White Americans as a normal minority

Creating a stable multiracial nation is a tricky thing to do.

Photo by kevin turcios on Unsplash

I haven’t written about racial issues in a while, and it’s not hard to see why. After a decade where it often seemed like Americans talked and thought about nothing else, I think people are generally tired of the topic. In fact, I think some of the big shift of minority voters to the GOP in 2024 can probably be attributed to progressives’ habit of painting every political issue in racial terms — for example, D’Urso and Roman (2024) found that Hispanic voters who encountered the word “Latinx” became more likely to vote for Trump. And even back in 2022, well before Trump was elected, American media and academia had already started discussing race less and less, as the “Great Awokening” wound down. The BLM movement all but disappeared, and Kamala Harris’ 2024 campaign generally avoided the appeals to racial justice that had been the centerpiece of her 2020 primary effort. In a recent Pew poll, the dominant feeling that both Democrats and Republicans expressed toward the issue of race in America was “exhausted”:

Source: Pew

But every once in a while, I think it’s important to circle back to the issue, because it’s important for our national future. As Gary Gerstle writes, every country conceives of itself not just in terms of civic institutions and national symbols, but also in terms of identity — the question of “Who are the Americans as a people?” is fundamental. Without a broad consensus on who counts as a real American, it becomes a lot harder to exercise collective action via the democratic process; we become an “artificial state”, where people are more wedded to the interests of their subgroup than to the nation as a whole. In that environment it becomes a lot harder to provide public goods like infrastructure, research, and even national defense, because everyone worries that their own tribe won’t receive the bulk of the benefits.

And while Americans in general are tired of racial issues, the second Trump administration is focusing far more on race than the first. In the 2010s, a lot of people assumed that Trump’s movement was all about white identity politics, but beyond occasional rhetoric about how “our ancestors tamed a continent” and some nasty swipes at “shithole countries”, there was very little in Trump’s first term that was explicitly targeted toward helping white people as a group. That has changed in his second term. Under Trump, the Department of Justice has shifted its focus toward investigating or prosecuting institutions for anti-white discrimination. For example, the DoJ is investigating the city of Chicago:

The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a civil rights investigation into…whether the city has habitually violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race.

And the DoJ is investigating Harvard Law Review:

The Trump administration said it would investigate whether Harvard University and the student-run journal, the Harvard Law Review, violated civil rights law when editors of the prestigious journal fast-tracked consideration of an article written by someone of a racial minority…The administration argued the school and law review journal may have violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by allegedly engaging in “race-based discrimination”.

And of course there’s Trump’s cutoff of federal grants to Harvard University over alleged racial discrimination against whites and Asians. Trump is having the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission probe Harvard for anti-white and anti-Asian hiring discrimination:

The Trump administration is investigating whether Harvard University discriminated against white, Asian, male or heterosexual workers in its hiring and promotion practices…In a six-page document, the charge notes Harvard’s share of tenured white male faculty dropped from 64% to 56% from 2013 to 2023. The share of tenure-track faculty who are white men dropped from 46% to 32%…Lucas alleged the data signal “an underlying pattern or practice of discrimination” based on race and sex and “there is reason to believe” discrimination is continuing.

Ending DEI programs has been a major focus of the administration’s efforts to reform the U.S. civil service. And Trump has used government leverage to pressure private companies to end their DEI programs as well.

The Trump administration’s desire to protect white people even extends beyond America’s borders. Despite his general opposition to humanitarian immigration, Trump has fast-tracked the admission of white South African refugees fleeing racial discrimination in their homeland. And he recently castigated the President of South Africa for anti-white discrimination.

In other words, despite Trump’s increasingly multiracial electoral coalition, he has become the champion of white people in a way that he never really was in his first term.

Plenty of progressives are mad about this, of course. Around 70% of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division has resigned in protest over the department’s change in focus:

[N]ow, current and former officials say, there's a sense that the division is weaponizing the country's civil rights laws against populations it's supposed to be protecting. They say the abandonment of the traditional mission has been devastating. One official recalled attorneys walking around the hallways in tears or sobbing through meetings.

Personally, I’m ambivalent about Trump’s efforts. On one hand, it’s possible to see all of this as part of the New Right’s crusade to reorient America, Europe, and the Anglosphere away from Enlightenment liberalism, toward a concept of “Western Civilization” that privileges European cultural and genetic heritage above all else. That reorientation would be a foolish, even suicidal move. And it certainly fits with the administration’s hostility toward immigration, which I think is an extremely self-destructive policy.

But on the other hand, I think it’s also possible to see Trump’s anti-discrimination lawsuits and investigations as the beginning of something healthier — a shift of white identity politics toward a focus on individual rights and away from traditional strategies of “white supremacy”. To put it bluntly, white people are in the process of becoming a minority in American society, and in general it’s better for minorities to defend their interests through the legal system and the framework of individual rights and non-discrimination than through collectivist mass politics.

In America’s multiracial future, white Americans will be one minority among many