The white supremacy culture disproven by minority immigrants
People who claim there is a white supremacist culture can't seem to explain why so many minority groups do so well.
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| A group of racially diverse people lying in the grass, but with white supremacist clothing. Am I using that term correctly...? // photo by Anna |
Someone once told me in a debate about affirmative action in California that we "obviously" live in a white supremacist culture. He graduated from UC Berkeley, where the white student population is currently 25% while the Asian student population is 37%. A troubling statistic right off the bat for the whole white supremacy culture angle.
When the popular defamatory term was "racist" years ago, you could kind of argue around it. One can maybe say people are racist against certain groups but not others. But since the left has overplayed the word so much that it's lost all meaning in political oratorical combat, they have shifted over to "white supremacy". In this case, how can one even begin to argue that this is a white supremacist culture when there are so many racial groups outperforming white people?
The term "white-adjacent" had been coined to deal with this, but thus far, there has been no standard by which a certain race can be measured as such, and as we have seen with the whole Stop Asian Hate movement recently, the term is flipped on and off depending how convenient it is to the person utilizing the term. It is easy to see then, that it is simply a meaningless term deployed to arbitrarily shift the goalposts in argument, in a giant begging the question exercise. These non-white groups performing well are white adjacent. We know this because any non-white racial group that performs well is white-adjacent. All white and white-adjacent groups do well. Therefore, white supremacy. Science!
Though many subscribers to this are proudly self-described atheists, this line of thinking closely correlates with reasoning from the lowest common denominators of religious adherents. God does good things. If they weren't good things, then it wasn't God (or he works in mysterious ways). Therefore, God is good. Religion!
So let's make sure the definition of white supremacy is clear. White supremacy is the idea that white people are superior to all other races and that the white race should have power over all others. This is how the dictionary defines it, and how Encyclopedia Britannica defines it. It doesn't seem like the race warriors on the left really defines it much differently, if at all. In its deployment in political debate, however, it seems to resemble more and more what the term "racist" meant in the 2000s and on, which is now popularly and mockingly defined by the non-left as "someone who is beating a leftist in an argument." But by their standards, I have no reason to doubt that when they say "white supremacist culture", it means "the institutions are run by white people designed to keep minorities suppressed." That is the only way to read their statements, with their continued insistence that white people are the reason why minorities can't get ahead.
Given the actual definition of the term, if we are in a white supremacist culture, one would expect white people to be, far and away, the highest performing racial group in the United States.
However, this is far from reality.
According to Wikipeda (citations point to the US Census; it is generally corroborated by Mark Perry of AEI, also sourced by the US Census), the median white household income would be just behind the 61st surveyed racial group in the United States at $66,902/year, after Laotian Americans. Granted, there are many European groups in there that many would consider white. But at the very top of the list are Indian immigrants at $135,705/year. I don't think many would argue that Indians do very well in this country. Second on the list are Taiwanese at $102,405/year. I don't think a many would dispute this either. Indeed, there are many racial groups that do better than the white group. Filipino, Indonesian, Pakistani, Iranian (if you consider them non-white), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Hmong, Vietnamese, etc. These groups and more all do better than the median white household income.
Since we know that the modern leftist race warriors are really dog-whistling (oh, snap!) "minorities" as primarily "black", let's focus on that, despite knowing that this narrowing of racial groups does not fall in line with the "white supremacist" charge.
If this is to be believed, it should stand to reason that all black racial groups perform more poorly than domestic white groups. But this is not the case.
The Nigerian diaspora has long been chronicled as one of the highest performing racial groups in the United States. They are one of the most educated groups in the country, surpassing white and Asian (overall) groups in the percentage of college degree holders, suggesting that lower black college acceptance rates are not due to some white supremacy plot.
In the median household income list, Nigerians show up above the median white American household income.
I suppose one could argue that racists could differentiate between Nigerians and black people, but I think that would give racists far too much credit. But to argue that white supremacists could do this? Ridiculous.
