Justin Ward
1 min readJul 6, 2018

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‘Pro-white’ isn’t just something random racists came up with their own, either.

People didn’t just start saying it out of the blue. It’s catching on as a result of years of active agitation and propaganda by part of organized white supremacists.

David Duke coined the term in an attempt to rebrand the KKK decades ago. The National Socialist Movement followed suit, ditching the swastika and billing themselves as a “white civil rights organization” akin to the NAACP.

The Traditionalist Workers Party founder Matt Heimbach continued this trend by trolling his university with a White Student Union.

These euphemisms only started to gain currency with a wider audience more recently with the wave of aggrieved entitlement that carried Trump to office.

“It’s OK to be white” is a little bit more clever. Alt-right trolls from the /pol/ board on 4chan tried to trap people into labelling this seemingly innocuous phrase as “hate speech” so they can reinforce their white supremacist victimhood narrative.

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Justin Ward
Justin Ward

Written by Justin Ward

Journalist and activist. Founder and co-chair of DivestSPD. Bylines at SPLC, The Baffler, GEN, USA Today. Follow on Twitter: @justwardoctrine, @DivestSPD

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