Indeed, I suggest that this competitive virtue signaling is a major cause of the increasing polarization that we see in the United States and throughout the West in the age of social media. A Pew Research Center survey on changes in U.S. political culture from 1994–2017 found that the increasing divide between Republicans and Democrats, especially on immigration and race, was much more due to the median views of Democrats shifting left.[954]
Nevertheless, a theoretically similar phenomenon exists on the right as, for example, when individuals condemn others for being insufficiently militant or ideologically pure. However, because the left dominates the cultural landscape, such competitive virtue signaling has had most of its effects on the left. Such competitive virtue signaling from both the left and the right is highly characteristic of the social dynamics of social media sites and journalism.
People on the right face the danger of “doxxing,” having their identity and personal information made public. Hosts of shows in the mainstream media may have to cope with losing sponsors and hence their livelihood; e.g., as of March, 2019, Fox News host Tucker Carlson had lost around 30 sponsors, mainly because of his comments on immigration.[955] Or people may fear losing their job as a result of a phone call to their place of employment by a self-described “civil rights” organization such as the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League. This may well be why it is the left that has become more extreme in recent decades, whereas far too many on the right attempt to mollify their leftist critics by knuckling under to their moral righteousness.
The cultural domination of the left has meant that certain views are off-limits for all but the most daring. Thus, media sites like Breitbart and The Daily Caller, while definitely to the right of the mainstream media, avoid explicit advocacy of White identity and interests. Such constraints are much less apparent on the left, with the result that the left continues to get more and more extreme in their views. As I write, views on immigration noted above and on abortion (making abortion legal up until or even shortly after birth) that used to be virtually non-existent among Democrats are increasingly being espoused by mainstream Democrat politicians and pundits.
A critical consequence of this is racial polarization. White Americans have been shifting toward the Republican Party—the last Democrat president to get a majority of White votes was Lyndon Johnson in 1964. In general, this is an expression of implicit Whiteness (discussed below), as non-White groups coalesce in the Democratic Party. The point here is that such trends are likely to increase and polarization become more severe.
Controlling Ethnocentrism: Implicit and
Explicit Processing
As noted in Chapter 5, psychological research indicates two different types of psychological processing: implicit and explicit processing. These modes of processing may be contrasted on a number of dimensions.[956] Implicit processing is automatic, effortless, relatively fast, and involves parallel processing (i.e., processing going on independently in different parts of the brain) of large amounts of information; it characterizes the modules described by evolutionary psychologists. Explicit processing is the opposite of implicit processing: conscious, controllable, effortful, relatively slow, and involves serial processing of relatively small amounts of information in a sequential manner (e.g., performing the steps of solving a math problem). Explicit processing is involved in the operation of the mechanisms of general intelligence[957] as well as controlling emotional states and action tendencies (such as anger or frustration tending lead to aggression).[958]
As noted in Chapter 5, religious beliefs are able to motivate behavior because of the ability of explicit representations of religious thoughts (e.g., the traditional Catholic teaching of eternal punishment in Hell as a result of mortal sin) to control sub-cortical modular mechanisms (e.g., sexual desire). In other words, the affective states and action tendencies mediated by evolved implicit processing are controllable by higher brain centers located in the cortex.[959] The same goes for ethnocentrism.
Being able to control impulses of any kind taps into the personality system of Conscientiousness, often labelled “effortful control” because it involves explicit, conscious effort to control impulses (see discussion below). Simply put, conscientious people are relatively better able to regulate the more evolutionarily ancient parts of our brain responsible for many of our passions and desires.
Why is this important for thinking about psychology and White ethnocentrism? Just as conscientious people can inhibit their natural tendencies toward aggression and sexual arousal, they are able to inhibit their natural ethnocentrism. The critical point in the following is that cultural information is of vital importance for enabling people to inhibit their ethnocentric tendencies. This cultural information relies on explicit processing and provides the basis for prefrontal inhibitory control of ethnocentrism.
The conclusion is that the control of ethnocentrism is a direct consequence of the control of cultural information. My book The Culture of Critique is an attempt to understand what happened after the highwater mark of the period of ethnic defense (~1870–1930) discussed in Chapter 6.[960] The rise of the new elite meant that explicit messages about race (e.g., “there’s no such thing as race”) and ethnocentrism (e.g., “White ethnocentrism is a sure sign psychopathology and disturbed parent-child relationships) were being disseminated by the media and throughout the educational system. Especially since World War II, these messages have been consistently hostile to White ethnocentrism. And that in turn has meant that Whites have been encouraged to inhibit their natural ethnocentrism.
