Merriam-Webster’s 2016 word of the year might be fascism. For betting types making early 2017 predictions, “white nationalism” would not be a bad guess. Along with “white supremacy” and the newer phrase “alternative right,” or alt-right, it’s been a post-election fixture of news and accompanying battles over politics, racism, and language.
It started in earnest when it was announced that former Breitbart News editor Steve Bannon would serve as President-elect Donald Trump’s administrative adviser. White nationalists like neo-Nazi writer and publisher Andrew Anglin rejoiced. Ken Reed, the national director of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Renaissance Society, celebrated in a Facebook post that read, “Can you say WINNING boys and girls???” using the hashtags #WhiteLivesMatter and #AltRight.
The self-proclaimed alt-right made even more headlines when the white supremacist National Policy Institute held an alt-right conference in Washington, DC, the weekend after the election. There, the group’s leader, Richard Spencer, delivered remarks calling America “a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity.” In a video shared by the Atlantic, Trump’s victory and Spencer’s statements were cheered by the crowd with Nazi salutes and chants of, “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”
Yes, actual Nazi salutes. In a DC hotel. By people who felt Trump’s election and appointments were their victory.
Along with the horror over this came complaints that alt-right activists were being referred to in many headlines with their chosen, innocuous-sounding title, rather than something that made their racist agenda plain. Before long, the Associated Press and the New York Timesissued strong guidance to their writers regarding the term. In both cases, they said uses of the alt-right’s preferred label must be accompanied by an explanation to readers about what defines the group: the racism, misogyny, and white supremacy that characterize it.
These news organizations’ memos have been clear mandates in a contentious, evolving public debate about how to characterize the groups and individuals who have been emboldened and empowered by Trump’s win and share one scary thing: an obsession with white power, influence, and identity.
At a time when unabashed racists are elated at the possibility that the president-elect will take action to create the “white country” of their fantasies, and people who share their policy views but have no hate group affiliation are being empowered, the current battle of words is an important one. Fueling it is the risk that the wrong language choices could cloud Americans’ understanding of what’s actually happening. Complicating things is the sobering reality that the threats nonwhite people face don’t change depending on what we call the people responsible for them.
Why there are suddenly fights over how to describe racist views and groups — and why they have fresh relevance
Unless you work for an organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activity of hate groups, or are a scholar of critical race studies, “white supremacy” and “white nationalism” aren’t likely part of your daily vocabulary. Or at least they weren’t until Trump’s bold expressions of racism and xenophobia — and hints that he’d support policies that reflect these concepts — began to inspire groups that embrace these ideas, making them newly relevant.
Just as people debate when and where the term “racist” can be fairly applied (hint: nowhere, without plenty of people protesting), it’s becoming obvious there won’t be easy agreement on who and what deserve these other labels. Even people who appear to be white supremacy’s proud poster children reject the label.
Hints of this battle over words first surfaced during the campaign season, when Trump received the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke — just one of the white nationalists and white supremacists who were elated and energized by Trump’s campaign. In fact, Mother Jones’s Josh Harkinson reported on the white extremist movements that hoped to capitalize on Trump’s victory. The week before the election, the front page of the KKK’s official newspaper displayed a raving embrace of his “Make America Great Again” message. Candidate Trump denounced the support of both Duke and the Klan, in a clear distancing from the negative associations with white supremacy.
But soon after Trump was declared the winner of the election, he appointed Bannon to be an administration adviser. Extremists like Anglin, the neo-Nazi writer, and commenters on his Daily Stormer post who celebrated Bannon’s reported anti-Semitism were pleased.
But there was a twist: Bannon insisted he was not a white nationalist but rather an “economic nationalist.” Trump went even further, telling the New York Times that Bannon was neither racist nor “alt-right.”
Another tug of war over labels followed when Spencer made it known that he wasn’t fond of the terms “racist,” “Nazi,” and “white supremacist” being applied to him. Instead, Spencer, who led the “Hail Trump!” Nazi salute and heads a group that promotes “America for white people,” told the Washington Post he prefers to be called an “identitarian” — a reference to a movement that has more momentum in Europe but all the same associations with racism and xenophobia.
