The Great Awokening

A hidden shift is revolutionizing American racial politics — and could transform the future of the Democratic Party.

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Updated Apr 1, 2019, 9:25am EDT

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020 

For all the attention paid to the politics of the far right in the Trump era, the biggest shift in American politics is happening somewhere else entirely.

In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.

This change amounts to a “Great Awokening” — comparable in some ways to the enormous religious foment in the white North in the years before the American Civil War. It began roughly with the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, when activists took advantage of ubiquitous digital video and routine use of social media to expose a national audience in a visceral way to what otherwise might have been a routine local news story.

“If there had been no Twitter or Facebook,” Columbia University’s John McWhorter, an early and somewhat skeptical observer of the Awokening, tells me, “Trayvon [Martin] and Mike Brown would have had about as much impact on white thought as, say, Amadou Diallo did.”

During protests after the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, marchers hold a banner listing the names of people killed by law enforcement since 1990.

Orjan F. Ellingvag/Corbis via Getty Images

Pollsters began to see a rapid, sustained change. White Democrats suddenly started expressing dramatically higher levels of concern about racial inequality and discrimination, while showing greater enthusiasm for racial diversity and immigration. (While political disputes around race are often found under the same umbrella as gender and sexual orientation, where attitudes are also shifting, the relatively recent, relatively sudden change that constitutes the Great Awokening is fundamentally about race and its relationship to national identity.)

There’s also a certain paradox to the Awokening. As white liberals became more vocal about racial inequality, more racially conservative Democrats left the party and helped power Donald Trump’s electoral victory. This backlash gives the impression that there’s a surging tide of white racism in America.

But just as slavery was not new during the pre-Civil War period, there’s absolutely nothing new about white racism as a force in American politics. Jenée Desmond-Harris wrote in 2016 that Trump was “refreshing” not just “to people who share his views” but “to people who have always known that views like this exist.”

Trump has made white racial resentment more visible than it was before, but at the same time, white liberals have become much more attuned to racism — seeing more of it not necessarily because the world has changed but because their own attitudes toward longstanding features of it have changed.

Students at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, protest to draw attention to police abuse on December 1, 2014.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The exact implications of this for short-term electoral politics are dicey — older, more rural, less educated whites who are relatively untouched by the Awokening exert disproportionate influence in the political system. But the fundamental reality is that the Awokening has inspired a large minority of white Americans to begin regarding systemic racial discrimination as a fundamental problem in American life — opening up the prospects of sweeping policy change when the newly invigorated anti-racist coalition does come to power.

Public opinion on race is shifting

While opinion on LGBTQ issues has been evolving in a broad, steady manner for years, the shift on racial thinking that constitutes the Great Awokening is of more recent vintage. Trump’s presidency itself is probably a driver of this, since there is a tendency well-known to political scientists for public opinion to move in the opposite direction of the person who occupies the White House.

The change, however, appears to predate Trump and, in fact, to have relatively little to do with the calendar of presidential politics. Instead, polling from the Pew Center shows that as late as 2014, most Americans believed there was no longer any need for the country to make changes to address black-white inequality. Consequently, few people believed discrimination was the main barrier to black upward mobility. These numbers then started to change rapidly, with the shift driven overwhelmingly by a change in the views of self-identified Democrats.

The timing of this change suggests that the Ferguson protests were a key flashpoint in changing thinking about the discrimination issue. But Brian Schaffner, a Tufts University political scientist, says the beginnings of the shift were visible even during Barack Obama’s first term.

“I don’t think it’s just a reaction to events,” Schaffner says. Rather, “even prior to Ferguson, people take cues from elites,” and Democratic elites were beginning to signal to the rank and file that they should take systemic racism concerns more seriously.

Obama’s 2012 observation that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon” is just one small example of how elite actors have helped push a shift in whites’ perception of race. And the shift, once underway, became mutually reinforcing. Liberal white audiences became increasingly interested in black intellectuals’ conceptions of race and racism in America. Back in April 2015, the social justice group Race Forward produced a series of videos starring Jay Smooth trying to explain the concept of “systemic racism” to a mass audience. Hillary Clinton used the term in a February 2016 speech.

Trump, of course, responded to this with his own racial discourse bringing white identity politics into play in a more explicit way than had been seen in a generation or two. But that evolution was two-sided.

Schaffner observes that “Clinton talked a lot more about racial justice issues during the 2016 campaign than Obama did during his campaigns” — further priming the minority of white Americans who supported her to adopt a more sweeping view of racial justice. Key to this view, as Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic in November 2017, is that we should see racism as a question of “institutional and political power” rather than being “about name-calling or rudeness.”

