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White supremacy
| The colorful pseudoscience Racialism |
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| Hating thy neighbour |
| Divide and conquer |
| Dog-whistlers |
“”Pride should be reserved for something you achieve or obtain on your own, not something that happens by accident of birth. Being Irish isn't a skill… it's a fucking genetic accident. You wouldn't say I'm proud to be 5'11"; I'm proud to have a pre-disposition for colon cancer.
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| —George Carlin |
“”White supremacy is, essentially, an ecosystem built around the idea of never having to fight fair. A full-bodied commitment — culturally, politically, spiritually — to the retention of the privilege to be cowards. They’re learning to read? Let’s kill them. Can’t (legally) kill them anymore? Let’s burn down the schools. Can’t burn down the schools anymore? Let’s ban books.…
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| —Damon Young[1] |
White supremacy or white supremacism is an ideology claiming that white people are superior to other races, and are a "master race" or some other such nonsense. The movements of this ideology are racialist and fascist. An easy (but not necessarily foolproof) way to spot a white supremacist is their insistence on capitalising the word "white".
When people use code words such as "Western chauvinism" (Proud Boys) or "defending Western civilization" (Steve King), it is spin (public relations) for white supremacy.[2]
Types of white supremacists[edit]
There are three basic types of white supremacists. The first type of this species wraps themselves openly in the symbols and regalia of Nazis, Fascism, and/or the Ku Klux Klan.
The second type is more insidious. These racists avoid identification with the first type and wrap themselves in the language of anthropology and archaeology. This second type is fond of parading forth statistics relating to skull size, brain size, comparative IQ, crime rates, and other quack pseudoscience from the 19th century that was discredited not long after, as well as pseudo-libertarian bullshit about "freedom of association". They may also be identified by their apparent inability to distinguish correlation from causality, though that deficiency is shared by a wide variety of cranks and denialists,[note 1] so it isn't a foolproof sign.
And there's a third, more careful class of white supremacist. They're the conservative Tea Party types: those who say, "I love black people, but they're more violent than white people." It's clear that they think they're superior to non-white people, but they couch it in economic and traditionalist language rather than even separatist language. Discussions of this sort inevitably spiral into apologia for slavery and the term "white genocide" getting thrown about. Ironically, they think that other races are plotting to exterminate white people.
Despite the label, the apparently "white"[note 2] Jews are often the targets of white supremacists, often ranking among their preferred victims. Paradoxically, the Jews are often characterized as devious tricksters, a trait which would theoretically require a great deal of intelligence, which should, in turn, lead to their inclusion among the "higher races". However, the supremacists seem to think that a genetic propensity towards "virtue"[note 3] and extreme gullibility are more important to the master race than intellect.[note 4] If the above makes not a lick of sense, it has nothing to do with the contributor's ability to express ideas; the rhetoric of white supremacy is really just that ass-backward.
And really, if even a shred of white supremacy is to be believed, one should take note that they can't make a single decent video game, tabletop game, or webcomic that's faithful to their views (and probably reflective of their intelligence).
White Pride[edit]
Due to negative publicity in modern times, many white supremacists no longer directly claim whites are superior but, instead, attempt to steal rhetoric from racial minorities by claiming that white people are an oppressed and disadvantaged group. "White Pride" is the term some supremacists use to claim that they are simply proud of their white/Aryan heritage rather than claiming that their heritage somehow makes them better than other races. They often point to Black Pride or Asian Pride groups as a double standard or reverse racism that they can form without a second thought while any White Pride is declared racist by default. This claim quickly falls apart under any sort of inspection. For instance, they say that if Black pride is allowed, then White pride should be socially acceptable also. But there is a non-equivalence in the definitions of Blackness and Whiteness. Blackness is defined by possession of Black heritage, whereas Whiteness is defined not by the possession of White heritage, but by possessing only White heritage (see one-drop rule). Barack Obama, for example, has one Black parent and one White parent and is considered Black by most people but not White (and he does not "pass" as White). Black pride, therefore, means being proud to have Black ancestors, but White pride means being proud to have only White ancestors, which can indeed be seen as offensive. If they really wanted to be equivalent, they could create (for example) a French Pride parade… where Haitians and other black people with French heritage are also allowed to take part. Such Pride parades already do exist; everyone is Irish on St Patrick's Day. Pride in one's heritage is okay — that's what Black pride is. If White pride was simply pride for heritage without any racism or supremacy, that would be okay. However, pride in one's skin color being superior is not okay — for example, White pride. Another example: a person with African and British heritage can have Black pride (aka pride in their African heritage) and pride in their British heritage. It goes without saying that Whites can take pride in their European heritage as well; nobody's contesting that idea. It's just that anything motivated by skin color is, again, a red flag.
They can be identified by their mating bellow: "Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white!"[4] It has been noted by notable linguists that when certain words from the mating bellow are removed, the truth is revealed. Generally, scientists believe that "Racist is a code word for white!"[citation NOT needed] is a rare form of the mating bellow. However, this call has yet to be heard in the wild.[citation NOT needed]
See also[edit]
Notes[edit]
- ↑ It should go without saying that one can be a crank or denialist without being a bigot. Being a crank merely requires believing some nonexistent bullshit phenomenon to be legitimate and genuine despite volumes of evidence to the contrary; being a denialist merely requires believing some legitimate and genuine phenomenon to be nonexistent bullshit despite volumes of evidence to the contrary. Depending on the specific erroneous belief, arbitrarily hating people on the basis of factors such as race, nationality, or religion may or may not be optional; it is perfectly feasible to believe in stuff like ghosts, UFOs, psychic powers, cryptids, chemtrails, homeopathy, etc. or not believe in stuff like global warming without thinking that people who don't share your skin color or birthplace are inherently scumbags. With that said, many conspiracy theories do have bigotry as one of their underlying assumptions (for instance, the International Jewish conspiracy theory is very clearly antisemitic). Also, crank magnetism is a thing, so a crank who starts off as being non-bigoted may become bigoted if they end up adding a bigoted conspiracy theory into their web of insanity.
- ↑ Genetics and ethnology are way, way more complicated than 'white' and 'dirty people', but it's their fucked-up rhetoric, not ours.
- ↑ The scare quotes are necessary because white supremacists define "virtue" very differently from people who aren't hopelessly addicted to arbitrary hatred.
- ↑ And that assumes that white supremacy isn't just selfish "Me and my kin are the only people who matter and everyone else can fucking rot" chest-beating. (Spoiler alert: that's exactly what white supremacy usually turns out to be once all the rhetoric is stripped away. Heck, that's what bigotry in general usually is when stripped down to its most primal motivators — the desire to rig society, the world, and natural selection itself to give one's own genes and genetic characteristics (such as skin color) a massive advantage in fitness over the genes of other people.[3])
References[edit]
- ↑ Cowardice is the point of white supremacy, too by Damon Young (May 26, 2022 at 1:33 p.m. EDT), The Washington Post.
- ↑ Why non-White people might advocate white supremacy by Philip Bump (May 8, 2023 at 2:48 p.m. EDT) The Washington Post.
- ↑ See The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins for more details on this low-level "desire" of genes to suppress their rivals and see themselves flourish above all else.
- ↑ Rhonesha Byng (11/07/2013) "Arkansas Town Responds To Controversial ‘Anti-Racist Is A Code Word For Anti-White’ Sign"