In an effort to stop people like Spencer from allowing inoffensive-sounding labels to distract from their shocking (and, to people of color, deeply threatening) beliefs and goals, some left-leaning publications have announced that they’ll reject the “alt-right” term altogether. On November 27, ThinkProgress editors announced that people in this movement would not be labeled with their chosen descriptors but rather would be called “white nationalists” or “white supremacists.”
Yet that same week, Mother Jones’s Kevin Drum urged progressives to go in the opposite direction: pulling back the use of the phrase “white supremacy,” which he dubbed a “fad,” as liberals use it “with more abandon than we should.” Instead, he advised that the term should be reserved for people and institutions that “really deserve it,” and use “racist” in its place: “If something is racist,” he wrote, “then call it racist.”
Confused? You’re not alone. In this scramble to define and regulate the use of terminology in a new landscape of open calls for white power, the competing personal, political, journalistic, and ideological interests have created a kind of chaos.
The single thing everyone seems to agree on is that words matter — a lot.
White supremacy, white nationalism, and the alt-right: Here’s what these terms mean and where they overlap
Let’s start with the broadest term, white supremacy, and its adjective form, “white supremacist.” It has a powerful ring to it — probably because, unlike “alt-right,” it creates associations with terrorist racist organizations that the majority of Americans have been taught to recognize as objectively bad.
Perhaps that’s why Drum argued that it should be used with caution and reserved for “actual Neo-Nazis and a few others.”
Crystal Fleming, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University, says Drum’s proposed “neo-Nazis and a few others” standard is misguided, but not uncommon.
“It’s pretty easy to explain,” she told Vox. “The reality is that when folks hear the term ‘white supremacy’ — the layperson and even the average scholar — they tend to think of the KKK.”
That’s not what it means, she explained. The key difference is between “white supremacy” and “white supremacist.” The latter refers to people who embrace the ideology of white superiority, but white supremacy is more general: It simply describes “the sociopolitical dominance of people socially defined as white,” Fleming said.
In her view — and the view of critical race scholars — “white supremacy” just refers to the way people defined as white (which has shifted throughout the course of America’s history) have been allowed to have, and systematically have been given access to, more resources, whether those are political, economic, social, or all of the above.
In other words, she says it’s not an outrageous, overused slur but instead “a constant throughout history.”
If you have any doubts about that, consider Richard Spencer’s description of America again: “A white country designed for ourselves and our posterity.” That’s basically, Fleming’s definition of white supremacy in different words. Given that a white supremacist and a black sociologist agree that the concept of white supremacy is foundational to America — and the former is working to make that more so — now would seem like an especially ill-advised time to pull back on using the phrase.
The next thing to understand is the relationship between white supremacists and white nationalists. While listing the words it will use while announcing recently that it would abandon the term “alt-right,” ThinkProgress offered a distinction between the two:
Sophie Bjork-James, a postdoctoral anthropology fellow at Vanderbilt University who studies contemporary white supremacist movements, distinguishes these groups of people similarly. Within white nationalism, a lot of people also have a specific goal: a white ethno-state. They’d contrast this with the ultimate aims of white supremacists, who want to have power over people of color within the same state, she told Vox.
Finally, the phrase that’s been the topic of the most debate — “alt-right” — is the name Spencer gave to a loose, internet-based group linked by racist ideas about “white identity” and the preservation of “Western civilization” when he launched his Alternative Right blog in 2010 (more on this group’s beliefs later).
Finally, there’s “neo-Nazi.” ThinkProgress’s editors also said the term can apply to any of these groups “when they identify as such, or adopt important aspects of Nazi rhetoric and iconography.” According to Bjork-James, the National Policy Institute’s recent “hail Trump salute” incident isn’t the only reason many think the term “neo-Nazi” is a good fit for the group. Like white nationalists as a whole, “many members of the so-called alt-right have decided that targeting Jews and ratcheting up anti-Semitic language is a strategy,” she said.
There’s a strong case that the phrase “alt-right” is the sneaky, dangerous rebranding work of white nationalists
The label “alt-right” may be considered the latest attempt to create distance from racist groups and terms like “white supremacy” or even specific groups like the KKK. Those names and labels come with weighty, negative histories that have been generally rejected as destructive and immoral.
