By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 18, 2026
I was about to write that I own most of Thomas Sowell’s
books, but then I figured I should look up how many books he actually wrote.
The number is around 45. So I’ll say I have most of his famous books, and a few
of less well-known ones. But I only have two on my Kindle. I searched those two
for the phrase “acting white.” It comes up numerous times in Black Rednecks
and White Liberals, and a few times in Discrimination and Disparities.
If you know anything about Sowell, you know that he has
contempt for the term. He thinks it harms blacks, and he has a lot of studies
to back him up. He also—fun fact—thinks intra-black cultural animosity towards
educational achievement is one of the “self-inflicted wounds that can
jeopardize the whole future of a people.”
He also condemns the “white liberals and others who
excuse, celebrate, or otherwise perpetuate that lifestyle, not only preserve it
among that fraction of the black population which has not yet escaped from it,
but have contributed to its spread up the social scale to middle class black
young people who feel a need to be true to their racial identity, lest they be
thought to be ‘acting white.’ It is the spread of a social poison, however much
either black or white intellectuals try to pretty it up or try to find some
deeper meaning in it.”
I agree with Sowell. I’ll be more blunt: telling young
black kids that excelling in school makes you a race traitor is evil, racist,
and un-American. In a Venn diagram those three judgments would overlap each
other. But just to add a little clarity: It’s evil because it’s a massive
impediment to individual and collective self-improvement; it’s racist (a
subordinate kind of evil) because it assumes the inferiority of blacks and the
superiority of whites; and it’s un-American because one of the single best things
about this country is the cultural and moral expectation that you should judge
people based on their actions, not on their membership in some group.
Sowell is one of the hardest-working and most
intellectually accomplished people alive today. Conservatives have lionized
him, and deservedly so, for most of my life.
Now a bunch of conservatives, or at least right-wingers,
are arguing that he’s just acting white.
They won’t say it about him, but that’s the upshot of the
new fad for “white culture.” The idea burst out into the open last week when
Jeremy Carl, a scholar at the Claremont Institute, had a confirmation hearing
for his nomination for a State Department gig. He’s the author of The
Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. He was
also the author of thousands of tweets defending the January 6 rioters and saying things
like “if the U.S. were a serious nation,” Randi Weingarten would be “tried for
crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.”
(I think Weingarten has played a terrible role in
American life. I do not think she should be executed.)
Now, here’s where I might lose some readers, but stay
with me. I agree with the claim that anti-white racism is—or has—done terrible
damage to America.
Among the evidence to support my opinion, I give you
Jeremy Carl and the effort to make “white culture” a thing.
Let’s turn back the clock. As many of Carl’s defenders
rightly note, over the last three decades, the people pushing the idea that
“whiteness” is evil, and that “white culture” must be dismantled, have been on
the left. I wrote about this extensively in my first book. An excerpt:
The “key to solving the social
problems of our age is to abolish the white race,” writes the whiteness studies
scholar and historian Noel Ignatiev. Whiteness studies is a cutting-edge
academic discipline sweeping American higher education. Some thirty universities
have WS departments, but many more schools teach the essentials of whiteness
studies in other courses. The executive director of the Center for the Study of
White American Culture explains, “There is no crime that whiteness has not
committed against people of color…. We must blame whiteness for the continuing
patterns today … which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within
it.” The journal Race Traitor (ironically, a Nazi term) is dedicated “to serve
as an intellectual center for those seeking to abolish the white race.” Now,
this is not a genocidal movement; no one is suggesting that white people be
rounded up and put in camps. But the principles, passions, and argumentation
have troubling echoes.
I also pointed to Leonard Jeffries. Now largely
forgotten, the former chair of the Black Studies Department at City College of
New York made quite a splash with his racist claims that whites are “ice
people” and blacks are “sun people.”
In the years since I wrote that, the left’s obsession
with “whiteness” metastasized. I won’t review it all, but Dispatch Contributing
Writer Jesse Singal has a great
piece on this with links to some useful surveys of the academic obsession with the scourge of whiteness.
For years, respectable academics, intellectuals, and
journalists trafficked in all sorts of anti-white or anti-whiteness ideas and
policies. I don’t just mean race-based admissions policies. Medical schools
have been flirting with all manner of ideas about taking race into account when
providing care. During COVID, there was a push to prioritize access to vaccines based on race. Well before I wrote Liberal
Fascism, left-wing activists used a flawed study, “Workforce 2000,” to
celebrate the fact that white people would soon be a minority. There was
another round of such giddiness after progressives misread Ruy Teixeira’s and
John Judis’ book The Emerging Democratic Majority (Democratic activists
missed the part about holding on to the white working class, preferring instead
to believe they could jettison it—and they did). You can roll your eyes at J.D.
