There was actually pretty big ethnic tensions in the 90s between the Asians and Mexicans when I went to school there. There were lots of Asian/Mexican street gangs then. When I was a teen, I thought it would be a semi-permanent conflict, but when I go back; it's pretty much disappeared. The ones who still hold the resentments are people from my generation, but the younger cohorts do not feel the same way.
You see this also among Asians: Koreans hated almost all other Asian groups when I was growing up. The younger ones now don't mind being pan-Asian and don't feel the hatred towards other Asians their parents felt (Koreans have this disposition because they have a made up history constructed by nationalists in Korea). Parents can't pass it on, especially in America.
Fascinating. Could one perhaps argue that wokeness worked then?
I actually remember tensions between Arabs and whites in the 1990s when I was in grade school. Then I went back to the same area as a substitute teacher. Someone asked me about my ethnicity and another kid was like oh my god we don’t do that!
I said wow, these kids are ridiculously woke now. But maybe that kind of thinking is what ended racial tensions.
I'm not sure, but the biggest effect I see is it's a cohort thing. My cousins still feel resentment towards Koreans and haven't updated on how things have changed. These stories are largely unreported on because no one cares about these groups.
Back in the 90s/00s, there was this local reporter, Tony Rafael who had a blog that just focused on the Mexican Mafia: In the Hat. He was screaming for a long time about how the Mexican Mafia was doing race related killings of blacks to intimidate black people that was never picked up by any news outlets or serious journalists. I had friends that were in prison at the time also (Asians) and it was known that there was a green light on Asians in prison or you can kill any Asian with no repercussions by the Mexican Mafia.
That area you live in. If you've seen the movie: Stand and Deliver. That high school that was the "worst of the worst" in that movie is a pretty nice place now. It's right near Monterey Park. I showed Stand and Deliver to some modern kids and it does not translate at all how people were afraid of Mexican people in LA or the US at the time. Maybe my memory is shoddy, but I could've sworn that Sailer's whole thing back then was anti-Mexican racism and not anti-black racism. That's come and gone too. Just a lot of this stuff people think is permanent or forever doesn't persist.
Interesting. It’s a cohort thing but I wonder why. Just because they were recent arrivals? Now Mexicans and Asians have been in the area for a few generations. I wonder if it’s that or it’s just the culture has changed.
I remember Sailer making the argument that LA had gotten safer because Mexican gangs ethnically cleansed blacks (but that this was just moving the hot potato somewhere else).
Shows what he knows about that: not much. A lot of other factors were - and remain - in play. Concocting a fake notion of ethnic cleansing kinda certifies that guy’s status, though the story would never hold up to closer inspection. I went to high school in Lynwood, a close-in suburb across the street (Alameda) from Watts. By the time I graduated in the ‘All-American City’ had gone through an extensive demographic change. Blacks became the majority as whites moved out, but the Mexican pop. % stayed about the same. 30 years later the white remnant remained, many blacks had moved on, and the Mexican-American pop. had transformed into a pan-Hispanic group of various origins.
The ethnic replacement of Watts was a pretty deliberate and organized thing. People weren't throwing a dart at a map of LA and saying "aha, when we leave Mexico, we'll go to this place the dart landed... 'Vats.'" They came from the same regions, often the same families, and had a plan. Nothing wrong with that - that's how immigrant groups tend to end up in their enclaves. It's safer for them and it helps them get a start in their new environment if they can pool resources and rely on neighbors. But it's still a replacement.
Yes. He lived right across the street from the high school. I lived a couple blocks away and we were friendly. He was smart - skipped ahead two grades and also the valedictorian of his class in '76 - and very funny. Too bad nobody had home video cameras yet - his graduation speech was hilarious. If tape of it did exist it would burn a hole through YouTube worldwide in about 2 hours.
The ethnic cleansing of blacks from Watts was something of an open secret but that's simply because you could see it happen in real time - a black family moved out and a Mexican one moved in. But I had not heard of targeted killings being a part of this in East LA.
Well, you'd have to say it worked. East LA is now entirely Hispanic (and almost entirely Mexican) and there are no blacks in Monterey Park.
East LA was predominantly Hispanic from way back, certainly by the late 60s. It's a stretch, though, to claim 'ethic cleansing' of blacks from Watts as a prime mover of demographic change. Interracial gang violence existed and certainly scared innocent people; it has occurred in other parts of the city since then, including relatively recently. But other major factors were in play. Lynwood was literally next door to Watts and had decent schools. The black population of Watts and south central included many people with middle class aspirations and the means to achieve them. My classmates included middle class kids who went on to become doctors, school teachers and admins, prosperous salesmen, etc. A huge factor in how they got there was the Century / 105 freeway project. Public domain condemnation of huge swaths of housing put the clamps on property values along the path of the project at a time when LoCali was headed for the beginning of a long period of skyrocketing appreciation, and that provided an opening for families that wanted out of Watts in the years after the riots; another significant factor was the abolition of restrictive housing covenants at around the same time. Lynwood was a natural and convenient option at a time when the housing stock in south LA was beginning to show its age. Changes since then reflect a further playing-out of a familiar part of the LoCali story: people chasing a nicer house to live in than they can afford nearby. They'll go for it even if they have to add an hour (or 2 or 3) to their daily commute.
When I was working minimum wage jobs in the Milwaukee parks system back in the 70's, the word was the black kids could be intimidated they only had balls if they had the numbers, but watch out for the Mexicans, they all carry knives and they will take on anyone, its the machismo culture thing. Today they are like Eastern European immigrants of my youth, just another ethnic. But black is still black, unchanged.
My hunch is that the racial tensions were fueled more by the gang violence that was much more prevalent in the 90s across demographics, and the fact that racial tensions were so high was only because they served as a crude proxy for the fact that there was about to be trouble. If you were in a Latino neighborhood and you saw a group of Asians role through, they may not be dangerous but it’s better to assume they are. So it’s more akin to how in the wrong neighborhoods, if you’re wearing a red shirt they arent going to consider whether you might just be a Chiefs fan, they’ll just go to violence straight away. From what I understand, law enforcement really cracked down on organized crime in the 90s/2000s and a lot of the major players were thrown in jail. So once the racial gangs were weakened, tensions naturally decreased since it was only a small % of men driving the whole thing. Violence and crime today seems much more individualized, chaotic, and gangs more small scale.
This is a good guess. Fear of violence is the main thing that sustains divides between peoples. It’s what sustains the black-white divide (or perhaps increasingly, black-everyone else).
In the absence of violence and predatory crime, other groups are a nuisance at worst.
Yeah I recently went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about some organized crime figures, ended up discovering how prevalent and powerful Asian gangs were in NYC up until the 90s. The drug trade was controlled largely by these gangs since they had connections for heroin in Southeast Asia. But the Mafia, African American gangs, etc were all bringing in insane amounts of money until I noticed all of the big players got taken out around the same time and most got the book thrown at them. A lot of guys flipped at that time as well and all of a sudden the US gangs weren’t as powerful, and my assumption is that Mexican cartels filled that void and have become extremely powerful. US Violent crime was very high at that time, but there was often millions of dollars at stake and people were getting taken out. Today crime is much more small scale, and I feel like driven by the desire to intimidate as an end in and of itseld. This is why the rise in crime in 2020 was very concerning to me.
Is that wokeness though? As you mentioned, democrats are pushing the MENA category on the census in order to distinguish them from whites. To me, wokeness wants to reify racial/ethnic barriers so long as it doesn't manifest in anti-black or anti-LGBT ways.
That bit about inter-Asian conflict is interesting. I grew up going to an upscale suburban public school in the 90s that was majority white (including many Jews) but with a very large Asian minority -- maybe 30%, roughly split 50/50 between East and South Asians, and very, very few blacks or Hispanics.
There was some cultural affinity within the East Asian and South Asian groups but no conflicts I ever detected. It was pretty common for a white kid and Asian child of immigrants to be very good friends, in some cases best friends.
So I wonder if that’s a class thing, or if it’s the difference a white majority makes.
I think the white majority does ameliorate it to a degree, but I think a lot of Asian kids can slip into it later in life when they try to find their "identity" and drift towards Asian majority areas like the SGV.
I grew up in LA and my cousin from Flushing went to Stuyvesant and he knew about the video I posted and had similar feelings about Koreans. Like I said, I don't think those animosities persisted.
Here's some internet history that might sound made up, but it was my experience. During the Friendster era, there were a lot of different clones and microblogging sites that appeared. One of them that was big for a tiny second was Xanga and when they lost to all the other sites; it devolved into a primarily Asian American microblogging site. The biggest account on Xanga in this era was an account called "stilladick"
His whole thing was he was a Korean guy who shit on all the other Asians. I think he might've coined the Jungle Asian term. The guy was pretty hilarious though and he also had this side thing of girls would send him pics and he would just shit on them. It was like that Vice format; I forget what it's called, but the thing Gavin Mcinnes did. I think he was doxxed so removed all his stuff; I think he was a finance-bro in NYC. There were accounts dedicated to kind of reacting to him; Chinese guys making fun of Koreans, but they weren't as good.
Illustration of the conflict between Koreans and other Asians. This video was really popular among Asian Americans in the 2000s. These guys went to Mark Keppel high: one is vietnamese and the other Japanese imitating the general stereotype of Koreans and their greivances.
I also grew up in the SGV, but was a teen a little earlier, around the late 80's early 90's. I think it was worse than the late 90s. I actually had a childhood acquaintance shot and killed on Main St. by some Asian gang members. I'm pretty sure he deserved it, and it made the neighborhood safer, sad to say. He ran around with Mexican gangs, but was actually white (or a mix). Anyway, in my experience (as someone of mixed Mexican descent) it was us that caused most of the problems. The Asian gangs often kept to themselves unless picked on. They were more of a problem for other Asians (like home invasions).
Like you said, these days everyone does seem to get along. It's great melting pot. I prefer it to the actual city of LA.
BTW, the Mexican attacks on blacks, from what I recall was more in the Highland Park area, by the Avenues gang. Maybe it occurred elsewhere also, but I mostly heard about it there.
It's pretty wild how silly and unresearched Hanania's post is. I'm not even old enough to have experienced much of this directly and if you do any reading at all you know that actually there have been A LOT of what he describes as "nationalist" movements focused on the narrow interests of particular ethnic categories: Chicanos, Dominicans, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and on and on.
Blacks have been least balkanized because they have the smallest immigrant population and face the most uniform discrimination - Caribbean immigrants were brutalized by Florida police the same as American descendants of slaves despite different ethnic origins and cultures.
Hanania, who is a virulent racist, is just doing a natural and very uncreative triage. Having been called out for being a nazi he is narrowing his hatred towards the people he hates most: blacks. He is basically calling for conservatives to focus their racial hatred towards blacks. It won't work because they simply can't help themselves.
Please name these non-Black nationalist movements and where they are right now relative to the sheer scale of BLM and the Black ghettos found in nearly every major American city.
A "ghetto" is not a movement. It is a concentrated pool of poverty created intentionally through decades of U.S. government policy. How big is BLM? What is BLM? Who is in BLM? Even Hanania doesn't present BLM as being relevant to this story at all.
America's "Chocolate Cities" have always been conscious and proud of their ethnic identity, represented by mayors who reflect the skin tone of their constituents and who decry racism while overseeing mass crime that results in non-Blacks leaving.
Yeah. I actually most racists are "casual racists" that don't make it their mission to spread racist ideology or socially engineer racist outcomes like Hanania.
Extremely important article--fantastic work. This is something everyone on the Right needs to internalize.
In 2013-2015 a bunch of journos misread the 2012 exit polls while massively underestimating Castizo assimilation into White society. The subsequent gloating about Whites becoming a minority in Buzzfeed articles and talk shows made a lot of guys like me radicalize and become White Nationalists for a few years. But if we understood what was actually happening this never would have occurred, and the nation would have had a much healthier discourse during the 2010s. So many young guys had their lives ruined at Charlottesville for no reason.
Ultimately White America has a weird, toxic, almost quasi-religious relationship with black people where we constantly cycle between worshipping and imitating them, ignoring or disdaining them, and trying to make them like us.
