if everyone is racist, no one is racist

the political philosophy of a diouana woman

in anything i do, i consider myself a student. i seek out masters with whom i can serve under their tutelage. when it comes to writing, i look to f. scott fitzergald. not only for his incredible pulse on the spirit of the times, but for his immortal words that one should only write if one truly has something to say. 

how the irish became white

race is a really interesting thing. because depending on who you ask, it’s either a social construct or the reason for many, many social ills. now, the construct argument of race, that being that we as a society sort of made it up to suit our own ideological ends, is an interesting one. to provide an interesting, although (now) obscure, example of this consider the immigration patterns within american history. specifically, the irish and the italians. what i mean by this, is that, when they, the irish and the italians, arrived to the new world, the existing protestant anglo-saxon community heavily othered these new groups of people. despite the fact that they all belonged to the same race. that didn’t matter. the white protestant anglo-saxons, fearing a threat to their established political and social dominance in the new world, regarded the white italian and irish immigrants, who were deeply catholic, with great suspicion. this suspicion would often boil over into xenophobic violence by citizens at worst, and derogatory fear-mongering by politicians at best. sound familiar?

thankfully, the nativism subsided. as did the othering of the irish and the italians. and the white anglo-saxon protestants came to see their catholic brethren as white. in the context of the religious difference between the two, it hadn’t been since the great schism of 1054 that they really got along. religiously speaking. one could argue that they don’t get along, religiously, now. but racially, they’re in the same group. and that’s the point. that’s how fluid race can be over the course of a couple of several decades. the next generation moves on from the prejudices and biases of the old generation. and so forth and so on.

this ability to include other groups of people, once you’ve become comfortable with them, into your racial group, i believe, will be the answer to racial fears surrounding the great replacement theory. what’s interesting about great-replacement theory, as it relates to american society, is that it’s mainstreaming, thanks of course, to none other than tucker carlson, coincided with the 2016 election that gave the american people our 45th president: donald j. trump.

now, it is not my belief that trump started the theory. he didn’t. nor did he mainstream it in america. that was all tucker carlson, the boy-prince that he is. aided by his sponsor, the great patriarch, rupert murdoch. and his three-headed hound, fox news.

that said, trump’s rise, alongside that of far-right political movements in europe, notably the front national (now known as national rally) in france, did benefit from the collective reckoning by the white community in these nations that this theory could be, in fact, a forthcoming reality. especially following the 2015 european migrant crisis. which i have always believed was the true catalyst for brexit.

i mean, think about: at the time, you had the middle east in the throes of a syrian refugee crisis. many of whom fled into lebanon, straining an already fragile infrastructure. many of those syrians ended up in turkey because brussels, as the power seat of the eruropean union, was able to convince president erdoğan to take them in, thereby stopping the syrian flow into western europe. (the turkish president would go on to remind the europeans the sacrifices he made for them in this crisis.) the true black swan moment in all of this was that a record number of 1.3 million migrants would seek asylum in europe. half of that 1.3 million came from middle eastern countries, the other half came from outside the mena region, notably sub saharan africans. many of whom were cutting through libya to cross the mediterranean, some tragically dying in the process, to come to europe via italy. that’s why they say that africa begins in palermo. against the background of all this human movement, you had politicians like marie le pen publicly declaring that there’s an assimilation problem with migrants and that french borders need to be closed. then you had politicians like david cameron taking the vote to the people and asking them what they want. and what did they people want? brexit.

at the center of all these anxieties, many of which are still present today, was not the question of immigration. or the question of race. but the question of assimilation. the question of, “who are you, if you’re not one of us?”

they not like us

it has always been my belief that culture trumps race. if race is a construct. something that one can move in and out of. at will. when convenient. then, what endures, is one’s culture. one’s values. how one views, not only the world, but themselves.

we, tragically, live in a post-modern world. i say “tragically” because i feel we’ve all lost our sense of irony. not humor. irony. for irony to be effective, you need distance. in order to create distance, you need self awareness.

