The Great White Hoax
Two Centuries of Selling Racism in America
by Philip Kadish (The New Press)
Even without the great outline of themes in the political life of the United States, the facts this book covers are rare and delightful.
Except the title is awful. A weak pun to being with, it has been used before, and is not descriptive. It becomes more a term of art in this book, describing a sort of white supremacist doctrinal move. Reading the book, it feels like the term was meant to cohere a series of journal articles into a single program of a book, which, in the closing chapters of the book, is how the author describes writing it.
To get the rest of the problems out of the way, the writing is arch. The author loves to look at the camera and provide the historical analog for contemporary events, usually overstating the obvious with too much smarmy contempt. In particular, this leads to a weak closing. The already stretched to the factual bounds description of a continuum of events seems even weaker in such a context. Not in having a side, but in playing with it.
Of course, I love it, but I am in the Alice Roosevelt school of prized discourse. My suspicion is, if you are following my reviews, you are too. So this is a problem that is also not a problem.
The book is a spiritual sequel to the Mismeasure of Man. Arguably, it looks to answer the question that was the tagline of my own review. It is about racist lies in the history of U.S. politics, which fits within a greater tradition of bunkum and politicized deception in the United States.
Usually they are fanciful, which makes no difference in their reception.
The creators’ intentions are blurry between supporting white supremacy and fleecing the rubes. Often there is a scientific quality, with the author going so far as to claim that science’s repudiation of racism marked the moment where racists repudiated science.
Most are facilitated by new technologies of their day. Strikingly so, in fact: it is established the moral panics that often come about around new technologies are remarkably similar, but noteworthy here is that the practices are as well. In other words, people are hoodwinked by changes in newsprint in the same way that they are hoodwinked by changes in LLM sophistication.
Most are forgotten, or at least remembered disproportionately to their effects. The last point might be the true point of unification between the examples here. This is absolutely the book to make you the least favorite cocktail party guest with the most malignant trivia about the awesome, awful thing that is the United States. Oh, and several involve P.T. Barnum, appropriately.
The holotype here is a pamphlet titled “Miscegenation,” with the original suprise being that it invented the term. Not since ‘trimester’ will you be so surprised at a history of a word and its usage. Originating as an attack on Lincoln and other Republicans and anti-slavery advocates during the Civil War, it intentionally added a sort of Uncle Chester factor to motivate people towards pro-slavery and to attack the good interests of the anti-slavery faction as prurient. It takes an argument about civil liberties and fills it with pseudoscience and fear to justify white supremacy, which ends up being all about money anyway.
The book stands for the idea that, to paraphrase Faulkner, history does not repeat itself, because it isn’t even history. Whatever notion that we have in the United States of a fair media is as fictional as the G in MAGA. There is a great thesis to be written here about how the facts here intersect with the small l-liberal meritocratic marketplace of ideas mythology and why we came to think about media in that way. Instead, fake news is the norm in the United States, not the modern invention, and the book points out the number of otherwise esteemed people who participated in it in some sort of media deception, or otherwise supported or took its wrong facts as assumed.
But before you have to hand it to Curtis Yarvin and assume a Dark Enlightenment, an additional sub-theme of the book is the heroic opposition. There is always someone who knows better. There is always someone who resists the hoax. They are always outnumbered. And the hoaxers here tend not to ‘win,’ or end up conflicted and tortured features of their own stories, swallowed by their own lies which can sometimes go where they do not want. It is messy, and it is frightening, but it is hopeful.
(There is a significant sub-story here of the author’s discovery of a prior lone researcher’s work in the topic, which itself is a lone standout concerning the authorship of the Miscegenation text, that might as well be an adventure story in and of itself.)
The only real complaint here is that the writing, in its need to score points, can employ too much spin and end up over-leveraging a position. This is functionally the weakness of the concluding chapters, where the author tries to find the direct linkages to contemporary politics, which is surplus at best and red-string conspiracy at worst. In exposing the structure of structural racism, you do not need to glue a bow to the flying buttress. The thing speaks for itself.
My thanks to the author, Philip Kadish, for writing the book, and to the publisher, The New Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 