Three years ago, the left-wing mayor of a Budapest district oversaw the erection of a statue in honor of the U.S. Black Lives Matter movement. When journalists asked her for the point of putting up a monument to BLM, given that Hungary has very few black people, the politician said, “The BLM goals of opposing racism and police brutality are just as relevant in Hungary as anywhere else.”
The unusual Budapest statue (which was destroyed quickly after it was erected) was but one of hundreds of pro-BLM European demonstrations following the death of George Floyd. American racial conflicts have a way of going global in the age of worldwide mass media, as if left-wing crowds in Britain and continental Europe were connected by a central nervous system.
What these Europeans rarely understand is that the news media’s presentation of racial conflict in the U.S.—especially when it involves the interaction of blacks with police—rarely does justice to the complexity of the phenomena. The narrative spread by both American and global media is simplistic at best, and often flat-out wrong. It is distorted in part by the progressive politics of the media, but also by a more widely shared unwillingness to discuss certain aspects of race in America.
Jeremy Carl’s new book, The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism Is Tearing America Apart, offers a potent antidote to the powerful but false narrative of race in America that has guided not only journalism, but also law, public policy, and even Hollywood. It offers a calm, reasoned, fact-filled book that explains why the received narrative on race is wrong, but also why demonizing the white majority is a foolish, even dangerous, idea in a multicultural society.
The conservative public intellectual and I recently spoke by video link to his home in Montana. He believes that the information and argument in The Unprotected Class is highly relevant to current events in Europe—not only the way Europeans think of race in American culture, but also in how Europeans think about majority populations in their own nations.
Why should Europeans care about the things you write about in your book—that is, the phenomenon of systemic anti-white prejudice in the United States?
I think that in a different way, Europe is actually dealing with a lot of the same issues. And in many ways, they’re actually more poorly equipped to deal with it. In America, we have historically been open to a wide variety of people. The challenges that Europeans have with identity are more profound. The French people really do have a very specific history of being French, and how they think about themselves. Even more so with peoples like the Hungarians, who have these really strong and particularistic national identities—and in Hungary’s case, a very particularistic language.
Europe right now is being completely overrun by almost uncontrolled immigration from the developing world, from people with often dramatically different cultural and ethnic backgrounds than the native population. Whether Europe is able to assimilate those groups and also regain control of its borders is going to tell us a lot about whether Europe is going to thrive in the 21st century.
What struck me at reading your book as an American who lives in Europe, is how the particulars might be different, but the same inability of white people—or specifically white elites—to even talk about the problem for fear of being called racist is very much the same. The things you write about in your book are things that a number of white Americans have been talking about among themselves for years, but few dare to say publicly. Why did you decide to speak out now? Aren’t you worried you’ll be tagged as a racist?
Well, you just hit on it. A lot of people were talking about this privately, but few were willing to say so publicly. As somebody who wants to be a meaningful participant in the public dialogue, I took that as an invitation to step forward. Maybe this makes me sound a little braver than I was, but as you and I are both Christians, there was something of the Book of Jonah here. I mean, I felt like I was being told quite some time ago to go to Nineveh and preach to them to mend their ways. I really did resist that in some ways.
I was a think tank guy who worked in the Trump administration. Because I had a high enough position in the administration, some on the Left looked at my writings on this topic, and raked me over the coals. I think that was my final signal, when the fish, so to speak, spat me up on the banks of the sea, and told me it’s time to go to Nineveh. It was like God was telling me to go this time and preach, and hopefully they’ll be willing to see it.
And as far as what people are going to call me, I can’t control that, my conscience is clear. I know why I wrote this book, and it was not out of malice toward any group, but out of a concern for America and its future. And I’ve actually been really pleasantly surprised so far. I’m sure that the hard Left will eventually come after me because the book is getting some prominence. But people have picked up on the fact that this is written in a very even-handed tone, that it is very factually based. And then it’s not an angry polemic, but a serious attempt to address the problem.
What is the central argument of The Unprotected Class?
The central argument is that anti-white racism is the dominant and most important form of racism in America today. I’m not suggesting, of course, that there are no other forms of racism in America today, or in our past, where we had other types of racism in which whites were the perpetrators, not the victims. But when you look at today’s issues, and what is salient today, it is really anti-white racism that we should be most concerned about.
Why do you believe that anti-white racism is the most important kind of racism in American life today?
It’s because white people are the most prevalent group in America. They’re the founding, historically dominant population. And again, this is not some sort of supremacy argument. It’s just a numbers argument, in terms of what the demographics of America looked like.
But what we’re doing is increasingly taking this group that is so deeply intertwined with America’s history and culture, and we’re attempting to marginalize it.
