The Unbearable Whiteness of Self-Loathing
The psychosis of self-hatred
Last week was an Internet GotterDIEmmerung. Twitter was broken not just once but twice by high profile acts of noticing.
Peachy Keenan managed to trigger an autoimmune response with an innocent tweet about a friend’s daughter who, despite a stellar high school record, was locked out of her schools of choice ... in stark contrast to the girl’s diverse classmates, who despite being considerably less stellar, were all accepted to top schools. Her tweet went viral in the most hilarious way, as shitlibs threw a collective tantrum of the ‘it’s not happening and it’s good that it is’ variety. We’re expected to simultaneously applaud affirmative action, diversity hiring, and preferential treatment for equity-deserving groups, but we’re also required to simultaneously affirm that no such programs exist, and that in the zero-sum calculus of who gets into what school or gets hired for which job, putting thumbs on scales to pre-select winners according to twisted notions of racial ‘justice’ does not by obvious and inevitable symmetry imply losers getting screwed out of actual justice.
Keenan is a high-profile anon, but Scott Adams has no compunctions about saying naughty things under his own name. Fuck-you money helps with that sort of courage, which isn’t to take away from his bravery in saying what he did. Dilbert’s sin was to see a poll revealing that about half of black, sorry Black, people do not agree with the statement that ‘It’s OK To Be White’1. About a quarter strongly disagreed with that milquetoast sentiment of all-rightness, from which it can only be inferred that they believe the contrary: it is not okay to be White. Sorry, white. Dilbert then reasoned, logically enough, that if a very large fraction of one population have been indoctrinated into an implacable hatred for another group, the other group should probably stay away from them, for their own safety.
A mob of outraged NPCs descended almost immediately; Dilbert, by far the top syndicated comic strip for a very long time now, has been unceremoniously dropped by every newspaper in the US; book deals have been cancelled. Adams refused to back down, and gained a ridiculous number of new followers. He’ll be fine.
In the case of the controversy kicked up Keenan, the left’s position was ‘this isn’t true but also it’s great’. In the case of Dilbert’s brouhaha, the poll says what it says, and no one can really deny it, so the left is reduced to simply saying that it’s racist hate speech to ... say that White, sorry white, people would be safer disassociating from people who hate them on the basis of race. The first is simply Anton’s celebration parallax2, which is by now tiresomely familiar. The second is even more deeply weird: if Adams is wrong, it follows that White, sorry white, people should presumably seek out the company of people want to hurt them.
Now, I don’t want to exaggerate things here. Adams was using hyperbole to dramatic (and excellent) effect, but the truth is that a narrow majority of black, sorry Black, people strongly or somewhat agree with the statement that ‘It’s OK To Be White’, with only about a quarter disagreeing, and a similar proportion being unsure one way or the other. A quarter disagreeing with the statement is still a lot, but it isn’t surprising given the constant barrage of propaganda directed against the White, sorry white, devil by the Interahamwe left. Actually, I think it speaks quite well of black, sorry Black, people that a majority of them agree with the statement, and a plurality strongly agree – indeed those who strongly agree outnumber those who strongly disagree. Most of them are normal humans who aren’t consumed by the race hate the regime is so eager to make them complicit in, and are just as disgusted by it as the rest of us are. That said, it is a simple fact that black-on-white violence is something like 40x more common than the reverse3, and I find it difficult to believe that this is unrelated to the howling whirlwind of racial oppressor/oppressed narrative that’s been unleashed on us.
Using the same aggregation Adams used, one fifth of White, sorry white, people disagree with the statement that ‘It’s OK To Be White’. Excluding those who just aren’t sure4 still leaves 7% of European-descended people who despise their own race either a little or a lot.
It’s a minority of whites who hate whites, but it is a very loud and influential minority. Just from glancing through the replies to Keenan and Adams, it seemed to me that a majority of those taking umbrage at their statements were White. Sorry, white.
I don’t believe for a second that black, sorry Black, people are remotely ashamed of the racial component of their identity. Just watch this video, in which two groups, one African and the other European, are asked if they’re proud of their respective racial identities:
The black, sorry Black, people unhesitatingly walk to the line on the far side of the room marked ‘strongly agree’. The White, sorry white, people all dither, half of them going to ‘disagree’, two to ‘somewhat disagree’, and one brave soul timidly edging over to the ‘somewhat agree’ line, all while they have a very awkward conversation revolving around whether or not they should feel guilty for ancestral sins, or if the question even makes sense because like, we’re all individuals, so how can you be proud of something you didn’t do?
