The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict

Thoughts on the Homie-Enemy Distinction

This is a follow-up to my earlier essay arguing that white people would benefit from passing slavery reparations for black people.

In this piece I will provide a more complex and somewhat meandering take on the relationship between Black America and White America that should help you understand why I feel reparations are necessary.

My narrative will be delve into factors historical, philosophical, and psychological. It will attempt to show empathy for black nationalists, white nationalists, and all the normies in between.

I’ll also be making fun of each of these groups, so try not to get offended once you’re in the crosshairs. If any topic needs to be approached with levity, it’s this one.

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Richard Hanania recently wrote a fantastic article arguing that America’s racial strife isn’t white people vs. nonwhites so much as a highly racially motivated population of black people vs. everyone else.

I was glad to see a major figure inject this idea into the discourse because I’ve felt this way for some time. It seems clear now that the intense racial polarization of the 2010s was caused by everyone’s judgment being distorted by a confluence of societal red herrings.

The first and worst of these was a catastrophic mischaracterization of exit polling from the 2012 election. This extremely dangerous analysis—which was ubiquitous on both sides of the aisle—misattributed Obama’s victory to Hispanic immigration, when it was actually caused by secular but culturally conservative white people in the Rust Belt hating Romney for being an effete rich guy.

Virtually nobody in the mainstream press gave an accurate representation of what actually killed Romney’s campaign in 2013-2016. One reason for this is that journalists were too innumerate to properly comb through the data, but the main reason is that (at least superficially) everyone benefited from spinning a false narrative.

This false narrative allowed Democrats to indulge fantasies of an “Emerging Democratic Majority” propped up by an unending tide of Latin American immigration that would give them 60-70% of the vote in every election. Today liberals call the “Great Replacement” a conspiracy theory, conveniently ignoring that a decade ago they were telling everyone it was going to happen and was a Good Thing.

Like Karl Rove a decade earlier, these people had apparently never paid attention in Political Science 101, or they would have known that First Past the Post systems will always trend towards a 50-50 power split, and that large coalitions like FDR and Reagan put together are very easy to pick apart once the charismatic figurehead dies.

Meanwhile, on the GOP side this story deepened the cleavage between rich chamber of commerce types who wanted open borders and populists who wanted further restrictions. By raising the salience of immigration it enabled both factions to make a play for power.

The GOP establishment argued in its famous “postmortem” that Republicans could never win enough Hispanics to triumph nationally unless they moderated on immigration, while Tea Party stalwarts and crypto-WNs claimed Latinos would never be conservative, and would just flood the country like Orcs voting for more handouts at the expense of the beleaguered white middle class, who wouldn’t have the numbers to electorally defend themselves.

10 years later it seems all of these factions were comically wrong in their predictions.

It turns out Hispanics will vote Republican very easily, but going soft on immigration so Mitt Romney can hire cheaper day laborers isn’t how you achieve that. You just need to give Latinos a rightist party that looks like the ones they had back home—one that ostensibly prioritizes the interests of uneducated and superstitious peasants over those of educated urbanites, and is led by a charismatic alpha male caudillo.

Once MAGA dropped explicit racialism (implicit racialism is fine because plenty of Hispanics are “aspirationally White” and the Latin American caste system has always been built on the impulse to mejorar la raza) the movement fit Hispanics like a glove.

The real narrative on 2012 should have been educational polarization.

The Tea Party had left the GOP coalition completely dominated by a fanatically ideological and highly educated suburban petit bourgeoisie that didn’t care about anyone but themselves. To a lot of this contingent, anyone who couldn’t succeed could just go fuck themselves, be they a black single mother on food stamps or an alcoholic white guy who had lost his union factory job to NAFTA.

Mitt Romney barely triumphed over this faction in the primaries, and then had to pander to them by choosing Paul Ryan as his running mate and adopting a quasi-Randian fiscal policy that was always going to doom Republicans in the Rust Belt.

This faction was very damaging to GOP prospects for a long time because they were too intransigent to take any Ls for the good of the coalition. They only lost power once Trump came along and upset the apple cart by introducing white identity politics, which split the Tea Party mostly along class lines.

In 2016 the downscale Tea Party (which was less about ideology and more about Fuck Liberals) supported Trump, while the upscale Tea Party supported Cruz, and there was too much resentment between the Tea Party leadership and GOP establishment for Cruz and Rubio to coordinate to take down Trump. So in the end Trumpism devoured and absorbed the Tea Party, while the establishment sighed and did its best to control and co-opt Trump in the years that followed.

MAGA is a lot more electorally viable than the Tea Party ever was, but it’s also ideologically vacuous, and is essentially a peasant movement dominated by superstition and blind loyalty at the bottom and cynicism at the top, and features lots of resentment at all levels. This makes it extremely appealing to low status whites and a lot of Hispanic migrants fleeing corrupt or violent hellholes, as well as lumpenbourgeoisie boat store owners who laugh at homeless people and choke hookers.

