Words matter. The media currently is awash in the term "white nationalism." I prefer "white supremacy" for the simple reason that it more accurately describes the beliefs of those who profess it. White nationalism has a vague whiff of legitimacy about it that white supremacy does not. And to be sure, white nationalism is wholly illegitimate. White nationalism is, ideationally, a construct that functions to justify separation. White nationalism does not, as an idea that takes up psychic space, contain room for even segregation or apartheid. Instead, white nationalism is of a piece with national socialism, more commonly known as Nazism. The reason is that white nationalism, like Nazism, seeks to carve out a geopolitical space populated wholly by those it defines as "white." There is no room in the "white" nation for persons or groups designated as non-white. However anodyne the language white nationalists use, the fact is that a white nation has no room for non-whites; hence, white nationalists will ultimately, if they have the authority, use state power, including violence or the threat of violence, to maintain the separate geopolitical space they crave. In this respect, white nationalism is the geopolitical equivalent of white supremacy.
It behooves us to refer to white nationalism as white supremacy so that we never lose sight of the teleological endpoint white nationalists seek: it is the same teleological endpoint that white supremacists seek. That the definition of "white" is wholly arbitrary and incoherent in any meaningful biological, sociological, or political sense matters little. Like Nazism or Stalinism, the arbitrariness and incoherence become irrelevant in the face of state violence against categories of persons. White nationalists define "whiteness" as a sort of self-referential privileging of "whiteness." To be sure, whiteness inures in part based on appearance, but whiteness does not inure on appearance alone. That which is deemed effete, tolerant, or skeptical is not white. Hence, categories of persons such as intellectual liberals who might otherwise be deemed white are placed in a non-white category. The point being that "whiteness" is used to signify a particular sociocultural experience, to privilege that experience above all others, and to use the experience as a justification of state-enforced separation.
White nationalism is of course ironic in the sense that if all those who are not "white," as white nationalism defines it, left the country, the white nationalists would find themselves in an economically and intellectually impoverished nation. The political and economic consequences of white supremacy, however, do not assuage its danger. White nationalists are white supremacists and will resort to violence against those deemed to be non-white in order to enforce the sociopolitical ramifications of their beliefs. This is why it is imperative to refer to white nationalists as white supremacists. They do not seek peace. They seek domination and exclusion. They do so based on a belief that they are superior to other humans. In fact, the simple truth is that white supremacists do not consider non-whites to be fully human. Whether such a belief is coherent or justified does not matter if one is being dominated and excluded. Placing oneself in the "human" category and others outside the "human" category will beget violence.
One of the problems we face is that calling a white supremacist a Nazi or equating white nationalism with Nazism feels uncomfortable. This has to do with many factors, but two seem apparent to me. First, no white supremacists in the U.S. have, at least since the Bureau of Indian Affairs abandoned efforts at assimilation, attempted to exterminate a class of persons using state-sanctioned deadly force in the way that Nazis did during the Holocaust. We simply have no received experience of anything so radical in its violence and extensive in its reach. Even the violence done to black Americans does not compare to the systematic efficiency and scope of the Nazi killing project during World War II. Thus, calling a group Nazis feels overblown. The problem is that white supremacists would surely behave as vilely and violently as Nazis should they ever control the levers of state power in the United States. For this reason, the comparison, while a bit jarring, is certainly apt.
Second, we in the United States have a belief that we are somehow inherently different than Germany in the Weimar era. In essence, we believe that Nazism or anything similar cannot happen here. The reason for the belief has to do with the vast experiential differences in representative democracies between the United States and Weimar Germany. No one would seriously debate that the American republican system is different from Weimar Germany. The U.S. was a historical first and has nearly 250 years of uninterrupted history as a representative democracy. Nevertheless, this does not suggest something about the inherent quality of being American. It simply reflects that this was the government the American people chose due in large part to historical fortuity. What this means is that demagoguery in the U.S. is unlikely to take the same route to power that it took in Weimar Germany.
