America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization

Liberals and conservatives are both wrong to center whites

For the last several years I’ve lived in an area East of Los Angeles called the San Gabriel Valley, where Asians and Hispanics make up a majority of the population. Up until 2021, I lived in the town of San Gabriel, which is 59% Asian and 27% Hispanic. I was one of the 10% of the population classified as “non-Hispanic white.”

If you read right-wing media, much of which harps on the harms of “diversity,” you would think this area should be a cauldron of tension and racial animosity. Yet group conflict is completely absent from local politics, including the schools. The Asians work as engineers and landlords, recent migrants from Mexico and South America get jobs as gardeners and nannies, and no one cares. I lived here during the “racial reckoning” of 2020, and with whites down to such a minuscule part of the population, I kept expecting the mob to come for some of the numerous war memorials that are found throughout the area, but no one ever did.

Meanwhile, California during that year became the first state in the nation to create a reparations task force, despite no history of slavery and blacks making up less than 7% of its population. The LAPD is currently being sued for allegedly using excessive force against Black Lives Matter South Pasadena, an organization that represents a city that is about 4% black, though I’ve never heard of the police having a problem with the much larger Hispanic community in the area. The “racial politics” of California look like they do everywhere else in the country, despite the state having a unique demographic profile. On a similar note, look up the demographics of New Mexico and Hawaii and think about how rarely you hear about racial tensions in those states.

I think that what is happening, or not happening, in the San Gabriel Valley, and LA County and California more generally, shows how observers across the political spectrum get race in America wrong.

They tend to think of whites and minorities as the two main relevant categories. For leftists, people of color have unique experiences that bind them together against a common oppressor. Conservatives think in terms of the same binary, except that whites aren’t so bad in their story. The country is being threatened by increasing diversity, which makes it difficult to maintain a common culture and leads to ethnic squabbling.

Yet instead of focusing on whites, a better understanding of American racial politics comes from realizing that the true divide is between blacks and everyone else. The correct model is not Balkanization but, as Joseph Heath recently argued, a country with a minority that seeks representation and a degree of self-determination. Diversity really isn’t our weakness or our strength. It’s simply not that important as a political force, at least compared to Black Nationalism.

Ethnonationalism is defined as a movement that puts ethnicity at the center of individuals’ relationship to the political world. It focuses on advancing the material interests of a group with a shared common ancestry, whether real or imagined, at the expense of others, and seeks symbolic respect. This means supporting the kinds of economic or redistributionist policies that are thought to bring tangible benefits to the group, along with recognition for its heroes and care taken to avoid offending its sensibilities. Ethnonationalists tend to care a lot about representation. Sometimes wanting to be ruled by one’s own kind conflicts with trying to improve the group’s material standards, and since people are tribal and not really that great at cost-benefit analysis, in those cases the former tends to win out.

Coolest map I’ve seen of LA racial demographics. Source is Reddit, but I’m going to trust it, because the guy used black for blacks and yellow for Asians, showing he’s a thought criminal and therefore probably honest.

Politically, the Voting Rights Act writes Black Nationalism into law. It assumes that people of this particular minority cannot be represented by outsiders. The law doesn’t simply guarantee the right to vote, but has been interpreted to actively require the drawing of congressional districts where blacks make up a majority of voters. African Americans have their own TV networks, distinct cultural heroes, and historical teleology. They want to be governed and policed by their own kind, and maintain their own educational establishments, dorms, and graduation ceremonies. While there are some brands that cater more to Hispanics than others, it is difficult to imagine that a clothing company would appeal to them simply by announcing it makes apparel “For Us By Us.” When blacks lose demographic dominance in an area, it is considered problematic, if not a major political issue.

Of course, one thing Black Nationalism in the United States doesn’t ask for is political independence. In fact, it knows that it must rely on the goodwill of white society, or its judges and bureaucrats at least, and asks for more giveaways. This is in part framed as a matter of historical justice. Under Black Nationalist thought, everything that the rest of the country has exists through the efforts of slaves. This seems like a cope more than anything, but black political elites have an incentive to cater to this delusion, since they live pretty good lives under a racialized American regime. Demands for self-determination are therefore localized and limited in scope, but other than this Black Nationalism in the US looks like a fairly typical ethnonationalist movement.

