It’s not that white culture is hard to define. It’s that defining even its most obvious aspects has been made taboo. American culture had a very explicit, if not fully nuanced, definition as recently as the early 1980s. It was understood to mean “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”. The pathologization of a positive white identity has led to extremism and divide. Antiwhite discrimination is normalized culturally as well as institutionally. The dilemma: promoting diversity everywhere, quite literally by definition, dilutes the native cultures. Multi-culturalism is actually anti-diversity.
Timestamps.
0:00 The far-right don’t like Indians
1:01 Ideological icebergs
3:57 This is pissing of white America
7:28 Is America a white country?
9:57 American exceptionalism is a myth
11:58 The creedal identity is not enough
14:48 White culture is real
18:24 This is obviously white culture
21:37 Nonwhites are paying the price
22:58 There is a solution
VIDEO BY PF JUNG / WATCH AND SUBCRIBE TO PF JUNG ON YOUTUBE
The double standard that’s radicalizing white America
ARTICLE BY PF JUNG / READ AND SUBSCRIBE TO PF JUNG’S WAR ROOM ON SUBSTACK
A Texas Republican official named Bo French posted this picture of a University of Texas fan section made up mostly of Indian students with the caption “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” It currently has more than 53 million views, and it has generated a ton of division within the Right, primarily about whether or not white identity politics is a legitimate political project.
But first we must ask why this image upsets a significant portion of the American Right. There are several reasons, some of which are more interesting than others. One reason is that there is a sizable minority of people who simply do not like Indians. Racism against Indians is extremely common among the far-Right, largely because there just isn’t as strong of a cultural reflex against anti-Indian racism as there is against anti-black racism.
There will always be a portion of the population who are incompetent, degenerate, and anti-social to the point where they blame all of their insufficiencies on some external factor, and for many on the Right, that external factor is too many brown people in America. But there’s more going on here than just run-of-the-mill racism. The reason this image catalyzed such a reaction is not because of what it actually depicts, but because of what it symbolically depicts.
The structure of ideological movements
Ideological movements can be understood as psychological icebergs. The core of the iceberg that sits beneath the surface is made up of the collective psychological frustration that motivates any given ideological movement. The tip of the iceberg can be conceptualized as a single image, idea, or event that catalyzes and activates all that pent-up psychological energy underneath it.
The crucial fact that everyone reading this must internalize is that the objective reality surrounding the event or image at the tip of the iceberg is functionally irrelevant.
What do I mean by this? Let’s look at two obvious examples of this dynamic — the BLM riots and the January 6th riots. The original 2014 BLM riots in Ferguson, Missouri kicked off after 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot by a police officer and the story spread that he’d had his hands up (hence the “hands up, don’t shoot” phrase many people are familiar with). The objective reality of the situation, which has long since been investigated and confirmed, is that the shooting of Michael Brown was completely and utterly justified. When the Department of Justice investigated the shooting, they concluded “multiple credible witnesses corroborate virtually every material aspect of [the officer’s] account and are consistent with the physical evidence.”
The reason Michael Brown’s shooting kicked off the BLM riots in Ferguson is not because the shooting was actually immoral. It’s because the incident acted as a Rorschach image that people were able to project all of their negative psychological energy onto; it was the symbolic tip of the iceberg. And the core of that iceberg had nothing to do with Michael Brown. The core of that iceberg consisted of the real collective psychological frustration that black people have because they are disproportionately poor. Disproportionately likely to be victims of violent crime. Disproportionately more likely to be born to broken families. So on and so forth.
It doesn’t matter what proportion of black people’s collective psychological frustration you think is legitimate vs. self-inflicted. The psychological frustration is real either way. What this means is that if you want to diminish the cultural influence of a movement like BLM (which I believe is a noble thing to do considering how deeply parasitical and destructive the BLM movement proved to be) then you have to contend with the underlying psychological realities that energize the movement.
The same is true with January 6th. The riot wasn’t really about a stolen election, because the evidence that it was stolen continues to be uncompelling at best. But that doesn’t matter, because the stolen election claim was merely the catalyst at the tip of the psychological iceberg. It was really about working-class Trump supporters who were neglected by the system, called racist deplorables, and believed they were losing the one politician who would fight for them.
