Rreasons “White Pride” is Always Racist

With the far right in America and many Republican extremists ready to launch a war against Islam and give the NSA unfettered powers in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, it is important to remember that these same individuals are more often than not supporters of "white pride" and lament the demise of total white privilege in America.  Yes, Christianity and Islam have often been at odds with each other over the centuries, but for the American right, besides religious differences there is the convenient fact that one doesn't find many lily white Muslims.  Most have darker skin shades which, to these "godly" patriots sets the stage for a form of McCarthyism where every non-white is suspect.  A piece in Salon looks at some of the reasons why the "white pride" movement is always based on racism.  Here are excerpts:

The Ku Klux Klan is currently sponsoring a Harrison, Ark., billboard that sends the following message: “It’s not racist to love your people. www.WhitePrideRadio.com.” The message is featured next to an adorable photo of a kitten and a puppy. On the White Pride Radio website, the group further clarifies their mission: “A lot of people recognize that there is an ongoing program of genocide against white people. There are websites, newsletters, videos, and radio shows, but too many talk about family without including the family. It has always been our mission to not just promote the white family, but to make them a part of this cause of white Christian revival.”

Oddly enough, this isn’t the first time that a Harrison billboard has gone viral. Following similar signs in Alabama and Eugene, Ore., a message went up that read: “Anti-racism is code for anti-white.” If that doesn’t clear it up for you, let’s put it bluntly: White pride is always racism, always. Here’s why.

Whiteness is an artificial sociological construct which has been used throughout history to exclude certain groups of people from the rights guaranteed others and to justify bigoted attitudes.

As Nell Irvin Painter explains in The History of White People, the notion of “white culture” is a myth. “Our culture was founded in 1789 right about the same moment that Blumenbach was inventing Caucasians . . . . White Americans, however, are not a single ethnic group or a distinct number of ethnicities; they are an amalgamation of everyone who benefits from white privilege, and its boundaries are always shifting.  Before the Civil War, this distinction often made the difference between whether you were a full citizen or a slave with three-fifths congressional representation; afterward, as Edward J. Blum discussed in Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898, the paradigm of “whiteness” was used to forge a new sense of national unity for the American people as a way of healing sectional, regional, and class strife.


Throughout American history, many groups considered white today (e.g., Germans, Irish) were viewed as non-white.

[T]he term “white” has not always meant the same thing. Although WASPs have always benefited from that term in this country, virtually every other European nationality has been considered lesser at some point, from Eastern Europeans (like Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians) and Southern Europeans (like Italians, Greeks, and Spaniards) to long-standing victims of Western persecution (like the Irish and the Jews).  During World War I, a particularly virulent strain of anti-German prejudice swept the nation. When Millard Fillmore sought a second term as president in 1856, he did so as the candidate of the Know Nothing Party which was based primarily in anti-Catholic (and specifically anti-Irish) prejudice, netting 22 percent of the popular vote in the process. Yet as time has gone on, even the Irish and the Jews have gradually been accepted as “white” by the majority of the American population.

It is sponsored by the Ku Klux Klan, which by virtue of its history is a racist organization with a white supremacist agenda.  It’s easy to forget that the KKK was once a politically powerful organization. During Reconstruction (the 12-year period immediately following the Civil War), the KKK was used by Southern whites to subjugate the recently emancipated black slaves and thus reestablish white supremacy for a century. For a long time they were viewed with a romantic tinge by many Americans, including D. W. Griffith in his landmark epic motion picture The Birth of a Nation when it was released in 1915.

The billboard is a symptom of white minority politics.   . . .  Coining this phenomenon “the birth of white minority politics,” former Republican political adviser John Avlon talked to hundreds of Tea Partiers and kept his thumb on the pulse of the radical right-wing surge that occurred immediately after Barack Obama’s election in 2008. “I think there is an anxiety underneath this that President Obama represents the rise of a multicultural elite and the rise of a non-white majority in America,” he observed, adding that “if you talk to many of these protesters in the field, one of the dates that keeps coming up is 2050, which is the date the U.S. census estimates that there will be a non-white majority in the United States.”

I continue to ponder why some people simply cannot see the common humanity in others regardless of skin color or sexual orientation.  Why the sick need to feel superior or to look down on others?  Perhaps being gay and hated by the same segment of society that hates blacks, Hispanics and other minorities makes one less judgmental of others since one finds them self always being judged.