The coming storm

This isn’t your granddaddy’s KKK. It’s not about hate, it’s about love. It’s not about power, it’s about autonomy. White Nationalism is about the right of white people to establish their own communities and live amongst other whites in celebration of white culture. This autonomy is important because who we are is written on our genes, our skin and our facial structures. If whites don’t remain separate genetically, our culture and values will fade away.

This is the worldview of many White Nationalists, a growing political movement in the United States that is found not only in the South and more rural areas but also Philadelphia, Los Angeles and New York. Many of its adherents are poor and working class, but many of them are middle-class professionals. Stormfront, a popular White Nationalist website that is 10 years old and has almost 50,000 registered members, includes many posts asking how to reveal one’s racialism to a new date or more liberal family members and friends. I’ve had some interesting online discussions with these folks. Many of them are intelligent and well educated and quick to refer you to a handful of “scholarly” works by the likes of J.P. Rushton funded by the racist Charles Darwin Research Institute. The arguments are pretty old-school (as in 19th century) and follow the line that skull structure and skin color are connected to attributes like intelligence, personality and even cultural values.

Before you dismiss White Nationalism as an ignorant but benign ideology, let me tell you why I think a storm is coming. Scholars like Dr. Carol Swain, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, agree with me that White Nationalism is a growing threat. In her book The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenges to Integration, Swain argues that this new movement is politically savvy and exerting an increasing influence over mainstream politics. They are able to manipulate some of the legitimate concerns of many white Americans: crime, job loss and rampant consumerism and convince them that people of color and immigrants are to blame for the bulk of these problems. I disagree with Swain’s solutions to a large extent since she believes we need to dismantle race-based affirmative action and tighten our immigration policies. Still, I certainly agree with her that the problems facing working-class whites in this country are real and unfortunately not being addressed. We ignore these legitimate concerns at our peril, Swain believes, and invite race-based conflict in this country.

Disturbingly, White Nationalism is not just confined to the Stormfront website and other enclaves of racist beliefs. White Nationalism has managed to work its way into mainstream politics and culture and rear its ugly head everywhere from the pages of the New York Times to welfare reform. In his Dec. 7, 2004 column “The New Red-Diaper Babies,” New York Times columnist David Brooks extols the virtues of the “natalists”—Americans who are bucking cultural trends and having large families. Brooks points out that the birthrate is falling in Europe as well as many regions of the United States, but what he means to say is that the white birthrate is falling—many immigrants of color do not have falling birthrates. Intentionally or not, Brooks is actually citing a popular line from the White Nationalist movement that white birth rates are falling and threatening to make whites a minority in their old stomping grounds of Western Europe and the United States. But Brooks doesn’t stop there; he goes on to describe how these natalists are “moving away from disorder, violence and vulgarity” to “clean, orderly and affordable places.” Implicit in this is the concept of more urban, diverse areas being “vulgar” and whiter, suburban locales being “clean.” There is of course nothing wrong with desiring safety for your children, but there is something disheartening about an exodus of working and middle-class white families to segregated neighborhoods and schools.

Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous treatise on race and intelligence The Bell Curve is credited by many scholars with spurring debate on welfare reform with his 1984 book Losing Ground. In this book Murray argued that welfare was only encouraging out of wedlock births and should be abolished altogether and poor mothers forced to try their luck in the job market. Murray became the darling of conservative politicians and many of his arguments from Losing Ground are still quoted in welfare debates. Murray extended his vaguely racist points in Losing Ground into an explicitly racist argument in The Bell Curve. In this later work he argued against welfare not just on the basis that it was detrimental to the poor, but that it encouraged “dysgenesis,” that is the “outbreeding” of intelligent whites by less intelligent people of color as well as poor whites. Murray’s arguments found their way into mainstream politics as well as popular culture and when Clinton proposed to “end welfare as we know it” he was directly quoting Charles Murray.

If we are to avoid the coming storm of racial conflict in this country, we must both listen to and address the concerns of working class whites while refusing to tolerate racist propaganda in our politics and culture. Barack Obama won votes in rural white areas as well as he did in Chicago because he understands that not all oppression is race-based and he sees the need for working class solidarity. At the same time, we must address the racism inherent in our policies, institutions and culture. Hopefully, working class whites will then join with people of color in forming a storm front of solidarity against the corporate interests that threaten us all.

Bridget Newman is a Trinity senior.