But it also turns off the educated and comfortable middle classes who always vote and helped the GOP dominate midterm and local elections a decade ago. It is absolutely poisonous to the sort of educated and civic-minded people who make the most competent bureaucrats and civil servants, and this makes it incredibly challenging for a MAGA-dominated GOP to staff key institutions (which are already overwhelmingly liberal, since high IQ conservatives value money more than influence and all become consultants instead).

In this sense education/class polarization is much more dangerous than racial polarization. Thankfully it seems a lot of people are waking up to this dynamic today.

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But in 2014 nobody was talking about education. Back then the salient topic was race.

Race was everywhere. It seemed to a lot of educated and reasonable people that the GOP was the White Party and becoming more White, while the Democrats were the party of nonwhites and (depending on your alignment) virtuous white allies or bootlicking traitors.

Today it’s easy to forget how annoying antiwhite sentiment used to be, but in 2013-2015 you constantly had articles coming out saying that white people will become a minority in America by such and such date, and that this is a Good Thing.

On shows like Colbert they would read these headlines and the audience full of chubby HR Managers with horn-rimmed glasses and frizzy hair would all clap and hoot and holler. Then it would cut to a commercial break and you’d see at least three advertisements where a beautiful blonde woman was kissing a muscular black dude.

There was definitely something intentional going on with this.

The Alt Right take at the time (which I originally subscribed to) was that it’s all a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the white population. It made some sense to think this way, as the most horrifically antiwhite Slate and Salon articles that would never get published today were indeed written by -steins and -bergs and -blatts. In retrospect I think this was just an extremely visible quirk of the mid-2010s digital media boom that was centered in NYC and as a result mostly employed young Jews.

As wider phenomenon I now think it was mostly driven by goyish hicklibs a la Will Stancil—midwit elder millennials with low testosterone who’d moved from the sticks to second rate cities like Atlanta or Chicago or Minneapolis. The kind of guy too smart for Kansas but too dumb for New York.

These people deeply resented their Boomer conservative parents for not having any empathy for their downward mobility during the Great Recession, and were disgusted by the simple bigotry and ignorance of their former classmates in Middle America. To these people a career in media or liberal activism was a way to hurt and humiliate the exurban and rural chuds who called them a queer in seventh grade.

As someone who has spent a lot of time with elite Jews, briefly worked with them in NYC, and has miscegenated with more than a few JAPs, I can say with authority that they mostly see such people as irrelevant provincials and wouldn’t waste political capital just to cause them pain in a high time preference way that will only provoke a thermostatic backlash.

Some Jews are a bit paranoid where their own race is concerned and will throw around spurious charges of anti-Semitism (though even this is more of a trashy lumpen middle class thing), but that’s typically where it ends. To a rich Jewish guy who’s always lived in a cosmopolitan area, Flyover Country doesn’t have any emotional salience. Usually he resents the bisexual antifa communist from Tennessee who works through childhood trauma by acting in an obnoxious way that makes normie conservatives more sympathetic to fascism.

What WNs from Middle America don’t realize is that the sort of Jews who worked for Buzzfeed etc. and wrote those really hateful antiwhite articles in 2014 are the low status ones that other Jews laugh at for not making it at a real publication or just getting a job that pays well. They’re the Kosher version of the guy in the Alt Right we all came to hate who blames his being a loser on affirmative action.

Even back then their peers saw them as hacks, and most of them have since been fired as digital media collapsed, and they ended up leaving the industry. The silly bundle of sticks who tried to doxx me is now working for legal aid, and probably spends his days getting yelled at by black people for a salary that barely pays his rent.

People who are actually rich or influential—be they white, black, or Jewish—almost never waste time hating people. It codes as low status for a reason.

These days it seems the Jewish journos with the most influence on the ground—folks like Matt Yglesias, Nate Silver, and Ezra Klein—are also the ones with the most nuanced and reasonable takes. Functionally speaking it’s these Jewish Elites (and a bunch of old black people in South Carolina) who are holding back the Democratic Party from adopting the hysterical and toxic views of affluent blonde women and tattoo-laden Scotch-Irish crustpunks. These guys are the reason the Biden years haven’t been as annoying as Obama’s second term despite a lot more left wing legislation having passed Congress.

If we ever see real organized violence against white people in America it’s not going to come from blacks or Jews. It’s going to come from white guys who hate their dad.

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But none of this was apparent to me in 2014—the narrative of racial polarization was just too strong. In that era it was easy to look at Ezra Klein’s last name and instinctively see him as the same Type of Guy as the loser who tried to doxx me.

It didn’t help that I was just coming out of college and had been bombarded with the worst excesses of antiwhite ideology in the classroom. The decline of free speech on campus was deeply troublesome to a contrarian gadfly like me, as were the many instances of smug Orwellian newspeak (“undocumented immigrant”, “sex work”, “marriage equality”) imposed on me by the useless slave labor adjuncts grading my papers. It was this experience, in conjunction with the annoying media climate described above, that served to negatively polarize me into radicalization.