The extent to which that model has become mainstream among Democratic Party leaders is now evident. Just this March, Beto O’Rourke told an overwhelmingly white audience in Iowa that American capitalism is “racist.” The previous summer, Elizabeth Warren called the criminal justice system “racist.” Even Joe Biden — who in the mid-1970s was a leading political opponent of aggressive school integration measures — in a January 2019 speech called on white America “to admit there’s still a systemic racism” in American life. Mainstream Democratic Party politicians, in other words, are beginning to take for granted that their constituents will embrace the more institutional understanding of racism.

At roughly the same time, there has been a large increase in the number of Americans who express positive attitudes about immigration — driven almost entirely by shifting views of Democrats.

The sheer scale of this change is far too large to have been caused by the much-discussed rising Latino share of the electorate.

White Democrats have become much more racially liberal

The biggest change in attitudes on race has been most pronounced among white Democrats.

Opinion leaders often miss the scale and recency of these changes because progressive elites have espoused racial liberalism for a long time. Sean McElwee, of the left-wing policy organization Data for Progress, did an analysis of General Social Survey data, which shows that throughout the 1980s, ’90s, and 2000s, most white Democrats thought African Americans’ lack of individual initiative was the main source of racial inequality in America.

The notion that Obama’s ascension to the presidency would usher in a “post-racial” era of American life, of course, proved false. And not just because of a white backlash to his administration or to the growing diversity of the American population, but because white Democrats dramatically shifted their views of the centrality of racial discrimination in American life after the election of a black man to the highest office in the land.

Some of this is a compositional effect. As Obama pushed racially conservative whites out of the Democratic Party, the remaining Democrats are more racially liberal. But using Voter Study Group data, McElwee is able to show that people who consistently self-identified as Democrats changed their views between 2011 and 2016.

Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate at Georgia State University, observes that on key measures of racial attitudes, white liberals’ opinion has moved to the left of where black and Latino opinions are. White liberals are now less likely than African Americans to say that black people should be able to get ahead without any special help. 

White liberals also have warmer feelings about immigrants than Hispanics do.

And, critically, white liberals are much more enthusiastic about the idea that diversity makes the United States a better place to live than are blacks or Latinos. Non-liberal whites are least enthusiastic of all, which is not enormously surprising, but Latino views of this are closer to those of non-liberal whites than to white liberals.

At the same time, between 2001 and 2018, the share of Democrats who describe themselves as liberal in Gallup polls has risen from 30 percent to 50 percent. The upshot is that white liberals — a group whose views on race are generally to the left of nonwhites — are now about 40 percent of the overall Democratic Party, making them the largest bloc in the party and the critical driver of Democratic politicians’ leftward shift on race and identity issues.

The Awokening has driven big platform shifts

Back in 1996, the Democratic Party platform read like something out of a Trump campaign ad. “In 1992, our borders might as well not have existed,” the document states. “Drugs flowed freely. Illegal immigration was rampant. Criminal immigrants, deported after committing crimes in America, returned the very next day to commit crimes again.” Bill Clinton went on to run for reelection boasting about his crackdown at the border.

Even by 2008, when Democrats substantively supported a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, the platform was still framed around enforcement-first themes, intoning that “we cannot continue to allow people to enter the United States undetected, undocumented, and unchecked.”

On criminal justice, the 2008 platform led with a promise to be “tough on violent crime,” while by 2016, it opened by committing the party to “ending mass incarceration” and explicitly denounced the war on drugs while calling out “the discriminatory treatment of African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and American Indians.”

Perhaps the clearest sign of the shift, however, is the completely upturned politics of reparations. Ten years ago, reparations were a total nonstarter in Democratic Party circles. Instead, someone like Rush Limbaugh would try to secure political advantage by characterizing Obama administration economic policies as a form of reparations. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 article making the case for reparations was obviously enormously influential on the specifics of that question, but also more broadly in the larger Awokening — such that references to redlining and other discriminatory aspects of the post-World War II real estate market are now commonplace throughout progressive circles.

Coates said that “initially I was very surprised” by the size of the white audience for his work — an audience whose existence is both a cause and a consequence of the Awokening — but he’s palpably changed the conversation. Now it’s Democrats themselves who embrace the term even when their actual policy proposal is race-blind. Kamala Harris, for example, mentioned her LIFT Act, which would boost incomes throughout the bottom 60 percent of the income distribution, as a form of “reparations” even though most of the beneficiaries would not be black.

The leftward shifts on immigration, criminal justice, and reparations are often described as reflecting the electoral clout of nonwhite voters. But while that is surely part of the story, the underlying demographics simply haven’t changed rapidly enough to account for the pace of the change. The key difference is that white liberals have changed their minds very rapidly, thus altering the political space in which Democratic Party politicians operate.

