Eric Kaufmann: evaluation

Transcript context

…You argue in your book, Whiteshift, that we should, in some way, enable people to recognize and grant legitimacy to whiteness as an ethnic category that can have a dialogue about whiteness, which is not racist, not evil. Is that a fair way of putting your point? Yeah, what I would say is that attachment to is not the same as hatred of the outgroup, right? This is something Ashley Jardina points out also in her book. And if you look at the American National Election Study, the thermometer of whites who are warmer towards whites are not colder towards blacks, quite the opposite. So there just isn’t . . . and this is, again, part of the psychological literature. We’ve known that for a long time. Unless there’s a violent conflict going on, attachment to your own group is not the same as hating an outgroup. Attachment to being white or attachment to a North European ancestry is not a predictor of disliking a minority. The problem is, if we try and mash those together and outlaw this identity, we store up more trouble than if we simply say, “Okay. This is fine. You can express this identity like anybody else, but it’s got to be moderate, and you have to bear in mind the common good, so it should be subordinate to that.” What do you think of the argument that appeasement in politics, ethnic politics, rarely works, and that even if the view you’re putting forward is logically sound, it will, de facto, just encourage the crazies. And we need to be a bit Straussian and keep a lid on talk about whiteness — realize a lot of it’s going to happen, but penalize it a bit more than, ideally, we ought to just to keep things under control?…

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