If you think White supremacy is just for White guys, think again. Progressives are waking up to the fact that what they believe in is so odious that even people who aren’t White claim they are White supremacists rather than be associated with them.
The Patient Zero for this phenomenon seems to be 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, who killed nine people and wounded seven at an outlet mall in Allen, TX, see Washington Post Rushes to Call Texas Mall Shooter a White Supremacist, Shoots Itself in the Foot.
Garcia’s use of neo-Nazi references and other thoughts set guts a-bubbling in left-wing newsrooms across the country. The idea that a Hispanic male, even one discharged from the Army for psychological problems, could eschew racial solidarity, actively dislike people of a different race or ethnicity, and not be a White Southerner had never occurred to anyone.
There are three articles in circulation that I’d recommend as additional reading. Harvard Lecturer Christopher Rhoades used Al Jazeera (of course he did) for an essay titled Why ‘white’ supremacists are not always white. He lists three reasons:
First, there’s the idea, rarely articulated but often observable, that certain non-white people who espouse white supremacist ideologies will benefit by virtue of their proximity to the privileges and power that come with whiteness in America. NYU Professor Cristina Beltran has coined the term “multiracial whiteness” to describe people like Tarrio who appear to seek to identify with whiteness, not as a racial construct but as an ideology of power and supremacy.
This phenomenon creates strange bedfellows, as white nationalists and non-white alt-right activists end up operating side by side. Despite being the leader of the Proud Boys, Tarrio does not hide his heritage. “I’m pretty brown, I’m Cuban,” he said in an interview, adding that, “There’s nothing white supremacist about me.” Tarrio’s heritage, however, did not stop him from using racist language against Black people on his social media accounts, attending the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville in 2018, or defacing a Black Lives Matter sign in front of a Washington, DC church. His detention for the DC church incident kept him from participating directly in the January 6 insurrection, but he was convicted of several crimes related to organising the Proud Boys’ participation in the assault on Capitol Hill.
I was gobsmacked by how obvious this was. American businesses are so in love with White supremacy that even non-Whites pretend to be White supremacists just to get a social advantage. I suppose that you can write this if you are totally unfamiliar with race relations in Latin America and the Caribbean and believe that everyone but White supremacists support BLM.
Some conservative Hispanic Americans like Fuentes hold a disdain for immigrants, particularly those from Mexico or elsewhere in Latin America, who they view as socially and economically undesirable, just as some Black Americans look down upon other Black people whom they see as socially inferior. More generally, the second force behind the production of non-white white supremacists comes through the targeting of marginalised groups in ways that allow some members of racial minority groups to assert their superiority over other marginalised communities, or even other members of their own group.
And finally:
Purveyors of internet hate, often operating anonymously or from behind carefully crafted online personas, have been able to claim that they are simply pushing back against “political correctness” or “wokeness” or “cancel culture,” all the while normalising hate speech and ideologies that have emboldened unapologetic neo-Nazis and white supremacists to come out into the open.
I’m reminded of a trend some years back in which several popular rap acts briefly chose to appropriate the Confederate flag, wearing it ironically as a denigration of what it stood for. Ye, the musician and fashion designer formerly known as Kanye West, was one of the artists who followed this trend, only to then commercialise it as well. And thus the line between irony and embrace becomes blurred.
The New Yorker has a story by Geraldo Cadava called The Rise of Latino White Supremacy. He blames two things. First, he says, there is American culture which makes everyone aspire to “whiteness.”
Scholars and journalists have described these Latino white supremacists in different ways. Some Latinos, they’ve argued, are also afflicted by “aspirational whiteness,” or the desire to be white in order to fit into the racial and capitalist order of the United States, to avoid the discrimination that Black Americans experience, or to justify the pursuit of individual wealth and belonging. They ascribe to “multiracial whiteness,” which the political scientist Cristina Beltrán defines as an identity that people from all racial backgrounds can participate in. It is rooted, she writes, “in a discriminatory world view in which feelings of freedom and belonging are produced through the persecution and dehumanization of others.” Such concepts help to explain how, in a country with rising racial violence, Latinos can be both potential perpetrators and potential victims.
