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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36586 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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This was almost comical back when apartheid South Africa classified Japanese as "white" as it exposed how absurd any claims of basing white supremacy on actual genetics were.

You can call it comical if you like, but perhaps white South Africans, due to their unique geographical circumstances, understood something about Whiteness which the rest of the White (and White-adjacent) world is only now beginning to grasp: that Whiteness is most useful as a way to exclude its opposite - Blackness. White as “not-Black” seems like a fairly important distinction, given the geopolitical and demographic outlook of the century to come.

I suspect you will have a hard time getting most of your fellow white nationalists to adopt your definition of "whiteness" as "Not black."

You know, @HlynkaCG sometimes goes on about how white nationalists are just leftist identitarians under the hood, and I never really saw it, but now I think there is something to it. One of the most amusing aspects of the woke terminology treadmill is how they keep inventing successively narrow terms - "PoC," "BIPOC," etc. - because at first they just meant "Not white", but then they needed to exclude Asians and/or Jews and/or wealthy Nigerians and/or Iberian Spaniards, etc. (Same thing in reverse with the ever-expanding "LGBTQBBQ++" acronym that basically means "anything as long as you're not 100% straight.")

And here you are doing the same thing. Just saying "I don't like blacks" is a little too on the nose, so you invent this whole taxonomy where you're defending "whiteness" but "whiteness" is "anyone who's not black" and then you get to have fun arguments with your fellow identitarians about whether Jews and Asians and Arabs and Indians get to join the club.

So yes, I call it comical, but moreover, I call it incoherent, at least if you're trying to justify your beliefs via genetics.

After some googling I can confidently say that POC and BIPOC refers to the same set of people, and it's identical to adding+ to LGBTQ.

BIPOC was basically created to exclude, or at least deemphasize, Asians.

To the extent that White Nationalists resemble leftist identitarians, I think it’s because both camps understand the deep power and vital importance of coalition politics, structural power, and communitarian thinking. Critical race theorists are absolutely correct that White civilizations constructed hierarchies of values which were designed to reproduce hegemonic culture and distribute power and resources to those who were best able to embody and perform the roles valued by that culture. I just disagree with them about whether or not that’s a bad thing, and I recognize the central importance to me and my posterity of preserving the power structures put in place by my ancestors to benefit their descendants.

The endless salami-slicing of the BIPOC category has been a result of the fact that it was a coalition designed to center and empower blacks, but which created a network of power in which non-blacks quickly began to dominate the hierarchy, given their manifestly undeniable advantage over blacks in the sorts of traits and talents that allow one to accrue political and academic power. That’s why the artifice had to be abandoned so quickly; blacks tried to design a club where they could have pride of place, but chose to (or had to, or were manipulated into) opening the doors of that club up to people who were never going to accept taking a backseat to blacks. (Hell, the most persuasive argument against my attempts to welcome Jews back into the White fold is that by doing so Whites would be committing an identical act of self-sabotage, opening our club up to people who will quickly and comprehensively out-compete and marginalize us.)

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