The Two Racisms

 On the latest episode of The Argument podcast, Matt Yglesias was opining about the recent MAGA obsession with ginning up anti–South Asian bigotry—captured perhaps most succinctly by a notorious social media post from Bo French, a GOP candidate for statewide office in Texas (who, thankfully, lost), about South Asian football fans cheering at a UT-Austin home game. 

Yglesias argues that MAGA's failure to make hating on South Asian people a winning electoral pitch speaks well of the American electorate. And doubtless, he is right about that. 

On the other hand, I'm not sure I draw quite such reassuring conclusions from it as he does. 

Yglesias suggests that voters are going around with different unfair stereotypes about different immigrant communities in their heads. And while none of these stereotypes may be remotely well-founded—or, still less, just to the individual members of various groups—they nonetheless shape many American voters' default attitudes to immigration. 

People from poorer countries in Africa and Latin America often get stereotyped in voters' minds (falsely, as the statistics prove, but enduringly, by people like our president) as "criminals" or people who abuse social services. Meanwhile, the default stereotype about South Asian and East Asian immigrants is that they are hard-working, academically successful—"model minorities," in short. 

Yglesias suggests that part of what the failure of the Bo French candidacy proves in Texas is that ordinary voters don't actually respond much to attacks on "model minorities." When people are told: "look at this immigrant group; they are succeeding in America and attending a flagship state university and cheering for the home team, isn't that terrible because they are non-white?"—most voters say: "no, that's great, what are you talking about?"

According to Yglesias's theory, then, the MAGA anti–South Asian hate campaign was a helpful political science experiment in that it distilled how much of Americans' political backlash to immigration boils down to pure racism ("even if these people contribute to our society, we still hate them just because they are non-white"—i.e., the Bo French position) vs. people really just wanting to see immigrants "assimilate" and "work hard," etc., and so they are only mad at the specific immigrant groups who are often stereotyped as "criminals" and welfare cheats. 

Well, okay, but to my mind, the question then just becomes: why are immigrants from Latin America and Africa more likely to be stereotyped as "criminal" and "lazy," when the opposite is proved every day? Doesn't that have something to do with racism? 

In reality, all sociological evidence suggests that refugee and immigrant communities from Latin America and Africa have lower crime rates than native-born U.S. citizens. They work harder jobs for longer hours and lower pay than all the rest of us. Far from being "welfare cheats," they are overwhelmingly net contributors to public coffers, because they pay taxes as working age adults but are barred by law from receiving most social services in return, which are largely reserved for U.S. citizens.  

So why are voters more likely to have negative stereotypes about these groups, and positive stereotypes about South Asians and East Asians, unless "pure racism" really is a factor in U.S. elections, pace Yglesias's more optimistic thesis? 

I think the political sociology observation that Yglesias is talking about here—namely, the fact that Trump bashing Mexicans and Hondurans and Haitians seemed to "work" in a national election, whereas Bo French bashing Indians and Pakistanis did not "work" for Republicans in Texas—has an all too obvious and far less encouraging explanation. 

Namely, people tend to feel the most racism not against groups that are most different from them, but against groups they feel they are competing against most directly. Freud called this the "narcissism of minor differences," and it remains a potent factor in politics.

Now, most American voters are not competing for high-skilled tech jobs or slots at selective flagship state universities. Most Americans have at most a high school education or an associate's degree. Thus, the majority of the electorate does not feel that they are in direct competition with the groups who are stereotyped as "model minorities." Hence, they are able to look at their perceived success and say "good for them." They do, however, feel competitive with immigrant groups who are stereotyped as seeking low-wage working-class jobs. And so, working-class voters are more likely to perceive them as a threat. 

This element of competitiveness and fear in human psychology is undoubtedly the unconscious source of a great deal of racism. 

In his study of H.P. Lovecraft, for instance, Michel Houellebecq observes that the author's neurotic racial hatred against immigrants emerged only once Lovecraft found himself unemployed in New York for a period and forced to compete for work. Prior to this, Lovecraft had been fairly indifferent to race. Only after his stint looking for a job, and feeling that all these new arrivals must somehow be boxing him out of all the available positions (the "great replacement" fear?), did Lovecraft become the fanatical racist paranoiac of his later writing. 

Likewise, the always-wise and hilarious Robert Tressell—that most trenchant observer of working-class political psychology—satirizes early on in his great novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, the ease with which conservative newspapers and politicians were able to redirect populist anger by promoting absurd fear-mongering rumors about some alien community. As Tressell describes, in his inimitable style, one conversation among his working-class protagonists: 

“Yes,” said old Joe Philpot, tragically, “and then thers all them Hitalian horgin grinders, an’ the blokes wot sells ’ot chestnuts; an’ wen I was goin’ ’ome last night I see a lot of them Frenchies sellin’ hunions, an’ a little wile afterwards I met two more of ’em comin’ up the street with a bear.” 