It isn’t only those of African heritage who are reflexively proud to be who they are. I imagine you’d get a similar response from the Han, Japanese, Mongolian, Tibetan, Thai, Vietnamese, Khmer, Kazakh, Indian, Persian, Arab, Ashkenazi, Mayan, or any other ethnos you pick out of the hat. The anomaly is not Africans readily affirming the basic rightness of being African, it’s Europeans who don’t ... with a substantial fraction of them being vehemently opposed to their own.
Of course it’s no mystery why this is the case. We are bombarded daily, and have been for generations now, with anti-white propaganda. White people are depicted either as ruthless, duplicitous, sociopathic colonizing oppressors driven by xenophobic bigotry and bottomless material greed, or as clumsy, blundering, socially retarded, fat, clueless idiots who can’t get anything right. We hear constantly about the evils of slavery and Jim Crow in the American South, or the genocide of the American First Peoples, or the brutal conquest of New Spain, or the subjugation of India under the Raj, or the Holocaust. We are made to constantly interrogate our unconscious biases, scouring our institutions for the merest hint of structural racism. It’s no real surprise that a considerable fraction of the population internalizes this one-sided and slanderous caricature.
How many times have you heard someone say they feel guilty for being white? How often have you heard a White, sorry white person spit out ‘white’ like the foulest of epithets? I’ve experienced both of these multiple times.
The African-descended population has been elevated to the status of a sacred people. They complain about getting tokenized, but it would be more accurate to say they’ve been totemized. They are beyond reproach, above questioning, possessed of an invulnerable moral authority5.
This totemization is clearly visible in the ever-evolving set of elaborate linguistic taboos governing the nomenclature appropriate for the totem caste. Utter the dreaded n-word, and an African may assault you without consequence. Drop an n-bomb during a violent altercation, and risk a hate crime enhancement that trebles your sentence. ChatGPT, that window into the woketard soul, is unequivocal in its condemnation: better that a city gets nuked and millions die, the language model has repeatedly insisted to multiple users, than that the n-word be spoken aloud, even whispered, even so much as thought about for the briefest of moments. Then of course there is the recent demand that black be capitalized as Black, while the hateful term white is quite explicitly denied this honourific. It is not enough that some words are imbued with supernatural terror, now it begins to affect our very grammar.
Then of course there’s the spectacle we were all treated to during the months-long funerary games held in celebration of the beatification of Saint Floyd of the Fentanyl Overdose, during which we saw white people kneeling in supplication to their black betters, raising their fists in the Sign of the Cross of Saint MLK, Jr., and even washing the feet of their saviours6.
The funny thing about this is just how little self-loathing whites get out of it. Their obsequious behaviour towards any non-white ethnicity, but especially towards blacks, elicits nothing but contempt and resentment, depending on whether the white lib is adopting the worshipful or the patronizing stance. No one likes being talked to like they’re an idiot child, which is something liberal whites do almost by default when addressing blacks, larding up their language with emotive monosyllables communicating warmth and concern rather than just talking to them like adults. It’s even more off-putting when someone falls all over themselves to apologize for imagined slights. Crawl on the ground like a worm, and you will be treated like a worm. No one likes worms.
I’ve observed this play out many times, particularly in left-wing circles. Minorities are perfectly happy to emotionally terrorize liberal whites, who after all ask for it: their willingness to continuously confess to racism simply invites further accusations of racism.
The reverse is also often true. Right-wing whites frequently get along quite well with minorities. This seems counter-intuitive: how can racists be friendly with other races? But it is no great mystery. If you are comfortable in your own skin, and respect yourself enough to make it clear with your bearing that you will not take shit, as a rule people will not give you shit. I do not mean by this that one should be obnoxious, of course not; courtesy almost always begets courtesy. It is simply that the strength and confidence that emerges from a healthy relationship with one’s own being projects a kind of aura. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
In any case, I do not blame black people for this state of affairs. They had very little to do with bringing it about.
No, this conditioning was done by our own ruling class, quite methodically and deliberately, as a key component in the cognitive conquest of the Anglospheric world. If you want to take everything from a wealthy, vigorous, heavily-armed, and fiercely independent people, doing so by shooting at them is liable to be difficult and expensive. If, on the other hand, you convince them that they are morally unworthy, that nothing they have is really theirs but was akshually all stolen from more deserving others, that they in consequence the lowest of the low, really the most despicable villains in all of history ... well they’ll put up no struggle at all against your depredations, and simply let you take whatever you want.
It isn’t white genocide.
It’s white helotry.
