Let's Talk About the Radicalization of Young White Males Online
- Thread starter Trajan
- Start date
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Every time the filibuster was used on this list was by right-leaning conservatives mainly to the detriment of black people but we still have some black people who love to scream about how they’re conservative or moderate, and how being liberal is so bad
#BothSides 
Basically Schindler is saying white people are going to start turning towards russia because they're so white...
topsecretumbra.substack.com
Wokeness and the New Cold War
John Schindler
12-15 minutes
American politics and society are currently experiencing profound shifts on social matters, particularly relating to issues of race, identity, and gender. In recent years, “woke” attitudes on the Left have moved from college campuses to the heart of society, including endorsements by big business, countless celebrities and media mavens, as well as rising numbers of Democratic party notables. Attitudes on politically touchy issues regarding ethnicity and sexuality that were regarded as fringe less than a decade ago now appear to have been mainstreamed, at least as far as social media is concerned.
This is all thanks to the “Great Awokening” in Vox’s memorable phrase, which witnessed a major upsurge in racial liberalism, particularly among educated young whites, during Barack Obama’s second term in the White House. Right-wing pushback to this newly vocal Wokeness aided the election of Donald Trump in 2016, yet his polarizing one-term presidency also served to increase enthusiasm for it on the Left. Indeed, Wokeness and MAGA operated in a sort of symbiosis throughout the Trump presidency, with their radicalisms only serving to bolster and intensify the other.
One of the intriguing aspects of Wokeness is that it enjoys limited appeal among the broad electorate, and is viewed skeptically even by many Democratic voters, particularly non-white ones, yet it has been embraced wholeheartedly, indeed with religious-like fervor, by many Democratic-leaning donors and influencers. Wokeness is merely the common term for the Critical Race Theory that underpins the ideology, which can best be viewed as a watered-down version of Late Marxism, with non-whites replacing the proletariat as the revolutionary class and whites standing in for the bad old bourgeoisie. The orthodox Marxists remaining among us generally find Wokeness horrifying in its crudeness, while those acquainted with Antonio Gramsci understand intuitively how Wokeness has achieved a sort of elite cultural hegemony in record time.
The ersatz-religious nature of Wokeness has been much commented on by its critics, which include many old-school liberals who have noticed that it places little value on things like free speech. Indeed, the censorious attitude among many young Leftists towards what George Orwell famously called wrongthink is difficult to miss. It would be incorrect to attribute resistance to Wokeness to the Right exclusively; there are plenty of old-fashioned liberals who seem appalled by it as well (though many of them remain quiet about it, fearing shaming and worse). Nevertheless, increasingly numbers of Republicans view resistance to Wokeness, for instance by banning CRT indoctrination in public schools, as a vote-getter as the 2022 midterms approach.
Judging from opinion polls, which indicate that many Americans, particularly but by no means exclusively on the Right, worry about being “cancelled” over their unwoke views, the GOP may be making a successful wager with their vocal resistance to CRT and what goes by the colloquial catchphrase “political correctness.” What Americans generally miss, however, is the expanding international dimension of Wokeness. This crusading faith, born on American college campuses, in recent years has gone global, sometimes with strange consequences.
It’s not surprising that Wokeness has expanded across the Anglosphere, given the dominance of American popular culture among English-speakers worldwide, notwithstanding that the discordant American racial experience, with its current CRT emphasis on the legacy of chattel slavery among blacks, has limited conveyance in, say, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or even Great Britain, which never experienced this directly. In a strange form of cultural appropriation, across the Anglosphere, young radicals speak about race and related social matters with a distinctly American voice, grounded in American issues, even when these have little if anything to do with local history or experience.