It must be said that this measure of median household incomes between races isn't the end-all, be-all in income measurement. Lyman Stone contested this in an article with very good points and controlled for some variables. Some of the controls aren't exactly relevant to this exact case, like for household size. Controlling for household size in favor of per capita only helps with households with multiple income earners like with two families living in one household, but this introduces issues in households that culturally have more children. While his explanation that more children lowers the standard of living may be accurate for what he's getting at, we are looking at income opportunity, so this adjustment is not relevant and incorrectly hurts the numbers for Nigerian household income. Even with these reworked numbers, Stone concludes that Nigerians still earn more than most European groups. Some other black groups like certain Caribbean countries, who were very close to the median white household incomes, adjusted up following some of the data adjustments.
Further still, there are reasons outside of race that make it easier for domestic white groups to have higher incomes in today's society. Domestic white groups have accumulated generational wealth and family connections for a far longer period of time, especially compared to immigrants, particularly from poor countries. This capital greatly helps in creating new opportunities for downstream family. Of course, racism in the past, particularly when Jim Crow was still around, played a large part in suppressing this capital accumulation for certain other races domestically, but it's society today that is on trial. The United States is ranked at #22 in median wealth per adult whereas Nigeria is ranked at #142. Immigrants coming from higher wealth countries like some eastern Asian and western European countries would have better resources to start with, giving those immigrants a head start. Coming from such a poor background with few connections and a wide cultural and language gap makes it very difficult for immigrants from Nigeria to be successful, yet they are more successful than the overall white population.
I recall during my freshman year of college a black friend making a remark to me about how he was the only black student in architecture school, one of the most selective degree tracks at the University of Oregon. I replied that the president of the Oregon chapter of the American Institute of Architecture Students, going after his M.Arch degree, was black. He disagreed, saying that he was Nigerian. Okay, true. I didn't understand the difference then in the context of the discussion and was maybe a bit afraid to ask then, but I think I understand better now.
The high levels of black performance are not limited to Nigerians. Immigrants from Ghana have an even higher level of median income compared to Nigerians. Immigrants from the Caribbean countries tend to be highly educated. In fact, African immigrants in the United States had an employment rate of 93%, from 2015 numbers, higher than the African immigrant employment rate in every single European country.
On top of all this, there is very little evidence of white supremacy in the major institutions in the United States today. Major corporations have appeared to all jump on the anti-racism bandwagon, sending their executives to diversity training and releasing advertising promotions to proclaim their wokeness as they continue to utilize labor in countries with major human rights violations (who makes things in China anymore, amirite?). There aren't many universities that are not on the anti-racism tenure. I don't think anyone would really argue that the major cultural institutions of the entertainment industry are skewed to particularly favor whiteness aside from their introspective guilt. The hot air of smug wafting from the Academy Awards ceremonies makes sure of that as the MLB leaves a predominantly black city in favor of a predominantly white city for its All-Star Game in a bizarre proclamation of its solidarity with the black population. All the major news outlets to the left of Fox News push this agenda. In politics, any stark racism among Democrats is overwhelmingly against white people, as former KKK members like Robert Byrd had departed. Even Donald Trump had specifically denounced white supremacy, despite media outlets continuing to report that he refuses to do so. When all of the major cultural institutions vehemently denounce white supremacy, where exactly is this white supremacy sneaking into the culture? There must be more than one isolated Charlottesville incident to point at.
None of this is to say that there are no racial issues in the country. One can argue that given Nigerian's rates of education, they should be earning even higher rates than they already are, but it's unclear how this can be adjusted with the other factors brought up above. There was also a study done evaluating callbacks for resumes between white sounding names versus black sounding names, with a significant gap of callbacks between the two. However, the study also states that the discriminatory difference between businesses in predominantly white neighborhoods and predominantly African American neighborhoods were only slight, suggesting that white supremacy, specifically, is not likely the cause. Further still, it doesn't appear to try names of other races to differentiate between racism and white supremacy. Perhaps most egregiously, are the racial differences within government policies. The drug war cages black people and Latinos at a far higher rate than white people, as do authoritarian policies like Stop and Frisk, championed by Republican Democrat autocrat Michael Bloomberg.
