White nationalism wants you to treat it like an honest ideology. It wants you to debate it, honor it, privilege it. But it isn’t yet another source of water flowing into the well, it’s poison.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece on white nationalism. Specifically, I wrote about the challenge in responding to white nationalism. I heard from a couple of readers who wanted a more active solution to the problem.
This was my response to two ideas which had really engaged my mind. Trying to figure out what to do about it wasn’t even on my radar yet because I don’t think we’ve fully embraced the idea that there is even a problem.
Talking With People About Hard Things
Name an issue. Any of them. If it’s in our public consciousness, there will be a debate around it.
But not just around it, but around what to do with it.
This is actually a separate thing.
Take gun violence. There’s the part in which gun violence is a huge scourge on our country. Then there’s also the public debate around how to deal with the scourge of gun violence.
And, like any one of these big issues, there’s also a lot of historic baggage around the commonly espoused responses to dealing with it. In some ways, this offers for us a third dimension. The first is the issue, the second is the conversation, and the third is the baggage and associations we have from past conversations.
All of these things are present before we sort ourselves into political parties and ideologies. This sorting offers a fourth dimension for consideration.
So when I bring up gun violence and call it a “scourge,” there are easily four dimensions of debate already going on before I put the period at the end of the sentence.
I’ve literally had to tell a friend before I’ve said anything beyond this point that I actually hold many different ideas and hopes so he shouldn’t assume I want to confiscate firearms just because I think gun violence is a problem.
Of course, that’s what he claimed I wanted. But in doing this, he hasn’t just jumped to a conclusion, he’s done it by making assumptions on four dimensions of dialogue before I’ve said anything.
He’s come to multiple conclusions from a single data point.
So when we’re wrestling with our big issues, we’re dealing not only with actual arguments, we’re dealing with assumptions and politics.
Now let’s add a fifth dimension: the belief that you and I are responsible for fixing the ills of society.
1) White Nationalism and the Inside Debate
I used guns in the above example, but I could have easily used the one I started with: white nationalism.
And while most agree with me, more or less on the first two dimensions when discussing white nationalism, it’s in the third, fourth, and fifth dimensions where we’ll get hung up. And this is first reason I wrote the piece the way I did.
Because so much conversation around white nationalism has been arguing over the right way to respond to it. Half of the think pieces I’ve read about free speech and protesting since Charlottesville have been about the response to white nationalism. Half of all free speech articles. Far more than those written about the ideology itself.
Of those I’ve read about our response to white nationalism, only a few were from activists looking to get people involved in direct action. The lion’s share, mostly written by columnists in big newspapers have harangued protesters for not protesting the “right” way.
Many reference Martin Luther King, Jr., nonviolence, and the civil rights movement through rose-colored glasses without the self-awareness that they’d be writing the same article in 1963.
Discussing free speech is valuable to our society, but that isn’t the exclusive matter here. Our communities are intentionally allowing hate speech and we’re debating whether we respond to it at all.
So this is about that.
But it’s also about how much more we seem to focus on response than the white nationalists and how their oppressive speech become the icon of free speech.
2) Like Blaming the Victim
The second piece that kept bouncing in my head came after listening to an episode from On the Media about the rise of white nationalism and its historical context.
In it, they describe the many different approaches communities have used to deal with white nationalists and supremacists as they’ve flared up in American history.
Sadly, the verdict we come to halfway through the episode is that directly combating white supremacy doesn’t destroy it. And pretending it isn’t there (starving it of oxygen) doesn’t destroy it either. So either choice leads to white supremacy and white nationalism growing.
One way to hear that is fatalistically. What can we do? Nothing. Either way, they’ll grow.
Another way to hear it is how I heard it: the growth of white nationalism isn’t my fault. At all.
White nationalists and supremacists have gamed the system so that they’ll win either way. So nothing I do “encourages” them.
We’ve heard this before…
This is actually the same thing we hear around guns: the election of President Barack Obama encouraged 3% of the population to begin stockpiling guns in record amounts.
And the same thing we’ve heard around race: Black Lives Matter protests encouraged police to stop doing their jobs.
Oh, and don’t forget #metoo: opening up stories of abuse encourage and radicalize some white men to become men’s rights activists.
Please. Yes, blame the victims of violence for encouraging the violence. And while we’re at it, blame the poor for encouraging extortion, the oppressed for encouraging bigotry, and the sick for your lack of empathy.
Hold everyone else responsible. Just not the one doing it.
White nationalism is growing, not because I’m doing anything wrong, but because some white people are so afraid that they’re willing to destroy our country.
But they are solely responsible for their heinous and immoral ideology.
Protestors didn’t inspire Richard Spencer’s racism or his Nazi salutes. He brought that stuff to the party.