Hence the recent American habit of players publicly “taking a knee” before professional sports games, which has become de rigueur in the United States with the encouragement of the Black Lives Matter movement and its corporate sponsors, has spread to Britain. This has been met with varying degrees of befuddlement by continental players, and there was a minor bruhaha last week when Polish footballers who were playing a World Cup qualifier in England refused to get on their knees before the cameras. Indeed, the idea seemed to bewilder the Poles, with their team chief stating that taking a knee to honor BLM was the “last topic that interests” them.
While Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries appear to be resistant to the charms of Wokeness – perhaps because they lived rather recently under Communism and therefore possess a degree of herd immunity to Marxistoid fads – Western Europe has taken to this American import with a surprising degree of enthusiasm, at least in certain quarters. Murals honoring the late George Floyd, BLM’s current martyr-hero, have appeared in several German cities, while France has witnessed intense debates about Wokeness and its political meaning.
To many French intellectuals, by no means just on the Right, Wokeness appears to be a toxic import which has given rise to what its detractors term “Islamo-leftism.” This threat, which fuses CRT-flavored narratives about race with French controversies, has been deemed sufficiently serious that President Emmanuel Macron’s government is investigating Islamo-gauchisme. Macron himself has denounced Wokeness as an unhealthy “American import” that is causing “division and self-hatred” in France. It’s increasingly common among European skeptics to term Wokeness “the American disease.”
If this is how America’s friends view our latest ideological fad to go global, what about our enemies? That’s where things get interesting. Communist China regularly cites CRT-inspired language in its increasingly shrill diatribes against the United States. Beijing mouthpieces routinely denounce American “racism” as its “chronic disease,” while BLM was cited recently by Yang Jiechi, the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign affairs boss, in his tempestuous meeting with American counterparts in Alaska, stating acidly, “We hope that the United States will do better on human rights.”
This is all rather rich coming from the dictatorship that subjects Muslims in Xinjiang and Tibetans in their occupied homeland to cultural genocide – and perhaps worse. The People’s Republic of China is functionally a Han ethno-state, since that group makes up 94 percent of the PRC’s population, with non-Han minorities playing rather limited roles in public life. That decidedly non-diverse reality hasn’t stopped the CCP from employing our own Wokeness as a weapon against the United States, often ham-handedly. On cue, Beijing has made a lot of noise about a recent surge in anti-Asian violence in the United States, even though it’s not yet clear what exactly is causing that surge, which may simply be a part of generally rising violent crime in most American cities over the last year. All the same, a PRC foreign ministry spokesman recently expressed Beijing’s “deep concern” including the pointed recommendation: “The United States should take practical measures to resolve issues of racism and racial discrimination at home, and earnestly safeguard and protect the safety and legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens in the United States.”
Russia’s take on America’s racial problems is even more interesting than China’s frankly predictable, if decidedly cynical, spin. Kremlin media outlets, too, are prone to praising BLM and using CRT-inspired language to attack the United States for its racial problems, thus carrying on anti-American propaganda themes which date to Soviet times. Moscow’s official viewpoint is more complex, however, and Kremlin media outlets are as likely these days to criticize Wokeness as to praise it – sometimes in the same outlet, in adjacent articles. Consistency has never been a strongpoint of Russian propagandists.
Concerns about the other side of Wokeness, namely that it fosters anti-white attitudes and policies, also have currency in the regime of President Vladimir Putin, and they’re now being discussed openly. Last week, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, an excellent barometer of Kremlin viewpoints, warned about anti-white “aggression” in the United States. In televised comments, Lavrov offered a full-throated defense of whiteness against Wokeness that no Western politician of any stature would dare utter publicly, while pointing his finger directly at America for this radical and dangerous ideology:
Hollywood changes its rules now, too, so that everything reflects the diversity of modern society, which is likewise a form of censorship, which stifles art and imposes various artificial restrictions and demands. I saw black people playing in Shakespeare’s comedies. I don’t know when we will have a white Othello. You see, that’s absurdity. Political correctness pushed to such absurdity won’t end well…
Probably, everyone wants to get rid of racism, and we never doubted that. We were the pioneers of the movement for equal rights of people of any skin color. But there is a risk of reaching the other extremity, what we observed during the BLM events and the aggression displayed against white people, white US citizens.