Moreover, as emphasized throughout this book, White people tend to be more individualistic than other peoples, implying that they are less likely than other peoples to make invidious distinctions between ingroups and outgroups and are more likely to be open to strangers and people who don’t look like them. Because Whites are low in ethnocentrism and high in Conscientiousness, controlling ethnocentrism is easier for them on average. Their subcortical mechanisms responsible for ethnocentrism are weaker to start with and hence easier to control.
There is considerable research on the roles of implicit and explicit processing in ethnocentrism and its control. Implicit attitudes on race can be measured, e.g., by performing brain scans when the subjects are looking at faces of people of different races.[961] On the other hand, explicit attitudes on race are typically assessed by filling out questionnaires which tap explicit processing. College student populations of Whites in the West typically exhibit pro-Black attitudes on tests of explicit attitudes. For example, one study found that Whites scored 1.89 on a six-point scale, with 1 meaning strongly pro-Black and 6 being strongly anti-Black.[962]
Another way to measure explicit attitudes is by interview. A recent representative sample of 2000 households found that a surprising 74 percent of Whites thought that racial identity was very important (37 percent) or somewhat important (37 percent).[963] In general, people become more racially conscious as they get older—only 53 percent claimed that racial identity was important while growing up. (I have noticed this also as a feature of Jewish identity.[964]) Even more surprising is the finding that 77 percent of Whites thought that Whites had a culture that should be preserved. However, despite asserting the legitimacy of White ethnic identity, only 4 percent of Whites claimed to be a member of an organization based on racial or ethnic identity. (This presumably includes organizations for, say, Scottish or Polish identity which are politically irrelevant in the American political context.) And 75 percent of Whites state that prejudice and discrimination are important or very important to African-American disadvantage.
In general, Blacks and other minorities have much stronger explicit ethnic identities than Whites do. For example, this same survey found that 90 percent of Blacks thought that racial identity was very important (72 percent) or somewhat important (18 percent), and 91 percent felt that Black culture was worth preserving. Blacks also demonstrate a substantially larger explicit ingroup pr
eference than Whites.[965]
The gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes is made possible by the inhibitory mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex. In one study, subjects were shown photos of Blacks and Whites while hooked up to a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine that takes pictures of the brain in action.[966] When the photos were shown for very brief periods—too short to be consciously processed, the fMRIs showed that Whites had a negative response to the photos of Blacks. This procedure therefore measures implicit negative attitudes toward Blacks.
However, when the photos of Blacks were presented for a much longer period, so that they were consciously experienced, then the difference in reaction to Black and White faces decreased. This happened because the prefrontal region was activated. In other words, people who are consciously aware that they are seeing photos of Blacks are able to inhibit the automatic negative responses from the sub-cortex. Subjects who showed the most prefrontal activation showed the lowest subcortical response. This implies that they were better able to inhibit their negative attitudes toward Blacks.
This study (and there are other studies with similar findings) shows the importance of prefrontal inhibitory control over automatic negative attitudes of Whites toward Blacks. White ethnocentrism exists, but for most Whites, it exists only in a sort of underground world of unconscious, automatic processing: it is an ethnocentrism that dares not speak its name: As soon as the explicit, conscious processor swings into action, it acts to suppress the negative implicit attitudes coming from below so that the subject’s responses align better with the cultural norms of the social environment.[967]
Young children tend to have unabashedly explicit bias in favor of their own race. Explicit race bias emerges early, as young as age three or four, peaks in middle childhood, and then undergoes a gradual decline through adolescence, typically disappearing in adulthood.[968] However, there is no such decline in implicit racial preferences, which remain strong into adulthood.[969] There is also a decline in cross-racial friends and companions as children get older. White schoolchildren are much more likely to have White friends than chance would account for, and this trend increases as they get older.[970]
This means that even as explicit racial preference in White children is declining, they become less likely to actually interact with and form friendships with children from other races. In effect, schools undergo a process of self-segregation. And among adults, Whites are significantly less likely than other racial groups to report interracial friendships and contacts.[971]
The bottom line, then, is that as children get older, they become increasingly aware of the official explicit racial ideology, and they conform to it. Their prefrontal centers of inhibitory control are becoming stronger, so that they are better able to inhibit their implicitly generated negative thoughts about racial outgroups. At the explicit level, they are free from any negative attitudes toward non-White groups and may even be politically liberal or radical. At the same time, however, they are “voting with their feet” by choosing friends and companions of the same race.
