Fighting Whiteness

A Field Guide to White Supremacy
Belew, Gutiérrez et al
University of California Press, 2021

Whiteness is having its day in the sun. Not White people — we may have already had ours — but the word itself, and the whole concept of Whiteness. “The problem of Whiteness” often appears in newspaper and magazine headlines, the implication being that Whiteness is a troublesome puzzle which needs to be solved, hopefully using some sort of cross between the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine and a final solution, depending on where the person is on the spectrum of blancophobic hatred. Blacks can be regularly seen online calling for the death of Whites, genocidal talk actually being enacted in countries such as South Africa and Zimbabwe, which have been handed over to Blacks with predictable results.

It has long been asked in certain academic circles what Whiteness is, and this is not a bad thing in itself. Definition is a first principle, as Marcus Aurelius recognized: “Ask of each thing; what is it in and of itself? What is its nature?”

Perhaps those who espouse White supremacy as a problem, and take the time to research the field, might enlighten us. A collection of essays published five years ago, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, is an excellent almanac of Left-wing, academic attitudes towards Whiteness, thematizing as it does something that is both their nemesis and the jewel in the crown of White people; White supremacy. Appropriately, as language is one of the major battlefields in the cultural war currently raging, the collection opens with a lexicon of words which constellate around the central concept of White supremacy. The author rather arrogantly proposes it as “a resource for journalists, activists, policymakers and citizens” — everyone, in other words – with a self-importance familiar to anyone who has followed the ruinous arc of development traced by modern, White, middle-class, Liberal women.

The first thing that stands out about this introductory guide for journalists is the sheer audacity of calling it Thoughts on the Associated Press Stylebook. The internationally recognized Associated Press (AP) is heavily biased to the Left, as are all MSM outlets and syndications, but it does indeed have an industry-standard style-sheet. Kathleen Belew, one of the editors and essayists here, is a journalist, and she has written for some major newspapers in her native USA, as well as having a book on the New York Times best-seller list. But so have an awful lot of other people who don’t feel the need to tell the world’s press how to do its job. Ms. Belew is grossly impertinent to believe she has the right to tell an industry leader how to run their business, which in AP’s case is essentially ordering language in order to provide accurate reportage, or at least it should be.

This introductory glossary is the academic equivalent of a girl-boss in HR chastising a male employee:

Our aim in this section is to briefly provide journalists with an overview of terms and understandings agreed upon by most scholarly specialists and to encourage the editors of the Stylebook to reconsider some of the book’s guidance.

“Most scholarly specialists” are not cited and will likely turn out to be a network of faux-academics working in the same, CRT-based field as Ms. Belew. This is how CRT gives itself the illusion of intellectual integrity, by producing a blizzard of footnotes all of which tend to refer to works by people the author has probably had at least lunch with.

Ms. Belew strongly disapproves of the use of the word “immigrant”. “Immigrants”, she scolds, “are people who move”. Well, yes, they are. They are specifically people who move into a country from outside and typically dilute the voting power of the natives. “Migrants” are actually people who move, and “immigrant” is a cognate of that, the antonym being “emigrant”. Still, don’t let that disturb you while you advise one of the world’s largest press syndicates.

The next demand in a litany of disapproval is that the AP recognize that biology is no longer the gold standard, either for race or gender:

We urge the Stylebook to consider defining race itself as a socially constructed category of political identity that has changed over time.

This is evidently absurd, but absurdity in a brave new linguistic world is no longer an argument for invalidity. As for gender, and the busy modern self-elective traffic between male and female, “Pronouns should always match self-identification”. In short, this is a command that standpoint epistemology take the helm from post-Enlightenment rationality, flawed as that may be. This is an important and corrosive paradigm shift.

Capital letters are another area of concern for this journalistic martinet. “Black” should be capitalized, but not “white.” And AP have actually put this into place.

After all, as The New York Times says,

We believe this style best conveys elements of shared history and identity, and reflects our goal to be respectful of all the people and communities we cover [except White people],” said Dean Baquet, The Times’s executive editor, and Phil Corbett, associate managing editor for standards, in a memo to staff.

And:

“The lowercase B in Black has never made sense to me as a Black woman, and it didn’t make sense to me as a Black girl,” said Destinée-Charisse Royal, a senior staff editor in the Graphics department and one of the editors consulted on the change. “My thought was that the capital B makes sense as it describes a race, a cultural group, and that is very different from a color in a box of crayons.

