American History and White Supremacy Are Closely Intertwined

Y’all, Irish people used to not be considered white. Neither were Greeks or Italians and for sure not any Eastern Europeans. Being Catholic was often enough to make you not white. In his “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.” Benjamin Franklin was out here worrying over his version of the Great Replacement:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Compexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.

Let’s be clear about what he’s saying here. If America keeps letting in “tawny” people, white people will become a minority in the country, and shouldn’t America take the opportunity to limit who can live here in order to protect white power and white prettiness? In fairness to Franklin, if you know anything about him, politics and the happiness of his dick were very closely related. This is exactly the sentiment behind anti-immigration policies now. Hell, it used to be you couldn’t switch on Fox News without hearing Tucker Carlson pontificating about the Great Replacement and how “someone” is flooding the U.S. with nonwhite people in order to negate white votes and unseat white power. (I don’t want to get sidetracked, but it’s important to note that, like the majority of American conspiracy theories, this conspiracy theory is at its heart antisemitic. The “someone” is the globalists, who are Soros or the Rothschilds or bankers or some other Jewish cabal.)

Literally the biggest difference between Franklin’s concerns and the concerns of racists now is where the threat of this dilution of whiteness is coming from. Franklin saw a threat in Spaniards, Italians, the French, Russians, Swedes and Germans. Currently, the supposed threat is from “illegals” and migrants and Mexicans and the rest of Latin America, though modern racists tend to lump them all in as Mexicans.

We find it laughable that Franklin thought Russians, Swedes and Germans weren’t white. To us, those are obviously white people. My God, the idea that Germans aren’t white? About a century ago the Germans devoted a couple decades to cleansing Europe of nonwhites. Of course they’re white.

Go back and reread that.

Americans will view you as white if you devote yourself to white racist violence. This is not a new observation. Noel Ignatiev wrote a whole book, How the Irish Became White, about this back in 1995. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan was virulently anti-Catholic. In the 1930s and 1940s, Father Coughlin’s radio show became widely popular, and his brand of antisemitism and support for the Nazis helped sway racist whites that American Catholics could be “good” whites. In the third iteration of the Klan, Catholic Klansmen were not unusual. Hell, even the “brother against brother” rhetoric of the late 1800s that mythologized the Civil War as a tragedy amongst white families was supposed to show white Northerners that they should see themselves as being more aligned with white Southerners — who had betrayed their country and fought against them — than with the Black people who fought alongside them during the War.

I keep reading all this outrage and surprise and sometimes mocking of how stupid it is that there are Latino white supremacists. Mauricio Garcia had Nazi tattoos and was hoping for a race war when he massacred people in Allen, Texas. But geniuses like Elon Musk find this idea of a Mexican neo-Nazi “incongruous.” As if there aren’t white people in Latin America? Do y’all think everyone south of us speaks Spanish or Portuguese on accident, or that they just coincidentally developed those languages over here independently of them being spoken in Europe? Nazis could hide in South America because they could hide among people who looked like them. Both North and South America have shared histories of European colonialism, the enslavement and importation of Africans, and attempted genocides of the people who were here when we got here.

Of course we would have similar racial hierarchies and similar histories of white supremacy. Why did Nashvillian William Walker invade Mexico and Nicaragua in the mid-1800s? Because he thought he could easily turn these areas — areas that had already been colonized by Europe and were already living with the racial hierarchies needed to have a society of enslavement — into satellite powers of the U.S. South. All the white people in the Western Hemisphere who loved slavery just needed to join together under the leadership of the U.S. South to protect their way of life.

We, in the United States, decided at some point that Latin Americans weren’t white. But as white Americans become more frightened of whiteness losing its cultural dominance, it’s completely unsurprising that white supremacists would be casting about for more people to be white. And it is also completely understandable, when you consider the benefits of being white in the United States, that some number of Hispanics would embrace white supremacism in order to demonstrate that they’re white in ways the U.S. will recognize.

I wouldn’t say that we’re lucky to be living in a time when we can observe this phenomenon of whiteness expanding, since the expansion of whiteness depends so heavily on white supremacist violence. But I do think that it’s important to realize that going back to Benjamin Franklin himself, America has been very anxious about what will happen when white people aren’t the majority of the people in the nation in a few short years. And yet those few short years have apparently stretched out like Rip Van Winkle’s nap, and we have never reached their conclusion, because whiteness isn’t a real thing with clearly defined and agreed-upon boundaries. Whiteness in this country expands to remain the majority. It’s how Germans became white. It’s how Swedes became white. It’s how the Irish became white. And we’re watching Hispanics become white.

It’s not surprising. It’s not weird. It’s how this country has always worked.