Some years ago I published an article in the Journal of Hate Studies (Vol. 4, Pp. 59-87) titled “White Nationalism Revisited: Demographic Dystopia and White Identity Politics” (2005). In it I presented an argument focusing on the ways in which changing demographics in the United States are reshaping cultural and political self-understanding in the “white, middle-American” population and the ways in which various flavors of ideologically committed white nationalists are exploiting these changes.

The argument in “White Nationalism Revisited” turned around an understanding of post-Jim Crow white nationalism as different than old-fashioned white supremacy. As civil rights lawyer Dan Canon observed in a recent SALON article: “There are some who rightly criticize the term ‘white nationalist’ as too forgiving” there are, nonetheless, important differences at the level of tactical politics between the old and new forms of bigotry that changing the label cannot address.

Canon writes,

“The brash Klansman still cannot go out in the sunlight, but the nationalist is a day-walker. A Northern fox. An incrementalist. The nationalist is not equivalent to a white supremacist per se, because you don’t have to accept racial supremacy for their theories to sound good. The whites and the non-whites just need to stay on their own turf.”

It is important, however, to understand that at its base, white nationalism as such embraces the idea of race as both a biological essence that determines not just who your people are, but to differential abilities such as intelligence, creativity, initiative, morality and self-control. Thus in the white nationalist political imaginary, it is not just that all people have some innate preference for those “like them” and animus for the “different” understood in racialized terms, they actively believe in the relative superiority of “white” over other “races.” As political scientist Carol Swain wrote in her important (if flawed) book The New White Nationalism in America (2002), the core of white nationalism thinking can be summarized as follows:

“The main reason black people today are plagued by such high incidence of criminal violence, out-of-wedlock births, poor school performance, and AIDS is rooted in their differential genetic endowment. The process of human evolution, as it has adapted to different ecological circumstances, has produced, they contend, a distinct racial hierarchy in terms of innate intelligence, the ability to delay gratification, to control emotions, and to plan for the future.” (p. 18)

As such the primary difference between the new white nationalists and Jim Crow-style white supremacy is not in attitudes toward race as such but in the politics constructed around race. Jim Crow used racial differences in ways that replaced the direct exploitation of slavery with various forms of social control that stigmatized all blacks (not just those living in Jim Crow states) and preserved white privilege and blacks as exploitable labor. The Civil Rights Movement and the legal reforms enacted in its wake ushered in a new era of “color blind” modes of social control that have increasingly constructed black folk as dispensable, socially useful only as surplus labor, and largely replaced by more recent, mostly brown immigrants. The new white nationalists do not want to return to the status quo ante, but to protect white genetic heritage through deportation, immigration reform (“defending the borders”), pro-white natalism, and further marginalization of black and native populations through criminalization. (See Leonard Zeskind’s magisterial history of white nationalism, Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream, 2009, for a detailed account.)

As argued by Michelle Alexander in her essential work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), all three modes of racialized social control—slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration—have salient features in common. For example, all three serve to justify “a legal, social and economic boundary between ‘us’ and ’them’” (p. 18). But they also have significant differences, “Most significantly, the fact that mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable—unnecessary to the function of the new global economy—while earlier systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labor” (p 18).

The move from exploitation to warehousing has not been incidental. It has been in response to both agitation and organizing of black folk and other people of color, leading to the demise of the previous system of racialized social control, and the changing character of politics and capitalism in the United States. In the age of “globalization,” the nature of exploitation itself has changed. Globalization means the exportability of capital (e.g. the “outsourcing” of manufacturing) and the “importability” of hyper-exploitable labor both documented and undocumented, supplemented as in the post-Reconstruction era by prison labor. Additionally, the ongoing processes of automation have changed the moral basis of politics in the U.S.

Keep in mind that moral politics and pragmatic politics are always potentially (though not necessarily) at odds. A plurality of white Americans has long recognized that African American and Native American subjects have been historically oppressed, exploited, expropriated and otherwise treated in ways somewhere between the unconscionable and the unforgivable. However, the recognition that such treatment is ongoing and a willingness to do something about it has been tied to circumstances that have both minimized threats to white privilege and guaranteed that white accommodation would not prove to be too expensive to particularly privileged classes. Thus, for example, school integration would have little impact on white families willing and able to send their children to private schools while simultaneously allowing feel-good sentiments about what “we” are doing.

The fundamental economic shifts glossed as neoliberalism—that is, the globalization of capital and labor, automation, and the covering philosophy of market infallibility—have had an erosive impact on white privilege, generating resentment in the white working and middle-classes. This resentment has been exploited by a wide range of political actors ostensibly focused on “race neutral” or “color blind” categories like “big government,” “law and order,” “the threat of terrorism,” the “legal status” of immigrants or the “unamerican” beliefs of refugees.

