What Does White Identity Even Mean?

White nationalists can't articulate what their culture is beyond yelling and punching.

I’ve developed a sense of unease whenever I see a young white man with a shaved head.

I know that’s not fair. Some guys look great bald. I have friends who do it. It’s not an unusual style. It’s not a square moustache or a sonnenrad tattoo. In the vast majority of cases it is, of course, entirely benign. That’s part of the problem and, I’m sure, this is intentional.

On 31 August, Australia was subjected to a nationwide series of ostensibly “anti-immigration” rallies that were actually organized by neo-Nazis and the mainstream didn’t know this until the last minute. Due in part to the media exposure, the whole “March for Australia” rally went down like a wet fart compared to what the 1488 crew were hoping for. Still, thousands of people seem to have rocked up. I don’t know how anyone continues to believe that events like these can be clean. How many knew and didn’t care?

A shameful day, punctuated with predictable violence, the worst being when a pack of around fifty Nazis descended upon a peaceful camp of indigenous Australians in Melbourne and just started beating them mercilessly in an astonishing act of cowardice.

Then the media, with the help of antifascist group the White Rose Society, started naming names. Some of these men are the types of people you would expect, like Stirling Cooper, an Andrew Tate-style manosphere influencer. But then, there are others. Like this happy, smiling dentist.

Formerly employed by a small family dental practice in Ballalrat, Dr Lomax, reportedly, “enjoys all aspects of dentistry with a particular focus on holistic and preventative dentistry. His patients love him for his eye for detail, reliability and calm manner. Outside of the clinic he enjoys camping, maintaining physical fitness, spending time with his family and getting to know all the cafes in Ballarat.”

Here he is attempting to break a woman’s face with his fist:

“His calm manner.” Image source

Grinning coyly in his scrubs, he looks like the friendliest person in the world. You would have no way of imagining that the happy guy with one rubber-gloved finger in your mouth has designs on exterminating groups of people he sees as racially inferior. At least you know he has the strongest imaginable motivation to whiten your teeth. But it is particularly chilling to know that these people are in medical settings. If there are dentists, how many doctors are there? How many non-white people trust them with their health? How many school teachers are there? How many kindergarten teachers?

These monsters are, of course, emboldened by much higher-profile white identitarians like Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, who bang on constantly about the need to reclaim our white pride and assert our white power, to push the other races out, to outbreed them.

And yet, something that I have never been able to figure out from all this thrashing—What even is white identity, anyway? What does white even mean?

Intermission:

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To compare, we have a fairly good idea of what “black” means.

The darkest person I know has skin just a couple of grades lighter than bitumen. There are parts of my pasty body that are paler than the whites of her eyes. But most people would still recognise the absurdity of calling her “black.” Some years ago, another acquaintance, who had forgotten her name and was trying to summon it, said something about “the black girl.” It still took me a while to figure it out—because she’s Sri Lankan, ethnic Tamil.

“Black” has specific connotations that are clearly distinguishable from simple skin colour. The meaning of “a black person” in the USA may differ from what it means in Europe, and it is complicated in Australia—Indigenous Australians, who are further ancestrally separated from native Africans than white people are (and likely closer related to my Tamil friend), have historically been called “black,” but it is commonly accepted drop the “C” to say blak, or blakfella.

These words mean something, contextually, and the meaning is independent from skin colour. White identitarian movements seem to be entirely skin colour. While it would be absurd to imagine a “black identitarian movement” composed of African-Americans, Indigenous Australians, and Tamil people, the standard for white identitarians is a grab-bag of Celtics, Nordics, Slavs, and Mediterraneans.

The whiteness status of Jewish people is another can of worms that seems to depend on who’s asking and what kind of ethnonationalist we’re talking about. Here’s Stephen Miller, a Jewish man who is nevertheless almost universally accepted as the biggest white supremacist in the Trump administration, going on an identitarian rant in which he claims racial heritage with Greece, Rome, and, I think, stone age cave people? (who were almost certainly some shade of brown. I dunno, I guess I’m surprised he seems to believe in cave people at all, rather than the Biblical account of two white people who were born as adults in a magic garden on Day 6 of Earth’s existence and their kids automatically knew about farming and crop rotation.)

White identitarianism and white nationalism arguments, especially outside of Europe, don’t make sense on the very face of it. There’s a cliché they always drag out to explain the concept of racial homeland that goes something like: “India for Indians, Africa for Africans…” But then they trail off or say something incoherent because they can never finish this thought. There is no way to finish this thought that doesn’t reveal its fundamental absurdity, because what they actually mean goes something like: “The Indians get India, the Africans get Africa, the Whites get the European continent, the Australian continent, the North American continent, a good deal of the South American continent, the north of the Asian continent, and the south of the African continent.”

“Look, all we claim is this.”

That is, fundamentally, the difference between white nationalist movements and other nationalist movements. White nationalists believe the only nations on Earth that don’t rightfully belong to them are whatever ones they decide they don’t want.

White nationalists, to the best of my knowledge, are the only people who do this. I don’t think that Japanese nationalists typically invite mass Chinese immigration into Japan on the basis that they’re “the same people.” White nationalists, though, will invite immigration from Poland, South Africa, and Greece, citing some kind of shared identity.

You can not convince me that David Duke doesn’t bleach his hair and skin to try to win a whiteness competition

Even white people who aren’t white nationalists tend to have a clearer understanding of their own cultural heritage. Most white Australians I know can identify their heritage as Scots-Irish, or German, or whatever, and get married in a kilt to honour their grandparents. A white nationalist will say something oblique and zoological like “Anglo Celtic founding stock,” and assign to themselves a randomized jumble of incongruent cultural slop. They’ll drape the Union Jack over Roman statues and celebrate both Oktoberfest and St Patrick’s Day as their heritage.

In this way, they respect their culture less than those who don’t reduce it to a skin tone.

It’s a rather sad thing to be completely culture blind and look at the whole world though a racial glass, darkly (or whitely). I can’t help thinking this is tied up, in a way, with a strange episode in July when figures on the right attempted to embroil the New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani in a race scandal—it emerged that he had, in his college application, ticked boxes indicating that he was African and Asian. The whistleblower, working with documents hacked from the college internal database, was white nationalist Jordan Lasker, who blogs about race science under the pseudonym Crémieux.

Mamdani is ethnically Indian, but he grew up in Uganda as a member of a unique cultural group, the Indian diaspora of Southeast Africa—specifically, the subset of that group who are Gujarati Muslim, a culture with its own rich cultural heritage.

Most people, knowing this, would rightfully imagine there’s a lot of fascinating and deep nuance to a cultural story that combines elements of Middle-Eastern, Indian, and Sub-Saharan African. A white nationalist like Lasker, however, just thinks “African and Indian?? Herp-derp, does this man look black or Chinese to you?? Muslim means he’s an Arab!!”

He’s in disguise by not wearing that tea towel thing on his head

The sad truth is that white nationalists don’t see humanity as the rich spectrum of cultures that it is. They see it as starkly categorized and simple. Everyone in the world sorts into one of, like, five or six different tubs, and everyone sharing the same bucket is on the same team.

So, like Elon Musk whining about white birth rates, your entire identity becomes nothing but a numbers game. That means you’re not a culture, you’re not a people—you’re just a mob. I guess that mentality makes it easier to see a bunch of non-white people sitting quietly in a park and decide the correct course of action is to kick the shit out of them.

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