White Progressives Still Don’t Get Black Voters

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, March 12, 2026

 

The internet is both ephemeral and eternal. Websites and memes erupt into popularity, only to disappear as quickly as they came. But these paint splotches of fleeting greatness remain online forever.

 

A perfect example is Christian Lander’s masterpiece of a website, Stuff White People Like. Begun in 2008, it paid mocking tribute to a very specific breed of wealthy, white progressive who savors Wes Anderson movies, loves to wallow in bad memories of high school, and brags about not having a TV. Eighteen years later, all of it still rings true.

 

Some of Lander’s brilliant entries (“Knowing What’s Best for Poor People,” “Awareness,” and “Diversity”) were prescient of the post–George Floyd era, with many white progressives still seeking to be absolved of their white guilt.

 

(Lander notes that white people care about “diversity” but “only as it relates to restaurants.”)

 

But perhaps Lander’s most astute observation was that white people take pride in “being an expert on YOUR culture.” This serves as “a reminder that they are not racist, which also makes them feel terrific.”

 

Nowhere is this cultural tourism more evident than when liberal whites try to explain the positions of black Americans. Using nothing but stereotypes gleaned from obnoxious podcasters and cable news guests, liberals plow headfirst into issues with the full belief that African-American voters will have their backs, unaware that no monolithic “minority” position exists.

 

This was never more glaring than following Floyd’s death, when young, liberal whites sprinted to support the “defund the police” movement. Yet black Americans never put their running shoes on to join the parade of insanity. A 2022 Gallup poll showed that 81 percent of blacks in America supported police retaining or increasing their presence in their communities. It is, after all, black Americans who disproportionately live in the areas with the highest crime, and they want the police there to make their lives more livable.

 

Further, in one 2022 Pew poll, 70 percent of black Democrats listed “reducing crime” as a priority, while only 34 percent of white Democrats agreed. Similarly, black Democrats were much more likely than white Democrats to prioritize issues like “defending against terrorism” (68 percent to 44 percent), “reducing the budget deficit” (50 percent to 21 percent), and “strengthening the military” (40 percent to 15 percent). Black Americans were also far more likely to prioritize “dealing with immigration” (43 percent to 26 percent).

 

Did John McCain give a speech years ago at the Source Awards that we all missed?

 

Of course, nowhere is the white liberal obsession with race more prevalent than on American college campuses. For years, progressives have argued that racial diversity is paramount to the university experience, while conservatives have argued that intellectual diversity makes for a more robust student body.

 

If a recent study is to be believed, however, not only can you have both these types of diversity; the former may actually stimulate the latter.

 

This week, researchers at the Tommy G. Thompson Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison released a survey of the school’s faculty, and it told us what we already knew: that the number of self-described liberals on the faculty (70 percent) dwarfs the number of faculty members who consider themself conservative (9 percent).

 

But buried in the numbers, one finds that it is the white faculty members who drag the professoriate to the left. “Faculty of color are not more liberal than white faculty,” the study reads. “In fact, they lean slightly more conservative.”

 

One explanation for the non-white faculty leaning more to the right is that the category includes Asian employees, who tend to be more conservative. But the study’s authors ran the numbers with Asian faculty members removed, and even then they found that “there is no evidence that white faculty are more conservative than other non-Asian faculty; if anything, white faculty are still estimated to be less likely to be conservative.”

 

So if you want more ideological diversity, it makes sense to provide more racial diversity.

 

For progressives, these embarrassing errors in divining what black Americans think can be corrected by simply asking racial minorities what they think, rather than listening to snotty rich white kids at Black Lives Matter protests throwing projectiles at cops.

 

The trouble is that learning to talk to black voters isn’t white liberals’ strong suit: One 2018 study from researchers at Yale and Princeton showed that white liberals, far more often than white conservatives, “downshift” their language when interacting with blacks, talking to them in a simpler, more patronizing way than they would to other groups. (Conservatives simply think that telling black friends how much they loved the movie Get Out will earn them credibility, failing to understand that this is the entire point of the film.)

 

Yet if liberals listened to black citizens and took what they were saying seriously, they would find, for instance, that black adults (68 percent) are slightly more likely than the general public (60 percent) to say that a person’s gender is determined by their biological sex. They would learn that while Democrats scream that voter ID requirements will disenfranchise minorities, 75 percent of blacks support such requirements. Large majorities of black parents support school-choice programs for children, and minorities have expressed far more desire to start their own businesses than whites. Capitalism for the win.

 

Lander’s website was from a bygone era, where you could make jokes on the internet without people plotting to take a flamethrower to your home. But it remains Tom Wolfean in how it captures the radical chic rampant among early 21st-century progressives.

 

The lesson to liberal whites is simply this: Treat everyone the same, and understand that amid the current tumult, you are not the story. In the end, race-baiters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo may have a point: White people really are the problem.