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OPINION: The growing Christian nationalist Redoubt movement is just the latest example in a long history of plans to make America white again.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
“Thank God we have in America perhaps the largest percentage of any country in the world of the pure, unadulterated Anglo-Saxon stock; certainly the greatest of any nation in the Nordic breed. It is for the preservation of that splendid stock that has characterized us.”
Have you heard about the Christian nationalists urging God-fearing Americans to move to Montana, Idaho and Wyoming to create their own Whitekanda? How about the “Greater Idaho” movement — conservative Oregonians’ plan to secede from their liberal state? If you like the idea of an evangelical ethnostate but prefer a more pro-confederate locale, there’s also a Kentucky version of the Redoubt movement’s white wonderland. If you fantasize about neighborhoods filled with “patriots” flying the American flag, then you should contact the real estate developers building a “grass-roots movement” in North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas where “patriotism will become vogue and then maybe we can have some healthy debates about things like tax policy and the judicial system and foreign policy.” While they claim that their only intent is “to advance American Patriotism at the zip code level” and “to effect a demographic solidification,” these movements’ true goal is abundantly clear:
Make America white again.
Since the day our esteemed founding fathers imagined a “more perfect union” where “all men are created equal,” white America has been searching for ways to protect the racial identity of their hijacked homeland. The first Congress passed the Nationality Act of 1790 restricted citizenship to “free white persons” of “good character.” In 1920, legislators tasked the U.S. Census Bureau with estimating the “National Origins of the White Population of the United States.” The Immigration Act of 1924 contained literacy tests, race-based immigration quotas and an “Asiatic Barred Zone” to ensure the population would always be composed of “colonial stock.”
It didn’t work.
According to the company’s website, North Carolina’s 1776 Community “of close-knit neighbors who share patriotic values” has only sold three lots. Most of the homes have yet to even be built, as the Charlotte Observer reports, as neighbors complain about “the lack of activity on land that is now ‘overgrown’ and an ‘eyesore.” At Kentucky’s two Redoubt communities, founded by Caucasian venture capitalists who “explicitly oppose DEI” and “left-wing ideology,” a mere eight of the 67 proposed lots appear to be sold.
While the immigration laws achieved by the Civil Rights Movement pushed the country closer to becoming a true multiracial democracy, the country alternately described as “God’s melting pot” and a “nation of immigrants refuses to give up its great white hope. In spite of harebrained schemes like redlining, segregation and racial covenants, white children are no longer the majority in public schools and, according to Census Bureau projections, America will be majority-nonwhite by 2045. Whether it is a Muslim ban, building a wall or a government-funded human trafficking plan, the marathon continues. The desire for a white America will never die …
It just multiplies.
Luckily, theGrio is here to help. To aid the movement for divisiveness, inequity and exclusion, we created a step-by-step guide for anyone who dreams of becoming part of the Whitest States of America.
Here is theGrio’s six-step guide to creating a more perfect Caucasian union:
The journey toward a whiter future begins with whitewashing the past.
Before you can make America white again, you have to manufacture a romanticized version of America that only exists in white people’s minds. White supremacy is a hallucinogen that can erase away the race-based human trafficking system that built their beloved country using violence or the threat of violence. If you’re not into the narcotic of white nostalgia, you can watch episodes of “Leave It to Beaver” and return to the bucolic, predominately white, Christian paradise of the 1950s where no one talked about race (except for the people who were subjected to a half a century of Jim Crow.)
Antjuan Seawright
Gerren Keith Gaynor
Michael Harriot
Associated Press
Michael Harriot
Michael Harriot
Michael Harriot
Michael Harriot
This is the make-believe utopia that groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Moms for Liberty and other Caucasian race theorists want to recreate. Apparently, the only obstacles preventing us from returning to the fictional America of yesteryear are Nikole Hannah-Jones projects, Ibram X. Kendi’s books about being the opposite of racist and social studies teachers who insist on teaching facts.
But if Taylor Swift can imagine a racism-free 1830s, why can’t we make our dreams come true?
Once you have romanticized the past, you should begin viewing the present through the lens of whiteness.
While the white lens is the only way someone can see America as “their country,” the side effects can cause a visual impairment that sometimes makes white people believe “they don’t see color.” For example, there is no difference between the undocumented migrant workers of today and your poor white ancestors who immigrated to “The Land of Opportunity” to escape oppression and build a better future. However, your Caucasian-colored glasses clearly show that the Mexican caravan carrying “illegal aliens” and MS-13 gangsters is totally different from the ships carrying undocumented English “settlers” and Spanish Conquistadors who slaughtered the Indigenous people.
Without the perspective afforded by white privilege, it is impossible to imagine how much “economic anxiety” the native Americans must have felt when their land was stolen. I’m sure Black people felt a little bit anxious about their stolen tax dollars being used to create generational wealth during Jim Crow. Of course, a “patriot” who was truly anxious about economic inequality would support reparations …
But that would make them blind with rage.
Once you have adjusted your view of the past and present, you will realize that you are under attack.
According to numerous polls, an increasing majority of white people believe they are being discriminated against. It can make white people feel imperiled by affirmative action programs, DEI policies and alternative national anthems. Of course, you might be wondering: What good is feeling like a victim if you can’t use it? Well, once you feel endangered, whiteness demands that you have to do something about it.
