I like to joke that I’m so white, I’m practically transparent. My paternal grandmother was a Colonial Dame, meaning that she had traced her family’s ancestry, via her grandfather the carpetbagger, who settled in southern Louisiana after the Civil War, back to the Mayflower. Because my great, great grandfather on my father’s side was a carpetbagger and married a local gal in Louisiana, then had a daughter, my great grandmother, who married a rancher in Galveston, Texas, and because my mother’s mother was a descendant of the twelve Shields brothers who settled in Sevier County (I’m related to Dolly), Tennessee in the 1780s, I am at once a child of the Mayflower and a southerner.
I really, really do not get the whole white identity, “white supremacist” thing. I often say that “white supremacist” is risibly self refuting. I have never seen one who was not laughably, obviously, not supreme at anything that anyone could see by looking at them.
The most recent explosion of “white supremacist” effluvia is not to the contrary:
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poster child for “white supremacy.” She is overtly Christian, which is a core element of “white supremacist” ideology. And, for unknown reasons, she feels aggrieved by many aspects of the culture of the United States.
She is really dumb about being a member of the House of Representatives. She seems not to realize that, as a first year member representing the minority Party, she has very little power, although she can make pointless motions to adjourn and force votes that even her fellow Republicans find annoying.
“White supremacy” in the modern United States mostly appeared after the end of legal slavery, although it harkens back, at least implicitly, to the period when owning slaves was still legal. Given the close identification between slavery and visible African ancestry in the United States, the kind of white people who would become champions of “white supremacy” did not much need to bleat about their supposed superiority as long as they could just assume nearly any Black person was a slave.
Why exactly so many of the people who survived the Civil War clung so tightly to their racial identity as the core of their being, such that their descendants after three or four generations are still so touchy about any supposed slight to their whiteness or, more importantly, are still so adamantly opposed to any move to improve the lives and opportunities of the descendants of the slaves, is anyone’s guess. It really is a form of mental illness insofar as it plainly infects their reasoning powers.
Just as it emerged with the end of slavery, so it has surged with new vigor every time the status and well being of African Americans has become a major issue in our society. So, when Harry Truman decided to make African American civil rights a major issue in his 1948 presidential campaign and ordered the racial desegregation of the U.S. military, leading “white supremacist” Strom Thurmond bolted the Democratic convention and ran for president on the “states’ rights” platform. He carried four states:
Truman won handily, to everyone’s surprise.
Twelve years later, in 1960, Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat John Kennedy competed for the votes of the few African Americans who had the option. Kennedy narrowly won, having made specific promises on African American civil rights, which activists pressed him to live up to. His staff was working on what would become the Civil Rights Act when he died.
In the summer of 1963, major protests broke out against racial segregation in Birmingham, Alabama, giving people all over the country vivid images of police brutalizing African American protestors:
With the horror of watching the Birmingham protests, the horror of the assassination of John Kennedy, and new president Lyndon Johnson’s unmatched political skills, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The “white supremacist” backlash was relatively subdued that year, with “libertarian” Barry Goldwater explicitly running against the Act on the grounds that it expanded federal power too much. He lost badly.
By 1968, Congress had also passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and, seemingly inexplicably, multiple race riots had broken out, creating an opportunity for Richard Nixon, who won the Republican nomination again that year, to run on the covertly “white supremacist” claim of speaking on behalf of the “silent majority.” Nixon thus taught Republicans how to use dog whistle racism to win elections. He also did the Republican Party the huge favor of sundering the New Deal electoral coalition that had mostly governed the country since 1933 by pitting working class white people against African Americans.
Nixon thus bears significant responsibility for starting the “white supremacist” grievance that civil rights for African Americans somehow came at the expense of white people, that the federal government does nothing but take the money of white people to give it to supposedly lazy Black people, and that the liberals who brought about civil rights legislation were somehow “elitists” who cared not for ordinary white people. This brilliant ruse allowed Republicans to leverage white grievance to win elections while pursuing policies that harmed the very people who voted for them.
So the republic muddled along for forty years, until the Democrats nominated a Black candidate, the first time either major Party had done so, and he won. As is always true, Obama’s victory in 2008 was the result of many factors, but one important one was the demographic changes observers had remarked since roughly 1970 according to which Black and Hispanic people, who are not Black but not white, either, were going to become the majority of the U.S. population in the not too distant future. This spelled the end of “white supremacy.”
Obama got his major reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), passed. It applied to everyone, but it helped Black people disproportionately because African Americans then and now still fall out at the bottom of every metric of well being, including access to health care. The “white supremacists” in the Republican Party were furious and set about undermining and voting repeatedly to repeal the ACA, winning from the Supreme Court the option of refusing to expand Medicaid, as the ACA contemplated, in what can stand as the apotheosis of white people cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Refusing to expand Medicaid entails refusing to accept the state’s federal tax revenue back via a program that necessarily benefits more white than Black people because white people are still the numerical majority.
