Discussing Donald Trump’s election victory with a panel of TV pundits, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude explained it with reference to race. “There’s this sense,” he said, “that whiteness is under threat.” He went on to elaborate, if not elucidate, what he meant by this. “All these demographic shifts,” he said, “all these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.” They are “confusing the hell out of” white people, and these white people, confused by children’s faces on Cheerios boxes, and threatened by this confusion, reacted against this “sense” of threat by voting for Trump. Glaude gave no evidence of white people confused by children’s
faces, or of the feelings of threat these young faces were supposedly causing.
You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.
Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.
This is the second election in a row where a professor at an elite American university provoked scorn and mockery by using “whiteness” to explain things that non-white people had done. Writing in The Washington Post after the 2020 election, New York University professor Cristina Beltrán characterised increasing pro-Trump sentiment among blacks and especially Latinos as expressing “multiracial whiteness”. This apparently self-contradictory phrase was widely mocked by readers, who turned “multiracial whiteness” into a meme that still circulates on social media today.
Through three elections I have refrained from becoming a Donald Trump supporter, but I have to admit that his massive presence in American politics has had some positive effects. For example, he seems to have inspired this healthy reshuffling in ethnic voting patterns that some are calling “racial depolarisation”. And this is giving academics like Glaude and Beltrán the opportunity to beclown themselves before the general public by looking at things that non-white people are doing and ascribing them, somehow, to “whiteness”. And, in doing this, they are helping to discredit the increasingly empty and useless concept of “whiteness”.
“Whiteness” wasn’t always an empty and useless concept. The text that probably did more to push “Whiteness Studies” toward the academic mainstream was Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book How the Irish Became White. But Ignatiev’s study was very different from the work that came to characterise the academic preoccupation with whiteness, and it was infused with a very different set of political concerns. Ignatiev wasn’t a diversity bureaucrat or a professor of racial studies. He was a historian. But he didn’t get his PhD until he was in his forties. Before that he was a Pennsylvania steelworker and labour organiser.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is a successful American, an author who has risen to the top of his field and become nationally renowned on the strength of his equal participation in the American conversation, who writes grammatically correct mainstream English, well-educated, embraced and accepted by white people, respected and treated as an equal by white people–I think Mr. Coates needs to check his own “whiteness”, because he sounds pretty white to me.
The epiphany that Mr Coates hasn’t quite grasped is that his current elite world of anti-whiteness will last exactly one generation at most within academia, government and business.
Here’s an example of why: I’m an American with mostly European ancestry. My kids, therefore, have European ancestry and they appear to be white.
But my kids are actually Native American. Their grandmother owns Native American land on their tribe’s reservation.
So what exactly am I and my children according to Mr Coates and his contemporaries? Am I a white colonialist? Am I an oppressor?
My Native American children’s own truth – which is far more important than Mr Coates’ generalized opinion – is that I’m their protector and their provider. They know how much I love and sacrifice for them. They see me as their defender against corrupt government and corporate interests that are largely run by progressive hucksters – primarily of white European ancestry – that have the audacity to speak in the name of my kids’ Native American ancestry, without my kids’ permission, to destroy their father’s career and opportunities. Which is, by definition, also destroying these Native American children’s future opportunities at the same time.
When my children write and potentially publish their Native American histories – after this racist Woke generation has retired with pats on the back from their colleagues – who will be the ‘good guys’ and who will be the ‘bad guys’?
Many in America have similarly complicated and mixed ancestry. And people like Mr Coates in today’s generation DO NOT speak for prior generations, nor are they qualified to accept reparations for themselves from ‘white oppressors’ on behalf of my Native American kids who are actually damaged by these very same progressive grifters.
This is merely one example of legion.
The whole Woke enterprise totters upon the brink of collapsing under the weight of its own internal contradictions. A lot of progressive folks’ reputations will be destroyed because they’ve pushed progressive racist ideology – instead of the more enlightened path of Rev. Martin Luther King’s Dream – and have caused serious damage while pretending that their conduct wasn’t racism. My genuinely caring advice to them is to get out of such careers while they still can … before truth is revealed and history’s tide turns against them and theirs.
But for Coates, as he relates it in his book, the meaning of this maddening event reveals itself clearly and simply in the fact that it happened in America, and that it’s maddening to him as a black man, and it involved a black boy and a white woman. It was, ergo those things, another predictable instance of white presumption as to “black bodies”.
