How Anti-Racism Became Anti-White

Western societies have a systemic anti-white bias, which pervades all major institutions. There are laws that demote white people to second-class citizens, who can be discriminated against, because they are not part of a “protected group”. There is preferential hiring of non-whites, aka “affirmative action”. There is a biased presentation of historical events, in which only white people and European civilization are portrayed as oppressors. There is an extreme bias in entertainment and advertising, which disproportionately represents other races, especially blacks, and always casts whites as the villains, while non-whites are either noble heroes or victims. The news media amplify stories about white perpetrators and non-white victims, while suppressing stories with the roles reversed. “Black” is capitalized; “white” is not. White countries must have mass immigration, but this moral standard is not imposed on non-white countries.

The bias is blatant. If you deny it, you are lying. This essay is not about the existence of anti-white bias in our societies. It is about how this bias emerged.

It starts with a liberal position: treat people equally. This principle is deeply enshrined in Western culture. When it is applied to races, it becomes “Don’t be racist”.

This principle can be applied at the individual or social level. At the social level, it demands that laws and policies treat people of all races equally. At the individual level, it demands that we avoid racial prejudice, and judge people “by the content of their character”, not “the color of their skin”.

However, there are problems with applying this principle.

At the social level, there two main problems:

• Even if an institution (governmental or non-governmental) is explicitly unbiased (has no mention of race in its rules), the rules are applied by individuals, and those individuals could be biased, making the institution implicitly biased. Police officers could enforce the law in a biased way. At a major corporation, managers could hire whites preferentially.

• There is no way to measure institutional neutrality. If institutions are perfectly neutral, there can still be differences in outcomes, due to genetic or cultural differences.

So, we see that the existence of personal bias can affect institutions even if those institutions are explicitly neutral. The anti-racist points to this problem, and also points to the existence of differences in outcomes. She insists that outcome differences are due to systemic racism. She dogmatically rejects genetic explanations, because those could be used to justify racism. She insists that we must fight racism, not just by having fair laws, but by eliminating individual biases. Essentially, we must brainwash everyone to be non-racist. She also demands that institutions explicitly favor other races, to correct for implicit biases.

From this, we get the two prongs of anti-racism: propaganda and affirmative action.

At the individual level, the main problems are:

• There is a natural tendency to prefer people who are more like ourselves, culturally and biologically.

• Racial stereotypes are natural. There are race differences in socially important traits, such as criminal behavior and IQ. Thus, intuitions shaped by everyday experiences will be racist to some degree, and so will explicit beliefs based on statistics.

• There is no way to measure individual racial bias, outside a laboratory. There is no way for an individual to prove that he is not racist.

Anti-racist propaganda is exclusively directed at whites, because whites are “the problem”. This, in itself, is a racial bias. The propaganda portrays racism as a terrible sin. This places a burden on white people to prove that they are not racist. How can they do this?

Suppose that a white man has only white friends. It could be that he selects his friends entirely on the basis of common interests and character, and is open to having friends of other races. It could also be that he rejects any overture of friendship from a non-white, due to his racism. There is no way to tell the difference. Even he wouldn’t necessarily know why he chose his friends, since such decisions are made subconsciously. So, how can he prove that he is not racist?

He needs a black friend, of course. Alternatively, he can aggressively signal how non-racist he is, by professing concern about racism, talking about how bad racism is, fawning over black celebrities, etc. He might even start saying “I hate whiteness” or “Look at all the bad things Europeans did”. These are ways to signal that he is a good non-racist, not an evil racist.

Similarly, institutions have an incentive to favor non-whites over whites, to signal that they are not racist.

Thus, there is a tendency to add an explicit bias that favors other races over whites. This is much easier, cognitively, than trying to be unbiased. It is possible to suspend unconscious bias, in an interaction, and treat a person as a unique individual. But it requires some mental effort. It is easier to add another bias. It is easier to be anti-white than not racist.

Anti-racist propaganda affects people’s intuitions. We learn intuitions from real and artificial information. So, people start learning unrealistically positive stereotypes about non-whites, and unrealistically negative stereotypes about whites. This effect is greatest on people who have the least experience with other races, and/or consume the most artificial information. Kids are especially vulnerable, as they have less life experience, and are bombarded with anti-white propaganda by the education system.

One goal of anti-racist propaganda is to promote the belief that racism is a BIG problem. So, it tends to vastly exaggerate the level of racism within a society. There is an “Emperor’s New Clothes” feedback loop involved here too. Individuals have an incentive to amplify the propaganda, to signal their anti-racism. Thus, the belief in pervasive racism is socially reinforced. Questioning it becomes a sign of racism.

The myth of pervasive racism provides non-whites with a convenient excuse for their failures and crimes, and a justification for demanding special treatment. There is an incentive for non-whites to promote the idea that society is biased against them, and to complain about racism. Those complaints are then treated as evidence of pervasive racism (another vicious circle).

Starting from the assumption that racism is bad, Western societies have fallen down a slippery slope from anti-racism to anti-whitism. Rather than having a society with no explicit racism, but some natural level of implicit racism, we have a society that is explicitly and implicitly biased against whites.

There is no post-racism utopia. The attempt to engineer one has created an anti-white dystopia.