, and an ongoing crimewave known as the “Ferguson Effect.” It prompted a spike in “black identity extremism” and the corresponding growth in white identity extremism.
By November 2016, many of the same exact white people open-minded enough to vote for our first black president twice over broke for Trump, as election analyst Nate Cohn aptly summarized in a Tweet on November 9, 2016:
Trump’s election, in other words, was not the genesis of a new white racial consciousness but rather, if anything, a consequence of it, of the Left’s betrayal of the Martin Luther King, Jr.’s colorblind dream, of identity politics run amok, of people being attacked again and again for having had the misfortune of being born white in 21st century America.
Thus, if Trump was brought to power by racists at all, it is racists on the Left, not the Right, who bear the brunt of the responsibility.
The race obsession among the press, academia, and corporate America has only intensified since 2016. In 2019, after the New York Times’ Trump-Russia narrative collapsed, the paper’s executive editor held a staff meeting in which he stated openly that it was time to turn the focus to racism. Shortly thereafter, the Times’ notorious “1619 Project” was born, arguing America was evil from the outset, founded on slavery and racism. This ahistorical nonsense was then quickly parlayed into a school curriculum and rushed into action by multiple school districts. Soon enough, we had critical race theory running roughshod in classrooms nationwide. Then George Floyd died, and our collective racial obsession escalated still further. Hardly a single American could have escaped the ensuing BLM bombardment that hit us in every facet of our lives. Then we got yet more talk of race-based reparations, the brilliant idea that if you’re white, you owe blacks something concrete and quantifiable. For encouraging white resentment and “white supremacy,” all of this was marvelous.
Having created this monster, the Left can now declare, in somber tones, how they were right all along, how racism and white supremacy were, indeed, always everywhere among us, how, as Joe Biden told us, “the most lethal threat to the homeland today” is not the out-of-control criminality and thuggery besieging out cities, not the fentanyl epidemic, not runaway inflation or the looming threat of total economic collapse, not the plagues of obesity, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, and no, not even COVID-19, but rather, yes, white supremacy. And if we keep on fighting it using the same tactics people like Biden and his many comrades-in-arms have been using for the better part of the last decade, we might just conclude, a few years further down this crooked path, that, in the same way that even a blind squirrel sometimes finds a nut, Biden was actually, even if ironically, correct.