It’s the reduction of white people to second-class citizen status in their ancestral homelands, largely enforced by a small contingent of pale-faced janissaries who have so thoroughly internalized the white devil identity that it seems to them morally obligatory that white people be subjected to regular humiliation, deprivation, and frustration, that they have everything taken from them – their property, their culture, their language, their self-respect, their very lives.
Thus, when an anonymous housewife gets uppity and wonders about bright young white kids getting denied admission to top schools on the basis of their race, the pale janissaries react with rage. Of course those kids should be kept out of good schools, regardless of how smart they are or how hard they’ve worked. They’re white.
Thus, when a mild-mannered cartoonist calmly notes that maybe white people should avoid a group that’s been taught to violently despise them, they lose their minds. Of course white people shouldn’t look to avoid physical harm. They’re white. They should seek that harm out, because they deserve it.
The anti-white whites are psychologically broken. There’s a reason for the correlation between leftist politics and mental illness, which even Matt Yglesias has been forced to acknowledge. It isn’t emotionally healthy to hate yourself. And, no, it isn’t possible to harbour a deep hatred for wypipo, and be white, and not hate yourself at least a little bit. You know what you are, much as you might try to take refuge in the ‘I’m just an individual’ dodge. That’s a half-truth. Yes, you’re an individual; you’re also necessarily a member of multiple overlapping groups, some of which are biological. Both of those things are true.
Look at it this way. You are the product of lineages stretching back into the misty dawn of time itself. Uncountable generations passed in order to produce you. Their numbers included every sort of human that you can imagine – good men and bad men, drunkards and warriors, violent maniacs and peaceful farmers, thoughtful artisans and thoughtless spendthrifts. No matter what race or races produced you, it is all but certain that at some point in the past at least one of your ancestors owned slaves, and equally certain that at least one of them was a slave, because the institution of slavery is a human universal. There were rapists and rape victims, because rape is equally perennial. There were participants in genocide, and victims of the same. All of that had to pass in order to generate the person you are now. If you repudiate that, if you say that should not have happened, then you are in effect saying I should not be. That does not mean that you have to agree that it was good, the lessons of history are there for us to learn. It means that you must accept what happened, and forgive it, all of it, if you are to live with yourself. Your lineage lives inside of you, as it does for all of us.
If you condemn the humans who made you, you condemn yourself.
And that way lies madness: depression, anxiety, the schizoid oscillation between self-love and self-hatred. Perfect just the way you are, living your best life, even as you despise yourself and fantasize about ending that best life. “You should allow yourself to be abused, like I do.” Trapped in this abuse cycle, the children of a BPD culture, the fractured liberal psyche must constantly deny the reality it is forced to navigate. “The abuse isn’t happening, and I deserve it.”
You might think that I’m arguing in favour of white supremacy here. That would be incorrect. Ethno-narcissism is as obnoxious as ethno-mascochism. The dominance of the latter in our cultural discourse has produced, as a reaction, a certain amount of the former, its purest expression found in the race uber alles wignat types, who tend to be just as humourless as their woke counterparts7. Wignats just switch out one form of idolatry – the totemization of blacks – for another, which is ultimately just as unhealthy. Neither the self, nor the race, nor another race, nor a random rock, are appropriate objects for worship. Worship is for the gods, and especially the one God who stands above them.
Ethno-narcissism is in any case inconsistent with the nature of European man, who historically has been known precisely for his openness, his fascination with the foreign other, his eagerness for new vistas, his boundless curiosity about the world, and his profound emphasis on the individuated soul. An inwards-looking chauvinism that swallows the individual into a racial hive would be the death of that spirit.
The point here is ultimately very simple. It is not healthy to hate yourself. Self-loathing sickens the soul. It is right and good to respect yourself, and that means having a certain amount of pride in all of the myriad aspects of yourself, all of the social and historical factors that came together to make you who you are: the ancestors that led to you, the peoples who fostered you. Contrary to what we’re constantly told, this is not the same thing as ‘hate’. You can respect yourself without despising others. Indeed, self respect is the only firm ground on which mutual respect has ever been established.
We’re constantly told that we need to have a ‘conversation about race’, which in practice has meant that the rest of us shut our mayonnaise holes, allow insane Marxcissist diatribes to go unchallenged, and meekly submit to the labyrinth of self-contradictory kafkatraps comprising the Church of No Salvation. That isn’t helping anyone. Relations between the races are worse than they’ve been in a long time, and the longer this goes on the worse those relations get. We do indeed need to figure things out. We will get nowhere so long as we allow the mentally ill to dominate the conversation. As you can see in the Rasmussen poll, we sane whites, the people who don’t actively hate themselves, vastly outnumber the pale janissaries. We need to stop indulging the compulsive self-destructiveness of self-loathing whites. We need to stop allowing them to demand that white people hate themselves. If the different races are going to figure out how to get along, the sane humans that don’t hate themselves need to be the ones doing the talking.