I think the most healthy path forward would be a Reparations plan proposed by a GOP leader who codes as pro-White, like Vance or Hawley, and can sell it in a "Nixon Goes to China" way. This plan would require Black leaders like Sharpton, Obama, Jay-Z, Kanye, Oprah et al to sign a Declaration of Forgiveness that formally absolves all White people of any guilt over slavery and accepts that Affirmative Action is over.
This could be accompanied by a large monument and a National Day of Racial Healing where White and Black families are encouraged to have barbecues together or something. Maybe pour federal funding into an initiative that encourages White and Black Southerners to explore their shared heritage and build a sense of ethnic kinship.
I think White conservatives would overwhelmingly support this if it meant permanently abolishing the Race Card in all aspects of life (this kind of sentiment is basically why Obama won Indiana and North Carolina in 2008). You could also use the massive short-term wealth transfer to Blacks as cover to dismantle a lot of the welfare state long term.
Great post. I like the idea of a Republican supporting reparations and tying it to abolishing AA or something, but I don’t see any politician having the skill to do something that creative.
It's hard to envision now because the Orange Man is sucking up all the oxygen on the Right and nothing else can germinate. But after his second term or eventual death there will be a huge intellectual and emotional vacuum, and that will allow space for bold new ideas.
I think DeSantis specifically would and could pull this off. But he seems unelectable at the moment and needs to take public speaking lessons to become just 30% less visibly autistic. With a bit more practice he wouldn't be any less telegenic than Nixon (who he actually resembles temperamentally in a whole host of ways). And he was actually okay in the last debate of the 2024 primary, but it was too little too late.
It would also help if you, Richard Hanania, used your current clout to cultivate a relationship with people close to his team in the same way Matt Yglesias does with the Biden people. I think you could eventually get Meatball to read a white paper that argues for adopting this as his central policy for a 2028 run. IMO DeSantis will go for it if the argument is good. I think he realizes at this point that most Republicans are morons and he's just going to get cucked by Don Jr. or Vivek without a game changer to hang his hat on, especially since everyone will have forgotten his Covid response by 2028.
And DeSantis is cunning enough to realize that Black Reparations sold to the GOP in explicitly pro-White terms would be political dynamite--exactly what he needs to seize back control of the GOP from people more naturally charming than him. It would enable him to drop traditional dogwhistling and actually say the words "White People", which not even Trump did and would make his rivals look like pussies. Meanwhile you would get tons of young black guys on TikTok etc. fanatically supporting DeSantis wanting their bag and making fun of the oldheads for being loyal to the Democrats. And you could even win back affluent suburban white women by playing up the reconciliation angle.
The energy would be like combining 2008's Obamania with the 2016 Alt Right and 2020's #YangGang. It would probably produce Reagan margins in a realignment that would enable Republicans to dance on the graves of the Democrat Party for a generation.
I'm going to be writing a lot in favor of this strategy in the coming months, so please reach out in the DMs if you'd be interesting in collaborating to make this happen!
No this would require a once in a generation communicator to do something this new and different. People are confused by anything creative. DeSantis couldn’t even seem likable and normal in a regular campaign, he can’t do this. You’d need someone on the charisma level of Reagan, Clinton, or Obama. Rare talents.
But GOP Reparations would only be pursued at this juncture by someone a little spergy and contrarian. No establishment pol or true MAGA populist would touch it because they are almost all low openness people.
Vivek would probably be interested behind the scenes and has the charisma you talk about, but he'd prob be the first to tell you this would need to be advocated by a racist-coded white guy to have the right punch and would never sell coming from him.
You really need someone who's a bit of a freak for this, like DeSantis or Blake Masters.
And DeSantis doesn't need to be likeable, he needs to be *dominant*. Republicans respect strength above all else. Someone like Newt Gingrich is incredibly unlikable but he won SC and Georgia by being a contrarian nerd who could intellectually dominate Romney in direct exchanges. If Santorum had dropped out earlier 2012 probably would have been a lot more competitive. DeSantis needs to emulate Gingrich and be mean but very smart and very aggressive. His awkwardness comes from trying to seem nice or like he cares about people's kids etc.
Tell him to forget about that. Instead coach him to lean into being a mean pedantic nerd. Approach the other guys on stage like a Gitmo jag officer. Don't do the weird fake smile. Instead scowl and reproach your rivals for being idiots pandering the lowest common denominator and turning the GOP into a party of grifters.
Call Vivek a pump and dump snake oil salesman. Maybe do a little dogwhistle as a treat for the DR and say he's cynically misrepresenting his own religion as monotheistic to "CURRY favor with Iowans". There is no way Vivek can respond to that because he built his entire campaign around saying conservatives aren't racist and something that grug-brained will catch him off guard.
Call Don Jr. a talentless nepo baby and constantly talk about how he's dating Gavin's sloppy seconds or say Baron should be running instead. Just be an absolute asshole to everyone.
When DeSantis is in a mean headspace he is quick on his feet because that is who he truly is. It will lose him corny Iowan evangelicals but NH will like this sort of thing and he'll crush SC by getting blacks to cross parties.
You have to figure this would somehow result in both reparations and turbo affirmative action and a national day of penitence for slavery. When is the last time anything got less work on the federal level.
I would be utterly shocked if a Republican could convince the anti-woke right-wing to sign on to reparations as their primary campaign promise. I don't think even Trump could do it, and he's probably the one with the best shot given the apparent cult-like loyalty he inspires among many conservative voters.
White and Black southerners already do this. The only real issues you will find in the South (contrary to media) is working Black and Whites against ghetto blacks and trailer park whites. That's the real divide here.
It seems to be working class black and whites against ghetto blacks, and everyone against trailer park whites. Literally no one gives a shit about white trash. This isn't a personal grievance, I'm not white trash, and I don't like them much either.
Almost. I'm not white trash, either, but my husband came.from that type of family. We've been married forever and he came my way, so he's not, either. The only thing wrong with your statement is that ghetto/trash vote with highly-educated white people. Which is weird on a voting level, but in life, they don't really come into contact with those people. The middle-class and upper-middle do socialize and I prefer hanging out with the middle-class of every race than the others.
Is there any data or evidence that white trash regularly vote in alignment with Dems?
I grew up in a trailer in rural Alabama and was probably at least white trash-adjacent...and the trashiest of the white trash would gladly avoid working and hoover up as much welfare as they could, but they simultaneously tended to vote (if they voted) for the Republicans. And they couldn't stand to be on the same side as the ghetto blacks. So this doesn't match my experience at all.
Maybe this is a generational thing? They were still a few quasi-populist (or at least anti-rich) blue dog democrats rattling around when in the 70s and 80s, but they were clearly on their last legs by the early 90s.
Nah, you're mostly right. They dont vote at all. A lot of them run their mouth, but when the day comes, they are not about to get up and go vote. I used to think they leaned more R than D, too. But, when I said something to that affect the last time we went to visit, I was informed they aren't voting for anybody that might take their check and medicaid. I think if any of them do vote, it's because there's something on the ticket they want. Like weed. (Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with weed).
I was one of those white nationalists, and I concur. It really bothers me when people like Cathy Young chastise Richard when he and his "associated acts", for lack of a better term, for being "racist" when his comment section alone has a better idea of how to defeat white nationalism than any institution devoted to the cause.
As for your reparations plan, I don't think "black leaders" would be dumb enough to fall for it. They know that their career lies in agitating for handouts forever. Still, it's a great pitch!
problem is Cathy Young doesn't want to defeat WN, she wants to humiliate it, and is willing to expend political capital to do so in situations that are counterproductive and just provoke a thermostatic backlash You can't negotiate or reason with hateful people like this because they are not rational actors.
When negotiating with the Left you have to deal with people like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias, or most old black people, who will hear you out and are perfectly willing to negotiate with you in a transactional way. These people just want to secure an optimal outcome for their ideology and don't care about humiliating you.
The people to avoid are affluent credentialist White women who live in a universe of obsessive status seeking and complex social games, as well as downwardly mobile white guys with tattoos who hate their dad. These people want to see you suffer and will burn political capital for literally no other purpose.
The key is to build an incentive structure that rewards Matt Yglesias liberals for moving the discourse in a way that silences Karens and antifa.
>I think the most healthy path forward would be a Reparations plan proposed by a GOP leader who codes as pro-White, like Vance or Hawley, and can sell it in a "Nixon Goes to China" way. This plan would require Black leaders like Sharpton, Obama, Jay-Z, Kanye, Oprah et al to sign a Declaration of Forgiveness that formally absolves all White people of any guilt over slavery and accepts that Affirmative Action is over.<
This seems naive. As you point out a bit further down, this was already sold to people by Obama, and then he went right back to the race-baiting well when he perceived that it would help him. More importantly this was already the entire idea behind the Civil Rights movement as a whole, trying to have a "colorblind" society. Affirmative action and other DEI crap are already a form of reparations. It's been 60 years and where has that project gotten us?
At best, this might buy a temporary reprieve, at the cost of yet another huge unnecessary government wealth transfer. Then in 5-10 years when the money has all been blown and racial outcomes are still as unequal as ever, blacks would come right back to the well demanding more. It's a bit weird to see Hanania endorsing this when it seems like his line of thinking on Israel/Palestine should apply here--if you cave to reparations demands from the likes of Al Sharpton, you're just going to teach them that their racial grievance-mongering can pay off big time, just like the Palestinian cause being kept alive by all the bones that people keep throwing to it.
The only way to shut down this garbage permanently would be with the stick, not the carrot. This has largely succeeded with regards to white nationalism, a fringe ideology for losers and whackos that is kept thoroughly in check because society does not hesitate to impose very heavy costs on those who espouse it.
lol you do realize Blacks have received on net 40 trillion from welfare (minus their contributions)
Also it clearly would never be enough and it would not solve their dysfunction. You just have to state plainly blacks have received net 40 trillion and 60 years of race quotas which has never happened before in history, every group has passed them and they need to figure out why.
The point of this isn't that they deserve it. Obviously they have already received 100x their contribution in free cotton picking labor etc. from welfare and AA. But to properly internalize this kind of logic someone probably needs at least a 110 IQ and an 80th percentile disagreeable nature. It's trivial to find people like that in Hanania's comment section but the real world is run by hyperarticulate grifters manipulating rich women into crying to their mostly disengaged husbands and getting them to cut a huge check to horrible anti-White organizations. That is who you need to target to castrate anti White sentiment.
The point of Right Wing Reparations is to give White people a sense of moral certitude and consistency that lets us be more assertive with blacks. In particular you need a mechanism to get people under 25 and affluent women to not be extremely naive and softhearted by pointing to a big central event that "wiped the slate clean" morally. We need to make sure 2020 never happens again by creating a compelling moral narrative that works on the mushiest and most sentimental among us. Otherwise you will get the same cycle repeating over and over.
If the truth and good arguments mattered one whit then Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer would have triumphed 20 years ago.
This sounds extremely naive .Too much people benefit from the current situation of racial polarization. The black liberal upper class would go bankrupt.
"Ultimately White America has a weird, toxic, almost quasi-religious relationship with black people where we constantly cycle between worshipping and imitating them, ignoring or disdaining them, and trying to make them like us."
100 TIMES YES
also how great would it be to see all those black celebs on a stage like the signers of the Declaration of Independence? There would need to be at least one Kardashian involved and then a Beyonce show live from the steps of the Capitol...
I believe that Ron Unz argues along similar lines. He loves the new Asian-Hispanic ascendancy in California, and is also exasperated with the white-nationalist right. Steve Sailer sometimes argues that the most salient division of humanity is “black vs. nonblack.”
Normal Asian & Hispanic people may be perfectly happy to live in the US, but there are also a nontrivial number of Sarah Jeongs who see that white-bashing is rewarded with high status. https://twitter.com/ArminNavabi/status/1025015489729196032
White libs may not *cause* black nationalism, but they certainly do all they can to further its success. White libs are why white-nationalism is a complete nonstarter. How are you supposed to deal with 50% of your putative ‘white nation’ loving Ibram Kandi and hating Stonewall Jackson? Counterfactually, if “Albion’s seed” had come from Balkan/Slavic/Mediterranean whites instead of Northern Euro Protestant whites, there’s no way that American whites would have greased the skids for Black nationalism to they extent that they have in fact done.
