What is colonial culture? Students will readily attribute “whiteness” to colonialism, and conflate that concept with imperialism, racism, slavery, capitalism, and a host of other talking points that don’t require thoughtfulness to be socially effective at generating racial hatred. This is why it is somewhat ironic that I am here arguing that the white leftist of today resembles the white colonizer of the past, who sought to “take up space” that was not his to take up, disseminate and impart his knowledge and beliefs on others, and penalize others for resisting him.
But perhaps it is not so ironic afterall. While the white conservative will try to make the case that no one race is responsible for the historical sins of the past so that people of today should not have to issue reparations to ameliorate an egoistical guilt, the white leftist explicitly dismisses that as ideological nonsense.
The white man, says the leftist, is directly and indirectly responsible for oppression, past and present; the white man, he says, benefits from this oppression and directly and indirectly ensures that his privilege bestowed upon him from birth, from his biology, remains superior; the white man, he concludes, must repay his bottomless debt; and those who do not see this, he warns, suffer from a false consciousness: for the black, that means he has internalized his oppressor, i.e., the white man, and does not just accept himself as colonized but practices apologetics (Larry Elder, an uncle tom), and therefore is a traitor to his race; for the white, unless he flagellates himself at the altar of this racialism and accepts this doctrine—whereby the black must be elevated above him in reparation, for the aboriginal in repatriation, for the migrants of the world a home to stay and redecorate (an opportunity to be colonized, supplanted, to be diverse and inclusive)—he is a white supremacist and a literal Nazi.
Note the expressive tension between the varying beliefs that is expected of the token, the enlightened, woke, moral white man.
Race remains a pinnacle of the movement of history. It is not able to be shed for the false American identity where one “melts” into an encompassing culture. The culture and all of its preceding social foundations, the white man says, was irredeemably built to maintain the unequal, inequitable, racist, marginalized structures upon which America now stands.
The irony of this doctrine is that of course it is self-defeating; so much so, that the whites even enjoy the alliance of self-immolating blacks who believe that the only way to eradicate racism is through it in the practice of toppling a perceived structure (a prophecy self-fulfilled) so that blacks will have their turn to imperialize. “Black people will never gain full equality in this country,” In 1992, Derrick A. Bell Jr., the grandfather of Critical Race Theory, wrote in “Racial Realism.”
He continues: “This mindset or philosophy requires us to acknowledge the permanence of our subordinate status. That acknowledgement enables us to avoid despair, and frees us to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring fulfillment and even triumph.”
Race did not become invisible, no matter how many liberals or conservatives argue for colorblindness; it remained as part of the center of tribal identity. While Europe becomes self-hating for its “whiteness,” the tide of public sentiment to praise “blackness” grows stronger by the day. Europe is lost and America is next.
In discussing the decadence of the West in his Origins of Nazi Violence, Enzo Traverso wrote that the racists of the nineteenth century saw the reversal of their decadence in conquering peoples and imposing upon them what was correct, ideationally and then physically, to pursue the “natural law of historical development.”
“It was precisely this desire to ‘regenerate,’ this aspiration toward a new world order and new relations of domination between people, that marked the transition from an ideology of decadence to vitalism, from an apology for the traditional order to a cult of technical modernity as the source of conquest and power—in other words, that favored the move from conservatism to Fascism.”
At this point, the white leftist and his enlightened minority can be envisioned nodding vociferously at the association between conservatism and fascism, while dismissing the rest of the statement, so let us be clear in definition. The aspiration toward a so-called “new world order” that establishes “new relations of domination between people” cannot be a contemporary aspiration found in conservatism since, using the verbiage of the leftist, conservatism does not bear any institutional power. “Conservatism” is a catchphrase for “dead upon arrival.”
This is being only slightly facetious because of course right wing politics can be “progressive” and institute change; however, to think fascism came from the right forgets that it was an international movement built upon the “ashes of the old European order,” as Jonah Goldberg writes. Fascism “drew together the various strands of European politics and culture—the rise of ethnic nationalism, the Bismarckian welfare state, and the collapse of Christianity as a source of social and political orthodoxy and universal aspirations. [It] drew from the same intellectual wellsprings as American Progressivism. Indeed, American Progressivism—the moralistic social crusade from which modern liberals proudly claim descent—is in some respects the major source of the fascist ideas applied in Europe by Mussolini and Hitler.”
Race is not the only moralism the white leftist uses in his pursuit of revolution. There is sex, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration…Each is an excuse for sanctioning those who resist his fluid ideology—fluid, because the ideas are neither consistent nor intended to be, though they are part of a pattern of thinking. For instance, sex is a social construct (logic of transgenderism), but sexual orientation is not (logic of homosexuality), but also sometimes orientation is too, so that when straight men refuse to have sex with biological men they are transphobic (logic of leftism).
The “regeneration” that Traverso writes about when describing the aspirations of the twentieth century racists is representative of the imperializing minorities of today—race does not preclude itself from this tendency. In other words, the white is not seeking hegemonic power and institutionalizing doctrine of his puritan creed. The white hates himself too much to ever take such a program seriously, which explains his alliance with the minority to elevate them beyond himself, to minoritize the West, to institute doctrine of the puritan creed that says only the minority may have a culture and be proud.
