Scott Adams' descent into reactionaryism [1] has not been subtle or quiet. If you were surprised that it eventually exploded in a public way, that just tells me you haven't heard much of anything about him in the past decade.
Also, "it's okay to be white" is not a hidden rake of a dogwhistle to stumble on. If that were a serious position, it immediately leads to the question of "who is saying otherwise". And then you learn about replacement theory, "a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory" [2], and realize what Scott Adams was really saying without saying.
Lots of language policing is dumb. Hell, language policing would drive me away from even using "dumb". Scott Adams did not stumble into this controversy through zealous language policing, he charged into it with eyes open, and knew exactly what he was saying.
[1] I think the word is actually reactionism, but chrome's spellcheck prefers reactionaryism
> Also, "it's okay to be white" is not a hidden rake of a dogwhistle to stumble on. If that were a serious position, it immediately leads to the question of "who is saying otherwise".
I found a few examples if you are interested:
> conservatives are objecting after the discovery of a speech by Berkeley Professor Zeus Leonardo in which he discussed the need “to abolish whiteness.” […] “to abolish whiteness is to abolish white people”
I'll start with addressing the second one, because it sets up the first. To start, the author of that article is himself white. He seems to be saying (and pointing to others who have said) that "whiteness" as a cultural identity leads to white supremacy. For example, "white pride" is white supremacist in a way that "Irish pride" isn't. The article isn't saying anything should happen to people considered white, just that lumping us all into a single "white" identity is a problem.
Meanwhile, the reaction to that first link seems to prove that professor's point. In context, it seems clear to me that he's saying is that people interpret arguments like those presented in the second link as attacks on those people rather than just calling out that singular identity as an issue. He's not saying "the solution to white supremacy is to get rid of white people", he's saying "whiteness as a singular identity is a problem, and pointing out that it's a problem is seen as an attack on white people themselves", which is clearly true based on the reaction to his speech.
Newsweek is trash, but I'll put that aside for the moment. The training seems to be presenting the same arguments as the first two, but badly. A workplace training is really the wrong context to try and make that kind of nuanced point, and that seems to have been an especially clumsy attempt at it.
> The article isn't saying anything should happen to people considered white, just that lumping us all into a single "white" identity is a problem.
And yet, it seems to be that many Americans – including Americans like this university professor – are actually huge on doing exactly that.
Growing up in 1980s/1990s Australia, there was very little talk about "white" or "who is white". At school, this kid was Irish, this one Italian, another Croatian, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Filipino, etc – who was "white" and who wasn't? Who knew and who cared–"white" (in a racial sense) was not a frequently used word in our vocabulary. Even the school curriculum avoided the term – 1788 was presented as the start of the "European settlement" or "British settlement" of Australia, I don't remember any teacher ever saying "white" in that context.
But, in the last 10–15 years or so, there's been this big influx of talk about "white" and "whiteness" – which mostly seems to be coming from the US, and (my impression is) predominantly from that part of America which this university professor represents.
Australia wasn't always like that – we did once have a "white Australia policy". But, as we dismantled it (a gradual process between 1940 and 1970), I think we collectively decided that the best way to be less racist was to stop lumping people into coarse racial categories such as "white". Hence, post-1970 Australian officialdom was very happy to put people in ethnicity/nationality categories – British, New Zealander, Aboriginal, Maori, German, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Lebanese, Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Vietnamese, Egyptian, Somalian, Sudanese, South African, etc, etc, etc – but studiously avoided the use of terms such as "white". Most Americans seem to have never got that memo, and the creeping Americanisation of Australia seems to be injecting that kind of "white" talk back into the conversation.
I'm really not qualified to say much on the subject of race in any other countries, but I think coming at that professor from an external perspective misses context. Pushing the audience to recognize that the system is classifying them as "white" is true for a US audience. The fact that it seems like he's pushing whiteness isn't because he's wrong, it's because he's not talking to you.
Unfortunately, I don't think it's especially surprising that the US's cultural export also includes our deeply unhealthy relationship to race.
> Unfortunately, I don't think it's especially surprising that the US's cultural export also includes our deeply unhealthy relationship to race.
I still think that professor LeVine is busy pushing that "deeply unhealthy relationship to race".
An example of how he does it, is by promoting Noel Ignatiev's very dubious "How the Irish Became White" theory. Both Ignatiev, and LeVine, ignore that most anti-Irish sentiment was actually anti-Catholic – so long as the majority of Irish immigrants to the US were Protestants, anti-Irish sentiments were almost unheard of, and they only began when Catholics came to outnumber Protestants among immigrants from Ireland to the US. At which point Protestant Irish Americans rebranded themselves as "Scots-Irish" to make clear that they weren't Catholics, hence escaping that prejudice and discrimination. Ignatiev is taking something which was fundamentally about religion, and misrepresenting it as something about race – which is one of the ways in which people like Ignatiev and LeVine keep on pushing that "deeply unhealthy relationship to race". In fact, I'd even say that their refusal to acknowledge the reality of anti-Catholicism, and their denial of it in an attempt to transform it into a form of "racism", is a sign of their own anti-Catholic prejudice.
