Jeremy Carl, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, Regnery Publishing, 2024, 369+xviii pages, $29.99 hardcover, $14.99 e-book
Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, served as deputy assistant secretary of the interior under President Trump, and has been associated with the Hoover Institution. His other books have dealt with energy policy. In a chapter on religion, he describes himself as “an actively engaged Christian of Jewish descent.” That a writer with solid connections to “respectable conservatism” is publishing a book with “anti-white racism” in the subtitle is a sign of changing times. Moreover, the author does not try to tell us that the problem with hostility towards whites is merely “divisive” or supposedly incompatible with Martin Luther King’s “dream.” He states forthrightly that it leads to injustices against whites, and that whites must fight back.
The heart of The Unprotected Class is 12 chapters dealing with anti-white attitudes and policy in civil rights law, crime and punishment, housing, education, historical remembrance, immigration, entertainment, environmentalism, business, medicine, religion, and the military. Race realism peeks through only in the chapter about medicine; the author admits that race differences are based in biology. The first four chapters are the most interesting.
Mr. Carl rightly begins his analysis with civil rights law, the heart of the anti-white regime. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did much more than outlaw certain types of racial discrimination; it created an army of bureaucrats and lawyers to enforce the new rules. The intrusive powers of this bureaucracy were greatly extended by the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs vs. Duke Power Supply (1971), a case involving the use of IQ and mechanical aptitude tests to assess employees for advancement.
As the author notes, “the record is clear that the Congress which enacted the 1964 act did not intend to interfere with employment tests,” but that didn’t matter. Blacks do not perform as well as whites on IQ and other tests, and the Court ruled that this “disparate impact” by race is discrimination even if there is no intent to discriminate. As Mr. Carl writes:
Disparate impact has been used exhaustively to deprive whites of jobs they would have otherwise earned. Much of this happens not overtly, but due to the ubiquitous looming threat of a disparate impact lawsuit. . . . Most companies, after all, loathe legal risk.
Disparate impact now applies not just to employment but to “housing policy, education, and criminal background and credit checks, discriminating against whites in almost every instance.”
The problem with the reasoning behind disparate impact is that, since the races are different for evolutionary reasons beyond our power to alter, everything we do can have a disparate impact. As legal scholar Gail L. Heriot wrote in 2020, the Griggs standard makes virtually everything presumptively illegal. If we are not all being sued all the time, it is only because there are still some time and budgetary constraints on the Department of Justice. The Department continues to grow, however, sucking wealth and energy out of private enterprise and impoverishing us all. Whites will not be able to deal with this monster through euphemism and compromise; we have to defeat it.
This will not be easy, because private companies have long since internalized the thinking behind Griggs and civil rights law: “When the Reagan administration attempted to weaken enforcement . . . they were dismayed to find the business community opposing them.” Large companies — with employees dedicated to satisfying civil rights laws — can outcompete small companies that can’t afford such employees.
Anti-white quotas known euphemistically as “affirmative action” were an inevitable consequence of Griggs, because they are the only way to avoid liability. Americans don’t like race preferences. As the author points out: “Even in liberal California, the movement to restore affirmative action to universities went down to a 57-42 percent defeat, despite having the endorsement of almost every Democratic politician and despite outspending its opposition overwhelmingly.” The refusal of the Republican Party to show any leadership on this indicates that respectability in the eyes of its constituents’ enemies is more important than victory.
Mr. Carl devotes special attention to affirmative action in the legal profession. Prospective law students take the standardized Law School Admissions Test, or LSAT, and a score of 170 is about average for admission to America’s top 10 law schools. The ratio of whites to blacks getting this score is greater than 60-to-one. Nonetheless, blacks and other “underrepresented minorities” are not only admitted to top law schools, but to the bar and the bench, at wildly disproportionate rates. The Biden administration has been especially aggressive about “diversifying,” and the shortcomings of judges promoted beyond their abilities cannot be concealed:
Justice Sonia Sotomayor clearly does not understand some basic distinctions between state and federal powers. In her unimpressive dissent in Students for Fair Admissions, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson made basic errors of fact . . . looking silly in comparison to Clarence Thomas’s evisceration of her position. . . . One judge nominated by Biden was exposed as not knowing what Article II and Article V of the Constitution were.
