Yes, White Culture is Being Discriminated Against

Jeremy Carl, a Fellow at the Claremont Institute whom I have met and corresponded with, and who wrote an influential book on anti-white discrimination in America, has been running the gauntlet of Senate confirmation hearings for a top post at the State Department.

He once tweeted about ‘the erasure of white culture,’ which goes too far, but he is right that white culture is being discriminated against in elite circles. This is true in four ways:

1. Uniquely among pan-ethnic groups, the existence of white culture is denied and its proponents told to either deconstruct it into ethnic subcultures or expand it into a superordinate category like American or Western

2. Uniquely, white culture is pressured to break its connection to white identity and seek a racially diverse audience

3. Uniquely, white artists may not appropriate minority cultures

4. Uniquely, white identity cannot be expressed with pride, nor can whites advocate for their group interests

Democratic Senators like Cory Booker, Tim Kaine, Chris Murphy, Jeanne Shaheen and Jack Rosen have attempted to extract their pound of flesh from Carl’s past pronouncements. They, and the online left, have trotted out the dishonest ‘white nationalist’ canard – a term referring to those who support a racially pure white ethnostate – and sought to smear him with it. Here it’s worth noting that Carl hails from an ethnically Jewish background, even as he is a practicing Christian.

But what is most interesting about the affair is the subsequent brouhaha that blew up over Carl’s use of the term ‘white culture,’ which he claims is under threat from the cultural left. Chris Rufo and his co-host Lomez argue that white culture is well-defined and has played a dominant role in the formation of American culture. Against this, Leighton Woodhouse and John Podhoretz suggest that ‘white culture’ does not exist or is a racist dogwhistle. Thomas Chatterton Williams claims that Carl does not adequately define white culture: when queried, Carl mentioned Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language Super Bowl half-time show as being from a minority culture while white churches were an example of white culture.

This entire discussion involves three sets of category errors.

First, culture is not identity. Culture refers to external practices visible to the observer. Identity is about subjective narratives and attachments. Culture involves practices like music, food, symbols, sports, clothing and vernacular architecture. Identity is about myths, memories and attachments to symbols and places.

Second, the vertical transmission of folkways from parent to child, or from an ethnic community to its members, differs from the horizontal borrowing or disembedding of culture by outsiders, businesses or intellectuals.

Third, identities typically take a nested form: family within extended clan within ethnic group within pan-ethnic groups like black or Christian. At a particular moment and place, a higher or lower level of identity may be most meaningful. Identities involve an internal collective memory, but also external cultural markers of difference which members deem important, and which outsiders use to identify the group. These are typically language (think Estonians vs Russians), religion (Irish Catholic vs British Protestant) and physical appearance (black vs white Americans).

Thus, when thinking about white culture, we are referring to cultural practices passed down vertically within European-origin ethnic groups. Its originators share a pan-ethnic ‘white’ identity and are identified as white by nonwhite outsiders.

White vernacular folkways can escape their group boundary, moving horizontally to nonwhite individuals and cultures. As a result, the universe of individuals who express white culture is broader than white people. Whites have often borrowed from nonwhites, as with country music, which contains black musical influences. Yet this does not mean that white culture is just American culture. Certain cultural practices originate from, are more popular among, and are identified with, whites. They needn’t be exclusively white to constitute ‘white culture’ any more than blues or rap need be exclusively black to be called ‘black culture.’

Progressive or liberal commentators such as Woodhouse or Podhoretz or AOC seek to deny white culture by deconstructing it into its European ethnic components. Ethnic cultures within the white category do not, however, render nugatory the term ‘white culture.’ Pan-ethnic cultural practices sit under the European category the same way pizza, which comes from southern Italy, fits inside the more capacious ‘Italian’ category. White culture thus encompasses the practices of all European ethnic subcomponents, from Scotch-Irish influenced bluegrass to the Scandinavian-derived log cabin to European Jewish-origin bagels.

To be sure, a valid quibble might be that there are phenotypic whites who are not of European origin (i.e. Syrian, North African, Afghan) and so ‘European culture’ rather than ‘white culture’ is the correct label. If we reject even ‘European culture,’ then any appellation, be it ‘Greek culture’ or ‘Persian culture’ or ‘Chinese culture’ must also be discarded.

Even so, ‘European culture’ is not as accurate as ‘white culture’ in America. Why? Because in the US race is more socially relevant than Old World continental origin. The assimilation of a wide range of West African tribal and ethnic groups into Anglo-Protestant American culture was shockingly complete. Moreover, whites in America developed new forms of culture without European roots, like clam chowder and the pickup truck, which came to be associated with white American identity. The cultural differences between white and black Anglo-Protestants are therefore not coterminous with European and African traditions. ‘White culture’ fits better than ‘European culture’ in the American context.

White culture, contra AOC, cannot be simply decomposed into its ethnic constituents. When it comes to white identity, it’s vital to appreciate that since the 1960s, European groups have heavily intermarried across ethnic and religious lines to the point that pure ethnics are rare. Relatively white neighbourhoods exist but Polish, Irish and Italian neighbourhoods have essentially disappeared. White ethnicity has become attenuated and assimilated.

