“SKIN IN THE GAME: HOW ANTISEMITISM ANIMATES WHITE NATIONALISM”
“Within social and economic justice movements committed to equality, we have not yet collectively come to terms with the centrality of antisemitism to White nationalist ideology, and until we do we will fail to understand this virulent form of racism rapidly growing in the U.S. today…
White nationalists in the United States perceive the country as having plunged into unending crisis since the social ruptures of the 1960s supposedly dispossessed White people of their very nation. The successes of the civil rights movement created a terrible problem for White supremacist ideology. White supremacism — inscribed de jure by the Jim Crow regime and upheld de facto outside the South — had been the law of the land, and a Black-led social movement had toppled the political regime that supported it. How could a race of inferiors have unseated this power structure through organizing alone?…
Jews function for today’s White nationalists as they often have for antisemites through the centuries: as the demons stirring an otherwise changing and heterogeneous pot of lesser evils…
White supremacism through the collapse of Jim Crow was a conservative movement centered on a state-sanctioned anti-Blackness that sought to maintain a racist status quo. The White nationalist movement that evolved from it in the 1970s was a revolutionary movement that saw itself as the vanguard of a new, whites-only state. This latter movement, then and now, positions Jews as the absolute other, the driving force of white dispossession — which means the other channels of its hatred cannot be intercepted without directly taking on antisemitism.”
Our society is still absolutely steeped in anti-semitic language about Jewish conspiracy; I’ve heard members of my family express narratives of media or real estate control. And we have some Jewish ancestry. It’s so insidious.
The relationship to white nationalism is something I’ve been educating myself about since Charlottesville, something I was shamefully unaware of.