And their parents are doing the same thing. Liberals show a greater gap between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes and behavior than do conservatives. Moreover, while highly educated White parents tend to have liberal explicit attitudes on racial issues, including the desirability of school integration, these same highly educated Whites seek out schools that are racially segregated and are more likely to live in racially segregated neighborhoods. A 2018 article noted that for progressive parents, “more often than not, [their progressive] values lost out” when choosing a school.[972] Indeed, there is a positive correlation between the average education of White parents and the likelihood that they will remove their children from public schools as the percentage of Black students increases.[973] Michael Emerson, an author of the study, is quite aware of the gap between explicit attitudes and behavior: “I do believe that White people are being sincere when they claim that racial inequality is not a good thing and that they’d like to see it eliminated. However, … their liberal attitudes about race aren’t reflected in their behavior.”
The flip side of this is that less affluent Whites are more likely to have explicitly illiberal attitudes on racial issues that are condemned by elites. Yet they are also more likely to actually live in racially integrated areas and send their children to racially integrated schools, presumably due to financial constraints.
Implicit White Communities
Children’s choice of friends and parents’ choice of schools and neighborhoods reflect the raw reality of racial hypocrisy in the United States. These children and their parents are acting on their implicit attitudes, and there is a profound gap between their implicit attitudes and their behavior (which show ingroup racial preference) versus their explicit attitudes (which express the official ideology of racial egalitarianism). In effect, they are creating implicit White communities—implicit because even though these communities are an expression of (implicit) racial preferences, they cannot speak their name: Whites behaving in an implicitly White manner do not explicitly state that their friendship choices or their choice in neighbourhood or school derives from racial preference, because that conflicts with their explicit racial attitudes and with the official racial ideology of the wider culture.
White Americans are gradually coalescing into political and cultural affiliation as Whites, and this trend will continue to strengthen in the future as America ethnic diversity is more of a reality even away from the immigration centers on the East and West coasts and the southern border. But at present, this political and cultural affiliation is not yet consciously and explicitly White, at least partly because conscious White affiliation is a cultural taboo.
In the face of overwhelming sanctions on explicit assertions of White racial identity in the post-World War II world, Whites have adopted a variety of explicit identities which serve as the basis of White association and community. All of these identities exist under the radar of the political correctness enforced by elites in academia, politics, and the media: Republican political affiliation, NASCAR racing enthusiast, evangelical Christian, and country music fan. Each of these identities allow White people to associate with other Whites and even to form a White political base without any explicit acknowledgement that race plays a role.
Implicit White communities have become an increasingly important part of the American landscape as racial polarization increases due to the rise of identity politics—first among non-Whites (and encouraged by the left) but now clearly also among Whites as a reaction. The most important of these implicit White communities results from residential segregation due to White flight. As Kevin Kruse notes, “at the dawn of the twenty-first century, America found itself dominated by suburbs and those suburbs dominated by the politics of White flight and urban secession.”[974] “In the past, the hostility to the federal government, the welfare state, and taxation had been driven by racial resentment, whether in the form of segregationists inside Atlanta or secessionist suburbanites outside it. In the 1990s the new generation of suburban Republicans simply took the politics of White flight to the national stage.”[975]
As Kruse notes, race is never part of the explicit rhetoric of White flight, which tends to be expressed as opposition to the federal government, the welfare state, taxation, and perceived moral issues like abortion and homosexuality. But at the implicit level, the desire for White communities and the aversion to contributing to public goods disproportionately benefiting non-Whites are the overriding motivations.
White flight is part of the fragmented future that lies in store for the U.S. and other Western countries with high levels of non-European immigration. It is a well-established finding that the more ethnically mixed a population becomes, the greater is its resistance to redistributive policies.[976] For example, a study of donations to the United Way of America charity found that White Americans give less when their communities are more than 10 percent non-White.
Robert D. Putnam recently showed that greater racial diversity of a community is associated with a loss of trust.[977] Putnam’s result is confirmed by studies conducted at the local community level[978] and, given the recent surge in ethnic diversity, by recent survey data according to which 71 percent of Americans believe that trust in fellow citizens has declined in the last 20 years.[979] Moreover, people are found to be happier living among fellow ethnics than as an ethnic minority.[980] White people living in relatively homogeneous areas like New Hampshire or Montana are more involved with friends, the community, and politics than people in more diverse areas.[981]
At the political level, implicit Whiteness is also reflected in Howard Dean’s famous comment that the Republican Party is the party of White Christians.[982] Non-White ethnic groups tend to vote Democrat even when they have relatively high socioeconomic status, while working class Whites tend to vote Republican—a good indication that this pattern results from identity politics rather than economics. The long-term trend is that since 1992, the Republican share of the White vote has been increasing 1½ percent every four years. Moreover,
it seems a bit touchy to assume that Republicans will max out at around 60 percent of the White vote. This might be the case, but … it’s entirely possible that as our nation becomes more diverse, our political coalitions will increasingly fracture along racial/ethnic lines rather than ideological ones.[983]
Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition Page 33