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In between writing on Substack you can find me on Twitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom
4chan started trolling the left with that statement in the first place a few years ago. There was a period of a year or so during which anon pranksters would print out 8 1/2 x 11 posters and put them up around university campuses, knowing full well that it would get a reaction. You can read all about this on Wikipedia, which has a very neutral and unbiased description that is eager to let you know that if you think It’s OK To Be White you’re a supporter of the KKK, David Duke, the Daily Stormer, neo-Nazis, and White, sorry white, supremacy. There’s even an ADL page about it, which is exactly as balanced and reasonable as you’d expect it to be. The insane reaction this trolling campaign provoked was, of course, precisely the point of it. It’s the flip-side of ‘Black Lives Matter’, which as the left is always insisting should be an anodyne statement to which any reasonable person ought to reply, ‘well of course they do?’ And yet, they reacted to ‘It’s OK To Be White’ with reflexive fury. Curious.
This being Michael Anton’s observation that the same phenomenon is either a hateful right-wing conspiracy theory, or a great and wonderful thing that is obviously happening, depending entirely on whether one is critical or celebratory about the phenomenon in question.
Have you heard of the knock-out game?
But like ... how can you not be sure about that?
Save of course should they commit the one unpardonable sin, that being to publicly say something nice about the chandalahs, in which case they are unpersoned as heretics as has been done to e.g. Thomas Sowell or Candace Owens.
The Black Hebrew Israelites had a field day with that, managing to get random white people to literally lick their boots. Which they did. With feeling and enthusiasm.
Humour is really the key element, here. The racist jokes that are the contraband currency of underground right-wing discourse are best understood as defensive blaspheming, rather than an expression of ‘hate’ as the joyless wokescolds insist.
I have a slightly different take on the Scott Adams situation. Or more specifically, the chicanery that spawned it. The inciting poll question, like so many, seemed designed to produce a desired result (yes, it's possible that it was just incompetence, but attribution to evil seems more likely these days).
The problem lies in the statement itself's multiple valid interpretations. One of these, as you quite correctly note, is that the respondents thought the question was about whites. In other words, was it "okay" for *whites* to be white. In that formulation, it is indeed an expression of ugly, and perhaps even genocidal hatred. I know from experience that this form of black hatred of whites exists, and that it's more common than the reverse in the current era.
But there is another interpretation of "It's okay to be white" that is very commonplace, and which (bizarrely) I haven't seen anyone mention. In this interpretation, the question is whether it's okay for yourself (i.e. the black respondent) or other (black) people to "be white." As my own wife can attest to, for the question to be perceived this way by a significant fraction of black Americans isn't at all anomalous, but cuts rather to the heart of a certain (and unfortunate) socialization process that many have experienced.
In fact, even I can attest to it. I well recall the black-on-black accusations of someone "acting white" from my youth. In a sense, it was the *ultimate* insult, because it meant you were a phony, a fake. It meant that you lacked authenticity, even if your behavior was authentically a part of your particular upbringing. This was particularly the case in patterns of speech; if you didn't adopt the mannerisms and informal patois (ironically, inherited from Southern whites), you were trying to set yourself above other black people. Make of that what you will, but these were *very* strong currents to stand against.
That's not to say I didn't see some stand against them. But an unfortunate side-effect was innvoluntary segregation (if not total disownment) from other black youths. You would have white friends, because they were the only ones who wouldn't look down on you for the way you (quite naturally) presented yourself. For young people in general, that kind of limit coupled with ostracization is going to be very difficult to accept. Thus, you're going to get a significant number of scarred black adults who internalize the hard lesson that "it's not okay to be white." Meaning themselves, and perhaps their own children.
How significant? Unknown, because the question was so "poorly designed." But I think we can safely assume that the 48% figure is too high, and may be off by as much as half in my opinion. Although I'm guessing most of that reduction would come from the "somewhat agree" faction. Those who "strongly agree" are likely the sort of hypnotized racists who did the scarring in the first place.
This totemization goes WAY back. I saw it in college 40 years ago. Those of use who went to mixed race high schools were much more conservative than those who grew up in wealthy suburbs.