The Politics of Multiracialism: Challenging Racial Thinking

2. DEFENDING THE CREATION OF WHITENESS: WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE THREAT OF INTERRACIAL SEXUALITY

TWO DEFENDING THE CREATION OF WHITENESS: WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE THREAT OF INTERRACIAL SEXUALITY ABBY L. FERBER There is a double standard for hatred, as there is for so much else. . . . We are not allowed to hate. They are. . . . Every oppressed people worth its salt hates its oppressors. We should feel no more guilty about hating our enemies than a rodent should feel about hating a snake. . . . Enmity is a key component of the art of individual and group survival. The man who hates to hate is only half a man and a poor defender of his family and race. . . . Without love there is no creation. Without hate the creation cannot be defended. Hate is just as much a unifier as love.1 (Italics added) FOR THE WRITERS and readers of Instauration, an overtly racist and antiSemitic white supremacist journal, hatred is an integral part of life. It is every man’s duty to defend his own kind against his enemies: in this case, Jews, African Americans, and all nonwhites. And as this passage suggests, hatred is essential to protecting the race. In sharp contrast to the increasingly subtle deployment of racist codifications that pervade mainstream discourse, white supremacist hatred is blatant. 43 44 ABBY L. FERBER Throughout white supremacist discourse, whites are depicted as the victims of racial oppression. Another article asks, How much damage does minority racism do as it requires the Majority to keep its mouselike feet on the treadmill; fork over a disproportionate share of the taxes; or battle in the overseas wars? . . . daily, at all hours, the minority racist makes his appearance, alternately complaining, accusing, plotting, sleuthing, whining, gloating, demanding , inserting and twisting his ideological dagger, as he attacks the majority in a thousand different ways.2 Inverting the reality of racial oppression, thousands of articles in dozens of different white supremacist publications paint an overwhelming picture of the white race under attack. Since race is believed to be something that shapes the lives of people of color, whites often fail to recognize the ways in which their own lives are shaped by race. Recent scholarship argues that we need to extend our analyses to explore white identity and privilege.3 As Toni Morrison maintains, we need to examine “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it.”4 Not only do traditional conceptions of race exclude the experiences of whites, they also prevent us from understanding racial privilege, relieving whites of responsibility for racism. “Racism, from this perspective, disadvantages others , but is not shown to advantage whites.”5 Oppression and privilege, however , are tied together. And as recent studies demonstrate, white identity developed historically as a consolidation of privilege.6 When we focus only on the victims of racism, privilege remains invisible . We often fail to explore the way race shapes the lives of white people, treating whites as if they were raceless and, therefore, the norm. Embarking on a new course, Toni Morrison asserts that white American identity is constructed through its relationship with and representation of an African other, created in opposition to this Africanist presence. Recently, sociologists and other scholars have begun to take a similar approach, systematically exploring the construction of white racial identity.7 Surprisingly, even much research on the white supremacist movement has failed to explore whiteness itself, and the central threat posed by multiracial identity. However, I do not think we can understand the white supremacist movement and its adherents without exploring the ways in which they construct both white and multiracial identities. I argue that the white supremacist movement is primarily a project to reconstruct whiteness and maintain white privilege and power. In white supremacist discourse, whiteness is elaborated and defended because it is perceived to be threatened, and it is this threat that interests me. In studying white supremacist literature, DEFENDING THE CREATION OF WHITENESS 45 what surprised me most was the way in which this threat was articulated, almost exclusively, as the threat of interracial sexuality. It is an understatement to claim that white supremacy is obsessed with interracial sexuality and multiracial people. For white supremacists, multiracial people serve as a powerful symbol of the dangers of transgressing racial boundaries. Poststructuralist theory has revealed the centrality of borders to the construction of coherent identities. Far more than a lurid preoccupation, the obsession with interracial sexuality is part of the process of boundary maintenance essential to the construction of both race...