But of course, capitalizing White doesn’t make sense because everyone knows that White does not refer to a race or a cultural group. It’s just like a color in a box of crayons.

“Indigenous” should also be capitalized, as should “Latinx”. This is amusing, as “Latinx” will certainly appear far more in the English-speaking media than its Spanish equivalent. The well-respected polling company, Pew Research, ran a poll a few years ago here in Latin America. The results showed that just 5 percent of Latinos had even heard the phrase “Latinx”, and only 3 percent used it. The statistics do not show how many of those who use the term do so simply to get an easy laugh in some Rancho bar in Panama. Latinos do not take kindly to being collectively described using a term invented by Liberal White women in American universities. There’s your White supremacy, right there.

There is much journalistic advice on the subject of Whiteness, obviously the center of gravity of CRT thought, such as it is:

The word white refers to a socially constructed and historically fluid category of identity in which people, systems of power, and wealth are invested. This is not a biological or unchangeable category, but neither is it neutral.

Whiteness, which built America and Europe, as well as many Commonwealth countries, is not something fixed and immutable:

Whiteness itself is a socially constructed category that has changed dramatically over the course of United States history. … Not until the nineteenth century did racial pseudoscience introduce the idea of ‘white’ as a biological marker.

Because White science hadn’t progressed enough to investigate it scientifically, although implicit notions of race date back to the ancient world.  We are familiar with the notion of the “social construct”, which is genuine “racial pseudoscience”. But what is this historically fluid entity capable of? Why, White supremacy of course. We have a definition which is clearly intended to hold for the Field Guide as well as the world’s media. White supremacy is defined as follows:

Both individual belief that White people are inherently better than others and the broad systems of inequality that insure racial disparity of health, income, life, and freedom.

Well, it goes without saying that White people in the aggregate are better than non-Whites (as Prof. Ricardo Duchesne has shown), and that this is demonstrable provided some kind of universal calibration is agreed to, which it no longer is. Who created the modern world?

The Left’s familiar technique of abstract complication extends to the definition of White supremacy:

What is White supremacy? White supremacy is a complex web of ideology, systems, privileges, and personal beliefs that create unequal outcomes along racial lines across multiple categories of life including wealth, freedom, health and happiness.

In fact, White supremacy follows simply from any objective interpretation of history. “Unequal outcomes along racial lines” are dictated by the divergence in intelligence and ability of the different races.  Race is not a social construct. Styles of dress are indeed social constructs because they differ between cultures. But race inheres at a cellular level, it is a chromosomal phenomenon.

Negative conceptions of White supremacy have to be craned into some of the essays here. With the CRT lexicon, and the ease of its grammar, this is an easy matter, and there is a philosophical reason for this. In an essay on the supposed persecution of “sex workers” — which is what prostitutes are now called — who are being de-banked and generally hassled as they try to go out their deviant work, the writer almost forgets to mention the star attraction:

While there has been an increase in legislative scrutiny and criminalization of sex workers, White supremacy/racism and transmisogyny/cissexism function to disproportionately impact Black and Brown trans/women/femmes who engage in sex work.

Apart from raising the question of whether “femmes” are French sex workers — salops Françaises, perhaps — this perfunctory mention of White supremacy, coupled with racism, shows the strange methodology of CRT. It works on reverse induction. Instead of gathering facts and progressing towards a hypothesis, testing it against an antithesis, and then arriving at a tenable thesis, they take the answer first and work back. These essays contain more than the usual quota of unsubstantiated claims such as those concerning the “Unarmed Black, Brown, and Asian women and men executed by the police”. These “never happened” memes are often used to reinforce claims about White supremacy, claiming that “overt and covert White supremacy [are] supported by often-violent patriarchy and gender norms”. I’m sure they are. I can’t prove that they are not, and nor can anyone else, given the standards of proof which now obtain.

Other statements made in the essays are very probably true, but lack ethnic and racial context:

Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined.

Undoubtedly true, but which males are more likely to be violent? Without breakdown by ethnicity, a formula like that makes no sense whatsoever. The underlying ideology is this: it is not any particular ethnicity or religion of violent men that is important, it is that they are men. This recurs with discussion of those with sexual dysfunction:

In our heterosexual culture, being lesbian, gay, trans, or a nonbinary person also places people in disproportionate danger.