Notwithstanding the disquieting nature of this intelligence, Owen again laughed, much to the indignation of the others, who thought it was a very serious state of affairs. It was a dam’ shame that these people were allowed to take the bread out of English people’s mouths: they ought to be driven into the bloody sea.

This, alas, is still how much of the working class American electorate perceives Haitian and Central American and Somali asylum-seekers—as people who, as the local demagogue puts it in Auden's poem "Refugee Blues," "have come to take our daily bread." 

Now, MAGA influencers tend not to be working class people competing for low wage jobs themselves. Rather, they are the sorts of people who compete for slots at selective universes and law schools. Thus, they have an elite fear of status competition with groups who are stereotyped as highly motivated and successful "model minorities," rather than as working-class layabouts and welfare cheats. 

We are profoundly kidding ourselves if we think this type of "elite" racism, as opposed to working-class racism, is a less dangerous or potent force in politics. I would say that both are equally horrible; but if anything, it can be even more catastrophic for society when elite groups develop a racist obsession. This is the psychological origin of much anti-Semitism, for instance; and it should therefore not at all surprise us that this form of bigotry too is now resurgent on the right, including with many of the same individuals who are obsessing over what they now call "the Indian Question."

There are thus at least two kinds of racism: populist and elite. Neither is a good thing; though the former may have slightly more mass appeal in a democratic society with a largely working-class electorate. 

Now, just to underline how disconnected from reality these racist worldviews are, we should note that it often happens, in the course of history, that the same group will be subjected to first one, and then the other, form of racism, as its sociological composition and default stereotype changes. 

Hence, when Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth century were largely seeking low-wage working class jobs, they were routinely subjected to populist racism and violence (see Edgar Lee Masters's haunting poem on the subject, "Ye Bow"). But once East Asians were perceived as competing for admissions slots at selective universities, anti-Asian racism became a more elite preserve. 

The same goes for anti-Semitism. And indeed, much of the current MAGA obsession with Indians and Pakistanis is really just a kind of disguise or psychological displacement for an underlying anti-Semitic hobbyhorse. 

Many of the MAGA influencers are not even trying to hide the ball on this. Their phrase about the "Indian question" is obviously borrowed from the rhetoric of anti-Semitism. And some of the same figures leading the current anti–South Asian hate movement have also posted anti-Semitic memes (the NYT reports: "[Bo] French shared a poll on social media last year asking whether Muslims or Jews were a bigger threat to America").

This all tracks. Jews were in many ways the original "model minority" in the lexicon of American immigration stereotypes—and hence, they have long been the target of specifically intra-elite forms of bigotry. (Nor, need we observe, is this merely an American phenomenon. Ernest Gellner writes in his Nations and Nationalism that anti-Semitism has long derived its psychic potency around the world from the perception that Jews are "economically privileged"). 

Yet, before Jews were stereotyped (and attacked) as model minorities, they were stereotyped as criminals. This shift from one racism to another—from populist racism to elite racism—corresponded with the change in people's stereotyped notion of Jews' social position. 

For a glimpse into the earlier form of populist anti-Semitism—from the days in which Jews were perceived primarily as competing for working-class jobs, and therefore had all the usual "working class" negative stereotypes lobbed at them ("criminal," "lazy," etc.), recall this passage from Mike Gold's indelible memoir of immigrant life in New York, Jews Without Money: "Ku Klux Klan moralizers say the gangster system is not American. They say it was brought here by 'low class' European immigrants. What nonsense. There never were any Jewish gangsters in Europe. [... I]t is America that has taught the sons of tubercular Jewish tailors how to kill." 

Gold is obviously correct here. But note the stereotype he had to combat at the time. Jews, so long as they were predominantly a working-class community in America, were perceived as "killers," and "gangsters." 

These are exactly the same stereotypes Trump has deployed to such effect against predominantly working class immigrant communities in contemporary politics: "they're bringing crime; they're bringing drugs; they're rapists; they're killers," and all that. 

The mistake of Trump's MAGA epigoni was to shift the focus away from populist racism toward elite racism and intra-elite status competition, which is bound to have less electoral appeal for a largely non-elite public.  

But it doesn't mean, alas, that American voters are somehow immune to xenophobia and bigotry. Far from it. It just means that Trump, with his instinctual sense for all the tricks of demagogy, was better at exploiting the types of racist fears and obsessions that are common to a mass audience.