Posted on April 14, 2021

A New Elite Ethnogenesis

Wesley Yang, Twitter, April 8, 2021

68 percent of the US citizens or permanent residents admitted by Princeton for the class of 2025 “self-identified” as “people of color.”

People who understand the social construction of race are engineering a new elite ethnogenesis: assortative mating at Ivies will create racially mixed elite overclass as remaining legacy and athlete whites mate with “POC” majority

This is “dismantling whiteness” in practice. Soon, K-12 schools will teach majority POC classes that the new locus of American national unity is the POC nation overcoming the remaining influence of Trumpian whiteness

The rapidity with which Princeton successfully engineered its POC majority points to how this can be done nationally — you make whiteness a toxic identification that limits opportunity but then let whites flow easily through self-identification out of whiteness

It’s the obverse of the process that “whiteness studies” scholars claim manufactured whiteness out of distinct European ethnicities in the first place (it amounted to a single generation of intermarriage in mid-century) and at least in the domain they control, it’s working

This of course leaves the rump of Trumpian whites who lack the emotional and rhetorical lability to play the new game of race and gender fluidity in an increasingly isolated situation; as they lash out in rage, they will further delegitimize themselves

And create pretexts for the continuation of the agonistic process through which the new American nation emerges in opposition to the legacy one — it may well involve a domestic war on terror as the rump turns violent

It has been remarkable to watch this process evolve and reveal its contours; the new admissions policies are a key inflection point is showing us what’s happening. People compare racially mixed America to Brazil, but in Brazil white purity is valued at the top of society, while we are deliberately engineering an elite where being mixed will be valued and selected for by its elite gatekeeping institutions Asian who are POC in some contexts and not POC in other contexts — and heavily overrepresented in the elite — hold the balance in a certain way, though there are no at present no leaders to execute or thinkers to articulate what that role can be Remember when that lefty professor got in trouble for tweeting “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide?”

The premise of that joke is that “white genocide” just means racial intermarriage and white people doing the work to disaffiliate from white privilege

It of course got lost in translation when white conservatives saw it as “literal mass murder of whites.” “Dismantling whiteness” is not “white genocide” because it lets white people disaffiliate through “self-identification” or through devoted allyship. This project is well underway in elite colleges and more or less has an official stamp on it. So I’m describing that process which coalesced into a new hegemony in the latter half of 2020. The introduction of these ideas at the K-12 level is a whole other matter and is fraught with peril. And no, I don’t think a significant portion of white applicants to Princeton are “self-identifying” as POC; just that the embrace of the language of “self-identification” on race signals the direction we intend to move and are moving

As terms like “politically black” go into circulation, as well as “white traitorship,” etc, we are layering race onto political affiliation and identification in ways that portend evacuation of the (politically manufactured in the first place) category of “whiteness”

The “white traitor” in anti-racist doctrine being the person who disaffiliate from whiteness and does the work of dismantling… it’s one of the key stages on the path to anti-racist identity…

Dumb progressives will be like “you’re embracing white genocide conspiracy theory,” and dumb Nazis will be like “Jew adjacent apologist for white genocide.”

I’m describing what “dismantling whiteness”, an openly avowed goal and project of racial progressives means in practice. It means encouraging people to disaffiliate from whiteness and setting up incentive structures to nudge them in that direction. This essay from 2015 is one of the clearest registrations of the academic/activist concept of “whiteness” and its abolition that I’ve read and which informs my understanding of the project.

Now, is the Princeton admissions office consciously on board with executing this vision? No, of course not. But it is no accident that the institutions most explicitly aligned with anti-racist doctrine of the sort written above are accepting 68 percent non-whites.