To what extent are Black African immigrants seduced by the siren song of Black Nationalism? Quite a number of them seem to be successful, conservative business-oriented Christians who aren’t big fans of the US “ghetto culture” they encounter. I mean, by definition, such immigrants have had first-hand experience with living under Black Nationalism, which for some reason they were willing to abandon in order to be oppressed by American White Supremacy an ocean away. In fact, Gallup suggests that 30 percent of Black Africans living under Black Nationalism would prefer to voluntarily place themselves under the bootheel of Western White Supremacy, for some strange reason https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx
Thanks to affirmative action, black immigrants have a huge incentive to join black nationalism. I think a majority of black students at elite schools are non-ADOS. In the political sphere, look at Obama and Harris, who are 50% black and 0% ADOS.
Right -- and this doesn't just apply to black immigrants but to highly enterprising blacks in general. I'm acquainted with a highly enterprising, intelligent, and affable black man, who actually is ADOS. He probably could have been successful in many domains of business, but he ended up setting up a holding company that controls a local empire of businesses within a particular city that are designed to extract affirmative action and DEI rents from state, local, Federal, NGO, and corporate sources there. And he plays the game quite well.
Naturally, he's not about to advocate shutting down that gravy train. And he's in the process of handing over his organization to his kids. He's the only guy like this I know, but I imagine there are many such cases throughout the country among the black upper class.
I hope he has lots of kids. I am generally pro-natalist. Especially for smart people. Smart black people aren’t having enough kids.
And it also dilutes the grift. Which is good.
If we’re gonna have any affirmative action policy, I support 0 income tax for any black guy with 3+ kids. Only 53% of Americans pay income tax so it’s likely 25% of black Americans.
Yes yes I know not politically feasible. But I’m at least glad he has kids.
Sure, he has 3 grown kids, all of them well-educated and accomplished. Married to the same woman his whole life. Attends a historic black church. He lives a good and clean life, personally very socially conservative but of course doesn’t vote that way. I’ll have done well if my family ends up as well as his.
EDIT: Just to make the story better, he grew up fairly poor, in a large family in the South. But his parents, though fairly uneducated, were hardworking and wise and stayed together. All of his siblings also did pretty well (though not as well as him).
The stats show a burst of black class mobility in the first few decades after Civil Rights (which subsequently declined), and in my mind they're the exemplars of it.
Meanwhile, the whole DEI movement is probably bad for the black lower class people with luxury beliefs like defunding the police. As a real "Hananiac", I hate the populist argument that DEI is elitist and a substitute for working-class socialism (which would be way worse) and therefore bad. But when just talking about the Black American population maybe it has some truth in it which is why people do spout this line.
Interesting essay, mostly true in my experience living in the USA as a middle-class immigrant.
I see a lot of anti-black social sentiment around me but I suppose that’s the rational result of black lefty activists dominating social discourse on what ails America.
I’d love to see Richard and others write more on “Blacks vs Everyone Else” as it’s an under explored topic.
It also includes the 2-3% who are Jewish, so it's of course NOT a Nazi reference. I guess 88 has some Nazi connotations, not intended like that at all. It was just that 88 is a multiple of 11 so that the digits are the same, and is the next one down after 99, so I wanted to imitate Occupy Wall Street.
Also this is extremely good politics, for those of us who are non-ADOS non-Native Americans, we are children of immigrants. We can point out that affirmative action is actually discrimination and quotas against immigrants and their descendants, and that this is xenophobic. I do think that "core Americans" really are immigrants and their descendants. America is a nation of immigrants. This leaves ADOS and Native Americans in a weird place.
I've said for a while that "diversity" is mostly a euphemism for black people.
This article seems largely correct. Unfortunately, what this means is that, if we are ever to leave ethno-nationalism behind and progress well and truly towards a real "post-racial" society, we are going to have to leave blacks behind as well. Blacks have only ever engaged in democratic politics through the lens of racial tribalism, and there is no evidence to suggest that they are capable of doing otherwise. At some point, if we are to do away with racial conflict, the rest of us will have to become apathetic to the tribal concerns of blacks.
This is actually, I think, the only correct answer. Race is also synonymous with Blackness. Which is why examples of racism are only about Black people. (This is part of why I don't engage in BIPOC theory; only Black people are "of color").
I think developing a class oriented view is a good way of leaving Black Nationalism behind because I've seen in real time Black people reject this view. I think every day about how Black people in general wont ever develop a class framework. But if you don't engage Black complaints you get called a racist.
So I think people need to stop being afraid of being called a racist first, which can create a problem where actual racism gets ignored. But going after white liberal worship of Black victimhood is a good place to start.
The truth is, if there were a true paradigm shift where people no longer care about black tribalism, there likely would be more incidences of genuine anti-black racism that get ignored. You'd just have to acknowledge that's worth it in exchange for stopping the obsessions with race more generally. Reality is messy, everything has trade-offs, and there is never a perfect solution where no one is an asshole.
I wonder if that is correct though. I think it just wouldnt make the news. Hate Crime Hoax talks about people lying about hate crimes and the fervor they entail mostly in large part due to the media. Candace Owens had an experience where she experienced some racial antagonism that ballooned because one of the white boys was the son of the Mayor. She says the NAACP came out and sidnt talk to her or anything. There's an economy for hate crimes.
I dont think hate crimes or garden variety of anti Blackness would increase. I think that the veneer would just fall away and reveal how much everyone already dislikes Black people.
The trade off, as you put it, would that Black people couldnt leverage the economy of Black grievance. Like I am often surprised white leftists arent more upset with Black people because a race centered lens helped cost Bernie Sanders the vote when he was running.
I just think the power of calling people out would be erased, which was a power reserved for a select few already.
Exactly. "POC" was created just to inflate black numbers by making all non-whites pseudo-black--but only when convenient. And we can see that "diversity" indeed just means black when the 80% black NBA wins awards for being "diverse," while actually diverse MLB gets criticized for supposedly having an underrepresentation of blacks (it doesn't).
No, because blacks also have agency. If the rest of us decide that we will not listen to black nationalism any longer, but blacks generally continue to parrot black nationalism as their primary ideology, then the obvious result must be that we leave them behind, in the sense that we stop caring about what they have to say.
Some individual blacks will certainly opt out of the racial tribe hive mind, as some already do right now. There are some "based blacks" that support Trump and there are people like Larry Elder and what have you. And those people will be part of the conversation, just like they are now. But those blacks who choose not to engage in politics through the lens of race have always been a small minority of blacks in general, and again, there is no reason to believe that this will ever change. For the majority of blacks who continue to engage in racial grievance-mongering, everyone else must look at them and say, "we don't care anymore."
Sure. But the best thing for black Americans is generally the best thing for all Americans - GDP growth, life expectancy growth, technological advancement, etc - rather than us listening to their specific group interests.
Well sure, this is almost certainly true. As we can see from the fact that none of the black people complaining about racism seem particularly eager to immigrate over to the supermajority-black continent of Africa.
Or even to a developed country in the Anglosphere like the UK or Canada where there is more generous welfare and the black population does much better but the GDP/capita is lower.
Interestingly enough, when in other countries we speak about "importing racial categories from the US", we use the categories that fit this narrative you just presented.
The last Argentinean census had those exact three questions: check if Native, check if African, check if Else. I think this reflects that Argentinean progressives have accurately evaluated that in order to be perceived by the US as having "a legitimate and conscious racial politics", they only really care about us contending with Native and Black issues (despite our history not necessarily aligning with US experiences, of course). There isn't a domestic effort or a foreign demand to compartimentalize, say, Asians in the same way.
This very same process is underway in Australia with the rise of Indigenous nationalism, which was born in the 60s (copying the US as always), lost steam in the early 2000s, and now since the great awokening is arguably the most powerful force in Australian political life, despite Indigenous people being ~3% of the population (and many of those being racially + culturally + economically assimilated into mainstream society). Australia is stuck in this hopeless cycle of giving enormous and ever growing political, legal, economic and symbolic concessions to 'Indigenous issues', while outcomes for the Indigenous underclass continue to stagnate if not actively deteriorate. When these concessions naturally fail to 'Close the Gap' (because they don't remotely address the actual causes of Indigenous disadvantage), activists simply double down and demand that the state give more concessions, which of course doesn't achieve anything except empower a minority of Indigenous elites and give the group more symbolic status. (This was what the failed Voice to Parliament was)
Also naturally, the conservative Liberal party (confusing for Americans I know) has been completely unable to resist the rise of Indigenous nationalism, so that it is now completely taboo across the political spectrum to meaningfully oppose it. It is difficult to see this changing anytime soon.
We can’t become honest about race for the simple reason that if we were to do so, blacks would begin to vote for their own interests rather than as the interestless D-voting bloc they’ve been since 1928. If they did, the D party would evaporate. D leadership will always keep lighting the race fire because they know this.
That's kind of what's happening in slow motion already.
Center white voters have moved from a slightly liberal bias in 2012 to a slightly conservative bias in 2022. Center Hispanic, Asian and Black voters have moved from deeply liberal to less liberal on average (Ruffini 2023).
It is postulated that many non-white voters have always been more conservative than they voted in the past because they did not trust the Republican candidates to defend them as constituents. But that is changing and now more non-white voters can "be themselves" and publicly/legislatively support their actual conservative beliefs.
-country of origin (select country if less than third generation no mixed and still assimilating)
The reality is we are a mulatto nation (that’s what assimilation is), it’s embarrassing for people who have been here for 5 generations to call themselves have German half Italian, they’re American ethnically as they don’t speak the language or share the culture and non of those countries would claim them. The best way to look at it is there are genetics, ethnicity and nationality. If it was phrased this way we could see which groups make the best immigrants and still have people join the ethnic core as naturally happens in three generations.
I have ancestors that I can trace to the Huguenot community in New Netherland, but others came over in the Ellis Island era and left me with an odd surname. My paternal grandparents grew up in the US, but in a highly ethnic neighborhood. My father didn't, but still identified heavily with the culture and imparted at least a few things onto me. I'm not embarrassed to identify with it in some sense, though I don't generally lead with it.
Also, when your surname is odd, people like to ask where it's from. They might ask if you speak the language or ask questions about the place. After having that conversation so many times (even as a child), it reinforces the sense of being distinct from the WASPs.
I grew up alongside many Catholics, and I could see that being ancestrally Catholic also can have this effect; it's a family ethnic tradition still kept alive. You tend to remember your "Irishness" or "Italianness" a little more if it's backed up by even a token commitment to Catholicism.
I can contrast this with my pure-WASP Southern wife, who is truly and deeply "ethnically American." Her entire family, when asked where their ancestors came from are rather puzzled by the question. They might start to name nearby towns where various grandparents or great-grandparents grew up. When I was first getting to know her, we really had to work through the logic and the history for her to finally arrive at a tentative answer of "England," something she had clearly never thought about in her life. By contrast, I could have told you where my surname came from by age 6.
All that to say, there is something different about these two experiences, in terms of the sense of place and origin it leaves you with -- even if, as you say, there's no other country that would have you. Whether it's a difference worth recording on the Census, perhaps not, but it's a difference nonetheless.
Ethnicity is all about cohesion and proximity. Northern and southern Italians see distinctions but outside of Italy no one knows. The key is just changing the census and the idea of ethnicity into an Anglo mulatto one where people just have hints of their cultural ancestors but identify as ethnic Americans
Great post. Agreed on the Catholic + ethnicity point. I cannot count the number of Irish-Americans I know whose ancestors came here in the late 19th century and proudly wear their Irishness on their sleeve and strongly identify as Irish despite not ever having set foot in Ireland (for generations,) not speaking Gaelic or knowing much of the culture other than St. Patrick's Day, drinking and the Catholic church (mostly as a cultural relic). My best friend who is half Irish/ half Italian but grew up more Irish, has a cladagh engagement ring from her husband who knew how important her Irishness is to her. All the 5+ kids families I knew growing up were Irish Catholics, despite being here for generations.
What I find hilarious that that the UK also has lots of ethnic Irish who have been there for years the way the US does, but in my experience many of them don’t identify as Irish but rather generally as “English Catholics” despite a white Irish box on the census. White Irish is generally understood to mean recent. Irish immigrant.
