The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Here's my "Chronicles" article from a year ago about the mainstream respectability of racist anti-white hate. What's changed since and what hasn't?

Here’s an article I wrote a year ago for Chronicles.

The Hate That Dare Not Speak Its Name

May 2024, By Steve Sailer

The right’s unwillingness to mount a coherent defense against racist anti-white animus encourages the left to keep it up.

One of the most important but least mentioned developments over the last 10 to 12 years has been the growth in respectability of anti-white hate.

In an era when criticism of various identities has become a firing offense, we might have gone one of two ways. We could have tried to be fair about it and mandated that if blacks, gays, Jews, women, and so forth were to be above reproach, then so would be whites, straights, Christians, men, and so on. This would have made for a dull but genteel and idealistically principled culture.

Instead, the conventional wisdom in America has become that the human race is divided into two kinds of identities: the Good ones (i.e., Democratic-leaning) and the Bad ones (Republican-leaning). If anyone is so rude as to mention any unfortunate facts about American society’s Democratic-designated sacred cows, everybody else must jump in to explain that any and all failings of the Good people must be due to the malignancy of the Bad people.

This is of course childish and stupid. Indeed, Marvel superhero movies offer more sophisticated models of the relationship between the Good Guys and Bad Guys.

Why has racist enmity against whites become so acceptable? There are multiple reasons, but I think the most important driver is that the grand strategy of the Democratic Party has become to exploit the growing diversity of the American electorate to construct a Coalition of the Fringes. The less you demographically resemble George Washington, Ben Franklin, or John Adams, the more likely you are to vote Democratic. Pitting the increasing margins of American society against its core has been reasonably successful for the Democrats: they’ve won a plurality of votes in seven of the last eight presidential elections.

But you can also see the obvious problem with this ploy: how exactly do you unite black church ladies, transgenders, Asian immigrants, movie executives, academics, blue-collar Hispanics, gays, and so forth? The only solution Democrats and their affiliates in the press have come up with has been to stoke resentment and animus among Fringe Americans toward Core Americans (whites, men, straights, the married, homeowners, and so forth).

I suspect this helps explain why Democrats have been so poleaxed since November 5, 2024. If Trump had won by rallying more whites to vote for him, Democrats would have announced that that just proves they were right all along about Trump and his voters being vicious white racists who deserve their Great Replacement (which is of course, they would also say, just a conspiracy theory), and that while whites have had their one last hurrah, their demographic doom is carved into stone.

But with Trump making inroads in 2024 with practically every imaginable diverse group except black women and, perhaps, the more T of the LGBTs, Democrats are deflated. Their entire 21st Century strategy is in tatters: they imported and/or concocted all that sweet Diversity, only to discover that the Diverse like that epitome of everything wrong with whiteness, Donald J. Trump, while the only group that the Democrats keep doing better with are white suburbanites, long derided as the antithesis of diversity.

Granted, there’s a ruthless logic to the Democrats’ tactics. But those tactics are also hard to defend ethically.

Importing ringers from abroad to vote for you is bad enough, but then encouraging racist animus toward other Americans to keep your ramshackle alliance from turning on itself is even worse.

But few Americans reflexively think about the ethics of the situation in this way. Not surprisingly, the Democrats and the media relentlessly quote the Emma Lazarus’s “wretched refuse” Statue of Liberty poem, “The New Colossus,” as if it were the Constitution. But what’s especially striking is how few white conservatives call out racist anti-whiteism for what it is.

There is so little interest in responding to the growing anti-white animosity of the Great Awokening decade that nobody seems to know whether to spell the term describing hatred of themselves as “anti-whiteism” or “anti-whitism” on the model of “anti-Semitism,” which drops the “e” at the end of “Semite.” I looked to The New York Times for guidance on spelling, but while it has run 5,770 articles since 1851 featuring the word “anti-Semitism,” it has run none with either “antiwhiteism” or “anti-whiteism,” and just two with “antiwhitism,” the latest being about apartheid South Africa in 1983.

In case you are wondering whether an anti-white person is an “antiwhiteist,” which would emphasize his being racist or, like an anti-Semite, an “anti-whiteite” (with or without a hyphen), well, don’t ask The New York Times. In its 173 years, it’s never seen fit to print any possible version of the term even once. As George Orwell pointed out in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “The Principles of Newspeak” appendix, it’s hard to notice a reality if you don’t have a word for it.