And there in lies the problem. Every time people like Coates need someone to blame there is the obvious candidate and most POC do not need a second invitation.
A while back one of the Smithsonian Institution’s museum promulgated a graphic entitled “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness & White Culture in the United States”. It included such things as self-reliance, objective rational thinking, work before play, planning for the future, using standard English (bizarrely described as “the King’s English”, when we Americans have no monarch and Elizabeth II was still very much alive), being polite. Evidently if one really wants to avoid “being white”, one has to be dependent, subjective, live for the moment, speak dialect, and be rude.
The graphic was roundly mocked and quickly withdrawn.
The Smithsonian graphic could not survive as it made the demeaning stereotype of blackness implicit in the whole intersectional grift too explicit.
It also made what the left genuinely thinks of minorities too explicit.
The Smithsonian have revised their graphic to emphasis the evil of whiteness
https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiteness
Indeed. It’s a fine article yet it misses the mark. Yes whiteness is everywhere.
“America would not exist, they believe, were it not for whiteness.”
Whiteness is the culture that built Western civilization — ‘white civilization’ to be honest. Whiteness is what sustains it, ‘blackness’ is what will tear it down. But that’s not categorical racism because, as the author points out, many POC have embraced whitness — they want to build, not destroy. Thus Jews have been white for quite a while, and non-muslim Asians will very soon be white.
Oh goodness. Tell me you’re not going to infect Unherd comment threads as you did Quillette’s.
Ignatiev was a genocidal Marxist Jew who wanted to “abolish the white race”—his words. The others are racist blacks. It would be a lot easier to analyse “whiteness studies” if only people could bring themselves to use the term “anti-white” in their analysis.
Under the convoluted gibberish of these so-called “professors” lies something very simple: race hate.
Why is it important to you if he was a Jew?
He’s noticing a pattern
‘Why is it important to you if he was a Jew?’
Because he called for the genocide of white ‘gentiles’. Just like it’s fine for Jewish people to combat anti-semitism – non-Jews who hate Jews. It’s also fine for ‘gentiles’ to combat Jewish anti-gentilism – Jews who hate gentiles.
Did Mr Ignatiev also advocate for the abolition of the Jewish race?
None of that (if true because I don’t know and the author sounds like a lot less of a nutcase than you do) nullifies his study of the assimilation of Irish laborers. But it seems like you really needed to evacuate your mental bowels so I’m glad you found a place to s***.
Whiteness is used interchangeably with ‘racism’. (Notably ‘white people’ are the only group deemed to have enough agency to enact significant racial discrimination, & minority group racism is denied, ignored, or even encouraged).
To understand the current metaphysical transformation of the idea of whiteness/racism, beyond its historically contingent role in group solidarity and tribalism, just substitute the word whiteness/racism for Evil/sin.
Explains a lot about the contemporary progressive hive mind.
Good essay. Minor note. You say, “Now it’s true, as I note above, that whiteness has been used by both industrial bosses and American politicians to build political communion upon racial difference.” Missed in your list are unions, which were massively resistant to black participation.
Once I heard the phrase “multiracial whiteness” I never forgot it. It’s such a perfect reductio ad absurdum of the entire left-wing race obsession – the “some animals are more equal than others” of our time.
Here’s the thing: for much of American history, “White people,” just meant the collection of ethnic groups that enjoyed the rights of citizenship and were regarded as full participants in American society – so, for instance, Germans and French and Anglo-Saxons were always in, black Africans were always out, and Irish and Italians and Hispanics and American Indians and Mestizos and Chinese were debatable. But if your focus, as an anti-racist, is to attack “whiteness,” rather than just trying to make race less relevant, then your real ideology is just resentment toward citizenship itself, and toward people who feel themselves to be fully American. And so, in the end, you end up whining about “multiracial whiteness” as Blacks and Hispanics who don’t like your ideology, and consider themselves to be Americans first, stop voting the way you tell them to.
I’ve written about this on my own Substack, in an article called “Identity Politics Blows Up In The Democrats’ Face.”
https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/identity-politics-blows-up-in-the
In essence, there are a lot of Blacks and Hispanics – mostly men, but some women too – who are just plain fed up with a party that thinks being “inclusive” of people like them means being soft-on-crime, making as many positions as possible available to only black women since they’re the “most diverse” (i.e. what Biden did when choosing both his VP and Supreme Court Justice), and so forth. They can see that this is not working in the interests of most Black and Hispanic people… whose interests really aren’t any different than those of most Americans.