If we don’t get back to a more historic American ideal, where we’re trying to treat everybody equally based on the content of their character, not their race, we are going to empower extremists on all sides. Right now, you see a lot of very angry, white young men out there. And they have good reason to be angry, by the way—and that’s part of why I wrote the book. If they’re not given a healthy political outlook, and if we don’t work to create a society where those people, and all people, feel that they can be treated on an equal basis, you’re going to have them choosing dark paths. That’s not going to be good for any group in America.
You have a chapter on Civil Rights law. Most people understand that what was done to black Americans under segregation was evil and needed remedy. Where did the Civil Rights legal tradition go wrong?
I’m glad you mentioned this, because this is an important point in which I feel like I’m a little bit less rigid than some other people who’ve written on this issue, who fixate on problems with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. You and I both grew up in the South and recognize that there were real and serious problems that the Civil Rights Act was trying to address. Maybe it was a blunt instrument, but the problems it attacked were real.
The concern is that we didn’t have a limitation on civil rights law. The administrative state began issuing a whole bunch of rulings that expanded the kind of scope and focus of the law, far beyond where it was originally intended to go. If you go back and read the Congressional debates on what they thought they were passing with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it’s clear that Congress in no way intended to enable a lot of the radical changes that came after.
For example, there was a Supreme Court decision in 1971, allegedly based on civil rights law, that established the principle of “disparate impact.” This is an oversimplification, but it says that if you have a hiring process, even if it’s not intended to be discriminatory, but you wind up with a disparate number, by race, of hires—then presumptively what you’ve done is illegal. That has had a profound effect on the law. Affirmative action, likewise.
That’s the American term for what many Europeans call “positive discrimination”—that is, hiring policies that discriminate in favor of non-whites, for the sake of achieving an ideal.
Affirmative action is not something that was inherent to civil rights law—in fact, it’s contrary to it—but it’s where we wound up. Then finally in 1991, we get another civil rights law, which codifies a lot of the bad stuff that the administrative state has been doing in the intervening 27 years. And what’s more, it kind of turbocharges things in the courts and makes it much easier to sue for alleged damages. So I think it’s a long process of a creative violation of the spirit of what was trying to be done with the original Civil Rights Act.
But today, if you talk about the Civil Rights Act as being problematic in the way you’ve outlined, you immediately get shouted down as wanting to take America back to days of segregation. Do you think the crisis of race in America can ever be solved without addressing the Civil Rights Act?
No, I think we’ve got to. I think we need to acknowledge that the act, written in 1964, addressed very real, prevalent challenges in American society at the time. But we are now as far away from that in 2024 as the people in 1964 were from the Wright brothers in time. We simply have a different set of challenges today. We don’t have black people not being served at lunch counters, but we do have a lot of anti-white discrimination, and even anti-Asian discrimination, in employment and lots of other areas. We can’t fix these destructive mistakes without fundamentally reforming civil rights law, and particularly the administrative rulings that have arisen from existing civil rights law
In your chapter on race and crime, you demonstrate conclusively both that the violent crime in America is mostly a black male phenomenon, and also that we Americans can’t speak honestly about it. Just the other day I saw a clip of the black American intellectual Glenn Loury saying the same thing, and warning that the unwillingness of liberals to talk about it publicly doesn’t mean ordinary people can’t see what’s happening. That’s Glenn Loury. Tell me what Jeremy Carl thinks.
Glenn is right. It’s similar to what I was just saying about how if you don’t give an outlet for some of these young white men who are justifiably angry at what they’re seeing, you’re going to get something much worse than people complaining on the Internet.
I don’t think that we should address this issue in a way designed for maximum provocation. And in fact, I don’t do that in the book. I just try to lay out what the numbers are. It becomes really important when false narratives—like what happened to George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and Michael Brown—take hold and spread widely. This has had profound effects on America’s public culture, but they are simply rooted in lies about how police interact particularly with unarmed black men.
If we allow these public lies to rule, then we are pushing our society toward this outrage theater. Then when people know the actual numbers, and know they’ve been lied to, the backlash to that outrage theater is intense. This dynamic is not serving the common good.
We need to have that discussion, and we certainly need to aggressively challenge people who are kind of promoting lies about race and crime, and who’re likely to be the victims of interracial violence and crime. By the way, it’s really clear when you look at the survey data that liberals, particularly elite white liberals, they’re not just lying about this stuff. Although they are completely wrong when they talk about it, they actually believe a lot of these incorrect facts. This is disinformation, if you will—and that’s why it’s really important to correct the record.
You also have a chapter about race and neighborhoods. Recently, in my previous city—Baton Rouge, the capital of Louisiana—a big portion of the predominantly white, prosperous southern half seceded from the poor, black, crime-ridden northern half of the city. They created a new city called St. George.
The stated reason was to gain back control of local schools. The implicit reason was that the black majority of public schools in that city are too violent and academically underachieving. St. George advocates were called racist, of course, and also accused of abandoning the poor. I don’t believe that’s true, but I do recognize that the existence of St. George represents a loss of faith in the possibility of blacks and whites living together as one community. On the other hand, what is the alternative? Does this sort of thing concern you?