i’ll give you my favorite example. i am an avid reader of the financial times. i think they have the best financial journalism. although i concede that the wall street journal has better headlines. in my reading of the ft, i remember this article they wrote on censorship in china. i also remember how in this article, the ft did not open up their comment section. anyone who is chronically online understands that a closed comment section means one thing and one thing only: they don’t want to hear it; whatever has been understood to be the consensus around this story or idea or person, they don’t want to hear it. now, the irony of censuring the chinese government for their lack of freedom of speech, while closing your comment section on that same article was lost on the ft. but it’s rarely lost on its readers. that why when a particularly spicy article has the comment section open, someone surely makes note it. usually with a sarcastic quip. the audience is not dumb. it’s also telling that the ft always closes its comment section when it reports on israel. but that is an essay that unfortunately will never see the light of day.

this is the world we live in. we’ve been living in it for some time now. this post-modern, foucauldian, freudian slip of a world. and it hadn’t quite dawned on me until this american presidential election that no one else in my culture seems to understand that as well. at least the majority of those in my culture. and by that culture i mean the left. especially the radical left. after all, i am a radical feminist, à la andrea dworkin.¹ but that’s an essay for another time.

i have understood since 2020 that the left won the culture wars. i estimate that this victory happened sometime in the early 2010s. but i didn’t understand that we had won until unsaved numbers were texting me to “check in” during the instagram “black out” trend. i was politically aware during the first iteration of black lives matter and that’s not the response i got in 2014. no one checked in on me in 2014. people checked me in 2014.

in 2014, i was told by my white classmates that i was racist against white people. which to me was interesting because all i said was the united states happens to be racist. which is true. and if you had asked an irish immigrant in 1820 that same question, he would have agreed with me. and that’s the funny thing about race. you’re down in one century, you’re up the next one. not because you’re no longer irish, but because you are now part of a group that the institutions of the country you live in favor at best, and do not actively harm at neutral. obviously irish is not a race. but white is. in the first wave of irish immigration to the united states in the 1820s to 1830s, they were not considered white. but in the 2020s, they are. what changed? american culture. they way we see the groupings around us. they way we see ourselves. realignments happen, people let go (for the most part) of their prejudices, and no one (rarely) talks about how anti-irish this country used to be.

i reckon that should harris win, my culture, which i am beginning to disavow, will come to find that there will be certain groups, that will become more favored by the institutions of this country, if they haven’t been already. perhaps to the point of making that favor permanent. again, down in one century, up the next. which, honestly, has already happened. because we won the culture wars. and we’ve been rather sore winners about it. because we have lost all sense of irony.

i’ll give you another favorite example. in that era, where i was told i was racist against white people, i’ll call it my brat era, another white classmate of mine confined to me that it was his belief that white men are the most hated group in america. true to my culture, i thought to myself, “you lieeeeee.”

but in the years that followed since his confession to me, his words became rather prophetic. especially if you look at the crisis among young, white, working class men. and if anything is to blame for this particular crisis, i blame nafta (the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs), fentanyl (the opioid crisis), and about 20 years of quantitive easing (which inflated asset prices, while keeping nominal prices, things like wages, historically low) as the institutional bad actors. the cultural bad actors are another story.

what’s interesting if you look at this cohort of young, american men is that they’re the only group of young men globally that are becoming more conservative. not liberal. it’s an old adage, and a political science fact, that that the young are more liberal than the old. but not in america. and especially not among gen z men. they’re turning to the church, they’re turning to joe rogan, and if the betting markets are to believed, they’re turning to trump.

the thing about trump. after seeing what i am seeing. hearing what i am hearing. analyzing the numbers i am analyzing. is that i honestly believe that history will regard that man as one of the most consequential presidents in american history. and i know we already knew that. but i think there are those among us who will be surprised by how positively the history books will look upon him. not because he became an authoritarian dictator and that’s all they can write about him. but because he has done what no republican president, since reagan, has done. which is. realign the grand old party not on (white) racial lines, but (working class) economic lines.

i say this because i’ve been time traveling. i went back and listened to the republican primary debates from 2016. trump was the first one, and for some time, the only one, to say that the united states should have never invaded iraq and we are responsible for destabilizing the middle east. that was a watershed moment. because until then, the republican establishment was defined by that war. no one could criticize it publicly. let alone acknowledge, in front of the american people, that it was a mistake. because no one could afford, electorally and politically, to lose face with the establishment.

