I wrote this a few months ago but thought I might develop it as an article. Constraints on my time made that impossible, so I am posting it here.
Memory is a thing of convolution and happenstance. The scent of Oud or the taste of dates takes me back to Abu Dhabi. One sip of a Pilsner beer transports me to Berlin, and a bone-chilling wind has me revisit the year I spent in Wisconsin. For me, however—as I suspect for many who make their daily bread with the written word—it is most often something read that starts the fire of remembrance.
A recent Fordham Law Review (2018) article by Reginald Oh is a case in point. Oh ties the legacy of the landmark 1967 Loving vs. Virginia verdict that effectively banned laws prohibiting interracial marriage to contemporary forms of white nationalism. Oh writes,
“Opposition to interracial marriages is opposition to multiracial children based on the fear that the production of multiracial children will lead to the end or ‘genocide’ of a physically distinctive race of white people. At the heart of white backlash toward diversity, multiracialism, and immigration,” he continues, “is a deep-seated anxiety about the destruction of whites as a physically distinct cultural group and the loss of power and privilege such destruction entails.” (p. 2762)
The words above took me back to work I did in the early 2000s, culminating in an article I published in the Journal of Hate Studies in 2005 (“White Nationalism Revisited: Demographic Dystopia and White Identity Politics,” 4 (1): 59 – 87). Therein I conceptualized a sector of organized bigotry that focused on (what they saw as) threats to an indivisible biological and cultural “whiteness”—what I call demographic dystopia. At the time I identified opposition to other-than-European immigration as the most significant policy area for white nationalists intent not just on preserving a white racial majority, but in promoting a white ethnostate.
Oh relies on the important, but deeply flawed, work of conservative political scientist Carol Swain (2002), who more-or-less hallucinated a demonstrable uptick in white nationalism being driven by what was even at the time of her study an already decimated policy of affirmative action.[1] Fortunately, Oh also turns to more grounded analysis—such as journalist Donna Minkowitz’s relatively recent piece on white nationalism for The Public Eye (Fall 2017), “Hiding in Plain Sight: An American Renaissance of White Nationalism”—in drawing his conclusions. Specifically, he seems to get it that White Nationalists are at the core of their belief system obsessed with biological purity. Thus for White Nationalists, Oh writes (echoing Minkowitz), “[t]he threat of white genocide not only comes from the ideology of racial integration but from the ideology of gender equality or feminism, especially with respect to reproductive freedom” (p. 2770).
The central obsession of White Nationalism, then, has not much changed since the 1990s when the new group of racist ideological entrepreneurs such as those at American Renaissance and the Council of Conservative Citizens made the scene. That is, except concerning the movement’s increasing access to power, highlighted by both the closeness of the Trump administration to White Nationalist (so-called Alt-Right) figures, and even more so by attempts to implement essential elements of the anti-immigrant program. (For more background on the Alt-Right see Spencer Sunshine’s article “Three Pillars of the Alt Right: White Nationalism, Antisemitism, and Misogyny” (December 4, 2017), on the Political Research Associates site.)
In reviewing Oh’s argument about White Nationalism’s ideology of ethnocultural—or probably better said biocultural—purity I was forcibly reminded of the link between this more explicitly racist position and that of the broader anti-immigration movement—a link that Oh does next to nothing to point up.
As I said, memory is a strange thing. What Oh’s reference to “white genocide” brought to mind was a memo written by John Tanton. Tanton is the man most responsible for creating the network of organizations that became the foundation of the contemporary anti-immigrant movement.
Dated October 10, 1986, and known as the WITAN IV memo, this piece of revealing far right ephemera was rescued from oblivion by Devin Burghart and Chuck Tanner at the Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights (IREHR). In an unusually candid moment, Tanton writes, “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?” He then goes on to quip: “Can homo contraceptives compete with homo progenitive if borders aren’t controlled? Or is advice to limit one’s family simply advice to mover over and let someone else with greater reproductive powers occupy the space?”
Even as few individuals have melded White Nationalist ideas to what have now become “mainstream” politics as successfully as Tanton, there are few more succinct expressions of the driving ideology of the racist right than his words above. The point he makes, however, is not just about biological purity—by implication, it’s about women’s rights and reproductive freedom. That includes, as Oh points out, the freedom of choice of intimate partners, bus also the decision to delay, titrate, or avoid having children.
That is, the fears of the White Nationalists may be explicitly racist, but they are not exclusively racial. They have a cultural component that excludes feminists, LGBTQI folk, liberals, leftists, Muslims and Jews from the ranks of “real” whiteness. Like the opposition to immigration, these exclusions allow them to form alliances with the religious right and other nominal conservatives, fomenting resentment against a demonized conspiracy of culture wreckers.
[1] Swain’s new book (with Steve Feazel) has the hyperbolic title Abduction: How Liberalism Steals Our Children’s Hearts and Minds (Christian Faith Publishing, 2016). It features a foreword by Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBTQI lobbying group considered to be a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.