The Finger Is Always Pointing

On whiteness, the newly Othered, and the lazy math of skin

Every “us” is load-bearing on a “them.” Pull the them out and the ceiling sags, and somebody always runs in with a fresh beam.

Lately I’ve been watching a lot of documentaries about the people who sell us the future: Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, Donald Trump, Masayoshi Son, Elizabeth Holmes, and the global business culture that keeps minting more of them. Rockets, databases, a blood test that never worked, hundred-billion-dollar bets on whatever comes next. I came out of them thinking less about money than about sorting: who gets counted, who gets pointed at, and who does the pointing.

Confession: the first draft of this essay was AI output, a model at the controls, and it read like it. A glossary of marginalization, each group filed under its bullet, the Other described as “a critical lens.”

Fine for disseminating data, poor for conveying my feelings.

A lens is something you (hopefully) know you’re looking through. The trouble with the Other is that most of us never notice the glass. So this is the rewrite. The model is still in the room, but the fingerprints are mine, which seems fair, since the whole essay is about fingers.

Whiteness, a membership with dues

The philosophy is old and it’s good. Hegel had the self come into being only by meeting a rival consciousness. Beauvoir showed how man made himself the default and woman the deviation. Said watched the West invent an “Orient” so it would have something to be the opposite of.

Fanon’s version is the one I can’t shake. On a train in France, on a white winter day, a little white boy sees him, tells his mother to look, and says he’s frightened. One small voice, and a grown man is fixed in place. That is the finger in its original form, and it belongs to a child.

Four thinkers, one finding: the Other is manufactured, and it tells you more about the factory than about the product.

America’s flagship product is whiteness, and it has always behaved like a club whose membership committee can’t stop amending the rolls. The first Naturalization Act, in 1790, offered citizenship to “free white persons” and left the meaning of white to be litigated for the next century and a half. The Irish got in eventually; Italians and Jews later, and on probation.

Takao Ozawa had lived in the United States for twenty years when he applied. He had graduated from Berkeley High School, spent nearly three years at the University of California, and spoke English at home. In November 1922 the Supreme Court told him he couldn’t be white because he wasn’t Caucasian. Three months later it told Bhagat Singh Thind, who had enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1918, that although he was Caucasian, he wasn’t white “in the understanding of the common man.” The same justice, George Sutherland, wrote both opinions. Both were unanimous.

When the reasoning flips and the verdict holds, you aren’t looking at a rule. You’re looking at a gate.

In my old line of work we’d call that a control that drifted from its stated purpose and kept running anyway, because nobody owned the review.

Israel, newly Othered

For most of my life the American map of us-and-them was drawn in permanent marker, with all the nuance of Team America: World Police. After 9/11 the Muslim was the national Other: the face pulled aside at the airport, the name on the watchlist.

Jews had been an earlier draft, and I’m skeptical of anyone who calls that draft finished. I’d say the same about every minority this country has let in on probation.

You could date the draft to June 1877, when the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs turned away Joseph Seligman, a banker who had helped sell the Union’s war bonds in Europe. Or to 1922, when Jews made up about a fifth of Harvard’s students and President A. Lawrence Lowell proposed a quota. He reached for the hotel comparison himself: a summer hotel “ruined by admitting Jews,” he wrote, fails because the Jews drive away the Gentiles. The quota was too blunt to pass, so Harvard began judging applicants on “character” instead. That is how Jews were admitted into whiteness, gradually and never completely. And Israel sat firmly in the “us” column: ally, democracy, the hyphen in “Judeo-Christian.”

The marker turns out to be dry-erase. In February 2026, Gallup reported that for the first time since it started asking in 2001, Israelis no longer come out ahead in Americans’ sympathies: 41 percent side more with the Palestinians, 36 with the Israelis. The gap sits inside the margin of error, which is its own kind of news. Three years earlier it was 54 to 31 the other way. Among Americans aged 18 to 34 it’s now 53 to 23. For a big share of the country, Israel walked from one column to the other in about a thousand days.