That the United States is different from Germany does not mean that Americans are immune to promises of prosperity and happiness based on ethnic scapegoating. Donald Trump's promise to exclude Muslims and deport/keep out "Mexicans" demonstrates that we are as susceptible to ethnic scapegoating as any. A part of the population that self-identifies as "white" is aggrieved for a variety of reasons. That population blames Muslims and "Mexicans" for their grievances. This is of course patently absurd. Muslims as a category are not violent or anti-American. Further, Muslims as a category create enormous wealth and add tremendous value to the United States. One need only look at the roster of doctors at any hospital to understand that Muslims as a category benefit America rather than harm it. The same is true of "Mexicans." American produce would not make it to American tables if "Mexicans" weren't working the fields. Nevertheless, Muslims and "Mexicans" are scapegoated as sources of white supremacists' grievances. This is not so different from Nazis scapegoating Jews for grievances Jews were not responsible for. Like the case with Muslims and "Mexicans" in the contemporary United States, Jews in Weimar Germany benefited the German republic but were nevertheless blamed for all grievances.
White supremacists are ultimately Utopian thinkers. This is why white nationalism is a poor word choice to describe the white supremacist project. The truth of all Utopian projects is that they seek to create a sort of prelapsarian community in the world. This requires a myth of an ideal community, the prelapsarian Eden from which the world devolved, and a narrative of what corrupted the ideal community. All such myths are incoherent from anthropological, sociological, and historical perspectives. Nevertheless, all such myths are dangerous because they establish a hierarchical organization of human beings based on purity and impurity.
All utopias are imagined because every utopia assumes an impossible state of perfection is possible. In this regard, every utopia is pernicious, whether left or right, because achieving utopia requires eliminating human imperfection, an inherently exclusionary and violent project. The white supremacist utopia imagines a prelapsarian world in which prosperity and happiness were functions of whiteness. What white supremacists consider to be white is a sort of 1950s chauvinism in which family supporting jobs were available because white males were the workforce and the jobs were good because white males were not constrained from being white males. That is, white males were bigoted, society was segregated (though insufficiently), and economic prosperity resulted. At the international level this translated into American belligerence which is viewed as evidence of America's strength and confidence. Individuals were strong because they were free to be prejudiced and the nation was strong because its bellicosity was unfettered. The Utopian project seeks a return to "white" America, which means elevating bigotry beyond the normative to the legal and intentionally removing any persons or groups with state force who would sully the new "whiteness." Again, the fact that this idea is wildly incorrect is irrelevant because many persons adhere to it and the notion countenances segregation and ultimately violence. It is a supremacist movement through and through. History tells us that supremacist movements will use the possibility of and desire for a Utopia as justification for state violence. America is no different than any other country in this regard.
How we describe the current iterations of the white supremacy movement matters. Cloaked in the garb of an incoherent form of ethnic nationalism, those espousing white nationalism are still white supremacists and ought to be so described. "White nationalism" tames the true yearnings of white supremacists and implies that statehood is an ethnic concept rather than a political one. This has implications for all persons who are not considered "white." First, it strips them of the legal standing and protections granted to citizens because it transfers political rights to an ethnic category. Second, it suggests that every non-white would then have a place in a nation that matches their ethnic category. In this way, white supremacy creates the conditions for legal exclusion and possibly violence if full citizenship is effectively removed for non-whites and there is no physical place to put the new non-citizens. The violence the U.S. government perpetrated against native tribes is perhaps instructive.
The question remains whether this concern over language is hyperbole. In this regard I return to the Nazi problem: if white supremacists who masquerade as white nationalists espouse beliefs that designate "white" as the only fully human category of persons and they have as their goal an exclusively "white" geopolitical territory, then the Nazi comparison is fair and not hyperbolic. That the U.S. has different political conditions than Weimar Germany does not by necessity immunize the American system from racist demagogues willing to use state power to perpetrate violence against non-whites. White supremacy is, if not on the rise, more in the open. Every media outlet should call white supremacy for what it is rather than using language that has even the merest whiff of political legitimacy, i.e. white nationalism. Anything less is complicit in the white supremacy movement's attempt to color itself as even marginally legitimate when it is wholly illegitimate. It is not hyperbole to call something exactly what it is, particularly when that thing is fraught with danger for so many.
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