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Zach Goldberg’s most famous graph depicts the strange phenomenon whereby every racial group in America likes themselves, except for White liberals, who like other groups more than they like Whites.
I’ve seen this graph enough times that I got curious about how well it replicated, and what else we could learn from this sort of data. So, I grabbed the data and set about answering some questions.
#1: Does it replicate? Yes. The plot itself holds up in adjacent waves of the same survey.
#2: Does a self-derogating split across ideological lines extend to other races? No. Other races consistently like themselves, regardless of their politics. It’s just White liberals.
#3: Has it always been this way? No. White liberal self-derogation is a recent phenomenon, timed after the so-called ‘Great Awokening’ that came with Obama’s re-election and fomenting of race relations.
#4: Do White conservatives show an opposing trajectory shift? No. White conservatives are about as distinct from one another as they’ve always been. They even seem to have started going in the direction of their liberal counterparts, with weak evidence that such a shift has been larger for the less conservative among them.
#5: Do White liberals show a dose-response? Yes. More liberal Whites show greater racial outgroup preference.
#6: Do the results for ideology transfer to party? Yes and no. The more liberal party does show the same trajectory as liberals more generally.
The ‘No’ has to do with the dose-response: the split among Democrats is about ideology, not party attachment, and party attachment and ideology are only weakly correlated (r = ). As a result, we get this quite different-looking graph:
#7: Has this happened before? Not in recorded data. If we use the older ANES data going back to 1964, we don’t see this happen any other time. We also see that Blacks have reverted from the trajectory other groups were on, where they were heading towards having less ingroup bias over time. They are back to 1960s levels.1
#8: Is this because White liberals began liking Whites less or liking non-Whites more? Both.
#9: Does this replicate in other U.S. datasets? Yes. This seems to replicate whenever we have representatively-sampled data from the U.S., in which participants are asked a substantially similar question. For example, here’s alternative ANES results, the VOTER survey, and mention of two additional sources and one dead-end.2
#10: Is this responsive to events? Yes. We generally do not have granular enough data to see whether particular events drive this reporting, but we do for one event: George Floyd’s death. We have weekly polling from the time, and right after it happened, White liberals’ anti-ingroup bias doubled. White moderates were affected in the same way to a smaller extent, whereas conservatives were unaffected.
#11: Did the Floyd effect on warmth affect members of other races? Yes. From the same dataset:
#12: Does White liberal outgroup preference replicate in international datasets? No. Across Europe, Australia, Canada, etc., attitudes have trended in the same direction, but they have not become as severe as in America: on net, Whites abroad still tend to prefer their own national and racial ingroups, even if said Whites lean left. We see this replicate in the European Social Survey, Australian Election Study, the British Election Study, and so on. I’ll show two charts to make some points.
First, compare the European Anglosphere to the Continent in terms of views on other-race versus same-race immigrants. The preference for own-race immigrants is smaller in the Anglosphere:
Second, in Britain, the post-Brexit trajectories on immigrant attitudes are curious:
And I’ll toss in a third chart to make a contrary point: where America, Europe, and the rest of the Anglosphere differ: the various in-group attitude measures are most differentiated by politics in the non-U.S. Anglosphere, despite how different the patterns look.
Bonus: The Great Awokening had a lot of focus on Black-White relations. How do different groups feel about Whites relative to Blacks? Outside of non-liberal Whites, everyone now prefers Blacks, at least in polling.3
September 9, 2026 Update: Sex, Education, and Income
Over on X, I’ve posted four additional analyses. These show that, even though liberals are more likely to be women, that doesn’t modify the ideological relationship in the ANES; that education and income trends do not carry over across ideology and now liberals are homogeneous in belief despite differences in income and ideology; and the reaction to George Floyd was greater for women.
This was a timed post. The way these work is that if it takes me more than an hour to complete the post, an applet that I made deletes everything I’ve written so far and I abandon the post. You can find my previous timed post here.
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Note that the results for Hispanics and Asians are harder to interpret here because the questions are not the same until more recent waves.
The GSS supports the trend, but not the sign reversal, but it uses the alternative measure ‘rated in-group closeness’.
P.S. I wanted to check if this result replicated for non-White racial majorities like Japanese in Japan, Koreans in Korea, etc., but there are no such applicable datasets as far as I know.
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?
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".