The Whiteness Project

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Gregory Hood

It’s always a trap when a reporter, politician, filmmaker, or activist asks a white person what he thinks about race. As in a television interview, the purpose is not to exchange information or discover the truth, but to draw out a politically incorrect comment and then use it to hurt the person who made it. Because the Internet is a tool for silencing debate as much as generating it, white people who don’t want their lives destroyed because of a tweet or a comment know the value of strategic silence.

The PBS television series the Whiteness Project is supposed to “engender debate about the role of whiteness in American society and encourage white Americans to become fully vested participants in the ongoing debate about the role of race in American society.”

Already, you should hear alarm bells. Whether it’s in corporate “diversity training” or on a college campus, there’s no real debate about the role of race. There’s a monologue, in which whites are urged, scolded, and then finally forced to give unearned concessions to protected classes — in the name of combating “privilege.” White privilege, despite being unprovable and unfalsifiable, is an “invisible knapsack” of qualities responsible for the problems of everyone else. Like witchcraft in the Middle Ages, the charge alone creates the consequences of guilt.

Documentary filmmaker Whitney Dow, who produced the project, claims that an honest discussion about whiteness will be liberating for everybody. To his credit, he claims that “as a white person” he rejects the idea that recognizing white privilege requires some kind of guilt. He promises us a total of 1,000 interviews from all around the country, but for now he has posted very short interviews with a score of white people in Buffalo, New York. They are compelling and surprising, while still occasionally depressing.

Here are some typical comments:

• Andrea says she is not treated like a normal white woman because she is “discriminated against” for having tattoos.
• Shayna is obviously familiar with “white privilege” theory because she decries domination by “white male doctrination,” and says she feels very uncomfortable when there are “too many only white people in a room.”
• Deanna, a self-described “voluptuous” woman, reports being harassed by black men — easy enough to believe considering the catcalling video making the rounds.
• Ronald excited lefty commentators when he said that “a lot of white boys aren’t going to be pushed around.” However, his context is a case in which white men in Buffalo filed suit after being denied jobs because of anti-white racial preferences.
• Corina notes that she is “proud to be white,” but thinks everyone should be proud to be whatever they are. This hasn’t stopped this comment from being trotted out as proof of the inherent evil of the project.

Other interviewees express confusion, bitterness, and resignation about the difficulties of navigating a multiracial society. They also worry about their own interests being sabotaged, especially because of “affirmative action.” No one talks about “white genocide” or calls for white nationalism. But even mild comments have caused outrage. Mr. Dow himself says “I expected some reactions, but the level of the anger really caught me off guard.”

But wasn’t that the point? Reporters, critics, and those who make a living hating whites will define the “correct” interpretation of these interviews and force compliance.

In Salon’s opinion, “the contortions of some interviewees as they struggle to put across a blinkered worldview without sounding openly racist are terribly painful to watch.” Indeed, they are painful, though not in the way Salon thinks. Familiarity with race realism isn’t just about scientific and sociological truth — it lets you spot and avoid the traps leftists have set. As Talleyrand put it, “Man was given speech to disguise his thoughts.” The well-meaning white people in these interviews mostly say things that are obviously true — but this only gives reporters and commentators reasons to lecture us on why they are evil.

And that’s why Jamelle Bouie of Slate, who calls people racist for a living, sees these interviews as “valuable.” “It’s rare that white Americans talk about race,” he points out. “It’s even rarer that they do so on camera. And it’s rarer still that they reveal ignorance, confess to prejudices, and share their fears.” To Mr. Bouie, it shows that we need to “push harder for an integrated society” and fight back against Supreme Court decisions that could challenge “disparate impact” — the theory that unequal outcomes are ipso facto proof of racism.

Steven Thrasher of The Guardian, a mulatto who understands there’s more money in identifying as non-white (and homosexual), has a piece called “The Whiteness Project will make you wince. Because white people can be rather awful.” He insults one interviewee, proving her complaint that you cannot talk about subjects such as fried chicken without worrying whether blacks will be offended. Mr. Thrasher believes the Whiteness Project can be used in the same way as “Whiteness Studies” — to pathologize whites and define their identity as an expression of “privilege.”

The producer, Mr. Dow, has already given the game away in interviews. However he frames it, he is trying to get whites to say the “wrong” thing, so they can be corrected and reeducated. He thinks reeducation must be more subtle to be effective — not just screaming about “racists.” In an obscenity-filled interview with Vice, Mr. Dow notes, “White people don’t have a lot of experience talking about their race, so they’re going to say a lot of dumb shit” — referring in this case to whites who fear violent young black men.

In fact, Mr. Dow is clear about his motivation.

I had this epiphany where I suddenly realized, I don’t have a racial identity . . . But oh my God, of course I have a racial identity. I have the most powerful racial identity on the motherfucking planet. And despite all the work I had done, all my talk about it, all my bullshit, until that moment, I hadn’t really processed it in a real way where I recognized it. It sounds really fucking corny, but it was like having some sort of conversion experience. With that knowledge, all of a sudden, I started to see the world in such a different way. It was kind of like getting X-ray glasses. Once I became conscious that my race was an active component of my everyday experience, that it was an active dynamic thing that I controlled that impacted me, it fundamentally changed the way I saw the world and interacted with people.

