This article appeared in Marianne the 27 / 10 / 2020

In "Poor Little White Man: The Myth of Racial Dispossession," French historian Sylvie Laurent accumulates the most hollow concepts of contemporary sociology to incriminate the American white.

Until recently, the delusions of some American academics crossed the Atlantic without their most outrageous features. That was without counting on Sylvie Laurent, author of Poor Little White Boy: The Myth of Racial Dispossession (Fondation maison des sciences de l'homme), Americanist historian, teacher at Sciences Po Paris and former associate researcher at Harvard University. Her work reveals the decrepitude of the grandes écoles and the most prestigious universities, gangrened by differentialism whether "racial" or "gender" and in which a sum of footnotes and ridiculous concepts is increasingly enough to make a "scientific study".

The author compiles in his book almost all the most hollow concepts of contemporary sociology.

Jean-François Braunstein had given the title of Philosophy Gone Mad to her exploration of the theoretical foundations of anti-speciesism, gender and bioethics, which justified bestiality, pedophilia and eugenics. Sylvie Laurent is a historian but her essay belongs to the register of a sociology gone mad. This is today the queen discipline in terms of falsifying reality; it tells of another world made of executioners and victims; it reconfigures other areas of knowledge, such as history here, according to its Manichean methods.

The author compiles in his book almost all the most hollow concepts of contemporary sociology ("structural racism", "stereotype", "neoreactionary" etc.). Sylvie Laurent reads the "subtext" rather than the text itself, which allows her to attribute infamous ulterior motives to the critics of multiculturalism, immigration and positive discrimination. She is less reminiscent of the great historian Fernand Braudel, whose name is associated with the Maison des sciences de l'Homme which is now publishing this book, than of Aymeric Caron, the journalist who reads "between the lines" to set himself up as the prosecutor of those who think badly. For Sylvie Laurent, the fear of being put in a cultural minority by migratory flows is called racism; criticizing positive discrimination policies based on resentment would be an insult to ethnic minorities; wanting to erect merit in place of infantilizing welfare programs would be an identity Reconquista. As expected, the historian deplores the porosity between "the extreme right supremacist" and "dyed-in conservative right". She puts on the same level the Ku Klux Klan, the neoconservatives, the Tea Party, Donald Trump and the author of Clash of civilizations Samuel Huntington. Only the degree of frankness would separate them: some would be open-faced bastards, others masked bastards.

The good and the bad

As a good student of contemporary sociology, Sylvie Laurent launches into questions of delirious abstraction to which she provides the most essentializing answers possible. “What does it mean to be white?” she asks: "It's a rank, a status, a heritage" that the American police are responsible for maintaining since they are the armed wing of the"racial order". The author freezes individuals in a "race", which she specifies has a social and not a biological meaning for her, as if she could thus distinguish the wheat from the chaff. She also freezes national identities. The white American is white because he is American. He is only the product of a "structurally" racist history. He cannot even escape his condition to the extent that he is not aware that he hates the other.

Contrary to what he thinks, the White man depicted by the historian would not be socially downgraded any more than culturally dispossessed. If he does have some economic difficulties, Sylvie Laurent concedes, they would be incomparable with those suffered by Blacks and Hispanics. He would especially feel a sense of downgrading, to paraphrase all those "researchers" who diagnose a "feeling of insecurity" in order to better conceal real insecurity. Patriotism, work ethic and Christianity would be for him only pretexts justifying his privileges compared to ethnic minorities.

Unsurprisingly, Sylvie Laurent also opposes the famous study of "died of despair" ("Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism", Princeton University Press, 2020, 312 pages) led by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, winner of the "Nobel" in economics (2015). The latter reveals a decline in life expectancy among middle-aged and less educated white Americans due to, among other things, suicides, alcohol and drugs. Between 1999 and 2013, their mortality rate linked to these factors would have increased by 22% even though that of all other groups fell, including that of Blacks (before covid) which nevertheless remained higher. Also between 1999 and 2013, the number of deaths due to alcohol and drugs would have quadrupled for whites who had never been to university; suicides would have increased by around 81% among this category of the population. These developments are said to have led to a significant decline in average life expectancy in the United States, a first since AIDS. These "little whites", who have thus joined the ranks of the victims of capitalism and the American health system, form a significant portion of Donald Trump's voters.

“Reverse discrimination”

In her entire effort to disqualify the United States, Sylvie Laurent ignores the work of authors such as thomas frank in the USA (Why do poor people vote right?, Agone, 2013), David goodhart in England (The Two Clans: The New Global Divide, The Arenas, 2019) or Christophe Guilluy in France (Peripheral France: How we sacrificed the working classes, Flammarion, 2014), which all highlight the existence of working classes, mostly white, living far from dynamic metropolises and often tempted by "populism". It does not grasp the unity of the social recompositions at work in the West under the effects of globalization. The socially downgraded white, but also the French, the English and the American of long-standing immigration are two important figures of the working classes who live in the famous peripheral nation (60% of the population in France). They fear becoming a cultural minority in their own territory and have preferred to flee certain neighborhoods to find themselves in a cultural majority with lifestyles that are familiar to them. Their votes were decisive for the victory of the "yes" to Brexit and for the election of Donald Trump.

Sylvie Laurent does not, however, see the shadow of a truly poor white person behind Donald Trump's electorate. After electing a black president, white Americans of the "middle class" - which Christophe Guilluy has shown no longer exists (No Society: The End of the Western Middle Class, Flammarion, 2018) – would have nothing but vengeance in their heads. According to the author, the next American presidential election will be a simple repeat of the previous one: a one-sided confrontation between whites and minorities, considered the only truly poor and the only truly discriminated against. On the defensive, those will vote Democrat. The others, those whites tired of civil rights, will vote for Trump in the hope that legitimate violence will once again be delegated to him to assert the "white supremacy"Sylvie Laurent unwittingly illustrates the validity of the thesis of “reverse discrimination”.

Behind this barbaric expression, the idea is that whites would also be the object of rejection or even hatred, whether from a part of ethnic minorities but also from these "elites" who see themselves so modern in their mirror and shelter blacks and Hispanics from criticism. Sylvie Laurent acts as if ending racism required making the "Poor little white man" a scapegoat.

The author barely mentions France in his book, but enough to understand that she could have applied exactly the same reasoning to it, thus sabotaging his thesis of the specificity of American history. Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan would be replaced by Éric Zemmour and the National Front; the former footballer Lilian Thuram, and the activist co-founder of the Indivisible Rokhaya Diallo, who have in common the reintroduction of the racial criterion into the public debate, would be the legitimate representatives of oppressed minorities; secularism, and not Christianity as in the United States, would be the pretext invoked to justify an ascendancy of Whites over minorities. If Sylvie Laurent published such work, her historian-sociologizing friends would at least take it to the Collège de France.

* Sylvie Laurent, Poor Little White Boy: The Myth of Racial Dispossession, editions of the House of Human Sciences, 318 p., 12 euros