For a scholarly criticism of Ignatiev's whole "Irish Became White" theory, see Arnesen, E. (2001). Whiteness and the Historians' Imagination. International Labor and Working-Class History, 60, 3-32. doi:10.1017/S0147547901004380 https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/6817279/mod_resou...
White ethnic groups that are predominantly Catholic being distinguished from "real" whites and being targets of White supremacists is a real historical thing (and not just with the Irish, also true of Italians, and its no small factor historically in why predominantly-white-in-traditional-racial-terms Hispanics have been largely constructed as non-White for quite some time in the US, which has turned out to be more durable than the others.)
Race is a mutable social construct that largely exists to rationalize other prejudices, and ethnic and religious prejudices are high on that list; treating race as if it were a real and fundamental thing orthogonal to other concerns is buying into race essentialism. Which is not to say Ignatiev is right, but rather to pretend that the anti-Catholicism he ignores contradicts a connection to racism and the construction of race rather than explains it is...also wrong.
> White ethnic groups that are predominantly Catholic being distinguished from "real" whites and being targets of White supremacists is a real historical thing
Anti-Catholicism is a huge part of the history of the UK, Ireland and the British Empire. As such, it has no particular connection with white supremacy – were the Penal Laws "white supremacist"? Was the Ulster Protestant League "white supremacist"? Is the Orange Order "white supremacist"?
Outside of the US, anti-Catholicism had no significant association with ideas of "race" or skin colour. Indeed, the whole "Irish weren't white" claim sounds so bizarre from a British or Irish or Australian perspective. All three countries have unpleasant histories of discrimination against Catholics, but nobody ever tried to justify it because "they weren't white". They were discriminated against because of their "popery", because they were viewed as disloyal to the state, bearers of foreign allegiance, practitioners of outdated superstition, etc.
And, much of US anti-Catholicism was directly imported from the UK. Which is why trying to view it all through a racial lens – which is a peculiarly American approach – seems so confused. It seems to come from just looking at things from a narrow US-centric perspective which ignores everything that happens in the rest of the world, and even ignores the British historical origins of much that happened in the US as well.
> Anti-Catholicism is a huge part of the history of the UK, Ireland and the British Empire. As such, it has no particular connection with white supremacy
It does in fact have a particular connection with American white supremacy and, historically, with construction of race in America. You seem to be making the irrational jump from “X originated separately from Y” to “X has no particular connection with Y”, but that’s neither logically warranted nor as at all reliable as a practical guide when looking at elements of culture.
> It does in fact have a particular connection with American white supremacy and, historically, with construction of race in America. You seem to be making the irrational jump from “X originated separately from Y” to “X has no particular connection with Y”, but that’s neither logically warranted nor as at all reliable as a practical guide when looking at elements of culture.
I wouldn't say that race and anti-Catholicism have zero connection in US history – but I do think Ignatiev fundamentally misrepresents what that connection is. People can be prejudiced against both groups A and B simultaneously, without making them the same sort of group or the same kind of prejudice; people can simultaneously have religionist and racist prejudices, without making religionism a form of racism.
And there are some deep differences between the two. Catholics who converted to Protestantism (a significant minority did) found that the vast majority of Protestant prejudice and discrimination against them disappeared, almost overnight – now, they shouldn't have to do that, and of course for most it was not a live option socially or psychologically, but for all it was at least physically possible – the impossibility was in deciding to do it, not in being unable to do it if they'd decided to. By contrast, the vast majority of African-Americans couldn't "convert to being white" – a minority of individuals of mixed ancestry could manage to "pass", but for the vast majority "convert to white" was asking the physically impossible. Ignatiev et al cite occasional historical usage of "racialised" language against Catholics, but they overstate its frequency and significance, and ignore the fact that even most people who deployed this "racialised" language would forget it the moment a Catholic expressed interest in conversion – there was nothing most African-Americans could do to get them to forget it.
The fact is, prejudiced people tend to have lots of different prejudices–that doesn't make all their prejudices the same, or make all of their numerous prejudices instances of just one of them. I mean, if someone is homophobic, is that racism? Sure, most racists may well be homophobic, but gay people can be racist too, [0] and I don't think the Ugandan politicians who have been clamouring to reintroduce capital punishment for homosexuality are motivated by racism either. [1]
But Ignatiev decided to take this one issue, race – which no one denies plays a major role in US history, and arguably a much bigger role than in the history of the rest of the English-speaking world – and turn it into the be-all-and-end-all of American history, in terms of which everything else has to be interpreted, the square hole into which everything else must be squeezed, regardless of its shape. And, this is I think the biggest particular connection between anti-Catholicism and race in US history – through pseudo-history, Ignatiev has made history, and caused very many Americans today to believe such a connection exists, no matter how ahistorical that belief may be – and believing it is true makes it true, not in the past, but in the present. I really doubt the US is going to be able to move past its "deeply unhealthy relationship to race" until people abandon views such as those of Ignatiev and LeVine, who are part of the problem not part of the solution.
