Can White People Have a Sense of Identity?
Is it wrong for white Christian men to have a sense of identity? Ben Shapiro seems to think so. During a recent interview with Dana Loesch, the Daily Wire host lamented the rise in white identity among young conservatives. “I think we can start with what’s driving this in the first place,” Shapiro said. “For a decade or more, there was an attempt by the left to target Christian white men.”
Continuing, he explained:
In saying that over and over and over, they started to create a feeling in a lot of young white men, that as a targeted group, they actually were an identity group of their own, and that now as an identity group of their own, they must rise up and lay low anyone who is not a member of that group.
Shapiro’s two assertions are correct: the left promulgates anti-white identity politics, and many younger conservatives have developed a sense of white identity in response to it. But his read of the situation is simplistic. White people can have a positive sense of identity without needing to “rise up and lay low” people from other backgrounds.
It is reasonable not only for white conservatives but also for conservatives of any racial background to object to demographic change, race preferences, and the demonization of European contributions to world civilization. One could certainly oppose these things on colorblind grounds, as conservative activist Chris Rufo has done, since it appears to be the most effective way to build a broad coalition capable of winning elections and changing laws. But just as Asians may oppose woke policies on the grounds that they feel personally targeted, so, too, do many white people oppose them because they feel targeted. It is entirely reasonable to oppose a policy that directly targets you because of your race, while supporting a colorblind approach to undoing those policies.
In other words, it would be entirely sensible for a white American to object to becoming a minority in a country where discrimination against and demonization of whites is not only legal but widely celebrated. I fail to see why a self-respecting person of any race would support such discriminatory treatment of their own group. Does this qualify as white identity politics?
Clearly, it would be a grievous mistake to look at our current situation and conclude that the solution is to hate all non-white people, expel all blacks from America, advocate for violence, or become as loud and annoying about one’s white identity as the woke activists are about theirs. Those who espouse this hardline white identity politics are often crude and disagreeable, and I’m convinced most on the right who categorically reject any form of white identity are responding to them.
Yet those who seek to quash any sense of white self-identification among younger generations misunderstand the phenomenon and are doomed to fail. Life experiences for young Americans differ dramatically from those of their elders. For one thing, many young white people grew up in raucous minority-majority schools, where to be white may be to stick out like a sore thumb. Spend a little time on X and you are bound to see videos of black mob violence against white teenagers in high schools across the country. It doesn’t help that in class these students are taught to feel ashamed of their ancestors’ real or perceived sins, a narrative that is also promoted by political elites, entertainers, and the mainstream media.
It’s a sorry situation. But one thing’s clear: telling young white Americans that these problems don’t exist is the surest way to lose credibility in their eyes.
Like it or not, many young white people are being forced to confront the realities of race. To ensure they avoid overreacting, it is important to eschew the finger-wagging and moral denunciations that brought us here. Those who point to antiwhite discrimination are now so accustomed to scolding that they’ve become immune to it. Instead, what is needed is to calmly and rationally acknowledge the injustice they see while explaining why things shouldn’t be taken too far.
What does such an explanation look like? In the first place, it’s important to stress that hardline white identity politics is a dead end for the right. If ending anti-white racism and mass immigration are the goals, then the right must build a coalition capable of winning elections and changing laws. Appealing only to white people is unlikely to make that happen. In fact, Trump campaigned on mass deportations and opposition to anti-white DEI policies, yet he won by increasing his share of minority voters at the same time he supported these policies. Had he adopted a hard white identity politics approach, not only would he have alienated non-white voters, but he also would have alienated many whites.
Second, hardline white identity politics doesn’t offer a path to individual or national flourishing. Look at the white nationalist movement to see what happens to those who subscribe to and get caught up in this ideology. It always ends badly. They find themselves cut off from polite society—not only because of the risk of doxing, but also because the demand for an ever-ratcheting ideological purity puts one at odds with most people, even white conservatives, who do not share their views. It is perhaps no surprise that when one looks at the numerous high-profile white nationalists who have disavowed the movement—from Derek Black to Jeff Schoep—one notes how easily, once leaving, they became leftists. If this kind of intellectual instability isn’t a wise idea at the individual level, it certainly isn’t going to be at the national level.
The third and last reason is that the form of white identity advocated by hardline proponents is not, as they assert, historically accurate. It’s true that white identity has played a role in American history. British colonists recognized themselves as distinct from Indians and black slaves and understood that those racial differences were greater than whatever ethnic and religious divides separated them from other Europeans. But modern proponents of hardline white identity politics, who reduce everything to race, ignore the realities of ethnicity, culture, and religion. Putting your racial identity above all else is a sign of deracination, not a return to tradition.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that race is an inconsequential factor in society. We can support racially neutral laws while at the same time opposing the third-world demographic transformation of the West. Recognizing and celebrating the unique achievements of Europeans need not entail supremacism. We can acknowledge that group differences exist without resorting to hatred. And there’s simply no reason why white Christian men should be uniquely denied a sense of identity.
Some, like Ben Shapiro, might disagree on that last point. But the onus is ultimately on them to demonstrate that their position is not rooted in an anti-white double standard.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/web/can-white-people-have-a-sense-of-identity