Can Whites Be Subjected to Racism?

An old journalist “frenemy” of mine, a hopelessly liberal former reporter for the New York Times, once posted a tweet on Twitter saying he never could be subjected to racism — because he is white.

In other words, he is a member of the white ruling class, impervious to racial taunts from his lessers, those poor downtrodden minorities who are to be pitied as victims. And, golly gee, if people of color express hatred and anger for white people they never have met, it is justified.

This oddball sentiment among white liberals always struck me as arrogant and condescending, a display of preening white guilt to garner “likes” on social media. Plus, this assertion is false: Of course, people can be racist against whites, right?

Now a new book just out shows how anti-white hate has proliferated in America. The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, by Jeremy Carl of the Claremont Institute, charts anti-white sentiment in the workforce, politics, on university campuses, and in real estate, media & entertainment, Big Tech and elsewhere.

Carl has done so at great risk of being accused of white supremacy, white privilege, or maybe just white whining. He says his real intent is to get more people to stand up against it.

“In many ways, even though I tried to write this book for everybody, I’m mostly trying to get whites to get up off the floor and have some self-respect, because we’re allowing ourselves to be treated this way,” Carl says in an interview on my podcast, What’s Bugging Me.

“It’s our fault, primarily. If we just put a stop to it, there’s nobody that could stop us. We are not a tiny minority in this country. We’re not a group that is without some kind of power or resources. So, it’s not an attempt to whine to the refs. It’s more of an attempt to rally the troops on my part.”

Anti-white sentiments are on the rise, expressed publicly and unabashedly. On TikTok, white youths, taught self-loathing, bash all whites as privileged and racist. 

Sometimes the worst offenders are leading white liberals, Carl says. On some university campuses, minority students are invited to huddle in “safe spaces” that bar their white classmates; courses preach that white oppressors are responsible for Blacks’ troubles.

This is bad for whites, but it also is bad for Blacks. In a sermon posted on X, Bishop Patrick Wooden Sr. of Raleigh, N.C. recently told his Black flock that “wicked people” have “messed us up, the Black folks,” by telling them, “You can’t have nothin’, you can’t be nothin’. Everybody's against you. You can’t get anywhere. And then once you buy that, all you are fit for now is the orange jumpsuit” behind prison bars.

“They fill you with anger and resentment, and they make you think that everybody whose color is different from yours is out to get you,” he said. Preach!

In the workforce, whites are getting only a small percentage of new jobs, even though they still make up 58% of the U.S. population. Whites comprised only 4% of the more than 320,000 new hires made by the 100 largest companies in 2021, the first year after the George Floyd protests, Bloomberg reports. It implicitly celebrates this lopsided outcome.

Likewise, all employers added some 4 million jobs from early 2020 to late 2023. Hispanics gained 2 million new jobs, Asians landed 882,000, and Blacks 768,000 — while whites were down, net-net, by 904,000 jobs in the same period.

These stats, reported in September, made a columnist for the Washington Post giddy: “Fewer White people are employed now than pre-pandemic. … It’s also notable that over 2 million more foreign-born people are employed now than before the pandemic. This means that more than half of the new workers have been immigrants.”

Oh, yay.

Black and Hispanic leaders are partly to blame in all this for their use of anti-white rhetoric, Jeremy Carl says, but, “I do think it’s fair to say that, arguably, the most powerful actors are left-wing whites who are really pushing this.” He adds: “In fact, I think my sequel to this book is going to look at liberal whites, in particular.”