Have an upvote, but please stop capitalising “black”. It’s not the adjectival cognate of a proper noun.
If you are a member of a “race” that benefits from this ideology you might well be happy to buy into it but many Hispanics and blacks are understandably sick of being patronised and stereotyped instead of being treated as an equal human being. If you are an academic presumably you stick to elaborating the absurdity of racial ideology because you know you will receive grief from your fellow academics: hence “multiracial whiteness”.
I think most of the Black and Hispanic people I know are just dismissive of all this identity nonsense. It’s just one more example of how block-headed the progressives really are.
It’s a great way for these block-heads to lose elections. And when we finally rid ourselves of these troublesome academics, might turn out to be proof of the resilience of multi-ethnic Democracy.
Fingers crossed!
Irish and Italians were always seen as white, their problem was religion not race
Don’t believe anything someone like Noel Ignatiev says, he hates white people, he wants us dead and gone, many such cases
When you capitalize the B in black and not the W in white, you lose me.
I capitalize “White” but not “black”, because I want to offend the woke scum.
Your loss pedant…
The lefts constant obsession with difference obscures what Mr Coates identified in his final paragraph” maybe they just want to be American” Unfortunately , most ethic groups in Britain want to identify as different not as British. Immigration would be much more successful if we accepted migrants on condition they wished to be British. The relentless desire to identify difference undermines.not enriches society
From the UK perspective, it’s clear Trump can assemble a multi-ethnic populist coalition of voters because the US does not have a communitarian problem with Islam. I suspect this is why E Musk has shone the political spotlight so clearly on the UK social dystopia.
However, he himself has family problems connected to transhumanism – literally, in the case of trans children – so he should not take his eye off the ball in his own country. In the UK, we are to face a sister issue in the drive to facilitate state-assisted suicide – I hope he takes a concerted interest in that issue too.
The race-obsessed academics got the election result they deserve. I’ll enjoy watching them squirm in the coming years.
This nonsense of putting people into ‘community’ categories is divisive and damaging both to society and individuals.
Identity politics has one purpose and use and that is to split an electorate into identifiable subsets that can be lied to differently from one another in a campaign….thanks Clintons.
Calhoun’s ideology didn’t succumb to entropy. It was washed away in rivers of Union and Confederate blood.
Does the left refuse to learn or are its members simply incapable of it? The professor quoted at the top is the poster boy for intentional obtuseness, both in refusing to understand that Trump is less about the man and more about the conditions that made him possible, and also that not everyone views all things through a binary racial prism.
The professor would be shocked to learn that black people, as well as people in any other minority group, are just as ideologically diverse as white folks. That people see racially ambiguous kids on cereal boxes is practically a drinking game. Every commercial – broadcast, print, or digital – features either a mixed race straight couple or a gay pairing. It’s as if these folks believe that black people no longer mostly marry other blacks, or that whites do likewise with whites, and so forth.
Further, let’s explore “white” as defined by the US Census Bureau. It includes not just people of European heritage but also those from the Middle East and North Africa. Because everyone knows that a Finn is just like an Iraqi, a German is just like an Egyptian, and Italians are interchangeable with Libyans. Even within Europe, it’s hard to say “Swedes and Greeks are just the same.”
Finally, it’s amusing to see someone who clearly does not like Trump forced to make sense of him AND of the stuff his preferred party has been peddling for years. “But maybe Trump’s importance is that, even with his crudeness and scapegoating, he treats them as something other than objects of symbolic pandering.” Well, yes. The left should try that sometime instead of viewing minorities as pets, mascots, and props to be used for, dare I say it, white social warriors.
‘ It includes not just people of European heritage but also those from the Middle East and North Africa.’
And those people are pushing hard not to be classified as white, so they can get all the perks that come with not being white in America.
“whiteness” is Ivory Tower Bull Shit, and it is not even quality BS.
I’m guessing here but could Professor Claude be black, by any chance? Or should that be Black?
Am I the only person who thought this was a terrible article? Inevitable if one is discussing tenth rate thinkers perhaps.
I wouldn’t say terrible but in large part “crafted for applause” from this readership. There are some valid points but they are not original. The article also lacks the humor and “negative capability” of Feeney’s less self-certain contributions to UnHerd.