Protestant religion and British or Dutch surname no longer demarcate the dominant group in America, as was true until the 1960s. For this reason, white phenotype is now the central marker of the pan-ethnic majority. The pan-ethnic ‘white’ layer of identity is now far more relevant in everyday interaction than ethnic identities such as Italian, German or WASP. Compare this with 1960 when JFK struggled to get elected as an Irish Catholic while the top echelons of society were as uniformly WASP as the advertising firm Sterling Cooper from Mad Men.

Though there is an impressive level of race mixing today, marriage, residential choice and friendship remain largely within-race for most whites. In Los Angeles, for instance, if random mixing was the rule, the typical white should have partners and friends that are three-quarters nonwhite. The reality is quite the opposite. Meanwhile the decline of the white share of the population is increasing the salience of white pan-ethnicity.

The collective memory of white identity is, however, relatively disunited and disorganized. The blending of colonial, western settlement and Ellis Island myths of origin, and their propagation, has not been undertaken by any major school of white American ethnic revivalist intellectuals. The group’s memories and narratives are only weakly reproduced as a communal myth. In this sense, whites resemble disorganized groups such as nineteenth century Provencals in France. The myth-symbol complex of white Americans has also become polarized, with white Republicans identifying far more than white Democrats with Puritans and western Anglo-Protestant settlers. Indeed, white liberals are often openly hostile to the white Anglo past, seeing it as shameful settler colonialism. An important segment of white liberals even reject the Founders.

The absence of a unifying mythomoteur for the new white group means that commodified white cultural forms take on greater importance in defining white identity. Mass cultural practices like rodeo, heavy metal music, hipster bars, Nascar, preppy chinos and other ‘stuff white people like’ produce white identity. This results in what scholars term a decentred ‘everyday nationalism’ in which large numbers of people participate in interpreting, creating and appropriating the symbols which define group boundaries. This makes it a complex nationalism, more like a self-organizing flock of birds than a centrally-directed army. There is no intellectual nerve centre like the cultural associations and patriotic societies of nineteenth century Europe: Ivy League universities are certainly not interested in reproducing this identity the way they did prior to the 1960s.

We should distinguish white culture with roots in white ethnic traditions, such as country music or St. Patrick’s Day, from forms based on people drawing associations between white identity and modern pastimes such as stock car racing or indie rock music. Few elements of white culture are produced or performed for the purpose of marking racial boundaries. Perhaps only the confederate flag plays this role. Instead, taste communities (such as skiing, Nascar or heavy metal) heavily coincide with being white. The fact this culture is coincidental with the white group rather than self-consciously expressing its identity means the culture is predominantly but not exclusively enjoyed by whites.

While white cultural practices are not under threat, they have, from Hollywood to hiking, come under pressure to diversify. Where DEI campaigns are successful, they aim to sever the association between cultural activities and white identity. While hardly fatal for white self-consciousness - since a stripped-down culture complex can still sustain group identity - this shaming of white preponderance reduces the white group’s distinctiveness and opportunities for in-group cohesion. Regardless of whether this is a good thing or not, the fact remains that nonwhite cultural activities face no similar policing.

We find an analogous asymmetry for the nonsensical notion of ‘cultural appropriation.’ White artists must ‘stay in their lane’ and avoid borrowing cultural practices from black, Asian or Hispanic cultures while nonwhites are under no compunction to do likewise.

But the most profound double-standard is that white identity is stigmatized while black, Asian and Hispanic identities are celebrated. You can express your pan-ethnic identity with pride and defend its economic, cultural and demographic interests, but only if you are not white.

In a survey I conducted in 2017, I discovered that 91 percent of white Democrats with post-graduate degrees (73 percent of white Democrats overall) said a hypothetical white woman who wanted to reduce immigration to help maintain her racial group’s share of the population was racist, as opposed to ‘pursuing her racial self-interest, which isn’t racist.’ This compared to just 58 percent of nonwhite Democrats, 45 percent of nonwhites overall and 11 percent of White Republicans who said the woman was racist. By contrast, only 18 percent of White Democrats said that a Hispanic woman who wanted to increase Hispanic immigration to boost her group’s share of the population was racist. The test showed how simple tweaks to categories and words dramatically increased the perception of racism. In fact the white and Hispanic women were doing the same thing: advancing their group’s demographic interests.

The white left’s approach amounts to what I described in my first book in 2004 as asymmetrical multiculturalism, which forms the basis of the most convincing arguments in Jeremy Carl’s book on anti-white discrimination. It is possible, in my view, to accept that whites have small everyday economic advantages – in renting a private room or having their resume returned by a small business – while also being disadvantaged when it comes to Charles Taylor’s ‘politics of recognition’. Namely taking pride in, expressing and reproducing group identity, and having it recognized by society.

While white culture is not being erased, white identity, in contrast to that of other racial groups, is stigmatized. In addition, the group’s cultural practitioners are either frowned upon or face unique social pressure to disassociate their output from the white group by diversifying their customer base.

The point is not for whites to retreat into a cultural ghetto or fixate on their race, but for society to treat all groups’ culture and identity equally, accepting that most people, from Bad Bunny to Kid Rock, will combine moderate attachment to their pan-ethnic group with overriding attachment to the American nation.