Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
I think we should entitle our short video today “Tribalism: Tribalism Doesn’t Work.”
And what do I mean by that? The ancient prejudice that people would identify largely with people who resemble them, whether that’s in terms of religion or gender or sexual orientation or superficial appearance, and that they would have cliques or cohorts or tribes, does not work in a consensual society in which all groups vote for an elected government.
And when we see this in Rwanda or we saw it in Iraq or we see it in Lebanon or we see it in some places in large democracies like Indonesia or the caste system in India or racial tensions in Brazil, it does not work.
So what’s going on right now?
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Well, if you look at the nature of the United States right now, we are seeing one tribal group pitted against the other, and they’re jockeying for political power.
They’re jockeying for share of government expenditures. They’re jockeying for everything, admissions to college, and it’s accentuated by our establishment, whether it’s racial quotas or uneven application of the law based on a person’s race or superficial appearance.
Just take a couple examples.
As I speak right now, the black community in Detroit is galvanizing against the Arab immigrant community. Apparently, there was an incident in which an African American woman was surrounded by Arab men, and words were exchanged, and her purse was stolen, and she was intimidated and called for help. And the result of that is long-simmering anger against the Arab immigrant community, the Muslim community in particular, because they are on the front line of 7-Eleven-type stores, gas stations, small stop-and-go markets in which many of the majority population of African Americans in Detroit use, and there has been tension.
Now that tension is boiling up to abject violence. At York College, in an off-campus home, a group of African American girls were walking by. Words were exchanged with the people residing in the house, and before we knew it, there was a swarm that went up on the porch, grabbed two or three of the white girls, beat them to a pulp, knocked them unconscious.
Part of what the problem is social media. Now, for the first time in recorded history, you can take any event, film it without context or commentary, and put it on YouTube or TikTok or X. And so what’s happening is all over the seven billion-person planet, but particularly in Western countries, when they see, when the public sees an incident, they capture it and they post it.
And the more that they can do this and the more clicks, perhaps they can get advertising revenue. So there’s incentives. That said, the government since 1965, though, has accentuated not unity but diversity, and now we’re bearing or suffering through the effects of those policies. Again, as I’d mentioned earlier, part of the problem also is that the Obama administration did something that was not noticed at the time.
It was unheralded, but it was probably the most divisive thing, act, protocol, attitude, ideology we’ve seen in recent history. They took the old affirmative action binary of 89, 90, 88% white so-called versus 9, 10, 11% black, and we framed that in the context of slavery, Jim Crow, reparatory admissions, affirmative action, and there was an economic element to it.
People said, “Well, the black community is on a per capita basis less affluent because of the white community, and that’s because of the discrimination of the past.” The Obama people came in and said, “Well,” and now I’m extrapolating, “that constituency that has claims against the majority is a lot larger than 10 or 11%.
“We’re going to include anybody, Indian immigrants from Mumbai, aristocratic children of professionals in Chile that have an accent on their name, members of the Middle East.”
And now I’m just going to give you some names. Hassan Piker, a multimillionaire family, drives a $200,000 Porsche. Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan immigrant who’s very, very wealthy.
Ro Khanna, his in-laws are worth probably a quarter of a billion dollars. I could go on and on and on.
Barack Obama, who is now a multimillionaire, many times over.
Under this new binary, it doesn’t matter your class status. There’s many ethnicities that are much more affluent on a per capita basis than so-called white people, but you’re a victim.
And that skewed everything because the whole basis of reparatory attitudes was not just skin color or demonstrable prejudice. It was you didn’t really have to cite the prejudice because you could look at the income inequality.
And even though we had institutionalized a quality of opportunity, there were calls for an equality of result because of the disequilibrium between income.
But now what’s the problem is we have generations coming up, two, three generations that have never seen Jim Crow, have never seen racism. They’ve seen only the reaction to it and things like affirmative action and DEI and programs to aid people who are not white.
In other words, when Obama really said that people who step foot in the United States for one minute who are not white, people who come from wealthy families from Asia, people who do very well in the black community. They’re all victims of whites.
And yet you see that there’s 45, 50 million impoverished whites among the majority population. It doesn’t really, it doesn’t jibe. It doesn’t compute. And when you add other elements to it, such as the data on interracial crime or the data on hate crimes, that the so-called white majority in rare, rare, let’s be honest, they’re not common, but in about 7% to 8% of all crimes, they are interracial.
And in that 7%, African Americans who, take one group, are far more likely at six to 10 times the ratio to assault, murder, steal from whites than whites black. And the same ratio, the same inequality occurs with Hispanics and whites. And the same inequality happens with blacks and Hispanics and Asians.
So what I’m getting at is the government says that there are oppressed groups that need reparatory action.
The public says, “Well, when I look at hate crimes, the people who are supposedly victims are overrepresented as victimizers. When I look at rare interracial crimes, the people who are supposed victims are overrepresented as victimizers. When I look at income inequality, I see six, seven, eight, nine, 10 groups, whether Arab Americans or immigrants from India or Japanese Americans, you name it, who have more per capita income than the supposed oppressor class.”
And when you then give up on the melting pot, acculturation, assimilation, integration, and you educate a whole generation of youth to be infatuated with, obsessed with superficial appearance, and it doesn’t jibe into this demonstrable inequality in terms of real victimhood or crime or income necessarily, then you get this anger.
And the anger now is not just white versus non-white. It’s breaking out everywhere, and social media and the internet is the fuel that accelerates this pathology.
We all know what the medicine is. The medicine is to forget racial chauvinism and to renounce tribalism and to judge and associate and talk with people as if their race is incidental and not essential to who we are, to who they are.
The problem is, in finishing, that our government thinks the medicine for that disease of tribalism is worse than the disease itself.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.
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