Of the 97 judges President Biden approved during the first two years of his term, just five were white men and 22 were black women. One of the latter, Nancy Abudu, came directly from a career at the Southern Poverty Law Center! She was narrowly confirmed on a party-line vote.
As Mr. Carl says, the purpose of all this is “to entrench a racial caste system in America.” The regime needs judges who can be counted on to enforce anti-white policies more than it needs judges with sharp legal minds. One group of regime-friendly legal scholars has even complained that President Trump’s failure to “diversify” the judiciary “could erode the legitimacy of the judicial system” and “damage the court’s ability to serve its function as a neutral arbiter of the law.” In other words, benefitting non-whites at the expense of whites is a source of the court’s legitimacy and guarantees neutrality.
Crime and punishment
As Mr. Carl points out, crime is where reality diverges most grotesquely from what the mainstream media and Hollywood want us to believe. We are supposed to be outraged over the death, probably by drug overdose, of black criminal George Floyd, but scarcely to take note of Cannon Hinnant, a five-year-old white child shot in the head by a black neighbor for no apparent reason. People were up in arms over Kyle Rittenhouse’s acts of self-defense even as Jacob Blake, a black criminal shot as he was attempting to stab police, got a visit from the vice president of the United States. Examples could be multiplied almost endlessly.
In movies and television, crime is “whitewashed,” with most criminals played by white actors. But sometimes the dishonesty goes much farther. The 1989 case of the Central Park Jogger, in which a white woman was violently gang raped and nearly murdered by a group of blacks, shocked an already desensitized nation. Five young men were arrested shortly afterwards. As columnist Ann Coulter wrote:
What the police had against the Central Park Five were detailed confessions, on videotape, given in the presence of their parents or adult relatives; the deeply incriminating statements of at least a half-dozen of their friends and acquaintances; and the defendants’ knowledge of facts about the crime that only the perpetrators would know.
The five also admitted to having attacked eight other people that same night, two of whom had to go to the hospital. Accordingly, they all received substantial prison sentences.
Many years later, another criminal confessed to the rape, and matching DNA evidence was found. It had always been known that there were other attackers besides the five originally arrested. And yet the discovery of this sixth man was treated as an exoneration of the other five! Netflix produced a mendacious film that omitted incriminating evidence and falsely depicted the original Central Park Five as “deprived of food and parental contact and forced to confess.” Their original prosecutor, by this time an author, “was dropped by her publisher amid the flood of moral outrage that followed.” Today, there is a memorial in Central Park celebrating these criminals as “The Exonerated Five” and attributing their convictions to “systemic racism.”
Racial attacks on Asians are largely carried out by blacks, but “acknowledging this would upset the political coalition between black and Asian anti-white racial activists.” Asian activists thus claim they are “suffering under white supremacy.” Some people even blame Donald Trump for this, but no one explains how his calling Covid the “Kung Flu” could make blacks who did not vote for him hate Asians. One black rapper tells listeners how to attack Asians: “First, you find a house and scope it out. Find a Chinese neighborhood, ‘cause they don’t believe in bank accounts.”
Hate crimes statistics are extremely likely to be biased:
In 2020, there were a total of 2,871 anti-black hate crimes, 869 anti-white and 279 anti-Asian. Yet we know that blacks commit vastly more interracial crimes than whites. While it is theoretically possible that somehow this situation is dramatically reversed for hate crimes, it is much more likely that rules or reporting incentives are being manipulated to punish (presumably white) defendants.
Housing
For many decades, as Mr. Carl writes, the American housing market has presented “the pathetic spectacle of non-whites following whites as they move around like vagabonds from place to place, looking for a community free from crime and chaos — all while the non-whites yell at them about racism.” Whites moving out is racist “white flight;” whites moving back is racist “gentrification.”