Instead, conservatives prefer to label racism against whites as “Communism,” “Marxism,” or some other 20th-century “ism” that’s hardly relevant in 2024.

Republican activist Chris Rufo made progress by adopting the left’s own academic jargon term, “critical race theory.” But why not make your objection self-evident? Hating whites because they are white is wrong.

This lack of coherent pushback against anti-white racism encourages the left to keep it up. Meanwhile, the few rightists who do see what’s going on are driven to desperate, despairing recommendations, such as calling for the breaking up the United States on the assumption that nothing else can prevent genocide.

This is not to say that racist anti-white violence is currently running amok on the streets. Indeed, black-on-white murders peaked way back in 1980, during the powder cocaine boom. Further, there has been a major falloff over the generations in robbery-murders. Mugging pedestrians and knocking over liquor stores have declined as credit cards have replaced cash.

Granted, the overall gun murder rate is up nearly 50 percent from a decade ago—before the rise of Black Lives Matter at Ferguson in August 2014 got so many blacks killed in black-on-black shootings and car crashes. Most of the carnage induced by the de-policing fad of the Great Awokening, in fact, has been intraracial. Now in the 2020s, a huge fraction of murders take place at black social events. Hence, the historic surge in shootings after George Floyd’s death in May 2020 mostly impacted whites by driving up home prices in the suburbs and small towns.

Encouraged by the growing climate of hate, there has been some increase in “stochastic terrorism” against whites—a phrase that means violence directed against demonized groups. It is especially perpetrated by meth-addled schizophrenics who have helped make public transportation even less popular in this decade than it has been in previous ones. But it wouldn’t be hard to dispatch the 100 or 200 scariest crazymen in each of our big cities to asylums in the peaceful countryside. So this decade’s rise in random violence against white and Asian urbanites is hardly an insoluble problem, just one that we haven’t resolved to do anything effective about yet.

So, do demands for diversity inclusion, and equity spell DIE for whites?

Nah. It’s a philosophy that appeals less to hard men than to overweight women. Nor is the spread of anti-white hate terribly likely to lead to apocalyptic outcomes such as genocide or civil war.

There are no practical ways to divide up the country when the political dividing lines don’t follow something simple like latitude or longitude, but instead run roughly between the inner and outer suburbs of our top 100 metropolitan areas.

Instead, I’m referring to the normalization of anti-white racism in media discourse.

Consider, for example, the popularization of the racist and sexist slur “Karen,” a recently invented term of abuse for middle-aged white women, the definition of which The New York Times has patiently explained over and over so that its subscribers can employ it with confidence: Know Your Slur.

Of course, a huge fraction of Times’ subscribers—who tend to be very white and not-so-young—could be described as Karens themselves, but that seldom seems to occur to them.

Now, the Old Gray Lady, which traditionally prides itself on its gentility, would not enthusiastically jump on a social media bandwagon to stereotype pushy and demanding Jewish women as, say, “Shoshanahs” or demanding and pushy black women as “Imanis.” After all, we live in an age sensitive to microaggressions. But defaming “Karens” is fine because they are white, the designated punching-bag race of 21st-century journalism.

In pre-woke 2011, only one article appeared in the Times featuring the name Karen and the term “white woman” (and that only accidentally referred to a slur that hadn’t been invented yet). By 2020, near the peak of its anti-white rage, the Times ran 28 such articles.

Or consider the jargon term “whiteness.” Google’s informative Ngram database reports that “whiteness” more than quadrupled in use in English language books from the late 1980s to Ngram’s last updating in 2019. While “whiteness” is no doubt still employed in nonracist books about Antarctica, interior decorating trends, and bleach, it’s primarily used these days to explain what one hates about white people and wishes to abolish from the human race. Not that one really wants to “exterminate” whites, which sounds genocidal—just their whiteness. Or something.

While calls to “abolish whiteness” may sound alarmingly Hitlerian, advocates of deconstructing the white race respond that they don’t mean genociding the white race, which they believe science can demonstrate doesn’t even exist biologically. They just want to deconstruct “whiteness,” which is totally different from whites (or as acclaimed Atlantic prose stylist Ta-Nehisi Coates used to write, “people who think they are white”).

Read the rest at Chronicles there.