So if we apply this very straightforward psychological lens to the tweet from Bo French, we see the same dynamic at play. This picture is at the tip of the iceberg, and what it actually depicts is a bunch of brown American students celebrating their team’s big win at a university where roughly 90% of students are American citizens.
But as we’ve established, what the picture actually depicts is largely irrelevant to our discussion. This picture is a Rorschach image, and what is being projected onto it is the collective psychological frustration of many white Americans. And the more interesting discussion is about where that collective psychological frustration is coming from.
We can start with the creepy and pervasive anti-white racism that has saturated our culture. If there is any doubt in your mind that disdain for white people is both widespread and normalized, this compilation is a particularly egregious wake-up call. Then you have the simple fact that for the past six years our leaders oversaw a mass immigration wave so significant that leading Democrats and Democratic commentators called it a disaster, with some Democrats welcoming said disaster because they “need migrants for redistricting purposes.”
I could show you dozens and dozens of clips like these, or an endless number of stories about H-1B fraud, but to be honest, anyone who denies the reality of hostile sentiment towards white Americans is simply not worth trying to communicate with at this point. Most reasonable people on the Left won’t even deny it. So instead, we should be asking what it is about this image from the UT game that tapped into the collective psychological resentment that many white Americans are feeling.
The answer is obvious. It’s a bunch of American college students at a Texas Longhorn football game and not a single person is white. It doesn’t matter if these students are American-born or not; many people have been primed to perceive this image as an example of foreign immigrants replacing the native population.
And that brings us to the core issue at hand. There is a growing number of white identitarians on the Right who reject the idea that it’s even possible for non-whites to assimilate into American culture. And even though I strongly disagree with this position, the fact is there are plenty of intelligent people who hold this view. This means honest actors are obligated to try and understand the motivations of people who adopt such a view.
Is America a white country?
In one sense, this is obviously true. America as we know it was founded by white colonists. All of our legal and political institutions are modeled on English common law. And up until 1965 America was nearly 90% white. The more interesting question is, if anyone can be an American, would America still be America if white people became an absolute minority?
My aspirational belief is that if the overwhelming majority of Americans adopted a genuinely color-blind attitude, then America could exist as a socially cohesive high-trust society. I’ve experienced this in microcosm. Twice in my life, I have worked on teams in corporate America for a year or more, and both times I genuinely did not even notice that I was a racial minority in that environment until several months in. Why would I? Everyone on my teams spoke perfect English, most of them grew up in middle-class America like I did, and not a single one of them was particularly progressive or viewed DEI any differently than I do. I remember age differences being more obvious to me than racial ones.
But the truth is, we don’t live in a color-blind world and I don’t know how anyone expects to get there. Think about what it would mean if we thought that color-blindness was an essential American value. We would be discouraging Italians, Indians, Japanese, and Jewish people from taking pride in their racial identity the same way we discourage white Americans from having white pride. Progressives will say it’s fine for white people to have pride in being English, German, or whatever European racial lineage they are part of. But this doesn’t really apply to most white Americans, including myself, who are random mix of European ethnicities, none of which we would consider our country of origin.
I suspect everyone reading this knows at least one non-white American who doesn’t care about their country of origin any more than most white liberals care about whatever random mix of European countries their ancestors come from, but it’s unreasonable (and probably racist) to expect all minorities to just stop taking pride in their racial identity the way white liberals have been conditioned to do.
White Americans with no single country of origin (who I will refer to as just “white Americans” going forward) are discouraged from having a positive attitude toward their racial identity, while every other race is encouraged and celebrated for doing so. We know this double standard is real because progressives are always justifying it, pointing out that white pride has a very different history than black pride. I don’t even disagree with that. But notice that this is a justification for the double standard rather than a denial of it. And my primary contention is that this double standard between white Americans and non-white Americans is the root cause of most of our problems when it comes to race politics.
American exceptionalism doesn’t override human nature
Anytime people talk about the role of racial identity in America, the underlying assumption is always that because America is different from most countries in the world, our understanding of racial identity will be different as well. Whereas most other nations in the world are centered around a particular racial lineage, America is one of the few countries centered around an idea. Insert Ronald Reagan’s famous “anyone can be an American” speech here.