“White supremacists started to be called white nationalists by groups born out of old white citizens’ councils that were fighting desegregation the South, as a way to make their position of whites being better than any other race more politically palatable,” Ryan Lenz, the editor of the SPLC’s Hatewatch blog, told Vox.
Eventually, he says, “white nationalist” developed its own negative baggage. And while mainstream acceptance of their views may have dwindled since the civil rights era, the commitment of people holding these views — many of whom discovered them on the internet — to seeing them become reality did not. Next thing you knew, the alt-right was born.
“Richard Spencer coined the phrase ‘alternative right’ — a phrase that is so innocuous and so normal-sounding that it gives the idea that it is simply one alternative to conservatism,” Lenz says. “It is not.”
According to the SPLC, the name is one key part of a package that includes neat dressing and a clean-cut appearance. (“We have to look good,” Spencer once told Salon’s Lauren Fox, explaining that no one would want to join a movement that appeared “crazed or ugly or vicious or just stupid.”) And they’re not alone in the belief that it’s all a dangerous effort to rebrand vile ideas about racial superiority and separatism as a legitimate part of the political spectrum.
“I am very passionate about this idea that we need to be very careful with that term,” Bjork-James told Vox. “‘Alt-right’ sounds much more palatable than ‘neo-Nazi’ — it is an attempt at reframing a violent ideology as a palatable political position.”
Former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro told Vox’s Sean Illing in November that this branding is key to making the alt-right appealing for the kind of people who are willing to support the group’s racist visions for the country once they’re in the door but would have hesitated to open that door if it said “white supremacy” in bold letters:
Bjork-James’s concern about the term “alt-right” is based on similar thinking: It creates the risk that more white people may become radicalized by the group. “If we help to normalize these ideas as just part of the political spectrum, then it can make it seem less radical than they are and less connected to racial violence — because if people espouse racist ideas and racial rhetoric, there’s always some kind of a correlation to racist violence,” she said. “And if we don’t describe them for what they are, we’re kind of giving other white people a path to think these are legitimate ideas and a chance that more white people will become radicalized in adopting these ideas.”
The nuanced difference between these groups matters to their members. To people of color who’d suffer under their agendas, not so much.
Most of the time, white nationalists don’t want to be called white supremacists. And many members of the alt-right don’t want to be called white nationalists.
To be fair, they’re not being inaccurate when they point out that there are differences between the groups.
Vox’s Dylan Matthews’s pre-election explainer on the alt-right makes this clear. It was an incredibly detailed take on the diverse demographic, emotional, and philosophical ingredients that are baked into the alt-right cake. Matthews outlined the group’s various factions — from libertarians to neoreactionaries to Gamergate guys — and quoted Milo Yiannopoulos, an alt-right activist, saying that some alt-righters embrace racism for “shock value,” not because they’re actually bigots. With insider perspectives like this and many more, Matthews makes a compelling case that the group really is more than “warmed-over white supremacy” or “a simple rebranding of the white nationalist movement.”
The New York Times’s Amanda Taub pointed out a similar distinction, explaining that what makes the alt-right different from white nationalism is that many of its members’ first priorities and entrees into the group aren’t related to race. “The alt-right is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and meme-loving internet trolls,” she wrote.
So, yes, the alt-right includes views and characters that fail to map perfectly onto say, your average KKK chapter.
But a key question is whether, and to whom, these differences matter.
The answer: Not at all, to people paying attention to the rising influence of racist hate in this country. Lenz told Vox that from his perch at the SPLC, “White supremacy, white nationalism, and the alt-right are all the same thing.” Bjork-James similarly dismisses the distinctions between the three groups as “splitting hairs.”
Why? Because for all intents and purposes, they share a vision for America. As Taub explained, “White supremacists and white nationalists both believe that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law and policy.” And the alt-right as a whole — whether we call its members white nationalists, white supremacists, far-right racists, the Gamergate gang, or some other new term — is quite clear that it’s enthusiastically behind this plan.
Ultimately, as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp reported, the alt-right’s hope for the president-elect’s influence is “reducing the numbers and influence of African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, and Jews.” Its members want Trump to follow through on the most extreme immigration ideas he’s discussed — such as deporting millions of undocumented immigrants and banning Muslim immigration. Their goal: slowing the “dispossession of America’s whites.”
