Conserving Whiteness?

Media elites want to abolish whiteness; conservatives should resist.

Written by Bo Winegard.

The reaction to those Sydney Sweeney advertisements once again makes clear that liberal elites detest whiteness. Some call for its abolition. Others are content to belittle it, equating it with history’s greatest evils: Nazism, eugenics, slavery. In the fulness of time, it will disappear, mocked and disgraced.

But are mainstream conservatives much better? Many have capitulated. Rather than defend whiteness, they dismiss it, either as a racist construct or as a mischaracterization of American history. For them, the concept itself obstructs the long-cherished goal of race-blindness, the hope that we might one day transcend race altogether. America, in this lofty vision, is an idea, not a people. And whiteness is a calumny.

This capitulation is unfortunate. It leaves conservatism in retreat like a timid boxer always backpedaling and evading, never striking. Worse still, it compels conservatives, like their progressive counterparts, to distort and regret their own inheritance, fabricating convenient fictions about the beliefs of the Founders and the nature of the nation they built.

Conservatives seem sincerely to hope that the whole unseemly race problem will simply fade. And they believe that if they remain quiet or repeat the proper slogans about color-blindness and equal opportunity, the salience of race will dissipate or even disappear altogether.

But it will not. The race issue remains for many reasons, perhaps the chief being that the goal of progressivism is not harmony, but replacement. Not reconciliation but transformation. The persistent battle against whiteness will not stop until the very foundations of the West, its aesthetics, its norms, its history, its heroes, and its people, have been irrevocably and often unrecognizably altered. Shakespeare, Beethoven, Faulkner will stand aside for a more representative, i.e., a less white, canon. Whiteness will be annihilated by diversity.