The Right's Mantra of White Supremacy

Sadly, racism has existed from America's founding both in terms of racism against Native Americans who stood in the way of lands desired by white immigrants from Europe and then, after 1619 against blacks forceably brought to America in the slave trade. For a time it seemed that white racism had faded or at least become less front and center to the agenda of the far right and evangelicals.  Then with the election of Barack Obama to the White House a torent of racism swept the nation as self-serving politicians and right wing talking heads perceived racism as a way to solidify their base and/or gain viewership. Among the high priests of white supremacy today is Tucker Carlson, a rich white man from a family of wealth who has likely never faced discrimination of any kind save by moral people due to his moral bankruptcy.  Donald Trump is another high priest of white supremacists and launched his presidential campaign maligning and denigrating Hispanics.  All these people use the same mantra that opposing racial discrimination against non-whites equates to being anti-white and opening the doors to genocide against whites.  The claim is false and stems from a zero sum mindset where anythhing that is an improvement for others somehow takes something from others.  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out, this mantra has been used for decades and arose before the Civil War and has been merely repackaged by hate mongers and self-centered opportunists.  Meanwhile, all minorities want is what we all want: safe homes, schools and neighborhoods for themselves and their children, good jobs and not needing to live in fear if pulled over by law enforcement,  Here are article highlights: 

Below a Democratic donkey, the Fox News graphic read ANTI-WHITE MANIA. It flanked Tucker Carlson’s face and overtook it in size. It was unmistakable. Which was the point.

The segment aired on June 25—the height of the manic attack on, and redefinition of, critical race theory, which Carlson has repeatedly cast as “anti-white.” It was one of his most incendiary segments of the year. “The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating on, day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, the cycle, before it’s too late?” Carlson asked. “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”

Some white Americans have been led to fear that they could be massacred like the Tutsis of Rwanda. CRT=Marxism, Marxism→Genocide Every time, read a sign at a June 23 Proud Boys demonstration in Miami. Other white Americans have been led to fear America’s teachers—79 percent of whom are white—instructing “kids to identify in racial terms,” as Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, said in May.

Even when GOP politicians and operatives don’t openly “call it what it is,” they end up echoing Masters nonetheless, saying without saying that “critical race theory is explicitly anti-white,” to use the words of Christopher F. Rufo, a travel-documentary filmmaker turned leading critic of CRT.

At his final campaign rally, in Loudoun County, Virginia, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin said, “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race where we divide them into buckets and one group is an oppressor and the other is a victim and we pit them against each other and we steal their dreams.”

Republicans provoked a backlash against CRT, which they also call anti-racism or wokism. Their backlash won 2021 elections. “But it wasn’t a backlash of parents,” William Saletan found in his close study of polling data. “It was a backlash of white people.”

How many Americans know that the claim that anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology? Americans are familiar with white-supremacist movements like the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Proud Boys. But they don’t seem to recognize white-supremacist ideology—the most venomous form of racist ideology.  . . . “Anti-racism is anti-white” is the old and explosive mantra of avowed white supremacists. It has been their organizing vehicle, fueling their rage, fueling their backlashes, fueling their delusions.

All year long, this white-supremacist mantra has been fueling what Martin Luther King Jr. once called the “white backlash” against last year’s racial reckoning. It is inciting voter-suppression policies and insurrections (to protect white political supremacy). It is inciting swarms of lies, insults, threats, and simulated killings of anti-racist Americans (who are branded as anti-white). It is inciting the false claim that anti-racist books and education are harmful to white children. It is inciting bans of those books and lessons.

As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, recently told the Los Angeles Times, “This idea that racial reckoning has gone too far and now white people are the ones suffering is the most predictable thing in the world if you understand American history.”

There are numerous variations on this mantra. “Wokeism” or anti-racism or critical race theory or the 1619 Project or “cancel culture” or Black Lives Matter or anyone challenging racial inequity is said to be anti-white or racist or an anti-white racist. And variations on this mantra have become so ubiquitous in the American political discourse that people can easily dismiss or deny its origin in white-supremacist thought.

When Robert Whitaker, 76, died in June 2017, white supremacists reflected on his legacy online. “Perhaps his most important, and most lasting, legacy is that his incessant promotion of the term ‘anti-white’ is now slowly but surely going mainstream,” someone named “Bellatrix” said on Stormfront, the prominent white-supremacist website. “A very important corner to turn indeed, as it is the rebuttal of the accusation of racist.” . . . . Whitaker’s fame among the most extreme white supremacists came toward the end of his life, when he wrote a screed called “The Mantra.”

“The Mantra” ends with what has become the new mantra in American politics: “They say they are anti-racist. What they are is anti-white. Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.” . . . . Whitaker’s mantra has been linked to some of the deadliest acts of white-supremacist terror over the past decade.

Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine Bible-studying African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, posted his manifesto on a website named The Last Rhodesian. He included photographs of himself wearing a jacket patched with an old flag of Rhodesia, a former white-supremacist colony in southern Africa. Whitaker lived in Roof’s hometown of Columbia, South Carolina, but there’s no evidence Roof and Whitaker had any direct contact. But Roof might have had contact with Whitaker’s ideas.

Many Americans have had contact with Whitaker’s ideas, likely without knowing it. . . . “It proclaims ‘Diversity = White Genocide’ and ‘Diversity Means Chasing Down the Last White Person,’ blaming multiculturalism for undermining the ‘white race.’”

White supremacists were quietly organizing elements of what’s now Donald Trump’s base. From the earliest days of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2015, his support has been most concentrated among white Americans who think anti-whiteness is ascendant. Trump voters typically considered racism against white people to be a bigger problem than racism against people of color. Among white Americans who don’t think there’s much anti-white racism, support for Republican presidential candidates has actually fallen over the past decade.

Whitaker did not create the mantra. He reproduced it. Since the very first Civil Rights Act, white supremacists have cast anti-racist bills as racist toward white people. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 defined citizenship, granted it to African Americans, and affirmed that all citizens are equally protected by the law.

For five decades since the civil-rights movement, Republicans (and many non-Republicans) have expressed two conflicting racial mantras: (1) racism no longer exists, and (2) racism is spreading against white people. Since Joe Biden’s election, this second mantra has overtaken the first.

White-supremacist ideology lives on what Heather McGhee calls the “zero-sum myth,” the idea that progress for people of color necessarily comes at white folks’ expense. This zero-sum myth erases the past and present of abolitionist and anti-racist movements, which have aided ordinary white people. It fearmongers about the future: If white people are not worshipped in schools, then they will be demonized; if white people don’t reign supreme, then they will be subjugated; if white people don’t hoard resources and opportunities, then they will be starved; if white people cannot kill at will, then they will be killed at will. White violence is presumed to be self-defense.

White supremacists are mobilizing against an anti-white army that isn’t mobilizing, that isn’t coming, that isn’t there. Then again, if there is an army that is mobilizing, that is coming, that is here—it is made up of white supremacists. Their carnage is here. Their ideology, too.

History reproduces itself. But when people don’t know history—or are barred from learning it—how can they ever recognize its reproduction?

We desperately need a full and accurate teaching of history in our schools whether it makes some "uncomfortable" or guilty about the privileges they enjoy.