Racial realignment keeps reshaping politics

Ever since the 2016 election, analysts have been stuck in a tedious argument between the observation that racial resentment was a key predictor of which voters flipped to Trump’s camp and those who prefer to ascribe Trump’s ascension to some form of “economic anxiety.”

After all, say the racial resentment skeptics, the Obama-to-Trump flippers were, by definition, willing to vote for Barack Obama — so how racist could they possibly be? A key point to understanding this is that “racial resentment,” as used by political scientists, is a term of art that largely measures political views rather than any kind of interpersonal animosity.

One traditional factor that goes into the racial resentment mix, for example, is the General Social Survey question that asks whether you agree or disagree with the statement “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up; blacks should do the same without special favors.”

This is, in fact, a very revealing query in terms of your understanding of the history of race and ethnicity in the United States. About a third of African Americans disagree with it, which is more than the share of the overall white public but substantially less than the 45 percent of white liberals who say they disagree.

A big part of what Trump did in the 2016 campaign was simply increase the salience of racial conflict themes, thus boosting his appeal to white voters who may have previously backed Democrats on other grounds. But it’s crucial to understand that, in large part because of the Awokening, Trump is not to blame: Democrats themselves have moved the goalposts in terms of what kind of racial views one is expected to affirm as a good liberal.

The growing racial liberalism of rank-and-file white Democrats now has party leaders talking about “systemic racism” and sending strong signals to the party’s base about what kinds of attitudes are appropriate for Democrats to hold.

The irony of the Great Awokening

One of the signature consequences of the Great Awokening is the sense that Trump is a uniquely loathsome figure in American politics.

To the extent that white liberals now see racism as an enormous looming challenge for the country in a way they did not in the relatively recent past, Trump is very much the personification of that challenge. And thus, given the perfect enemy, it’s perhaps not surprising that much of the newly woke attitude is, in crucial respects, a bit vague in its precise policy implications. Everyone is talking about reparations and “institutional racism,” but nobody has a precise policy program for tackling either of those things. Congress passed the prison reform bill, the First Step Act, but there’s little consensus on what the next step is.

But it’s clear that getting rid of Trump is a key part of the story, and a key argument in the 2020 primary is over who is best suited to do that — a flashback candidate like Biden, someone like Harris or O’Rourke who’s more evocative of the future, or a leftist like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren.

And yet to the extent that one believes — as, in fact, the evidence seems to say — that racial polarization of the electorate was a boon to Trump’s fortunes, it seems plausible that Democrats’ new post-Awokening political style will only help him win. But since anti-racism really is a central motivating force for the anti-Trump coalition, it hardly seems realistic or reasonable to expect it to hide that fact.

Social upheavals simply do not abide by the dictates of partisan politics. The increased moral fervor unleashed by the Great Awakening of the 1840s and 1850s broke the Whig Party and temporarily entrenched the South’s hold on political power. But abolitionist sentiment carried the day in the end. And by the same token, while the Great Awokening might drive some Democrats into Trump’s arms now, the sustained phenomenon is forcing the Democratic Party to confront the legacy of America’s racial caste system squarely. The next Democratic president will have to do the same.

 

The Triumph of Media Power

Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, September 8, 2022

https://www.amren.com/commentary/2022/09/the-triumph-of-media-power/

Democrats and their allied media are increasingly worried about “fascism.” One might think fascism, if it means anything, is the combined use of state, media, and corporate power to incite a never-ending campaign against invented enemies. At the risk of making the “Democrats are the real fascists” argument, it seems leftists are projecting. They’ve even got the optics figured out.

Tech companies censor information that challenges official orthodoxy on health, race, sex-change, and other questions. The government asks them to do this. Republican opposition stopped the Department of Homeland Security’s proposed “Disinformation” panel, but that was a minor victory, since progressives already control the information people can see and hear.

Democracy and self-government need a population that gets accurate information. If you aren’t allowed to make up your own mind, you’re not free. You can’t make up your own mind if you can’t hear all sides. Do we really have democracy or self-government? Did we ever? There is no “marketplace of ideas” when censorship smothers competition.

Elections outcomes may be downstream from culture, but culture is downstream from media control. The process is as crude and effective as a besieging army controlling the defender’s food supply. We may tell ourselves that hiding the truth won’t work, but with enough power, it can work. A defending army may be courageous, but it will die if supplies run out.

Race realists and white advocates believe the truth is on our side. Race is biological, there are race differences, and differences have consequences. However, “truth” is elusive in a democratic, media-dominated society. (Apparently, so are the concepts of male and female.) Racial differences in IQ are some of the most consistent findings in all of social science, but our rulers conceal them. Some may know they are hiding the truth; others may think they are hiding “disinformation.” The consequences are the same.