It certainly does. It places those deviant categories in danger primarily from Blacks and Muslims, and of course they didn’t discuss how sexual non-conformity is regarded in African or Muslim cultures. In a chapter on the mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in 2016 in Orlando, Florida, we see elective blindness of race. The shooter was Omar Mateen:

Using hate to explain Omar Mateen … too readily conflates an Islamophobic narrative that misnames Islam as a religion of hate.

Islam is most certainly not exclusively a religion of hate. There are many things it loves very much, in-group things, endogamic things: the myth of its own superiority, that Mohammed is a role model, the genuine subjugation of women (dismissed by Western feminists). But there are certainly other things, other practices, that Islam hates. And one of those is homosexuality (a word the editor warns AP against using in its copy). Boy, do Muslims hate gays. I’ve written here before about “intersectional pile-ups”, in which lifestyles which are utterly antithetical to one another try to group together under a big, Socialist tent. If you are familiar with the group “Queers for Palestine”, you will be aware of the level of cognitive dissonance active among some gentlemen who play for the other team, as the English used to call gay men.

Islamophobia makes its obligatory appearance in the Field Guide, described as:

The presumption that Islam is inherently violent, alien, and unassimilable… [combined with] the belief that expressions of Muslim identity are correlative with a propensity for terrorism.

Firstly, it is not a presumption. For anyone with standard-issue cognitive ability, it is inductive reasoning. Secondly, people who don’t find the statement to be true confirm themselves as either deeply unserious or a Muslim. Islam gets a pass on terrorism, again uncited and unsubstantiated:

White power activists have carried out an overwhelming majority of domestic terror fatalities [sic] and attacks in recent years.

Much of the Field Guide replays many of these unsubstantiated modern myths:

A war is being waged against Black and Brown trans women/femmes in the United States. And this war is caused by systemic White supremacy that fuels racism, economic inequality, and transmisogyny.

No attempt to break down the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

Victimhood in the Field Guide is present and correct, with its usual false extrapolations and sense of melodrama:

When a Black person was lynched, they were not just lynching that person, they were targeting the entire African-American community.

This is a form of racial transubstantiation. There is no one Black person, they are all one and all is in the one, a negro ummah. This matches up with a tradition of grandiosity and self-aggrandizement among Blacks which is easily fed by the White Liberals behind the Field Guide. There is a lot of faulty wiring in the circuitry of the Black psyche, and one of the worst short-circuits is an acute susceptibility to bias confirmation. On receiving information, Whites are far more likely to assess that input and disregard it if it is dubious, even if, were it true, it would be advantageous to them. Blacks tend to enact a sort of corollary. They are more likely to assess whether the information, if true, would be advantageous to them, and then judge its dubiousness on that basis. It is like utilitarianism, but without the rational workings. Blacks are not, however, the only victims:

Anti-Asian violence recurring throughout US history should not be seen merely as episodic, arising in periods of xenophobia, but rather a structure sustaining racial divides.

This is crucial to the CRT program; It requires constants and not variables. If anti-Asian violence can be localized as “episodic”, it becomes just another aberrant social phenomenon to be explained away using the context in which it occurred. It must be the context. White supremacy must exist even if only presumed by a misreading of empirical facts. It is like the ether eighteenth-century scientists erroneously believed existed always and everywhere.

The media has an uncomfortable, cognitively dissonant role in the Field Guide. It must both help and hinder:

Trump and his supporters and key members of his staff and cabinet appear to adhere to the idea that immigrants are displacing the White ethnics who claim ownership of the nation that they allegedly founded. … This narrative is spread primarily by influential mainstream media pundits, writers, academics, and a host of conservative groups who seek to curtail immigration by invoking tropes of white decline, profound demographic change, and an ongoing Mexican invasion of the United States.

The media can be good or bad little children, dependent on the needs of the CRT community:

Trump’s racist discourse emboldened self-avowed White supremacists to take to the streets while the mainstream media normalized this scandal by calling them ‘Alt. Right’.

The phrase “Alt. Right” actually came into media usage after a stump speech given by Hillary Clinton in 2016, and if the media “normalized” the term, it was effectively at the request of the woman the media confidently expected to win the 2016 Presidential Election. The phrase “Alt. Left, incidentally, is included in Ms. Belew’s introductory linguistic demands as “False terminology; do not use”.

