Gog and Magog: “People of Color” and Negative Identity
How the term "people of color" is symptomatic of a lack of individual identity in the West
Identity politics do not signal the emergence of identity, but its decay. The elevation of gender and race signal the crisis of lack of identity in our culture.
The term “person of color,” which specifically means “non-white,” has arisen not as an identity per se, but paradoxically as an identification with a lack of identity. It is distinctly and definitionally the negation of identity—identification with the absence of “being white.” To further complicate the matter, when such a term is employed, “white” is the only part of the dichotomy that has any fundamental reality and identity behind it. There are no identifiers in common between the diffuse races who employ the term “people of color,” and everything under the purview of “people of color” is a reference to what they are not. This identification of “whiteness” with “being” and “people of color” with “non-being” is fundamentally important to understand how this operates in cultural and institutional contexts.
It is the greatest expression of a mass because it takes the shallowest form of identity, namely race, and negates it. If a person refers to himself as a “person of color,” he is no longer an individual, but rather identifies with the mass. There cannot be any touchpoints in the term to explain his character, his beliefs, his looks—even, ironically, his race. To be a person of color is no to be Asian or black, but rather a non-white.
Identity is a necessary anchor to culture, history, morality, and self. Similarly, all of these which flow from identity come to constitute identity itself. This is why the rise of “people of color” and its replacement of ethnic and even racial identity was followed immediately by the death of American culture, as exemplified by the creative standstill in American film— “people of color” culture and history, by its own virtues, can only be the absence of what is perceived to be “white” culture and history. If it were “black” history, it would cease to be that of “people of color”—but en masse many non-whites have embraced the term and ideology. The new wasteland of American culture created by racialization in turn makes identity even harder to navigate, and in turn this is itself exacerbated by racialization’s transformation of racial groups into the racialized mass of “people of color” and so the problem becomes an infinitely regressing negative feedback loop of deracination.
I. On “Whiteness” vs. People of Color
What created a “person of color”—i.e., an undefined, deracinated, self-identified non-white mass— to begin with? Why were white people selected as the paradigmatic culture and not, for example, Asians?
The logic here is circular. First, one must eliminate any nuanced categories and view the world totally through a racialized lens. French food is “white” food, for example. This is because in America, specific ethnicities cannot survive as an identifier. Two Vietnamese people give birth to an American baby on American soil, the “Vietnameseness” of the baby has already largely retreated. This becomes even more apparent when the child goes on to participate in “AAPI”-styled events. What became a unique ethnic marker in one generation is at best a bunch of arbitrary symbols for a culture that child has little connection to, most likely and at best a commodity for the culture at large. To put it simply, Vietnamese immigrants, upon arriving to America, give birth to Asian children. Irish nationals in America give birth to white children. Only religion (which is largely rejected, especially by the masses) and sexuality (in the form of sexual identity, an identity of consumption) can compete for a stake in identity as important as race in America. And on this front, even sexual identity has failed, as the latest iteration of the ever-evolving pride flag now includes black and brown to represent “people of color.”
The American child of Vietnamese immigrants, destined to in fact become an AAPI, has already experienced a massive (if not total) loss of identity simply by virtue of having been born in America. There is, in a sense, a kind of destiny to be a race, and then more so importantly there is a destiny to not be a race—there is a destiny to not be white. One only needs to see the plethora of Asian Americans and Hispanics that will openly insist they are a person of color and not white to distinguish themselves from the paradigmatic race and identify with its opposite.
Hannah Arendt has described the catastrophic destiny of race in her book Origins of Totalitarianism:
“When Russians have become Slavs, when Frenchmen have assumed the role of commanders of a force noire, when Englishmen have turned into “white men,” as already for a disastrous spell all Germans became Aryans, then this change will itself signify the end of Western man. For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.”
Once this racialized deracination has been established, one must recognize as a kind of racial truism that the dominant cultural milieu of the United States, Europe, and even a burgeoning number of non-white countries is clearly a “white” export. The most visible culture is “white,” and necessity demands one must learn a “white” language and eat “white” food. All other identities become subsumed into white culture or become a fetishized version of a culture existing for the needs of that same “white” culture (again, Vietnamese-ness as a commodity). Occasionally, racial subgroups will vie to artificially replace white figures in, for example, history (the Broadway play Hamilton tried to do this in a respectful, unresentful manner, but oftentimes fictional racialized history accounts are borne out of a dislike and even hatred of whites), but these have virtually no lasting power in the cultural mind. The history of America, through a racialized lens, is undeniably white.
A second aspect of this phenomenon is the need to sustain racial pride. This is why “white” food is criticized online for being bland and disgusting, despite foods associated with so-called “white” people (French and Spanish cuisine) are associated in an almost blatant and obvious manner with the most sophisticated cuisines in the world. Because there is no “Asian” cuisine, black cuisine, or Hispanic cuisine to compare it to, “white” food is the only visible category. Any rejoinder to these racial subgroups of “people of color” turns to comparisons along ethnic lines. An ethnic comparison would allow for diffuse ethnic comparisons of food, but likewise would have us comparing Italian (white) food to Uruguayan (people of color). Racial categorization is necessary to sustain racial pride in this instance, as no person who belongs to a racialized mass wants to actually compare his country’s culture to that of a European’s. But race itself invites this comparison: why, when we talk about “white” food, do we never talk about the individual ethnic cultures that constitute “whiteness?”