That's surprising given the hatred the Irish have for the English. Maybe they blend into the English Catholic population because they feel like outsiders together due to the English persecution of Catholics in England?
I am always amazed by the persistence of Irish identity in the US, even if superficial. Many of the cops, firefighters, teachers and government employees still tend to be Irish in my area, despite a small population and much assimilation. It's like Tammany Hall still here.
Surely being Catholic must come up at some point and like goes to like and all. Still interesting English has seemingly assimilated Irish Catholics more than America.
Whenever people discuss intermarriage, my first question is how are the kids raised? It's often one side being favored, not both being given equal status.
One of my theories is that the reason why the left and the pro black interests movement has gone so gung ho on afrocentrism is due to the fact that the 1960’s civil rights era paradigm on race is coming to an end.
For one, Hispanics, Asians, and other groups combined outnumber blacks now, and their interests clash with what Tariq Nasheed would call FBA interests. Thus while Democrats (despite not anywhere near as much as they used to) still win the latter demographics, they have a far deeper connection and vice versa with the black community. And black interest groups correctly view the newer populations as having interests different to theirs.
All types of Asians oppose affirmative action and while it hurts whites greatly as well (the demographic it was historically designed to) Asian activism was pretty central to eliminating it. Hispanics are not a centralized group at all but none of them seem to care much for blacks or vice versa, and their interests collide frequently. I think the woke/pro black wing of the Democrats realize this and went full in on black interests, even in states like CA with very few blacks.
Another and arguably a more explicit and important reason is due to the days of the civil rights regime slowly coming to an end. Part of it is due to the above factors I mentioned but also, said CR regime is getting weakened legally and thus becoming less popular. I think that Obama’s regime during his second term may have predicted this, which is why they went all in on black nationalism, although Obama has always been a very weird and lefty figure who has always held a chip on his shoulder.
Regardless I agree with this article as a whole, and while I don’t personally believe increased immigration will further combat the CR/Black nationalist regime, I would recommend more conservative lawfare as well as the GOP building a type of coalition against not only psuedo black nationalism but this idiocy as a whole. It’s more sustainable than the “multiracial working class” long term after Trump is out of the picture.
Was going to say something similar. I applaud Richard for recognizing and naming BN for what it is. I think a lot of the intensity around it now recognizes that the paradigm is shifting disfavorably for them. The new population will not be so easily guilted into co-signing endless BS
I think the whole "white guilt" narrative, where all white people are guilty or whatever, made much more sense in the 1960s. Of course, it never made THAT much sense. While large parts of the country did have slavery and Jim Crow and anti-black sentiments were widespread, even a small minority of *Southern Anglos* ever owned slaves. When you talk about the whole country and add all of the post-1865 immigration through Ellis Island, it's clear that even then only a minority of the white population had a personal connection to the worst kinds of anti-black hatred. But at least Italians, Greeks, and Jews do look *something* like Jefferson Davis or George Wallace even if they are a bit darker. You add Hispanics and Asians to the mix though, and it's checkmate.
Along these lines, it seems that “cultural appropriation” is something blacks care about but other groups seem not to and in fact enjoy seeing white Americans partake in their culture.
See videos here contrasting reactions of college students with actual Mexicans and Chinese whose cultures are being “appropriated”:
Reminds me about why black-aligned activists popularized “people of color.” That term suggests some commonality among sundry non-whites. It’s shorthand for a political coalition. Like, originally, when someone identified as a “person of color,” they aligned with black nationalists despite not being black or even having anti-black views. To me, “BIPoC” and “white-adjacent” seems like strategic error. But some people can’t resist ethno-narcissism or purity-signaling, I guess. Interesting, “default American” is like “people of color” but in reverse, aligning non-blacks with whites.
Also, about Latins and Asians, I was thinking about Fujimori (also Bukele). Seems like Asianness is not as big of deal in Latin America as it is in North America? Might have even been a plus for Fujimori, with the 80s being Japan’s golden age.
America is not alone in the world. From the experience of other countries, it is clear that there are two other identities that will greatly complicate assimilation, even if they are marginal in America: Islam and Native American.
Muslims assimilate decently well in America I think. Europe not so much. But there it's different as you have a very large population of Muslims with lower skill levels and it's very concentrated.
There are tons of Algerians in France. The issue with France and Algeria and the pied noir and FLN doesn’t at all have a parallel for us. Morocco has always been a pro-Western monarchy with terrible relations with Algeria, sure.
Britain has colonial guilt the way the US has white guilt.
Anyway vast majority of Muslim Americans aren’t from Iraq or Afghanistan. British and French had troops all over the region. We have only in a few countries.
While the US has done various things in the Middle East and North Africa, it’s quite distinct from British and French colonization. Most countries in the region got their independence from Europeans. Algeria even had French settlers and fought a huge war. While the US was in Iraq and Afghanistan for a while, it’s not like these countries’ modern national stories begin with a war or independence struggle against America. Look at Egypt, the most populous country in the region. Nasser and Naguib on the jeep had to do with British and not Americans.
For good reason, the Israeli CBS classifies people as "Jews and Others" and "Arabs". Israel is more than happy to allow the free immigration of non-Jewish Russians with a distant family connection, and to in fact allow the migration of anyone married to a Jew, except those from an enemy state. Arab immigration not so much.
Hanania's proposal is similar, the US should have a category for "Whites and Others" and then for "Blacks", where Others are Asian and Hispanics. The Hispanics of mixed white and indigenous ancestry are analogous to the non-Jewish olim.
The overall point - that the real Balkanization, and the one with the most real-world ramifications, is Black vs. everyone else - is correct. But this feels like a hand-wave to me:
"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."
It's really not a non-issue. It's just baked in. It's a given that areas with large numbers of Indians will begin to vote for Indian interests. In some suburbs in my metro, school boards are increasingly East Asian and the schools are taking an East Asian style. (To be clear, I regard this as mostly a good thing, despite not being East Asian myself.) And one of the reasons that Hispanic enclaves remain Hispanic is that they run them as sundown towns. (Again, a perfectly rational thing to do.) These things ultimately do matter to the social fabric at a local level; and that's before we get into state and federal politics, where every group except Whites has all kinds of caucuses, grants, ethnic lobbyist organizations etc.
You have argued that this kind of mosaic (as opposed to melting pot) ultimately serves the body politic well because mutual mistrust will lead to less socialism. I disagree with this not just morally but because it's plainly not really happening. But at the local level the only way to say race is a non-issue is to ignore the manifold ways in which it's actually the biggest issue, because non-white demographics tend to stick together (as well they should.)
I think you need to rewrite the bit on the Voting Rights Act:
"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.
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."
The preceding paragraph makes it sound like the Voting Rights Act requires proportional representation among the legislature/our leaders. But it doesn't, as the next paragraph points out; it's about voting rights, not representation among the leadership as such.
This is important because the prior paragraph is used to frame the Voting Rights Act in a very odd way. Yes, it requires not just that black folks be allowed to vote but that there be a proportionate number of majority-minority districts, so black folks elect roughly the same proportion of legislators as they make up of the population.
You explain this as: "It assumes that people of this particular minority cannot be represented by outsiders."
That's just bizarre and not the case. Black folks can be represented by outsiders; majority black districts can and do elect representatives of other races.
What they cannot do is count on the rest of the population to be aligned with their interests, to vote for someone they'd align with. This is the result of being a minority population in a first past the post system.
Imagine if we elected a world government, and every leader would be chosen at large. When every leader was Chinese or Indian chosen by the people of those countries, we'd obviously gripe that giving us voting rights is rather meaningless if the voting system dilutes our power in this way. We'd obviously advocate for some kind of proportional representation system where, instead of having everyone elected at large, each region or people would get to elect someone of their choosing.
Crafting districts whence black folks can do that is imminently reasonable, particularly in light of the goals of the 14th and 15th amendment. As cool as it was having the political clout of the Dixiecrats magnified by their representation of black populations who were outvoted in every statewide and majority-majority election, it was not actually fair and did not provide the protections to black citizens that the drafters of those amendments intended.
Finally, I think you err on this issue because you view race primarily through a coastal and northern urban lens. That leads you to wonder why black folks need to have their own district where their vote is not diluted while Asians and Hispanics do not.
The answer is the other great people, whose nationalism is as stubbornly distinctive and maladaptive as black people - southern whites. In the deep south it's not just blacks who vote based on race; so did whites, and in many places we still do.
The rest of you elected the first black president in 2008, sweeping an educated black urban liberal into power after Bush's disastrous second term. In Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, President Obama won only between 10-15% of the white vote in each state - a solid 10% points behind John Kerry's performance in 2004. Yep, we somehow reacted to Bush's second term and the prospect of a third GOP presidential term by shifting millions of votes from the challenger the GOP.
Incongruous and inexplicable, unless you know anything at all about us. Then you know why only 10-15% of us voted for President Obama. And you know why we need majority-minority districts.
Hopefully this will change as more of the sough assimilates and is overrun by carpetbaggers - Georgia truly is an inspiration and model in this regard. But the deep south rejected Atlanta's capitalistic pragmatism a long time ago - why New Orleans remained a backwater as cities all around it, Atlanta,
In Texas, and in Tennessee thrived - so
i'm not optimistic.
In the meantime I'm thankful Louisiana has two congressional districts in which black folks are the majority and elect representatives. Otherwise we'd have zero, just six representatives elected by the majority white folks in each district despite no black support.
This is spicy! I think a lot about how no one, on the right or the left.l, take Black politics seriously. White leftists just accept whatever middle/upper middle class Blacks say online (but don't read books about Black history. They literally just repeat what they see/saw on Twitter).
Black people, being so race focused, become an impossible group to contend with politically. There are Black conservatives, but they dont seem to have a large platform and Black liberals tend to see these people are race traitors or Uncle Toms. Black liberals mandate a commitment to Woke ideology as part of being Black. The two are connected. There are some Black people are simply liberal, like whites, and are guided by similar principles. But I think experiencing racism at the ends of white liberals prevents a lot of Black liberals from being identical to their white counterparts. Likez every MLK Jr day, Black people like to remind white liberals about the note Dr. King wrote to white moderates. A lot of politicized Black people are deeply fixated on white racism and view the world through this lens of race and white racism.
Even though no one seems to be paying attention (??), people kinda give in anyway. And sometimes co-opt Black Nationalist ideas (ie Asians do this a lot) in their pursuit of an anti white politic that we call wokeism.
To say nothing of Black people who want to reclaim woke since it started as AAVE (a political deadend that serves no purpose except for white liberals to posit conservatives as racist every time they call something woke or complain about wokeness). Even though white liberals are also racist - a fact that doesnt seem to energize or interest Black Identity activists.
I loved this!
I often think of Black Nationalism as from the 60s but this is helpful too.
I grew up in the area that you now live in.
There was actually pretty big ethnic tensions in the 90s between the Asians and Mexicans when I went to school there. There were lots of Asian/Mexican street gangs then. When I was a teen, I thought it would be a semi-permanent conflict, but when I go back; it's pretty much disappeared. The ones who still hold the resentments are people from my generation, but the younger cohorts do not feel the same way.
You see this also among Asians: Koreans hated almost all other Asian groups when I was growing up. The younger ones now don't mind being pan-Asian and don't feel the hatred towards other Asians their parents felt (Koreans have this disposition because they have a made up history constructed by nationalists in Korea). Parents can't pass it on, especially in America.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-06-10-ga-1831-story.html
Fascinating. Could one perhaps argue that wokeness worked then?
I actually remember tensions between Arabs and whites in the 1990s when I was in grade school. Then I went back to the same area as a substitute teacher. Someone asked me about my ethnicity and another kid was like oh my god we don’t do that!
I said wow, these kids are ridiculously woke now. But maybe that kind of thinking is what ended racial tensions.
I'm not sure, but the biggest effect I see is it's a cohort thing. My cousins still feel resentment towards Koreans and haven't updated on how things have changed. These stories are largely unreported on because no one cares about these groups.