Likewise, the prescription matters. In the NBER study above, the abstract starts with "Despite laws against discrimination, affirmative action..." The authors appear to just assume that affirmative action would fight resume discrimination and cannot possibly cause it. However, this is not clear. The late great Walter Williams has written in a letter lamenting that a hospital "has an all but written policy of prohibiting the flunking of black medical students," with the great Thomas Sowell writing in his obituary for Williams that a medical school professor revealed what Williams has said to be true. This would mean that affirmative action could very well lead hiring managers to believe that credentials for certain races hold lesser value due to the imbalance of standards given, just like how hiring managers would view the same degrees from different colleges of differing pedigrees.
The bottom line is that if we all suffer from a white supremacist culture and this is the overriding factor that minorities can't get ahead, does it make sense that white people are so far behind so many minorities? Even if the answer is somehow yes, the mitigating solutions offered typically exacerbate the problem by forcing unreliable metrics on people, leaving them more and more reliant on stereotypes instead of data. Worse still, the continued push by Critical Race Theory adherents could easily have the effect of keeping minorities down. As seen by the since taken-down CRT exhibit by the Smithsonian, values and characteristics proven to be effective in success, self-fulfillment, and intellectual enrichment such as hard work, rational thinking, independence, and emphasis on the scientific method, are considered "white characteristics". As if minorities don't or shouldn't work hard, don't think rationally, can't be independent, or utilize the scientific method. The entire exhibit itself reads like a real white supremacist wrote it and yet it actually holds true to Critical Race Theory which claims to be critical of white supremacy. I don't doubt that the people engaging in this line of thinking have the best of intentions for minorities, but in effect, what they're doing serves to push minorities down, not hoist them up.
Figuring out and having an honest discussion about the cause of racial disparities in wages and opportunity is significant. If we continue to push the white supremacy angle when it really isn't white supremacy, it would be like giving chemotherapy to a patient that is not suffering from cancer, but from chronic fatigue syndrome. It would actually make things worse.
Since the whole white supremacy culture trope is so easily disproven, why have all the powerful institutions, much like the cultural institutions covered above, in the country taken to it?
All the corporations that are movers and shakers have taken to it. For example, the Federal Reserve, though it's technically more of a government entity, is soon to take up an equity directive, if it hasn't already started. Major banks have positioned themselves in the culture fight. Bank of America, for example, one of the most hated banks due to its policies in the past, has issued a $2 billion bond in the name of racial equality (this does not mean they spent $2 billion on it) to try to get people to look the other way as they rebrand themselves into something more palatable while they continue their collusion to leach money out of Americans into their own pockets. Progressives, remember when Occupy Wall Street was a thing? Where has that gone? Now they've spent a scant few million on advertisements and executive diversity retreats to placate you while the corporations continue to bend you over by colluding with the Federal Reserve Bank and Congress to shower them each with billions of your tax dollars.
All the Democrats have taken to it. It seems like the majority of their messaging is about this now. They spend more time renaming schools for racial reasons than they do trying to fix the broken school system that is such an abject failure to minorities. Progressives, remember when you would hold both the Republicans' and the Democrats' feet to the fire over things like domestic spying? Well, they have renewed the Patriot Act time and again while you have been focused on this ghost of a problem.
Even the Military Industrial Complex and the warfare state has taken to it. Military contractors like Raytheon have implemented diversity programs. The CIA released a cringey woke advertisement featuring a Latina ticking off as many woke buzzword checkmarks as she could cram into the ad segment while saying "my existence is not a box-checking exercise," with no sense of irony. Progressives, remember when you were actually anti-war? Where have you been for the past 12 years? Oh, yeah, chasing this nonexistent white supremacy problem as the United States murders people abroad by the hundreds of thousands while war contractors make billions. But hey, now they're getting minorities to help murder and torture people abroad. Win?
It's quite simple. These institutions give up peanut shells to placate you with the illusion of improving racial disparities. To distract you and keep the populace fighting each other over trivial nonsense while they continue their theft of money from poor people to line rich executive pockets, killing for profit, and broker power among the politically connected. They give up next to nothing, while you give up everything. In the process, you are unintentionally suppressing the people you purport to help while diluting the meaning of and trivializing the real horrors that result from actual white supremacy in world history.
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| A chart showing mentions of "white supremacy" over time. Or the climate change Hockey Stick graph from the IPCC. (more charts in link) // chart by Zach Goldberg |
Stop being their useful idiots.