In short, the comparison around racial lines becomes devastating to the anti-white racialist, and specifically this is why the Asian or Hispanic person becomes the person of color. He himself sees white culture (a decay of individual ethnic European groups into a racial group) as the only real racial identity, and thus, not being white, can only form his identity in opposition to it.
II. On “Whiteness” as a Spiritual Evil
The concept of “people of color” and the necessary inclusion of Asians created a crisis during the Stop Asian Hate movement. How does one explain interracial conflict between two people of color? The more that activists mined evidence, the clearer it became that material explanations would not satisfy this issue. Whiteness couldn’t even serve its usual function as a social evil through its regular status as “privileged,” because any dimension that whites were privileged by, Asians often exceeded them. Even the desperate attempts at race hoaxes in the social sciences and any definitions cooked up by the crackpots who participated in racial pseudoscience all proved insufficient to define whiteness as a definite evil confined to material reality.
The second explanation deals with a lack of individuality in the perceiver (lack of individuality is running theme here). To put it plainly, a black man at NYU who proclaimed he was oppressed by “white privilege” could never use his own personal experience to understand the real world, lest this same personal experience and real world contradict such a proclamation. It would immediately cause a collision when he left his wealthy enclave in New York City and spent time with the white middle class. He had to view himself as a collective, as a statistic of people who suffered in ways he individually did not and measure himself against the bundle of statistics that constituted whiteness, even if his lying eyes told him he was more privileged than most Americans. And even still, to return to the point exemplified by Stop Asian Hate, statistics could not be trusted because they could also affirm that “people of color” did not universally belong to a racial underclass. Thus, all rational material experiences failed, whether supplied by academic studies or anecdote.
With no explanations in the material world, “whiteness” and race had to occupy a mystical and spiritual dimension. This new conception of whiteness slips through the fingers like smoke, it is mythological and operates like the concept of the devil in Christianity. You can never point at the devil directly because he is a spirit, but one can see his works and the works of his whispering. Of course, this viewpoint is nonsense, as it confuses simple and obvious categories of the material (skin color) with the immaterial (spirit).
This intellectually crippled race activists because they were mystifying basic and tangible realities. Now even academic anti-white race activists would have to be confronted with the fact that a meth-addicted Denny’s waitress in rural Oklahoma possessed more explanatory power for reality than years of preparing doctoral dissertations and fancy speeches. One of the greatest products of this calamity is Michael Eric Dyson, who speaks with the cadence of a self-important preacher, uses awkwardly big words so that he sounds as if he’s prepared his speeches with a thesaurus, but simultaneously cannot construct basic arguments. Almost inevitably, when he is not sermonizing his audiences on his devil of whiteness but confronted with actual arguments against his ideology, he dissolves into cursing and name-calling. Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo similarly outrage the public with their stupidity and are often suspected to be scam artists and hucksters because of this. This is true—they absolutely preyed on the American public with fiction and lies for personal gain. But that they are “grifters” is only half of the truth.
What people mistake for a “grift” in these instances is actually a pathological lack of identity. St. Augustine believed evil was a lack or absence of goodness and being. “People of color” and those who use the term define themselves in the absence of whiteness— define themselves in terms of “lack thereof.” When they equate whiteness with evil, they willfully are equating what they themselves recognize as identity and being with evil. The public, in assuming Ibram X. Kendi is merely engaged in a scam, simply can’t wrap their heads around something so fundamentally and willfully stupid, and though whites have suffered an identity loss, they still identify as a race and not a negation of a race.
This is not to exonerate completely the lack of basic moral principles so prevalent in these anti-white circles. At some level, the mass is made of the individual who, for some reason, is unable to engage in critical thinking, which is downstream of such an individual’s rejection of the available identities in America. The person who self-identifies as a person of color at some point refused an identity somewhere along the line. The only real identity America offers is through religion, and racialized thinking has relegated much of the only available religions to “whiteness.”
One can see desperate religious revivals in America as an expression of this. In the Mission District of San Francisco, deracinated Hispanic populations have begun painting murals to Quetzalcoatl. But who will go the extra step and resurrect the Aztec religion, so that Hispanics can become Aztecs again and not Hispanics? How seriously can they partake in such a religion? In reality, neo-pagan revivals always become an intensification of racial awareness for those who engage in it, because neo-paganism falls apart almost immediately because modernity renders it absurd. In this failure, the Hispanic person sees no religious identity to engage in. And when they see that they must remain a Hispanic in America and no longer a Mexican or an Aztec, they are more prone to becoming a “person of color”—in fact, “person of color” is the default, because they inevitably will define themselves in terms of what constitutes “non-whiteness.” The Mexican person, in finding out that he cannot become an Aztec, becomes a Hispanic, and he and his children soon come to identify themselves as people of color.
III. Conclusion
Race is a kind of decayed ethnic identity, and “person of color” is a decay of race. But to be a person of color is not merely to belong to a collective—a person of color is not the commonalities of non-white races with each other, but rather their distinction in merely not being white. Whiteness, in its association with being, becomes the paradigm and real identity, and to be a person of color is to negate this identity. Identity being the fundamental building block of culture means that this loss and negation of identity subsequently lead to a loss and negation of society.