President Trump and the fantasy of a race war against white people

[Gothmog]

There is no war on white people and white people are not the victims of discrimination https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/09/10/donald-trump-and-the-dream-of-a-race-war-against-white-people/?utm_term=.78b2df681125

Prepare to be shocked: One of the Trumpiest candidates in the country repeatedly spoke at a conference whose organizer believes that the “only serious race war” in this country right now is the one targeting white people.

The Post reports that Ron DeSantis, the Republican nominee in the nationally watched Florida gubernatorial race, has spoken four times at conferences organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. The group’s conferences have featured a parade of alt-right, white nationalist and Islamophobic heroes, as well as speakers who claim that refugees and immigrants are destroying European culture and that diversity is dumbing down America.

Horowitz himself has said that “American blacks are richer, more privileged, freer than blacks anywhere in the world, including all black run countries.” He responded to the news that a man was arrested after vowing to kill “all white police” at the White House by saying: “Meanwhile, the country’s only serious race war — against whites — continues.” DeSantis is running against Democrat Andrew Gillum, the African American mayor of Tallahassee....

The larger story here, as Adam Serwer recently documented, is that we are currently seeing the careful mainstreaming of white nationalism, even if overt white supremacists are getting driven from the public square. Such sentiments are gaining a foothold in the GOP, thanks to prominent right-wing media personalities who regularly sound the veiled — and not so veiled — refrain that the browning of America represents at bottom a severe cultural and demographic threat to white America. As Serwer notes, openly committed white nationalists and supremacists alike hear in this rhetoric an exhortation to whites to understand that they are under existential racial attack — albeit one so couched that it can air on Fox News.

[Generic Other]

1. Probably even the poorest person in the USA regardless of wealth

is undoubtedly richer than much of the world's population. This is such a silly argument! The average income in Washington state makes us all look rich. One man is responsible for that average. Bill Gates. It does not mean the rest of us "are richer, more privileged."

[Caliman73]

2. This only works if one very important thing continues to be overlooked.

White...what is it?

The supposition is that there is some kind of monolithic and continuous "White" identity which has specific identifiable characteristics. The whole "European" history and ancestry thing, does that include Spain, which last I saw was in Europe, but spent a considerable portion of its history (as well as parts of France) under the influence of the Moors, who came from North Africa.

The Irish were certainly not considered White when they came to the Americas, neither were the Poles or Italians. See, I can understand Polish Pride, Irish Pride, German Pride, Puerto Rican Pride, etc... even if those particular places run into a similar situation regarding a monolithic and continuous identity. They are historical and defined spaces with many shared experiences. I am American even though my ancestry is heavily Mexican. What I see as American is probably different than what a person with whiter skin or Black skin, or people from Asian backgrounds or Native American groups see as "American" but we blend it all into American culture.

People with White skin have had a historical dominance of the United States. They brought Black people with them as slaves and then bred Black people while in the United States to continue slavery, becoming a significant exporter of slaves to other places in the Americas. People with White skin displaced the people who had been living for tens of thousands of years, in the areas where White skinned people wanted to live. They displaced Mexican people, who came from Spanish European and indigenous people living in Mexico, throughout the southwest of what was to become the US. White skinned people, from the very inception of the US (before it became the US even) went into Central and South America to exploit resources and set up power structures. The only thing that these people really had in common, was the belief that their White skin made them superior to those people with darker skin.

I would like to know, "Exactly what is White Culture?" Not what it isn't. I am pretty sure I have a good idea of what it isn't, but "What is it?" I haven't ever really heard a definition that stands up to even the most superficial scrutiny, yet somehow a whole culture and way of life is threatened by migration.