If you really listen to Trump, it’s clear the issue isn’t about race for him in the traditional sense but something deeper. DEI fiasco didn’t just reveal who holds power—it exposed how power among whites is concentrated through economic systems, trapping poor whites alongside black Americans in similar oppression of economics but with different language/propaganda. By focusing on black issues, the system distracts and manipulates poor whites—a dynamic people like Vance et al understand well. Interesting to mention how Irish became “white”!
Trump’s focus isn’t on minorities, per se; it’s on the elite power structures—whites in closed systems—who fund and control everything. Listen to the people he aligns with and their critiques of the “deep state.” It’s not about black Americans—it’s about who holds the real levers of power even over Trump. Blacks supported Trump because he was targeting the system, which ironically retaliated against him through lawfare, a tactic minorities recognize as a tool the powerful use to maintain control – the canary in the coal mine!
The Smithsonian critique? If whites were truly as polite and virtuous as claimed, Europe and the U.S. wouldn’t be in wars every few years, so that was not a compliment. The Smithsonian didn’t frame minorities as rude—it made whites uncomfortable by revealing their lack of true expression. Whites can’t express their frustrations because doing so means challenging the system (look at the comments in Unherd any day LOL). Trump is the ultimate “rude” white person who dared to confront it—and the system (those nice polite people) came for him. Many black Americans saw that clearly.
Excellent point. Times have changed – look around.
I think it is really pretty simple. The elites and their politician pals need we here in the US to believe that there is no class divide. It is after all the defining myth in the USA. I say myth because in any human society there is of course always a class divide.It’s what we do. But as long as they could convince us the what we had was a RACIAL divide, then the white people, the overwhelming majority would let the elite get by with anything because they think that they too someday they would maybe join the elite ranks. And of course other politicians, particularly in the north, see that by portraying the Blacks as inferior, needy and dependent, they could use them as a solid voting block in exchange for give aways, special carve outs, etc. All that is changing really is the we regular people Black and White are awakening to the fact that there is indeed a class divide and that we are ALL on the wrong side of it. We have realized that the elite and the politicians were running what Obama would refer to as the Okie Doke on us. We were worrying about race while the Corporations and Banks stole the entire country. Just as Jefferson warned about. The elites now know that we know and have thrown back the curtains, abandoned any pretenses of Free Market Capitalism and are now robbing hand over fist as partners in a Fascist State.
In some black communities, they used to internalise the same fallacy in the form of the “acting white” accusation that supposedly revealed race treason on the part of any black person who decided to do things like stay in school, pass exams, go to college, get a job with prospects, pay taxes and never break the law.
Thankfully that sort of self-destructive class-hatred is disappearing now that black communities see those sorts of things as mainstream behaviour to which they have equal access and in fact an equal duty to participate within (and it was, to be clear, never more than a minority attitude anyway).
But it’s weird that white class activists are now resurrecting the fallacy, because it is of course actually just racism. No, not racism towards white people – though it is of course also that – but racism towards the very minorities the activists claim to ally with, because it tacitly asserts that the values and behaviours which produce successful members of society are somehow an essential and originating property of white people.
It ought to go without saying that such a view ought to be seen as, stupid, repugnant and bigoted, but clearly nothing seems to be able to go without saying these days, as our academic institutions are infested with ever-greater numbers of tin-eared lunatics.
There is, of course, the idea that academics who peddle these stupid ideas do so not out of any sincere desire for the advancement of knowledge (which is supposed to be their job), but simply as a means of devising tools of political influence. I get this: it’s nothing new. But what is new seems to be the hopeless amateurism of the contemporary players of this game: they’re intellectual mediocrities coming up with stupid arguments that persuade nobody and annoy everybody. And they are, it seems, the only ones who haven’t noticed.
Commercial scale slavery (as opposed to slave trading) came late to colonial America, long after the moral arguments against human bondage had been laid out and widely circulated.
When the Deep South colony of Georgia (which also included much of modern day Alabama and Mississippi) was founded, there was an absolute ban on slavery that lasted for decades, until the commercial potential of cotton in the 1750s made planters “stark mad after negroes.”
This was bound to cause dissonance in a literate and supposedly Christian society. Until whiteness was invented.
The only way to square the moral circle was through hypocrisy, justifying the unjustifiable on the basis of racial superiority while passing sumptuary laws that prevented slaves from dressing white, and banning free African Americans from living in slave states.
Whiteness obviously survived the end of the Civil War. It was still illegal for a white and black person to marry in Virginia until 1967. There are still issues of racial profiling in traffic stops. But it would be absurd to suggest that things haven’t radically changed since the Cvil Rights era.