Anti-White Privilege

A Review of Jeremy Carl's The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart

Jeremy Carl, a policy analyst at the right-leaning Claremont Institute, is the author of a new book entitled The Unprotected Class: How anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, which argues that anti-white animus underpins the worldview of the western left, and, by extension, American institutions and elite culture.

Carl’s impeccably-researched, highly-readable, book makes the parsimonious argument that the elite institutions of post-Civil Rights America have been engaging in open discrimination against white people. ‘We live in a society of anti-white privilege,’ he says. As a result, white Americans must organize as a group, along with nonwhite allies, to defend their right to equal treatment under the law.

This is a provocative thesis in a world where saying ‘It’s okay to be white’ is considered hate speech and any expression of white identity is catastrophised as a ‘far right’ slippery slope to Nazism and Jim Crow. And yet, a majority of white respondents in surveys in the US, UK and Britain positively identify with being white. As with minorities, I find that the strongest predictor of racial identity is whether a person identifies with their ancestry: white Americans who are attached to being Irish or Italian are much more likely than whites who are weakly attached to being Irish or Italian to identify as white. Likewise, those who identify strongly as Chinese identify strongly as Asian. Yet only one pan-ethnic entity is prohibited from expressing itself and mobilising as a group, and must obliquely argue its case by appealing to liberal universalists.

Indeed, remarks Carl, no other group would stand by as a public figure like Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times attacks their group as ‘the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager and thief of the modern world’ or Sarah Jeong celebrates being ‘cruel to old white men.’

Affirmative action for African-Americans, whether in government contracts or university admissions, is a policy that long discriminated against white applicants. It was only when an Asian plaintiff could be found, as in the Harvard Fair Admissions case, that this discriminatory policy could be overturned. Similarly, Carl was repeatedly told by sympathetic allies that, as a white male, he should find a minority person to plead his case.

Asymmetric group treatment extends to crime and punishment. Whites who kill blacks are treated very differently by the media than the reverse, as when black career criminal Darrell Brooks drove his car into a Christmas parade in Wisconsin, killing six and injuring sixty-two. When whites leave ethnically-changing neighbourhoods due to concerns about crime, or even the desire for familiarity, they are derided as racist. The same holds when they gentrify a formerly black-majority area.

Republicans in Congress, remarks Carl, are notoriously skittish around race, preferring to beat populist drums around religion, guns, the military or anti-Semitism. In reference to Waukesha, Carl observes that Republican politicians in Wisconsin avoided calling this anti-white hate crime. Whereas the left leans into the hate crime narrative when it often is absent, the right does the reverse. Paul Ryan, for instance, in whose district the parade took place, was silent. For Carl, he ‘represents the cowardice of the GOP in defending its white voters from overtly racist criminal attacks.’

Hollywood also fabricates the idea of the white criminal while distorting the actual racial profile of offenders in what Tom Wolfe in his 1987 classic The Bonfire of the Vanities called ‘the hunt for the great white defendant.’ Here Carl alleges that the trial of Derek Chauvin occurred under political duress, and was a miscarriage of justice that did not take into account alternative explanations (i.e. fentanyl in the blood) which suggests there is a strong possibility that Floyd was not murdered by Chauvin. From OJ Simpson to the Central Park Five, justice has been racially slanted against whites in the America in recent decades.

Carl writes that ‘white flight’ from the 1960s onwards was generally not about racism, but a case of homeowners fearing rising disorder in their neighbourhoods and wishing to retain a sense of community. Unscrupulous real-estate agents deliberately engaged in ‘blockbusting’ by spreading rumours of black influx, crime and white flight to force established residents to sell low. In addition, the widely-held belief that lenders specifically ‘redlined’ black neighbourhoods, preventing them from accessing credit, is erroneous since  - as John McWhorter has documented - 92 percent of redlined homes in the 1930s and 40s were owned by whites.

Whites also face unequal treatment when it comes to defending their demographic interest in slowing ethnic change by advocating for limiting immigration, especially on cultural grounds. They are not permitted to do so without being accused of racism, while other groups can argue for higher numbers to boost their communities. My own survey experiments back this up, showing that 3 in 4 white Democrats (over 90 percent among well-educated white Democrats) believe that a white woman who wants less immigration to maintain her group’s share of the population is racist while only 18 percent say the same of a Hispanic woman who wants more immigration to boost her group’s share of the total. While a quest for race purity or expulsion of nonwhites would certainly be racist, Carl is no white nationalist, but instead argues for an absorptive beiging of the white population within a multi-ethnic society where all groups – including whites – are treated fairly.