But while it is certainly true that America is relatively different from most countries in our ability to integrate and assimilate immigrants (and this is very often to our benefit), it is a fatal mistake to think that American exceptionalism exempts us from human nature itself.
Human beings are social creatures with an extremely strong and immutable in-group preference. Universalist ideologies and cultural technologies like Christianity, Roman citizenship, or secular humanism don’t actually suppress or override in-group preference. Instead they change who is perceived to be part of the in-group by expanding it to include people beyond one’s immediate kin. The Christian metaphor that all people are “children of God” who are made in his image (and therefore all part of the same family) is a clear example of this.
But in America, we operate under a very warped sense of morality, where in-group preference is viewed as effectively always immoral. The hyper-individualism we foster in America, particularly among white Americans, makes it difficult for people to integrate themselves into a larger collective identity. The result is a kind of psychological backlash that Progressive journalist Andrew Callaghan describes as a spiritual sickness from being part of a nation without ancestors.
It is contrary to human nature to suppress one’s sense of collective identity. The problem we have in America is that the only collective identity currently on offer to white Americans is a creedal identity. In this model, being American only means aspiring to the civic ideals laid out in the Constitution. This view of American identity is held so strongly by many progressives that to even suggest that immigrants should assimilate to American culture at all is considered a form of racism.
The fundamental problem with this creedal identity is that Americans who possess a distinct racial lineage are encouraged to ground their identities in something beyond just the creedal identity — Italian-Americans, Indian-Americans, Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, etc. — while white Americans are condemned for doing so. What this means is that your ability to celebrate your racial identity as an American depends on which race you happen to be. That is what renders the creedal identity useless as a uniting mechanism. You can’t really be part of a shared identity if other people who claim it are held to different standards. A shared identity implies that the thing being shared is the same.
It’s basic game theory at the end of the day. If only white Americans are discouraged from celebrating their racial identity, while all other Americans are encouraged to do so, there is simply no way to avoid the inevitable rise in racial resentment that we are seeing. But before we can come up with a solution to this problem, it would help to better understand what the racial identity of white Americans actually looks like.
What is white culture?
Many people will claim the reason white Americans are held to a different standard when it comes to celebrating their racial identity is because there is no such thing as white American culture. Italian, Irish, and Spanish culture are real, but white people with no single country of origin don’t really have a distinct culture. I used to have this perspective myself until I thought about it for more than a minute or two.
Aside from the fact that it’s impossible to have a human being without a culture, we can look to what many progressives have been correctly pointing out for some time. For most of American history, and up until very recently, “white culture” was simply the default cultural milieu that most Americans operated in. The reason so many white Americans adopt a color-blind attitude toward their own racial identity is because theirs was the dominant one for most of their lives. A fish doesn’t notice he’s swimming in water until he’s no longer in it, and many young Americans who are gravitating toward white race politics aren’t swimming in the same water as their parents.
Unlike older generations of white Americans who were almost always part of the racial majority and were inculcated with the ideology of color-blindness encapsulated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, young white Americans have grown up in a hyper-racialized world where it was immoral to not see color. The ideologies of DEI and intersectionality have dominated the majority of American educational institutions, social organizations, and corporations, where white identity is pathologized as oppressive and ignorant. People didn’t realize that white American culture was the default until this new, progressive, racially conscious one started displacing it. Not even the most progressive commentators deny this anymore.
While there are some easily identifiable aspects of the white American culture that many non-whites have very clearly assimilated to, such as speaking English and the belief in free speech, most of what makes up a culture is implicit and hard to define in words. But as sophisticated cognitive scientists like Iain McGilchrist would point out, the inability to define something doesn’t mean it isn’t a real phenomenon. The “reasonable person standard” is arguably the basis of our entire criminal justice system, and not once in American legal history has it been clearly defined. It doesn’t need to be because “reasonableness” is like “culture” or “pornography”: you can’t define it but you know it when you see it.