Some kinds of racialized politics exist among Chinese Americans, Jews, Hispanics, etc. But everything in life is a matter of degrees. If you live in a black area, racial concerns basically dominate local politics. Even if you live in a not-so-black place like California, you’ll run into quite a bit of it! But you can spend your life in a city that is majority Asian and Hispanic, send your kids to public school, and follow the local news, and race will be a complete non-issue.

More and more, the white-centric framework is breaking down. Hispanics seem to like Trump’s style, are on board with DeSantis’ anti-woke project in Florida, and don’t even seem to prioritize higher immigration all that much. Asians are pushing back against pro-crime and anti-merit policies, particularly in San Francisco. All this is not something I would have predicted ten or fifteen years ago, so I have updated my views quite a bit, although most right wingers appear incapable of shifting their opinions based on new evidence. Leftists meanwhile seem to have lost some of their old enthusiasm for the “browning of America,” a phrase one rarely even hears anymore. Now they have to worry about ways to censor what information and arguments people have access to in two languages. At the same time, anti-immigration politics is as strong as ever on the right, because it’s really driven by implicit white identitarianism, and is a good electoral strategy too since old people find border hoppers scary.

Racial change has already been baked into the future, so the entire debate over whether the nation is going to be 44% or 49% white in thirty years isn’t that interesting, at least from a demographic balance perspective. People who prioritize stopping immigration on cultural grounds, like Amy Wax, sometimes sound to me like they believe we currently have the option of becoming a homogenous nation-state, when that’s completely off the table.

I used to read right-wingers who around 2010 would argue that as the white share of the population declined, the country would have less time for special pleading from blacks, as every group pursued its own parochial interests. It hasn’t worked out like that, and our politics is even more black-centric than it was back then.

Both the right and left make the same mistake, which is underestimating the power of two key forces: America’s capacity for assimilation and its obsession with black people. Both of these forces have shown themselves immune to demographic change. Academics and journalists tried to beat the whites versus everyone else narrative into our heads during the Obama era. In response, leftists went all in on wokeness, while conservatives adopted white identity politics, with Fox News and right-wing influencers now sounding like VDare did ten years ago, minus the hereditarianism. This should’ve exacerbated white-Hispanic tensions, but we’ve instead seen a decrease in racial polarization when it comes to voting behavior.

When I’ve traveled overseas, I’ve been struck by the extent to which educated people speak English and are obsessed with American politics and pop culture. The idea that we’d have large zones of unassimilated masses living within the United States itself was never plausible. Hispanics and Asians who go to college may begin to think in terms of identity politics. Those that don’t are largely alienated by wokeness and often find themselves friendly to conspiracy theories and charmed by Trump. In other words, they largely behave like white people, which is what you’d expect in a nation that was good at assimilating outsiders.

Meanwhile, blacks remain first and foremost in our minds when we think about “race issues.” Some people put the blame on white liberals for this, and there is something to that idea, but what is commonly missed is that democracies tend to give people what they want, and a minority is going to be able to exercise power if it is united around an ethnonationalist approach to politics. This country is obsessed with black issues in large part because blacks themselves approach politics through a racialized framework. I don’t think it’s white liberals who cause the inner city to erupt in protest when a career criminal is killed by police, or who make blacks attend segregated graduation ceremonies.

While growing up in the south suburbs of Chicago, I had several jobs where the majority of my co-workers were blacks from the city. As mentioned, I now live mostly around Asians and Hispanics. Personal experience confirms what we see in our politics. Blacks will often bring up race unprompted. They’ll randomly complain about how some cashier or boss discriminated against them, and even use humor, sometimes self-deprecating, that centers their personal identity. A leftist might say this is because they suffer more discrimination, but regardless of whether that’s true or not, the tendency is still there. When I deal with someone from Mexico or Central America, they practically never mention their background, even though many are illegal migrants or dealing with immigration issues, which means that their identity objectively has a lot more relevance to their everyday life than it does for an American-born black citizen. I don’t think elites are as powerful as they themselves assume they are, nor as powerful as their conservative critics contend. Our racial politics to a large extent reflect what people themselves care about.

