"The Language Of Equality/Political Correctness" Also A Class Indicator

James Fulford

12/15/2016

In Gentrification and Ghost Towns | Two types of losers in the white liberal world order, December 13, 2016, Ms. Lindsay points out that your educated white liberal is a beneficiary of globalism, and in fact, as Steve Sailer has pointed out, having a job that can be taken by an immigrant is a sign of not being in the "cognitive elite" — thus a loser.

These people don’t care about "Trump voters", by which they mean the white working class. Of course, urban white liberals are frequent gentrifiers — they don’t care about the Hispanic or black neighbors displaced by gentrification. I don’t either.

When Spike Lee ranted about gentrification in Brooklyn, he seemed unaware that before the Second World War, everyone who lived in Fort Greene Park was white. They were driven out by black crime. If a drop in crime makes those neighborhoods livable again for whites, I’m not going to worry about it.

However, the contempt of white liberals for anyone who is white and works for a living is reflected in their attitude towards anyone who has those kinds of thoughts about blacks. It didn’t start in The Current Year. Here’s something John Derbyshire wrote in 2006, long before he proved the thesis of it by getting fired from National Review:

Among American nonblacks in the present age, being known to have "incorrect" opinions about race results in catastrophic loss of status.

A literary example will illustrate the point very well. Here is America’s foremost observer of our social mores, Tom Wolfe, writing in the mid-1980s in his novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the extract below we have a lower-middle-class but upwardly striving white couple, the Kramers. The Kramers have a baby, and have hired a nurse to help look after it. Their yuppie instincts led them to an agency recommended by the New York Times, and the agency provided them with a crisply-turned-out, briskly efficient, English baby nurse, also white.

The presence of this Englishwoman in their apartment causes considerable psychic stress to the young couple. On the one hand, she is an employee, so of course they, who are paying her wages, ought to outrank her in status. One the other hand she is English. It is a peculiar thing — a very peculiar thing, when you consider this nation’s origins — that being English gives you extra status points in the U.S.A. all by itself. It’s odd, and I do not know why it is so; but I can assure you, being English-born myself, that it is so. So this baby nurse, socially inferior to the Kramers on an employer-employee scale, actually outranks them on status, just by virtue of being English. The psychic stress is, as I said, acute.

Then one day the husband, wife, and baby nurse are watching news footage of a race riot on TV. The English nurse passes some mildly anti-black remarks: "The colored don’t know how good they've got it in this country …" etc. I will let Tom Wolfe tell the rest.

Kramer and his wife looked at each other. He could tell she was thinking the same thing he was.

Thank God in heaven! What a relief! They could let their breaths out now. Miss Efficiency was a bigot. These days the thing about bigotry was, it was undignified. It was a sign of Low Rent origins, of inferior social status, of poor taste. So they were the superiors of their English baby nurse, after all. What a fucking relief.

As always with Tom Wolfe, this is absolutely spot-on social observation. Reveal yourself to be racially "incorrect," and watch your in-group status points go swirling down the toilet. And look at the emotions on display there. In-group status evaluation is not just a matter of cold arithmetic. Powerful emotions are engaged: pride, humiliation, envy, fear. The co-opting of this key portion of the nonblack psyche by "anti-racist" reformers was a tremendous triumph. Race and Conservatism, New English Review, September 2006

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