Justin Ward
2 min readAug 20, 2017

--

What does it mean to be “pro-white?” There is no “white” ethnicity, no singular “white” culture.

Does “white” mean “European?”

Europe is a diverse multiethnic continent. There is no single “European” culture or even biologically homogenous population cluster.

If you say “European” identity is rooted in “Western” ideas, like the Greek classics, then that would make most Muslims “European.”

Muslims too studied the Greek classics. They preserved them during Europe’s Dark Age/Islam’s Golden Age in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. Without this transmission of classical knowledge, the Renaissance would not have been possible.

So where does “white” identity come from and what does “white” mean?

A white identity didn’t really emerge until after colonialism and the beginning of racialized slavery.

Racialized chattel slavery (treating people and their descendants as property) arose out of a colonialist need for a stable labor supply. Indentured servants were problematic because it was thought that once they were granted freedom they would form a restive and potentially dangerous class.

So slaves were brought in and kept in permanent servitude to get around this, and an ideology of inferiority was constructed post hoc to justify this.

Thus “white people” were born and defined in opposition to “black people.” And this was the basis of a race caste system that would define the structure of American society for 400 years, and it is still threatening to tear this country asunder.

To say you are pro-white is to support this divvying of Americans into “white” and “black”; to explicitly endorse it and the notion of racial hierarchy that it entails.

There is no “white” people. For most of history, many white-skinned Europeans weren’t considered white, especially Italians and Slavs, but also the Irish, who were thought to be the “missing link” between “Negroids” and “Anglo-Teutonic” British (which is especially ironic if you consider that the Aryan Brotherhood is made up of many Irish and even features a shamrock in their logo).

All of these groups were eventually merged into white identity. But black people, by definition, never can be. This is what we mean when we say we want to smash white supremacy.

This is not being “anti-white (people).” I am as white as they come, but the idea of whiteness is a false idol worshipped by fools, and it must be destroyed.

--

--

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

No responses yet