The modern United States of America is not a “white supremacist” society. In his recently published The Unprotected Class: How Anti-White Racism is Tearing America Apart, Claremont Institute’s Jeremy Carl makes one of the most obvious but least discussed points of our era: there exists far more bigotry against whites, and less bigotry against population minorities (although some certainly remains) than is generally recognized in polite conversation.

　　Carl’s thesis, parts of which I have outlined before in less comprehensive form, can really be broken down into three parts. First, “white supremacy” has not been a genuine problem in the United States for some time. Brown v. Board opened the door for desegregation in 1954, and was followed up by a series of laws culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which Carl argues became “almost a second Constitution”). Pro-minority affirmative action has existed at scale at least since 1967. As The Unprotected Class states as early on as page three, this is in fact why we can talk constantly and openly about racism and “white privilege,” in the integrated America of 2024: North Koreans don’t spend a lot of time discussing the phenomenon of “one-family, unelected, Asian male dictatorship.”

　　Second, this plain fact of declining racism—among all groups—is being widely, almost comprehensively denied by the American intelligentsia. Carl, while not a quantitative methodologist, presents a fair amount of solid data demonstrating this—in one chapter pointing out that less than 60 percent of all Americans, including senior citizens, currently believe that any “improvement in the civil rights of Black Americans” occurred during their lifetimes. Remarkably, that figure is down dramatically relative to the scores in the mid-to-high 80s which were recorded for all races from the 1990s until the mid-2010s. It is hard not to notice that this growing, and logically baseless, sense of racial depression tracks neatly with the rise of an academic paradigm literally called “Afro-pessimism,” and with the claims of radical scholars such as Ibram X. Kendi (née Henry Rogers) that every performance gap recorded between whites and Blacks must be due to racism.

　　Third and most important, a great deal of actual bias against whites—often in the name of stopping rather imaginary bias in favor of them—exists today. This last point is obviously the true focus of The Unprotected Class, and the book provides a multitude of mostly on-point examples. Some are frankly amusing: at one point, Carl notes something that every casual fan of televised sport has un-scientifically observed—the casts (castes?) of major-brand commercials often seem to have been selected by corporate diversity committee, and competent white men in same-race marriages are a vanishing breed.

　　Others are less funny. The lead voice behind the New York Times’ lauded 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, is on record calling the white race “the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief in the modern world.” Despite this, the 1619 educational curriculum—much of which conveys basically the same point of view—is one of the more popular educational supplements in American schools. Major magazines and journals, at the level of Salon, quite regularly run articles with titles like “White Men Must Be Stopped–the Future of Mankind Depends on It.”

　　I—perhaps unsurprisingly, as a sardonic Black guy—do not agree with every point Carl makes. The idea that any native-born Americans, citizens of the world’s richest and most powerful country, where formal discrimination against almost everyone has been illegal for 60 years, are “oppressed” is a bit rich. It is to be hoped that besuited white men do not adopt the leaning-forward-with-begging-bowl posture that is already unbearable enough when affected by minority teenagers or aqua-haired campus feminists.

　　At present, whites remain by far the largest and most powerful group in our Sacred Union, coming to the communal table with 202,981,791 white-only citizens (per American Community Survey data presented via Wikipedia and Britannica), versus a mere 40,191,304 Blacks. To be sure, there are 53,868,002 Hispanics—something Carl notes when arguing that the USA is now only 58–61 percent white. However, the roughly two-thirds of Latinos self-identify as white, and many are Caucasian in population-genetic terms, something often overlooked in today’s era of intense ethnic consciousness. America remains more than 75 percent white if we simply count the Caucasian majority of Hispanics, along with groups like “MENA” Lebanese and Jewish Americans, as white.

　　Whites are also doing pretty well financially—posting a median household income of $74,932 versus $57,671 for non-white Hispanics, $53,148 for Native Americans, and $48,297 for Blacks. They have significantly more wealth, at the mean, than other groups: according to one recent in-depth study from the Census Bureau, white households were on average about ten times as wealthy as Black households in 2021. Further, the population dispersion of each American group makes any sort of genuine civil or racial war scenario wildly unlikely. As conservative eminence grise Thomas Sowell pointed out more than a decade ago, about 50 percent of all American Blacks and Hispanics live in the South and Southwest, while a giant state such as North Dakota remains almost 85 percent white even today. White Americans, for great good and occasional ill, will be with us for a long time to come.

