Interesting that so much hinges on 2012. What happened in 2012? Obama was already president, it wasn’t his first election. Trump, brexit, merkel’s millions were nowhere on the scene yet. I remember noticing the extent of woke madness seeping into the public sphere outside of academia and college campuses around 2012, but I am surprised it extended so far that it is seen this much in attitudes across white liberals. Was there some media source or social media platform that was becoming very active around that time? There was HuffPost, slate, daily kos…were such things enough to have such an impact on white attitudes about other whites?
Trayvon Martin -> 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon', proto-BLM/BLM founded 2013, etc. Perhaps the awful racial discourse was also amplified by cell phones.
I don't think anyone has a comprehensive theory, but we definitely 'get' the timing, that it was harmful, etc.
I know this might sound a bit far fetched, but as I recall, 2012 was not long after the concept of a commentariat appeared on news articles. At the time, comment sections were generally unmoderated. Blogs were becoming popular and among this, HBD started to gain legs and those ideas made their way out of strictly pioneer fund pariahs. Somewhat before 2012, you saw comments responding to any news articles and editorials that contradicted legacy media claims that racial outcomes were due to some kind of oppression or poverty. When Eric holder called America a nation of cowards for not talking about race, the commentariat came forward in droves with data about race and iq stuff. At the time, HbD types were optimistic, as if HBD was about the go mainstream. This seemed plausible at the time because people making such claims were everywhere on the internet. Anyway, I got the impression that this drove educated leftists into the mode of both severe censorship and also to retreat into a mentally fortressed worldview of systemic injustice. It was like a person whose core beliefs were threatened who then retreated into a kind of fanaticism. I have no proof for this or data. It’s just how the online world appeared to be behaving to me at the time.
Agnes Callard’s unicontext theory provides an interesting explanation for this: it roughly claims that the communications revolution put us in a global normative space and certain distinctive norms were developed in this environment. In particular, racial transgressions came to have significantly more weight because it could be judged without requiring local context to understand - whereas traditional values e.g. loyalty require too long an explanation to fit into 280 characters
Would be interesting to relate this data to studies of jury bias, though I'm not sure the latter have as much data longitudinally. If I recall, the general finding is that blacks have large in-group bias on juries, consistent with what you show here, while white jurors have essentially no in-group bias, but no anti-in-group bias, either ... though I'm not sure if anyone has broken out the specifically liberal white segment in the jury context.
Richard Hanania published an excellent article a while ago called "Anti-woke as autism" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism), and treating white liberals' poll-measured stated preferences as even remotely relevant indicators of their actual preferences is exactly the kind of misguidedly autistic anti-wokeness he talks about.
To illustrate the point with a simple example from his article, consider the "fat acceptance" movement during the peak woke era. The only commentary we heard from liberals about weight was that it supposedly has nothing to do with physical attractiveness because "big is beautiful." We saw plus-sized models, etc all over the place with the implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) message being that their plus-size could not possibly have any implications on their attractiveness. A running poll of self-identified progressives, and maybe even liberals, on whether they find fat people physically attractive would unquestionably have documented a significant spike in "yes" responses during 2016-2020. Does this mean that wokes actually started to care meaningfully less about weight as a factor in physical attractiveness and started to find fat people physically attractive?
Well, someone's perceptions of physical attractiveness is inevitably going to influence their dating preferences and choices and how they treat other people. So if wokes really started to find fat people a lot more physically attractive like they claimed, then you would expect to see fat people start to get many more likes on dating apps and much more attention from the opposite sex, at least in progressive areas such as college campuses, than they used to. You would expect woke male college professors who fully paid lip service to "big is beautiful" to show no subtle biases whatsoever in favor of thinner female students relative to fatter ones during personal interactions.
Obviously, no such thing ever happened, because no one really started believing that "big is beautiful", which was always just a polite/politically correct stated preference that never reflected their revealed preferences. The vast majority of liberals who paid any kind of lip service to "big is "beautiful" viscerally found plus-sized models to be as out-of-place in an ad as conservatives did. This is the kind of contradiction that conservatives would correctly call "virtue signalling". White liberals' poll responses on race are the same kind of virtue-signalling as their fake stated preferences about fatness being attractive. If White liberals really shifted their truly-held racial preferences in favor of non-whites, then there would be evidence of that in their revealed preferences, but there isn't. At least not nearly as much as taking poll responses at face value would imply.
Someone's dating preferences are usually among their most visceral and deeply-held emotions and thus a good indicator of revealed/truly-held preferences. It's especially valuable as a proxy for revealed preferences about race because it's the one area of life in which it's not taboo to express racial preferences for White people- you can't really say "I only want White friends/neighbors/colleagues/doctors/immigrants", but it's largely still acceptable to say "I only want to date White people." So if White liberals actually started to like non-whites a lot more than they liked other whites after Floyd, you would expect to see non-white people start to do much better and white people start to do much worse among white people on dating apps in liberal areas. You'd expect to see a surge of white people buying homes in majority-non-white areas relative to majority-white areas and enrolling their kids in majority-non-white schools. No such things ever happened, and as Hanania noted in his article, being White has always been valued on dating apps to the point that apps don't want to publish the data. There is no evidence whatsoever of any change in those dynamics or a huge post-Floyd increase in inter-racial marriages between Whites and non-Whites.
The "self-hating White liberal phenomenon" is really just the "virtue-signalling and lying White liberal phenomenon".