It does concern me. What happened in St. George was recently tried in Atlanta, with the Buckhead neighborhood, but it didn’t succeed. I actually think that as uncomfortable as these instances are for people, this type of democratic accountability is going to be the only way that we are going to fix these problems. There’s nothing illegal going on here. I’m sure there are a lot of black people already living in St. George.
12% of St. George is black.
And there’s nothing to prevent black people from moving into it. The residents of St. George there are just saying, “hey, look, we’re not going to be your punching bag anymore. We are going to demand a school system that actually works and that is safe and that is functional.” And when I talk about white flight in my book, I point out that yes, there were prejudiced individuals who just left because they didn’t like the fact that somebody with a different color of skin was living next to them. But in many cases, this white flight was a response to real and profound problems in terms of safety and security and schooling that people were experiencing. They didn’t want to leave, but ultimately, they felt that they didn’t really have a choice.
Yeah, there was a public television documentary about St. George about 10 years ago when the process started. In it, a Baton Rouge black lawyer was quoted as saying St. George proponents are afraid of what they don’t know. That’s exactly wrong. Those people were afraid of what they do know, which was the reality of black crime and educational dysfunction in their city.
In my book, I close my introductory chapter by quoting someone who says that courage is not the absence of fear, but the judgment that something is more important than fear. And I think that’s the point that I reached. I am opening up a Pandora’s Box, not just personally, but also because it unleashes forces in society. But ultimately, I think that it’s more important that we have this conversation honestly, because these forces are going to come out one way or the other.
For so long now I’ve addressed progressives in my writing, telling them that by abandoning Martin Luther King-style liberalism on race in favor of identity politics, they were inevitably going to provoke a resurgence in racial consciousness among whites. Now we’re starting to see that emerge. Do you think it’s possible for America to reverse course—or is it too late?
Well, I think it is possible and if not, I wouldn’t be writing a book, but getting my armory ready. I mean, I am armed, but I’m not preparing for civil war tomorrow, thankfully. The key to moving forward is that we’ve got to have more of an acknowledgement of reality and again, I don’t think that that means we should say every single unpleasant fact about race relations in the United States in the most unfair, provocative way, designed to get people really angry. But I think it does mean that there’s just got to be a greater relationship between actual truth and the dialogue that we’re having.
There are substantive things that we can do, not just in terms of reforming our civil rights laws, but also to stop the anti-white discrimination formally within our laws and institutions. We need to push back against the informal racism I talk about in my chapter on Hollywood, such as the ways in which white people are being portrayed negatively, and that we would not portray any other race in the same way. I think that’s the only way that we reverse our negative trajectory, but there will be some unpleasant and contentious dialogue and politics on the way there. But I hope people realize that the only other solution is going to be one of actual conflict. That’s something that we should all be looking to avoid.
Let’s end the conversation talking once again about Europe. You said that European readers should care about your book about race in America, because both sides’ problems are parallel. You’re right about that. We’re heading into an election here in Europe, for the European Parliament. The migration issue—which is the umbrella issue covering crime, ideological radicalization, and social destabilization—is really reaching a crisis point. You’ve spent time here in Hungary. What do you think both Europe and America can learn from each other in the midst of this shared crisis?
Europeans are even behind America in terms of their refusal to deal with the problem.
I have spent a fair bit of time in Hungary over the last several years, and I think Hungary has a lot to recommend it. And by that I don’t mean that the Orbán government is perfect. It’s simply that Viktor Orbán, despite the level of hatred slung at him by European elites, is a lot more realistic about the world than the traditional liberal elites running Europe.
Europe’s security depends a lot on U.S. domestic stability, and yet the European elites tend to amplify the false left-wing narrative on race that is destabilizing the U.S. That’s the only narrative they tend to have access to, since their experience of America is usually filtered through the media—and that’s very dangerous. There were George Floyd protests in Europe—even in Budapest, based on some of the same false premises that drove the American protests. As an American, I think it’s bizarre how American events and struggles can become Europeanized almost instantly.
Now, if you believe what you’re seeing in the upcoming European Parliament polls, those elites are about to be punished on election day. And in fact, I’ve seen the so-called ‘far-right’ parties—not a term that I would use, but a term that’s often used in the European press—are likely to become the biggest parties in the European Parliament. And so, my warning to the Europeans would be to kind of stop the moral grandstanding that the traditional elites really seem to prefer to engage in. Take very seriously the complaints of your native citizenry. Don’t throw away your culture and history on the funeral pyre of multiculturalism and the chimera of economic growth. If European leaders don’t get more serious about understanding the ways that we’ve gone wrong in the way we think about race and society, then dangers to Europe are even more profound than those we find in America.