trump, having come into the race showing his whole ass, could get away with it. because he, unlike them, have what historians call jester’s privilege. and he, unlike the rest of the republicans in those primaries, was completely self-funded. he had no special interests groups to appease. he was just a billionaire who had something to say. he completely reframed the conversation, the republican agenda, and single-handly ended the political careers of two iconic american political families: (jeb) bush and (hilary) clinton. on top of admitting, on national television, in an election year, that the united states is responsible for destabilizing the middle east. progressives, populists, and those of us who studied edward saïd’s orientalism in our post-colonial classes rejoiced.

what has become abundantly clear to me, having time traveled back to that period, is that had the democratic establishment listened to young people and ran bernie sanders, and not hillary clinton², we could perhaps be living in a feel the bern cinematic universe and not a make america great again one. alas.

to their credit, the republican establishment, as much as it offended their sensibilities, ran the candidate their electorate wanted. and in doing so the republican establishment was completely overtaken by a populist movement.

and the neoconservatives, seeking a political home, have been welcomed into the democratic party with open arms by kamala harris. what’s interesting is that she’s not demanding that they make themselves more left to assimilate within the party. but instead is making herself, and ostensibly the democratic party, more right to cater to them. and ostensibly the american people, who have become more center than center left. some have even argued center right.

yet despite her, yet again, altering herself to fit the mood of the times, she is failing to capture the spirit of the times. barack says her lackluster reception is due to misogyny. michelle holds similar views. but in the first time since i became politically aware of the obamas, i disagree.

she’s hemorrhaging the straight male vote, on both sides of the party lines, and in multiple different racial categories, not because of her sex but because she keeps failing the vibe check. she’s simply not capturing the spirit of the times. and the audience is not dumb.

on top of the failure to be, or at least appear to be, firm in her policy standings (outside of abortion) or authentic in her matter of form (is she a far leftist or hardline centrist?), she’s also failing because she’s guilty of committing political malpractice. biden gave the democrats a playbook for beating trump: which is to build a working class focused coalition not just on racial lines, but economic ones as well. and instead of building off of this, she courts the neocons and the so-called independent voters (the republicans who think it’s distasteful to vote for trump). she’s wasting her time. she needs to focus on gen z young men, the working class, and those who continue to feel left behind in the social and economic realities that have cemented since the left won the culture wars.

and if you consider that fact. the fact that the left won the culture wars, you’ll begin to understand how trump has managed to redesign the grand old party into one that is a multiracial, multiethnic, working class coalition.

culture trumps race. class is culture.

and if you also consider gen z men. who increasingly seem to be the group that will decide this election, alongside the podcast bros (and gals) and minority voters, one should remember that the youth gravitate towards the counterculture. the counterculture today is being a conservative. the party of the rebels is now the republicans.

this certainly wasn’t the case when romney went against obama. it wasn’t the case when trump usurped the republican establishment to everyone’s chagrin. but by the time kamala was installed as the nominee by the democratic establishment, it has very much become the case. and the only people who don’t seem to truly understand that the vibe has shifted this much are those within the left. that’s why we’ve been sore winners about it. because we don’t know that we’ve won. so the lack of self awareness is to be excused. but, then again, maybe we do know we’ve won. which is why hillary called for any citizen that shares misinformation to be criminally charged (in some cases).

democracy certainly is on the ballot. so is freedom, according to the woman that has never won a presidential primary in her life.

i’ve gone down this political rabbit hole because these political realignments have been seismic. what i believe we’ll find in the avanchles of think pieces, essays, and commentary that will follow post november 5th, is that politics can no longer be mapped neatly across racial lines. if one does not do a proper socioeconomic analysis, one is likely to arrive at the wrong conclusion.

one might believe racism to be the culprit. even xenophobia. when the true culprit is that the rent is too damn high.

the white slumlord and the biracial top cop

race, of course, cannot be understated in this moment because it is palpable. he represents what my former classmate told me is the most hated group in america. she is the product of this country’s most defining historical trait: racial diversity.

again, if you exist within the culture i used to exist in, she represents the natural choice. racial diversity, by and large, means change. positive change. at least, as far as facades go. and i tend to agree.