I don’t blame my young self for this. Back then if you were a white guy of a neurotic, disagreeable, high openness temperament—and particularly if you were Extremely Online without normie meatspace friends to pull you back into the real world where commercials and Salon articles don’t fucking matter—this cultural and political ecology made it incredibly easy to become a White Nationalist.

And this is what happened to me in 2015.

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Thankfully the landscape is very different today. We’ve moved past the antiwhite gloating and triumphalism of 2013-2016, as well as the hysterical and repressive censorship and ostracism of 2017-2021.

MAGA has become a multiracial coalition without purging crypto-WNs and has thereby set the stage for a more relaxed and mainstream kind of white advocacy in the medium term.

Meanwhile, the 2024 election is more likely to have the racial demography of 2004 or 1984 than that of 2012 or 2016. If we’re lucky we may even reach a midcentury level of racial depolarization.

Because of these factors, I am mostly optimistic when it comes to American race relations.

The one exception is in regards to Black People.

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We whites have had a mostly toxic and painful relationship with our melanated neighbors for as long as we’ve shared this continent, but the picture is nuanced and defies easy characterization. It certainly fluctuates a lot with time.

Looking at American history I see a reoccurring “cycle” in politics and culture that seems to govern how white people feel about blacks. Generally it occurs as follows:

Every two or three generations we have a brief moment of intense “racial reckoning” where the relatively terrible condition of blacks emotionally overwhelms white people and we are briefly possessed by an ideological fervor that makes us put them on a pedestal and see them in a quasi-religious way.

During these periods we become obsessive about purging ourselves of bigotry, and start to venerate figures like MLK and George Floyd in a way typically reserved for saints and founding fathers.

This impulse probably stems from America’s rather strange Puritan foundation, which makes sense given that every time this has happened historically the fire always burns hottest in New England despite the region’s relative homogeneity.

During this phase of the cycle we basically subordinate all other national goals to the mission of improving the lot of black people, and anyone who objects to this mission is seen as grossly immoral.

This oftentimes terrifying sanctimony and groupthink ensures that highly impactful legislation can be passed—think the banning of slavery in the northern states and outlawing of the Atlantic slave trade by Jefferson, the Civil War Amendments and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, and DEI policies implemented during the Summer of Floyd. Coalitions will always adjust as necessary to force these policies onto intransigent holdouts.

But inevitably the honeymoon period doesn’t last. Something always happens to break the spell and white people start to become a lot more racially conservative.

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In the early 19th century this event was the Haitian Revolution, which had involved lots of antiwhite ethnic cleansing and the mass rape of white women, and made white people fear that southern blacks would revolt and massacre them in the same way.

This probably wouldn’t have occurred in Virginia or Kentucky where slave density was low and conditions fairly humane, but it was a real threat in states like South Carolina, where some counties had a black supermajority and conditions weren’t much better than in Haiti. Paranoia over this mightily hardened white hearts.

Meanwhile, southern leadership was starting to pass from the stately and mostly Virginian Jeffersonian generation—whose tobacco plantations by that point were barely profitable—to a younger and more enterprising cohort more heavily from the Deep South, led by the infamous South Carolinian firebrand John C. Calhoun.

In the Revolutionary Era Jefferson had looked at social trends and the unhappy state of his own finances and concluded that slavery was an antiquated relic of the past that would inevitably die out over time. But thanks to Eli Whitney and the insatiable industrial demand of London and Boston (both of course hotbeds of abolitionism), the “peculiar institution” seemed more like the future to men like Calhoun.

Calhoun’s generation was making enormous profits growing cotton, the likes of which would have been inconceivable in prior eras, and in an era where soberminded Enlightenment rationalism had given way to Victorian romanticism and bold imperial dreams of Manifest Destiny. This landscape made it a lot easier to find reasons to keep slavery around than it had been in Jefferson’s day, and southerners started to see it less as a necessary evil or neutral fact of life and more as a Positive Good that benefited both blacks and whites and was worth spreading for its own sake.

Meanwhile, white northerners mostly stopped caring about slavery. Sure, they hated how the Three-Fifths Compromise gave southerners too many electoral college votes and House seats, enabling Dixie to force free trade onto Yankee industrial centers while blocking the passage of crucial internal improvements. But this didn’t equate to loving black people or in any way caring about their interests. They certainly didn’t want blacks in northern cities. The average white northerner wanted to live in a free white country, and if the slaves were freed would have wanted them deported to Liberia or Central America.

And plenty of northerners themselves benefited from slavery, the fruits of which helped to industrialize the North. You can bet the average white Bostonian circa 1830 thought about the black slaves in Alabama who picked the cotton sent to his textile mill about as much as you think about the Bangladeshi orphans who make your shoes or the trafficked girls in your porn.