Lavrov further accused the United States of spreading Wokeness around the world by design: “They have colossal capabilities for that.”
It should be noted that this Kremlin concern for endangered whiteness is hardly new. The Soviet regime, while pushing the Cold War anti-racist propaganda which Lavrov cited (not entirely accurately), felt differently in private. During a state visit in the late 1970s, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev flabbergasted British Prime Minister James Callaghan when he stated to the visiting Western leader, “There is only one important question facing us, and that is the question whether the white race will survive.” Callaghan, having no idea how to respond, fled the room silently.
For several years, Putin and his regime have posed as the defenders of conservatism and traditionalism on the global stage, including Kremlin endorsement of old-fashioned values regarding race, gender, and religion. Moscow is already deeply opposed to Wokeness in its policies and most of its propaganda. However, if the Putin regime decides to make itself the global defender of endangered whiteness too, as Lavrov seems to be hinting, that may prove a serious irritant inside the West. The Russian Federation is about 80 percent ethnically Russian, making that country considerably whiter than the United States is at present. Might we soon come to a day when Vladimir Putin is viewed by disaffected people around the globe as the last hope for the demographically declining white world?
It would hardly be out of character for the Kremlin to take that pose. Putin and his regime are always seeking new propaganda angles to exploit against the West, and our Wokeness is a weapon which can be employed against us with ease. This matters particularly because we are now in a new Cold War with Putin and Xi’s China too. Those regimes have many differences and there’s no love lost between Moscow and Beijing, thanks to a lot of bad history and current rivalries. But they hate the West together, and Russia and China fear and loathe us, particularly the United States, more than they despise each other. We should expect Beijing to talk a lot about American racism as it impacts minorities; we should prepare ourselves that Moscow will keep talking about American racism and how it harms whites. They may find a receptive audience in certain corners of our politics.
Way back in 1970, when the Nixon administration was just starting to reach out to Mao’s China to seek a strategic partnership against the Soviet Union – a development which helped turn the tide of the last Cold War – the historian John Lukacs published a provocative book titled The Passing of the Modern Age. A Hungarian by birth and raising, the continentally cosmopolitan Lukacs escaped Communism as it took over his homeland and arrived in the United States at age 22. He remained in this country until his death in 2019, writing thought-provoking books to the end of his long life. Lukacs, it should be noted, was a Catholic reactionary who despised populist nationalism in all its forms; he detested Trumpism long before it took shape. His 1970 publication nevertheless included this remarkably prescient prediction:
Bismarck was supposed to have said that the most important fact of the twentieth century would be that Americans speak English; it is not impossible that the most important condition of the next hundred years might be that the Russians are, after all, white.
Developing…
*******
IMO, the west better start embracing Africa cause Asia won't be particularly kind to the europeans
The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea
The long read
The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea
Statues of former US presidents in Croaker, Virginia. Photograph: Randy Duchaine/Alamy
Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world
by Robert P Baird
Tue 20 Apr 2021 01.00 EDT
In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.
The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who’d been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet there’s little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab on to,” Lander said in 2009. “Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.”
Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site’s age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and “black music that black people don’t listen to any more” (#116).
What has changed, however – changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably – is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they weren’t exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.
In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Lander’s blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as “an existential danger to the country and the world”.
Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, “whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power”. But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature – by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others – has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.
This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a “major change” in American attitudes about race – another 45% said it was a “minor change” – and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.
At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was “too much” discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didn’t exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.
What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society “white” is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as we’re not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as we’re put to the test.
A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”
Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the “new religion of whiteness” – a religion founded on the dogma that “of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan” – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.
That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attempted to delineate “the real distinctions which nature has made” between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnstein’s Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that “the most plausible” explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was “some form of mixed gene and environmental source” – in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.