Back in the 90s/00s, there was this local reporter, Tony Rafael who had a blog that just focused on the Mexican Mafia: In the Hat. He was screaming for a long time about how the Mexican Mafia was doing race related killings of blacks to intimidate black people that was never picked up by any news outlets or serious journalists. I had friends that were in prison at the time also (Asians) and it was known that there was a green light on Asians in prison or you can kill any Asian with no repercussions by the Mexican Mafia.
https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/which-way-la/has-la-gang-violence-turned-into-ethnic-cleansing/has-la-gang-violence-turned-into-ethnic-cleansing
That area you live in. If you've seen the movie: Stand and Deliver. That high school that was the "worst of the worst" in that movie is a pretty nice place now. It's right near Monterey Park. I showed Stand and Deliver to some modern kids and it does not translate at all how people were afraid of Mexican people in LA or the US at the time. Maybe my memory is shoddy, but I could've sworn that Sailer's whole thing back then was anti-Mexican racism and not anti-black racism. That's come and gone too. Just a lot of this stuff people think is permanent or forever doesn't persist.
Interesting. It’s a cohort thing but I wonder why. Just because they were recent arrivals? Now Mexicans and Asians have been in the area for a few generations. I wonder if it’s that or it’s just the culture has changed.
I think the secret sauce is that capitalism works 😆
I remember Sailer making the argument that LA had gotten safer because Mexican gangs ethnically cleansed blacks (but that this was just moving the hot potato somewhere else).
Shows what he knows about that: not much. A lot of other factors were - and remain - in play. Concocting a fake notion of ethnic cleansing kinda certifies that guy’s status, though the story would never hold up to closer inspection. I went to high school in Lynwood, a close-in suburb across the street (Alameda) from Watts. By the time I graduated in the ‘All-American City’ had gone through an extensive demographic change. Blacks became the majority as whites moved out, but the Mexican pop. % stayed about the same. 30 years later the white remnant remained, many blacks had moved on, and the Mexican-American pop. had transformed into a pan-Hispanic group of various origins.
The ethnic replacement of Watts was a pretty deliberate and organized thing. People weren't throwing a dart at a map of LA and saying "aha, when we leave Mexico, we'll go to this place the dart landed... 'Vats.'" They came from the same regions, often the same families, and had a plan. Nothing wrong with that - that's how immigrant groups tend to end up in their enclaves. It's safer for them and it helps them get a start in their new environment if they can pool resources and rely on neighbors. But it's still a replacement.
That's where Weird Al grew up, right?
Yes. He lived right across the street from the high school. I lived a couple blocks away and we were friendly. He was smart - skipped ahead two grades and also the valedictorian of his class in '76 - and very funny. Too bad nobody had home video cameras yet - his graduation speech was hilarious. If tape of it did exist it would burn a hole through YouTube worldwide in about 2 hours.
The ethnic cleansing of blacks from Watts was something of an open secret but that's simply because you could see it happen in real time - a black family moved out and a Mexican one moved in. But I had not heard of targeted killings being a part of this in East LA.
Well, you'd have to say it worked. East LA is now entirely Hispanic (and almost entirely Mexican) and there are no blacks in Monterey Park.
East LA was predominantly Hispanic from way back, certainly by the late 60s. It's a stretch, though, to claim 'ethic cleansing' of blacks from Watts as a prime mover of demographic change. Interracial gang violence existed and certainly scared innocent people; it has occurred in other parts of the city since then, including relatively recently. But other major factors were in play. Lynwood was literally next door to Watts and had decent schools. The black population of Watts and south central included many people with middle class aspirations and the means to achieve them. My classmates included middle class kids who went on to become doctors, school teachers and admins, prosperous salesmen, etc. A huge factor in how they got there was the Century / 105 freeway project. Public domain condemnation of huge swaths of housing put the clamps on property values along the path of the project at a time when LoCali was headed for the beginning of a long period of skyrocketing appreciation, and that provided an opening for families that wanted out of Watts in the years after the riots; another significant factor was the abolition of restrictive housing covenants at around the same time. Lynwood was a natural and convenient option at a time when the housing stock in south LA was beginning to show its age. Changes since then reflect a further playing-out of a familiar part of the LoCali story: people chasing a nicer house to live in than they can afford nearby. They'll go for it even if they have to add an hour (or 2 or 3) to their daily commute.
When I was working minimum wage jobs in the Milwaukee parks system back in the 70's, the word was the black kids could be intimidated they only had balls if they had the numbers, but watch out for the Mexicans, they all carry knives and they will take on anyone, its the machismo culture thing. Today they are like Eastern European immigrants of my youth, just another ethnic. But black is still black, unchanged.
My hunch is that the racial tensions were fueled more by the gang violence that was much more prevalent in the 90s across demographics, and the fact that racial tensions were so high was only because they served as a crude proxy for the fact that there was about to be trouble. If you were in a Latino neighborhood and you saw a group of Asians role through, they may not be dangerous but it’s better to assume they are. So it’s more akin to how in the wrong neighborhoods, if you’re wearing a red shirt they arent going to consider whether you might just be a Chiefs fan, they’ll just go to violence straight away. From what I understand, law enforcement really cracked down on organized crime in the 90s/2000s and a lot of the major players were thrown in jail. So once the racial gangs were weakened, tensions naturally decreased since it was only a small % of men driving the whole thing. Violence and crime today seems much more individualized, chaotic, and gangs more small scale.
This is a good guess. Fear of violence is the main thing that sustains divides between peoples. It’s what sustains the black-white divide (or perhaps increasingly, black-everyone else).
In the absence of violence and predatory crime, other groups are a nuisance at worst.
Yeah I recently went down a Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about some organized crime figures, ended up discovering how prevalent and powerful Asian gangs were in NYC up until the 90s. The drug trade was controlled largely by these gangs since they had connections for heroin in Southeast Asia. But the Mafia, African American gangs, etc were all bringing in insane amounts of money until I noticed all of the big players got taken out around the same time and most got the book thrown at them. A lot of guys flipped at that time as well and all of a sudden the US gangs weren’t as powerful, and my assumption is that Mexican cartels filled that void and have become extremely powerful. US Violent crime was very high at that time, but there was often millions of dollars at stake and people were getting taken out. Today crime is much more small scale, and I feel like driven by the desire to intimidate as an end in and of itseld. This is why the rise in crime in 2020 was very concerning to me.
Is that wokeness though? As you mentioned, democrats are pushing the MENA category on the census in order to distinguish them from whites. To me, wokeness wants to reify racial/ethnic barriers so long as it doesn't manifest in anti-black or anti-LGBT ways.
That bit about inter-Asian conflict is interesting. I grew up going to an upscale suburban public school in the 90s that was majority white (including many Jews) but with a very large Asian minority -- maybe 30%, roughly split 50/50 between East and South Asians, and very, very few blacks or Hispanics.
There was some cultural affinity within the East Asian and South Asian groups but no conflicts I ever detected. It was pretty common for a white kid and Asian child of immigrants to be very good friends, in some cases best friends.
So I wonder if that’s a class thing, or if it’s the difference a white majority makes.
I think the white majority does ameliorate it to a degree, but I think a lot of Asian kids can slip into it later in life when they try to find their "identity" and drift towards Asian majority areas like the SGV.
I grew up in LA and my cousin from Flushing went to Stuyvesant and he knew about the video I posted and had similar feelings about Koreans. Like I said, I don't think those animosities persisted.
Here's some internet history that might sound made up, but it was my experience. During the Friendster era, there were a lot of different clones and microblogging sites that appeared. One of them that was big for a tiny second was Xanga and when they lost to all the other sites; it devolved into a primarily Asian American microblogging site. The biggest account on Xanga in this era was an account called "stilladick"
His whole thing was he was a Korean guy who shit on all the other Asians. I think he might've coined the Jungle Asian term. The guy was pretty hilarious though and he also had this side thing of girls would send him pics and he would just shit on them. It was like that Vice format; I forget what it's called, but the thing Gavin Mcinnes did. I think he was doxxed so removed all his stuff; I think he was a finance-bro in NYC. There were accounts dedicated to kind of reacting to him; Chinese guys making fun of Koreans, but they weren't as good.
Illustration of the conflict between Koreans and other Asians. This video was really popular among Asian Americans in the 2000s. These guys went to Mark Keppel high: one is vietnamese and the other Japanese imitating the general stereotype of Koreans and their greivances.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ptyzc4BQliY
I also grew up in the SGV, but was a teen a little earlier, around the late 80's early 90's. I think it was worse than the late 90s. I actually had a childhood acquaintance shot and killed on Main St. by some Asian gang members. I'm pretty sure he deserved it, and it made the neighborhood safer, sad to say. He ran around with Mexican gangs, but was actually white (or a mix). Anyway, in my experience (as someone of mixed Mexican descent) it was us that caused most of the problems. The Asian gangs often kept to themselves unless picked on. They were more of a problem for other Asians (like home invasions).
Like you said, these days everyone does seem to get along. It's great melting pot. I prefer it to the actual city of LA.
BTW, the Mexican attacks on blacks, from what I recall was more in the Highland Park area, by the Avenues gang. Maybe it occurred elsewhere also, but I mostly heard about it there.
https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2006/August/06_crt_481.html
They were hit pretty hard by the police and gentrification. Which is great, cause that place was a real s-hole for a while.
It's pretty wild how silly and unresearched Hanania's post is. I'm not even old enough to have experienced much of this directly and if you do any reading at all you know that actually there have been A LOT of what he describes as "nationalist" movements focused on the narrow interests of particular ethnic categories: Chicanos, Dominicans, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, and on and on.
Blacks have been least balkanized because they have the smallest immigrant population and face the most uniform discrimination - Caribbean immigrants were brutalized by Florida police the same as American descendants of slaves despite different ethnic origins and cultures.
Hanania, who is a virulent racist, is just doing a natural and very uncreative triage. Having been called out for being a nazi he is narrowing his hatred towards the people he hates most: blacks. He is basically calling for conservatives to focus their racial hatred towards blacks. It won't work because they simply can't help themselves.
Please name these non-Black nationalist movements and where they are right now relative to the sheer scale of BLM and the Black ghettos found in nearly every major American city.
A "ghetto" is not a movement. It is a concentrated pool of poverty created intentionally through decades of U.S. government policy. How big is BLM? What is BLM? Who is in BLM? Even Hanania doesn't present BLM as being relevant to this story at all.
"created intentionally"
By whom, through what means?
America's "Chocolate Cities" have always been conscious and proud of their ethnic identity, represented by mayors who reflect the skin tone of their constituents and who decry racism while overseeing mass crime that results in non-Blacks leaving.
I've never seen a non-virulent racist. Is there such a thing?
Yeah. I actually most racists are "casual racists" that don't make it their mission to spread racist ideology or socially engineer racist outcomes like Hanania.
They were probably obsessed with getting into the best college (as with all the non-Asians at a place like that, I'd imagine.)
Extremely important article--fantastic work. This is something everyone on the Right needs to internalize.
In 2013-2015 a bunch of journos misread the 2012 exit polls while massively underestimating Castizo assimilation into White society. The subsequent gloating about Whites becoming a minority in Buzzfeed articles and talk shows made a lot of guys like me radicalize and become White Nationalists for a few years. But if we understood what was actually happening this never would have occurred, and the nation would have had a much healthier discourse during the 2010s. So many young guys had their lives ruined at Charlottesville for no reason.
Ultimately White America has a weird, toxic, almost quasi-religious relationship with black people where we constantly cycle between worshipping and imitating them, ignoring or disdaining them, and trying to make them like us.
I think the most healthy path forward would be a Reparations plan proposed by a GOP leader who codes as pro-White, like Vance or Hawley, and can sell it in a "Nixon Goes to China" way. This plan would require Black leaders like Sharpton, Obama, Jay-Z, Kanye, Oprah et al to sign a Declaration of Forgiveness that formally absolves all White people of any guilt over slavery and accepts that Affirmative Action is over.
This could be accompanied by a large monument and a National Day of Racial Healing where White and Black families are encouraged to have barbecues together or something. Maybe pour federal funding into an initiative that encourages White and Black Southerners to explore their shared heritage and build a sense of ethnic kinship.