After the Supreme Court ruled in Shelley vs. Kraemer (1948) that racially restrictive housing covenants were unenforceable under the 14th Amendment, realtors made a quick buck by “block-busting:”
Unscrupulous real estate agents (who rarely, if ever, lived in the affected areas) frightened existing white homeowners, including by hiring black women with baby carriages, starting simulated fights in neighborhoods, selling houses in middle-class white neighborhoods to black families with the explicit goal of generating panic sales among whites.
The trick worked so well that block-busters were flipping an average of two or three blocks a week. At one point, over one hundred were operating in Chicago alone. Whites whose homes were their principal asset sold for pennies on the dollar. Billions in capital, sometimes built up over several generations, vanished. As the author of a 1962 Saturday Evening Post article “Confessions of a Block-Buster” wrote:
Nobody who has lived in a neighborhood for years, seen his children grow up there, remodeled his home exactly to his liking and become accustomed to nearby school, church, and shopping facilities likes to be uprooted. Once a block has been busted, some white owners simply stare, almost dumbfounded, as we draw up sale papers for them. Others break down and cry. . . . Several elderly persons have died because of the anguish and upheaval involved.”
These are the people who are portrayed as bigots in books about white flight. Today, what happened to them would be called “ethnic cleansing.” Some of the early suburbs that were built because of white flight practically amounted to refugee camps for displaced whites, “places where they could buy a modest home in a safe and culturally familiar environment with what was left of [their] equity.”
Careful studies have confirmed what many have suspected: White liberals are every bit as likely as conservatives to flee blacks.
The fears exploited by block busters were justified. Many of the formerly white urban neighborhoods “did become dilapidated and crime-ridden as minorities moved in.” Some of the Chicago neighborhoods flipped in these years now have shootings every weekend.
A few whites did not join in the exodus, often because they were old and living on fixed incomes. In Left Behind in Rosedale (1998), Scott Cummings describes the fate of such people as “comparable to a natural disaster,” involving “collective trauma” and “extreme grief:”
Fear dominates them. They have converted their homes into fortresses. On the streets, black adolescents seize their personal possessions, bags of groceries, wristwatches, purses, wallets, cash and social security checks. The elderly are pushed down, shoved, beaten. Many robberies are accompanied by violent assault, rape or murder.
Block-busting was outlawed in 1968, but by then the damage had been done.
About a generation later, and to the surprise of many observers, a few hardy whites began moving back into some of the black neighborhoods their parents had fled, restoring gutted buildings, starting businesses, and making these areas much more attractive. Housing, most of it now minority-owned, increased in value. So, everybody was happy, right?
Wrong. While minority owners saw their wealth increase, rents rose, and some renters were forced out. They did not like being displaced any better than whites had in the era of block-busting, but they could claim racial grievance. Gentrification became the newest form of “racism,” a version of what one activist group called “colonialism and white supremacy.” The New Republic declared that gentrification was about “profit and power, racism and violence on a massive scale.” Who would have guessed that fixing up old buildings was so villainous?
White homosexuals — who don’t care about finding a “good neighborhood for raising a family” — have been pioneer gentrifiers. Anti-gentrification activists downplay this for the same reason Asian success is downplayed: Homosexuals do not fit the official image of oppressor and oppressed.
The subprime mortgage crisis was another housing disaster that could have been avoided through a realistic understanding of race. According to one California study, even after adjusting for income and credit score, blacks are 3.3 times as likely to be in foreclosure as whites, Hispanics 2.5 times, and even Asians 1.6 times. But George W. Bush believed he could foster an “ownership society” by pressuring banks to write mortgages to minorities regardless of creditworthiness.
The government massively subsidized the housing market between 2004 and 2007, particularly in Hispanic neighborhoods. Some who took out mortgages during these boom years saw the value of their houses rise so sharply that they were able to use them as virtual ATMs — until the crash of 2008. Then they were unable to pay off their mortgages, which were partially or totally “forgiven.” This means they were bailed out by mostly white taxpayers to the tune of about half a trillion dollars, leading to the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
The government appears to have learned nothing from this. In 2015, the Obama administration instituted a policy called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), rewriting the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to require housing discrimination in favor of “core Democratic constituencies.” Majority-white neighborhoods have been forced to build high-density low-income housing regardless of local needs or wishes. To fill such housing, Dubuque, Iowa, had to recruit non-whites all way from Chicago, 217 miles away. Any community the government considers “too white” gets the same treatment. AFFH was canceled by the Trump administration but restored by Mr. Biden.