The hinge of all of these forms of “color-blind racism” falls between size-of-government complaints on the one hand and use of the repressive state on the other. Taken together they form a kind of pseudo-libertarian politics of starving government of funds to spend on the public good—health, education, welfare, environmental protection, infrastructure—while feeding the military/security/incarceration state an endless all-you-can-eat buffet.

There is nothing explicitly “white nationalist” about a shift of spending from the public good to the military, police and prisons, except as the burden of such policies falls disproportionately on people of color. From the white nationalist point-of-view, such proportioning is exactly the point. The policies themselves open a common ground between doctrinaire white nationalists and those who eschew the label, no matter that the “war on drugs,” “war on terror,” and the unnamed “war on the undeserving” are always described as post-racial.

The explicitly color-blind justifications for objectively racist policies and their consequences do not, of course, absolve anyone of bigotry. What such justifications do is allow white Americans to vote against public good spending in the name of “tax revolt” and “small government” even while supporting increasingly draconian and racist-in-effect policing, surveillance, drug enforcement, and incarceration. The key to understanding this phenomenon is that the “tax revolt” element—beginning with California’s 1978 Proposition 13 which ushered in comprehensive property tax limitations—emerged in lock-step with immigration-driven demographic changes and residential desegregation. White voters who had been willing to support public good spending, however reluctantly, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Immigration Act of 1965, started voting to limit and reduce taxes that went to support local services in their wake.

The “tax revolt” movement, like the more explicitly anti-immigration movements and efforts that would follow, has often been described as grounded in “bread and butter” economics—volnerable people voting against “taking money out of their pockets” or policies that “took their jobs.” Careful analysis of exit polls in relevant elections (c.f. Hood and Morris 2000; Alvarez and Butterfield 2000; Newton 2000) indicates that the determinant voting blocks are not the economically vulnerable, but large segments of the white middle-class. This block tends to vote against its tax dollars going to support racial and ethnic others–other than through the dubious “support” of police and prisons. I call this heterogeneous tax refusal or perceived heterogeneous exploitation.

Here I would emphasize that heterogeneous tax refusal and the “law and order” movement that fueled the Republican “Southern Strategy” (and the Democratic “me too” pandering around crime and drugs) grew up together. The creation of a mass incarceration state aimed primarily at African-Americans and the demographic shifts which resulted from Asian and Latin American immigration and engendered heterogeneous tax revolt were woven together in a new politics that while never dominated by ideologically transparent white nationalists, has nonetheless been congenial to, and influenced by, them. The rhetoric of both heterogeneous tax refusal and law and order converge around issues of white identity and what it means to be a “real American” living in a real American community—which is to say it converges around what I call theft of collective identity.

The politics of “identity theft” at the collective level are by no means confined to parts of the country that have experienced demographic transitions and have become or are well on their way to becoming multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. A kind of “moral panic” similar in kind—not coincidentally—to that found around racialized drug-law enforcement, can be seen in towns like St. Cloud, Minnesota. An influx of North African refugees has led to an anti-refugee backlash and large crowds gathering to be “informed” by professional fear-mongers who warn that Muslims are on the verge of taking over the country and imposing Sharia law. (For example, http://www.startribune.com/st-cloud-comes-to-grips-with-clashes-between-immigrants-longtime-locals/367079471/#1). As outlandish as such claims may seem, it is important to understand that they can still form the background noise of white “Middle American” politics both as pandered to by the center and as acted out on the bodies and freedoms of immigrants and refugees.

In the context of the evolving politics described above, the so-called alt-right, as the latest vehicle of white nationalism, cannot be dismissed as a distraction or reduced to the potentially out-sized influence of an individual like Trump-advisor Stephen Bannon. The logics of heterogeneous tax refusal and the racialized surveillance/carceral state provide a free-flowing pipeline for de facto white nationalist politics to shape “mainstream” policy and place a misogynistic, narcissistic bully in the White House. The basic shape of this state, reinforced by Supreme Court decisions (e.g. Florida v. Bostick and McCleskey v. Kemp) which have made it virtually impossible to challenge either the arbitrariness or racialized impacts of policing and prosecution, is now firmly in place. Add to this a legally and technologically unprecedented post-9/11 security apparatus that is almost impossible to hold accountable and the argument that “things can’t get much worse” dissolves in a bath of acid. The current reality of racial oppression, economic precariousness, unfolding ecological catastrophe, and worldwide militaristic hubris is catastrophic; but only those lacking in imagination will claim it can’t plausibly get worse under a demagogue who has repeatedly appealed to the core policy goals of white nationalism.

