What is White Identity?
What Jeremy Carl Could Learn from Michelle Obama
Much has already been said about Jeremy Carl’s senate confirmation hearing for his nomination to Assistant Secretary of State by President Trump. In an exchange posted to his personal Youtube channel, Senator Chris Murphy performed the familiar song-and-dance about how stupid and racist it is for someone to suggest that white people have a shared identity, or much less, are discriminated against in the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - how dare he contradict critical theory!
In what would become the most talked about moment, Senator Murphy asks Carl “what is white identity?” Carl fumbles about in his response. He references the book “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America,” brings up black and white churches, and mentions broad categories like food and music. As someone sympathetic to Carl’s views, he comes across as unprepared and was unable to provide a coherent definition of white identity, conflating ethnicity and race, as rightly called out by Murphy. His appeal to food and music is especially disappointing, categories often cited by liberals as the benefits of immigration, because it’s perceived as a tacit acknowledgement that the differences between people groups can be boiled down to trivialities. In fairness to Carl, he was trained to “avoid the argument” not “win the argument,” as he shared in a piece for The Spectator. Likewise, had he been able to provide a coherent definition, it likely would have been received with reflexive accusations of racism.
Among the analysis that followed from Conservative commentators, Chris Rufo penned an article titled “The ‘Whiteness’ Double Standard,” where he demonstrates the not so sneaky leftist tactic of readily acknowledging white culture for all its faults, but not its contributions. This will come as no surprise to those who’ve started believing their lying eyes. My goal is not to re-explain the phenomenon, but to underline it, recalling two forgotten clips from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch of them that once occupied our algorithms. Clips easily missed had you not been there when they flowed down our timelines into that swirling sea of irrelevance. The first being Michelle Obama’s rant about white people, and the second being Paola Ramos’ interview with pro-natalist couple Simone and Malcolm Collins.
I know what you’re thinking, which Michelle Obama rant about White People?
In what is titled, “A Live Conversation on Beauty, Culture, & Confidence with Tracee Ellis Ross,” where she promotes her new book “The Look,” Mrs. Obama addresses the crowd:
Let me explain something to white people, our hair comes out of our head naturally in a curly pattern, so when we’re straightening it to follow your beauty standards we are trapped by the straightness. That is why so many of us can’t swim, and we run away from the water; people won’t go to the gym because we’re trying to keep our hair straight for y’all.
As evidenced here, it is completely fine for Michelle Obama to identify white culture as the source of the oppressive beauty standards under which black women suffer. It’s amusing to think of the reaction Senator Murphy would’ve had if Jeremy Carl had offered “beauty standards” as an example of white identity and culture. At the very least, white people share some cluelessness as to the texture of black people’s hair. However, this scenario doesn’t merely illustrate what Rufo calls the “whiteness parallax,” but it is an example of how every race but the white one is allowed to notice heritable traits and affirm so-called racist stereotypes.
Specifically, it was Michelle’s implicit suggestion that black people’s hair texture is genetically determined that reminded me of this peculiar clip where Paola Ramos interviews the eccentric Malcolm and Simone Collins. Before this clip went viral, I was somewhat familiar with the Collins and completely unaware of Ramos. A skim of her Wikipedia reveals some interesting facts:
Father is Jorge Ramos (“one of the best-known Spanish-language news anchors in the United States”)
Masters in Public policy from Harvard
Served in the Obama administration
Served as Deputy Director of Hispanic Media for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign
Nominated for a GLAAD Media Award for (what sounds like it could’ve been written for Fred Armisen’s Documentary Now! Vice news parody) “The Latinx Drag Queens Spearheading HIV Activism on the Border”
Now works as an on-air contributor to Telemundo and MSNBC
The interview clip, which is posted to her Instagram, features Ramos repeating “there is no scientific evidence” like a mantra designed to stop all thoughtcrime, while Malcolm rattles off counter arguments with aspergian intensity. Their disagreement was about whether there are genetic differences between black and white women, even when it comes to skin color. Let the reader decide what he or she thinks.
It makes one wonder what would have happened if Ramos had been the one interviewing her former boss’s wife. Would she have impulsively replied “there’s no scientific evidence” to Michelle’s insinuation that black people’s hair texture is determined genetically? These contradictions are ultimately unsurprising to the seasoned internet denizen. This is all straight out of the Left’s playbook of identity politics and critical theory. If they keep using these tactics, Jeremy Carl will need not provide a positive definition of white identity. The negative will suffice.
A recently resurfaced clip of Representative Gene Wu declares that: “the day the Latino, African American, Asian, and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor, is the day we start winning, because we are the majority in this country now.” Wu leaves little doubt as to who this oppressor is when highlighting the United State’s shifting demographics. It is the white man, which includes ethnicities like Scots-Irish, Italians, Germans, and Anglos - the ones Senator Murphy considered too distinct to form a white identity. I wonder if Murphy believes the differences between the Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese are so minor that it’s perfectly permissible to lump them into such a vast category as “Asian Americans?” Thankfully, Representative Wu perfectly summed up the seemingly arbitrary criteria of who qualifies as a racial special interest group. Racial identities can include disparate ethnicities as long as they share the same oppressor - white people.
In an interview with the Aporia Podcast, pariah Steve Sailer is asked his opinion on the future of white identity politics. Sailer responds with a funny story of him telling “white supremacist” Jared Taylor
“You’d be a good Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson for white people, except that white people do not want an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson because it wouldn’t be very white of them; white people like color-blindness and meritocracy and dislike clannishness.”
It is this aspect of white identity that has suppressed white identity politics thus far. If the Left were serious about stopping what they deem the concerning rise of white identity politics, they wouldn’t be so insistent that white culture is the cause of everything evil while simultaneously being nothing at all.