I am becoming increasingly alarmed by the presence of white supremacists on social media and the internet in general. While structural racism has always been a part of the United States, it feels like we are going backwards if people feel comfortable expressing these viewpoints openly. Cracked recently had a podcast about this, and after inadvertently responding to a white supremacist on Twitter, and seeing #BoycottStarWarsVII trend on Twitter it seems like these people are everywhere. So I’m going to take Amanda Marcotte’s advice, and I’m going to feed the trolls.

I have written before about how dog whistle rhetoric Republicans use about “taking their country back” feels strangely isolating to me. In general I pass as a white person but every once in a while I am reminded that my status as the daughter of a Latino immigrant means my privilege is conditional on the whims of other white people. And the whole idea that there is a “white genocide” going on is just such a reminder.

The slogans and propaganda of white supremacists are becoming more and more commonplace online. “Antiracist = antiwhite” and “#WhiteGenocide” pop up when you’d least expect to see them. Like in the responses to this tweet about the governor of Minnesota congratulating the Lynx for the WNBA championship.

The entire concept of “White Genocide” is preposterous and offensive. Immigration is the foundation of the United States, and I believe that we are better equipped to deal with it socially and culturally than much of Western Europe, simply because we have been doing it on a larger scale for longer. But they will figure it out eventually. Underneath alarmist rhetoric about immigration is a fear of white women having children with non white men. That’s at the core of the obscenity “cuckservative” – a conservative who doesn’t oppose immigration (or doesn’t oppose it strongly enough) is therefore assumed to be sexually aroused by the idea of their white wife having sex with a man of color. Underneath the racism is misogyny and natalism.

And this is where it gets personal. As an American with a white mother and a Latino father, I can’t help but feel unsettled by these attacks. That there was something nefarious about their marriage or something wrong with my existence and my heritage. On another level, I can take some sardonic pleasure in knowing that such terrible people consider me to be “wrong.” But it’s unsettling.

There is no wrong way to have an ethnicity or a nationality. The existence of immigrants and people of color is not genocide, and to say so is both bigoted and contrary to the founding principles of this country. So many great Americans were immigrants or the children of immigrants. And we are better and stronger and richer for their contributions. Anti racist does NOT equal anti white. But to be anti-immigrant is anti-American.

Image Credit: Shane. Released under a creative commons license.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2015 at 7:00 am and is filed under Editorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.