The Folklore of White Supremacy, Part One: The Basics
Welcome to a series of articles that will attempt to define the legacy of white supremacy as a part of folk culture in the United States, specifically looking at white supremacy as the myth that white people represent a dominant race of humans. Here we’ll answer questions like, Why is it bullsh*t that Beyonce didn’t win the Grammy? and How come our founding fathers don’t have asterisks next to their names indicating that they owned people? Now these might seem like they have simple answers, but in a country where races is segregated on so many levels, not everyone has access to (or is willing to find) them. Also, white supremacy has done an excellent job of writing our history books.
To make it through this series successfully, you’ll need an understanding of what comprises a folk culture and I’m setting a very distinct definition — the systems and exchanges of cultural identity and belief by which a person or group expresses themselves. This definition (and it should be noted that each folklorist usually has their own) encompasses parts of American life that are both formal and casual, passive and active, encroaching on space that is both institutionalized to the highest level but also thriving in the conversations that take place on our living room sofas.
By taking a broad approach to various expressive forms that shape every day life, we will be able to dissect the ways in which white supremacy has become, not a historical afterthought for American history, but an ideology that has grown fat off it’s ability to increase membership through online communities and to fight globalization with a vision of what it means to be an American. But understanding what we mean by folklore is only possible when we stop to think about our ability to choose how we express both individual and group identity. This can be done by dipping a toe into the historical and scholarly work of folklorists with some basic vocab:
Folklore: The systems and exchanges of cultural expression and belief, including but not limited to digital media, material culture, performances, oral traditions, art, foodways, etc.
Myth: A story used to explain something.
Oikotype: A version of a particular story (usually a ballad or fairytale) that is told in different variations across time, place, and society, generally adapted for a specific audience or region. A prominent example of this is the “Cinderella” story, a popular fairytale that has variations all over the world.
Urban legend: A story involving a particular place, people, or incident, in which there is no verifiable source. There are usually many oikotypes of these circulating — we’ll talk later about how the Internet has caused the rapid spread of urban legends and what that means in a post-factual world.
The Twin Laws: Possibly the coolest folklore term ever. Basically, the twin laws are continuity and change, meaning that for a folk tradition to survive, it needs to be continuous but also changing to adapt to it’s surroundings. Think of quilting — still pretty popular. It’s popular because it is something passed down and is continuous, but also because it has adapted to new technologies. Quilters use sewing machines, can buy fabric online, can get patterns on Pinterest, etc. All of this makes it more viable for the present.
Now that you have a better understanding of what a folklorist is and the types of things we study, you are better equipped to understand the folklore of white supremacy and it’s role in developing cultural awareness, policy making, and individual agency. Through historical and behavioral analysis, we will piece together the how’s and why’s white supremacy has been able to monopolize culture in the United States to it’s benefit — and we’ll need to go back longer than the history of the U.S. for the answers. We’re going to get down into the nitty gritty, exposing the uncomfortable nerve of racial tension and the impact this racism has on our collective cultural fluency.
Folklorists are watching the Trump Presidency unfold with horror and morbid curiosity. One of the first things you learn about as a folklorist is the fine line between celebrating cultural heritage and feeding toxic nationalism. For the latter, the most talked about case study is Nazi Germany, where Hitler used romantic nationalism to aid in his rise as a populist leader. The heroes, stories, and magic of Germany’s long-standing history was warped and twisted until it fit with Hitler’s message of one race, one people, one Germany — and it should be noted that using folk tales and other narratives that shape a person’s worldview for this purpose was an incredibly effective tactic.
The cultural makeup of the United States has been described as a melting pot, a phrase from a 1908 play that gained renewed splendor in the 1990’s, describing a place where diverse communities contribute to the larger makeup of the country. And in some respects this is true. This is a diverse place with people of all walks of life living, working, and learning. Yet in the policy making and system building of this country there is a movement to create a hegemonic society that suffocates “otherness” while simultaneously reinforcing stereotypes and nationalist ideals. But we should never forget that part of the legacy of diversity in the United States is a result of trans-Atlantic slavery — that is to say forcibly removing cultures of people from Africa to build our economy and lay the foundations for systemic and interpersonal racism that continue to this very day.