By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Bois’s assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages – for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar – none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.
WEB Du Bois. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
If it’s easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon – in some quarters, the idea that “race is a social construct” has become a cliche – the same cannot be said for Du Bois’s suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.
Of course, it’s important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, “white identity didn’t just spring to life full-blown and unchanging”. It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.
Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in “the discovery of personal whiteness” took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. What’s more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Bois’s suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first president of Trinidad, “slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”.
The long read
The invention of whiteness: the long history of a dangerous idea
Statues of former US presidents in Croaker, Virginia. Photograph: Randy Duchaine/Alamy
Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world
by Robert P Baird
Tue 20 Apr 2021 01.00 EDT
In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a New York Times bestseller.
The founder of the blog was an aspiring comedian and PhD dropout named Christian Lander, who’d been working as an advertising copywriter in Los Angeles when he launched the site on a whim. In interviews, Lander always acknowledged that his satire had at least as much to do with class as it did with race. His targets, he said, were affluent overeducated urbanites like himself. Yet there’s little doubt that the popularity of the blog, which depended for its humour on the assumption that whiteness was a contentless default identity, had much to do with its frank invocation of race. “As a white person, you’re just desperate to find something else to grab on to,” Lander said in 2009. “Pretty much every white person I grew up with wished they’d grown up in, you know, an ethnic home that gave them a second language.”
Looking back at Stuff White People Like today, what marks the site’s age is neither the particularities of its irony nor the broad generalities of its targets. There are still plenty of white people with too much time and too much disposable income on their hands, and plenty of them still like yoga (#15), Vespa scooters (#126), and “black music that black people don’t listen to any more” (#116).
What has changed, however – changed in ways that date Stuff White People Like unmistakably – is the cultural backdrop. Ten years ago, whiteness suffused mainstream culture like a fog: though pervasive to the point of omnipresence, it was almost nowhere distinct. When the sorts of white people for and about whom Lander was writing talked about being white, their conversations tended to span the narrow range between defensiveness and awkwardness. If they weren’t exactly clamouring to dispense with their racial identity, and the privileges that came with it, they were also not eager to embrace, or even discuss it, in public.
In the years since, especially among the sort of people who might have once counted themselves fans of Lander’s blog, the public significance of whiteness has undergone an almost wholesale re-evaluation. Far from being a punchline for an anxious, cathartic joke, whiteness is now earnestly invoked, like neoliberalism or populism, as a central driver of cultural and political affairs. Whereas Lander could score a bestseller in 2008 with a book mocking whiteness as a bland cultural melange whose greatest sin was to be uninteresting, just nine years later Ta-Nehisi Coates would have his own bestseller that described whiteness as “an existential danger to the country and the world”.
Much of the change, of course, had to do with Donald Trump, for whom, as Coates put it, “whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic, but is the very core of his power”. But it was not only Trump. Whiteness has been implicated in events on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brexit; mass shootings in Norway, New Zealand and the US; the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings; and the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol. Alongside these real-world incidents, a bumper crop of scholarship, journalism, art and literature – by Coates, Nell Irvin Painter, Jordan Peele, Eric Foner, Ava DuVernay, Adam Serwer, Barbara and Karen Fields, Kevin Young, David Olusoga, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Colson Whitehead and Claudia Rankine, among many others – has spurred the most significant reconsideration of racial whiteness in 50 years.
This reckoning, as it is sometimes called, has had measurable effects. In a Pew poll last October, nearly a third of white Americans said that the recent attention to racial issues signified a “major change” in American attitudes about race – another 45% said it was a “minor change” – and nearly half believed that those changes would lead to policies that would ameliorate racial inequality. In the UK, a YouGov poll from December suggested that more than a third of Britons reported that they were having more discussions about racism than they had previously.
