This article was published in Marianne on October 27, 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 certain American academics crossed the Atlantic, losing their most outrageous traits. This was without taking into account Sylvie Laurent, author of * Poor Little White Man: The Myth of Racial Dispossession * (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'Homme), an Americanist historian, lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, and former research associate at Harvard University. Her work reveals the decrepitude of the elite schools and the most prestigious universities, riddled with differentialism, whether "racial" or "gender-based," and in which a collection of footnotes and ridiculous concepts increasingly suffices to constitute a "scientific study."

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

Jean-François Braunstein titled his exploration of the theoretical foundations of anti-speciesism, gender theory, and bioethics—which he saw as justifying bestiality, pedophilia, and eugenics— "Philosophy Gone Mad ." Sylvie Laurent is a historian, but her essay belongs to the realm of a sociology gone mad. This discipline is now the dominant force in the falsification of reality; it presents a different world of executioners and victims; it reconfigures other fields of knowledge, such as history, according to its Manichean methods.

The author compiles in her book almost all the most hollow concepts of contemporary sociology (“structural racism,” “stereotype,” “neo-reactionary,” etc.). Sylvie Laurent reads the “subtext” rather than the text itself, which allows her to attribute infamous ulterior motives to critics of multiculturalism, immigration, and affirmative action. She is less reminiscent of the great historian Fernand Braudel, whose name is associated with the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, which is publishing this book, than of Aymeric Caron, the journalist who reads “between the lines” to set himself up as a prosecutor for those who think incorrectly. For Sylvie Laurent, the fear of being relegated to a cultural minority by migratory flows is called racism; criticizing affirmative action policies based on resentment is an insult to ethnic minorities; and wanting to establish merit in place of infantilizing welfare programs is an identity reconquest. As expected, the historian laments the blurring of lines between "the supremacist far right" and the "mainstream conservative right ." She equates the Ku Klux Klan, neoconservatives, the Tea Party, Donald Trump, and Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations . Only their degree of candor separates them: some are openly villainous, others masked villains.

The good and the bad

Like a good student of contemporary sociology, Sylvie Laurent embarks on wildly abstract questions, offering the most essentialist answers imaginable. "What does it mean to be white?" she asks: "It's a rank, a status, a heritage" that the American police are tasked with maintaining, since they are the armed wing of the "racial order ." The author freezes individuals into a "race," which she specifies has a social, not a biological, meaning in her work, as if she could thus separate the wheat from the chaff. She also freezes national identities. The white American is white because he is American. He is merely the product of a "structurally" racist history. He cannot even escape his condition insofar as he is unaware 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 on "deaths of despair" ("Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism," Princeton University Press, 2020, 312 pages) conducted by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (2015). This study reveals a decline in life expectancy among middle-aged white Americans with lower levels of education due, among other things, to suicides, alcohol, and drugs. Between 1999 and 2013, their mortality rate related to these factors reportedly increased by 22%, even as the rate for all other groups decreased, including Black Americans (before Covid), whose rate nevertheless remained higher. Also between 1999 and 2013, the number of deaths due to alcohol and drugs reportedly quadrupled for white people who had never attended university. Suicides are estimated to have increased by around 81% among this segment of the population. These trends are said to have led to a significant decline in average life expectancy in the United States, the first since the AIDS epidemic. These "poor whites," who have thus joined the ranks of victims of capitalism and the American healthcare system, constitute a considerable portion of Donald Trump's voters.

“Reverse discrimination”

So focused on her campaign to discredit the United States, Sylvie Laurent overlooks the work of authors such as Thomas Frank in the US ( Why the Poor Vote Right , Agone, 2013), David Goodhart in England ( The Two Clans: The New Global Divide , Les Arènes, 2019), and Christophe Guilluy in France ( Peripheral France: How the Working Classes Were Sacrificed , Flammarion, 2014), all of whom highlight the existence of working classes, predominantly white, living far from dynamic metropolitan areas and often tempted by "populism." She fails to grasp the unity of the social transformations underway in the West under the effects of globalization. The socially downwardly mobile white person, but also the French, English, and American of long-standing immigrant background, are two important figures within the working classes who live in the so-called 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 familiar to them. Their votes were decisive in the victory of the "yes" vote on Brexit and in the election of Donald Trump.

Sylvie Laurent, however, sees not a single genuinely poor white person among Donald Trump's electorate. Having elected a Black president, she argues that 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)—are consumed by nothing but vengeance. According to the author, the next American presidential election will be a mere 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, these minorities will vote Democrat. The others, these whites weary of civil rights, will vote for Trump in the hope that he will once again be granted the right to use violence to assert "white supremacy ." Sylvie Laurent unwittingly illustrates the validity of the "reverse discrimination" thesis.

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 her book, but enough to understand that it could have applied the exact same reasoning, thus undermining her thesis of the specificity of American history. Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan would be replaced by Éric Zemmour and the National Front; former footballer Lilian Thuram and Rokhaya Diallo, the activist and co-founder of Les Indivisibles , who share the common goal of reintroducing race into 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 white supremacy over minorities. If Sylvie Laurent were to publish such a work, her historian-sociologist friends would at least champion it at the Collège de France.

* Sylvie Laurent, Poor Little White Man: The Myth of Racial Dispossession , Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme , 318 pp., 12 euros