i remember visits to my economics professor at harvard, and in the foyer, i always held my breath when i saw all the portraits of the most distinguished, tenured professors that had graced the department. i always thought to myself, “surely, there has to be some economist out there that’s not white and male whose scholarship is rigorous enough to come to harvard? surely.” there was a very promising black assistant professor. but he got caught up in #metoo. hopefully they’ll keep looking for other promising economic professors of color.

and it’s during my time within the economics department at harvard that laid the groundwork for me to begin a career on wall street as an investment banker. mind you, when i understood the department was lifeless (none of the students seemed to be enjoying themselves) and the academics were conservative in its teaching, i very quickly found myself in the department of romance languages and literatures. college is one of the few places where you’re able to study what you want. to not take full advantage of that would be poetic injustice in my opinion.

i always relay this origin story to those who ask. and it was during a flight to new york, where i was making conversation with the white man next to me, that he told me i had taken someone else’s investment banking job because i studied french literature (which is what my undergraduate degree is in) and not finance (which harvard has never offered as a concentration in its 338 year history). now of course i thought this man silly. because he didn’t know me, nor the work i put in, to make that assertion. he heard small aspects of my story and thought, “dei candidate.”

now, my readership is well aware at this point that i am a scholar through and through. self-education is one of my great loves. shakespeare being my first one. and i pride myself on having a deep understanding of finance and the american financial system. i may no longer be an investment banker, but i was born to be a financier. i am a jyestha nakshatra after all.

and my mother recently confirmed this to me: she sought my advice on what to do with her financial affairs and upon hearing my answer, told me i had said exactly what her financial advisor had said. i’m told he charged a premium for his advice.

the issue of substance is dear to my heart. because without substance, you have nothing. you’re left with symbolism. but symbolism makes no progress. it cures no social ills. it might placate a group of people, but it does not advance them. economically speaking.

when i was studying abroad in paris, i did an empirical research project based on the black european experience for my final project. one of the people i interviewed was a nigerian professional. having been born in lagos, educated in london, and now living between the two cities, i thought he would give me a holistic view of race in europe. when i asked him if he thought london was racist, he said no. i asked again, he said no. to ensure he properly understood my question, i asked him for a final time, and he, once again, said no. i told him, “surely you jest.” but he explained to me his worldview.

“i’m wealthy. so i don’t experience that.”

he would go on to tell me that it’s his opinion that black people experience racism because the vast majority of us are in poverty. as stark as that sounds, it actually tracks with what the president of ghana said when he came to speak at harvard, “the standing of black people in this country (the united states), is contingent on the standing of the african continent.”

culture trumps race. class is culture.

and so we arrive at the 2024 united states presidential election where we have a narcissistic, egoistical man, who despite all his faults, has a supreme instinct for the spirit of the country. and a woman, who despite a failed attempt to secure a presidential bid the first time around, has only continued to fail up since then. of course, it helps when you have nancy pelosi stage the coup that leads to your ascension.

and what has become clear, to anyone who investigates, is that the symbolism has been placed in front of substance:

“in the harris-walz agenda to lower costs for american families, released the week before the convention in august, the pair pinned rising food, medicine, and housing costs on businesses engaging in deliberately anticompetitive practices…the problem is that the mustache-twirling corporate villain theory of pricing is largely a fiction.

…there are surely some bad actors out there who can be taken to task. but the idea that the government can cut prices across the board simply by enforcing (new or existing) antitrust laws is a ruse—a sleight of hand that sounds tough but amounts to nothing for your average american because it misdiagnoses the cause of those high prices.

it's effectively "junk" populism, promising a radical transformation and delivering (at best) nothing or a few impotent, surface-level changes (like how biden's big war on "junk fees" boiled down to a change in the way cable bills are presented).

but the alternative to this useless populist posturing is even worse, because more government intervention in the marketplace threatens to drive up prices even higher…

…maybe, at her core, harris is just a run-of-the-mill democrat. she has sometimes misread the room—as in 2019, when she leaned a bit too hard into the party's more progressive ideas. but she has never strayed too far outside the bounds of whatever moment the party is in.