Except that people are literally killing themselves, this situation would be vastly amusing. Obama won a second term and served until 2017. In the 2016 election came the “white supremacist” backlash to the African American advance of electing one of their own as president in the form of Donald Trump. Trump did not pick on African Americans. He seized on the related issue of undocumented immigrants, where again, differences of language and of skin color gave members of the “white supremacist” rump an opportunity to assert their supposed superiority to gratify that weird psychological itch.
In announcing his campaign, Trump said to his “white supremacist” audience that Mexico was "not sending their best. They’re sending people with lots of problems.” And, of course, he whipped out the favorite allegation of Christian racists always, sexual irresponsibility. “They’re rapists.” In a perfect, and perfectly frightful, illustration of the self defeating character of “white supremacy,” two economists noticed around this time what they call, “Deaths of despair.” After steadily increasing life expectancies through the 20th century, in the 21st century, working class white people, the supposed beneficiaries of Republican “white supremacy,” the “Reagan Democrats,” started showing declining life expectancies, and this increasingly because of alcoholism and addiction to other drugs, and suicide. This is a problem public policy can help ameliorate, if the political will exists to do so. That it does not is the result of Republican voting by the very people who are dying. This is twisted. It is self harm writ large, at the population scale. It is the result of thirty years of Republican dog whistle racism that succeeded in part because Republican leaders carefully cultivated in their base an entirely unfounded sense of white grievance.
These two economists found a phenomenon that was “nearly unfathomable. Outside of wars or pandemics, death rates for large populations across the world have been consistently falling for decades. Yet working-age white men and women without college degrees were dying from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver disease at such rates that, for three consecutive years, life expectancy for the U.S. population as a whole had fallen.” They are economists. They look for economic explanations in data. A cultural historian cannot avoid the suspicion that the problem here is that the enormous flaw in the Republican bargain was beginning to show itself.
Instead of voting for officials who wanted to invest in the health and well being of the entire population, too many white people had put racial solidarity above all other considerations and voted for people who could rescue themselves, leaving their fellow white people who lacked the advantages of higher education and higher incomes to wallow in a slough of addiction and despair.
By all accounts, Marjorie Taylor Greene is a prosperous person. Income is no guarantee of intelligence or self awareness. Because Republicans had a reliable base of votes on the basis of “white supremacy,” they have not bothered to develop a policy program since Nixon. They have won by offering only tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts, all the while proposing draconian reductions in federal spending to make up for the lost revenue that have never materialized because they are wildly unpopular, even with the “white supremacist” base.
This was still true in 2015, when Republican supposed policy wonk, Paul Ryan, got his fantasy budget passed out of committee in the House of Representatives, then under Republican control. Ryan mostly wanted to cut federal spending. “All in all, the bulk of Ryan's cuts come from programs that serve the poor.” Note that, in a nation that is still majority white, most poor people are also white. Because Democrats controlled the Senate and Obama was president, Ryan’s fantasy budget did not become law.
In 2017, after the 2016 elections, Republicans controlled both Houses of Congress and the presidency and illustrated their own incompetence by still not passing Ryan’s fantasy budget. All they managed in two years was yet another tax cut. As they have since 1980, Republicans indulged the absurd fantasy that their tax cut would pay for itself through increased economic growth. This has never happened, and it did not happen this time, either. No thinking person has ever believed this fantasy.
It was still true in 2020, as Republicans, especially Senator Mitch McConnell, continued to promote the lie that the only way to solve growing budget deficits, a problem that the last Republican tax cut exacerbated, is to slash Social Security and Medicare, this despite the fact that the money for Social Security comes from a separate payroll tax, such that the program contributes nothing to the deficit in the general budget.
Trump’s loss has sent the “white supremacy” rump into paroxysms of increased insanity and paranoia.
They are at least amusing. As long as they are out of power.
Poor Marjorie. Reports of the “America First” caucus with its “white supremacist” implications blew up in her face and prompted a volte face. Her response to the news was as mature and responsible as one would expect from an avatar of “white supremacy”:
Greene is truly an heir to Trump. Petulant and childish. Incapable of a mature, measured response. Eager to blame the press for bad news about her.
She is also, thereby, an heir to the “white supremacist” legacy of the Republican Party. Trump is the logical culmination of Republican politics and policy since Nixon. That she vehemently rejects the label is meaningless. Her sort is never responsible or honest. Greene vocally supports Donald Trump and voted to challenge Electoral Votes for Joe Biden during the notorious imbroglio that the otherwise usually boring counting of those Votes became this year because of Trump’s whining. She also rejects the claim that she or Trump bear any responsibility for the attack on the Capitol.
The demographic changes that so upset “white supremacists” will continue apace, and no one can stop them. Republicans and the “white supremacist” base will be yet less popular in future elections than they were in 2018 and 2020. The sane citizens can state, correctly, that Trump lost and lost badly in a free, fair election.
We can fight for sanity and reject “white supremacy.”