The Utility of White-Bashing

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I thought of this when Sarah Jeong, a much-admired technology journalist with sterling credentials, became the center of one of our periodic micro-controversies for having written pointed missives about whites on Twitter. The tweets surfaced shortly after the New York Times announced that she would join its editorial board. Jeong insists that her remarks represented a satirical response to racist abuse she had received over the years, and I won’t presume to better understand her inner thoughts. The Times accepted her explanation, resisting calls, mostly from the political right, to fire her. Others, such as my National Review colleague David French, defended the decision not to fire her while stressing that anti-white rhetoric shouldn’t be lightly dismissed. {snip}

{snip} The people I’ve heard archly denounce whites have for the most part been upwardly-mobile people who’ve proven pretty adept at navigating elite, predominantly white spaces. A lot of them have been whites who pride themselves on their diverse social circles and their enlightened views, and who indulge in their own half-ironic white-bashing to underscore that it is their achieved identity as intelligent, worldly people that counts most, not their ascribed identity as being of recognizably European descent.

{snip} It is almost as though we’re living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites. Note that to be “upper” or “lower” isn’t just about class status, though of course that’s always hovering in the background. Rather, it is about the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.

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Some of this is just obvious edgelord trolling: the most transgressive thing you can get away with saying without actually getting called out for it. In this sense, it’s a way of establishing solidarity: {snip}

But that doesn’t exhaust the universe of possibilities. In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for. And, simultaneously, it allows Asian Americans who use the discourse to position themselves as ethnic outsiders, including those who are comfortably enmeshed in elite circles.

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Consider the recent contretemps over Harvard’s undergraduate admissions policies. Critics argue that the university actively discriminates against high-achieving Asian American applicants by claiming that a disproportionately large number of them have lackluster personalities. One obvious reaction to this charge is to denounce Harvard for its supposed double standards. {snip}

So what if you’re an Asian American who has already made the cut? In that case, you might celebrate Harvard’s wisdom in judiciously balancing its student body, or warn that Harvard’s critics have a darker, more ominous agenda that can’t be trusted. This establishes you as an insider, who gets that Harvard is doing the right thing, while allowing you to distance yourself from less-enlightened, and less-elite, people of Asian origin: You’re all being duped by evil lower-whites who don’t grok racial justice.

And if you’re an Asian American aspiring to make the cut, even with the deck stacked against you, you might eschew complaining in favor of doing everything in your power to cultivate the personal qualities Harvard wants most, or at least to appear to have done so. One straightforward way to demonstrate that you are Harvard material might be to denounce Harvard as racist, provided you’re careful to do so in a way that flatters rather than offends those who run the university and are invested in its continued success. For example, you might reject the notion that affirmative action is the problem while arguing that Harvard shouldn’t endeavor to increase representation of rural and working-class whites, on the spurious grounds that all whites are privileged. That you’ll make these claims even though you yourself are hardly among the most downtrodden is immaterial: The important thing is to be interesting. What better way to demonstrate that you’re not a humdrum worker bee, afflicted with a lackluster personality, than to carefully and selectively express the right kind of righteous indignation?

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Or, alternatively, this sort of rhetoric can be less a tool of assimilation than a method of alleviating what I’ll call the burden of representativeness. If you are an outsider who finds yourself in an elite space, you may well feel an obligation to represent the people for whom you are serving as a stand-in — working-class people, or the members of disadvantaged minority groups. {snip}

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