White Supremacist as “Victim”
The image of a group of white supremacist marching at night, carrying blazing torches in Charlottesville, Virginia. Not to mention, a clashing collision that occurred between opposition protesters and white nationalist lately. The tension escalated after a vehicle plowing into the crowd, causing such a horrific mayhem which left one death and several others injured. The white nationalist rally is initially established as a decisive response to Charlottesville’s plan of removing Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
Despite for the mounting tension, the existence of white nationalism in the U.S is still debatable due to irreconcilable differences in ideologies regarding race and identity. In the late 1960s, aftermath of the successful civil rights movement, the white supremacist movement in the U.S reached its nadir. However, it regained the momentum from the 1970s to 1980s, white nationalist had been effortlessly trying to restore and refashion the image of the white supremacist organizations. However, are the Whites ‘victims’ of socio-cultural discrimination that they are abrogated and stigmatized, showing signs of losing pride, and being self-esteem? It is apparent that white nationalist are trying to elaborately demonstrate the racial purity of Whites, they are presumably defending their own historical-cultural heritage by any means. Yet white supremacy is embedded with radical ideologies with racial hostility against Blacks mostly. White Lives Matter or Black Lives Matter, each side is proactively defending the preservation of ethnic-cultural heritage with the sensitivity of pride, as they believe their social and racial identities within the diverse population in the U.S are threatened by the contagiously haphazard expansion of racism and hatred.
Regardless of depicting black men as “rapist” and black women as “welfare queens”, the construction of these images described by white supremacy presents an ironic effort of illustrating white supremacist as ethnic groups. This is perhaps resulted from the complexity and uncanny side of impression management. There is a great distinction with older and current trends in white supremacy activist, with stylized presentation wherein activist to be articulate and polished while they deny hatred and proclaim respect of differences among people. It is seen that they emphatically deny of being hostile and racist towards African-American, while appropriate the rhetoric of anti-racism to claim that white people are the one that need protection.
The average Americans have faced dramatic economic restructuring since 1970s. Corporate downsizing, declining wages, technology changes and huge gap of socioeconomic status between the wealthy upper-middle class and working class, and the major shifting transition from industrial manufacturing to service sector jobs left many unemployed. Feeling of being abandoned, vulnerable and betrayed, left many Americans engaging with white supremacist movements, seeking for answers. While white supremacist organizations tend to recruit targeted communities in crisis, farmers facing foreclosure or workers laid off from duty, it is still unambiguous to confirm the relationship between economy restructuring and membership of the organizations.
Peter Cvjetanovic, an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno, was one of the attendees at the rally, depicted in a picture what people believed to be shocking, devastatingly horrifying and nerve-wrecking. The resemblance of white nationalism and presumably racism in the picture unfortunately entices the general public to criticize and boycott this particular individual, who claims not exactly the racist with furious anger as it is seen in photographs. He claimed that his intention is to defend the white heritage from being replaced or demolished by any means, as it is the discriminatory force of racial bias. He also admitted Robert E. Lee was not perfect man, but Cvjetanovic respected what the Confederate general stood for.
Cvjetanovic, is probably not the only one among other white nationalists combating with the struggle of sustaining the preservation of White ethnic-cultural heritage, and it is quintessentially determined to be existential crisis of them to be portrayed cruelly hostile, aggressive and conservative people, while they are in the pursuit of seeking identities.
The ramification of media portrayal of white nationalism, bigotry and racism has been relatively filled with negative connotation, which amplifies the escalation of public outrage enforcing toward the white supremacist groups. Throughout white supremacist discourse in contemporary American society, the Whites are subjected to an ‘oppressed people’ seeking for meaningful affirmation of their social status and survival within the onerous calamity of racially conflictual suppression. White supremacist organizations comprise full of individuals with different social conditions that tend to be marginal members of society. They can be unemployed, poor, uneducated and possibly mentally ill. Given by the faltering economy, which force these people to subjectively see white supremacist organizations as symbolic representation calling out for the frustration at economic distress. However, it is still unclear whether the improvement in economic development will constitute the decline of white supremacist activities and consequentially disappears.
The conundrum of divergent perceptions of racial progress is that black and white Americans tend to focus on different reference points. The complexity of racial bias is manifested by how Black Americans typically see less progress toward racial equality because they compare the present day with an ideal, yet unrealized society. Meanwhile, White Americans perceive more progress because they compare the present with the past. Upon the increasingly declining population of White Americans, white supremacists obviously perceive this dramaturgically demographic change is existentially threatening. White people are culturally victim of massive scale race-hate propaganda in mass media. And the media is blamed for being victimizer, outrageously or unconsciously guilty of regularly stigmatizing and devaluing Whites. This can be called a social reaction of reverse discrimination.
