The “Whiteness” Double Standard

The Left would like to portray white culture as a force of oppression—and deny its existence in any other context.

To my recurring frustration, much of modern politics can be reduced to a series of language games. Political fights rarely touch the substance of the disagreement, but instead hover on the thin layer of language that merely refers to the substance—or all too often, conceals it from view.

In the modern era, the Left’s coalition of liberals, progressives, and Marxists have turned these language games into an art. They deploy particular concepts when it serves their needs to do so; they deny the existence of those same concepts when it does not.

Last week’s confirmation hearing for Claremont Institute fellow Jeremy Carl, nominated by President Trump as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations, neatly illustrates this phenomenon. In this case, it involved the use of one of the Left’s most beloved bits of language: “whiteness.”

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy relentlessly grilled Carl about his past statements on race and his book, The Unprotected Class, which documents the history of DEI and “anti-white discrimination.” Murphy alternated between outrage and perplexity, accusing Carl of being a “white nationalist” for allegedly believing that “white culture” is a distinct sociological phenomenon. (The phrase does not appear in Carl’s book.) The subtext of Murphy’s performance was that he, Murphy, was befuddled by the notion of “white culture,” as if its existence were a wild fiction or conspiracy theory.

But his ignorance was purely performative. He knows exactly what “white culture” points toward. Murphy spent his formative years as the son of a corporate lawyer in Wethersfield, Connecticut, which was, at the time, almost exclusively white. He studied at Williams College, founded by Anglo-Protestants in 1793, and at the University of Oxford. As his campaign literature boasts, he is a true son of Connecticut, whose roots in the state trace back multiple generations on “[b]oth sides of Chris’s family.” This is precisely the milieu that constitutes “white culture,” which simply means the customs, manners, and habits of Americans of European descent.

Granted, it is theoretically possible that, like the water in which the proverbial fish swims, this culture was invisible to Murphy. But it is more likely that Murphy is simply playing a language game, denying the existence of the culture he grew up in to score points against a political enemy seated beneath him.

We’ve seen a lot of this game in recent years. During America’s “racial reckoning,” virtually all our prestige institutions advanced a notion of “whiteness” that sought to pathologize “white people” as inherently oppressive and “white culture” as pernicious. Now, the same people who marshaled these narratives, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, are pretending that these concepts don’t exist and that anyone who uses them is engaged in a racist conspiracy theory.

The only way to pass through the thicket of language games is first to clarify the concepts and define the terms. Only then can we begin to separate good from bad, useful from harmful.

In this case, we might begin with a short etymology of the term “white.” In the vernacular sense, everyone knows what “white” means: it is a color-coded shorthand for “Americans of European descent,” in the same way that “black” is a shorthand for Americans of African descent and “brown” is now often used as a shorthand for Americans of Latin American and Indian subcontinental descent. It is perfectly reasonable to argue that these terms are reductive, outdated, overbroad, or insensitive—I am not partial to them, for several reasons—but they are all attempts to describe the reality of continental ancestry groups.

The term “white” came into use after the discovery of the New World, when Europeans left the old continent and looked for ways to describe the different populations they encountered. While the dominant culture of England’s colonies was certainly English, there were enough Europeans of other nationalities that the colonial-era American writer Hector St. John de Crevecoeur described America’s mix of English, French, German, and Dutch frontiersmen as “a new race of men”—in short, “white people”—in contradistinction to the native tribes and African slaves who also populated the continent. (Again, we might wince at the crude use of color as a shorthand for groups, but as a historical matter, these were categories that all groups observed, including minority ones.)

Following the colonial period, America’s demographics became more complicated. New European groups arrived in the nineteenth century, and then other groups from around the world arrived in great numbers in the twentieth century, changing the demographic composition of the United States and increasing the diversity both within and between the main continental groups. Today, “white” contains Scandinavians and Sicilians, “black” contains descendants of slaves and recent African immigrants, and “brown” contains people from as far afield as Peru and Pakistan.

These terms are obviously imprecise, but most Americans can see their limitations and understand the categories as they are used in everyday life. For most people, as they survey their own experience, America is an assemblage of white, black, Latino, Asian, and Native American people, all with their own distinct cultures. At the superficial level, these can be distinguished by general patterns of ancestry, language, religion, cuisine, music, and shared history.

These cultures overlap in our freewheeling American context, and their mingling has provided a rich source of popular entertainment. The film Rush Hour, featuring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, is an extended riff on the cultural discontinuity between black and Asian culture. Likewise, the film White Chicks, featuring Marlon and Shawn Wayans, is a romp-style comedy in which two black FBI agents disguise themselves as white women. These films work precisely because most Americans immediately understand signifier and signified: “white,” “black,” “Asian,” and the groups they describe.

Why, then, would an educated man like Senator Murphy pretend not to understand these basic categories? Because the Left would like to portray “whiteness” exclusively as a force of oppression, and deny its existence in any other context. This particular language game is the identity-based version of what Michael Anton calls the “celebration parallax.” In this case, it means that “white,” as a shorthand for Americans of European descent, can be freely used for purposes of demonization—but it cannot be used to protest discrimination against white Americans.

This “whiteness parallax” is a malicious double standard. Personally, I don’t like the term “whiteness,” which is a Marxist coinage, and would be happy to replace the current shorthand with something better. But in any case, there should be a vocabulary to identify Americans of European descent in the same way that we identify all other groups. If all cultures truly can be celebrated, then that would mean the majority culture, too.

The Carl affair is a reminder that none of us should be shamed into silence about our history. The genius of the early Americans is that they gave us a nation that, over time, yielded a shared culture capable of recognizing the contributions of various groups while building a government based on equality under the law. At our best, we can honestly discuss the realities and differences among cultural groups while insisting that, as a matter of policy, we treat all individuals as individuals.

It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that our founding culture should be admired for its virtues, remonstrated for its vices, and celebrated alongside the contributions from all of those who came afterward.