For many, talking about racism and white supremacy is hard. Of course, that’s by design. The white power movement intends to confuse you.
The terms always guide the debate. But sometimes we mistake our seeking clarity of the terms for doing the work.
There are so many names for racists and their organizations. Are we talking about white supremacists or white nationalists? Do we trust the 2016 catch-all rebrand of alt-right? And what of all the little groups which draw inspiration from various sources as diverse as European-style ethnonationalism to the KKK?
There’s a way that this lack of precise understanding makes wading into the territory of overt white supremacist groups tricky. We feel the challenge of being precise, even when the nuance seems far more cosmetic than necessary.
We can easily intuit that the KKK and Stormfront have, at the very least, 95% compatible world views. That should be enough to talk about what’s common there, right? The Venn diagram is almost just one circle.
And yet, for some reason, it isn’t enough.
It’s almost as if that 0-5% difference is vastly more important than the white supremacy they both espouse.
Why?
Well, that feeling of needing total precision before we can deal with racism is the point. In fact, that is the strategy.
What we do need clarity on.
Rather than completely indulge this need for precision, let us simply recognize three different ideas which are central to this conversation.
1. Racism is not about belief.
This is the number one most confusing idea many white people have about racism. That it is only about the beliefs embedded in a person’s brain. Or the direct intention to hurt people. Racism isn’t simply about belief or motivation. It is the partnering of racial bias with actions which oppress.
The intention is not the point.
We must also recognize that so much can be true at the same time. Yes, we are all a little racist. And we can do racist things without meaning too. It doesn’t make us entirely bad people when we are unintentionally racist.
However, when we choose to be racist or refuse to learn why something is racist, we can no longer plead ignorance. We become active participants in perpetuating racism.
2. White supremacy describes the racial bias of western culture.
Our cultural systems set “white” as normal. And the roots of the setting of that normal are tangled in the toxic cocktail of racism and hubris.
Much of what constitutes a sense of western white hegemony are justifications for why white people, specifically Anglo Saxon, should be on top of the hierarchical pyramid.
Like racism, white supremacy is something already there. And most of us can be forgiven for being confused or fearing a loss of privilege. When we act to protect the systemic dominance of one race, we cross a line.
3. The White Power Movement is actively trying to make the United States a white country.
To deal with the White Power Movement, we must look past the various identity markers which only obscure our view of the movement. So no quibbling over one’s specific identity as a white supremacist, white nationalist, alt-right, Nazi or whatever. These only speak to the specific goals of particular parts of the white power movement.
We tend to focus our precision on these groups because they are easier to study. And it is that impulse the white power movement exploits.
What is the White Power Movement?
Where precision matters is in naming the nature of the white power movement and its specific goals; to impose a white identity upon the country.
Central to the movement’s goal is using a violent methodology to achieve these ends. For the movement, white superiority isn’t simply theoretical—and therefore destined to exist only in the mind—but is ideological. They see the federal and state governments as obstacles to achieving this central goal.
And this is the detail that serves as the devil’s home.
In this way, these smallish collections of different racist and white supremacist groups may or may not be part of the white power movement. Just because somebody puts “deplorable” in their Twitter profile, that doesn’t mean they are part of the movement.
But it is precisely that exploitable narrative the white power movement uses to its advantage.
The high-profile example
Think about what happened in a matter of hours in 2016. When candidate Clinton appealed to the Republican Party saying it has some seriously dangerous white supremacists in its midst, what happened? Millions of conservatives heard these words as calling them white supremacists. And their collective response was to defend white supremacy.
At that moment, many grabbed a common identity with those overt racists.
Suddenly, it became almost impossible for the average Twitter user to tell the difference between a Conservative, a Russian troll, and people actively seeking to make the United States an entirely white country by instigating a race war through domestic terrorism.
But how did the media respond to this moment? They called Clinton’s statement a gaffe.
Untangled
This fundamental confusion, however, didn’t just happen in a moment. The impulse to circle the wagons around white identity is always the intention.
Hiding the white power movement within cultural white supremacy and garden variety racism is the point.
And convincing us to do that dirty work is always the goal.
All of this confusion sets everything up perfectly. The white power movement has bigger ambitions. And they don’t want us prepared to stop them.