On Whiteness: Protecting Culture or Maintaining Supremacy?
The appointment of white supremacist to a State Department slot creates some thoughts.
So, waaaay back in December, I started thinking about a lot of the white nationalist/supremacist rhetoric coming out of this administration (for example) to include basic pronouncements, various symbolism used by DHS and other departments, and the deployment of terms like “third world” and “heritage Americans.” And before I could devote much time to writing about these things in detail, we had the events in Venezuela, the Greenland mess, the surge of ICE operatives in Minneapolis, including the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretti, not to mention the tariff ruling from SCOTUS and now a pending possible attack on Iran (and that is just between the first week of January and the third week of February, 2026–and I feel like I am leaving some things out).
As such, I have not written about some things I intended to write about, although fragments of at least three relevant posts exist. A new catalyst for this area of discussion emerged a little over a week ago, in the testimony of Jeremy Carl before the Senate regarding his nomination to be an Assistant Secretary of State. Carl is a fellow at the Claremont Institute and was previously at the Hoover Institution. He also has a substantial Twitter history, that inlcuding stating that J6 rioters had it worse than Blacks in the Jim Crow south, which he wanted purged.
Here’s the recent write-up on his nomination hearing via the NYT: Trump Nominates an Apostle of ‘White Erasure’ for the State Department.
Mr. Carl sits at the intersection of several movements and institutions gaining power and prominence within the Republican Party. He is a proponent of “national conservatism,” a movement that holds that American society lost its moorings when it drifted from a core power structure centered on the Christian white men who founded the nation and instead embraced diversity, multiculturalism and feminism.
He is a fellow at the Claremont Institute, a Trump-aligned research organization that became the intellectual nerve center of the American right.
[…]
Mr. Carl has argued that white people should organize as a group to protect their rights.
“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 writes in his 2024 book, “The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart.”
Carl was nominated to be Assistant Secretary of State (International Organizations) by Trump. After his testimony, his nomination appears to be at risk since Senator John Curtis (R-UT) is in opposition.
At his confirmation hearing, his views on Jews and the Great Replacement Theory were underscored.
During Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Jacky Rosen, Democrat of Nevada, who is Jewish, read a series of statements Mr. Carl had previously made about Jewish people.
“‘The Jews love to see themselves as oppressed,’” she said, quoting a 2024 podcast appearance. “‘Jews have often loved to see themselves as the victim, rather than accept they are participants in history,’” she continued.
Mr. Carl has also espoused the Great Replacement Theory, the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” white Americans with nonwhite immigrants.
When Senator Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey, asked if Mr. Carl believed there was an active effort to replace white Americans, Mr. Carl responded, “the Democratic Party, through its immigration policies, has certainly shown signs of that.”
However, Mr. Carl did walk back some of his statements that have been labeled antisemitic.
“I made some comments in interviews about minimizing the effect of the Holocaust that were absolutely wrong,” he said. “And I’m not going to sit here and defend them.”
A key problem (although not the only one, to be clear) with all of this, however, is that it is thoroughly unclear what “white” means here, save as a broad category.
When asked to explain his views on white culture, he responded as follows.
In the clip, he stumbles around. First, instead of providing a focus on whiteness, specifically, he spoke about “Scotch-Irish” military traditions and mentioned Italians. He then shifted, when pressed, to differences between white and Black churches, music, and foodways (I have another pending post on food specifically). He cited the Super Bowl halftime show, with Bad Bunny’s performance in Spanish, as erasing white culture.
Allow me to note, before continuing, that it never ceases to amaze me that people like Carl can cite, with a straight face, Irish (recognizing that some in the US use “Scotch-Irish” to distinguish from just “Irish”) and Italians, as someone being part of the white majority culture that he wants to define when at the time of their migration to the US, they were discriminated against and treated as unwanted minorities because of their Catholicism. Further, Italians were too olive-skinned to be truly “white.” It is as if people like Carl don’t see the obvious forces of assimilation over time at work. This oversight is also true when it comes to his statement about churches. These days, I have little doubt that he includes most Catholic churches in his “white church” category, but that was far from always the case.
