Why Christians Must Reject the Woke Right’s Answer to Racism

White identity politics is not the antidote to DEI—and is incompatible with the teachings of Christ.

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About the author

Julian is a columnist for Reality’s Last Stand and a member of the Braver Angels media team. He’s also the founder of Heal the West, a substack movement dedicated to combating illiberalism via spiritual formation and rebuilding the American community.

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White identity politics is back on the political menu, and for a surprising reason. The so-called “woke right” argues that embracing white identity politics is a necessary response to Black identity politics, claiming it’s the only way to get us back to a place approximating true color blindness as a society.

As Hunter Ash argues on X:

My radical, far right stance on race is equal treatment. Ibram Kendi should be as socially vilified as David Duke. Probably moreso. I don’t think Duke ever claimed that black people were aliens. “Black lives matter” and “white lives matter” should be treated the same. A scholarship for only minority students should have the same legal standing as a scholarship for only white students.

The problem is that this never happens. Politics is a negotiation. You typically get outcomes about halfway between what one side wants and what the other side wants. If white people advocate for neutrality while other groups advocate for special privileges, we’ll end up with moderate special privileges for them.

No thank you. I will not tolerate the seething resentment against whites broadcast from every major institution. I will not tolerate “moderate” discrimination against my people. And it seems, both empirically and theoretically, that the only way to achieve equality is for us to actively advocate for our own group interests, such that the final negotiated outcome is something close to equality.

The problem with Ash’s argument is that, when it comes to advancing civil rights, this simply isn’t how progress is made. The history of civil rights is not a story of two extremes clashing and then settling on a compromise. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. did not respond to the extremism of Jim Crow laws and the White Citizens’ Councils with an equal and opposite form of extremism. He did not look at a nation gripped by white supremacy and call for black supremacy in return. In fact, in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” King explicitly condemned the extremism of “black nationalist groups.”

Instead, King championed a simple but principled stance that stood apart from both extremes: the radical idea that all human beings are created equal, regardless of the color of their skin. Speaking at the Youth March for Integrated Schools in 1959, King said, “As I stand here and look out upon the thousands of Negro faces, and the thousands of white faces, intermingled like the waters of a river, I see only one face—the face of the future.”

King rejected black supremacist rhetoric, even when it emerged from within his own movement. In Stride Toward Freedom, he recounted an incident in which a minister referred to whites as “dirty crackers.” King wrote that the minister “was politely but firmly informed that his insulting phrases were out of place.” Rather than embrace separatist identity politics, King consistently called for bridge-building and integration. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man,” he wrote, “but to win his friendship and understanding.”

In Montgomery, a year-long bus boycott led to integrated buses. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were not compromise positions struck between two identitarian factions—they were precisely what King and his allies had fought for.

If we truly want all races to be treated equally, we should take a page from King’s playbook. We don’t need to fight identity politics for one race with equal and opposite identity politics for another. A politics grounded in our shared humanity is a winning message.

In fact, if our goal is a society where people are treated equally regardless of skin color, we should be especially cautious about leaning into identity politics—because that approach is likely to backfire. Social psychologists call this dynamic Social Identity Theory. Developed by Henri Tajfel, the theory explains how we form in-groups and then use those identities as a license to mistreat out-groups. As psychology teacher Saul McLeod puts it, Social Identity Theory “suggests that people seek to enhance their self-esteem by identifying with in-groups and differentiating from out-groups.” He warns that “This can lead to group favoritism, prejudice, and stereotyping as people favor those who belong to their own group.”

Humans are an innately tribal species. Experiment after experiment has shown that we’re not just a little pro-us—we’re often intensely anti-them. As David McRaney summarizes in How Minds Change, “once people become an us, we begin to loathe a them.”

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve been here before. During the Great Awokening, well-meaning progressives championed ideas like black affinity groups in K–12 schools, racially segregated college graduation ceremonies, and interpreting interactions primarily through the lens of skin color. These “progressives” believed such practices continued the noble work of the Civil Rights Movement and would lead to a more just and integrated society. But many of us who opposed the rise of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion warned that identity politics would have the opposite effect: rather than fostering interracial harmony, it would entrench racial divisions. We were right. From 2013—the year before the Great Awokening began—to 2021, the percentage of African Americans who rated race relations between whites and blacks as “very good” or “somewhat good” was cut in half.

Now that the woke left is on the ropes, the right should resist falling into the same trap—only with the skin colors reversed. Divisive identity politics won’t heal our society, whether it’s coming from Ibram X. Kendi or from the newly ascendant woke right.

So if white identity politics isn’t the path to racial harmony or to the “equal treatment” that Ash desires, what is? I propose two solutions.