Education
One area where whites have begun fighting back is against Critical Race Theory (CRT) in school curricula. A 2022 survey of 18- to 20-year-olds found that 90 percent had been taught about at least one CRT concept; 69 percent had been taught that whites have “privilege.” Researchers found that the more exposure young whites had to CRT, the likelier they were to report feeling “guilty about the social inequalities between white and black Americans.” As the author notes: “Propaganda works, which is why it’s used.”
School pupils have always been disciplined at different rates by race because they misbehave at different rates. In order to hide this, the Obama administration pushed for race-norming school discipline; laxer punishment for blacks and Hispanics. Obviously, this results in worse behavior on their part, and sometimes gets people killed — including the insufficiently disciplined pupils themselves.
Trayvon Martin, the black 17-year-old fatally shot in a confrontation with neighborhood-watch coordinator George Zimmerman in 2012, had already had “various brushes with serious school discipline” along with a history of “drug use, flashing of weapons on social media and other signs of incipient criminal behavior.” In the months before he was killed:
he’d been caught at school with burglary tools and women’s jewelry . . . [which] matched items that had been stolen from a local home, but police did not pursue the possible theft any further in an effort to reduce disciplinary infractions and suspensions of African Americans. Under pressure not to suspend black students, the school resource officer wrote up the jewelry as “found items” and never submitted a police report.
This disastrous policy misunderstands the purpose of disciplining juveniles: to teach them to behave at an age when their character is still somewhat malleable. This not only protects possible future victims, it also promotes their own futures. Trayvon Martin might be alive today if he had been properly disciplined. President Obama famously said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” Would he have wanted a son who got away with crime? What other conclusion are we to draw from his policy of race-norming school discipline?
Trayvon Martin paid the price for his own violence, but more often, others pay that price. In 2018, Nikolas Cruz killed 17 people and wounded 17 more in a shooting spree at a Florida High School.
Cruz, despite years of criminal behavior on school grounds and obvious signs of mental illness, was never reported to authorities because Broward Country attempted to reduce such reports at least partially in the name of racial justice. Indeed, federal authorities used Broward’s program as the model for a nationwide effort. According to the minutes of a teachers’ meeting held before the shooting, this created a “culture of leniency.”
Ironically, Cruz may be white, but he was classed as Hispanic because of his name, and thus “benefitted” from lax discipline. His birth mother’s name was Woodward.
The policy of race-norming in school discipline was canceled under President Trump, but has been reinstated under President Biden.
Anti-white policies continue in college and university. The University of Michigan has 163 “Diversity Equity Inclusion” (DEI) employees. “Each one takes resources aways from teaching students and is dedicated to discriminating against whites and Asian Americans whose parents disproportionately pay their salaries.” States have recently begun banning university DEI.
There are many college scholarships openly advertised for non-whites. They violate the Civil Rights Act, but they have long gone unchallenged. This is just starting to change: in July 2023, the University of Missouri ended $16 million in race-based scholarships, and those in Wisconsin are under attack.
When affirmative action in college admissions was successfully challenged in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard (2023), the suit was brought by an Asian-American group. Jennifer Lee, a sociologist of Korean heritage, said that “all the research shows it’s white Americans who would benefit most” from the ruling. Yet, despite the absence of any Asian justices on the Supreme Court, it was thought more prudent to have Asian plaintiffs.
Colleges have long foreseen such a ruling against racial preferences and have been looking for ways to get around it. Affirmative action was banned in California by Proposition 209 back in 1997, and its schools have since “developed extensive proxies for race that have either not been challenged successfully in court or have not been challenged at all.” Twenty-five years later, the percentage of whites in the California university system continues to shrink. As of 2022, they made up just 18.6 percent of admissions for class of 2026, substantially lower than their share of the population (and a fortiori of qualified applicants). California has spent half a billion dollars boosting diversity since Prop. 209 was passed.