The uproar about Spanish at the halftime show is also telling. We keep being told that US culture, especially white US culture, came to us from Europe. Call me a crazy academic who knows things, but Spanish is a European language with a population that is certainly just as “white” as Italians, if not moreso.
Beyond any of those contradictions and intellectual failings on display here, if the best you can come up with to demonstrate the erasure of “white culture” is a roughly 20-minute musical performance, then you might not have a very strong case (he said, with his gift of understatement on full display).
It is actually quite telling that someone like Carl could not produce a more succinct definition of his position, especially since he wrote a whole book on the subject. Further, if you are going to make claims about whites being an “unprotected class” who are being treated like “second-class citizens,” you need to have some clarity in your definitions.
So, I looked to Carl’s book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart. I was able to read the Introduction and first chapter and then skimmed the remainder that was available via Google Books. What I gleaned from that chapter was that he doesn’t like BLM, affirmative action, or the anti-racist movement. He derides the notions of “white privilege” and “white guilt” and, on balance, is quite concerned about demographic shifts in the United States.
What it does not do, however, is define “whiteness,” “white,” or the “white class” in any way whatsoever, save to note that one estimate of the pre-Revolutionary War population noted that rougly 85% of the population was of “British origin.” He goes on to note that in 1963, one estimate placed the white, non-Hispanic population at 83%. However, no actual definition of whiteness is provided
It seems worth noting that while the majority of the whites in the colonial era were of British origin, there were also a number of Germans and Dutch persons in the mix, which underscores the malleability of the notion of whiteness, but the way in which people like Carl like to pretend that it means English people more than anything else.
Further, according to the US Census Bureau as of July 2024, the “white alone” percentage of the population was 74.8%, although that number drops to 57.5% if the category is restricted to “White alone, not Hispanic or Latino.” No doubt people like Carl find that number an alarming bit of evidence to suggest that whiteness is under attack, although what it really shows is that “white” is a moving target.
In looking at the excerpt of the book, it seems to be based on typical grievances. The book starts with the lament that George Floyd was a criminal (so I guess killing him was okay?). It further opines that the prosecution of Chauvin was unjust because there was an Asian officer and a Black officer on the scene (or something?). He asserts that affirmative action damages qualified whites and wonders why we can’t allow private businesses to discriminate if they want to. And so forth. My favorite is that the show Law and Order shows too many white criminals, and not enough Black and Hispanic ones.
Still, here’s what I think all this actually means. In simple terms, we have a basket of terms and ideas (CRT, DEI, anti-racism, “wokeness,” “white guilt,” and “white privilege” among others) to go along with terms from the past (e.g., “affirmative action” and “multiculturalism”), which are part of a broader movement to reconcile our past with our present to help build that promised more perfect union. Or, to use more contemporary social science language, to better build a more functional, pluralistic, liberal democracy.
The real challenge with such a goal is that it is empirically true that in the history of the United States, there have been groups with more access to power and wealth than others (spoilers: white Christian males). Any attempt to rectify that situation is going to cause the relative loss of power to the previously privileged group.
This is not to say that any particular DEI policies, anti-racism seminar, or whatever example one might wish to bring to the floor for debate, is effective or well-constructed. We can debate this thing or that thing until we are blue in the face, but let’s not forget that what we are actually trying to come to grips with is the fact that when the US was founded, it was founded in such a way that encoded white supremacy into our politics and society, as well as misogyny and classism.
This is indisputably true. Not only was chattel slavery based on race constitutional, but control of the hemisphere was predicated on the notion that the white newcomers had the right to take territory from native populations, including ethnic cleansing and violence. Unpropertied men could not vote initially, and women could not vote until the early twentieth century. Black men were formally allowed to vote in the 1870s; yet, they were not fully given access to the voting booth until 1965.
