Peyton Manning

And are you even all that confident you know precisely what a trolley is? I would guess it’s that train-like thing that went “clang-clang-clang” in that Judy Garland song, but then Judy has a rather specialized demographic appeal these days, so who knows?

Yet despite all these conundrums, it’s important to keep in mind that this statistical noise should make the reported results less clear than they really are. If you could perfect the experiment”€”if the white guy was named, say, Dylan Schultz and the black guy D’Qevshious Washington-Jackson Jr.“€”then the liberal urge to kill whitey would most likely be even more manifest.

The authors carried out a second study on Cornell undergrads and Southern California adults, this time asking if it were morally justified to throw a mortally wounded Chip/Tyrone off a sinking lifeboat to save the other passengers from drowning. Once again, liberals were relatively enthusiastic about snuffing the WASP compared to killing the fellow with the basketball guard’s name (p = .03). As the psychologists report:

In particular, political liberals tended to be more likely to endorse a consequentialist justification for sacrificing an innocent White man compared to sacrificing an innocent Black man.

In a third study, even when shown both scenarios, liberals remained enthusiastic about shoving somebody to his death if the first person they had an opportunity to kill was poor old Chip.

While liberals tend to be racist, conservatives tend to be citizenist. (By the way, Microsoft Word’s spellchecker reports that there is no such word as “citizenist.”)

Two additional experiments reported in this paper found that conservative students felt that civilians being killed as a side effect of military action is less OK when the collateral damage strikes down American citizens rather than Iraqi citizens. On the other hand, liberals did not distinguish between the welfare of foreigners and their fellow citizens.

Authors Eric Luis Uhlmann, David A. Pizarro, David Tannenbaum, and Peter H. Ditto report that their best guess for the anti-white racism of liberals is:

A more likely explanation is that antipathy toward anti-Black prejudice played a greater role in liberals’ judgments.

An alternative way to phrase this is that anti-white animus is the hallmark of the contemporary liberal. Being anti-white is the KKKrazy glue that keeps the diverse Obama coalition together. And among whites, publicly hating your own race is proof of your moral and cultural superiority.

While conservatives tend to have natural concentric allegiances, white liberals pride themselves on their leapfrogging loyalties.

A few of the more perceptive cultural observers have noticed the pervasiveness of this anti-white inclination in 21st century America.

For example, my wife and I finally got around to watching Tina Fey’s very funny sitcom 30 Rock. What’s surprising is how over the course of the seven seasons, 30 Rock’s scripts become notably more anti-anti-white.

Presumably, as a moderate feminist Democrat, Fey assumed that it was Hillary Clinton’s time to become the first woman president in 2008, only to be surprised when the inexperienced Barack Obama was handed the presidency largely for being black (but not too black). As her former colleagues at Saturday Night Live were muzzled over pointing out anything funny about Obama, Fey became increasingly caustic about the brain-stagnating dominion of anti-white animus in American public life.

But how many people noticed? After all, is “anti-whitism” even a word? Do we even know how to spell it, much less pronounce it? On the model of “anti-Semitism,” it should be spelled without an “e” and pronounced with a short first “i.” Still, you’ve likely never heard that term spoken on TV. Indeed, Google only finds 12,000 references to “anti-whitism” and 1,890 to “anti-whiteism” versus 21,300,000 for “anti-Semitism.”

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, most memorably illustrated in the “Principles of Newspeak” appendix to 1984, argues that language is power. The more complex the concept, the more difficult it is to think about it without there being an accepted term for it in our vocabulary. For example, philosophers talk endlessly about the “trolley problem” not because it’s a well-designed thought experiment (it’s not), but because they have a phrase for it.

The term “€œanti-whitism”€ hardly exists today, but not because blacks are so powerful. Blacks are mostly totems in power games played by whites against other whites. Instead, anti-whitism is highly useful to white elites. You get ahead in this world by shoving white people out of your way. If you can rationalize your aggression in the name of your burning desire for racial justice for blacks, well, you get to shove away.