The most “woke” people in our society are white liberals. New findings indicate that they believe things that are obviously false. However, unlike dissidents, they don’t fear censorship. They know their sources of (dis)information will remain.

Zach Goldberg, perhaps the leading scholar of absurd American beliefs, reported years ago that white liberals prefer non-whites to whites. This attitude is unique among all people in the world, and perhaps in all history. It means white liberals may support policies because they makes things worse for whites. “Perhaps this is why white support for increasing immigration coincides with more negative feelings towards whites,” wrote Mr. Goldberg in 2019 in Tablet.

Mr. Goldberg recently reported that by 2020, white liberals had begun to believe that whites are more violent, lazier, and less intelligent than blacks.

 

 

He notes that this goes beyond egalitarianism and suggests anti-white animus.

One could argue that “intelligence,” “violence,” and “laziness,” can’t really be measured. However, if we accept the relationship between IQ and intelligence, crime rates and violence, and income and laziness, white liberals believe things that are provably wrong. Why shouldn’t they? They get little information telling them otherwise. It would be fascinating to see how white liberals justify their anti-white beliefs.

Some white advocates may comfort themselves by saying that while the “woke” are getting crazier, white conservatives are “waking up.” Not so. The data above show that white independents and conservatives are on the same path.

Propaganda works. Even absurdity works. If our rulers can persuade people to say things that would have been considered ridiculous even a year ago, they can persuade activists to do just about anything. “Wokeness” will not die because it’s wrong. It’s a political force. Truth has nothing to do with it.

Mr. Goldberg suggests that woke attitudes may be part of “an attempt to proclaim their [liberals’] anti-racist bona fides — which, interestingly, now seems to require expressions of anti-whiteness.” If all whites are racist no matter what we do, whites are the problem, and racism cannot be eliminated. Elites don’t expand their power by solving problems, but by inventing new ones that last forever. What would the civil rights industry do if we ever achieved the “post-racial” society we’ve long been promised?

John Robb of Global Guerillas writes that once people are in a “pattern matching network,” it is almost impossible to change their minds. Most people interpret new information to fit pre-existing mental frameworks in what is called confirmation bias.*

What Mr. Robb has called “The Long Night” could finally be upon us. In 2017, he said the danger is “an all encompassing online orthodoxy,” a “sameness of thought and approach enforced by hundreds of millions of socially internetworked adherents.”

CNN, The Guardian, Slate, and countless other powerful outlets celebrated the takedown of the site “Kiwi Farms.” It was a controversial forum that hosted what could be considered “hate speech” against “transgenders.” Cloudflare, which just a week ago said it would not pull its protection, reversed its decision after a few days of pressure. Cloudflare prevents distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. They are felonies. The pressure on Cloudflare for protecting Kiwi Farms was like persuading the police to look the other way while you ransack the house of someone you don’t like.

I don’t know much about Kiwi Farms, but critics accused it of obscenity, hateful speech, threats, and doxing. All that is fine, of course, if the victims are “racists.” Those with power respect no principles of free speech, legal norms, or what defines “hate.” We live in a world of arbitrary power. Our government’s boasts about democracy and a “Free World” are hollow.

At this point, it’s tempting to say that we will win because truth is on our side, but lies — at least for a time — can strengthen. It’s true that people usually make sensible choices in their own lives, when they buy houses in certain neighborhoods or send their children to “good schools.” But these choices don’t change policy.

If democracy is to mean anything, all legal speech should be permitted and protected by private industry and government. Today, when information is deliberately concealed, people must find the narrow, rocky path to the truth. Not even conservatives fight for free speech; they benefit when the competition is censored.

Free speech is nonnegotiable. Whites who demand a country of our own are far more realistic than anyone who thinks the government will stop discriminating against us when we become a minority. Working for a White Republic is more sensible than thinking our rulers will defend what every other generation of Americans took for granted. The hour is later than you think.

=================

* NEW YORK TIMES
May 27, 2017

You’re Not Going to Change Your Mind

By Ben Tappin, Leslie Van Der Leer and Ryan Mckay

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/27/opinion/sunday/youre-not-going-to-change-your-mind.html

A troubling feature of political disagreement in the United States today is that many issues on which liberals and conservatives hold divergent views are questions not of value but of fact. Is human activity responsible for global warming? Do guns make society safer? Is immigration harmful to the economy? Though undoubtedly complicated, these questions turn on empirical evidence. As new information emerges, we ought to move, however fitfully, toward consensus.

But we don’t. Unfortunately, people do not always revise their beliefs in light of new information. On the contrary, they often stubbornly maintain their views. Certain disagreements stay entrenched and polarized.

Why? A common explanation is confirmation bias. This is the psychological tendency to favor information that confirms our beliefs and to disfavor information that counters them — a tendency manifested in the echo chambers and “filter bubbles” of the online world.