Most Yankees were either very racist or very morally lazy, and didn’t care about slavery persisting in the South. They just didn’t want it expanding west into virgin land that should be saved for Free White Men. They saw a homogenous society of free yeomen farmers and tradesmen as the true realization of the Jeffersonian Ideal, which had been imperfectly realized at the founding, but could be actualized as America expanded in a more deliberate way. The first Oregon constitution literally banned black people for this reason.

The Yankees didn’t want to see their dream compromised by a bunch of fat guys in seersucker who’d import blacks into their ethnostate and sit around sipping mint julips all day. When this started to happen in Missouri alongside Yankee settlement it really pissed the North off.

Eventually the planters just got too big for their britches. It was probably inevitable that they’d push everyone too far. These men were in their own way just as ideologically rigid and fanatical as New England Puritans, having largely descended from royalist “Cavaliers” who came to the New World seeking to build a more authoritarian and stratified society than England, where they could retain feudal power structures and were free to beat up poor people and rape their servants. It’s only when lower class whites became too prosperous to allow themselves to be treated in this manner and started pushing back in large numbers that the Cavaliers started importing African slaves to fulfill the same role.

Unlike their equivalents up north, the southern ruling class didn’t have to work. They were born and bred to rule. This heritage made them exceptional diplomats and generals, but it also created an impetuous and entitled culture prone to ignoring things like a 3-to-1 population disadvantage and much smaller productive capacity.

And so the South began to take an attitude of extreme intransigence despite already enjoying massively disproportionate political power in Congress and the Supreme Court. They tried to push their plantations past Missouri and into Kansas, starting a low level guerrilla war that massively raised the salience of slavery. One of their leaders famously beat the shit out of a rival in Congress who criticized their Peculiar Institution. Worst of all, they violated state sovereignty and the political dignity of northern whites by imposing gross shit like the Fugitive Slave Act at the federal level.

And so we elected Lincoln to roll these excesses back, which made them chimp out and provoke us into permanently ending their way of life.

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As the Civil War progressed—and especially as it drew to a close—the conflict became more about freeing black people. But it didn’t begin this way. It basically started as White Nationalism vs. White Supremacy.

Characterizing the Civil War as “about slavery” as modern liberals do is dishonest because it makes it sound like there were hordes of young men marching down south specifically to free black people.

You had some of that from insane religious fundamentalists in New England, but the median northern white person circa 1860 was *incredibly* racist and unconcerned about black people. He went to go fight because he wanted to kick some southern ass and punish the planters for acting like dicks politically.

But even this enthusiasm faded fairly quickly—Lincoln famously had to staff his armies with hardscrabble Irish immigrants and put down draft riots because nobody wanted to fight in what people hilariously called his Ni… well, click on the link.

Anyway, as the war ended and Yankees made contact with the mass of Black America for the first time—and then especially after Lincoln was martyred—much of Northern society mobilized to help elevate the freedmen. But outside of the usual New England crazies nobody likes (not even black people, really), this impulse was pretty shallow.

A lot of the carpetbaggers who moved south to implement Reconstruction were Robin DeAngelo-type grifters or fanatical hatemongers like Tim Wise, and they never developed a mode of governance that met southern whites where they were or could establish lasting change. As a result, most of these people got thrown out of power quickly by southron “Redeemers” who rolled back reforms and instituted Jim Crow.

These setbacks were never reversed because by the mid-1870s white northerners had lost all appetite to finish Reconstruction. Their main goal had already been accomplished—the planters had been crushed, the South had stopped acting important, and southron leaders were now content to play a second fiddle role in the Democratic Party to the Irish and German immigrant political machines that had grown powerful up north.

The Redeemer leadership who replaced the planters turned Dixie into a slow, backward, inward-looking place that was actually worse for black people in most respects. But white northerners were basically fine with Jim Crow, since helping blacks was always a secondary goal tagged on at the end of the war.

It was thus for the next century that white northerners mostly gave up on blacks, and America entered what historians today call the Nadir of American Race Relations. This would be the prevailing state of affairs until Soviet accusations of hypocrisy motivated Yankees to end Jim Crow and force desegregation on the South.

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Whenever public sentiment turns against Blacks so quickly it usually stems from either mass violence—the Haitian revolution, black riots after MLK’s death, “mostly peaceful protests”—or the perception of widespread corruption and grift.

White people start to feel like blacks and their allies are taking advantage of our liberal attitude and generosity, and there is a severe conservative backlash against doing anything politically for black people—a “Blacklash”, if you will.

Whites will start to crack down on crime in a very bloodthirsty and punitive way (e.g. lynching, chain gangs, the War on Drugs) and even the most liberal Whites stop voting for any politician promising mo money fo dem programs.

In the 1870s this happened due to the excesses of Reconstruction as well as the need to build coalitions with white southerners to properly address the issues of the day.

In the late 1960s it was caused by the aforementioned riots, as well as the emergence of black radicalism, which scared the shit out of White people.

