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Reparations as a policy fails on so many fronts it's useless to point to as an example of political advocacy being made impossible or impractical by ambiguous cases of group identity. As you noted, the controversy isn't even who is "black" it is who is owed reparations and who is not. All of those groups are considered black for the purposes of political advocacy, but when assessing damages to some perceived harm that is a different entirely question. It's also just not a popular policy, a lot of Americans do not like handouts. Also, if we made an attempt to objectively settle the financial costs of harms caused by social relations between blacks and whites, then certainly the reparations would be owed to White people and not the other way around.
I don’t think you addressed the core of my point. I’m saying that the extent to which a given racial group has common interests worth coordinating around is extremely context-dependent. White advocacy potentially makes sense in a context in which white people are being systematically acted against, regardless of a given white person’s other characteristics.
To some extent, this is true of the current American political context. It does not appear to be remotely applicable to Europe. Hood wants Europeans to coalesce around a shared supranational White identity, but the current political and racial conditions in Europe simply do not seem conducive to this. Whites are not under attack as whites in Europe. There is nothing like the DEI edifice, the mass affirmative action disfavoring whites, etc. If current demographic trends persist in Europe, that could certainly change, but as of right now there is no strong external pressure compelling Europeans to defensively adopt a shared white identity.
The comparison to reparations is instructive, I think, because it reveals the cracks in the “black” racial coalition. When blacks feel collectively besieged, as though their collective destiny hinges on remaining in solidarity, then “blackness” is a meaningful identity to them. This has certainly been the case throughout the entire history of the black American experience. When things like affirmative action were introduced, it introduced another vector incentivizing blacks to stick together and to adopt a “big tent” understanding of blackness. However, reparations introduce a countervailing incentive: the reparations money is a finite resource, and the more people qualify for it and split the pie, the less each individual black person has to gain. Suddenly solidarity is the wrong approach. Suddenly the question of whether someone like Kamala Harris is black becomes very relevant. The question of whether Obama was black was at one point a live-wire question; once he became elevated as a figure around which blacks could politically coordinate in order to secure power and resources, it ceased being a question. But if he’d been trying to claim a limited resource to which another more “authentically black” person could have credibly laid claim, it would have stayed a potentially divisive issue.
Many whites in America understandably feel that way about the issue of who counts as white. Different camps of whites recognize political sovereignty as a limited resource which cannot be shared between groups of whites with radically different political and cultural sensibilities. There isn’t enough political and economic power to go around, such that every subset of white people gets an acceptably large share. That’s a recipe for division among whites, not solidarity, and people like Hood need to present a compelling case why white people should sacrifice their more local interests in order to secure resources for other whites whom they don’t even like.
Historically, the superordinate European identity wasn't whiteness, it was Christendom. Arguably it still is* - even though few culturally Christian Europeans actually believe in Christ. The near outgroup has historically included Jews, but is mostly physiologically-white Muslims (Albanians, Turks, North African Arabs), and increasingly extends to Muslims in general now that non-white Muslims are here in sufficient numbers. Christian Africa is fargroup, as is anywhere with a non-Abrahamic religion.
Also, critically, the superordinate identity is weak. The people who don't like non-white immigrants mostly don't like Polish immigrants either. If you really want to see British Brexit-supporting xenophobes get their hate on, the preferred target is still Ze Jermans.
* Things get complicated with the FSU and Yugoslavia.
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Obviously it's aspirational. You have the EU- so you already have an ever-growing political and financial integration of European countries, including movement across borders. You have NATO so you have a level of military integration, including major recent developments like Germany remilitarizing and France advocating for closer military ties among European countries.
We are already quite close to Pan-Aryan Imperium simply with the current powers of EU, NATO and growing political and financial integration of Europe. And then you have demographic change which is spurring populist movements in Europe and a racial consciousness. The conditions are absolutely conducive for the fostering of a pan-European racial consciousness or a European unification. But a "White racial consciousness" would be required for European Unification. Unifying Europe is a glorious aspiration, and it's not as impossible as you think.
German Unification seemed impossible for thousands of years, until it happened. American unification was a pie-in-the-sky idea, until it wasn't.
I also reject your notion that whites are not under attack, the demographic changes themselves are ipso facto an attack on White people, and they are increasingly perceiving them as such in Europe. Are White people able to stop or reverse demographic change without racial consciousness? It seems to be required.
An aspirational White identity already exists in the US, so the idea that European people can't just federally integrate into a single country, and then very shortly identify as White is disproven by history. The concept is extremely relevant to Europe.
And yet... there's still a Congressional Black Caucus. And the NAACP. And many, many, many other organizations dedicated to black advocacy. All of these arguments also apply to Jews who often disagree among themselves vehemently.... And yet....