right now, that means backing off some sanders-style democratic socialist policy prescriptions, while still flirting with what sounds like government price controls on groceries. protecting the right to obtain an abortion but not the right to own certain rifles. opposing the worst of "weird" republican overreach while insisting on new types of democrat-approved overreach.

democrats' new emphasis on freedom may initially seem like a welcome development—a return to the time when the party was better on civil liberties, at least, and perhaps even a signal that it's prepared to loosen up a little in other realms too. but by somehow making freedom just another word for big government, the harris-walz rhetoric could actually do a lot of damage in the long run, completing the work republicans have already been undertaking to muddy concepts like liberty and freedom beyond all recognition.”

it has always been my belief that the black american community places too much emphasis on white people. that the constant thinking about ourselves through the lens of a white gaze³ has done far, far more harm than good.

there have been scholars, feminists, and historians before me who have argued the reprehensibility of what we understand to be white supremacy. and that the political, socioeconomic system of the united states is a white supremacist one. that’s all good and well. and i tend to agree from time to time.

but the function of the system is not what it’s purported to be, but what it actually does. better put, it’s interesting that it’s this same system, this white supremacist one, that allowed the presidency of barack hussein obama in the years following 9/11 and the bush jr administration and is now, ostensibly, poised to give us a president kamala devi harris.

for a white supremacist system, it’s failing to do what’s its purported to be.

additionally, this is the same system that has allowed young women to completely outpace young men, both in terms of education and economics.

in this trend line, it’s non-college graduate working class men, of all races, who are falling behind college-educated women.

enter trump.

it is my belief that the left, especially the radical left, has spent too much time focused on identity politics. long after we won the culture wars. that was a mistake. in our pursuit of symbolism, we neglected the substantive reality of many groups of people. and now, not only is there a realignment, but a reckoning, coming.

it’s not as book of revelation as it sounds. it won’t be apocalyptic (if it isn’t already), undemocratic (if it isn’t already), or authoritative (if it ins’t already).

it’ll just be different.

the democrats are no longer the counterculture. we are the establishment. we are no longer occupy wall street. baby, we are wall street.

the last point i’ll say on identity politics, as it relates to white supremacy, is i find it interesting that all the first “black” presidential politicians we’ve had in the united states, certainly the one that has been elected, have been biracial. if white supremacy is to be understood in the simplistic sense of the closer to whiteness you are, the better, than it’s interesting that the “black” president the white supremacist system allowed wasn’t black at all. he was biracial. and now, in the eve of what is expected to be a trumpian win, that same biracial man tells the black men of his party that they ought to be voting for her. the other biracial. and not him. the white man. it’s an interesting racial dynamic that’s unfolded.

and should the betting markets be correct, and trump does win, do not believe the accusations of racism or xenophobia. or even sexism. i will keep repeating this until the horse is dead: the rent is too damn high.

and on the immigration front, it is disastrous to both a country and its working class populace if working class interests are not protected while immigration and open borders are promoted. australia, interestingly enough, understood this fact quite well. as did the first african american woman to be elected to the texan house of representatives since reconstruction, barabra jordan. she advocated for immigration reform in the 1990s, that, if you didn’t know she wrote it, could be believed to have come from the trump camp. or the harris camp, since she’s taking on his immigration policies now.

all is fair in war and elections, i suppose.

sweet dreams,

a diouana woman

p.s. truth or dare

this section is a curated list of ideas and items i’ve engaged with recently that i’ve loved. the truths were 10/10, so i must recommend. and the dares were not so great, so it’s me saying don’t do it. but only if you dare. get it? great. let’s begin:

truth: telling the truth about yourself. did you know i came out to my boyfriend as a conservative lol? i was *so* scared. but i was also like, “he has to know.” full discourse. always.

dare: not voting. the 19th amendment exists for a reason. use it.

1. i’m joking. i’m a single issue radical feminist. andrea was radical all the way.

2. to be extremely fair to hillary, i remember how, at that time, it seemed a political right of passage for the youth on the left to absolutely hate this woman. many called her a war criminal, a destabilizer of countries, a racist, etc. now, she’s not necessarily more guilty than any other establishment politician, but the negative response towards her from the youth was rather pointed. and i do believe a bit of that was laced with misogyny.

3. i know i’m not explaining this; it deserves its own essay.