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A few days ago Thomas Chatterton Williams published a piece in The Atlantic about the white identity movement on the right. The thesis Chatterton puts forward is the same one you’ll find in almost all of his columns, not to mention his books: there is a dangerous ascendant right-wing movement in this country, but that movement is the result of overreach by the left. He says:
By the 2010s, the most influential progressives no longer aspired to the color-blind ideal of Martin Luther King Jr., which deemphasized all racial categories. Instead, they embraced racial self-assertion….
All racial identities were named and valorized, except one. This wasn’t the sole cause of the white backlash that ensued; racist politicians and media figures bear ample responsibility for that. Still, the rhetorical and ideological excesses of the left generated a sense of unfairness that has become central to the white-identitarian project.
This contains all of the fallacies that you will generally see in a Thomas Chatterton Williams piece. It imagines that history begins in approximately 2013, and it treats the left as the only political actors with any agency. The right, to Chatterton, is not a political movement as much as a naturally occurring, reflexive response to the left. Any moral judgment directed toward it must be tempered by the fact that their hand was forced.
Chatterton doesn’t align with white supremacists, but when he criticizes them he always emphasizes that they are making the same categorical error that people on the left do - treating race as a real distinction that matters. His latest book, The Summer of Our Discontent, lays out the argument that blacks and whites in America have nearly reached material parity, and therefore calls for racial justice are at best misguided and at worst a way of reifying race as a material distinction.
It struck me when reading the Atlantic piece that I had just read a version of the same argument a few hours before, when I was re-reading the Civil Rights Cases of 1883. Back in 1875, Congress passed a robust anti-discrimination law that prohibited discrimination in various accommodations, from theaters to railroad cars. But the Supreme Court struck it down. They said this:
When a man has emerged from slavery, and, by the aid of beneficent legislation, has shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected.
This is, at its core, the same argument made by Chatterton: affirmative efforts to promote equality have exhausted their utility, and any further attempts will only operate to unjustly favor black people.
The argument has recurred throughout our history in different forms. In 1935, Congress was considering anti-lynching legislation (the laws were never passed, with Southern Democrats in the Senate holding the line on a filibuster). The New York Times published an opinion piece opposing the bill, arguing that “popular education, and the growth of civilization therefrom, have produced a constant lessening of mob violence of the types which are the objectives of the Costigan-Wagner bill.” In other words, enough progress has been made, and we don’t need legislation to force any more.
While Chatterton is not any sort of ideological white supremacist (he is black, after all), he believes that they have “identified a genuine problem.” One white supremacist he speaks to argues that ethnicity is “valued for minority groups, and it’s denigrated for majorities.” Chatterton concurs, saying that at “universities, nonprofits, and the publishing industry, I have repeatedly served on selection committees in which jurists—in many cases white jurists—stated that a candidate’s racial, ethnic, or sexual claim to marginalization ought to be the deciding factor for a coveted position or prize.”
There are a handful of obvious rejoinders here – the idea that ethnicity is “denigrated” for white people is only true in the sense that celebrations of whiteness itself are generally frowned upon. But celebrations of white ethnicities – Irish, Italian, German, etc. – are a part of mainstream culture.
More notably, Chatterton seems to buy the idea that whites nowadays are discriminated against in hiring, pulling from his own experience. But his own experience consists entirely of his time sky high in an ivory tower. It’s not hard for me to believe that in some highfalutin academic circles, minority candidates are being granted occasional favor in hiring. But if it were true that minority status was actually coveted in the workplace as a general rule, it’s not showing up in the statistics. A few years ago some researchers conducted a classic resume audit study. They sent out tens of thousands of identical resumes for entry-level jobs, half with stereotypically white names and half with stereotypically black names. The white candidates scored interviews about 10% more often than the black candidates. That – not some anecdotal selection committee at an unnamed university – is the reality of employment discrimination in America today.
Chatterton believes that modern social justice movements have made racial victimhood into a form of rhetorical currency, and that white supremacists are now trading in it:
The white identitarians’ ultimate goal seems to be the moral and institutional power that comes with victimhood status, which is now anyone’s prize in post-woke America.
But white supremacists were claiming victimhood long before the social justice movements of the 2010s. Segregationists in the 1960s bemoaned the tyrannical overreach of the civil rights movement. The Southern redeemers decried Reconstruction governments as oppressive, and chastised Northern Republicans for their divisive rhetoric. They took offense at the continued use of the term “rebels” by their Republican colleagues. They argued that the inequities of slavery were in the past, that the South had moved forward, and that Northern Reconstructionists were dwelling on the tensions of the Civil War. Communication scholar Kirt Wilson summed up the Southern argument: “bury the past and harmony will prevail.” Many powerful Americans took them at their word, and the result was nearly a century of Jim Crow.
Across three different centuries, the so-called white identitarians embraced different iterations of the same position. The legitimate grievances of black Americans were long past, they said, and attempts to remedy them would tip the scales too far and impose an unfair burden on the white majority. Whenever people in power acquiesced to the white supremacists, they leveraged that acquiescence to subjugate minorities and entrench white supremacy further. Chatterton is a contributor to this longstanding intellectual tradition, not because he believes in its mission but because he buys its excuses.
Sound familiar?
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