America — along with much of the western world — generally seems more racist than it did just a decade ago.

But it is not the old-fashioned racism. Now the asymmetry runs like this: blacks are allowed to be racist against whites, and whites are expected to be racist against themselves.

It is easy to see how the latter would encourage the former, but normally one would expect the former to discourage the latter.

So the missing element here is the factor that suppresses the latter natural reaction.

Surely it is ideology. Left-woke anti-racist ideology. Which is a kind of racism. It is white anti-white racism: “woke” is WAWR.