Sorry, Chris Rufo—“Colorblindness” Isn’t A Fight We Can Win
09/03/2023
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Chris Rufo [Tweet him] appears to have accomplished more than any living being in the battle against the insidiousness of Critical Race Theory in schools.

So for him to take to the pages of City Journal to specially denounce the “politics of whiteness” prompts these thoughts:

First, of course he does. To sustain the kind of mainstream legitimacy that has taken him this far, one must of course draw the line at direct white advocacy.

This is more a matter of political physics than a discussion of worthy ideas.

Rufo is to be credited for a fair summation of the right-wing racialist view:

Colorblind equality is unattainable. Left-wing racialism has been embedded in our institutions, laws, and policies to such an extent that it cannot be rolled back using conventional means. All politics is friend-enemy politics … and given the demographic decline of European Americans, whites will eventually need to activate ”white racial consciousness” to secure their basic interests.

[No to the Politics of “Whiteness” The case against right-wing racialism, City Journal, August 30, 2023]

Against this, Rufo proposes that white advocates—he names VDARE.com specifically—ignore two competing loci: the individual and the universal.

Neither of these can or should be completely discounted in the society I envision, but here’s the thing: individualism can only be meaningfully applied in societies that are strongly racially homogeneous.

It’s much easier for a college admissions board to see applicants as individuals when they’re all of the same race. The minute multiracialism enters the picture, the racial category rises like Godzilla from the sea, wiping everything else out.

Rufo makes the dubious suggestion that the Founders’ notions of universal rights can work for a multiracial America.

For the centuries when whites comprised approaching 90 percent of the population, sure.

But for the distribution of high-status jobs, government positions, tax monies, education policy, policing, ballot languages, school board designations of holidays and just about every other facet of life in America today, “colorblindness” is indeed unworkable.

Two and a half centuries later, we are at a point in history where inequality of outcomes will never be accepted. Left-wing racialism, as he calls it, cannot be put back in the bag because it is a natural bid for control based on either a particular race’s block power or simple anti-whiteness—and both have worked spectacularly well in recent years.

If Rufo expects non-whites to admit that he’s right and cheerfully return to 1997, he is deluding himself. Non-whites are gaining on half the population and they know they have us on the ropes.

Good policy starts with an understanding of the reality upon us. The reality I see is that races aren’t compatible, period, absent an openly acknowledged dominant people. We cannot blind ourselves to that—and even if we can, nobody else will.

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