I think White conservatives would overwhelmingly support this if it meant permanently abolishing the Race Card in all aspects of life (this kind of sentiment is basically why Obama won Indiana and North Carolina in 2008). You could also use the massive short-term wealth transfer to Blacks as cover to dismantle a lot of the welfare state long term.
Seems to me like this would be great politics.
Great post. I like the idea of a Republican supporting reparations and tying it to abolishing AA or something, but I don’t see any politician having the skill to do something that creative.
It's hard to envision now because the Orange Man is sucking up all the oxygen on the Right and nothing else can germinate. But after his second term or eventual death there will be a huge intellectual and emotional vacuum, and that will allow space for bold new ideas.
I think DeSantis specifically would and could pull this off. But he seems unelectable at the moment and needs to take public speaking lessons to become just 30% less visibly autistic. With a bit more practice he wouldn't be any less telegenic than Nixon (who he actually resembles temperamentally in a whole host of ways). And he was actually okay in the last debate of the 2024 primary, but it was too little too late.
It would also help if you, Richard Hanania, used your current clout to cultivate a relationship with people close to his team in the same way Matt Yglesias does with the Biden people. I think you could eventually get Meatball to read a white paper that argues for adopting this as his central policy for a 2028 run. IMO DeSantis will go for it if the argument is good. I think he realizes at this point that most Republicans are morons and he's just going to get cucked by Don Jr. or Vivek without a game changer to hang his hat on, especially since everyone will have forgotten his Covid response by 2028.
And DeSantis is cunning enough to realize that Black Reparations sold to the GOP in explicitly pro-White terms would be political dynamite--exactly what he needs to seize back control of the GOP from people more naturally charming than him. It would enable him to drop traditional dogwhistling and actually say the words "White People", which not even Trump did and would make his rivals look like pussies. Meanwhile you would get tons of young black guys on TikTok etc. fanatically supporting DeSantis wanting their bag and making fun of the oldheads for being loyal to the Democrats. And you could even win back affluent suburban white women by playing up the reconciliation angle.
The energy would be like combining 2008's Obamania with the 2016 Alt Right and 2020's #YangGang. It would probably produce Reagan margins in a realignment that would enable Republicans to dance on the graves of the Democrat Party for a generation.
I'm going to be writing a lot in favor of this strategy in the coming months, so please reach out in the DMs if you'd be interesting in collaborating to make this happen!
No this would require a once in a generation communicator to do something this new and different. People are confused by anything creative. DeSantis couldn’t even seem likable and normal in a regular campaign, he can’t do this. You’d need someone on the charisma level of Reagan, Clinton, or Obama. Rare talents.
But GOP Reparations would only be pursued at this juncture by someone a little spergy and contrarian. No establishment pol or true MAGA populist would touch it because they are almost all low openness people.
Vivek would probably be interested behind the scenes and has the charisma you talk about, but he'd prob be the first to tell you this would need to be advocated by a racist-coded white guy to have the right punch and would never sell coming from him.
You really need someone who's a bit of a freak for this, like DeSantis or Blake Masters.
And DeSantis doesn't need to be likeable, he needs to be *dominant*. Republicans respect strength above all else. Someone like Newt Gingrich is incredibly unlikable but he won SC and Georgia by being a contrarian nerd who could intellectually dominate Romney in direct exchanges. If Santorum had dropped out earlier 2012 probably would have been a lot more competitive. DeSantis needs to emulate Gingrich and be mean but very smart and very aggressive. His awkwardness comes from trying to seem nice or like he cares about people's kids etc.
Tell him to forget about that. Instead coach him to lean into being a mean pedantic nerd. Approach the other guys on stage like a Gitmo jag officer. Don't do the weird fake smile. Instead scowl and reproach your rivals for being idiots pandering the lowest common denominator and turning the GOP into a party of grifters.
Call Vivek a pump and dump snake oil salesman. Maybe do a little dogwhistle as a treat for the DR and say he's cynically misrepresenting his own religion as monotheistic to "CURRY favor with Iowans". There is no way Vivek can respond to that because he built his entire campaign around saying conservatives aren't racist and something that grug-brained will catch him off guard.
Call Don Jr. a talentless nepo baby and constantly talk about how he's dating Gavin's sloppy seconds or say Baron should be running instead. Just be an absolute asshole to everyone.
When DeSantis is in a mean headspace he is quick on his feet because that is who he truly is. It will lose him corny Iowan evangelicals but NH will like this sort of thing and he'll crush SC by getting blacks to cross parties.
Word, make this happen Richard 👏👏
You have to figure this would somehow result in both reparations and turbo affirmative action and a national day of penitence for slavery. When is the last time anything got less work on the federal level.
I would be utterly shocked if a Republican could convince the anti-woke right-wing to sign on to reparations as their primary campaign promise. I don't think even Trump could do it, and he's probably the one with the best shot given the apparent cult-like loyalty he inspires among many conservative voters.
Is reparations just in terms of libertarian ethics? Highly unlikely. Also, white America has shoveled billions to blacks already.
No, but neither is affirmative action.
White and Black southerners already do this. The only real issues you will find in the South (contrary to media) is working Black and Whites against ghetto blacks and trailer park whites. That's the real divide here.
It seems to be working class black and whites against ghetto blacks, and everyone against trailer park whites. Literally no one gives a shit about white trash. This isn't a personal grievance, I'm not white trash, and I don't like them much either.
Almost. I'm not white trash, either, but my husband came.from that type of family. We've been married forever and he came my way, so he's not, either. The only thing wrong with your statement is that ghetto/trash vote with highly-educated white people. Which is weird on a voting level, but in life, they don't really come into contact with those people. The middle-class and upper-middle do socialize and I prefer hanging out with the middle-class of every race than the others.
Is there any data or evidence that white trash regularly vote in alignment with Dems?
I grew up in a trailer in rural Alabama and was probably at least white trash-adjacent...and the trashiest of the white trash would gladly avoid working and hoover up as much welfare as they could, but they simultaneously tended to vote (if they voted) for the Republicans. And they couldn't stand to be on the same side as the ghetto blacks. So this doesn't match my experience at all.
Maybe this is a generational thing? They were still a few quasi-populist (or at least anti-rich) blue dog democrats rattling around when in the 70s and 80s, but they were clearly on their last legs by the early 90s.
Nah, you're mostly right. They dont vote at all. A lot of them run their mouth, but when the day comes, they are not about to get up and go vote. I used to think they leaned more R than D, too. But, when I said something to that affect the last time we went to visit, I was informed they aren't voting for anybody that might take their check and medicaid. I think if any of them do vote, it's because there's something on the ticket they want. Like weed. (Not that I'm saying there's anything wrong with weed).
I do agree that they are one of the few groups that both Democrats and Republicans are allowed to openly hate or scorn.
Republicans for the 'takers' reason, and Democrats just because they are white people who are not in their coalition.
The comparative liberal/progressive response to anti-vax sentiment among ghetto blacks vs white trash was...pretty stark.
I grew up in the South. Agree with Brandy. Northerners don’t get the South. At all.
I was one of those white nationalists, and I concur. It really bothers me when people like Cathy Young chastise Richard when he and his "associated acts", for lack of a better term, for being "racist" when his comment section alone has a better idea of how to defeat white nationalism than any institution devoted to the cause.
As for your reparations plan, I don't think "black leaders" would be dumb enough to fall for it. They know that their career lies in agitating for handouts forever. Still, it's a great pitch!
problem is Cathy Young doesn't want to defeat WN, she wants to humiliate it, and is willing to expend political capital to do so in situations that are counterproductive and just provoke a thermostatic backlash You can't negotiate or reason with hateful people like this because they are not rational actors.
When negotiating with the Left you have to deal with people like Ezra Klein or Matt Yglesias, or most old black people, who will hear you out and are perfectly willing to negotiate with you in a transactional way. These people just want to secure an optimal outcome for their ideology and don't care about humiliating you.
The people to avoid are affluent credentialist White women who live in a universe of obsessive status seeking and complex social games, as well as downwardly mobile white guys with tattoos who hate their dad. These people want to see you suffer and will burn political capital for literally no other purpose.
The key is to build an incentive structure that rewards Matt Yglesias liberals for moving the discourse in a way that silences Karens and antifa.
>I think the most healthy path forward would be a Reparations plan proposed by a GOP leader who codes as pro-White, like Vance or Hawley, and can sell it in a "Nixon Goes to China" way. This plan would require Black leaders like Sharpton, Obama, Jay-Z, Kanye, Oprah et al to sign a Declaration of Forgiveness that formally absolves all White people of any guilt over slavery and accepts that Affirmative Action is over.<
This seems naive. As you point out a bit further down, this was already sold to people by Obama, and then he went right back to the race-baiting well when he perceived that it would help him. More importantly this was already the entire idea behind the Civil Rights movement as a whole, trying to have a "colorblind" society. Affirmative action and other DEI crap are already a form of reparations. It's been 60 years and where has that project gotten us?
At best, this might buy a temporary reprieve, at the cost of yet another huge unnecessary government wealth transfer. Then in 5-10 years when the money has all been blown and racial outcomes are still as unequal as ever, blacks would come right back to the well demanding more. It's a bit weird to see Hanania endorsing this when it seems like his line of thinking on Israel/Palestine should apply here--if you cave to reparations demands from the likes of Al Sharpton, you're just going to teach them that their racial grievance-mongering can pay off big time, just like the Palestinian cause being kept alive by all the bones that people keep throwing to it.
The only way to shut down this garbage permanently would be with the stick, not the carrot. This has largely succeeded with regards to white nationalism, a fringe ideology for losers and whackos that is kept thoroughly in check because society does not hesitate to impose very heavy costs on those who espouse it.
lol you do realize Blacks have received on net 40 trillion from welfare (minus their contributions)
Also it clearly would never be enough and it would not solve their dysfunction. You just have to state plainly blacks have received net 40 trillion and 60 years of race quotas which has never happened before in history, every group has passed them and they need to figure out why.
No koombaiya moment is coming
The point of this isn't that they deserve it. Obviously they have already received 100x their contribution in free cotton picking labor etc. from welfare and AA. But to properly internalize this kind of logic someone probably needs at least a 110 IQ and an 80th percentile disagreeable nature. It's trivial to find people like that in Hanania's comment section but the real world is run by hyperarticulate grifters manipulating rich women into crying to their mostly disengaged husbands and getting them to cut a huge check to horrible anti-White organizations. That is who you need to target to castrate anti White sentiment.
The point of Right Wing Reparations is to give White people a sense of moral certitude and consistency that lets us be more assertive with blacks. In particular you need a mechanism to get people under 25 and affluent women to not be extremely naive and softhearted by pointing to a big central event that "wiped the slate clean" morally. We need to make sure 2020 never happens again by creating a compelling moral narrative that works on the mushiest and most sentimental among us. Otherwise you will get the same cycle repeating over and over.
If the truth and good arguments mattered one whit then Jared Taylor and Steve Sailer would have triumphed 20 years ago.
This sounds extremely naive .Too much people benefit from the current situation of racial polarization. The black liberal upper class would go bankrupt.
"Ultimately White America has a weird, toxic, almost quasi-religious relationship with black people where we constantly cycle between worshipping and imitating them, ignoring or disdaining them, and trying to make them like us."
100 TIMES YES
also how great would it be to see all those black celebs on a stage like the signers of the Declaration of Independence? There would need to be at least one Kardashian involved and then a Beyonce show live from the steps of the Capitol...
Great idea
Kanye would sign if you made him V-P... 😅
Kanye as VP would be sooooo entertaining. I would love to see it.
I believe that Ron Unz argues along similar lines. He loves the new Asian-Hispanic ascendancy in California, and is also exasperated with the white-nationalist right. Steve Sailer sometimes argues that the most salient division of humanity is “black vs. nonblack.”
Normal Asian & Hispanic people may be perfectly happy to live in the US, but there are also a nontrivial number of Sarah Jeongs who see that white-bashing is rewarded with high status. https://twitter.com/ArminNavabi/status/1025015489729196032
White libs may not *cause* black nationalism, but they certainly do all they can to further its success. White libs are why white-nationalism is a complete nonstarter. How are you supposed to deal with 50% of your putative ‘white nation’ loving Ibram Kandi and hating Stonewall Jackson? Counterfactually, if “Albion’s seed” had come from Balkan/Slavic/Mediterranean whites instead of Northern Euro Protestant whites, there’s no way that American whites would have greased the skids for Black nationalism to they extent that they have in fact done.
