Maybe It’s Bad That Recent Progressive Ideas On Race Are So Compatible With White Nationalism
Just sayin’
What is “white culture”? Jeremy Carl seems unsure.
Carl is a senior fellow at the conservative Claremont Institute who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior under Trump 1.0. As quoted by The New York Times, he wrote in a 2024 book stating that “White Americans are increasingly second-class citizens in a country their ancestors founded and in which, until recently, they were the overwhelming majority of the population.” He has a history of other, similarly provocative statements, including a number he attempted to scrub from his social media history.
This time around, Carl has been nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations. When, during his confirmation hearing, Senator Chris Murphy asked him to define “white culture,” he struggled significantly to do so. White identity is “certain types of Anglo-derived culture,” “the Scots-Irish military culture and certain pride that went with that,” or “sub-elements of that culture, you could have Italians, you could have Irish, and those are in many ways more distinct.” Murphy pointed out that Carl seemed to be talking about ethnicity, not race, but had previously expressed concern about white culture and white identity. “So tell me the values that stitch together white identity and that make it different than black identity?” Carl was unable to answer the question in a remotely credible manner.
For those of us who find concepts like “white identity” or “white culture” to be nonsensical and more often than not pernicious, it’s a satisfying video (and his nomination is cooked). But as I watched it, I couldn’t help but feel an old resentment flare up: It’s quite frustrating that mainstream progressivism has spent so much of the 21st century reifying these ideas rather than fighting them.
As Carl’s ideological opponents pointed and laughed, his allies kept posting graphics like this one:
That graphic was posted on the Smithsonian’s website until it sparked outrage and an apology. This idea of “white culture” or “white supremacy culture” consisting mostly of. . . just normal stuff that most Americans value comes from Tema Okun, a scholar who has had wild success spreading these ideas, particularly during the peak of the awokening. As Matt Yglesias wrote in 2021, “even though it’s not what I would call a particularly intellectually influential work in highbrow circles — even ones that are very ‘woke’ or left-wing — it does seem to be incredibly widely circulated. You see it everywhere from the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence to the Sierra Club of Wisconsin to an organization of West Coast Quakers.”
So Carl’s defenders were making a pretty simple point: You guys are pretending there’s no such thing as “white identity” or “white culture” when you guys endorsed these concepts seemingly 30 seconds ago! It’s sort of hard to argue with them.
