When David Duke traded in his cloak and robe for a coat and tie, he began to wrap his racist crusade in the lingo of civil rights for whites. One product of this grand wizardry was a new group called the National Association for the Advancement of White People, an obvious play on the name of the venerable civil rights organization.
Notwithstanding the vigorous debates already happening about affirmative action and forced busing, Duke’s innovation didn’t really catch on. Most white people found the need for such “advancement” by a charlatan and demagogue absurd. Duke had to pretend for a time to have renounced his most extreme views to enjoy his brief burst of political success.
“White nationalists” of the 1980s and ‘90s bemoaned this fact. “[W]e have to address and correct the problem we inflict on ourselves, our own lack of a racial consciousness and the absence of a common will to act in accordance with it,” complained the late columnist Sam Francis in the 1994 speech that got him cashiered from the Washington Times.
Talk to those drawn to the “alt-right” and you’ll find the idea that whites need to be more “racially conscious” has won some converts, however marginal. To them, pouring the new wine of contemporary identity-politics language into the old wineskin of racism seems a great deal less absurd than it once did.
As was the case in Charlottesville last year, sometimes the wineskins burst and old-fashioned racial bigotry spills forth in deadly fashion. When their follow-up rally occurs in D.C. over the weekend, alt-righters will no doubt hit back at the denunciations that appear in the press by pointing to the New York Times’ hiring of tech writer Sarah Jeong and subsequent defense of her spate of anti-white tweets.
Jeong isn’t morally equivalent to the tiki torch-wielding cretins of Charlottesville, let alone the Nazis and Jim Crow-era segregationists who actually wielded political power. Conservative journalist Reihan Salam penned a thoughtful piece treating her rhetoric as a kind of coping mechanism for a person of color swimming among disproportionately white elites who themselves engage in such banter as a form of “intra-white status jockeying,” though the scope and vehemence of Jeong’s tweets went far beyond playful jibes about Volvo-driving Trader Joe’s shoppers or stereotypical “white girls” sipping pumpkin spiced lattes.
But the Internet doesn’t limit the exposure of this kind of talk to upwardly mobile whites who aren’t threatened by it. Nor is the expression of anti-white sentiment limited to the ironic. What is noteworthy, however, is how much liberal defenses of Jeong played into alt-right assertions.
One is that Jeong’s tweets should be taken neither seriously nor literally, just a bit of harmless Edgelord trolling. This is something denizens of the alt-right often say when caught making Holocaust jokes on the Internet — they are just messing around with forbidden things. Even when not meant as a dodge, such a defense of neo-Nazi tomfoolery brings to mind the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
A more sophisticated argument is that racism cannot meaningfully exist without institutional or social power and cannot be divorced from a historical context in which whites have oppressed people of color, not the other way around. But most of what we call “hate crimes” can be committed without much institutional or social power (though having such power is certainly helpful in getting away with them).
What may be true of the power disparities between groups does not always hold true among individuals — as a New York Times employee, Jeong almost certainly has more social power than the white racist harassers she was ostensibly parodying. There are parts of the United States, if not in the country as a whole, where people of color have considerable political power.
Power can make the effects of racism much worse — think Bull Connor versus bad tweets. But it is not a condition for its existence.
The view that power is essentially a zero-sum game in which whites and nonwhites compete, that American and Western traditions cannot be disconnected from their racist past, that what has always been must always be, is held by alt-righters and a certain form of progressive alike. They just draw starkly different conclusions about what that should mean.
What it may well mean is that an ideology intended to eradicate white racism may beget more of it, as an aging, shrinking population rejects being held responsible for the behaviors of their ancestors and is unlikely to be reassured by Salam’s observation that “anti-white rhetoric is, in some communities, so commonplace as to be banal.”
Liberals rightly point out that the society in which we live is the product of our ancestors’ actions — a pretty conservative insight, actually — and that the consequences of their misdeeds do not magically vanish in 1865, 1964, or on Jan. 20, 2009. But neither did the ability to commit injustices against our fellow human beings by ignoring either their individuality or our larger, common identities, an unfortunate reality no combination of 280 characters can erase.