In 2022 and 2023 it was caused by lingering resentments over the Floyd riots, plus the colossal waste and rent-seeking of DEI.

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An interesting pattern always emerges after a decade or two of Blacklash. Conditions on the ground start to quiet, and racial issues fall to the background of American life such that most people aren’t thinking about race much at all.

Or at least no one is among the white middle class. The prison population will be enormous during this part of the cycle, and every now and then you’ll talk to a black guy who has an uncle serving a long sentence for some nonviolent offense that should probably have been half the length. Meanwhile, a lot of black people will live in quiet poverty, but they have no influence because white liberals know that advocating for them is politically toxic.

Crucially, during these periods even the Talented Tenth will build islands for themselves and have fun doing the Harlem Renaissance thing, or alternatively will fashion themselves as One of the Good Ones or a Cool Black Guy, and cash in on that status by making white people who are anxious about the era’s racial conservatism feel like they are actually progressive and broadminded.

Sometimes this even gets them elected President.

And this is what gives you the comfy (for wypipo) dynamic of the late nineties and early aughts, in which the black underclass has been so marginalized by mean and vindictive conservatives that most white people only interact with the black middle class. Everyone is obviously aware of black poverty and mass incarceration, but it’s so abstract that it can be idealized, and simultaneously becomes very cool to edgy teenage boys and sympathetic to young women.

This in turn gives black people enormous prestige, and soon every white person becomes eager to have a Black Best Friend, like Ben Carson or Brenda from the Scary Movie series (honestly every movie from this era has basically the same character, and they’re often written by black people who have fun getting meta with the archetype).

These white people are looking for someone who reacts to things in more emotive ways, on occasion code switches into AAVE for comedic effect, and can give them the “black take” on things, but mostly has precisely the same sensibilities as a middle class white person. Most importantly, because you are nice to them specifically they will always tell people you aren’t racist.

Middle class black people who grew up during the initial phases of the Blacklash are usually somewhat resentful of this dynamic, but can compare it to something a lot worse for them and will make their peace with it. But their children, who have never known anything but this landscape, will be a lot more prone to radicalism. To a lot of black people born in the 90s, becoming some peckerwood’s sidekick and assuming the role of Black Best Friend is basically cooning.

And perhaps they have a point. It’s true that a lot of white people during these interim phases are basically expecting their black friends to never be the main character and just make funny faces and go “mmm-mmm chile.”

It’s sort of like how Missy-Anne treated Kizzy in Roots.

But black radicals approach this behavior without any nuance to their understanding. They imagine all white people will treat them like this, and largely misunderstand where the cringey behavior comes from.

It doesn’t come from a place of malice or looking down on black people in any way. White people who actually look down on blacks or hate them don’t want black friends.

It’s a way to deal with the immense anxiety that comes from the fact that white-black racial politics in America are a zero sum game.

Practically speaking, you need to subject white people to an onerous level of affirmative action and redistributive taxation to give black people a reasonable level of dignity / prestige in society and a good standard of living. Likewise, you need to subject black people to an onerous level of policing (stop and frisk, drug war, etc.) to bring down crime rates sufficiently for white people to feel safe.

We’ve tried very hard to make the relationship a win-win, but in practice it never is. Uplifting black people requires whites to put up with increased crime and racial wealth redistribution, and we never tolerate that for very long. This creates a dynamic of mutual resentment that more or less permanently puts us on opposite sides of what the philosopher Carl Schmitt called the Friend-Enemy Distinction.

Black people feel this distinction in their bones and love to talk about it. White people also feel it in their bones, but dedicate a tremendous amount of mental energy to *not* talking about it because it makes us so very uncomfortable.

And that is why whites act so cringey to blacks sometimes—we desperately need a release valve for this discomfort, and there’s no better release valve than a Black Best Friend who says “mmm-mmm” while shaking her head and never hesitates to assure you that you weren’t being racist when you said that thing to that lady in the Target parking lot.

And to be fair to us Whites, lots of Blacks find it really fun to play that role. And in practice black people aren’t the only ones who do this. We ALL like to “coon” sometimes as the most extreme version of what we are.

“Reverse code switching” by embracing a stereotype for comedic effect is a charismatic way to diffuse the tension inherent in being around a lot of people who are different from you by leaning into it in a nonthreatening way. If I’m around my very conservative family or old internet friends in the Trad sphere I will play the degenerate polyamorist urbanite, just as I’ll play the Dumb White Guy chud around my girlfriend’s liberal trans friends.

There’s an undignified way to do this where they are laughing at you rather than with you and which *can* be fairly criticized as cooning, but this won’t happen if you have a sufficient understanding of group dynamics and a high enough verbal IQ. The key thing is that you crack jokes that subtextually convey your perspective and assert your dignity while superficially using the language of the other side. You lean into things that are high prestige in your world but low prestige in theirs in a clever way that acknowledges you value different things without making it a fight.