To what extent are Black African immigrants seduced by the siren song of Black Nationalism? Quite a number of them seem to be successful, conservative business-oriented Christians who aren’t big fans of the US “ghetto culture” they encounter. I mean, by definition, such immigrants have had first-hand experience with living under Black Nationalism, which for some reason they were willing to abandon in order to be oppressed by American White Supremacy an ocean away. In fact, Gallup suggests that 30 percent of Black Africans living under Black Nationalism would prefer to voluntarily place themselves under the bootheel of Western White Supremacy, for some strange reason https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-migrate.aspx
Thanks to affirmative action, black immigrants have a huge incentive to join black nationalism. I think a majority of black students at elite schools are non-ADOS. In the political sphere, look at Obama and Harris, who are 50% black and 0% ADOS.
Right -- and this doesn't just apply to black immigrants but to highly enterprising blacks in general. I'm acquainted with a highly enterprising, intelligent, and affable black man, who actually is ADOS. He probably could have been successful in many domains of business, but he ended up setting up a holding company that controls a local empire of businesses within a particular city that are designed to extract affirmative action and DEI rents from state, local, Federal, NGO, and corporate sources there. And he plays the game quite well.
Naturally, he's not about to advocate shutting down that gravy train. And he's in the process of handing over his organization to his kids. He's the only guy like this I know, but I imagine there are many such cases throughout the country among the black upper class.
I hope he has lots of kids. I am generally pro-natalist. Especially for smart people. Smart black people aren’t having enough kids.
And it also dilutes the grift. Which is good.
If we’re gonna have any affirmative action policy, I support 0 income tax for any black guy with 3+ kids. Only 53% of Americans pay income tax so it’s likely 25% of black Americans.
Yes yes I know not politically feasible. But I’m at least glad he has kids.
Sure, he has 3 grown kids, all of them well-educated and accomplished. Married to the same woman his whole life. Attends a historic black church. He lives a good and clean life, personally very socially conservative but of course doesn’t vote that way. I’ll have done well if my family ends up as well as his.
EDIT: Just to make the story better, he grew up fairly poor, in a large family in the South. But his parents, though fairly uneducated, were hardworking and wise and stayed together. All of his siblings also did pretty well (though not as well as him).
The stats show a burst of black class mobility in the first few decades after Civil Rights (which subsequently declined), and in my mind they're the exemplars of it.
Great.
I don’t blame him personally for taking advantage of the grift and voting D, anyone would in that situation.
Meanwhile, the whole DEI movement is probably bad for the black lower class people with luxury beliefs like defunding the police. As a real "Hananiac", I hate the populist argument that DEI is elitist and a substitute for working-class socialism (which would be way worse) and therefore bad. But when just talking about the Black American population maybe it has some truth in it which is why people do spout this line.
Interesting essay, mostly true in my experience living in the USA as a middle-class immigrant.
I see a lot of anti-black social sentiment around me but I suppose that’s the rational result of black lefty activists dominating social discourse on what ails America.
I’d love to see Richard and others write more on “Blacks vs Everyone Else” as it’s an under explored topic.
#WeAreThe88Percent
(88% includes e.g. Caribbean and African immigrants so it's not 86%)
It also includes the 2-3% who are Jewish, so it's of course NOT a Nazi reference. I guess 88 has some Nazi connotations, not intended like that at all. It was just that 88 is a multiple of 11 so that the digits are the same, and is the next one down after 99, so I wanted to imitate Occupy Wall Street.
Also this is extremely good politics, for those of us who are non-ADOS non-Native Americans, we are children of immigrants. We can point out that affirmative action is actually discrimination and quotas against immigrants and their descendants, and that this is xenophobic. I do think that "core Americans" really are immigrants and their descendants. America is a nation of immigrants. This leaves ADOS and Native Americans in a weird place.
I've said for a while that "diversity" is mostly a euphemism for black people.
This article seems largely correct. Unfortunately, what this means is that, if we are ever to leave ethno-nationalism behind and progress well and truly towards a real "post-racial" society, we are going to have to leave blacks behind as well. Blacks have only ever engaged in democratic politics through the lens of racial tribalism, and there is no evidence to suggest that they are capable of doing otherwise. At some point, if we are to do away with racial conflict, the rest of us will have to become apathetic to the tribal concerns of blacks.
This is actually, I think, the only correct answer. Race is also synonymous with Blackness. Which is why examples of racism are only about Black people. (This is part of why I don't engage in BIPOC theory; only Black people are "of color").
I think developing a class oriented view is a good way of leaving Black Nationalism behind because I've seen in real time Black people reject this view. I think every day about how Black people in general wont ever develop a class framework. But if you don't engage Black complaints you get called a racist.
So I think people need to stop being afraid of being called a racist first, which can create a problem where actual racism gets ignored. But going after white liberal worship of Black victimhood is a good place to start.
The truth is, if there were a true paradigm shift where people no longer care about black tribalism, there likely would be more incidences of genuine anti-black racism that get ignored. You'd just have to acknowledge that's worth it in exchange for stopping the obsessions with race more generally. Reality is messy, everything has trade-offs, and there is never a perfect solution where no one is an asshole.
I wonder if that is correct though. I think it just wouldnt make the news. Hate Crime Hoax talks about people lying about hate crimes and the fervor they entail mostly in large part due to the media. Candace Owens had an experience where she experienced some racial antagonism that ballooned because one of the white boys was the son of the Mayor. She says the NAACP came out and sidnt talk to her or anything. There's an economy for hate crimes.
I dont think hate crimes or garden variety of anti Blackness would increase. I think that the veneer would just fall away and reveal how much everyone already dislikes Black people.
The trade off, as you put it, would that Black people couldnt leverage the economy of Black grievance. Like I am often surprised white leftists arent more upset with Black people because a race centered lens helped cost Bernie Sanders the vote when he was running.
I just think the power of calling people out would be erased, which was a power reserved for a select few already.
Exactly. "POC" was created just to inflate black numbers by making all non-whites pseudo-black--but only when convenient. And we can see that "diversity" indeed just means black when the 80% black NBA wins awards for being "diverse," while actually diverse MLB gets criticized for supposedly having an underrepresentation of blacks (it doesn't).
We can leave black nationalism behind without “leaving blacks behind”. Right?
The best thing for blacks is generally the best thing for the US. That we have a bigger economy and lower poverty and so on.
No, because blacks also have agency. If the rest of us decide that we will not listen to black nationalism any longer, but blacks generally continue to parrot black nationalism as their primary ideology, then the obvious result must be that we leave them behind, in the sense that we stop caring about what they have to say.
Some individual blacks will certainly opt out of the racial tribe hive mind, as some already do right now. There are some "based blacks" that support Trump and there are people like Larry Elder and what have you. And those people will be part of the conversation, just like they are now. But those blacks who choose not to engage in politics through the lens of race have always been a small minority of blacks in general, and again, there is no reason to believe that this will ever change. For the majority of blacks who continue to engage in racial grievance-mongering, everyone else must look at them and say, "we don't care anymore."
Sure. But the best thing for black Americans is generally the best thing for all Americans - GDP growth, life expectancy growth, technological advancement, etc - rather than us listening to their specific group interests.
Well sure, this is almost certainly true. As we can see from the fact that none of the black people complaining about racism seem particularly eager to immigrate over to the supermajority-black continent of Africa.
Or even to a developed country in the Anglosphere like the UK or Canada where there is more generous welfare and the black population does much better but the GDP/capita is lower.
Interestingly enough, when in other countries we speak about "importing racial categories from the US", we use the categories that fit this narrative you just presented.
The last Argentinean census had those exact three questions: check if Native, check if African, check if Else. I think this reflects that Argentinean progressives have accurately evaluated that in order to be perceived by the US as having "a legitimate and conscious racial politics", they only really care about us contending with Native and Black issues (despite our history not necessarily aligning with US experiences, of course). There isn't a domestic effort or a foreign demand to compartimentalize, say, Asians in the same way.
This very same process is underway in Australia with the rise of Indigenous nationalism, which was born in the 60s (copying the US as always), lost steam in the early 2000s, and now since the great awokening is arguably the most powerful force in Australian political life, despite Indigenous people being ~3% of the population (and many of those being racially + culturally + economically assimilated into mainstream society). Australia is stuck in this hopeless cycle of giving enormous and ever growing political, legal, economic and symbolic concessions to 'Indigenous issues', while outcomes for the Indigenous underclass continue to stagnate if not actively deteriorate. When these concessions naturally fail to 'Close the Gap' (because they don't remotely address the actual causes of Indigenous disadvantage), activists simply double down and demand that the state give more concessions, which of course doesn't achieve anything except empower a minority of Indigenous elites and give the group more symbolic status. (This was what the failed Voice to Parliament was)
Also naturally, the conservative Liberal party (confusing for Americans I know) has been completely unable to resist the rise of Indigenous nationalism, so that it is now completely taboo across the political spectrum to meaningfully oppose it. It is difficult to see this changing anytime soon.
We can’t become honest about race for the simple reason that if we were to do so, blacks would begin to vote for their own interests rather than as the interestless D-voting bloc they’ve been since 1928. If they did, the D party would evaporate. D leadership will always keep lighting the race fire because they know this.
That's kind of what's happening in slow motion already.
Center white voters have moved from a slightly liberal bias in 2012 to a slightly conservative bias in 2022. Center Hispanic, Asian and Black voters have moved from deeply liberal to less liberal on average (Ruffini 2023).
It is postulated that many non-white voters have always been more conservative than they voted in the past because they did not trust the Republican candidates to defend them as constituents. But that is changing and now more non-white voters can "be themselves" and publicly/legislatively support their actual conservative beliefs.
Right, one consequence of the Great Awokening is that minorities are more comfortable voting for Republicans.
Richard
The census should be:
What’s your ethnicity:
-American (third gen or later/ on American parent
-American Black (50% or more descendant of slave)
-country of origin (select country if less than third generation no mixed and still assimilating)
The reality is we are a mulatto nation (that’s what assimilation is), it’s embarrassing for people who have been here for 5 generations to call themselves have German half Italian, they’re American ethnically as they don’t speak the language or share the culture and non of those countries would claim them. The best way to look at it is there are genetics, ethnicity and nationality. If it was phrased this way we could see which groups make the best immigrants and still have people join the ethnic core as naturally happens in three generations.
This is largely true, but it can be complicated.
I have ancestors that I can trace to the Huguenot community in New Netherland, but others came over in the Ellis Island era and left me with an odd surname. My paternal grandparents grew up in the US, but in a highly ethnic neighborhood. My father didn't, but still identified heavily with the culture and imparted at least a few things onto me. I'm not embarrassed to identify with it in some sense, though I don't generally lead with it.
Also, when your surname is odd, people like to ask where it's from. They might ask if you speak the language or ask questions about the place. After having that conversation so many times (even as a child), it reinforces the sense of being distinct from the WASPs.
I grew up alongside many Catholics, and I could see that being ancestrally Catholic also can have this effect; it's a family ethnic tradition still kept alive. You tend to remember your "Irishness" or "Italianness" a little more if it's backed up by even a token commitment to Catholicism.
I can contrast this with my pure-WASP Southern wife, who is truly and deeply "ethnically American." Her entire family, when asked where their ancestors came from are rather puzzled by the question. They might start to name nearby towns where various grandparents or great-grandparents grew up. When I was first getting to know her, we really had to work through the logic and the history for her to finally arrive at a tentative answer of "England," something she had clearly never thought about in her life. By contrast, I could have told you where my surname came from by age 6.
All that to say, there is something different about these two experiences, in terms of the sense of place and origin it leaves you with -- even if, as you say, there's no other country that would have you. Whether it's a difference worth recording on the Census, perhaps not, but it's a difference nonetheless.