The trepidation that makes people feel threatened by trans bathrooms, Black history books and kneeling football players is no different from the white fear that has been collectively weaponized by lynch mobs, segregationists and white women at school board meetings. And because white fragility is so contagious, fearmongers can use it as a galvanizing force. But first, you have to name your fear. How about “great replacement?” Or “white genocide”? Or a “Mexican invasion”? Or “Sharia law”? Or “cultural Marxism”? Or “diversity hire”?
White fear is not a feeling; it is a weapon.
Now that you’ve weaponized your fear, you’re going to need a target.
Think about it: If you’ve marketed your country as the “home of the brave” for 250 years, becoming a nation of ‘fraidy cats would ruin your brand. But, unlike the good old days, you can’t just go around lynching Black boys and spitting on little Black girls who want to integrate your school system. If you, like Tucker Carlson, believe that white people weren’t “designed” to live in a diverse country, you can still demonize the people and policies that threaten your supremacy in more subtle ways.
Instead of hating Black people, you can just hate the things they do. Ignore mass shootings, terrorism and gangbanging overlooked by leaders of the white community and ask why the leaders of the Black community won’t address “Black on Black crime.” Demonize anyone who doesn’t support white nationalist policies as “race baiters” playing “identity politics.” Explain how their “divisive anthem” is more threatening to national unity than your official hymn to slavery. Convince white Americans to disapprove of every single Black movement for freedom, justice and equality in American history — from the anti-lynching movement to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.
If they undo your literacy laws that banned them from reading and writing, you can just burn down 631 Black schools. If that doesn’t work, give them inferior schools. If they dismantle your segregation laws, underfund their schools and create biased tests. If they overcome that, destroy affirmative action and undermine DEI. If they reject your false version of history and write their own books, say their version is anti-white. Or critical race theory. Or “woke.” Or Marxist. And if Black people manage to dismantle every single barrier that white people created to prevent them from receiving an equal education, just ask them:
“Why don’t Black people care about education?”
Once you’ve made an enemy, you are allowed to do anything you want.
You can’t slaughter Native Americans and dispossess them of their land until you have painted them as savages standing in the way of your “manifest destiny.” How can you use Black people’s tax dollars to create whites-only schools before you weaponize the threat posed by miscegenation? You can’t create Jim Crow laws or mass incarceration without painting Black people as violent criminals. If this sounds like theft, you must realize one thing:
A racially homogenous homeland requires actual land.
But once you’ve painted them as subhuman and inferior, you can steal their labor to build a country. You can steal their wealth by redlining their neighborhoods. You can steal their education funds and then threaten to close their schools. Once you see all Black men as dangerous, you can kick them out of your schools and gentrify the neighborhoods you once confined them to. Don’t just limit your looting to real estate. Once a group of people becomes an enemy of whiteness, you can colonize their creativity and their art and their music and their history and their inventions and their families and their freedom and all the intellectual property you desire.
Now you’re ready for the last step.
Here is the most important thing you will ever learn about the fragile, violent, unceasing belief in the superiority of the white race.
It is not real.
If these white nationalist separatists truly believed that whiteness was supreme, they would have already built a separate white nation with their own hands. But because of laziness, ineptitude and ignorance, they could not. They are quite aware that their only option is to confiscate a country that we built. It’s the only explanation for why they can whine about white men being oppressed while suggesting that we should “go back to Africa” if we don’t object to anything. It’s why “fiscal conservatives” don’t mind spending their money constructing ineffective walls on the Southern border. It’s why people who believe in “family values” don’t mind separating children from immigrant parents. Still, the idea of white supremacy racism does have a valuable purpose.
For what is a hero without a villain?
There isn’t a single act of violence, persecution or oppression that hasn’t been done to Black people en masse. As a people, we have been subjected to kidnapping, rape, torture, theft, brainwashing, erasure, discrimination and every cruelty imaginable. Not only have we overcome every single one, but we have built communities and familes and institutions and art and beauty and magic that is envied the world over. Of all the myths, legends and tales that have chronicled human existence, the story of Black people is the greatest story that has ever been told.
We are undefeated.
This country is ours. It belongs to all of us. The “American experiment” was just a hypothesis until we made it real. There isn’t a single battlefield that hasn’t been watered with our blood. We have disproportionately protected every speck of freedom, liberty and justice these ethnic exodusers enjoy. There would be no economy without the intellect and labor forcibly extracted from Black Americans. There was no democracy here until we made it so. We are more American.
But the Whitened States of America is a beguiling fantasy that will never die. Aside from its ability to convince its adherents of their own superiority, white supremacy has never succeeded at a single thing. It is the most ineffective creation in the history of mankind. It is a godless religion; a tree that bears no fruit. A darkness that cannot stand our light. It is a fear that trembles in the face of joy; a hate that withers in the presence of love. It will always be a losing proposition. If white was supreme, it would not have to segregate itself to survive.
So run along, you inadequate, inferior losers. My only hope is that the Caucasian evacuation movement becomes so popular that you are joined by the “patriots” who have historically prevented this country from becoming one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all. Go back to wypipo paradise and leave us be.
Now that is a real American dream.
Michael Harriot is a writer, cultural critic and championship-level Spades player. His NY Times bestseller Black AF History: The Unwhitewashed Story of America is available in bookstores everywhere.
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