Whiteness has also evolved over time, initially excluding the Irish, Italian, Slav, Jewish, Polish (and countless other) groups, finding ways to create racial tension even among communities that would generally consider themselves to be “white.” When you think about it deeply, the perpetuation of a WASP (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) dominant culture is history’s greatest power play. The level to which working class whites in America genuinely believe that they are a part of the ruling class, a part of the dominant culture, a part of the elites — being only temporarily poor due to extenuating circumstances — is a testament to how far this mythology has travelled and how firmly entrenched it is.
The white supremacist framework of social standards, found throughout American history and our history as a world power, blasphemes every ideal of equality and civility. These standards encompass those of masculinity, of ability, of whiteness, of wealth, of a version of the “true American” that seeks to limit cultural growth and evolution by producing a stagnant caricature, a hollow shell of a national identity. In this series of essays, I will examine how folk beliefs are used to normalize the rejuvenation of white supremacy, specifically the intersectionality between digital media, alternative facts, and the Age of Trump.
Throughout the scope of modern history, nationalist propensities have erected barriers between peoples based on socially constructed notions of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and any other classification that you can think of. But classification is just a predilection to a larger piece of the puzzle, which is dehumanization. The dehumanization process allows people to turn against each other and commit acts of atrocity that would otherwise be deemed unacceptable by the collective social code. This has been a base principle of the founding of our country, as we saw with the treatment of the indigenous peoples and their treatment by early Americans (and now). We see this recently (and since forever pretty much) with how African-Americans are treated by the police and the response their abuse garners from a white populous with absolutely no clue how to process, digest, and empathize. In the span of so much time, so little has changed.
In this forcibly dominant culture, whiteness equates to humanity and blackness equates to less-than. The same could be said of Muslims, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and other groups in the United States that are used as scapegoats for policy problems, groups that are dragged through the process of dehumanization in order to incite fear and maintain the myth of white supremacy. In Trump’s executive order banning immigrants and refugees from seven different Muslim countries, the dehumanization takes an especially sinister turn as America watches people flee war-torn countries, often women and children, only to be met with a complete lack of empathy from both the Trump administration and it’s supporters.
To be clear, white supremacy so deeply ingrained, so vehemently defended that is is a foundational part of the cultural memories of many white communities in the U.S. There is very little recognition of how it manifests in everyday life outside of this white bubble. Whites see nationalism exclusively in symmetry with patriotism, defending the values of a post-colonial complex and iterating that anything challenging this nationalism, this whiteness, is inherently un-American. It is the cultural integration and perpetuation of these ideas that will be the focal point of this series. By examining the folklore and folk beliefs that continually reenforce these normative expectations of what it means to be an American, hopefully we can also discover the opportunities and actions to overcome them.
To accurately document and discuss white supremacy, we will be looking at a wide variety of media throughout this series — websites, blog posts, movies, music videos, memes, GIFs, Tweets, emails, petitions, and more. It is my hope that by delving into the murky waters of white supremacy that have flooded mainstream American culture, we can begin to unwind the tense coil of hatred that is suffocating our democracy. This is no small task, considering that these roots go all the way back to our inception, certainly since the first white settler landed on America’s shore. It should also be noted, as with any examination of a particular group, that this analysis does not apply to all white Americans, but that all white Americans should be cognizant of how white supremacy shapes our everyday lives.
In total, you can expect the following installments of this series on the folklore of white supremacy over the course of the next few months:
- Fake News
- Signs and Symbols
- Capitalism and Colonialism
- Violence and Criminality
- Online Community and Social Media
- Jokes and Humor
- Cultural Iconography and Mass Media
There are thousands of opportunities, of decisions, of moments each day to recognize and resist the white supremacist culture that has been erected around us. But in the meantime, let’s learn a bit more about what it is and how it got here.