The behind-the-scenes supervillain is the NRA.
According to Harel Shapira, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of a forthcoming book on American gun culture which focusses on Texas, the fact that gun ownership in the United States has become increasingly diverse is “something that people love to talk about, especially conservative groups like the N.R.A. and gun organizations. No one throws out the flag of diversity more than them.” Shapira thinks that, when the N.R.A. says it cares about diversity, “they are being at once cynical and genuine. They are being cynical when they express concern only in the context of supporting gun rights, but not, for example, affirmative action or other policies that benefit nonwhite Americans. They are being genuine in so far as they truly believe that the best way for minority populations to obtain equality is by being armed.”
At The Nation, Joan Walsh may have the most incoherent take in White Supremacists Don’t Have to Be White. Don’t ask me how Elon Musk and verified Twitter users fit into this because I have no idea.
But in a way, Garcia’s so-called “PC” teacher was right. She was trying to get him to see that he was desperate to join a club that would ultimately never admit him. He died after murdering eight people and seriously wounding seven others, and to this point, none of the victims that have been identified were white. If his racist massacre was intended to prove his devotion to white supremacy, “white power,” and fomenting “race war,” it didn’t do that for white right-wingers. Even as more evidence emerged, almost hourly, that all of this racist, misogynist, gun-worshipping social media came from the real Mauricio Garcia, guys that he might have considered his white brothers and allies were rejecting him. Greg Kelly and Elon Musk, and the Musk fanboys and girls of that new blue-check Twitter elite want no part of anybody named Garcia, it seems.
…
Garcia embodies that complexity. Hispanics and Latinos are free to consider themselves white, but they’ll likely discover that many white people do not share that belief. I can’t help wondering what he’d have made of Kelly, Musk, and other Trumpists’ almost desperate attempt to keep him out of their white he-man woman-hater right-wing clubhouse. Maybe he’d have preferred death to facing that humiliation.
Poor Garcia, he bought into White supremacy to gain acceptance and after he went and got himself killed those damned White supremacists still rejected him.
I’m not a sociologist but let me give you a critique of what this all means. First, at no point does anyone define “White supremacy” meaningfully. It is like race hustler Ibram X. Kendi defines racism. If you’re not an anti-racist, by that, he means someone who has bought into his diversity, inclusion, and equity grift and who is an “ally” for BIPOC folks, then you are a racist. It is simple Manichaenism designed to force people into your camp or accept a socially-charged slur for opposing you. White supremacy, it seems, is something that you dislike.
By casting a net so large that it embraces the Proud Boys, it shows the authors are more interested in labeling things White supremacy rather than trying to understand the issue.
By using one example of a phenomenon, I think they are missing a more significant and fundamental point. The progressives have uncorked the bottle holding the Racial Identity genie and have no idea what to do now.
The whole DIE industry is built around racial grievance and finding people to blame for your own problems. It is very easy to teach someone to hate or envy others; what you can’t reliably do is channel that hate and envy in a way that you can reliably direct.
The mindset that is shocked by Hispanic American citizens being outraged by illegal immigration is only possible if you live in a cloistered bubble and have only dealt with “Latinx” with magenta hair. Being astonished that a racial or ethnic minority would direct a racial slur against someone else means you literally don’t know people.
What they are describing is only now perking up to the surface. A generation of kids has been educated on the premise that you are, first and foremost, a member of a racial group. That group has its place in a pecking order in American society; every group is virtuous or evil. Being born into a racial group means you must act in a certain way and believe certain things. Everyone is either a victim or victimizer and all wear an indelible Mark of Cain to advertise who they are.
The wind of racial violence has been sown. The whirlwind is due for reaping.