The Language of Adverse Consequences

In their latest conversation Glen Loury and John McWhorter discuss one of my least favorite turns of phrase—”people of color”:

What is the justification for this? Some progressives will tell you that all “people of color” share a common experience, which is that they have suffered the oppression of white supremacy or systemic racism. Even granting the existence of such universal oppression (which I do not), would it justify describing the experiences of, say, a newly arrived South Korean delivery driver and the second-generation child of Harvard-educated Bahamian lawyers as, in any meaningful way, “the same”?

Of course not. To group two such people together, you would have to ignore everything about them except the fact that they are not white. You can’t even call this “racial essentialism,” since the only race it essentializes is the so-called white race. The “people of color” moniker doesn’t so much propose a coherent theory of non-white identity as it quietly legitimizes an even less respectable, more dangerous theory of whiteness. Advocates of “people of color”-type identity politics will tell you they oppose white identity. But I regret to inform them that they are, in fact, perpetuating and empowering white identity.

One of the fascinating qualities of language is that it allows you to talk about things that don’t exist other than in a Bellman, “Hunting of the Snark”, sort of way—”What I tell you three times is true”. And that’s probably the main reason the phrase irritates me. If its intention is to convince people of primarily European descent that they are an interest group and should vote as one, it’s quite effective.

My view is that in the United States people of sub-Saharan African descent, the descendants of slaves, do suffer from the vestigial effects, not just of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow, but of the unanticipated run-on effects of poorly constructed welfare programs and other policies. The one-two punch of racism and mass immigration coupled with the deindustrialization of America made it difficult for black men to get jobs that would allow them to support their families. Conjoin that with black women being able to get jobs as maids, cooks, etc. and AFDC that made men in the household a liability rather than an asset and you have the destruction of the black family. Young men, in need of social support, banded together in gangs. That’s part of the foundation of the self-genocide presently going on.

Those are not experiences shared by Hispanic, South Asian, East Asian, or recent African or Caribbean immigrants. Furthermore, to believe in a distinctive common cause among these disparate groups you must gloss over the competition for jobs between blacks and Hispanics and the reality that a disproportionate amount of anti-Asian hate crimes have black perpetrators, the recent murders in Dallas being prime examples.

Everyone experiences failure in life, rejection. Blaming those failures on racism can be a cheap and easy way of excusing yourself from trying again. Add to that a perverse black nationalism that considers studying in school, for example, “acting white” and you lay the groundwork for permanent failure.