That Ol' Comfy Racism

“At least I can hate the bad people again” was a particularly comforting thought brought to me by the Trump administration this week.

When I was most formative (1990s) it was common knowledge¹ that if you wanted the best people you hired women. They had to work twice as hard as men to get to the same positions. The societal headwinds were so strongly against them that only the most determined, fierce, and competent would make it through the filtering process. The sub-average women certainly would never make it into any serious applicant pool. Men, on the other hand, might be genius, but they were also the vast mass of mediocrity, and there was not much keeping out the dregs.

Yes, this sucked for the women. It wasn’t fair that they faced so much extra selection pressure. It wasn’t fair they had to work that much harder and be that much better than their male peers just to get a seat at the table. It lowered the overall quality of the total pool of human talent. BUT if you were an average person looking for a doctor or a lawyer or any sort of specialist that went through a filtering process² if you picked a woman at random you’d never get someone incompetent. And you’d have far higher odds of accidentally getting a genius that had been overlooked than if you picked from the men. It was a huge advantage to limit yourself to just the pool of women.

And of course this was roughly equally applicable to minorities of all types.

One of the things I really resented about wokeism when I finally came fully unwoke was how much they inverted this. How the policies of pushing through the worst candidates as long as they had the right genitals or skin color had destroyed all the honor acquired by the previous generations. Honor forged from pain by heroic effort by people that had always been a cut above everyone around them out of sheer steel-willed determination. Now I was forced into a sort of cheap caricature of racism just to protect myself. I had to give slightly more scrutiny to “diverse” people of a certain cohort to check for basic competence when performance really mattered. I will never forgive the woke left for doing that.

So when Trump took office and the new woke right started mass purges of “diverse” people I knew exactly what this meant: now the reverse would be true again. The filter for straight white men would once again be far too permissive—disproportionately allowing through incompetent fools, spoiled nephews, and worthless mooches. This would be bad for me personally as a Straight White Male, because people would again have the heuristic of “more likely to suck,” but at least I would finally be able to comfortably say again “The animus to this class of person is justified. They really do suck more than average. At least Trump gave me that gift.”

For a minute it felt warm and comfortable to say that.

We can’t help how we were raised. We didn’t choose which things would instinctively make us feel anxious vs comforted. That shit is ingrained on a deep, body-tissue level, when we’re too young to know better. It’s programmed into the intuitive brain.

But damned if you can’t eventually learn to recognize the bad shit in your upbringing. At last I had enough experience and insight that almost immediately I realized “Oh… this is what racism feels like. Actual ‘but it’s good actually’ style racism that people stick to. This is that feeling, no wonder it stays around.”

And it is bad, actually. We shouldn’t strive for a group to be as bad in reality as our instincts want to view them. I shouldn’t feel relief over it. This hurts all of society and every individual within it. If you’re like me, stay on guard during the next four years. The people who were your natural enemies will look increasingly villainous again. Remember that your body wants you to see the worst in them. Remember that racism is bad even when it’s against the people you were taught to dislike. Remember we vowed to be above this for good fucking principled reasons. That’s what makes us different.

1. in my social strata

2. just imagine how incredible at violent conflict you’d have to be to be a woman warrior! Many sigma outlier to make it that far!