This irritated me for some reason.

A lefty friend once asked me whether I thought I held any subconsciously racist opinions. One should always be on the lookout for one’s own intellectual and moral defects, so I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a possible candidate: As I suggest in my NRO piece today, “Asian-American” seems to me to be an obviously nonsensical category, because it includes people of origins ranging from Pakistani to Japanese. But “African-American” has never seemed immediately nonsensical to me in the same way. This may be because I know a little bit more about Asia than I do about Africa, or it may be because Indians and Koreans strike my white American eye as obviously and visibly different in a way that is not true of members of many African groups. It should go without saying that I detest racism, and it is also the case that racial and ethnic feeling, even of the benign, St. Patrick’s Day variety, seems to me atavistic and primitive. My self-analysis here is not meant to be taken as normative, but rather an examination of the semi-subconscious impressions of what I believe to be a fairly typical middle-class white guy from Texas.

The new religion has made race awareness into the worst moral sin. By “race awareness” I mean noticing that not all people hail from the same tribes. It has become such a fetish that otherwise sensible people are petrified they may be one of those wretched noticers. The ridiculous bit of squid ink in the first paragraph that I highlight is a good example. I don’t think for a second that Kevin Williamson is losing any sleep over his “subconscious racism.”

While I don’t buy the race-as-a-social-construct position entirely, there is a great deal of cultural specificity to racial perception. Surely I am not the only white American guy in the history of the world to meet a Somali or an Ethiopian and have his brain simultaneously register “black” and “not black.” And I believe that that is the real psychological fault line for white Americans: not white vs. not-white but black vs. not-black. Ethiopia, Wikipedia informs me, recognizes more than 80 different ethnic groups on its census and, for whatever reason, members of some of those groups only push some of the buttons of perception associated in my particular brain with “black.” I think it probably says something about the culture that at some level my mind really wants to make that distinction in absolute terms. We all know that Barack Obama has one black parent and one white parent, but my impression is that people generally look at him and see black, rather than biracial.

This is akin to saying “I don’t buy this gravity-as-a-social-construct position entirely.” The science is in and race is exactly what we thought it was for 5,000 years. Like a lot of received wisdom that is easily confirmed through simple observation, there is a scientific explanation. Race is one of those. The Chinese guy’s genetic differences are not just limited to skin tone, hair texture and the shape of the eyes.

The fundamental fact, I think, is that when a white American sees a black American, he sees history, and that history looms far more significantly over black Americans than it does over Hispanics or Asian immigrants or other minority groups. Conservatives see that history and generally don’t want to think about it; progressives see that history and want to use it for their own political ends. And I don’t have the imaginative capacity to guess what the view looks like from the black perspective. In that sense, it’s hard for me to believe that black-white relations in the United States will ever be normalized, as much as I wish it were otherwise. The fact that “black” exists in my internal taxonomy as a unitary and exclusive category — even though at some rational level I know better — suggests to me that while “Asian” maybe be only a geographic term in the American political mind, “African” is a very different kind of term, one that has more to do with realities on this continent than realities in Africa.

This is the least ridiculous portion of the post. I think he is right that people with a long history with one another tend to remember that long history with one another. This is true in the same way that people who have evolved here on earth tend to look like us. Armenians and Turks will forever have opinions about one another that outsiders will never fully appreciate. Jews and Germans will always be tied to one another in ways that the Dutch and Jews are not, even though the Dutch gladly handed over their Jews to the Nazis.

The post strikes me as a way for Kevin to build up some credits so that when he reviews or writes about the forthcoming book by Nicholas Wade he has inoculated himself against the hooting and bellowing from the race hustlers. Kevin is the one bright penny at the moribund National Review, but the feckless twerp running the place cannot be counted on to stand by even his best writer. Maybe it is a wise career move on Williamson’s part. As science unravels the Standard Social Science Model, the empirically minded will come under assault for not vigorously praying at the right shrines. Indifference will no longer be acceptable.

Alternatively, it could be the start of what I have observed for years. Pat Buchanan called it “going native.” A sensible person moves to a moonbat land and before long they start sounding like a moonbat. It is hard to stand out from the crowd. Almost all of us feel pressure to conform and fit in with the group. When your friends insist the sky is pink and the grass is yellow, you will eventually give in and agree with them. It is why your red state congressman ends up on TV hugging the wackiest nutter on the Democratic side while extolling the virtues of surrender bipartisanship.

Perhaps Kevin Williamson is just going native.