NOTES ON CHARLOTTESVILLE:
OR, WHY WHITE PEOPLE DO NOT EXIST AS A PEOPLE
I've heard some several buddies, people I know well and care about (most of them not in comment boxes or in public) asking about the moral equivalency between the neo Nazis, white nationalists, and other white ethnostate type supporters and groups like Black Lives Matter, Antifa (short for Antifascists), and other direct action groups.
I'd like to speak to that comparison a bit and then turn to a more important part of it that I worry about. Before I get to that, I should first say that I've said enough about Trump. Honestly, the guy confuses me. He swings from a nihilistic idiot to a idiotic nihilist. His inconsistencies pile so high that you either get lost in them or you use them wholesale to try and make your point. He wins in the time and toll it takes. He also, I think, has found a very particular niche worldview for his newfound politics and is willing to, at the end of the day, embrace ANYONE willing to give him what he wants the most: affection. Never, at least to my memory, have we had a more emotionally needy president. But that's neither here nor there at the moment.
If you look at most social protests and revolutionary movements you will find a basic set of factions that don't change. They tend to spread between non violent oppositions and even less violent moderates, both winged by some type of pragmatists who are not in principle opposed to violence. Different sides will use the radicals of different parts of this division to throw away the entire argument of one side or another, and this is not an even equivalent exchange in the history of US racial tension. But I want to stay away, mostly, from broad historical claims here.
The point I am driving at is evident when we realize that the Civil Rights activists who practiced non violent acts of resistance were often lumped in with Black Panthers, or others not opposed to violence, although the two groups were ideologically fairly different. But I am not willing to say that they were so different as to not be judged as being on roughly the same side of the discussion. After all, the Civil Rights movement was not just the movement for the passage of legislation nor did it belong to the non violence of MLK Jr entirely. This is not historical. If you don't see that the US institution of slavery was a grave moral evil and that the Jim Crow laws that succeeded it were demonic in their formal and informal application, and that, as a result, those determined to end these things were in principle on the side of justice, then you really have no moral compass. Say what you will of the vast differences between MLK Jr and Malcolm X, but it is hard to argue that their social protest was off key in the tonic.
The more popular -- but equally as appropriate -- comparison these days is to Nazi Germany. (Of course, a great deal of the sentiment of the Civil Rights movement was a direct result of the effects that US wars had for those within its ranks who were not white, but that might be slightly off the mark in this case.) There is a bright and clear moral line between the Nazi ideology and its perverse Final Solution and those who sought to oppose it. This line, by the way, finds its way directly into the symbolism and rhetoric of the neo Nazi's at Charlottesville. Not only were there swastikas, there were Nazi crosses and other niche paraphernalia. There were the salutes, yes, but there were other salutations and insider ways of speaking going on. There were also the tiki torches, the modern Pepe Wal-Mart replacement for the burning torch rallies and burning crosses of the KKK. The grand knight of that sick group was standing by. They brought their own military-grade armed militia to protect those who came in homemade riot gear. This was not the making of a peaceful protest or free speech of the sort that we see the Westboro Baptists practice (not that they are emblems of public virtue, far, far from it!).
As I said earlier, if you find yourself unable to distinguish between Nazism in its original form and neo Nazis, white nationalists, and others like them and those who through what ever means they find useful (which one can disagree with in practice while still endorsing in principle) oppose them, then you are morally corrupt. If you can't quite figure out how the math works in this moral calculus, you are morally mindless and incompetent.
Of course, within any opposition to these (supposedly) easy immoral targets one can find many arguments and even passionate disavowals. But there are real moments when these lines are simply drawn and one must take a side. I have in the past even used the language of "alt left" in an entirely different usage, but I regret it deeply, now, seeing its life-cycle. I will not exchange my allergies to the ideological types of identity politics I have long opposed nor will my more specific critique of the critics settle. All that fuss gets set aside in these events. If I have to choose whether to stand next to a neo Nazi or Antifa, I'll choose the latter on pain of eternal damnation. To those who say you don't have to choose, that risk is one I am not willing to make. I would rather be a black panther than a lynch mob, as much as my truer sympathies lie somewhere else. Despite all my oppositions to modern warfare, I would pick up arms against the Nazis long before I'd "peacefully" cheer on their side. I think most people feel this way.
But something remains and this is what I worry about and even dread most: we are not fighting Nazis or lynch mobs. Most people would never go to march in Charlottesville. And even when you talk to many of the white nationalists they will say something along the lines of "I'm not racist." To them, their present politics is no longer that of the slaver or the KKK. They don't wear hoods and they don't want to own people as property anymore, it seems. They hate the Jewish people for reasons I am still not able to process in my mind, but their argument is more separatist than colonial -- so they claim.