At the same time, this new focus on whiteness has prompted much confusion and consternation, especially among white people not used to thinking of themselves in racial terms. The Pew poll found that half of white Americans thought there was “too much” discussion of racial issues, and a similar proportion suggested that seeing racism where it didn’t exist was a bigger problem than not seeing racism where it did.
What these recent debates have demonstrated more than anything, perhaps, is how little agreement still exists about what whiteness is and what it ought to be. Nearly everywhere in contemporary society “white” is presumed to be a meaningful index of identity that, like age and gender, is important enough to get mentioned in news accounts, tallied in political polls, and recorded in government databases. Yet what that identity is supposed to tell us is still substantially in dispute. In many ways, whiteness resembles time as seen by Saint Augustine: we presume we understand it as long as we’re not asked to explain it, but it becomes inexplicable as soon as we’re put to the test.
A little more than a century ago, in his essay The Souls of White Folk, the sociologist and social critic WEB Du Bois proposed what still ranks as one of the most penetrating and durable insights about the racial identity we call white: “The discovery of personal whiteness among the world’s peoples is a very modern thing – a nineteenth and twentieth century matter, indeed.”
Though radical in its time, Du Bois’s characterisation of what he called the “new religion of whiteness” – a religion founded on the dogma that “of all the hues of God, whiteness alone is inherently and obviously better than brownness and tan” – would have a profound effect on the way historians and other scholars would come to understand racial identity. In part this had to do with his insistence that a racial category like whiteness was more akin to a religious belief than a biological fact. Du Bois rejected the idea, still common in his day, that the races reflected natural divisions within the human species – as well as the nearly inevitable corollary that the physical, mental and behavioural traits associated with the white race just happened to be the ones most prized by modern societies.
That had been the view, for instance, of Thomas Jefferson, who had attempted to delineate “the real distinctions which nature has made” between the races, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, first published in 1781. It was also the view that would appear, at least in attenuated form, two centuries later in Charles Murray and Richard J Herrnstein’s Bell Curve, which was published in 1994. Murray and Herrnstein argued that “the most plausible” explanation for the differences between Black and white populations recorded on IQ tests was “some form of mixed gene and environmental source” – in other words, that at least some of the discrepancy owes to natural differences.
By the time The Bell Curve appeared, Du Bois’s assertion that racial categories were not biologically grounded was widely accepted. In the years since, the scientific evidence for that understanding has only become more overwhelming. A 2017 study examined the DNA of nearly 6,000 people from around the world and found that while that while some genetic differences among humans can be traced to various ancestral lineages – for example, eastern African, southern European or circumpolar – none of those lineages correspond to traditional ideas about race.
WEB Du Bois. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
If it’s easy enough for many people today to accept that whiteness is a purely sociological phenomenon – in some quarters, the idea that “race is a social construct” has become a cliche – the same cannot be said for Du Bois’s suggestion that whiteness is a relatively new thing in human history. And yet just as in the case of genetic science, during the second half of the 20th century a number of historians demonstrated that while Du Bois was off by a few hundred years, he was correct that it was only in the modern period that people started to think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race.
Of course, it’s important not to overstate the case: the evolution of the idea of whiteness was messy and often indistinct. As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has cautioned, “white identity didn’t just spring to life full-blown and unchanging”. It had important antecedents that included a growing sense of a pan-European identity; longstanding cultural associations that saw white as a symbol of purity and virtue; and bog-standard ethnocentrism.
Still, with only slightly exaggerated precision, we can say that one of the most crucial developments in “the discovery of personal whiteness” took place during the second half of the 17th century, on the peripheries of the still-young British empire. What’s more, historians such as Oscar and Mary Handlin, Edmund Morgan and Edward Rugemer have largely confirmed Du Bois’s suspicion that while xenophobia appears to be fairly universal among human groupings, the invention of a white racial identity was motivated from the start by a need to justify the enslavement of Africans. In the words of Eric Williams, a historian who later became the first president of Trinidad, “slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery”.