Jef Rouner
4 Comments

So You Want to Live in an All-White Utopia?

So You Want to Live in an All-White Utopia?
Decrease Font SizeIncrease Font SizeText SizePrint This Page

White Lives Matter rally at NAACP Houston Branch. Photo: Dave Cebrero

 

Depending on how good you are at avoiding some of the grimier parts of the internet, you may have heard the term “white genocide.” It’s a favorite of the alt-right, but like most alt-right terms the actual words here have different meanings other than what Merriam-Webster and I are using.

 

The genocide they refer to is an erasure of white culture to be supplanted with a non-white one. The culture being erased that they apply this term to includes; feminists speaking out against Islamophobia, the last Star Wars film having a black male and white female protagonist, non-white people attending Harvard, and… Jews ruining The Legend of Zelda, apparently (content warning: may cause day drinking).

 

Earlier in this, The Year of Our Trump, my editor Omar Afra even went down to report on and confront a White Lives Matter rally outside the Houston NAACP because every once in a while Houston should have one journalist with worse impulse control than me. Watching these people made it clear to him that what they most want out of life is to be left alone to be as white as they want without having any other culture “shoved down their throats.”

 

Welllllllllll, I am here to help you folks. You want to live in a white or mostly white world? That’s easier than you might think, and you can even do it while not getting called a hateful bigot. Aren’t I Captain Helpful?

 

acl

Austin City Limits. Photo: Lars Plougmann via Flickr

 

Head out to the Austin City Limits Festival, for instance. You see this picture? It was not hard to find. Finding one where black faces were more statistically numerous than the sesame seeds on a Big Mac’s bun, though? That was a bigger hurdle to cross.

 

Heck, after the festival, just stay in Austin. It’s one of the most racially segregated places in the state. You can live and work in the “cool” (author’s note: barf) blue city in the red-as-Gary-Johnson’s-eyes state and go entire weeks without seeing a person of color.

 

Dallas Gourmet Food Truck Festival - August 2024 - Held on Saturday, August 27, 2024 at Sigels Liquor Store on Greenville Lane in Dallas Texas

Dallas Gourmet Food Truck Festival. Photo: BetterBizIdeas via Flickr

 

Or hey, how about attend a gourmet food truck festival like the one pictured here in Dallas. Sure, you’ll be exposed to some other cultures in the form of food and food handlers, but you can munch your Mexi-Thai fusion cashew chicken enchilada in the presence of a white sea of faces. As long as we’re talking about consumables, why not get into the craft beer scene? Craft beer brewing is, to quote David Infante, whiter than a ski lodge. You can get drunker than Cooter Brown, while holding the brown.

 

Maybe you could take up roller derby? That’s a fairly white sport. If that’s too strenuous, you could always try yoga. Despite being invented by non-white people, almost every person in Yoga Journal is white as the driven… the driven… what’s that stuff that falls from the sky in places where winter isn’t just the name of a semester?

 

berniesanders

Bernie Sanders rally. Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

 

You want to get political? You could have attended a Bernie Sanders rally earlier this year. Look at that blank sheet of paper above. In some states more than 90 percent of the black vote went to Hillary Clinton. Sanders, though, pulled a whole lot of white people, and you could have been one of them! People would be patting you on the back and talking about what an amazing progressive you are instead of calling you a deplorable.

 

Imagining what your readers are doing is an aggravating and cheap writing trick, but if you are a progressive saying, “wait, those are things I like and you’re equating me to a racist Trump voter,” then we’re about to have a little Come to Jesus moment, me and thee.

 

If you haven’t by now, you should read David Wong’s amazing article “How Half of America Lost Its F**cking Mind”. If you’ve already filled up your reading log for the day you can also get the same thing in this two-minute Trae Crowder video about Trump’s support in rural America. TL:DR to both of them, yes, there’s a metric ton of bigotry out there, but it isn’t the whole story.