So while it may be true that there are variations (big ones, in some cases) in internal lives and personal identities among people who call themselves white supremacists, white nationalists, and members of the alt-right, it’s also true that these nuances mostly only matter to them — and perhaps to people taking a historic academic approach to understanding their individual textures. Meanwhile, for people concerned about their growing influence on American politics and increasing confidence — in particular for people of color who would be the victims of the policies they support — these differences have little to no practical significance.
Even the strongest argument the alt-right makes for the case that it should be distinguished from white supremacists and white nationalists — that it doesn’t have a violent history — seems insincere in the eyes of experts. “They’ll seize upon this, arguing, ‘If you lump us in there with Klansmen, you’re trying to smear us by association,’” Lenz said.
But Stony Brook’s Fleming told Vox this indignation is for show, and that central to the alt-right’s attempt to mainstream white nationalism and racism is its tactic of going right up to the line of violence — but being careful not to explicitly endorse it. “There’s a lot of winking and denial,” she said. “They’re very astute with encouraging discrimination, violence, and bigotry but still hiding under the cover of, ‘We didn’t call for them to be lynched.’”
Not to mention that Spencer’s calls for peaceful rather than violent ethnic cleansing aren’t particularly reassuring or meaningful to the nonwhite and Jewish people who would stand to be eliminated from his ideal country. And you can read “not particularly” to mean “not at all.”
“We have this movement from the KKK, which is a terrorist group in a multiracial society, to this new position of saying, ‘We just want to have a white ethnic state,’ but white supremacist ideas are clearly foundational to that,” Bjork-James said. “Then [the alt-right] says the goal is not a race war, or violence, just a separate state. But the question is, in a multiracial state, how are you going to do that without violence?”
Nobody knows the answer. One reason some are so insistent on slapping the “white supremacist” label on the alt-right — along with all the negative associations that come with it — is to make it less likely that we’ll ever have to find out.
You don’t have to wear a hood, do a Nazi salute, be an internet troll, or claim memberships in any of these groups to perpetuate racism and cause harm
With the increasing newsworthiness of these groups of people — white supremacists, white nationalists, and the alt-right — it’s important to remember that most people don’t have links to any of these groups, but many share their core beliefs.
“While few people identify as white nationalists, there is a continuum of views shared by many Americans that are explicitly hostile to people who aren't native-born, English-speaking white Christians,” Omar Wasow, an assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, said. “In short, you don’t need to wear a white robe to feel, at a deep level, that America belongs to your community more than other citizens.”
Fleming added: “Organizations matter, but ideologies and practices I would argue matter more. Whether one is officially part of an org or not, you can look at folks’ records or statements and clearly see when they embrace policies that disadvantage or harm people of color.”
Bjork-James says Trump’s attorney general pick, Sen. Jeff Sessions, is the perfect example: “There’s been all this attention to Bannon because of his work at Breitbart, but there’s also someone like Sessions who was deemed too racist 30 years ago to be a federal judge,” she said. “I haven’t seen anything that says he’s part of this movement [the alt-right], but at the same time it’s not like his potentially racist leanings are any less dangerous.”
It’s no wonder Spencer told Mother Jones he was pleased with Sessions’s appointment, because labels don’t matter as much as ideas.
"Jeff Sessions, again, is someone who is not alt-right but who seems to see eye to eye with us on the immigration question. I think Jeff Sessions might very well resonate with something like a long-term dramatic slowdown of immigration,” he said. Spencer added, "What he is not going to do in terms of federally prosecuting diversity and fair housing and so on I think is just as powerful as what he might do. So it's about Jeff Sessions setting a new tone in Washington. I think that's a good thing.”
In other words, someone who has no links to any racist organizations has still managed to be the politician of white supremacists’ dreams and the nightmares of people of color. Professional racists are emboldened, and those who aren’t associated with any group are in a position to make their racist goals seem realistic, SPLC’s Lenz says. “These are confusing and scary times.”
While there may not be much to do to calm these fears, insisting on precise language to describe them is a start.
(Source: vox.com)
Excelente articulos sobre razas..
ResponderBorrarhttps://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/09/01/human-pre-history-and-the-making-of-the-races-part-1/
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2019/09/03/human-pre-history-and-the-making-of-the-races-part-2-genetic-distances/