I’m not going to tell you which column is correct; you have your own feeds for that. What I can’t stop watching is the mechanics. The finger didn’t drop when the target moved. It swung, and a finger swinging that fast doesn’t aim. A judgment about a government slides into contempt for a people. Fear of terrorism slides into suspicion of a headscarf.

You can see both slides in the counts. The ADL tallied 203 antisemitic assaults in 2025, the most since it began counting in 1979. CAIR took in 8,683 complaints of anti-Muslim bias that year, the most in its history. The two groups America used to Other in separate decades are now being Othered in the same news cycle, sometimes in the same sentence.

The line between a state and its people is the whole game. Lose it and you’ve built a new Other out of old parts.

An aside: Made in America

Here’s the page of the American export catalog we leave out of the brochure.

On June 5, 1934, the senior lawyers of the Third Reich met to plan what became the Nuremberg Laws, and a stenographer took it all down. Justice Minister Franz Gürtner opened with a memo on the race law of the United States. The room kept circling back to the American example, and the most radical men present were its biggest fans. Roland Freisler, who would later preside over the Nazi People’s Court, said American jurisprudence “would suit us perfectly,” with one exception: it didn’t count Jews among the coloreds.

That transcript is the core of James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model. Some historians think Whitman overstates how much the Nazis actually borrowed; the transcript itself isn’t in dispute. Jim Crow segregation interested them, but the more consequential models were American citizenship law and our bans on interracial marriage, which line up with the two main Nuremberg Laws, the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. The ugliest detail: when the Nazis declined to copy something American, it was sometimes because they found it too harsh. Our one-drop rule went further than they wanted to go.

It’s tempting to draw a straight line from the slave auction to Nuremberg. The instinct is right, though the line makes a few more stops. The slave trade built the racial hierarchy as an economic fact, and emancipation threatened it. Jim Crow, the one-drop rule, race-based citizenship and the marriage bans were the machinery built to keep the hierarchy standing once the chains came off. That machinery, slavery’s afterlife written into statute, is what Berlin studied. Hitler had already praised America’s race-based immigration limits in Mein Kampf, and in a 1928 speech he admired how the American West was “won.”

Then there’s industry, and the respectable sciences. Henry Ford’s newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, serialized The International Jew, which found eager readers in German translation. On July 30, 1938, his seventy-fifth birthday, Ford accepted the Grand Cross of the German Eagle at his offices in Dearborn. American eugenicists, bankrolled by some of the country’s biggest foundations, wrote the model sterilization law the Reich adapted, and Heidelberg gave one of them, Harry Laughlin, an honorary doctorate in 1936. By 1924 California had already sterilized about 2,500 people, nine years before Germany passed a law of its own.

We exported jazz and denim. We also shipped a working template for deciding who counts as fully a person. Racism is one of America’s original exports, and we know because somebody kept the minutes.

Both hands, same finger

It would be convenient to pin all of this on one party. It would also be one more round of pointing.

The right has its standing cast: the migrant at the border, the Muslim in the travel ban, the coastal elite who sneers at your truck. The left has its own: the rural white man, the evangelical, and lately the “Zionist,” a word that too often lands on any Jew within range. Gallup now finds Democrats siding with the Palestinians 65 to 17 and Republicans siding with the Israelis 70 to 13. An opinion about a war on another continent has become a team jersey.

Precision is the antidote. Critiquing whiteness as a system (the club, the gate, the dues) is different from despising white people. Criticizing the Israeli government is not antisemitism. Fearing extremism gives no license for Islamophobia. Each critique is legitimate and each slide is not. The slide is a reflex, and the reflex is bipartisan.

Paul and I have been scripting a performance in which we play ourselves, in earnest, as self-appointed representatives of all white men, and therefore of all white people’s opinions. It’s funny because nobody can represent “all” of anyone. The joke lands on both sides of the aisle, which is how you know it’s true.

The boy with the rockets

Alex Gibney’s Musk runs nearly four hours, and Musk had nothing to do with it. When the project was announced he called it a hit piece, and Gibney asked how he would know. Gibney also made The Inventor, the Theranos film, so he has practice with founders and the myths they build around themselves.