And yet, all these think-pieces bemoan the “encouragement” rather than the destructive ideology itself.
Writing Up a To Do List
Perhaps what frustrated a couple of readers about my original piece was that I wrote up a to-do list which didn’t seem very active. But it wasn’t that kind of list. It’s a collection of ways we must reorient our thinking. Because this begins with the problem pretending to be an inactive, hypothetical ideology worthy of respect.
So I didn’t make up a to-do list with checkboxes for one-and-done activities. Or a repeatable to-do list for your morning rituals. I didn’t say,
- Wake up
- Drink some water
- Brush your teeth
- Take a shower
- Drink coffee
- Meditate
- Take down the patriarchy
But I gave us a list of things we have to start acknowledging about this “debate.” Because we can’t move on until we internalize this fact: we aren’t doing anything wrong here. We’re trying to protect our community from fascists who don’t just dress up like Nazis because they like the fashion sense, but quite literally want to be them.
Those spreading white nationalism aren’t LARPing. They’re making the fantasy real.
That makes it more than a matter of free speech
If you think about it, pretending white nationalism is a simple theoretical ideology would be the perfect trojan horse. Just dismiss it! Or make rational arguments against it! Believe the trolls will honor social norms for debate! This is the frame white nationalists want the rest of us in. They want us “debating” about their right to speak.
Like they aren’t trying to make their fiction into fact and rewrite our history when they are the victors.
So if we pretend its a simple debate, we all have to respond to it like it’s real. That’s what they want. They want us all struggling to come up with better arguments, better opportunities to debate, better ways to respond to their bomb-throwing.
While they just get to sit there chucking the bombs while sitting safely on the sofa trolling on twitter.
The decentralized game is rigged for the spreading of racism and white nationalism regardless of medium or message.
And yet…
Our response is also decentralized. It’s counter-protests, pushing university presidents to stop white nationalists from speaking, counter-programming at nearby churches, making alliances between the young Democrats, Republicans, and Libertarians. It’s treating white nationalism as more than speech.
In Lansing, the decentralized response offered many different to-dos. That’s why one colleague of mine was marching with the counter-protest and another hosted ecumenical and secular counter programming at her church.
Focus on communication
It’s long past time to name the elephant in the room. No, not that one. The other one.
White nationalism is stupid.
It’s a stupid ideology which promotes stupidity from its people.
It can’t hold up to an honest debate, so it makes up and spreads false statistics about “black on black crime” and antisemitic ownership. It passes off snide tweets for honest debate and routinely moves the goalposts on its conversation partners.
Don’t believe me, engage some. Or engage our history.
Scientific “proof” about the superiority of whites has so long been discredited it’s offensive to even have to deal with it. It offends any educated person to imagine a dude with a smart phone should be treated as an equal to a wealth of scientific research.
This isn’t a free market exercise. We aren’t buying ideas from the store from the income we made sitting in class or reading books.
These are hucksters trying to con you long enough to make you steal from yourself, hand it over, and convince yourself that you deserve to be punished.
It’s a bankrupt and dangerous ideology which doesn’t need to be treated like it’s honest. It needs to be treated like its fundamentally dishonest and doesn’t bear anything close to the weight of scientific consensus.
This isn’t the discovery of a genius but the ravings of a loon.
So we don’t need to argue with it or create opportunities for it like it deserves our attention. We dismiss it and focus on the real subject: embracing tolerance, honesty, and compassion.
If we’re being honest
We don’t want to deal with white nationalism. It doesn’t fit in our clean and comfortable world view. It clogs our left/right sorting machine and makes us question the idea that all free speech must be free.
And that’s actually good for us.
We can’t stand the idea that a thing may not actually be true for “both sides” or that we’ve given certain parts of our society too much power.
Or that the long-con of white nationalism, with its anti-establishment ethos and libertarian political views are sweeping up good people in its dragnet.
It offends our sensibilities and ideologies to consider, not that a quarter of the population are racists, but that a tiny segment of the population are raging racists and enough people are white nationalist-adjacent for us to ignore the growing problem.
So this isn’t a “what do I do?” problem exactly.
Because most of the problem is how the media covers it and conservatives tolerate it.
It’s more like how many ways do I adjust my life, thinking, communication, friendships, and advocacy to seek change at every level?
It’s more a matter of being open to our neighbors and protecting our communities, states, country, and international community from the rise of fear-filled and -fueled evil through direct action, political action, and advocacy.
And doing this knowing how many good people still think the devil needs them to be it’s advocate.
White nationalism’s an evil ideology manifesting it’s darkness in the real world and we are the ones called to challenge it. On our terms not just there’s. Bringing a light powerful enough to drive away the darkness.
And we do so knowing that we’ll be spending our whole lives doing this.