If this explanation is right, then there is a relatively straightforward solution to political polarization: We need to consciously expose ourselves to evidence that challenges our beliefs to compensate for our inclination to discount it.

But what if confirmation bias isn’t the only culprit? It recently struck us that confirmation bias is often conflated with “telling people what they want to hear,” which is actually a distinct phenomenon known as desirability bias, or the tendency to credit information you want to believe. Though there is a clear difference between what you believe and what you want to believe — a pessimist may expect the worst but hope for the best — when it comes to political beliefs, they are frequently aligned.

For example, gun-control advocates who believe stricter firearms laws will reduce gun-related homicides usually also want to believe that such laws will reduce gun-related homicides. If those advocates decline to revise their beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, it can be hard to tell which bias is at work.

So we decided to conduct an experiment that would isolate these biases. This way, we could see whether a reluctance to revise political beliefs was a result of confirmation bias or desirability bias (or both). Our experiment capitalized on the fact that one month before the 2016 presidential election there was a profusion of close polling results concerning Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.

We asked 900 United States residents which candidate they wanted to win the election, and which candidate they believed was most likely to win. Respondents fell into two groups. In one group were those who believed the candidate they wanted to win was also most likely to win (for example, the Clinton supporter who believed Mrs. Clinton would win). In the other group were those who believed the candidate they wanted to win was not the candidate most likely to win (for example, the Trump supporter who believed Mrs. Clinton would win). Each person in the study then read about recent polling results emphasizing either that Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump was more likely to win.

Roughly half of our participants believed their preferred candidate was the one less likely to win the election. For those people, the desirability of the polling evidence was decoupled from its value in confirming their beliefs.

After reading about the recent polling numbers, all the participants once again indicated which candidate they believed was most likely to win. The results, which we report in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, were clear and robust. Those people who received desirable evidence — polls suggesting that their preferred candidate was going to win — took note and incorporated the information into their subsequent belief about which candidate was most likely to win the election. In contrast, those people who received undesirable evidence barely changed their belief about which candidate was most likely to win.

Importantly, this bias in favor of the desirable evidence emerged irrespective of whether the polls confirmed or disconfirmed peoples’ prior belief about which candidate would win. In other words, we observed a general bias toward the desirable evidence.

What about confirmation bias? To our surprise, those people who received confirming evidence — polls supporting their prior belief about which candidate was most likely to win — showed no bias in favor of this information. They tended to incorporate this evidence into their subsequent belief to the same extent as those people who had their prior belief disconfirmed. In other words, we observed little to no bias toward the confirming evidence.

We also explored which supporters showed the greatest bias in favor of the desirable evidence. The results were bipartisan: Supporters of Mr. Trump and supporters of Mrs. Clinton showed a similar-size bias in favor of the desirable evidence.

Our study suggests that political belief polarization may emerge because of peoples’ conflicting desires, not their conflicting beliefs per se. This is rather troubling, as it implies that even if we were to escape from our political echo chambers, it wouldn’t help much. Short of changing what people want to believe, we must find other ways to unify our perceptions of reality.

Ben Tappin is a graduate student, and Ryan McKay is a reader in psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London. Leslie van der Leer is a lecturer in psychology at Regent’s University London.

How Blatant Anti-White Racism Won Acceptance in Elite America

By John Murawski, RealClearInvestigations
September 07, 2022

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/09/07/how_blatant_anti-white_racism_won_acceptance_in_elite_america_850879.html 

Journal of the American Psycholanalytic Association

In a 2021 lecture at Yale University titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani described her “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor.”

Donald Moss: His scholarly article said whiteness is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition." No cure, either.

apsa.org

Around the same time, a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed academic journal described “whiteness” as “a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which ‘white’ people have a particular susceptibility.” The author, Donald Moss, had also presented his paper as a continuing education course for licensed therapists who would presumably treat patients with this condition. The paper advises: “There is not yet a permanent cure.”

This is a sampling of the new racism that is gaining purchase in American society even as its advocates relentlessly punish speech they deem harmful and threatening to people of color. It parallels the acceptance of anti-male rhetoric that casts masculinity as “predatory” and “toxic,” or just casually demeans males as oafish and clueless, which allows the Washington Post to give a megaphone to Northeastern University professor Suzanna Danuta Walters to ask: “Why can’t we hate men?” (Her conclusion: We can and we should.)

The escalation of this inflammatory rhetoric is reaching the highest levels of American society, as when President Biden insinuated in a fiery campaign speech last week that Donald Trump supporters are “white supremacists” and when he maligned conservative mask skeptics last year for “Neanderthal thinking." 

Aruna Khilanani: Spoke at Yale on “fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way."