There is also the fact that one’s family background can directly influence one’s current prospects. If one had a grandfather who owned a home and was able to build some amount of familial wealth, that could have generational effects. Many Blacks lack this family background because of red-lining and other discriminatory practices.
I talk about this in two posts from 2023: America’s “Family Secret” or Just Plain Denial? and Thinking about the Past. I would note that the photo I used for this post is from the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery, AL, which commemorates violent crimes against Black families within living memory.
There is a profound disjuncture between the poetic assertions of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble of the US Constitution and the lived reality of our history.
I would note that what anti-DEI actions by the current administration have mostly meant actions designed to not pay attention to the uglier aspects of our history. As Michael Bailey recently pointed out in his post Predictability in Authoritarianism: A Brief Three-Part Photo Essay, this administration just likes to take down reminders of the unpleasant aspects of our history. Trump, for example, criticized the Smithsonian because it talks too much, in his view, about “how bad Slavery was.” (Spoiler alert: it was pretty bad and we don’t like to think about it as much as we should). See also my post about Florida’s curriculum changes on the subject of slavery.
None of it is about some recalibration of how to deal with broader problems of the past and present. No, this is just about ignoring it all.
At its best, it is a desire to pretend that we live in a total meritocracy wherein outcomes are just when race, gender, and so forth are just ignored.
At worst, it is a conscious acknowledgement that white males in particular have long been privileged by the social and economic forces in American society, and if we stopped trying to address the injustice of that fact, those privileges would continue. And, indeed, consciously or not (and I think it often is quite conscious), this is really what is going on here.
This reminds me of an incident that I may have written about before. I was at a conference focused on fundraising with a number of colleagues from my former university. There were about 10 of us: five deans, an associate dean, a senior vice chancellor, an associate vice chancellor, and two development officers. We were all white males save for one white female (one of the development officers, i.e., one of the lowest-level employees at the event, who basically had her three immediate bosses present).
At the event, one of the speakers mentioned Critical Race Theory (CRT) in passing (I think it was about their academic expertise). The senior vice chancellor made at least two snide comments about CRT. At one point, I tried to note its academic significance, specifically in sociology, but that didn’t make an impact. I was poised to point out, had it come up a third time, that “Clearly, diversity happens by itself, just look at all of us.”
Along the same lines, here’s the current Trump cabinet as of August 2025. Does this look like an example of white men being cut out of power?
When people like Carl write and speak on this topic, but seem unable to really articulate what the injustice is, or what “white” thing is being damaged, all I ultimately hear is someone who wants to ignore the past and assert the “supremacy” part of “white supremacy” rather than championing some “white” thing being unjustly silenced or abused.
To analogize, it’s like the “war on Christmas.” The grievance is that the already dominant religious holiday might be ceding the tiniest of ground to other observances, rather than there actually being an assault on Christmas itself. You know, one of the few days on the American calendar where the country largely stops and whose gravitational weight influences everything from retail shopping to music to movies to commercials, and our social calendars every single year for over a month.
The analogy to the current white supremacist movement is that the “war on Christmas” folks are hellbent on not sharing a specific holiday season at all. Never mind that Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s, at a minimum, are all part of the season. Never mind that most people who say “Happy Holidays” probably mean Christmas and New Year’s. Never mind that Bing Crosby was singing “Happy Holiday” in 1942. What matters is not reality, but the perceived slight.
I recognize all of this is complicated and that having a multiracial, multireligious, plural liberal democracy isn’t easy. But if white people writ large, or some subset thereof has a legitimate grievance, bring it forward and define it. However, the notion that white people, as a mass class, are the losers in this system is simply an unsupportable assertion.
More to come. “White” foodways and “Heritage Americans” are both on deck.
Appendix: Some thematic Tweets that I didn’t work into the above, but still wanted to share.