Vance for declaring that white people no longer need to apologize for being
white all you like, but there’s a reason it resonated with so many people.
Not every point made by “whiteness” obsessives is without
merit. Race, after all, has played a huge role in American history and it would
be idiotic to deny that, particularly when talking about Jim Crow and the like.
There have always been white people who talked about
whiteness as if it was a culture. But if you scratch the surface just a little,
you’ll find that it most often meant something slightly different. They meant our
kinds of white people. The WASPs who ruled elite institutions didn’t
include southern and eastern Europeans (Catholic and Jewish)—never mind the
Irish!—fresh off the boat, nor did they include the hillbillies, rednecks,
Okies, crackers, sandhillers, and Yankee swamp rats who made up large swaths of
“white America.” And to be even more fair to the “whiteness studies” crowd,
it’s true that many of these groups, or at least many within these groups, were
quite racist toward blacks. But if you take a few minutes to study eugenics in the Progressive Era (and its
legacy into the 1970s), you’ll quickly learn that the “unfit” they had in mind
were fellow white people. And they sterilized tens
of thousands of them. The left made many mistakes in
their old obsessions with class as the Rosetta Stone for understanding America,
but they also caught many things that race-obsessed left missed.
One reason for the failure of the anti-white
project—which influenced elite journalism and pop culture in various ways (a
column for another time)—is that it was destined to invite a backlash
(particularly during a period of mass migration). Don’t take my word for it.
Sheri Berman, a scholar with impeccable progressive credentials, tried
to warn the left of how unhelpful this project was.
Reviewing piles of academic research, she writes:
Relatedly, research suggests that
calling
people racist when they do not see themselves that way is
counterproductive. As noted above, while there surely are true bigots, studies
show that not all those who exhibit intolerant behavior harbor
extreme racial animus. Moreover, as Stanford
psychologist Alana Conner notes, if the goal is to diminish intolerance
“telling people they’re racist, sexist and xenophobic is going to get you
exactly nowhere. It’s such a threatening message. One of the things we know
from social psychology is when people feel threatened, they can’t change, they
can’t listen.”
Guilt by association is evil. Blaming, punishing,
disrespecting, or otherwise demeaning a black doctor for something a black
criminal did is illiberal and unjust. Doing the same thing to white people is
also wrong. Intergenerational guilt is just another form of guilt by
association. When you tell people that their ancestors were the bad guys, with
no other evidence than they, too, were white (or Jewish, Muslim, black,
whatever) that’s unfair. But even if it were in some sense true, blaming them
for the deeds of others long ago is unfair, too. And it causes people to get
defensive. Our moral worth as individuals is exactly that, individual. My
Jewish ancestors were not slave traders, they were garment workers and jockey
cap makers. But even if my ancestors were slave traders, I didn’t trade any
slaves. I don’t hold Germans and Austrians born after the Holocaust accountable
for things they didn’t do and views they do not hold.
So it is not at all surprising to me that some white
people took offense and tried to defend “white culture” after decades of people
demonizing it.
But two wrongs don’t make a right.
Much of the effort to defend Carl and the concept of white culture takes the now familiar
form of pointing out that the left is hypocritical for denouncing white culture
and then pretending that no one ever talked about white culture. Christopher
Rufo & Co. are right about the double
standard. A standard that says you can use “white” to demonize but never to
defend is unfair and illogical. It boils down to a form of “shut up and take
it” politics.
But embracing whiteness is a mistake all the same.
Defenders of the white culture thesis want their own double standard. On the
one hand, they want to say that “white culture” is real, but when you press
them, they also say that “white” is just a synonym for Western or European
culture. Okay, then why use it? If the identitarianism of the left should be
condemned, why construct an identitarianism of the right?
Carl did not do a good job in his hearings, and it
doesn’t sound like he’ll get confirmed. But he’s still trying to clean things
up. He has a
long post on X clarifying his views, in which he
writes, “I firmly believe that Americans of *every* race or cultural background
can ultimately share in and contribute to that culture.”
That’s great. So why focus on whiteness in the first
place?
Bo Winegard has an interesting defense of the term. He writes:
In its broadest and most coherent
sense, it is traditional Western (European) civilization, the civilization that
white people created or absorbed and synthesized. It is Christian,
individualistic, analytical, rational. It values law, order, liberty, knowledge,
impersonal norms and self-restraint. It is the heritage of Greek philosophers,
Roman jurists, Medieval theologians, Renaissance artists, Protestant reformers,
Enlightenment political theorists, Romantic poets, constitutional framers,
jurists, scientists and other myriad defenders of ordered liberty. But it is
also the heritage of millions of unsung, unremembered men and women who
received that inheritance and faithfully passed it on to their children.