Interesting that so much hinges on 2012. What happened in 2012? Obama was already president, it wasn’t his first election. Trump, brexit, merkel’s millions were nowhere on the scene yet. I remember noticing the extent of woke madness seeping into the public sphere outside of academia and college campuses around 2012, but I am surprised it extended so far that it is seen this much in attitudes across white liberals. Was there some media source or social media platform that was becoming very active around that time? There was HuffPost, slate, daily kos…were such things enough to have such an impact on white attitudes about other whites?
Trayvon Martin -> 'If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon', proto-BLM/BLM founded 2013, etc. Perhaps the awful racial discourse was also amplified by cell phones.
I don't think anyone has a comprehensive theory, but we definitely 'get' the timing, that it was harmful, etc.
I know this might sound a bit far fetched, but as I recall, 2012 was not long after the concept of a commentariat appeared on news articles. At the time, comment sections were generally unmoderated. Blogs were becoming popular and among this, HBD started to gain legs and those ideas made their way out of strictly pioneer fund pariahs. Somewhat before 2012, you saw comments responding to any news articles and editorials that contradicted legacy media claims that racial outcomes were due to some kind of oppression or poverty. When Eric holder called America a nation of cowards for not talking about race, the commentariat came forward in droves with data about race and iq stuff. At the time, HbD types were optimistic, as if HBD was about the go mainstream. This seemed plausible at the time because people making such claims were everywhere on the internet. Anyway, I got the impression that this drove educated leftists into the mode of both severe censorship and also to retreat into a mentally fortressed worldview of systemic injustice. It was like a person whose core beliefs were threatened who then retreated into a kind of fanaticism. I have no proof for this or data. It’s just how the online world appeared to be behaving to me at the time.
Agnes Callard’s unicontext theory provides an interesting explanation for this: it roughly claims that the communications revolution put us in a global normative space and certain distinctive norms were developed in this environment. In particular, racial transgressions came to have significantly more weight because it could be judged without requiring local context to understand - whereas traditional values e.g. loyalty require too long an explanation to fit into 280 characters
Would be interesting to relate this data to studies of jury bias, though I'm not sure the latter have as much data longitudinally. If I recall, the general finding is that blacks have large in-group bias on juries, consistent with what you show here, while white jurors have essentially no in-group bias, but no anti-in-group bias, either ... though I'm not sure if anyone has broken out the specifically liberal white segment in the jury context.
Richard Hanania published an excellent article a while ago called "Anti-woke as autism" (https://www.richardhanania.com/p/anti-woke-as-autism), and treating white liberals' poll-measured stated preferences as even remotely relevant indicators of their actual preferences is exactly the kind of misguidedly autistic anti-wokeness he talks about.
To illustrate the point with a simple example from his article, consider the "fat acceptance" movement during the peak woke era. The only commentary we heard from liberals about weight was that it supposedly has nothing to do with physical attractiveness because "big is beautiful." We saw plus-sized models, etc all over the place with the implied (and sometimes explicitly stated) message being that their plus-size could not possibly have any implications on their attractiveness. A running poll of self-identified progressives, and maybe even liberals, on whether they find fat people physically attractive would unquestionably have documented a significant spike in "yes" responses during 2016-2020. Does this mean that wokes actually started to care meaningfully less about weight as a factor in physical attractiveness and started to find fat people physically attractive?
Well, someone's perceptions of physical attractiveness is inevitably going to influence their dating preferences and choices and how they treat other people. So if wokes really started to find fat people a lot more physically attractive like they claimed, then you would expect to see fat people start to get many more likes on dating apps and much more attention from the opposite sex, at least in progressive areas such as college campuses, than they used to. You would expect woke male college professors who fully paid lip service to "big is beautiful" to show no subtle biases whatsoever in favor of thinner female students relative to fatter ones during personal interactions.
Obviously, no such thing ever happened, because no one really started believing that "big is beautiful", which was always just a polite/politically correct stated preference that never reflected their revealed preferences. The vast majority of liberals who paid any kind of lip service to "big is "beautiful" viscerally found plus-sized models to be as out-of-place in an ad as conservatives did. This is the kind of contradiction that conservatives would correctly call "virtue signalling". White liberals' poll responses on race are the same kind of virtue-signalling as their fake stated preferences about fatness being attractive. If White liberals really shifted their truly-held racial preferences in favor of non-whites, then there would be evidence of that in their revealed preferences, but there isn't. At least not nearly as much as taking poll responses at face value would imply.
Someone's dating preferences are usually among their most visceral and deeply-held emotions and thus a good indicator of revealed/truly-held preferences. It's especially valuable as a proxy for revealed preferences about race because it's the one area of life in which it's not taboo to express racial preferences for White people- you can't really say "I only want White friends/neighbors/colleagues/doctors/immigrants", but it's largely still acceptable to say "I only want to date White people." So if White liberals actually started to like non-whites a lot more than they liked other whites after Floyd, you would expect to see non-white people start to do much better and white people start to do much worse among white people on dating apps in liberal areas. You'd expect to see a surge of white people buying homes in majority-non-white areas relative to majority-white areas and enrolling their kids in majority-non-white schools. No such things ever happened, and as Hanania noted in his article, being White has always been valued on dating apps to the point that apps don't want to publish the data. There is no evidence whatsoever of any change in those dynamics or a huge post-Floyd increase in inter-racial marriages between Whites and non-Whites.
The "self-hating White liberal phenomenon" is really just the "virtue-signalling and lying White liberal phenomenon".