Recognizing white supremacy

A fun little exercise using completely anonymous social media posts

I got in a conversation on social media this week with some folks who were having a hard time recognizing white supremacy outside of Nazism or the Ku Klux Klan, and I thought it might be instructive and maybe even fun to take a little stroll through some social media posts and talk about what makes them good indications of white supremacist thought or philosophical underpinnings.

But first let’s get a definition in and we’ll go very middle of the road/descriptive with no value judgements and so on:

White supremacy is the belief that white people are superior to members of other races.

That doesn’t preclude, of course, an “exceptional” member of another race being *just as good* as a white person. It doesn’t mean you couldn’t have a just awful white person who is exceptionally stupid or bad or whatever and thus just as terrible as someone from another race (which is where, by the way, we get the concept of “white trash”).

But the core idea here is that, all things being equal, in general, a white person — and ABSOLUTELY white people as a whole — is better than people of other races.

So let’s look at a few social media posts that may seem harmless at first glance but reveal some good ol’ white supremacy.

1. Why are America’s small towns so placid and lovely?

So here’s a post that is very interesting and we’ll learn a few things here.

One, note that there’s not actually a question here (the lack of a question mark being a clue to that). The poster isn’t *actually* wondering anything or asking anything… he’s *suggesting* something.

Two, although I didn’t include a link to the video the poster is sharing, we can make a pretty clear guess from the pic: there’s a cute white lady about to show us around “her town.”

If you watched the video you’d discover she lives in a small, mostly white, town. So the suggestion here absolutely appears to be: In places where it’s mostly white people, crime rates are lower because white people in general are more law-abiding (and placid and lovely and orderly) than people of other races.

Three, “Yeah but he never said that directly.” Correct. It’s very common for public-facing white supremacist content to be purposely vague, or require the reader to fill-in-the-blanks, or be a “dog whistle” (in other words, very clear to one population and invisible to another). Many white supremacists, knowing that their ideology is not widely beloved when overtly stated, work hard to have deniability.

Could context change the meaning of this post? Yes. If the guy posting was the owner of a small coffee shop and the girl in the video was showing how there was no Starbucks or corporate coffee in her town, sure. But that’s not what’s happening here.

2. Let’s ban third world immigration

It’s not so long ago that we talked about the third world here in this newsletter. In many circles today it’s another way of saying “the global south” and in white supremacist circles it’s a more polite way of saying “black and brown people.”

So what’s being suggested here is NO LEGAL PATHWAY for black or brown immigrants to enter the United States. Might some “exceptional” black or brown people get in? Mmmmmmaybe if they are already culturally assimilated into “first world” countries.

Because, note, third world immigrants have brought “cultural problems” (undefined). Any other problems in the United States (education, housing, the financial system, “essential services”) are ALL *because of* the presence of black and brown people in the United States.

Is there a context where this is not a white supremacist point of view?

Not that I can think of.

3. Multiculturalism is a failure

This one’s relatively straightforward: multiculturalism is a failure. What’s the alternative to multiculturalism? Monoculture.

So the question becomes, which monoculture are we requiring everyone to adopt?

A white supremacist would suggest we adopt the best culture, which is clearly “white culture” (leaving aside the fact that there is no white monoculture, but that doesn’t really matter because the argument here is not for an actual monoculture but for *doing away with* “unsavory” cultures. Like, you know, third world stuff.) Weird sidenote: many white supremacists “look back” to the glory of the Greek or Roman empire and really want to adopt those as emblematic of the glory of white culture. Which is super hilarious to anyone who knows history or even knows the history of whiteness, because neither Greeks nor Italians were considered white until very recent history.

Could someone mean something different than what a white supremacist means here? Yeah, but it’s almost always a supremacy of some type. If Russia managed to subsume Ukraine, for instance, and made everyone speak Russian, that’s movement toward monoculture that’s not white supremacy, it’s Russian supremacy.

An American white guy promoting monoculture is pretty much always a white supremacist.

4. The Great Replacement Theory

This is a white supremacist statement, full stop.