Now on to the current, post-election 2016 situation. First, I want to emphasize just how much electoral math navel gazing is a waste of time. The fine-grained statistical analysis is almost certain to reveal that a variety of factors led to the Trump victory. These doubtless will include implicit misogyny on the part of Democratic voters who stayed home as well as explicit misogyny on the part of the “lock her up” crowd. It will also include a surge of “white middle America” voting by those enthusiastic about a guy who says he is going to put a stop to heterogeneous exploitation and collective identity theft. Suppression of votes (particularly in communities of color), and a generalized disenfranchisement of the population centers will also be factors. Blaming women, people of color, or people who voted for a third party candidate is worse than useless—it is counterproductive.

The current question is not why did Clinton lose—in the election math sense—but what do we do now?

The United States has placed a heavily militarized, surveillance/incarceration state apparatus unprecedented in the history of humanity at least partially in the hands of a demonstrated bully and braggart with no moral compass who is beholden to white nationalists. In my view, we need to build the broadest possible Popular Front-style resistance even understanding that the liberals who may join with us have not suddenly become ready to give up the drone, bomb, stop-and-frisk, incarcerate, frack, speculate and surveillance state they have helped to build. They are anti-Trump. We need that. We need every form of local, state and regional organizing that might hold the line against what is all-too-likely to come.

Citations and Bibliography

Regarding what I am calling heterogeneous tax refusal (or in places heterogeneous exploitation), the special issue of Social Science Quarterly (Vol. 81, March 2000) devoted to California’s anti-immigration Proposition 187 is particularly useful, especially the following articles:

M. V. Hood and Irwin Morris, “Brother Can You Spare a Dime? Racial/Ethnic Context and the Anglo Vote on Proposition 187.”

R. Michael Alvarez and Tara L. Butterfield, “The Resurgence of Nativism in California? The Case of Proposition 187 and Illegal Immigration.”

Lina Y. Newton, “Why Some Latinos Supported Proposition 187: Testing Economic Threat and Cultural Identity Hypotheses.”

The best source on the history of white nationalism is Leonard Zeskind’s book Blood and Politics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to the Mainstream (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009). Look for related updates and commentary via the home pages of the Institute for Education and Research on Human Rights (http://www.irehr.org) and Political Research Associates (http://www.politicalresearch.org/#).

Michelle Alexander’s crucial work The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2010) has been referred to as “the bible” of the contemporary Civil Rights Movement spearheaded by Black Lives Matter and is the essential work to understand racialized social control and mass incarceration. Complicating expanding Alexander’s work is Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Harvard University Press, 2016).

Background reading dealing with issues facing the Black community in the U.S. including but beyond policing and incarceration can be found via the Black Lives Matter Syllabus Project (https://anthropoliteia.net/category/pedagogy/black-lives-matter-syllabus-project/ and Sociologists For Justice Ferguson Syllabus (https://sociologistsforjustice.org/ferguson-syllabus/). And, of course, the best place to start is the homepage of the Movement for Black Lives which includes its policy recommendations (https://policy.m4bl.org).

A good general background on the centuries-long war of European settler colonials against the Native Peoples of North America is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Beacon 2014). A variety of resources related to the current efforts by water protectors at Standing Rock are at via the#StandingRockSyllabus, a project of NYC Stands With Standing Rock, which has assembled more than a thousand pages of reading. (https://nycstandswithstandingrock.wordpress.com/standingrocksyllabus/).

A general introduction to the topic of demographic change, slightly dated now but still valuable, is Dale Maharidge’s The Coming White Minority: California, Multiculturalism, and America’s Future (Vintage, 1999). Note that there are scholars and opinion leaders who see the demographic shifts described by Maharidge, sometimes referred to as “the browning of America” as not being anywhere near as dramatic a change as some might think. The problem with such “sensible” assessments, grounding in projections of interracial marriage and the presumption of a general de-emphasis on race as a “thing” in politics is that it takes into account neither the underlying biological determinism of white nationalism nor the fears of identity theft and heterogeneous exploitation of “ordinary” whites. Find a related discussion on the Racism Review website, (http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2015/08/31/the-coming-white-minority-brazilianization-or-south-africanization-of-u-s/).

As of yet, there is nothing like the Standing Rock and Black Lives Matter syllabi dealing specifically with issues of immigration and refugees in the United States. The collection The New Immigration: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Brunner-Routledge, 2005), edited by Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, Carola Suarez-Orozco, and Desiree Baolian Qin is a reasonable place to start. The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (http://www.nnirr.org/drupal/) is a resource for activists.