First of all, you don’t get, do you, that saying things like “classic white denial” is classic racism (not to mention rude)? If I said something like “classic black criminality” or “classic black over-sensitivity” or “classic black thuggishness,” I’m sure you’d be one of the first out there eager to accuse me of racism, right? And you’d be right to do so. If you want people to treat you like a human being rather than just classify you as this or that based on your race, you need to extend to them the same basic courtesy. (So that you don’t start feeding me nonsense about how black people can’t be racist — an absurd notion invented to insulate virulent anti-white racists from criticism — I’ll head that off by linking you to my detailed rebuttal of that idea.)
Having said that, I’ll turn to your general thesis, viz., that we are not just individuals but also members of social groups, and so our collective social history matters as well as our individual history. First of all, you are myopically focused on “people of color” or “the pigmented human race” (do “white” people have no pigment?), but in most nations throughout history, there wasn’t much variation in pigment. The United States has been unique in that respect, in having people of many different races from pretty much the beginning of its history. But Europe was, historically speaking, much more homogeneous. Your history of oppression of people of color — overly simplistic as it is to begin with — is irrelevant to nations such as Russia. There were many ethnic minorities living within its borders, especially as Russia expanded in the 20th century to encompass what became the vast territories of the former Soviet Union, but other than oppression of Jews and Roma, Russia didn’t have some long, toxic history of oppressing what you would call “black people.” The serfs in Russia were largely ethnically Russian. So when you talk about this big history of worldwide white supremacy, this might be relevant to your narrow corner of the world, but it’s not relevant to many of us. I don’t want to compare who’s most oppressed. That’s silly. It’s a game no one can ever really win. The more you make yourself out to be a victim, the more you live out the life of a victim. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Many of us and many of our ancestors faced incredible obstacles. We can’t keep living in the past.
Second, while I totally accept that our history is one of social groups, not just individuals, what I completely don’t accept is that because many people and nations have, historically speaking, divided us up in the pseudo-scientific categories of “races” and used such categorizations to assert the superiority of some groups over others, it follows that we should, therefore, perpetuate those destructive categorizations. Quite the opposite: we should do everything in our power to deconstruct them and end their pernicious hold over our thinking and our societies. I’ve made this argument at some length, citing relevant research, here:
Any other approach, no matter how well-intentioned, is just going to backfire and make the problem worse, as I explain in the article linked above.
Third, again, even accepting that our history is one of social groups, I have no idea why you think race is the most important or interesting social group out there. Surely, for example, in almost every single society throughout history, people who are dumb or people who are ugly or people who are short have historically faced many more obstacles than people who are black. Why don’t you talk about smart supremacy or beauty supremacy or height supremacy? Why is the whole race thing so important to you? Before flailing against others, I’d look in the mirror and do some hard soul-searching to figure out the answer to that question.