For example, there’s this white guy who has been going viral on social media for sounding blacker than Draymond Green. He very clearly is a part of the hard-to-define-but-obviously-real thing called “black culture.” Then there’s this viral video with 22 million views that shows a gathering of Indian-Americans, most of whom sound as American as apple pie. If you think Tanya from this clip is Indian the same way a random lady from Mumbai who doesn’t speak English is Indian, you are blind in one eye.
White culture is that hard-to-define but historically ingrained core of American identity, and it is just as real as that equally hard-to-define and historically ingrained core of American identity we describe as black culture. You can play the deconstructivist game of pointing out that there are so many different versions of white American culture, or that it’s impossible to name a single trait that applies to all individuals within white American culture, but the fact is you can do this with every culture, rendering the exercise pointless.
There is clearly some essence to white American culture, as there is with all cultures. And while I don’t believe that just anyone can become an American from a cultural point of view, I do believe anyone’s descendants have the ability to assimilate into American culture regardless of race, as evidenced by Tanya and the rest of the Indian-American girls. Assimilation is a generational process, and one must have a real stake in the past in order to have a real stake in the future. The refusal to acknowledge the underlying truth behind the admittedly simplistic and unhelpful refrain “immigration without assimilation is invasion” is a major part of the white backlash. And what’s worse, those non-white Americans who have assimilated are paying the price.
The natural reaction to race politics
It is an iron law of human psychology that when a member of an out-group makes an attack on one aspect of an individual’s identity, there is a much stronger incentive to embrace that identity in response. When gay people are repeatedly told by religious fundamentalists that they are satanic degenerates, no one should be surprised when gay artists embrace that very aesthetic in response. By the same token, no one should be surprised that when you repeatedly tell white Americans that their identity is one of oppression and ignorance, and then you actively and openly discriminate against them in employment via DEI, they are going to lean much harder into their white identity.
In fact, this is what many of the Indian students at UT did after Bo French’s post went viral. A few of them posted videos embracing their role as the villain in the white identitarian story. And who can blame them? To quote one of white America’s strongest advocates (Kanye West), “With all of the money and fame I still don’t get to see my children. [Naysayers] see my Twitter, but they don’t see how I be feeling. So I became a Nazi, yeah, Bitch I’m the villain.”
Imagine being born in this country, going to college, and then going viral because your skin color, which you have absolutely no control over, triggers a psychological reaction in a large portion of the population. It’s no wonder Indian-Americans feel so despondent about this whole situation. Of course, these videos will now be used as proof that the white identitarians are right about Indians taking over, and things will continue to escalate and racial tensions will flare.
The long-term solution to this problem involves a return to our iceberg analogy. It is absolutely imperative that current and future political and cultural movements address the legitimate underlying frustration that is priming white Americans to react negatively to a post like this. We can do this by treating anti-white racism with the same level of disdain and disgust as racism toward any other group, as well as ending mass migration policies at the national level and severely restricting legal immigration for the next few decades in order to give the people who are here time to assimilate. But most importantly, we have to develop a more sophisticated understanding of American identity rids itself of hyper-individualism and naïve color-blindness, while maintaining its fundamentally universalist ethic oriented toward the common good.
In my opinion, a reorientation around the time-tested ideals rooted in Christian ethics is our best hope for revitalizing the American identity. As someone who sympathizes with post-liberals like Patrick Deneen, I believe a mere commitment to certain legal norms (which is ultimately what the creedal American identity boils down to) is not enough. Nor is it enough to believe reconstituting a country with a white majority will solve our deepest problems. The fundamental state of man is Cain and Abel, which means the capacity to do evil upon one’s own brother is so deeply rooted in our nature that only a commitment to the highest virtues can serve as the basis of a functional and cohesive society.
Because I refuse to view people of other races as political enemies whose interests are at odds with mine, many of my right-wing critics regard me as “more dangerous to pan-European survival than any rabid leftoid.” This is but one of many similar comments made about my recent conversation with two white nationalists.
At the end of the day, we are all made in the image of God. I don’t want a white nation. I want a nation where white people are not held to a different standard than people of other races. And I have more in common with anyone who shares my belief than I do with white identitarians who share my genes. As my black American countrymen like to say, “skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.”