Black comedians have always been good at using this dynamic to become popular with white audiences, but recently we’re starting to see the same thing happen from the opposite direction. Comedians like Shane Gillis can send extremely liberal audiences into hysterics by leaning into the Dumb White Guy role. The fact that Gillis has amassed a sizeable fanbase of conservatives is proof that he’s not just doing Chudface. He’s making his audiences laugh on his terms by knowing the rules very well and understanding how to break them in a calculated way.

This approach is how the most effective black people in America have used the Black Best Friend dynamic to make things better for black people or simply accrue lots of money and status for themselves. Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, MLK, Oprah, Will Smith, and Obama were all masters of capitalizing on this pressure point in the White American psyche without “cooning” in a way that seems undignified.

But while individual black people can and do become incredibly successful in this manner, the condition of black people as a whole tends to improve a lot more slowly, and “hard” institutional advancement has always come much more easily than “soft” social change.

Because of this dynamic it often feels like a zero sum black-white divide is an intractable part of American life.

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Crucially, this isn’t the case with racial politics generally.

With Native Americans and Asians and Hispanics it’s a lot messier. They don’t vote like a political bloc like blacks do, and when they marry white people their kids usually see themselves as white.

It’s basically the same dynamic that surrounded my Irish and Italian ancestors, and is why I strongly doubt white people will ever become a “minority” like I feared 10 years ago. America is always going to be a “white” country—it’s just that the modal white person will start to look like Richard Hanania or Anna Khachiyan or Nick Fuentes, and I am totally fine with that.

If we start doing any kind of ethnic purity spiraling we’ll end up at Ben Franklin’s position that Wogs Begin at Calais, and quite frankly I prefer my fellow Ellis Islanders to the Albion’s Seed people.

But when a white person has kids with a black person the kids will almost always see themselves as black. This isn’t “the cultural legacy of the One Drop Rule,” it’s the obvious fact that black people have much more dominant genes than everyone else.

And that isn’t a bad thing! If they didn’t have such dominant genes black people almost certainly would have faded into the white population very quickly after 1865. Their strong genes give black people an incredible cultural virility no other group has, except maybe Jews.

If I were a black guy I’d be very proud of this. Given my personality, I almost certainly would have gone through a Hotep phase as an edgy teenager where I insisted this phenomenon makes black people the master race, and spent all day spamming BBC porn on 4chan. I would probably marry the most Aryan looking woman I could find and make pissing off racist white guys my personality.

But I was born white, and so I became the Hyperborean version of this archetype.

Anyway, while their strong genes endow black people with a lot of staying power and cultural energy, it also hurts them socially and financially, because it makes it harder for whites and blacks to “blend” in the very seamless way that whites can with Amerindians, Hispanics, MENA people, and (to a lesser extent) South and East Asians. These days being a quarter Korean or half Arab is functionally identical to being part Italian 50 years ago or part Irish/German 100 years ago. Meanwhile, being one eighth black just makes you Team Lightskin.

And this is why black-white mixing has always carried a higher level of stigma than any other combination.

It’s extremely hard to talk about this fact in polite company, and we should be sensitive not to hurt anyone’s feelings more than we need to. I would never bring this up with someone actually in such a relationship, and I would encourage my dear reader to behave with similar courtesy. But when we’re operating in the realm of politics I think it’s important for us to be frank about the issue to get clarity here.

The reality is that even very racist parents usually won’t care that much if you bring home a Mexican girl, so long as she is sweet and feminine. This is because they know your kids aren't going to run around talking about La Raza Cosmica and posting Aztlan maps all over the internet. They’ll just be kind of swarthy white people.

Basically the same principle applies to marrying Asians—you’ll see a bit more hesitation if her parents have an accent or come from a tropical clime, and a bit less if they’re heavily assimilated or specifically Japanese or Korean. With MENA girls the religious factor might pose a big problem in some families, but that’s a separate issue. I think most White Americans see Arab Christians in the same way they see Greeks or Serbs and it would be more of a fun exotic thing for your family in practice.

Likewise, even during the most extreme and purity-spiraling era of the Alt Right, people would call you a psycho if you objected to Gavin McInnes marrying a Native woman or John Derbyshire having part-Chinese kids. Similarly, only the most extreme and disagreeable edgelords would countersignal the inclusion of Levantine / Iranian / Castizo people under the umbrella of Whiteness. This is where the meme comes from that modern White Nationalism is full of Hispanics and Arabs.

But because of the strong genes factor, this easy tolerance of blurred lines never seems to extend to black people. If you bring home a black girl and she’s not Meghan Markle levels of passing, lots of conservative parents will have a somber conversation with you in which they’ll say things they’d never even think in any other context.

Meanwhile even the most liberal parents will have some instinctive feeling of unease, and compensate for this with exaggerated behavior to demonstrate their comfort with the match in a Doth Protest Too Much kind of way. It’s because of this phenomenon that Jordan Peele’s Get Out was so popular—lots of black people had dealt with something very similar to the behavior of the girl’s parents in the first act.

