White Shite 2

The following extract comes from Zac Beauchamp's incisive critique of Kaufmann's White Shift:

"Much of [Kaufmann's] argument centers on relaxing what he calls the 'anti-racism norm,' the informal rules that stop mainstream Western political leaders and intellectuals from nakedly appealing to white identity and cultural fears. 'If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed,' Kaufmann writes. 'Not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but... in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.' This means politicians speaking openly of the need to maintain 'white culture' in their societies, and to emphasize the assimilation of migrants into the traditions and national identity that define whiteness. Acting on this means a series of policy proposals that sound like straight-up concessions to the far-right political forces Kaufmann claims to oppose.

"He suggests that Western nations should develop a 'cultural points system on immigration' that would rank immigrants on things like their 'assimilability to existing groups.' He proposes Europe put refugees in 'long-term refugee camps' rather than allowing them to move into existing cities and towns, a kind of segregation designed to to prevent native whites from freaking out. He advocates creating a form of 'second-tier citizenship' for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, which would 'deny them membership in the nation and the right to vote.' Kaufmann wants to let Trump build a wall on the Mexican border, and even defends the idea of white student groups on US college campuses. 'It is unclear to me why no members of a dominant group would be interested in their cultural traditions, ethno-history, and memories,' he muses...

"Chapters seven and eight of Kaufmann's book are dedicated to attacking the social justice left, blaming their overly censorious definition of 'racism' for helping produce the rise of the far right. In these chapters, Kaufmann advances a definition of 'racism' as, essentially, personal animus toward nonwhites and 'racial discrimination which results in a violation of citizens' right to equal treatment before the law.' He contrasts this with what he calls the 'left-modernist' account, the notion of 'structural racism,' which views racism as deeply embedded within systems that ultimately privilege whites over nonwhites. The problem... is that it is impossible to talk seriously about modern race relations without discussing structural racism. Racial prejudice did not disappear after the American civil rights movement; it simply became less overt. The anti-racism norm prevented people from outright saying, 'Black people are inferior,' but it didn't stop them from perpetuating a social system that privileged whites over nonwhites.

"Yet Kaufmann dismisses the very idea of structural racism as pseudoscientific gobbledegook. 'Indicators of structures of white oppression have largely disappeared,' he argues. 'Arguments based on critical race theory, history, or income differences do not constitute evidence of a structure of white privilege. Too often proponents make unfalsifiable claims which intimate that white privilege is engraved into the soul of society.' Kaufmann is mostly talking about research on race in America here - and he is presenting a straw man portrait of it. Even if you only care about quantitative research, as Kaufmann seems to, there are hundreds of studies, often validated by researchers in large meta-studies, documenting 'evidence of a structure of white privilege.'

"One review of 28 quantitative studies on job applications finds that 'whites receive on average 36% more callbacks than African Americans, and 24% more callbacks than Latinos,' and that levels of discrimination have not changed since 1989. A literature review on racism in unemployment, housing, credit, and other markets from scholars at Princeton and Harvard found that 'the weight of existing evidence suggests that discrimination does continue to affect the allocation of contemporary opportunities,' and that 'our current estimates may in fact understate the degree to which discrimination contributes to the poor social and economic outcomes of minority groups.' A massive report from the National Institutes of Health found that 'racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive a lower quality of healthcare than non-minorities, even when access-related factors, such as patients' insurance status and income, are controlled.'

"The causal mechanisms here are straightforward. Slavery, Jim Crow, and racially discriminatory practices like 'redlining' created a society in which African Americans were separated from the white population and shunted into inferior institutions. This was not fixed overnight in the late 20th century; on some metrics, like measures of school segregation, the United States has actually gone backward of late. Nor did white attitudes change overnight; while explicit prejudice toward all groups became less popular, stereotypes about minorities persist and affect the way whites treat minorities. The result is that it's still harder on average for minorities to live in safe neighborhoods, attend high-quality schools, or get access to the best health care. White Americans now enjoy systemic privileges purely because they were born white, a brute social fact that is among the most well-documented in all of American social science.

"Kaufmann does not engage with the literature in any sustained way... the sense you'd get from reading Whiteshift's middle chapters is that 'anti-white radicalism' - his term - is a bigger problem in the modern West than actual racial discrimination. This is vital to Kaufmann's argument. Because structural racism doesn't exist, he argues, white identity politics are no different from minority identity politics. 'Expressing a white identity, or group self-interest, or an ethno-traditional national identity which includes a white-majority component, isn't racist,' he writes. 'The same holds true for black, Muslim, or other minority interests.' This equation can only be true if a politics of 'white identity' does not require, by its very nature, maintaining a social structure in which whites enjoy privileged and unfair access to social goods. But to defend 'white group interests' today in the West  is to defend white privilege." (The Virtue of Nationalism and Whiteshift: books that explain Trump, vox.com, 26/2/19)