There is an old political trick of turning an opponent's argument around and asking what assumptions have to be true for that argument to work. A viral compilation of interviews about voter identification offers an almost painfully good opportunity to do exactly that. Modernity.news asks provocatively, "Why Are White Liberal Women So Racist?" That framing is obviously too broad. There are millions of white liberal women in America, many of whom hold perfectly sensible views about race, and some of whom are, no doubt, admirable. The particular interviews highlighted in the video still deserve examination, because something peculiar happens when the women are asked why voter-ID requirements are discriminatory.
The answers are apparently intended to defend Black Americans. Instead, some of them come remarkably close to describing Black Americans as incapable of performing elementary tasks that virtually everybody in a modern society routinely performs. One woman worries about internet access. Another suggests people may not have smartphone data. Another talks as though Black communities lack the knowledge required to discover how to obtain identification. Stop for a moment and reverse the politics. Imagine a conservative white man standing before a television camera and announcing that Black Americans do not really know how to use the internet, cannot work out where to obtain identification, and lack the knowledge necessary to find basic government information. We know exactly how that would sound. Yet attach the words "systemic racism" to essentially the same assumptions and suddenly they can be presented as compassion.
The statistics make the caricature particularly difficult to defend. Pew Research Center reports that 94 per cent of Black American adults used the internet in 2025, compared with 96 per cent of white adults. Black Americans are not a digitally isolated population wandering around helplessly outside the information age. There are genuine digital inequalities. Pew found that Black adults are more likely than white adults to depend upon smartphones rather than home broadband, and income remains strongly associated with broadband access. Those are real socioeconomic differences deserving serious discussion. But "there is a measurable broadband-access gap" is a very different proposition from "Black people don't know how to get information about obtaining an ID." The first is social science. The second is condescension.
Pew's latest figures also show that smartphone ownership is widespread across racial groups. In 2025, 85 per cent of Black adults owned smartphones, compared with 91 per cent of white adults. The gap exists, but an 85 per cent ownership rate hardly describes a population technologically incapable of finding a government office. There is an uncomfortable paternalism at work here. The anti-racist speaker begins with the admirable proposition that racial discrimination should be opposed. She then tries so hard to establish that Black Americans are disadvantaged that she begins stripping them of ordinary adult competence. They cannot find the information. They cannot navigate the bureaucracy. They cannot obtain the document. They need somebody else to speak for them. At some point one has to ask whether the cure has reproduced part of the disease.
This is sometimes called the "soft bigotry of low expectations." The phrase became politically famous through George W. Bush, but the phenomenon it describes is broader than any party. Prejudice need not always take the form of hostility towards another group. It can also appear as exaggerated paternalism: the assumption that members of another race cannot reasonably be expected to meet standards that one takes for granted among one's own group. That does not settle the voter-ID debate. There are legitimate arguments against particular voter-ID laws. Identification requirements differ considerably among American states, as do the documents accepted, the costs involved, and the procedures available to people who lack qualifying identification. The empirical literature is not unanimous either. A major NBER study examining the period from 2008 to 2018 found no negative effect of strict voter-ID laws on registration or turnout overall, including among racial groups. An earlier US Government Accountability Office analysis, however, found that stricter requirements in Kansas and Tennessee were associated with turnout reductions and that the estimated reductions were larger among African-American registrants. Those findings should prevent either side from pretending that every question has been settled.
There is an equally important fact that disappears from the viral interviews: Black Americans themselves are perfectly capable of forming opinions about voter ID. Pew found in 2025 that at least seven in ten adults in every major racial and ethnic group supported requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification. Overall support was 83 per cent. That produces a rather awkward situation for anyone claiming that opposition to voter ID follows automatically from concern for racial minorities. The people supposedly requiring protection from the policy do not speak with one political voice. Of course they don't. Black Americans are individuals. They are conservatives, liberals, moderates, and political independents. They are rich and poor, university professors and tradesmen, young and old, technologically sophisticated and technologically bewildered, just like everybody else. Perhaps the genuinely anti-racist starting point is to recognise that obvious fact.
This is why the interviews are funny, although unintentionally so. The interviewees apparently want to demonstrate their sensitivity towards racial disadvantage, but in doing so some reach for stereotypes that would sound appalling if uttered by their political opponents: Black people cannot use the internet properly; Black people cannot find the DMV; Black people do not know what information is available. The speaker believes she is describing structural oppression, while the listener may reasonably wonder what she thinks Black adults actually do all day. There is an additional irony here because modern American life already requires identification for innumerable activities. The precise requirements differ by transaction and jurisdiction, so claims that everybody must show photo ID for everything are exaggerated. Nevertheless, proving one's identity is hardly an exotic task confined to elections.
That leaves a sensible policy question. If some eligible citizens genuinely lack acceptable identification, why not make obtaining appropriate identification straightforward and free? That addresses the practical problem without requiring anyone to construct a racial theory of competence. If a poor elderly citizen in rural Mississippi or Melbourne, has difficulty obtaining the necessary documents, help that person obtain them. If administrative procedures are unnecessarily complicated, simplify them. If offices are inaccessible, improve access. Those are concrete problems with concrete solutions. What we should not do is move from evidence that some people encounter greater administrative obstacles to a general picture of Blacks as incapable of navigating ordinary modern life.
There is also a larger lesson here about contemporary identity politics. One of its temptations is to divide society permanently into protectors and protected. The protector acquires moral status by speaking for the supposedly vulnerable group, but that status depends upon the protected group remaining sufficiently vulnerable to require representation. This can produce a peculiar relationship in which treating minorities as completely ordinary autonomous adults becomes almost politically inconvenient. If Black Americans can use the internet, acquire identification, understand political arguments, and decide for themselves whether voter-ID requirements are reasonable, they do not require white political guardians to tell the world what they supposedly cannot do. That should be regarded as progress.
The title "Why Are White Liberal Women So Racist?" therefore goes too far. A handful of embarrassing street interviews cannot establish anything about millions of women, and political satire becomes less persuasive when it commits exactly the stereotyping it claims to expose. But turn the question from a demographic accusation into an intellectual one and something interesting remains. Why can anti-racist politics sometimes produce rhetoric that sounds remarkably patronising towards the very people it intends to defend? Perhaps because prejudice has more than one costume. There is the old-fashioned variety that says another group is inferior and therefore deserves less. And there is a softer variety that insists another group is so helpless that ordinary expectations cannot reasonably be applied to it. The first announces itself as prejudice. The second can announce itself as compassion.
https://modernity.news/2026/09/24/why-are-white-liberal-women-so-racist/