> I wouldn't say that race and anti-Catholicism have zero connection in US history – but I do think Ignatiev fundamentally misrepresents what that connection is.
Sure, I tried to make clear that while I think it goes to far to separate anti-Catholicism from racism (And the evolving construction of race) in America, I'm not defending Ignatiev's particular characterization in so doing.
> The fact is, prejudiced people tend to have lots of different prejudices–that doesn't make all their prejudices the same, or make all of their numerous prejudices instances of just one of them. I mean, if someone is homophobic, is that racism?
I dunno, I think generally multiple bigotries shared by the same person are society constructing different labels for the persons "not like me-ism", so in that sense, yes they are all the same thing having different labels assigned to different manifestations of a unified whole. But, on the other hand, when you are talking about social impacts, it makes sense to look at them differently because the different aspects can have different dynamics as societal forces, whether or not they individually are part of a unified system.
But the relation between anti-Catholicism and racism isn't that they are the same social force, but that they are social forces where each colors the manifestation of the other. This is, AFAIK, not as true of, say, homophobia and racism in the same way (they interact intersectionally, but that's a different thing).
> I dunno, I think generally multiple bigotries shared by the same person are society constructing different labels for the persons "not like me-ism", so in that sense, yes they are all the same thing having different labels assigned to different manifestations of a unified whole
I think that ignores that societies treat some "not like me" groups much better than others, and even have their reasons for doing so (whether right or wrong or a bit of both). British hostility to Catholicism wasn't just "not like me-ism" – they didn't show anywhere near as much "not like me-ism" towards Huguenot refugees, or the Dutch or the Germans – on the contrary, they imported monarchs from the Netherlands (William of Orange) and Germany (George I). Protestant England treated foreign Protestants better than English Catholics, because the religious similarity was seen as more important that the linguistic/cultural/ethnic differences. It is hard for people today – in a society where most people (even religious people) don't take religion that seriously – to understand how seriously people took religious disputes back then. Also, domestic Catholics were seen as a political threat to the reigning regime (many of them were Jacobites, or at least had sympathies in that direction), most foreign Protestants were not.
> But the relation between anti-Catholicism and racism isn't that they are the same social force, but that they are social forces where each colors the manifestation of the other.
Contemporary American culture foregrounds issues of race and backgrounds issues of religion – hence, if one immigrant group (e.g. Germans or Norwegians) was accepted into American society more easily than another (e.g. Irish Catholics) – people are quick to accept the proposed explanation that was because one group was "more white", the alternative explanation of "more Protestant" won't even occur to many people. I think that says more about 21st century US culture than 19th century US history. But isn't that cultural tendency to focus on "racial" explanations for things to the exclusion of non-"racial" explanations, part of that "deeply unhealthy relationship to race" which another commenter mentioned upthread?
If you listen to the video of what Scott Adams says, he's quite explicit about it. It doesn't seem like a plausible misspeak. He didn't merely say "It's okay to be white" in an ambiguous context (plausibly not related to the 4chan propaganda campaign.) He said that because some poll claims whatever% of black people disagree with the phrase, that black people are a hate group, that white people should stay away from them, and that he would no longer advocate for black interests. If you don't trust my paraphrasing, fair enough, but you can watch the video yourself and I think you'll find that my paraphrasing is fairly accurate.
Suppose for the sake of argument the poll is legitimate, and suppose he wasn't aware that the phrase is a 4chan propaganda slogan.. I think he still grievously erred when he decided to judge all black people by the opinions of only a portion of black people, as though black were a political affiliation that people can enter or leave at will. But it's not a political affiliation, it's an ethnic group. You legitimately can't claim that an entire ethnic group is a "hate group" because whatever% of them believe hateful things, even if that statistic is true. It's not as though the remaining% can disassociate themselves from the ethnic group, it isn't a voluntary association. I think his failure to distinguish an ethnic classification (involuntary association) from an ideological classification (voluntary association) is where he really went off the rails with no plausible deniability.
I interpret this whole affair as: he's rich, wants to retire, and decided now is as good a time as any to finally speak his mind. He lost his inhibitions.
Previously, Scot Adams "identified as a black person because he wanted to be on the winning team".
And then he decided that 'its OK to be white' was perfectly fine and re-identified as white, and that black people hate white people, and called them a hate group that should be stayed as far away as possible.
The only good out of that whole situation is that Scott Adams is a trashy racist, and anybody who likes him is also a trashy racist.
The real insidious racists are the ones who know how to use diplomacy, and affect organizations with "culture fit" (aka: not white enough), and other types of hard-to-identify racism.
At best the most I'd believe would be that "some people who Scott Adams pissed off now like to say that when he says X he actually means Y".