 

All those things I’ve mentioned so far cost money. A yoga class runs you nearly $20 per class, plus you usually bring your own gear. A craft beer starter kit is around $50. Taking time off to attend a festival or a rally? That can be hundreds of dollars in lost wages, entry fees and other expenses. Comicpalooza costs me roughly $500 a year and I live in Houston and get in free as a member of the press.

 

To quote Wong, Trump is a brick through the window for the average rural white voter who has been left behind in a really, really messed up system. They weren’t left behind because they were white, though that point does seem to elude many of them. They were left behind because the policies in the last three decades of American life destroyed their communities without getting the attention that social justice issues do.

 

When you combine that with the fact that progressive whites on the left tend to ignore when they create nearly all-white spaces that exclude minorities because of issues relating to class or inherent bias, you end up with two white-ass poles of a weird little planet. Your uncle in a small town hoping Donald Trump will make America great again isn’t just expressing bigotry. He’s expressing his rage that his life doesn’t look like the happy, financially-secure white men on the TV. It’s doesn’t look like that because the economic recovery has done virtually nothing for him.

 

Look, I’m not saying that the racism and misogyny that Trump and the alt-right brought out into the mainstream isn’t troubling and vile. It is. But I’m also saying that the reason those people aren’t part of the progressive white elite has more to do with an accident of birth than with any rational choice. And if those places were reversed, any one of us that has unconsciously created a whites-only zone could have been the other.

 

One final note… I once read this great essay by Henry Louis Gates Jr. about black slave owners in the antebellum south. In it, he mentions that southerners tend to like particular black people, while disliking blacks in general, while the reverse was true in the north. To your average white person out in Beaumont, the rappers in Screwston are a different species of black people than Willie down the street who works at the Exxon refinery. Understanding that divide, no matter how cognitively dissonant it is, is to understand why we’re in the mess we’re in.

  • Albionic American

    I suspect the message of the Alt Right upsets a lot of people because it invokes what terror management theorists in psychology call “mortality salience,” namely, reminders of vulnerability, failure and death. Look up terror management theory and see the experimental support it has – you will see human behavior in a new light once you absorb the theory’s implications.

    Specifically, people have finally started to wake up from the fantasy world of the Radical Enlightenment in the 18th Century. This sweeping social experiment – based on pseudoscience about equality, democracy, feminism, human fungibility, the mind as a blank slate, cosmopolitanism, borderlessness, mass immigration, miscegenation and trying to erase the biological distinctions between men and women – has come crashing down around us because it conflicts with man’s nature. “Social progress” can never happen because human nature doesn’t change; and “social justice” remains forever beyond reach because society’s losers, misfits, kooks, weaklings, defectives, scolds, utopians and degenerates have conflicting grievances that they can’t reconcile, especially when it comes to dividing up the shrinking pile of spoils produced by generations of white people’s labor.

    In other words, the Alt Right has rediscovered and articulated for our generation the essential tragedy of the human condition that politics simply cannot make go away. Inequality, hierarchy and patriarchy come from the nature of things, not from the alleged cruelty in white men’s hearts. Compared with our elites’ childish utopianism, it has become the voice of experience, wisdom and maturity in a world full of delusions that we can no longer sustain. I have my doubts as to whether Donald Trump has really stumbled across this perspective, much less that he knows what to do with it. But thanks to the inadvertent attention he has drawn to the Alt Right, American politics in the 2024’s could look radically different from the nonsense that has damaged the United States for the past few generations.

  • Kristan Overstreet

    And what, pray tell, are the liberal whites you’ve just called flaming bigots on a moral par with Klansmen supposed to do differently?

    • Not make everything about their fragile feelings is a start

      • Kristan Overstreet

        Horse apples. Your article is all about calling out white liberals, claiming that they’re bigoted and exclusionary, but you don’t tell them WHAT THEY CAN DO TO CHANGE. You’ve just said, “If you enjoy these things, you’re just like the Trumpists.” You even hang a damn lampshade on it. If you’re not going to offer some constructive remedies for people to follow, then all you’ve done is give ammo to the alt-right asses who claim that only leftists are bigots and that conservatism is naturally colorblind.