This is a form of racial collectivism . It’s judging people by ethnic, racial, and national groups instead of as individuals. In his landmark 1955 book Strangers in the Land , which chronicles the anti-immigration movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, historian John Higham labeled this attitude “racism”. Today, of course, we can’t use... See more

Asking to be judged by the content of your character is a reasonable defense against people who are trying to judge you based on your membership in a racial group.

It turns out that individualism is a bit like free speech — a principle that lots of people tend to support when their tribe is losing, only to abandon it as soon as they’re back on top. A lot of people really do believe in individualism, of course, especially in America. But a lot of others just use it as a cynical shield when they’re on the... See more

By the racial-collectivist logic of Miller and Trump, or of the restrictionists of a century ago, Indian immigrants should be turning America into a third-world country.

And yet the exact opposite is happening. Indian Americans are arguably the most successful group in the United States. They have the highest median household income of any national... See more

As another example, take El Paso. The overwhelming majority of people in El Paso are of Mexican descent. Mexican immigration is among the least selective, because Mexico is so close to America and there was so much illegal immigration in the past. And yet despite being filled with ethnic Mexicans, El Paso looks absolutely nothing like Juarez, the... See more

Once MAGA can convince you that “Are the Somalis bad?” is a legitimate question to ask, they then pretty much automatically get to ask the same question about every other group in America. They get to ask “Are Afghans bad?”, and “Are Haitians bad?”. They’ll get to ask “Are Jews bad?”, “Are Indians bad?”, and “Are Chinese people bad?”. Eventually... See more

What I fear is that by embracing identity politics in the 2010s, progressives have thrown away liberals’ ultimate weapon. Appeals to individualism carry much less moral force when the people making those appeals just spent the last decade decrying colorblindness as a tool of systemic racism (or embracing people who made that claim).

This is not to... See more