The basic strategy to retain anti-white preferences which have been formally outlawed is to eliminate objective standards in favor of subjective ones (sometimes euphemistically known as “holistic criteria”). Many schools have made standardized tests optional, and the University of California system has even banned them outright. AmRen contributor Steve Farron has repeatedly made the point that practices such as these will make preferences more harmful than they were under a quota system; if there must be anti-white discrimination, numerical quotas are the least unfair way to do it. Therefore, the recent victory in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard will not ensure fairness for whites. Either the government will have to require objective admissions criteria or whites must have their own institutions.
Conclusion
As Mr. Carl writes, white Americans today “suffer from downward economic mobility, declining fertility, rising drug addiction and depression, and narrowing opportunities, all piled onto a false presumption of privilege.” Any vestigial advantages they may still derive from belonging to America’s historical majority are “informal and evanescent cultural legacies,” whereas “the discrimination they experience is . . . increasingly legal and formal.”
Obviously, if there were any real “white privilege,” non-whites would be trying to “pass” for white (as they once did). Instead, we see a flight from white. The reported American Indian population ballooned from 0.4 percent in 1970 to nearly 3 percent in 2020, not due to any explosion in fertility but to an increase in Elizabeth Warren-style claims aimed at getting non-white privilege.
Mr. Carl acknowledges that whites are not merely the victims of anti-white hostility, but often its most enthusiastic perpetrators. He combines a defense of whites as a group with harsh criticism of these white progressives, writing that their “moral mania has made them, without question, the most destructive group in American life. No real solution to our racial problems is possible until they either reject their current anti-white animus or are removed from their positions of power and authority.”
The endgame of the current system is “the expropriation of land, property, and other wealth from whites” and the institution of “a permanent regime of anti-white employment and legal discrimination.” As of now, he writes, “appeals to expropriation are usually indirect,” but over time they “will become more direct and in need of less justification as the political power of white Americans continues to decline.”
Two developments make this clear. The first is the growing success of the reparations movement:
Black reparations will open the door to a massive multi-trillion-dollar payments to any group that can seize the holy grail of victimhood. We aren’t going to win this fight by nibbling around the edges, by compromising, or by saying that groups deserve reparations for this but not for that. We must pull up root and branch the entire concept of mass racial reparations.
The alternative is likely to be “racial extortion on an unimaginable scale,” possibly leading to “interethnic violence and a collapse of American society.”
The second recent development is a practice imported from Canada: land acknowledgements. It is no common for institutions built by whites to “acknowledge” that they are on land taken from this or that tribe. As the author points out, the entire practice is intellectually incoherent, since the particular group whose lands whites occupied were seldom or never the first group to hold them. An honest land acknowledgement might sound something like: “Our ancestors took this land from the Chippewa, who had previously driven out the Sioux to another place where they would go on to massacre the Pawnee,” etc., etc. More importantly, such “acknowledgements” are “an intellectual precursor to expropriation,” and deserve to be taken seriously as such.
Mr. Carl reports that some readers of early drafts of The Unprotected Class were enthusiastic about his ideas but felt that “a non-white ought to write such a book instead of him.”
Somehow a white person advancing arguments that white people should be treated fairly was seen as unseemly. It’s an understandable political instinct for anyone who has been involved in American politics in recent decades, but ultimately it’s an attitude we need to eliminate.
It is whites’ failure to organize in defense of our own interests that had made the anti-white regime possible. As Mr. Carl writes, “non-whites have organized and made powerful demands, while whites have focused on broad, gauzy appeals to . . . universal rights” that have proven “almost completely ineffective.” It is time for us to make strong demands.
As noted, we have looked here at only a few of the twelve realms of anti-white discrimination Mr. Carl discusses. The reader should get the book itself for the full story. I am unaware of any mainstream book on race published since American Renaissance was founded 34 years ago that pulls so few punches.
https://www.unz.com/article/the-respectable-right-discovers-anti-white-hostility/