REIHAN SALAM ON THE UTILITY OF WHITE-BASHING:

One reason I’ve been disinclined to take this sort of talk seriously in the past is that it has so often smacked of intra-white status jockeying. It is almost as though we’re living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites. Note that to be “upper” or “lower” isn’t just about class status, though of course that’s always hovering in the background. Rather, it is about the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.

But many of the white-bashers of my acquaintance have been highly-educated and affluent Asian American professionals. So why do they do it? What work is this usually (though not always) gentle and irony-steeped white-bashing actually performing?

Some of this is just obvious edgelord trolling: the most transgressive thing you can get away with saying without actually getting called out for it. In this sense, it’s a way of establishing solidarity: All of us in this space get it, and we have nothing but disdain for those who do not. And some may well be intended as a defiant retort to bigotry.

But that doesn’t exhaust the universe of possibilities. In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for.

Pretty much all race-talk in American society today is about positioning and reassuring high-status whites at the expense of lower-status whites. But the lower-status whites have noticed, and they aren’t amused. Like so much of what America’s professional class does today, this offers short-term benefits for them, at the cost of doing serious structural damage to the society. It has also, of course, sharply undermined the moral superiority that the upper class uses to justify its position at the top of the heap, with consequences that it will likely come to regret in time. But avoiding this behavior would require principles and self-discipline of a sort that it has not cultivated.

Related: The Elites’ War On The Deplorables.