The fundamental problem here is that there’s no way to say you don’t feel comfortable with your kids marrying a black person without sounding incredibly racist and making people think you’re simply dehumanizing millions of people. But the level of stigma that gets attached to this sentiment is actually very unhelpful.

Feeling this way doesn’t have to mean you *hate* anyone, or even that you feel very strong racial sentiment yourself. It can simply mean you want your grandkids to look somewhat like you. It can mean you don’t want your kids to have to deal with the greater social stress or disapproval from less tolerant family members on both sides.

Most crucially, it can mean you don’t want your grandchildren identifying with a group that votes 90% for the other political party, on some levels sees itself as oppositional to mainstream society, and can’t feel patriotic in the same way you can because George Washington held hundreds of their coethnics in bondage. Going to any American history museum with them will always be incredibly awkward.

It’s easy to see why someone would be upset to think their grandkids would automatically become part of this group. It means you are no longer on the same “side” as your own family. This isn’t really “racism”. It’s a sober assessment of the most powerful Friend-Enemy Distinction undergirding American politics and the inevitable personal consequences of this.

This is, after all, a group that now dismisses even Hamilton as “problematic” or “corny” for trying to create a narrative that lets blacks identify with America instead of dismissing the Founding Fathers as ipso facto evil for owning slaves. White people can’t bear to hear this, but large proportion of black people really do hate everything about the America that existed before MLK.

And can you really blame them?

Don’t get me wrong, to feel this way as a white person is cringeworthy ethnomasochism, and white people who don’t take their own side ought to be bullied.

But I understand why black people feel like White America is the villain in their own historical narrative.

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Imagine a world where China defeated America in a giant war and then sold us all to Martians to work as slaves in the salt mines of Olympus Mons.

Imagine that after we’d been there roughly a century Mars declares independence from the Saturnine Empire, and the most important Martian founding fathers are aristocrats who own many hundreds of human slaves. The man leading the fight for freedom wears false teeth extracted from his human property, while the most articulate defender of Martian liberty regularly beds his teenage human concubine.

Imagine that after a century of this, the Martians began to free us as the salt mines dried up and it’s become inefficient to pay for our food and shelter, and that after a few decades half of Mars was free, while slaves were no longer imported from Earth.

Imagine that at this juncture a new technology emerged which allowed Martians to harvest rare metals in Ares Valis, and they then pivoted into expanding slavery on an industrial scale in much worse conditions, all the while policing us much more sternly due to a successful slave revolt on Venus.

Imagine that half a century after this development we are finally freed thanks to an internal struggle that produced a temporary surge of goodwill from the victorious free half of Mars, which briefly tried to uplift us after concluding it would be too expensive to deport us all to Phobos and Deimos.

Imagine that this faction then abandoned us the precise moment our alliance became inconvenient (but not before it has provoked intense hatred from more local Martians).

Imagine we spent the next 80 years languishing in a caste system under these local Martians that is oftentimes more brutal and impoverished than slavery. Imagine that whenever we manage to migrate to the other side of Mars we are often treated worse because they have much less experience with us.

Imagine Mars suddenly enters into a Cold War with a formidable confederation of Space Dwarves on the Asteroid Belt who try to manipulate the nations of Earth into siding with them by playing up how badly Mars treats humans. This compels the nicer half of Mars who freed us but then abandoned us to once more come in on a white horse and pressure local Martians into giving us civil rights. Suddenly all legal barriers are removed and we can now vote and participate in polite society.

But it also turns out the average Martian IQ is 130, and to be the status equivalent of a doctor or engineer in the significantly more complex Martian society requires an IQ around 150. Almost no humans are capable of that, and even average jobs require a level of intelligence that would be pretty remarkable back on earth. Meanwhile the Martian temperament is extremely calm and forward-thinking and much less prone to violence than ours, and they have the same murder rate as Asian female octogenarians do among humans.

This means we can never really catch up with Martians collectively no matter how hard we try. Humans will commit more crimes and this will make the Martians terrified of us and prone to locking us up for a huge chunk of our shorter lifespan. The IQ differential will also make it impossible to compete with them, but Martians aren’t allowed to talk about this because the evil Helium Dragons of Jupiter also talked about racial differences, and a few decades ago they tried to kill everyone on Pluto with poison gas from Uranus.

And so nothing ever works to level the playing field. Every now and then the Nice Martians try to help us with increased social welfare spending or defunding the police or affirmative action, but this just leads to waste and abuse while increasing crime.

This in turn engenders resentment and makes more people side with the Mean Martians, who take away those programs and figure out ways to severely repress our much higher crime rate by locking adolescent human males up for drug offenses before they can commit any violent crimes as adults, leaving our women dependent on handouts and prone to raising fatherless human males who are themselves locked up at an even younger age.

I could belabor this analogy further, but I think you get the point.

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I think the above exercise in creative empathy hits at two key points that make black resentment so powerful in America.