The Great Replacement Theory is a white supremacist, white nationalist conspiracy theory invented by French author Renaud Camus. It’s a subset of another type of conspiracy theory called white genocide theory. White genocide started out as a primarily anti-semitic theory, which Camus— concerned about the influx of Muslim immigrants to France — took and adapted to be anti-Muslim.

The basic idea is that there are “influential forces”(originally Jewish, then Muslim in France, and in the US often it’s people of color or “the Jews” or Muslims because in the US we’re glad to target all of them) who are working in shadowy secret places to completely do away with white people and white culture. This is bad not just because whiteness must be preserved, but also because whiteness is inherently superior.

If you ever see guys walking around with torches and shouting, “They will not replace us!” you’ve found your local loud and proud white supremacists.

Now, just to be clear: not all white supremacists believe in the Great Replacement theory. But all Great Replacement theorists are white supremacists.

The Venn diagram would look like this:

Which is only to say that if someone believes the Great Replacement Theory, they are, by definition, also white supremacists.

Also of interest: while white supremacists fall all across the political spectrum — there are plenty of Leftist white supremacists — the Great Replacement Theory is a special bit of rightwing conspiracy theory. It’s one of those theories that tells you a lot about a person as soon as they associate with it: they are right wing, they are white supremacist, they are not particularly interested in history or science except as a political tool, etc.

Yeah but wait a second

So I could see someone reasonably saying, “Okay, I get it. That last one in particular seems pretty straightforward. But does saying something like, ‘multiculturalism is a failure’ truly make someone a white supremacist?”

And that’s a really, really good point. There could be someone who really honestly just has some questions about multiculturalism and that’s as far as it goes.

But here’s the big reveal: all four of these posts are from the same person!

Which is another really common thing about white supremacy: it tends to invade everything. You’re not likely to find someone who has only ever said one white supremacist thing or just has one small overlap with white supremacist thought. It’s an invasive philosophy that bleeds into a bunch of other areas. It wants to be the central philosophy in a person’s world and it tends to corrupt, consume, or replace other thoughts (religious, philosophical, political).

So if we look at these four posts in context with one another, knowing they all come from the same person, they reinforce one another. Start from the bottom:

* Post #4 — This guy believes the Great Replacement Theory. He thinks people of color are trying to get rid of white people in a cultural or actual genocide (or both).
* This informs #3. What does he mean when he says multiculturalism has failed? Well, it’s being used as a weapon against white culture. So the only thing to be done is to enforce a white monocultural while there’s still time!
* Which informs #2 — why does this guy think we should keep black and brown people out of the US? Because white folks need to consolidate their power, and reclaim their culture and their political power.
* Which gives us insight into #1. “Was he *actually* saying that small towns are less crime-ridden because they have more white people and fewer people of color?” Yup, turns out he was!

Anyway, it’s a fun little exercise and a reminder that white supremacy *can* seem hard to spot sometimes, but with a little bit of work, an open mind, and lots of context, we can often be certain that someone’s a white supremacist, whether they publicly accept the label or not.

What do you think?

P.S. I got into this particular conversation due to a series of articles that my friend Clay Morgan has been writing about the history of modern evangelicalism. You can read his most recent post here.

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Something fun to do this weekend!

Whew! That was a little intense. If you’re in the Portland, Oregon area this weekend, you might enjoy coming to Green Bean Books this Sunday at 2pm to hear storytime from local (awesome) author Jenn Reese. Her new book Seven Ways through the Woods just came out!

My favorite thing on the internet this week

This is clearly fake but like lots of fake things it made me laugh!

You should probably get this book before December 1st

I am NOT saying “Christmas is coming.” I am NOT saying you need to think about that one bit (I personally wait until the day after Thanksgiving). But I AM saying that this is a book that would be of particular enjoyment if read this December, and it did come out this week after all.

Bruce!

When I sit outside to read he likes to hang out under my chair! He’s the best pet! He’s regal and kind-hearted. He requires very little cleaning up after. He likes to cuddle a little bit sometimes. ONLY A LITTLE BIT. Is he the best? Yes! I have already said this!

Peace to you this week,

Matt