It Doesn't Actually Matter If Black People Are "Racist"
White People Also Don't Seem To Understand What Racism Is Exactly
A sort of culture war type topic that comes up every once in awhile is whether or not Black people can be racist. This fixation on negro racism tends to come from white people desperate to get out from under anti-whiteness by castigating Black people as being discriminatory or bigots.
In my worldview, whether or not Blacks can be (or are) racist is a non-starter. There are over 200 million white people in the USA, while Black people number about 40 million. Just looking at raw numbers, there are literally more white women in the United States than Black people.
This to me suggests that any Black person’s ability to successfully leverage their antagonism against white people absolutely requires white accomplices. Some notable examples are
’s reporting on the WNBA’s struggle sessions against Caitlin Clark, a white woman who has brought a legion of fans to an otherwise unpopular sport and a pair of women of color who chastised white women about being white (whom also paid quite a bit of money for the pleasure).When you live in a country where white people literally control the most popular institutions (higher ed, the media, the arts), it’s difficult to imagine a scenario in which Black people just so happen to have a platform big enough to demonize whites without backlash. The white progressives, whose ideology is running rampant all over the Anglophone West, have negative in-group racial preference:
So, it’s pretty clear that white liberals just basically hate white people. I’ve also personally seen white liberal hatred of white southerners, often wishing that the entire region would collapse to the bottom of the ocean.
In my estimation, if white people are upset about anti-white sentiment, they should look at whites on the left.
Because, to be quite frank, white racism is an ongoing reality for many Black people and we are under no obligation to be silent about it or tolerate white ignorance. We continue to have negative experiences with white people both on and offline.
This is why I see the urge to force Blacks into admitting that “we’re racist” to be white supremacy in a trenchcoat. There’s no political utility to it; even if every Black man, woman and child hated white people, there could at worse be massive civil unrest. If forty million whites hated Black people, it would be tantamount to genocide.
Alternatively, I don’t want to downplay how fervently many Black people believe in white progressive ideology, and use the platform given to them to openly hate white people. (In fact, I follow one such Black woman on IG, who uses her platform to passive aggressively hate white people).
The relationship between Blacks who hate whites, and whites who hate themselves, is a symbiotic one. White individuals, and organizations, come to these people on their hands and knees begging for salvation. Meanwhile, these white saviors bask in their own moral superiority - typically over other whites, but often also Blacks - wagging their finger at everybody with one hand while patting themselves on the back with the other.
Fundamentally, I don’t think the question of “can Black people be racist” is an insightful one and is ultimately a shaming tactic to defang us and render our complaints, ideas and opinions moot.
Although I don’t believe that we are marginalized or oppressed, the relative power Black people have in this country seems to rest on the benevolence of whites coupled with a commitment to their values/worldview. It is extremely clear to me that the only type of Black person whites seem to openly want to support are those who think like them and behave in ways that don’t frighten/upset them.
The reality that we eventually have to come up against white racism is a frustrating one. Even if a Black person are part of the upper/middle class, many will still have to struggle against white expectations and perceptions. This conundrum is probably easier for Black progressives to navigate because they are delusional and live in a deep seat of denial about white progressive racism.
In fact, the only issue Black progressives seem to have with their white counterparts is that they don’t talk enough about race!
To summarize, I think it’s a function of white supremacy for whites to try and force the issue of “Blacks being racist” because the ultimate function of this is curtailing how Black people think of and speak about white people. It hasn’t occurred to white people that actually no, no one is required to want the bullshit multiculturalism that they are obsessed with, to enjoy their company or to view the world through the same racial/cultural lens that they do.
The ways that white people understand racism are not the same as how we understand it. White guilt around being racist has caused them to now include Black people in their understanding of who/how/what racism actually is so that they can “share the burden” of being racist. If Blacks can be racist, then whites are no longer “on the hook”, which also allows them to downplay the severity of their own racism.
Of course, that’s a pretty generous charaterization. Because white people don’t see race in the same ways Black people do, they don’t have a problem calling Blacks racist because it doesn’t contradict their racial worldview. White people basically don’t think they’re racist because they’re polite, know Black people offline and “don’t care about race”. If any Black person highlights race, white people see this as racist.
Fundamentally, no white person who goes around calling Black people racist deserves to be taken seriously. But it’s something I’m noticing on Substack a lot since I follow independent and right of center newsletters - many of which are written (and read) primarily by white people. And the relationship these types of white people have to Blacks is underscored by antagonism, disrespect and a sort of moral superiority.
And after seeing a white man call Dr. King a racist, who, if he was alive today would be the same as Ibram X. Kendi, I felt that this post needed to be published immediately.
If white people are so concerned about being hated, they should a) take up their complaints with white liberals/progressives b) stop being racist toward Black people both online and off.
As a latina, I want you to know that I have picked up on this exact thing while reading center-right newsletters too.
I agree that accusations made against black people of being “racist” against white people is transparently coming from a place of white supremacy.
Like they can’t handle even a little criticism about their systems and biases without getting paranoid en-masse and immediately regressing to censorship. Like you mentioned, white people in the developed west vastly outnumber black people, and it’s only been like 10 years since these topics from black perspectives gained any sort of platform or cultural recognition, yet white conservatives and neocons are losing their minds already.
They just don’t want to hear anything that doesn’t affirm their greatness as ‘the best people of the best color’. No criticisms allowed. Very telling.
There is still something to be said with the question of how useful it is to focus on your own historical, systemic, and cultural oppression, but that doesn’t mean these thoughts should be censored because they make white people uncomfortable.
Glad you wrote this.
This is an interesting, if peculiar, essay. Seems to me that that it's functioning as a kind of Rorschach blot here in the comments, but I think people ought to slow down a little and approach it on its own terms. You seem to be moving towards a theory of understanding how power and race work in the context of progressive institutions, and I don't think anybody's adequately articulated that yet.
One element you might be missing though: even if we accept that negative liberal white in-group bias is doing a lot of the heavy lifting around making these milieus so weird about race, if we look at things from another perspective and include sex/gender in our equations, you can arrive at a scenario in which white men are the minority (even if they're a minority over twice the size of black Americans in relation to the racial composition of the US).
White men make up about 30% of the US population, so if you get a context together in which everyone except white men is effectively on the same team, you do arrive at a situation in which it's not particularly difficult for the "everybody else" group to exercise power over the white men group. Even if a majority of the women in positions of influence are white, so long as they're willing to play along with an "everyone except white guys" coalitional movement, this is something that can and does happen.
Still, I think it's important to note that most people simply are not in positions of much influence. So no matter a person's race or gender, they're probably not particularly influential around these issues. To me it sure seems like the identitarian ethos that's taken hold in progressive institutions over the past ten to fifteen years very effectively provides openings for manipulative opportunist types - in a word, people with cluster b tendencies - to seize influence. As a result, these institutions seem to be becoming increasingly corrupt.
I didn't quite approach things from the "white men as a contextual minority" angle in the essay I wrote about arts nonprofits a few months ago, but it's something that's been on my mind.
https://cinematimshel.substack.com/p/ideologically-out-of-line-and-insufficiently
Of course the solution to all of this is real egalitarian multiculturalism on the one hand and a shared American identity on the other, class solidarity across racial and gender lines, and the building of a society organized around the interests of the general population instead of those of the billionaire class.