　　Ethnic conflict is certainly a serious issue that should be seriously discussed, but our society faces many current problems—from war and crime to fiscal irresponsibility and poor education—that are empirically much more important.

　　Still, Carl does make a number of excellent points. For one, as he notes as early as page six and then throughout the book, the “Kendi” argument that some subtle form of racism causes all group performance gaps is simply idiotic. To use his example of group income, from Chapter One: while some native-born minorities struggle, America’s 19,157,288 Asians out-earn whites by a significant margin—with an average household income of $100,573. Specific Asians groups do even better, with Indians ($152,341) and Taiwanese Americans ($122,951) currently holding the #1 and #2 slots in the USA.

　　Black immigrants—importantly—are also extremely successful, with the Guyanese ($83,412), Nigerians ($72,577), Ghanaians ($72,089), Barbadians ($72,053), and Trinidadians ($71,920) all performing right around the white par. In contrast, the poorest single ethnic population in the United States is currently Appalachian Americans ($49,717), who perform almost exactly as well as native-born African Americans, and for similar reasons. Obviously, racism analyzed alone explains basically none of this complex picture.

　　Carl (I write here as an occasional boss, and by training a lawyer) is also correct that there exist many exotic varieties of anti-majority discrimination in modern America, many of them almost unknown to casual observers of the passing scene. Per the 1971 case Griggs v. Duke Power Company, for example, it is generally illegal for a business entity to use IQ or board tests, or any other instrument likely to have a “disparate” impact across different racial and sex groups, as part of any hiring process. This is the case even when doing so would make obvious sense, unless “business necessity” can be established, and tends to disadvantage white, Asian, and male applicants.

　　As Gail Heriot of the US Commission on Civil Rights has noted, the disparate impact standard is not only biased in practice but also makes almost everything “presumptively illegal”—because virtually any mental or physical test will produce somewhat different results among millions-strong groups of competitors or representative samples from them. We can imagine the results of almost any running of the Olympic 100- or 200-meter dash on the one hand: on the other, a typical recent administration of the SAT exam produced average scores of 941 for Blacks, 963 for Natives, 986 for Pacific Islanders, 987 for Latinos, 1118 for whites, and 1181 for East and South Asian Americans. Obviously, any policy of proportional representation, much less affirmative action, can operate successfully only by giving boosts at least as large as these testing gaps to members of under-performing groups—thus wildly disadvantaging members of those groups that are doing better.

　　Although this is not the book’s core theme, The Unprotected Class also takes time to make a very important point that I found myself mulling over while researching my own recent book Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. As Carl puts it, America’s post-1950 “struggle against anti-minority racism” often seems to have “swallowed up every other consideration of what makes a successful society.” This is something that almost every classroom teacher has noticed—far more high school students or college freshmen can name Malcolm X than Henry Ford—and it has significant social implications.

　　Ethnic conflict is certainly a serious issue that should be seriously discussed, but our society faces many current problems—from war and crime to fiscal irresponsibility and poor education—that are empirically much more important. By no purely logical standard should the death of career criminal George Floyd have been a larger national story than the near-doubling of the African American homicide rate during the Black Lives Matter era, the murky Chinese origins of COVID-19, or the $35,000,000,000,000 scale (!) of our national debt. For that matter, while “diversity” can be both a positive and a negative to be sure, citizens can fairly ask why this is often considered a more critical strength of the USA than our continental size or defensible location or deep-water coast-line—and thus is discussed at proportionate length in almost every textbook.

　　It is a given that America should not formally discriminate against Blacks. It should also be a given, however, that we ought not discriminate against whites. Seventy years after Brown, we should most often center our national historical conversations on topics besides civil rights, reparations, and slavery. Carl’s book, which makes these points and valiantly attempts to start a new conversation, is well worth the read.