If you used “traditional Western civilization” I wouldn’t
have a big objection to this. But he offers a footnote, in which writes:
One might argue that “white
culture” is a misnomer since other races can participate in and share this
culture. Why associate it with white people? Because it is the culture that
white people created/absorbed/synthesized and spread. Replace white people, and
white culture would cease to exist pretty quickly.
I think the paranoia over “white replacement” gives away
the store here. But putting that aside, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t
say “white culture” is a vital concept and then when pressed, retreat to an
argument that says “Oh, don’t get hung up on the white part.”
And I’ve got to say the outrage—even when sincere—at the
charge that “white culture” is racist is weak sauce politically, because a lot
of the people pushing it are perfectly happy to have the term serve as a dog
whistle for racists. It’s analogous to Yoram Hazony’s performative outrage over the idea that his coalition includes antisemites, even as
he defends people and institutions that amplify antisemitism. If you’re going
to hold all of the left accountable for the racist crap promoted by some, don’t
be too indignant about people doing the same thing to the new right.
But back to the idea that “white” and “Western
Civilization” are synonymous terms.
This also misses the fact that Western Civilization was
never a single culture. I’m used to such claims from anti-colonial firebrands
who want to argue that the Brits and the Nazis they were fighting were all one
culture. It’s kind of wild to hear it from the right.
One of the best things about Western culture is what the
left calls “cultural appropriation.” The story of the West isn’t about cultural
coherence, some steady-state machine where we do “Western things.” The story is
about cultural dynamism. It’s a vast marketplace where bits of culture are
bartered and traded, ideas are copied and reinvented in novel ways. The Western
thing is to explore, to question, debate, and study ourselves and non-Western
things, too. Western society draws its strength not from purity but from what
might be called mongrel vigor. Blacks used European instruments to create a new
form of music, jazz, widely considered to be the most authentic American music.
Is jazz white now?
One often hears about the loss of white American
“folkways.” Frankly, I am too. I like a lot of regional customs, diverse ways
of living, etc. I think we’re richer for such things (and not just the white
subcultures either). But the loss of folkways is the unceasing story of any
vibrant culture. Strong fish swim upstream against the current. Dead fish float
with the tide. Trying to create a government policy of “preserving white
culture” would turn those folkways into state-sponsored kitsch, like a vast Colonial
Williamsburg.
As a conservative, I am an unapologetic defender of what
radicals often deride as bourgeois values. I defend them not just because of
the moral and cultural assumptions inherent in them, but because I think they work.
Work hard, save, get educated, get married, put your kids first, act with
integrity, be reasonably judgmental about bad habits and poor behavior, act as
if the religious faith you follow tells you something important about moral
conduct and the good life: Do these things and you won’t necessarily be rich,
but you won’t be poor. Millions of blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and immigrants do
these things not because it’s the white thing to do, because it’s the right and
good thing to do (indeed, that’s what most of the immigrants who come here are
seeking). A cultural project that tells people that doing these things makes
you white or suggests that you’re trying to be white is just a horrible idea
morally and politically. Because at some level it creates a barrier to entry
for non-white people to thrive in America.
Virtually none of the things Winegard points to were
accomplished in the name of “whiteness.” Jesus—hardly the blue-eyed Norwegian
some might claim—did not preach on behalf of whiteness, nor did medieval
theologians dedicate themselves to a “white” project. The upshot of this
argument is that in order to keep white culture alive—which is not at all
racist according to its more high-minded advocates—we should still structure
our politics and cultural discourse so that we describe the best attributes of
our culture as “white.” I guess if you count Jews as white—and believe me,
there are a lot of people who don’t, going by my email and Twitter replies —you
can include Einstein, Irving Berlin, and Spinoza. But what does that mean for
Booker T. Washington, Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Ralph
Ellison, Oprah Winfrey, or Barack Obama? Winegard and Carl’s argument is
generous enough to include them in white culture, but their framing still
implies these people were or are just “acting white.” One might say that such
generosity is mighty white of them.
Or you might say that the new white culture right has
completed its journey up the slope of the horseshoe. Conservatives, white
conservatives, used to be outraged by the suggestion that Clarence Thomas
and Thomas Sowell were Uncle Toms and race traitors because they’re
conservative. The new white culture thesis agrees with the left, they just
salute the Uncle Toms for their loyalty and commitment to the bit.
