Black History Month — Politics of the Extreme Right
Post ‘White Lives Matter’ march, Dr Paul Jackson, Senior Lecturer in History gives us his views on the Extreme Right events during Black History Month.
As another Black History Month comes to an end in the UK, the university has asked me to blog on how this relates to my area of research: the history of British far right groups. While Black History Month celebrates the diversity found in black cultures past and present, and raises awareness of a history of cultural and political oppression, it is a sad fact that far right organisations that claim to stand up for specifically white communities regularly seek to appropriate and abuse the language developed by such initiatives, to argue it is they who are the real victims of oppression and discrimination.
For example, a few years ago, the British National Party tried to develop its own White History Month, as its answer to Black History Month. I will come back to this evocative example later. Thankfully, for the most part, in the UK at least these efforts to appropriate language such as ‘Black History Month’ do not get very far. Despite this, such stunts do have the potential to attract a few extra people to the far right, and offer such groups an angle for attracting wider publicity.
“White Lives Matter”
This year, one standout example of this was a “White Lives Matter” demonstration, held in Margate on 22 October and inspired by American activists using the same slogan. This event was a complete flop, and only around 40 “White Lives Matter” protesters turned up — although many who did have a long record of activity within the British far right. They were met with a major response from the local community in Margate, as well as anti-fascist protesters. Wonderfully, even the hashtag adopted by these self-styled “White Lives Matter” protesters, #WLM, was appropriated by Twitter campaigners as “We Love Margate”!
The “White Lives Matter” name is clearly a deviation of the Black Lives Matter movement, which emerged in American in 2013 to highlight injustices towards African American people following a series of high profile deaths at the hands of the police. While the Black Lives Matter movement has become a potent political force in the past few years, leading to new ways to promote and critically engage with of issues of white privilege and institutionalised racism, the temptation among white supremacists in America to appropriate this slogan for their own ends seems to have been just too tempting.
Among others, the Texan neo-Nazi group the Aryan Resistance Society has been a leading player in the US “White Lives Matter” movement, and one of its leading voices is Rebecca Barnette. As well as an outspoken leader for “White Lives Matter”, the Southern Poverty Law Center highlights that Barnette is also the director of the Women’s Division of another leading US neo-Nazi group, the National Socialist Movement. Some of the milder, outrageous statements from Barnette in 2016 include: ‘What happens to blacks in this country at the hand of law enforcement is none of our concern … we guard our town borders and make our homes white and great again.’
Taking ideas developed in America and trying to incorporate them in to British campaigns is not restricted to the stealing the language of the Black Lives Matter movement either. I co-edited a book in 2014, The Anglo-American Far Right: A Special Relationship of Hate, exploring the historical and ongoing linkups between the British and American extreme right. While showing these exchanges have a long history, contributors explored how, in the era of the Internet, a shared language has become ever more common.
“White Genocide”
The polemical term “white genocide” is another example of a phrase developed by American extreme right activists that is now also used in Britain, in order to try and claim a sense of white victim-hood. Promoted by American figures such as Robert Whitaker, “white genocide” is used to evoke the idea that, as a result of immigration and multiculturalism, white people should be seen as victims of a systematic effort to extinguish them as a race. This neglects the point that white people remain politically and culturally dominant in the majority of the most powerful countries in the world, and still often benefiting from ingrained prejudices in their favour.
One way or another, such ideas have always commonplace in the American and European extreme right movements. Yet the adoption of the term “white genocide” to generate this sense of victim-hood echoes other efforts to re-calibrate terms used to identify and analyze genuine situations of oppression, and basically use them to cultivate an emotive sense of imagined white victim-hood. In recent months, “white genocide” has been a term tacitly endorsed by Donald Trump too.
In the UK, the neo-Nazi organization National Action is one among several British extreme right groups to adopt this language. “White genocide” has become a rallying cry by other British neo-Nazi groups, such as the National Front and the BNP as well.
