Klannish Reform: The Paradoxical Restoration of White Nationalism on U.S. College Campuses in an Era of Color-Blindness

• In Event: Cutting Out Your Tongue: Scholars Under Fire in the Age of Neoliberal Education and White Nationalism

Abstract

Scholars have documented how colorblind ideology came to dominance during the post-Civil Rights Era, supplanting overt forms of white supremacy (e.g., Bonilla-Silva, 2009). Colorblindness reached full bloom during the Obama administration as narratives of a post-racial America filled the media. For some, Donald Trump’s campaign, which clearly relied on neo-fascism and white nationalism, shattered the myth of colorblindness. For others, it affirmed their understanding that widespread white supremacy lurked under a veneer of colorblindness (Bell, 1992; Daniels, 1997). Recently, we have also seen a plethora of white nationalist agents on college campuses (e.g., Richard Spencer). These events beg the question of whether the critique of whiteness needs to be updated to account for ideologies other than colorblindness.

During the last few decades, white supremacist discourse was retooled to manipulate the left’s critique of colorblindness and organization around identity politics. While the older versions of white supremacist discourse rooted in biological superiority and overt hatred of people of color certainly still exist, this paper focuses on the versions that are making inroads on college campuses, namely white nationalist discourses like that of the Alt (“Old”) Right. Drawing on “paleo-conservatism,” white nationalists say they reject the idea of white biological superiority (but they do believe in “European” cultural superiority). They support the idea that each race should pursue its own identity politics. Further, they argue that each race should have its own national territory. Since they believe that whites are under global threat from people of color, they argue that it is only right that whites, as a group, seek to openly control “their own” nations (namely, Europe and white settler nations) so they can “be themselves.” Contrary to critical whiteness studies, white nationalism argues that whites should openly pursue white identity politics, or else face oppression or even genocide. Much like the KKK’s drive to “save the South” during Reconstruction, current white nationalism makes “klannish” claims about protecting what is rightfully white by “making America great again.” The critique of white nationalist discourse will be developed more fully in the paper.

With their more erudite façade, which includes (distorted) references to critical theorists, agents of white nationalism have taken their project of klannish reform to college campuses. Under the guise that universities foster the open oppression of white people, klannish reformers argue they are merely fighting for the rights of “their” people. We should not be surprised then that their primary targets are whiteness studies scholars. This theoretical paper will argue that countering their attacks by explaining the realities of white structural privileges is insufficient since the hidden presupposition they make is that whites are a natural, biological group (see, Leonardo, 2013). Instead, this paper will argue that the better strategy would be to denaturalize the notion that “whites” are biologically white and deconstruct the political and psychological dynamics that racialize them as “white.” This approach (to be developed further), when combined with a critique of the structural privileges of whiteness, is necessary to thwart the growing movement toward white nationalism.

Author

• Ricky Lee Allen, University of New Mexico