You are just inventing these roadblocks for why White people can't advocate for themselves that do not exist. None of the reasons you are giving for why White people can't organize are unique to the challenges faced by White identity, they apply to all other identities exactly the same and yet those other identities succeed in organizing to project political power, even if it fails in certain silly cases like reparations.
I’m not trying to “invent” reasons why global white racial consciousness can’t become a reality. I’m simply observing that up to this point, it has not happened, and I’m trying to identify the reasons why. I also want a global imperium of sorts, although my vision of it is not limited only to people of European descent. I want to be clear-eyed about what the obstacles to that are.
You are correct to note that European identities are far less insular than they were a few centuries ago, let alone a thousand years. Nearly nobody cares about being a Burgundian, or a Moravian, or a Cornishman; those identities have been subsumed into larger and more inclusive identities. That process could certainly continue to erode petty-nationalist concerns. (Or it could see reversals — see the reawakening of Welsh language and consciousness, or the growing Catalan separatist movement.)
However, there are still very significant and (on a human-historical scale) very fresh wounds of enmity preventing integration of certain white countries into a larger pan-European project. (Russia most obviously, but also in the Balkans.) When I hear a Swede take potshots at a Norwegian, or a Fleming express enmity toward a Walloon, I find it as exasperating and cringeworthy as you do. It’s a bit harder for me to dismiss out of hand a Pole’s or Finn’s suspicions and hypervigilance about Russians. There are still very serious geopolitical tensions and conflicts of interests which seem to present a considerable impediment to full “pan-Aryan imperium”.
Those are two groups of people with a very specific history of persecution and conflict with larger and more powerful ethnic groups, though. Their ethnogenesis was forged in defensive struggle. Whatever you and I think about how much difficulty whites have suffered as a result of the black presence in this country, it’s simply not comparable in any way to racial chattel enslavement. Whites in Europe, even during the headiest days of the Saracen and Mongol invasions, have not suffered collective persecution on the level of the anti-Jewish pogroms. Whites have not had any good reason to assume a collective defensive identity, defined to exclude another more numerous group. Whites were too busy making war on each other.
I’m a big fan of an “aspirational white identity” (although my conception of “whiteness” is considerably broader than yours), and since we’re responding to OP’s post about Gregory Hood, I’ll bring up that Hood has made the point that “America was the original European Union.” In America, people of European descent had at least two distinct outgroups — blacks and Amerindians — against which to contrast themselves. It’s easier to recognize one’s similarities to other whites when they’re thrown into such stark contrast by the existence of a very different Other.
I am desperately hoping that whites, Asians, and other advanced peoples are able to develop a collective consciousness, without needing to first go through our own crucible of collective persecution by a dominant collective enemy. We need to be looking toward the future and projecting out threats which are, at this early stage, mere potentialities, and to start thinking collectively before they become stark realities.
To be clear, this has already happened in the United States, and for the vast majority of the history of the United States until very, very recently. That unification was inspired by the project of empire-building itself, not being victims in some "pogrom", no good civilization was born over identifying as Eternal Victims, and likewise Jewish identification and ethnocentrism was a cause for such progroms as much as the pogroms inspired ethnocentrism.
Collective identity is based on myth and propaganda, as it was in the United States, Rome, the British Empire, Greece, any great civilization, and certainly how it is for the Jews as well. No great civilization was ever built by a race of whiney victim-mongers.
It's another of many liberal precepts you still low-key hold, that in order to form a collective identity you must be a victim to be inspired to act that way. You don't need to be a victim, although I agree you need pressures to motivate the change. The pressures are already here. War with Russia, which has directly motivated greater European military buildup and integration. You have demographic change which is evoking racial backlash all over Europe as well as Canada and the United States. You have the threat of China, the African population bomb, you have Indian migration which judging by the Canadian subreddit has turned the average Canadian into an actual Nazi.
There are plenty of pressures, the project of European integration into a white identity has already happened in the US, and it wasn't based on identifying as some whiney eternal victim, or long-over struggle against the Indians. It's only modern-day liberalism that grants value for identification based on being a victim.
The pressures faced by Europe today are far, far greater than they were during the integration of European immigrants into the United States "white identity". At the turn of the century the country was 85%+ White, with the 15% blacks concentrated in the south and largely segregated. At the turn of the century New York city was 93% White. It's just not true that European integration on the American continent was motivated by blacks or Indians as a common enemy.
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I think that the average white French person - and certainly white Parisian - feels a closer affinity to a second or third generation black French person than they do white Americans. This is more likely to be the true if we're talking about a particularly idiosyncratic American culture, like the deep south, which most Europeans are confused by. And of course, white and black Americans have more in common with each other than they do with their racial counterparts in Europe.
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