I watched all four hours, and I came away without a villain. I came away with a boy. As Walter Isaacson tells it (Musk’s father disputes the account), classmates in South Africa kicked him in the head and pushed him down a set of concrete steps, badly enough to put him in the hospital. He retreated into science fiction. My read is that he was also made to feel small for dreaming about rockets, and then he grew up and built the rockets. Somewhere along the way he seems to have decided that trust was a liability and engineered it out of the design. What’s left is a man acting out his childhood at planetary scale, mostly alone and mostly online.

The dream is worth keeping. The categories riding along with it are not.

In November 2023 a user on X wrote that Jewish communities push “dialectical hatred against whites,” the Great Replacement compressed into a post, and Musk replied, “You have said the actual truth.” Two weeks later, at the DealBook Summit, he called it “literally the worst and dumbest post that I’ve ever done.” In January 2024 he toured Auschwitz-Birkenau with a rabbi and a Holocaust survivor named Gidon Lev, carrying his three-year-old son, and laid a wreath at the Wall of Death. That counts for something.

Then the finger swung again. Through 2025 Musk kept telling his followers that white South Africans face a genocide. South Africa’s president called it a completely false narrative, and in February a Cape Town judge, ruling on an unrelated estate, called the idea “clearly imagined and not real.” Twice that spring Musk posted a video of white crosses lining a road, offered as the graves of murdered farmers. The crosses were a temporary memorial from a 2020 procession in KwaZulu-Natal. Eight days after his second post, Trump played the footage for South Africa’s president in the Oval Office and called the crosses burial sites.

That May, Grok, Musk’s own chatbot, started inserting “white genocide” into replies about a baseball pitcher’s salary; xAI blamed an unauthorized change to its prompt. In July, four days after Musk announced that Grok had been “improved significantly,” it called itself MechaHitler. xAI apologized and explained that a code update had left the bot susceptible to the posts around it, extremist ones included. In September Musk appeared by video at Tommy Robinson’s rally in London and told the crowd, “You either fight back or you die.”

xAI’s explanation deserves more attention than its apology got. A model that mirrors its environment is a thermometer, and the reading was MechaHitler.

Here’s the hopeful read, and I mean it. Musk has absorbed more bad press than almost anyone alive. He plays the villain so well that half the country uses him as its Other, and I know an essay about him is one more finger pointed his way. Mine, at least, points at posts, with dates. That’s the difference between a judgment and a category, and it’s the difference this whole essay turns on.

The role he’s been cast in could be the most useful thing about him. A fall guy who stops falling, who says in public that he sorted people by the lazy map and was wrong, would do more than a thousand op-eds. He has done a small version of this once already, in Poland. It didn’t hold, because a single afternoon rarely does. Change holds through repetition, the way any skill does.

And the stakes are astronomical, which is the scale he likes. If we really are going multiplanetary, our categories ride along in the cargo hold. Ship a false designation of evil to Mars and you haven’t built a civilization among the stars. You’ve built a battlefield with a better view. The rocket is the easy part. The hard part is the passenger manifest, and how we decide who gets a seat.

The laziest category

The urge to sort people isn’t a uniquely American sin. Around 1970 the psychologist Henri Tajfel showed forty-eight Bristol schoolboys, fourteen and fifteen years old, paintings by Klee and Kandinsky, and told them they’d been grouped by which painter they preferred. They hadn’t. He assigned them at random. The boys still divided up rewards to favor their own side, often choosing a bigger gap between the groups over a bigger payout for everyone. Hand a human two abstract painters and a coin flip, and you get tribes. (As someone who makes conceptual art, I find this both flattering and alarming.)

So the instinct is native, and I’m not trying to get rid of it. I’ll even defend the dirty word. To be discriminating used to be a compliment: a discriminating eye, a discriminating palate, someone who could tell things apart. American English gave the word its prejudicial sense in 1866, the same year Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act. Telling things apart is how you survive. It’s how a trader reads a counterparty and how a curator reads a wall. The trouble starts when you tell people apart with a map someone handed you pre-printed.