Twitter

What strikes a casual observer is that such language would be instantly denounced if it targeted racial minorities or other protected groups. Just as remarkable is that this new rhetoric is not coming from dropouts and loners at society’s margins; it is being advanced by successful professionals who have scaled the heights of respectability and are given a platform on social media and in prestigious cultural outlets.

And though each of those examples generated a public furor, such inflammatory rhetoric is defended or downplayed by cultural gatekeepers. The incidents have been piling up especially in the past few years, especially since the election of Donald Trump to the White House during the ascent of Black Lives Matter in the age of social media, and even include cases of people calling for the hate of privileged groups and insisting it’s not hate speech.

Suzanna Danuta Walters: Asked “Why can’t we hate men?” in the Washington Post. Her answer: We can and we should.

Northeastern University

In its ultimate sign of success, this messaging has taken hold in public schools, corporate workplaces, medical journals, scientific research and even diversity training in federal agencies. It’s not limited to any single race but endorsed by whites, blacks, Asians and others, and disseminated in diversity materials and workplace-recommended readings that characterize white people as flawed, predatory and dangerous to society. Its sudden spread has caused a sense of culture shock and given rise to acrimonious school board meetings and employee lawsuits over hostile work environments as legions of teachers, students and workers have been educated about white privilege, white fragility, white complicity, and the moral imperative to de-center “whiteness” so as not to “normalize white domination.”

This new take on speech produces a moral paradox, particularly among academics and journalists: Those who are most militant about policing what they deem to be hate speech against minorities, women, gays and trans communities are often the most tolerant of demeaning depictions, incendiary rhetoric and violent imagery against whites and men.

To those who see a double standard, such routine disparagement of masculinity and whiteness is a case study in hypocrisy that upends longstanding norms against stereotyping entire social groups. It’s a manifestation of what Columbia University linguist and social commentator John McWhorter dubbed “woke racism” in a 2021 book of the same name that warns of the dangerous spread of “the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.”

James Livingston, Rutgers historian: Derided "little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do."

Rutgers

But its advocates insist there is no double standard; they argue they are simply speaking truth to power, which should cause discomfort. In this belief system, reverse discrimination can’t exist because social justice demands tipping the scales to favor marginalized groups to correct for centuries of injustice.

They include Rutgers University historian James Livingston who, in a Facebook critique of gentrification, described a Harlem burger joint as being “overrun with little Caucasian assholes who know their parents will approve of anything they do. Slide around the floor, you little shithead, sing loudly you unlikely moron. Do what you want, nobody here is gonna restrict your right to be white.”

The post concluded: “I hereby resign from my race. Fuck these people. Yeah, I know, it’s about access to my dinner. Fuck you, too.”

In a phone call, Livingston, who is white, said his Facebook post was a joke targeted at white people who are privileged and therefore require less protection than marginalized groups.

“White males have been the norm of our culture and our politics and our society and our economy for so long that unearthing the unstated assumptions that go into that is pretty hard work, and it reveals things that make us uncomfortable,” Livingston said. “So do they need to be protected? I suppose. Everybody needs some protection. But I’m not too worried about people telling me that I have no right to speak on the issue of transgender individuals.”

Although Livingston was initially found in violation of Rutgers’ discrimination and harassment policy, Rutgers later reversed its decision, accepting his claim that his Facebook post was satire protected by academic freedom.

Festering for Decades

It can seem that such putdowns and trash talk have burst out of nowhere in the last few years. But the underlying justifications have been percolating for decades, and they are seen by skeptics as a modern repackaging of ancient us-versus-them tribal reflexes. Telltale signs of role-reversal have been described by serious thinkers, such as 19^th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote that “He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself.”

More recently, author Douglas Murray has warned of the tendency for social justice movements to “behave – in victory – as its opponents once did” – which is to say: meanly – and which ultimately results in “the normalization of vengefulness.”

Herbert Marcuse, Marxist scholar and precursor of woke intolerance: He argued the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard.

Wikipedia

The idea that stereotyping and denigrating entire groups has no place in a society that strives for equality is one of the signature achievements of the Civil Rights era. By the 1970s, openly expressing racist slurs and jokes against black people was seen as a distasteful holdover from the Jim Crow era, an Archie Bunker-ism signifying low education and low intelligence.

The prohibition against racist speech rapidly became generalized to all identity groups. Ethnic slurs against Poles, Italians, Asians, and others became verboten as did mockery of gays and the disabled. Many words once commonly used to describe women, such as “dame” and “broad” became unacceptable, while terms that were once seen as neutral or descriptive, such as “colored,” “Oriental,” and “Negro,” suddenly took on negative connotations, and became unutterable in public (creating a replacement term, “people of color”).

