Is Whiteness Bad?
Why is being white atrocious?
Unless you are an Arctic explorer, a laundry detergent chemist, or an interior decorator, the term “whiteness” is almost solely used as a racist slur against whites. Anti-white intellectuals use the term “whiteness” as a euphemism for “we hate you for being white” because they realize that’s so on the nose that even white people will eventually realize that they are subject to racist hate.
If, like me, you dislike racism, you ought to be concerned that this hate word is used in American books an order of magnitude more often in 2022 than before the dawning of political correctness in the early 1990s.
For example, here are the top six hits Google shows me from News outlets for “whiteness:”
On the other hand, from The Atlantic:
The White Identitarians Are Having a Moment
Now that DEI and anti-racism are in retreat, they’re moving on to a more ambitious goal.
By Thomas Chatterton Williams
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is also a visiting professor of humanities at Bard College and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author, most recently, of Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.
June 8, 2026
“What is white identity?”
In February, the Democratic Senator Chris Murphy posed that question to Jeremy Carl, the Trump administration’s nominee for a top State Department job. It should have been a softball.
Carl has built his career on the claim that white identity is under threat. In his 2024 book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart,
Here’s my review in Taki’s Magazine: “It’s Not Okay to Be White.”
Carl warns that “white Americans increasingly are second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded.” A 53-year-old senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, he argues that anti-whiteness pervades the American mainstream and particularly elite institutions, which routinely pass over qualified white candidates in pursuit of diversity.
Yet during his confirmation hearing, Carl couldn’t give Murphy a coherent definition of the identity he seeks to protect.
Uh … the identity Carl seeks to protect are the people who are being discriminated against because they check the “white” and the “non-Hispanic” boxes on HR forms and the like.
Is this question really all that complicated?
We’ve had 57 years of affirmative action going back to 1969.
Sure, Senator Elizabeth Warren and some other women academics got a diversity thumb on the scale via dubious claims to be American Indian or Hispanic, but virtually no white men have by pretending to be black.
It’s one of the most clear-cut things in public affairs.
“You have made several statements about your worry regarding the erasure of white culture in America,” Murphy said. “Tell me the white values that you believe are being erased.” …
Paywall here.