First, from the black perspective it feels like they are always getting the rug pulled out from under them.

On four occasions now, they have made rapid progress by inducing the majority of white society to ally with them, only for this progress to be revealed as hollow and for virtually all white moderates to abandon them once it’s revealed that progress won’t be quick and easy (and as it turns out is probably impossible).

If I were a black guy and studied American history in a rigorous way, I probably would just conclude that “white allies” can’t be trusted.

Second, unlike literally every other group in America, blacks didn’t choose to come here. They were kidnapped by the ancestors of modern Africans in tribal raids or internecine warfare and then sold to wypipo, who brought them here in a voyage of captivity that itself retains cultural significance to them.

They don’t have the same fanciful Mayflower or Ellis Island narrative the rest of us do about our heritage that makes us feel—rightly or wrongly—like we’re descended from the most enterprising and adventurous people from our ancestral homelands. Instead they descend from people who lost a battle and got kidnapped. Their story as a distinct people is steeped in this humiliating lack of agency, which psychologically compels them to overcompensate with a greater level of aggression, group solidarity, and distrust for outsiders.

I can empathize with this tendency, because I too would be pissed if everyone associated my people with slavery just because great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandpa Mbutu was distracted one afternoon and got hit in the neck with a dart. There is something deeply unfair about that on an existential level.

From the white perspective, one can make the obvious point that Black Americans have a much higher standard of living here than they would have in Africa, and that we’ve repaid them for slavery many times over through welfare and affirmative action. These points are entirely legitimate from the white perspective.

But if I were black I don’t think I’d care about them at all.

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I’m sure everyone reading this has been in some conflict with a parent, romantic partner, or coworker where there are two sides to the story that would be equally compelling to a third party but are fundamentally at odds with one another.

That’s basically how I see the conflict between whites and blacks in America.

Is it true that whites have repeatedly pulled the rug out from under blacks, and broken promises like “forty acres and a mule,” while quickly abandoning projects like the Great Society? Yes.

Is it true that blacks have repeatedly taken advantage of whites? Absolutely.

You’re just going to see it differently and give weight to different parts of the story depending on who you are. As a conservative white guy I will say that affirmative action and welfare have repaid slavery many times over, but I don’t really blame the black guy for tuning me out when I make this argument. I’d almost certainly do the same thing in his shoes. That’s just how the human mind works.

It’s important for people to understand that there’s no way to teach history that isn’t extremely biased and ideological. You can’t cover literally every event in any textbook or lecture, so especially when teaching kids, you need to focus on the most important stories and personalities from the era to present a “historical narrative” that aligns with the basic goals of society and gives people a sense of pride.

The problem is that you can only do this when all parties in society are on your side and are in basic agreement about what happened. This has become impossible when it comes to American history because the slavery issue is so important to black people, while conservative whites are extremely protective of the founding fathers. Because of this dynamic there is literally no way to teach early American history that won’t be at least mildly disgusting to some segment of the population.

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I know the above thoughts were somewhat rambling and disorganized, so let me try to hammer them into a few central points:

• Hanania is correct—race relations are rapidly improving in America and our politics are racially depolarizing

• The one major exception is among black people, almost all of whom are black nationalists in practice, given their practical tendency to vote for their racial interests as a unified ethnic bloc

• The relationship between blacks and whites in America is highly “zero sum” and intractable compared to other racial dynamics. It’s relatively difficult to transcend this “friend-enemy distinction” because in practice there’s no way to make white people feel safe without heavily policing blacks, and there’s no way to economically uplift blacks without heavily taxing whites.

• Despite this, white people have a lot of genuine goodwill towards blacks and sincerely want to help them. It’s because of this goodwill that White America periodically will center the needs of blacks over all other national goals, and will then start to resent black people when it feels like they are taking advantage of our goodwill via crime and racial grifting.

• Black people will perceive this quasi-religious cycle of worship and resentment as “broken promises”, and it makes them resent white people in a uniquely intense way that’s basically understandable.

As I argued in my previous essay, I think that breaking this cycle has to be a priority for any prowhite political movement in America. If you don’t do this and “wipe the slate clean” you will always lose the white moderate normie to people like Kendi at some point. You will also get him back later, but only after a lot of pain and stress for pretty much everyone in society.

More broadly, I believe that making peace with blacks is essential for the basic political health of America. Black resentment was used against America by the British Empire in the 1770s and the USSR in the 1950s, and I’m sure China likewise had a hand in amplifying BLM in 2020. This is something America needs to address for basic national security reasons.

Conservative white people need to be at the forefront of advocating reparations. We need to seize moral authority and make sure that all future racial discourse happens on our terms. We need to ensure that fanatical neopuritans in New England can never again threaten our livelihoods for not bowing to their latest intellectual fad.

The reparations scheme I propose will cost about 4% of the current federal budget and will last roughly 50 years. To my mind that’s a small price to pay if it liberates both whites and blacks from this miserable cycle of racial strife.