Trump’s election has brought a major resurgence to that pernicious ideology known as white nationalism, with representatives of this movement like David Duke and Richard Spencer gaining a larger platform than ever before. The presidential administration itself is influenced by this insidious doctrine: from the voice of the “alt-right,” Steve Bannon, directing Trump’s every move, to the attorney general appointment of Jeff Sessions, who once said his only gripe with the Ku Klux Klan was that they smoked marijuana.
Before this shift in the political climate I would not have deigned to write about these people. Only a year ago they seemed inconsequential, and I most certainly would not be the one to give them any attention. But since they now have a platform, we need to deconstruct repeatedly the center of their political doctrine, the concept of “whiteness” itself.
The truth is that there is no biological reality to the idea of “whiteness.” According to the Human Genome Project, “people who have lived in the same geographic region for many generations may have some alleles in common, but no allele will be found in all members of one population and in no members of any other.”
Craig Venter, who was a major contributor to the mapping of the human genome, makes clear that “whiteness,” and race as a whole, is a social construct rather than a biological reality: “Race is a social concept. It's not a scientific one. There are no bright lines, that would stand out, if we could compare all the sequenced genomes of everyone on the planet.” Being “white” is not a scientific definition, but rather a social label.
“Whiteness,” as the scientific community has attested, is a creation of our culture rather than a matter of genetics. Today, in certain regions of North America, those cultural criteria for whiteness include light skin, wearing khakis and having an undying love for Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Yet “whiteness” as a cultural concept has constantly mutated and warped throughout the several centuries that it has existed as an idea.
Benjamin Franklin, in the mid-1700s, didn’t even view most Europeans as being white, asserting that “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.” The Irish, Slavs, Greeks and Finns have all historically been considered “non-white.”
Even today the label of “whiteness” is vague in what it encompasses, as the U.S. census counts Arabs, Turks, Persians, Armenians and a majority of Latinos, among others, as “white,” though this may not be a common perception. Not only is whiteness a social construct, it is a social construct that is in a constant state of flux.
Throughout history, “whiteness” has never been a biological reality or a unified culture: instead, it has consistently been an “in-group” created by the ruling class so that there may be “out-groups.” “Whiteness” as an idea exists only to define “non-white.” This is the source of its origins, as “whiteness” emerged during the Early Modern period to dehumanize and alienate both the indigenous peoples of the Americas and the West African slaves who had become a valuable commodity.
From there on, “white” identity became a political tool used to rally supporters by scapegoating the “other,” the “non-white.” By playing up the “us vs. them” mentality inherent in the concept of whiteness, groups like the Southern Democrats in the post-Reconstruction South and the Nazis in 1930s Germany came to power by rallying against a “non-white” out-group. More recently, this technique has been employed indirectly through “dog whistle” terms used by politicians like “voter fraud” or “welfare queens.”