Focusing on diversity and the supposed threat of Balkanization at the expense of Black Nationalism has serious costs for conservatives and classical liberals. As mentioned, it leads to too much fear of immigration. One issue is that this isn’t like abortion, where conservatives are wrong and it also kills them at the ballot box. Railing about the border actually mobilizes the base and wins votes, so it would be hard to change Republicans’ approach to this issue. But smart people should realize that immigration isn’t all that threatening, and adjust their priorities.

I also think that focusing on Black Nationalism can help clarify the debate over whether wokeness is primarily a matter of law or culture, with all its implications. As I’ve said in some interviews, the answer depends on what aspect of wokeness we decide to focus on. One thing I believe I show pretty conclusively in my book is that the categories of “Hispanics” and “AAPI” are government creations, and we wouldn’t even think in terms of such concepts if it wasn’t for the law.

From The Origins of Woke:

As Skrentny notes, in a racially, linguistically, and religiously diverse society, government classification “made some inequalities more real and others invisible.” According to Herbert Hammerman, who served for fifteen years on the EEOC until 1981, the racial categories adopted by the government in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Act used to enforce anti-discrimination laws were “the product of sheer historical accident.” Yet they remain with us today.

It is important to note that in the mid-1960s, Americans thought about race as a political issue in terms of the status of African Americans living in the South, one that was being solved through the Civil Rights Act and other laws passed under the Johnson administration. Practically nobody saw “minorities” as a government category that should separate certain individuals from the white majority and make them eligible for special government benefits. Yet while whites, blacks, and Native Americans were natural categories with deep roots in American history, even if their borders weren’t always clear, who exactly were Spanish Americans and Orientals, the categories invented by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations?

While categories like “Hispanic,” “AAPI” and “minority” were constructed by the federal government and still aren’t that deeply rooted in the culture outside of elite circles like journalism and academia, we could eliminate all civil rights law and abolish affirmative action, and Black Nationalism would still be there. Wherever blacks live in large numbers or form a significant part of an institution, they will to a large extent vote as a bloc and demand race-conscious rhetoric, policies, and practices.

All of this leads to a perhaps counterintuitive recommendation, which is that fighting to get rid of racial classification and recognition for non-black minorities can be more important than going to war against Black Nationalism itself. Since blacks can be expected to have a racialized outlook anyway, the big returns in the policy space come from doing things like stopping Democrats from adding a Middle East or North African (MENA) category to the census, and if one wants to get more ambitious, aiming for the abolition of all racial classifications, perhaps with exceptions made for blacks and Native Americans. One could imagine a Republican administration rewriting the census to have the following questions.

1. Are you a descendant of American slaves?

2. Are you a Native American affiliated with a tribe?

3. What is your ethnic background? (check all that apply)

Question 3 would put Germans, Chinese, Palestinians, Hondurans, etc. all in the same category of “not black and not Native,” that is, default American. Or one could simply abolish Question 3 entirely, and leave the other two as concessions to political reality. One funny thing about writing the census is that it only occurs every ten years, so you will usually have both Democrat and Republican administrations throughout each preceding decade. Trump happened to be the president in 2020, so there was no new MENA question that year. Biden has now resurrected the idea, but whether it actually gets implemented is going to probably depend on who wins in 2024, as by the next election after that the president would only take office in 2029 and then it may be too late to stop whatever has already been decided. Eliminating wokeness as law for everyone else should take priority over doing so for blacks, and the former would probably face less resistance.

At a cultural level, understanding Black Nationalism as the essence of the American race question can foster more realism regarding the future of the country. If our problem is Balkanization, one should be very pessimistic, because diversity is here to stay, and will keep increasing even if the borders were to be shut tomorrow, which they won’t be. But if Black Nationalism is the issue, it is one that has been with us since the 1960s, and its power tends to rise and fall in cycles, rather than be continually growing. It is still a problem, but a manageable one that we might be able to face, if we ever started to become honest about it.