The book ventures into history and culture, where it makes some of its strongest points. Attacks on Columbus and the Founders, for instance, are matched by the lionizing of criminals who often are responsible for falling victim to the police. At Montpelier, James Madison’s home, Carl writes that the exhibits centre Madison’s slaves and American structural racism: ‘There were no American flags and no displays devoted to any of his accomplishments’, while the children’s bookshop featured Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby.

At Thomas Jefferson’s home of Monticello, the emphasis on slavery is even more pronounced, with contemporary paintings replacing the originals and a new painting of a faceless slave greeting visitors as they enter. Meanwhile a romanticized portrait of Native Americans in schools and the media has convinced an astounding 71 percent of Gen-Z respondents that ‘Prior to the arrival of European settlers, Native American tribes lived in peace and harmony.’ The genocides, cruelty, conquests and slavery of Native Americans is airbrushed from the historical record.

All of this represents, for Carl, a full-scale assault on white American (as well as American national) collective memories, myths and symbols. Here again, whites come in for exceptional discriminatory treatment in an attempt ‘to make us live in an eternal now, where the historical consensus is controlled by a diversity-obsessed regime.’

Carl arguably neglects white economic advantages as evidenced by employment callback studies. Having said this, it must be noted that field studies which use names as a proxy for race are flawed inasmuch as ‘Jamal’ or ‘Lakisha’ also carry class connotations. Finally, those who suffer most in resume studies are Muslim or South Asian groups that do quite well in the labour market, suggesting that such studies based on ‘one shot’ reactions do not account for the more textured process that occurs as people find out more about an applicant at interview stage.

Even so, it is reasonable to argue that whites derive at least some economic privilege from being the ‘normal’ and historic race in America, with society to some extent moulded around their norms. It is certainly the case that white Americans have established the culture of American institutions and thus form the easiest fit with the American environment. This does confer an advantage, even if it is upheld by all racial groups and largely benefits whites seeking modestly-paid work in the small business sector rather than elite jobs in large organizations where DEI holds sway.

Carl’s argument that the true motive behind anti-white racism is to permit minorities to expropriate land and wealth from whites strikes me as excessively materialist, however. I would have preferred to see a laser-like focus on whites’ cultural disadvantage.

For, when it comes to culture and identity, the book’s case is unimpeachable. Whites cannot express their identity, history and interests the way other groups can. They are not portrayed fairly on stage and screen. Here is where more of a distinction could be drawn, with the racial angle strongest on culture and weaker on the economy and university admissions (where Asians arguably suffer more).

Affirmative action in private corporations, for example, often produces only a modest increase in minority representation. The injustice is less to do with economic opportunities (though this is real in the many instances Carl describes) than the symbolic assault on white ‘privilege,’ culture, racism and identity. A more explicit spotlight on symbolic politics that acknowledges some white economic advantage (even if well-earned) might build a somewhat stronger case.

The book rounds up with a call to return to colourblind justice. Paradoxically, in order to achieve this end, whites need to defend their interests qua whites. Only in this manner can others, and the system as a whole, grasp the moral force of the injustice that has taken place – and thereby seek to address it. This is not a contradiction, but forms a consistent, albeit realist, approach to achieving racial fairness.

Practically speaking, Carl suggests that white conservatives should appeal to the growing ranks of Hispanic and multiracial Americans to build a coalition while seeking to dethrone progressive whites from their perch atop the country’s institutions.

He offers many useful policy ideas, and his deeply-researched and well-written work illustrates that there is considerable talent on the conservative intellectual bench, even if much of it has been forced from academia into the more insecure and less well-funded world of independent media and think tanks.

To wit, The Unprotected Class is a bold and brave book with a clear thesis that will change the elite conversation by collecting and arraying damning evidence in an unflinching manner. It throws down the gauntlet to the many progressives whose only argument when confronted with the claim that whites face discrimination is to snicker that this is a racist delusion.

Jeremy Carl has meticulously exposed the pervasive anti-white animus and open race discrimination which has been such a poisonous and divisive influence in America and other western societies.