I was thinking about this last night. I give people the benefit of the doubt and try not to let literal meanings of words get in the way of obvious intent, so I read it as “why is it a bad thing to be white supremacist?” But the actual words he said feel really weird. There’s nothing offensive about the term “white supremacist” any more than there is something offensive about the term “murderer”.
Added to that is the idea that they somehow came into their current status as “offensive”… from what previous state? I had the impression it was a term that came out of academia, not something people invented to proudly describe themselves. It feels a bit like someone is asking "when did ‘shithead’ become and insult?’
All this and more is what drives me nuts about this statement. I’m going to spend days thinking about his statement and unpacking every word of it. But that’s not productive because we all already know that racism is awful. Instead, it’s like I’ve contracted a thought-virus and I have to suffer from the side effects of my thought-immune-system running rampant.
First, I don’t think there is missing logic. I think that Thailand is entitled to govern itself and the UK is entitled to govern itself. I think that more open immigration policies have proven to be helpful rather than hurtful to the societies that have them and closed societies have shown themselves to have more problems and make less progress. I would vote for a party that had more open immigration policies if I was voting in a UK or a Thai election. I don’t question the UK or France or Germany’s right to self governance, but I do think some of their political parties are racist.
I think that these anti-immigration policies are never disentangled from racism in reality. We might be able to have a philosophical discussion where we keep them separate. The problem is the practice not the theory. If we want to talk about the English, let’s look at how Brexit worked.
Some people felt the need to reclaim their homeland. They did so by making a coalition with high-flying racists (e.g. people who take to the streets to physically attack British citizens whose families have been in the UK for generations because of the colour of their skin) and by outright lying to people about what that would mean (e.g. Nigel Farage admitting that more money for the NHS promise from the side of the bus was never going to happen only hours after the vote came back).
Also Americans tend to look at race extremely simply, but Italian and Irish (and many other) people were terrbly discriminated against in history. If we talk about “white” people we probably include Italians. If we talk about “Western Civilization” we include ancient Greece. Brexit is essentially being imposed on the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish by the English. This isn’t about the English reclaiming their ancestral home - the engineers of Brexit are against breaking up the UK. It’s further complicated by colonialism. Families of Indian heritage living in Britain may have moved there when they were subjects of the crown (against their will). What’s the justification for disinheriting them now?
I think a lot of people feel a connection to their ancestral homeland. So when you ask about how whites lost that claim I don’t think that feeling of something being lost is illegitimate. But if I felt like something had been stolen from me and I was looking around to figure out who was to blame, I’d look for someone who had the thing that was taken.
I think a lot about hereditary rights to land these days and how to recognize those without racism. But I also look at the world and see that when rich white people get poor white people to blame black people for their feeling of disinheritance, the rich white people get to keep all the money, the land, the power. Chris Rock said that white people and black people have more in common with one another than either of them does with rich people.
So when I see people feeling upset that their heritage, culture and communities have broken down, I want to tell them I’m on their team. But that breakdown was a deliberate strategy of a political philosophy that these same people are usually voting for. It wasn’t Muslims who came to the UK to tell the British that their society was over. It was their own Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher who literally said, “And as we all know, there is no such thing as society.”
If you join a communist revolution you may think you are in it for a more equitable distribution of wealth, but you are probably in it for famine and authoritarianism. When you support anti-immigration politicians, you are almost certainly supporting a person who will point the finger at a black person to get you to turn around so they can pick your pocket.