The collection, as with all CRT, is selectively blind to the role of the MSM in defending their dubious position. The legacy media is concerned today not with objective reporting, but with imaginative and agenda-driven story-telling. Part of the Field Guide’s project is statedly “to tell, and understand, better stories”. This is of interest as it funds the currently popular concept of “the narrative”, the root of which is the Latin narrare, meaning “to tell a story”. This is why the Field Guide is able to repeat the outrageous fabrication that the BLM riots of 2020 were “A long summer of peaceful mass protests”.

When it suits the CRT lobby to stroke the media’s fur, however, they are happy to comply:

Our eyes are turned on other horrors. Our news is full of hate crimes, exclusions legal and illegal, cruelty and violence in speech and action.

“Our news” refers to the MSM, clearly a Leftist institution across the West. It has been clear for some time that MSM news is agenda-based, inaccurate, and dedicated to blancophobia and determined to erase Black on White violence. There are occasions here in which the writers seem to forget, or to be unaware of, the fact that the MSM is on their side. But for serious activists like these, the media can never be far enough left.

An essay on antisemitism sits uneasily here, as a dislike and distrust of Jews is the one thing which unites parts of the Right and Left, especially since Gaza. “Antisemitism” is a phrase included in the opening lexicon, incidentally, and the editor suggests the word not be hyphenated. The word “Semite” is, apparently, a word of recent provenance. The essay has a familiar theme, that of historical oppression of Jews by (White) gentiles. There is plenty of talk of “tropes” and “conspiracies”. One particularly hilarious sentence talks of any mention of worldwide banking being automatically anti-Semitic, whether or not there is any mention of the Jew:

The word Jew hardly has to be mentioned to be already nefariously at work.

This is extraordinary reasoning. Even to mention something of which Jews have been accused is Jew-hatred even if the Jews themselves are not mentioned.

The “takeaway” from this collection, to use modern parlance, is that the rift between Left and Right, between “woke” and “based”, reduces to a philosophical schism, that of standpoint epistemology versus post-Enlightenment rationality. The political faction behind CRT, “White supremacy”, micro-aggressions, unconscious bias, systemic racism and the rest of the post-modernist grabbag that passes for their thinking have a singular form of irrationality: they base their theses on ex cathedra statements made ex nihilo.

The Field Guide to White Supremacy is a very good collection of essays. Most of the essays are well-researched and informative. As noted, some of the wilder claims made are not cited or substantiated, but there is a curious aspect to the book. White supremacy is not a guiding principle of the collection, but rather added to many of the essays almost as an afterthought.

There is a tremendous pathos about Whites who whine about White supremacy. One almost feels sorry for them. To fail to understand racial difference, to deliberately ignore what they know to be true, to throw nature out with Horace’s pitchfork is not going to do them any good in terms of mental health. Cognitive dissonance isn’t some skin rash — it will do genuine mental harm to anyone suffering from it. One can see it in the psychotic behavior of many on the Left. All that said, White supremacy is not in a very healthy situation.

There remains only one option for Whites, which is to double down on White supremacy, and to come in so hot that non-Whites know all about it. One of the historical essays in the Field Guide states the following:

British colonists created slave codes to manage potentially dangerous slaves.

Good for them. They obviously saw what we cannot, that Blacks are largely a problem people for the White races, prone to criminality and disproportionately in need of welfare and social services. We need new codes which must be explained, using ebonics if necessary, to non-Whites.

Charlie Downes is a young politician, and a leading member of Rupert Lowe’s party, Restore Britain. He makes a straightforward point:

The answer, in my view, is simple. If the Left is anti-White, we must be pro-White. That’s the game they want to play, so let’s play it.

Fine as far as it goes, but this is not a game. White people may need to go a lot further than merely being “pro-White”. Perhaps the White race, or races, may be left with only one choice: make blancophobia real. It already exists, of course, in the same way as Islamophobia, homophobia, and transphobia are said to exist, but it is the phobia that dare not speak its name. Western deep states, along with their controllers and allies, already hate White people. What is missing is the original meaning of “phobia”; an irrational fear. Now, it is time to make that fear rational. It is time to take the advice of the mad Roman Emperor, Caligula. One of his generals told him that his people hated him. Caligula replied; “Let them hate me, as long as they fear me”.