But at the same time that these language taboos against expressing prejudice were becoming widely accepted across the political spectrum as a matter of civility, a far-more radical effort to regulate speech was percolating on the left.

This movement sought to limit speech on the rationale that language was a form of social control and therefore the source of oppression and violence. The assumption that hurtful language leads to harmful policies ultimately produced today’s cancel culture phenomenon, where otherwise well-regarded professionals are investigated, suspended, canned, or booted from social media for simply questioning the factual claims of Black Lives Matter, for affirming biological sex differences, for satirizing ritual land acknowledgements, and even for publicly saying the Mandarin word “nei-ge” (because it supposedly resembles a racial epithet in English).

The core proposition of this mindset can be traced to philosophers like Michel Foucault, who developed theories of language as a form of societal power and domination, and Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist scholar whose now-classic 1960s essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” argues that the oppressor class and the oppressed cannot be held to the same standard. Marcuse proposed that the classical liberal doctrine of free speech is a mechanism that benefits capitalists and others who wield power, that the struggle for “a real democracy” paradoxically necessitates “the fight against an ideology of tolerance.”

Stanley Fish: New York Times contributor wrote "The Harm in Free Speech."

YouTube/Friction

The subversive intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s passed on the torch to Critical Race Theorists and radical feminists, and in the 1990s the critique of bourgeoisie liberalism was taken up by Stanley Fish, a post-modernist literary critic and critical legal scholar who ridiculed the idea of “free speech” and “reverse racism,” giving wider exposure to these esoteric scholarly arguments.

“By insisting that from now on there shall be no discrimination, they leave in place the effects of the discrimination that had been practiced for generations,” Fish wrote. “What is usually meant by perfect neutrality is a policy that leaves in place the effects of the discrimination you now officially repudiate. Neutrality thus perpetuates discrimination, rather than reversing it, for you can only fight discrimination with discrimination.”

During the Obama era, Fish was a celebrity public intellectual publishing pieces in the New York Times titled “Two Cheers for Double Standards” and “The Harm in Free Speech.”

Thus it came to be accepted that creating a just society will require controlling speech to disempower the historically privileged and empower aggrieved groups, and to undo sex, gender, and racial disparities in society.

At Georgetown University, for example, it means that academic freedom is balanced against an “equally important” competing goal – diversity and “equity,” the latter vaguely defined – which puts the two policies on a collision course.

Ilya Shapiro: Georgetown Law denounced his "demeaning" tweet criticizing Biden's "black woman" litmus test for the Supreme Court. 

Cato Institute

Just this year, constitutional legal scholar Ilya Shapiro resigned from a plum job at Georgetown’s law school over a tweet in which Shapiro voiced his frustration that President Biden had promised to name a black woman to the Supreme Court. Shapiro recommended Indian-born federal jurist Sri Srinivasan and lamented that Biden’s racial litmus test meant he would instead nominate a “lesser black woman.” That phrase – which Shapiro subsequently described as “inartful” and for which he apologized, taking down the tweet – prompted an internal investigation by the university’s Office of Institutional Diversity, Equity & Affirmative Action.

Georgetown’s law dean denounced Shapiro’s January tweet as “demeaning” and “appalling,” but in his subsequent resignation letter Shapiro noted that Georgetown defended the academic freedom of a feminist professor when sent this tweet during Brett Kavanaugh’s 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings:

“Look at this chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

In a phone conversation, Shapiro said his experience serves as a reminder why free speech standards should apply uniformly to all citizens, rather than trying to compensate political identity groups based on theories of intersectional oppression. Such attempts end up being arbitrary, ideological, and political.

“Those kinds of theories are laughable,” said Shapiro, who is now director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “This idea of punching up and punching down, it all depends on definitions.”

C. Christine Fair: Georgetown Law defended the academic freedom of this feminist professor who advocated castrating white men's corpses and feeding them to swine. 

Wikipedia

Shapiro said that definitions can be rigged, so that the term marginalized or underrepresented in the academic context never refers to conservatives or libertarians who constitute ideological minorities on campus and have been documented as being reluctant to express their opinions for fear of cancel culture.

“If you define it in ways that privileges your ideology, well then you’re going to get the output that you’re looking for in the first place,” Shapiro said. “It’s arguing that you’re rectifying a structural power dynamic when what you’re doing is shifting the power to favor your preferred group.”

It may come as a surprise that one of Shapiro’s defenders was Christine Fair, the Georgetown security studies professor who in 2018 had tweeted about castrating male corpses and feeding them to swine.

For starters, Fair said Shapiro’s tweet wasn’t offensive. But even if it was, she said, that shouldn’t matter: “We have no right not to be offended.”