Ethnicity is all about cohesion and proximity. Northern and southern Italians see distinctions but outside of Italy no one knows. The key is just changing the census and the idea of ethnicity into an Anglo mulatto one where people just have hints of their cultural ancestors but identify as ethnic Americans
Great post. Agreed on the Catholic + ethnicity point. I cannot count the number of Irish-Americans I know whose ancestors came here in the late 19th century and proudly wear their Irishness on their sleeve and strongly identify as Irish despite not ever having set foot in Ireland (for generations,) not speaking Gaelic or knowing much of the culture other than St. Patrick's Day, drinking and the Catholic church (mostly as a cultural relic). My best friend who is half Irish/ half Italian but grew up more Irish, has a cladagh engagement ring from her husband who knew how important her Irishness is to her. All the 5+ kids families I knew growing up were Irish Catholics, despite being here for generations.
What I find hilarious that that the UK also has lots of ethnic Irish who have been there for years the way the US does, but in my experience many of them don’t identify as Irish but rather generally as “English Catholics” despite a white Irish box on the census. White Irish is generally understood to mean recent. Irish immigrant.
That's surprising given the hatred the Irish have for the English. Maybe they blend into the English Catholic population because they feel like outsiders together due to the English persecution of Catholics in England?
I am always amazed by the persistence of Irish identity in the US, even if superficial. Many of the cops, firefighters, teachers and government employees still tend to be Irish in my area, despite a small population and much assimilation. It's like Tammany Hall still here.
Brits are very private about religion and ethnicity.
In parts of the UK the Protestant-Catholic intermarriage has been common for centuries. Hence, Liverpool. Belfast is a different story.
Surely being Catholic must come up at some point and like goes to like and all. Still interesting English has seemingly assimilated Irish Catholics more than America.
Whenever people discuss intermarriage, my first question is how are the kids raised? It's often one side being favored, not both being given equal status.
One of my theories is that the reason why the left and the pro black interests movement has gone so gung ho on afrocentrism is due to the fact that the 1960’s civil rights era paradigm on race is coming to an end.
For one, Hispanics, Asians, and other groups combined outnumber blacks now, and their interests clash with what Tariq Nasheed would call FBA interests. Thus while Democrats (despite not anywhere near as much as they used to) still win the latter demographics, they have a far deeper connection and vice versa with the black community. And black interest groups correctly view the newer populations as having interests different to theirs.
All types of Asians oppose affirmative action and while it hurts whites greatly as well (the demographic it was historically designed to) Asian activism was pretty central to eliminating it. Hispanics are not a centralized group at all but none of them seem to care much for blacks or vice versa, and their interests collide frequently. I think the woke/pro black wing of the Democrats realize this and went full in on black interests, even in states like CA with very few blacks.
Another and arguably a more explicit and important reason is due to the days of the civil rights regime slowly coming to an end. Part of it is due to the above factors I mentioned but also, said CR regime is getting weakened legally and thus becoming less popular. I think that Obama’s regime during his second term may have predicted this, which is why they went all in on black nationalism, although Obama has always been a very weird and lefty figure who has always held a chip on his shoulder.
Regardless I agree with this article as a whole, and while I don’t personally believe increased immigration will further combat the CR/Black nationalist regime, I would recommend more conservative lawfare as well as the GOP building a type of coalition against not only psuedo black nationalism but this idiocy as a whole. It’s more sustainable than the “multiracial working class” long term after Trump is out of the picture.
Was going to say something similar. I applaud Richard for recognizing and naming BN for what it is. I think a lot of the intensity around it now recognizes that the paradigm is shifting disfavorably for them. The new population will not be so easily guilted into co-signing endless BS
I think the whole "white guilt" narrative, where all white people are guilty or whatever, made much more sense in the 1960s. Of course, it never made THAT much sense. While large parts of the country did have slavery and Jim Crow and anti-black sentiments were widespread, even a small minority of *Southern Anglos* ever owned slaves. When you talk about the whole country and add all of the post-1865 immigration through Ellis Island, it's clear that even then only a minority of the white population had a personal connection to the worst kinds of anti-black hatred. But at least Italians, Greeks, and Jews do look *something* like Jefferson Davis or George Wallace even if they are a bit darker. You add Hispanics and Asians to the mix though, and it's checkmate.
Only at elite universities, which is a tiny percentage of the population
Along these lines, it seems that “cultural appropriation” is something blacks care about but other groups seem not to and in fact enjoy seeing white Americans partake in their culture.
See videos here contrasting reactions of college students with actual Mexicans and Chinese whose cultures are being “appropriated”:
https://youtu.be/IT2UH74ksJ4?si=be 6gan-RV3-V3aXJ2D
https://youtu.be/GNXm7juuM-8?si=NPpA2DxP_wpdRF21
For fobs this is true. Second gens behave like the other college students. Americanization is a powerful force
Reminds me about why black-aligned activists popularized “people of color.” That term suggests some commonality among sundry non-whites. It’s shorthand for a political coalition. Like, originally, when someone identified as a “person of color,” they aligned with black nationalists despite not being black or even having anti-black views. To me, “BIPoC” and “white-adjacent” seems like strategic error. But some people can’t resist ethno-narcissism or purity-signaling, I guess. Interesting, “default American” is like “people of color” but in reverse, aligning non-blacks with whites.
Also, about Latins and Asians, I was thinking about Fujimori (also Bukele). Seems like Asianness is not as big of deal in Latin America as it is in North America? Might have even been a plus for Fujimori, with the 80s being Japan’s golden age.
America is not alone in the world. From the experience of other countries, it is clear that there are two other identities that will greatly complicate assimilation, even if they are marginal in America: Islam and Native American.
Muslims assimilate decently well in America I think. Europe not so much. But there it's different as you have a very large population of Muslims with lower skill levels and it's very concentrated.
And there are historical animosities due to colonialism that aren't an issue in the US.
There are tons of Algerians in France. The issue with France and Algeria and the pied noir and FLN doesn’t at all have a parallel for us. Morocco has always been a pro-Western monarchy with terrible relations with Algeria, sure.
Britain has colonial guilt the way the US has white guilt.
Anyway vast majority of Muslim Americans aren’t from Iraq or Afghanistan. British and French had troops all over the region. We have only in a few countries.
While the US has done various things in the Middle East and North Africa, it’s quite distinct from British and French colonization. Most countries in the region got their independence from Europeans. Algeria even had French settlers and fought a huge war. While the US was in Iraq and Afghanistan for a while, it’s not like these countries’ modern national stories begin with a war or independence struggle against America. Look at Egypt, the most populous country in the region. Nasser and Naguib on the jeep had to do with British and not Americans.
Since you're Israeli I have to comment this.
For good reason, the Israeli CBS classifies people as "Jews and Others" and "Arabs". Israel is more than happy to allow the free immigration of non-Jewish Russians with a distant family connection, and to in fact allow the migration of anyone married to a Jew, except those from an enemy state. Arab immigration not so much.
Hanania's proposal is similar, the US should have a category for "Whites and Others" and then for "Blacks", where Others are Asian and Hispanics. The Hispanics of mixed white and indigenous ancestry are analogous to the non-Jewish olim.
The overall point - that the real Balkanization, and the one with the most real-world ramifications, is Black vs. everyone else - is correct. But this feels like a hand-wave to me:
"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."
It's really not a non-issue. It's just baked in. It's a given that areas with large numbers of Indians will begin to vote for Indian interests. In some suburbs in my metro, school boards are increasingly East Asian and the schools are taking an East Asian style. (To be clear, I regard this as mostly a good thing, despite not being East Asian myself.) And one of the reasons that Hispanic enclaves remain Hispanic is that they run them as sundown towns. (Again, a perfectly rational thing to do.) These things ultimately do matter to the social fabric at a local level; and that's before we get into state and federal politics, where every group except Whites has all kinds of caucuses, grants, ethnic lobbyist organizations etc.
You have argued that this kind of mosaic (as opposed to melting pot) ultimately serves the body politic well because mutual mistrust will lead to less socialism. I disagree with this not just morally but because it's plainly not really happening. But at the local level the only way to say race is a non-issue is to ignore the manifold ways in which it's actually the biggest issue, because non-white demographics tend to stick together (as well they should.)
I think you need to rewrite the bit on the Voting Rights Act:
"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.
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."
The preceding paragraph makes it sound like the Voting Rights Act requires proportional representation among the legislature/our leaders. But it doesn't, as the next paragraph points out; it's about voting rights, not representation among the leadership as such.
This is important because the prior paragraph is used to frame the Voting Rights Act in a very odd way. Yes, it requires not just that black folks be allowed to vote but that there be a proportionate number of majority-minority districts, so black folks elect roughly the same proportion of legislators as they make up of the population.
You explain this as: "It assumes that people of this particular minority cannot be represented by outsiders."
That's just bizarre and not the case. Black folks can be represented by outsiders; majority black districts can and do elect representatives of other races.
What they cannot do is count on the rest of the population to be aligned with their interests, to vote for someone they'd align with. This is the result of being a minority population in a first past the post system.
Imagine if we elected a world government, and every leader would be chosen at large. When every leader was Chinese or Indian chosen by the people of those countries, we'd obviously gripe that giving us voting rights is rather meaningless if the voting system dilutes our power in this way. We'd obviously advocate for some kind of proportional representation system where, instead of having everyone elected at large, each region or people would get to elect someone of their choosing.
Crafting districts whence black folks can do that is imminently reasonable, particularly in light of the goals of the 14th and 15th amendment. As cool as it was having the political clout of the Dixiecrats magnified by their representation of black populations who were outvoted in every statewide and majority-majority election, it was not actually fair and did not provide the protections to black citizens that the drafters of those amendments intended.
Finally, I think you err on this issue because you view race primarily through a coastal and northern urban lens. That leads you to wonder why black folks need to have their own district where their vote is not diluted while Asians and Hispanics do not.
The answer is the other great people, whose nationalism is as stubbornly distinctive and maladaptive as black people - southern whites. In the deep south it's not just blacks who vote based on race; so did whites, and in many places we still do.
The rest of you elected the first black president in 2008, sweeping an educated black urban liberal into power after Bush's disastrous second term. In Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, President Obama won only between 10-15% of the white vote in each state - a solid 10% points behind John Kerry's performance in 2004. Yep, we somehow reacted to Bush's second term and the prospect of a third GOP presidential term by shifting millions of votes from the challenger the GOP.
Incongruous and inexplicable, unless you know anything at all about us. Then you know why only 10-15% of us voted for President Obama. And you know why we need majority-minority districts.
Hopefully this will change as more of the sough assimilates and is overrun by carpetbaggers - Georgia truly is an inspiration and model in this regard. But the deep south rejected Atlanta's capitalistic pragmatism a long time ago - why New Orleans remained a backwater as cities all around it, Atlanta,
In Texas, and in Tennessee thrived - so
i'm not optimistic.
In the meantime I'm thankful Louisiana has two congressional districts in which black folks are the majority and elect representatives. Otherwise we'd have zero, just six representatives elected by the majority white folks in each district despite no black support.
This is spicy! I think a lot about how no one, on the right or the left.l, take Black politics seriously. White leftists just accept whatever middle/upper middle class Blacks say online (but don't read books about Black history. They literally just repeat what they see/saw on Twitter).
Black people, being so race focused, become an impossible group to contend with politically. There are Black conservatives, but they dont seem to have a large platform and Black liberals tend to see these people are race traitors or Uncle Toms. Black liberals mandate a commitment to Woke ideology as part of being Black. The two are connected. There are some Black people are simply liberal, like whites, and are guided by similar principles. But I think experiencing racism at the ends of white liberals prevents a lot of Black liberals from being identical to their white counterparts. Likez every MLK Jr day, Black people like to remind white liberals about the note Dr. King wrote to white moderates. A lot of politicized Black people are deeply fixated on white racism and view the world through this lens of race and white racism.
Even though no one seems to be paying attention (??), people kinda give in anyway. And sometimes co-opt Black Nationalist ideas (ie Asians do this a lot) in their pursuit of an anti white politic that we call wokeism.
To say nothing of Black people who want to reclaim woke since it started as AAVE (a political deadend that serves no purpose except for white liberals to posit conservatives as racist every time they call something woke or complain about wokeness). Even though white liberals are also racist - a fact that doesnt seem to energize or interest Black Identity activists.
I loved this!
I often think of Black Nationalism as from the 60s but this is helpful too.