They seem to think that the USA was founded by *their* ethnic ancestors, who hailed from Europe, gathered together in this ancient race called "White" that has recently, especially after the activism surrounding police brutality against African Americans, fallen into a disrepute that is sending the world into a globalist terror to come, in the biggest of the big governments.
Now, these conspiracy theories do not need to be true or believed to find where they hit a live nerve in a lot of people. Some people do ask why white people cannot have rallies for themselves without longing for ethic purity. Some people do think that white folks today are being washed away through interracial marriage, but many more who don't mind interracial romance still worry that white people are on the losing end of public sentiment. Lots of people who try to counter this tend to make it worse by appealing to gotcha replies about privilege or other things. I tend to find that too complex.
I recently commented to one of my friends that I don't think of myself as having very many "white" friends. Some of you might balk since many extremely intimate people in my life are, supposedly, white. And of course if we use one way of thinking about what "white" is, that is true. On the same logic, I would be, in certain real scenarios, white as well. But what I meant when I wrote to my friend was that I see my friends of European descent as from where they are. Those who don't know where they are from share with me a genealogical confusion that I can also understand.
Maybe this weirdness is partly because, on the vulgar ethnic analysis I am used to, I am neither white nor Black. And, of course, as many Africans who are neither black nor American will remind you, things become quite complex depending on what rules we are using to count the deck.
My point is this, and if you read nothing else, please read this: There is no such thing as "white people" in history. Most folks who use the expression were not allowed to use it only a few decades ago. The white supremacy of the KKK of old hated Blacks, yes, but also Mexicans, and Catholics, and Jews (of course), and atheists, and more. Depending on how you see it, whiteness was either more or less ecumenical, but just as ideologically religious.
Let me say it again: There will never be a "white ethnostate" based on European culture because the history of Europe is covered in ethnic feuds and wars. If you've never heard of a guy named Napoleon, check him out. I'm being serious. If you think of yourself as being "white" in some serious ancestral way, you're not. You are wearing a name tag your family was GIVEN at some point but never had by its own right. There are no white people in this familial sense. (Settle down critical race theorists, I am well aware of the whiteness that is real, too, but this ain't it.) There is no such thing as a white European culture or of a white heritage in that sense at all.
Again and again: The most scandalously false part of the neo Nazi mentality is as old as its previous, original half baked idea in Hitler's weak mind. The concept of a master race doesn't work for mastery of people nor does it work for figuring out who you really are. We come from places with names and languages and peoples and legacies that are concrete. Some of us lost a lot of memory at the hands of another, and others lost through the same hands. Today we tend to think that the ancestors of slaves, or indigenous peoples, or mixed-up mestizos are the ones who lack a strong identity and the rest have theirs in bold font. Not true. From your family to your soul, you don't really know who you are if you are using ideological pet words to hang the hat of your self.
I'm not a real Mexican and I'm not a real American -- and I'm no Canadian, either. My father was an orphan, so I've taken his bloodless name as my own, a Portuguese word by etymology. I of course will pass as a white guy at a Black family reunion, just as I passed as an indigenous guy today on the pier (until I produced a fishing license instead of a status card), just as I passed as an Iranian at a birthday party last week, and so on. But the real facts of who I am don't work in the abstract.
This is why if you want to find a better substitute for whiteness find a Greek Festival or an Irish Pub or a German Beer Garden or a French Restaurant. This is food and drink, and it is a set of multicultural cliches, but enjoy an Italian family dinner and tell me there is nothing about who someone is at stake there. The point is that the real identity we can and do celebrate is everywhere and it is not necessarily riddled with guilt, even if sometimes it could use some (or far less). None of it calls itself "white." None. If you are using "white" as your only name tag, then I am sorry to say that you've been fooling yourself. You don't have a people by that name. There is no such thing. Your great-great-great grandmother would mostly likely not answer to "white."
Personal history quickly becomes social, national, and regional histories and we find ourselves, again, at Charlottesville. All I can say for now about it, to my dear and beloved friends who I suspect think that they are "white," is this: We cannot have white rallies because there is no such thing as a "white" people. Black Lives Matter is not a movement for everyone who is of one dark color in the world -- it is about the US experience for those living within the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow over the past three years (some Black activist groups are critical of this aspect of BLM, by the way). If you want a "white" identity, then look to the folk expressions of it that we have and should treasure like music, food, and regional folk ways of being. Poetry, dance, dialect, accent, story. These are not safe or sanitary places -- I tend to think this story of a "white people" got made up there, too -- but they also don't pretend like people are any more or less related than they really are.
Donald Trump is a German-American man, not a white man. His whiteness is an entirely different issue that I am disinterested in getting into right now. If you wonder why white people are seen as bad sometimes, it is largely because of this false assumption: that white people exist as a people when they so manifestly do not.
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