Barack Obama, Racism 2.0, & “Enlightened Exceptionalism.”

Tim Wise has written numerous books, mostly dealing with White privilege. I have read two of them: White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (2008) and Between Barack and a Hard Place: Racism and White Denial in the Age of Obama (2009). In keeping with the methodology as outlined by Kevin MacDonald in The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual & Political Movements, 1998, Wise tries to pathologize Whites by a combination of “data mining” and “just so stories.” I was interested in how he would try to explain away why whites would vote for a Black man in such high percentages (43%).
 
Data mining, when used to try and substantiate a scientific assertion, is an invalid tool. Used this way, one just keeps looking at as much data as possible until a desired correlation appears. This method is used in, for instance, to lie about income and wealth inequalities between races. Conveniently, the Left never compares the more successful East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews with Whites, keeping any comparisons between Whites and less successful minorities. Very convenient—to only look at the left half of the income and intelligence distributions!

Now that Whites have accepted a Black president, Wise needs to explain how Whites continue to be racist. He claims that Whites accept Barack Obama as an exception (enlightened exceptionalism), while still believing that most Blacks are pathological, lazy, have low intelligence, etc. But if Whites are maintaining a system that provides them with White privilege, a system of racism that “[I]s both an idea and a structure of institutions, in which policies, practices, and procedures produce inequitable outcomes,” why would we allow a Black man to hold the most powerful position in America that can change the very institutions that supposedly provide us with “White privilege?”
 
Conservatives’ attitudes towards under-performing minorities are usually based on culture rather than genes: blacks are thought to be lazy, shiftless, violent, etc., but they could change if they really wanted to. In academia two discordant positions are held at once: that genes do matter for a great deal; but there are no significant genetic differences between races even though there are significant genetic differences between individuals.
 
Wise defines his “Racism 2.0”: “The term racism, as I use it, can and does mean two things: first, an ideological belief in the racial or cultural superiority or inferiority of certain people defined racially as members of a group; and secondly, as a system of inequity based on race, or perceived racial difference.” The first term is meaningless in terms of outcome, and the second is easily outlawed or nullified through legislation as long as it can be found to exist.
 
According to Wise, “racism has become more sophisticated”; Obama’s rise shows how racism has triumphed once again to oppress people of color. However, since the civil rights movement of the 60s, what has occurred is the establishment of resentment on the part of Blacks towards Whites, Asians and Jews—that is anyone that does better than they do—because they have been led to believe that any disparity must be due to racism. This envy towards the other more successful groups was minimized prior to this change in attitudes: until that time Blacks really did believe they were on average less qualified. This envy also drives today’s jihadists. The globalization of culture that has taken place over the last few decades has juxtaposed the glaring failure of those who practice Islam versus the prosperous West. That is, it just happens that on average they are also low in intelligence, resulting again in the envious rage they project towards the more successful West, and especially Jews in their own back yards.
 
Wise states: “But as predictable as this denial may be today—and however maddening it must be to the persons of color whose very sanity and judgment, indeed life experiences are being called into question by such denial—it is far more enraging to realize that the inability or unwillingness of white America to see racial discrimination as a problem is a pathology with a lengthy and disturbing pedigree.” Whites are blind, pathological, uncaring, all the while conspiring against the Black masses by embracing an exceptional Black man as our leader. In reality of course, Whites are primarily concerned with whatever policies are coming out of the Barack Presidency, and they pay little attention to the numerous complaints about so-called institutional or systemic racism—until it affects them personally. In fact, at the slightest nuance of bigotry, it is the White media that tries to bring up racism while Barack Obama tends to ignore it.
 
Wise claims that in 1964 two-thirds of those incarcerated were White, but by 1990 the ratio had inverted, and that this is due to increased catching, prosecution, and incarceration of Blacks, but he does not mention the cultural change that brought about Black rage: Blacks were taught that their troubles were due entirely to White racism. Racial differences in intelligence as well as personality traits like conscientiousness were never mentioned by the media, academia or criminal justice system.
 
There has been a substantial amount of research on low Black intelligence. Current research is just now looking at differences in the executive brain or the prefrontal cortex that plays an important role in planning, decision making, and the ability to delay gratification.
 
Wise even claims that racism causes hypertension in Blacks—but only the successful Blacks: “indicating that negative health outcomes for persons of color are highly and directly connected to experiences with racism perpetrated by whites….Indeed, not only are hypertension gaps between whites and blacks widened by black experiences with racism, they appear to be related far more to racism than to economics…when whites and blacks at the highest levels of income are excluded from hypertension data, racial disparities between the two groups entirely disappear.” This to Wise means apparently that poor Blacks, relieved of being around successful whites, do not have high blood pressure. Or maybe successful Blacks suffer from high blood pressure because they really do recognize that they are often unqualified for the jobs they have, along with envy they suffer.
 
It is interesting that Wise accuses Whites of having a pathological racial attitude—we believe “Blacks are lazy”, have “character flaws”, are “behaviorally and morally defective”, they “lack the appropriate work ethic,” etc. Many of these characterizations are in fact personality or behavioral traits that may or may not be valid in the aggregate.  Still, to be politically correct, many Whites will attribute character flaws to groups rather appearing racist and claiming they are less intelligent on average. Yet, personality and/or behavioral traits are also determined by differences in genes.
 
So Wise attacks Whites similarly to how Blacks have been attacked in the past: “We are stuck here and must learn to make the best of it, but that will require courage and honesty, especially from whites who have been quite practiced at bigotry, cowardice, and deception heretofore.” So we are at an impasse unless we are willing to look at the science and accept that different population groups — races — really are different.

Posted by Matt Nuenke on Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 05:56 PM in
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