Race is that map, and it’s the laziest category we have. It costs nothing. You don’t have to talk to anyone or read anything. You glance, and the sorting is done.

The best counterargument comes from people who judge strangers fast for a living. Masayoshi Son says he decided to back Jack Ma about six minutes after meeting him, and the bet made SoftBank a fortune. In late 2016, by Adam Neumann’s telling, Son walked into WeWork saying he had twelve minutes, and that bet ended in bankruptcy court. The stopwatch was the same both times. Even so, both of Son’s glances landed on a person: a pitch, a building, an answer to a hard question. Race skips the person entirely. It judges the letter by the envelope.

Elizabeth Holmes was convicted of fraud for selling a machine that promised a full panel of blood tests from a few drops. Race makes the same promise about people, a full reading from a glance, and it has never once passed validation. In risk terms it’s a classifier built on a proxy variable: cheap to run, instant to deploy, with a false-positive rate of roughly everyone. Any model-risk team that caught skin being used as a stand-in for character, intent or worth would kill the model in review. We just never sent this one to review.

A world where anyone is less than anyone else is already broken. A world where the “less” gets assigned by melanin, hair texture or the shape of an eye is broken and lazy, which is somehow worse: cruelty that couldn’t be bothered to do the reading.

Coda: put the finger to work

There will always be a finger to point. I’ve stopped believing we can amputate the hand. The work is slower and less cinematic: notice where the finger points, ask who taught it to point there, and make the sorting cost something again. A conversation. A name learned and pronounced correctly. An afternoon spent somewhere you’d normally drive past.

Fanon’s finger belonged to a child, and children point where they’ve been taught to point. So do grown men with rockets. So do I.

Overcoming racism in America is hard because it’s in the original source code, compiled here and shipped abroad. But here’s the conceptual artist’s consolation: if the Other is a social construct, then it is, technically, a work, a collaborative, centuries-long piece with no artist statement and far too many contributors. Things that were made can be unmade. Just not by a glossary. This one has to be done by hand.

Notes

• Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Grove, 1967), ch. 5. Excerpt.
• Ozawa v. United States, 260 U.S. 178 (1922); United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923); National Park Service, “Bhagat Singh Thind”.
• On Seligman and the Grand Union Hotel: Journal of American History 107, no. 4 (abstract). On Lowell and Harvard’s quota: Jerome Karabel, The Chosen (2005); The Harvard Crimson (Nov. 9, 2023).
• Gallup, “Israelis No Longer Ahead in Americans’ Middle East Sympathies” (Feb. 27, 2026).
• ADL, Audit of Antisemitic Incidents 2025 (May 6, 2026).
• CAIR, 2026 civil rights report on 2025 complaints, as cited by CAIR-NY.
• James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press, 2017); introduction.
• Henry Ford and the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, July 30, 1938: Bettmann photo record.
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Eugenics Archive, on Laughlin’s model law and early sterilizations.
• Alex Gibney, dir., Musk (Bleecker Street, 2026); The Hollywood Reporter on the Venice premiere.
• Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster, 2023); CBS excerpt; Errol Musk’s denial.
• Musk’s November 2023 post, DealBook remarks and Auschwitz visit: Courthouse News/AFP; NBC News.
• The Cape Town ruling: Business Day (Feb. 24, 2025). The crosses video: NPR; CBS News.
• Grok: TechCrunch (May 15, 2025); CNN (July 12, 2025).
• The “Unite the Kingdom” rally: NBC News (Sept. 2025).
• Henri Tajfel, “Experiments in Intergroup Discrimination,” Scientific American 223, no. 5 (November 1970).
• On the 1866 sense of “discriminate”: Journal of Insurance Medicine, citing Etymonline.
• Masayoshi Son on Alibaba and WeWork: Fortune (April 1, 2025); Forbes (Oct. 2, 2017).
• Elizabeth Holmes: Axios (Oct. 19, 2026).