Last year, National Action, the National Front and others have came together and mounted demonstrations branded “White Man March”, though often these end up as farce. One such “White Man March”, held in Newcastle in March 2015, saw around 100 protesters turn out; another, in Liverpool in August 2015, ended in ended in chaos before it began, when antifascist protesters threw eggs and bottles of water at the neo-Nazi protesters. On one level, such events are ridiculous, but they also cost hundreds of thousands of pounds each time in policing overtime costs and do also help to spread an extremist agenda.
The BNP’s “White History Month”
While such incidents (thankfully) point to the limited scale of the British extreme right, they also help underscore that today’s white nationalists are the product of a culture that has a long history in Britain. Our Searchlight Archive collection at the university of Northampton contains many documents relating to this history.
Such cultures of neo-Nazism can be found in groups like the 1960s National Socialist Movement, which was founded by, among others, John Tyndall, who was also a leader of the National Front in the 1970s before in the 1980s founding his own organisation, the British National Party. He imbued this group with a hidden neo-Nazi agenda.
When Nick Griffin became leader of the British National Party in 1999, he tried to popularise its messages by making more effort to disguise its underlying politics. All manner of schemes were developed to try and offer a superficial veneer of respectability to its underlying white nationalism. For Griffin, the aim for the party’s public language was to be far more ‘positive’, and talk about white nationalist themes by developing a language promoting (white) family values, speaking “positively” about white identity.
…all this neglects the glaringly obvious fact that forms the premise of Black History month; for hundreds of years, white people have dominated, politically and culturally, swathes of human history, oppressing many people who are not white.
One such effort was the BNP’s “White History Month” campaign. In October 2009, the website of the BNP’s youth section went as far as to applaud the fact that, every October, Britain marked Black History Month in order to celebrate black history and achievements. Ostensibly as a balanced response, it proposed its own “White History Month”, which would follow on each November to allow ‘all White people around the world’ to ‘celebrate their history and heritage with pride’. The campaign itself consisted a website with a number of articles and features, each celebrating various aspects of British history. These pages evoked strong patriotic themes, and including calls for renewed pride in the British Empire while also critiquing the idea of guilt over the issue of slavery.
Yet beneath the surface veneer of the campaign was an even more sinister element. Included in the webpages was a link to an online history of the white race by BNP hardliner, Arthur Kemp, called The March of the Titans. Here the opening chapter offered a detailed discussion of racial types, using very clearly pseudo-biological language to describe the history of the supposedly uniquely superior white race — all very reminiscent of Nazi-era ideas. Unsurprisingly, later chapters veered into other neo-Nazi topics, such as Holocaust denial.
The final chapter discussed crime statistics drawn from America, Australia and Europe to argue that the mixing of races was leading to the decline of western civilisation and the ‘white race’. It concluded by stating that ‘Whites will be increasingly squeezed out of their great cities, increasingly replaced by Third World non-Whites and mixed-race populations’, and proposed the need for a coming racial revolution to restore white people to their position of superiority.
The BNP tried to re-launch its White History Month Campaign in 2013 too, and I would not be surprised to see it resurface one again in a re-calibrated format.
Willfully Ignoring the Obvious
Such examples underscore the ways that my subject area — the recent history of the far right — is filled with rather depressing episodes where extremists willfully manipulate inclusive language for their own ends. They operate on the premise that talking positively about “white” history is the same as developing a richer and more nuanced public awareness of black history through initiatives such as Black History Month. Recent slogans such as “White Lives Matter” and “white genocide” try to do similar things.
However, all this neglects the glaringly obvious fact that forms the premise of Black History month; for hundreds of years, white people have dominated, politically and culturally, swathes of human history, oppressing many people who are not white. Moreover, despite the claims of victim-hood from the extreme right, white people today continue to automatically possess privileges that are regularly not enjoyed by others. While Black History Month offers a way to overcome historical inequities, the extreme right seeks to entrench them.