Here, Mr. Dow identifies his “powerful racial identity” strictly as “privilege,” but “white privilege” isn’t a theoretical concept but an industry. Racial profiteers such as Mr. Thrasher, Mr. Bouie, and their colleagues in academia make a living justifying the dispossession of white Americans. Whites who are prominent in business, finance, and culture go along with this by systematically working against the collective interests of their people, and would lose their positions if they did otherwise.

And this is the great lie of “white privilege:” White consciousness can never be expressed in terms that explicitly support the collective interest of whites. It can be expressed only in negative terms. The point is to get whites to talk about what it means to be white, interpret their views as evidence of “racism” or “privilege,” and then push for concessions. Again, as Mr. Dow puts it:

I opened my funding proposal with a quote from [Ta-Nehisi Coates] that I can paraphrase from an Atlantic piece he wrote a few months ago: He says basically Obama-era progressives view racism as a problem within the system that needs prescriptions that either address inequality to help black people or change the system to make it more fair, whereas he sees white supremacy as the organizing principle of the United States of America. It always has been, it is today, and it always will be.

And I agree with that. And again, I don’t think that’s pejorative; I think that’s reality. Look at the fucking founding documents. White supremacy was the organizing principle. I think if you look at the world as it is, that’s a lot more interesting than looking at in some sort of fantasy.

Of course, the egalitarianism implicit in the founding documents may be at the root of our problem as European-Americans. No phrase in history has done more harm than “all men are created equal.” Yet Mr. Dow seems to be agreeing with Jared Taylor that the Founders (and indeed most American leaders) took for granted that this country was created by people of European descent and would continue to operate for their benefit — a project that would be unexceptionable for people of any other race.

At the same time, even though he says white supremacy “always will be” the organizing principle of the United States of America, his PBS-funded (and thus taxpayer supported) project is designed to break down any remnant of white America. European-Americans will not be allowed to flee the diversity that has been imposed on them. The apparently eternal founding principle of white supremacy does not allow for preserving the historic American nation or the majority population within the country they created.

The problem for Mr. Dow is that while the chattering classes know the game he is playing, non-whites don’t. Indeed, the response on social networking and among the non-white hoi polloi is sputtering outrage that whites are able to speak at all.

The climate of anti-white intimidation means whites must never defend themselves. “White privilege” may seem compelling to university professors who are protected from reality by speech codes and set-asides, but it is much less convincing to whites who don’t rely on politically correct platitudes to earn a living. Ordinary whites roll their eyes at the idea of “white privilege.”

While it is probably too optimistic to believe in a “silent majority” that holds a race-realist position, racially aware whites are cowed into silence by threats of economic or physical retribution. When they are given an opportunity to express their beliefs or act upon them, the “Bradley effect” and white residential patterns suggest whites are racially aware when they are allowed to be.

It is no coincidence that outlets like the Gawker media network, Salon, and others rely almost entirely on naming and shaming whites who transgress the ever-shifting boundaries of politically correct thinking. Even if such whites are a minority, we are a pretty large one. Certainly, if everyone who was proud to be white or at least unashamed to be to white were willing to talk about it, the overwrought climate of political correctness would collapse overnight. If there is any kind of actual debate about race — even a rigged debate — the forces of egalitarianism aren’t sure they would win.

The word “ignorant” is liberally applied to race realists, but anti-whites don’t use it the same way we do. The word “ignorant” now means that a person does not believe the established position on race and so-called white privilege. Those who are termed “ignorant” usually know more about human biodiversity, sociological realities, history, psychology, and political science than a professional name-caller who was handed an affirmative action degree from Diversity University.

For that reason, don’t expect Mr. Dow’s documentary to lead to the real “discussion on race” that everyone claims to want. As we have seen with the murder of Brittany Watts and the violent attacks against so many others, anger at “white privilege” and perceived historical wrongs quickly turn into hatred of whites as whites. It is not possible to separate opposition to “white privilege” from opposition to white people, when everything white people do is framed as oppression and justifies reeducation and punishment.

The Whiteness Project, like “Whiteness Studies” and “white privilege,” isn’t just about pathologizing behavior — it’s about pathologizing people. The project will only reinforce the belief shared by most white people that the best thing you can do is stay quiet, keep your head down, and make enough money to move far away from diversity, and hope the commissars won’t notice you.

Unfortunately, they will, no matter how quietly you live. And the solution isn’t white flight but white identity. One interviewee, Chris, put it this way: “As a white person, I wish I had that feeling of being — and that feeling of being a part of something for being white, but I don’t. The culture, the pride in your culture is just not there for white people.” Until “that pride is there,” pathology is all that is left for whites.

Mr. Dow thinks we whites have to deal “with our own shit.” So we do. We have to cast off self-hatred — and show people like Chris that he does have an identity as part of the European family — with a great destiny before us.