Fair thrives on controversy and provocation. She has a blog called Tenacious Hellpussy, subtitled “A nasty woman posting from the frontlines of fuckery.” She publicly defended her 2018 tweet at the time, tweeting: “I will not use civil words to describe mass incivility. … I will use words that make you as uncomfortable as I am with this regime.”

“I detest cancel culture,” Fair said in a phone interview. “I don’t think they fundamentally understand freedom of speech. They think there is a right to freedom from speech.”

But what was her motive at the time to use such gratuitously graphic language that was guaranteed to blow up in her face? She summarized her motives as giving her political enemies a taste of their own medicine: “Let me show you what structural violence sounds like.”

Fair said that her 2018 tweet was not without grievous consequences. After receiving death threats and rape threats, her teaching duties were suspended for a year out of concerns for her physical safety. Even as she publicly defended her free speech rights to be provocative and outrageous, Fair “lugubriously apologized” to staff and faculty members who were subjected to online threats and “terrorized” by trolls because of Fair’s intemperate tweeting.

George Ciccariello-Maher, Drexel U.: “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

geomaher.com

Speech codes have been a staple of college campuses for decades but the stakes intensified after Donald Trump was elected president and the nation underwent a social transformation that some call the Great Awokening. Seemingly overnight the bar for permissible speech rose for the oppressor and dropped for the oppressed. And now it was overtly about politicizing and weaponizing speech to save humanity from itself.

On Christmas Eve in 2016, just weeks before Trump took office, a Drexel University political science professor, George Ciccariello-Maher, pulled an attention-getting stunt on Twitter: “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”

The next day, the provocative professor pushed the nuclear buttons again: “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.”

Drexel officials denounced the professor’s comments as “utterly reprehensible” and “utterly disturbing,” and subsequently put him on administrative leave (for his own safety). The professor denounced Drexel’s response as “chilling” to his academic freedom.

Ciccariello-Maher was just getting started. He went on the offensive in 2017 against free speech advocacy and took pride in being involved in a campaign to shout down conservative speaker Charles Murray.

“We’re actually fighting a battle,” Ciccariello-Maher said on a 2017 podcast, “and for that battle we need to use weapons, and we need to fight against the enemies that we have.”

He proclaimed: “We make a mistake from the beginning when we assume that speech is and has been free instead of a terrain for hegemonic struggle.”

A year after his controversial tweets, Ciccariello-Maher resigned from Drexel, citing nonstop harassment and threats from right-wing, white supremacist media outlets and internet mobs.

The changing dynamic played out in public view at the New York Times in 2018, when the media organization hired and then quickly un-hired opinion writer Quinn Norton for several gaffes, including retweeting a tweet with the N-word and fraternizing with an alleged neo-Nazi.

Ezra Klein, New York Times podcaster: The meme #KillAllMen really just means “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.”

MSNBC

Just six months after tossing Norton, the New York Times stood by another opinion writer, Sarah Jeong, a Korean-born graduate of U Cal Berkeley and Harvard law school whose Twitter oeuvre trafficked in crude racial stereotypes. Jeong, who was fond of the hashtag #CancelWhitePeople, tweeted out such sentiments as: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.” And: “Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”

As the New York Times was pilloried for its double standard, progressive digital pundits at Vox came to Jeong’s defense, patiently explaining for the umpteenth time that Jeong was to be exempt from censure because “there’s no such thing as ‘reverse racism.’”

Ezra Klein, the former editor of Vox who’s now an influential podcaster at the Times, accused Jeong’s critics of “an absurd form of literalism.” He said the public misguidedly interpreted the online meme #KillAllMen literally, when Twitter habitués who are in on the joke understood that it really meant nothing more than “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.”

Another Vox writer dismissed the idea that we should all play by the same rules and spelled out how the “social justice left” approaches the world: “What makes these quasi-satirical generalizations about ‘white people’ different from actual racism is, yes, the underlying power structure in American society.”

“There is no sense of threat associated with Jeong making a joke about how white people have dog-like opinions,” the Vox piece said. “But when white people have said the same about minorities, it has historically been a pretext for violence or justification for exclusionary politics.”

Many Americans are still trying to figure out the boundaries of acceptable speech at a time when striving for colorblindness and equal treatment mark a person as part of the problem. However sensible it might have seemed a half-century ago as a corrective measure or to alleviate pangs of guilt, the creation of separate standards for different groups now strikes some as profoundly regressive.

“The development of two separate language codes, one for whites and one for blacks, was ominous,” the conservative writer Christopher Caldwell observed in his 2020 book, “The Age of Entitlement.”

“The rules of American public decorum now resembled medieval strictures that permitted only noblemen to carry weapons or ride horses, or laws that forbade certain classes of citizens to address others by a certain name.”

Email: jmurawski@realclearinvestigations.com
Twitter: @johnmurawski