The chairman of the hate group The Proud Boys identifies as Afro-Cuban. One of the organizers of the pro-Trump extremist group Stop the Steal is Black and Arab. Why some groups who are disdained by white supremacists embrace white power movement?
According to Cristina Beltrán, professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, and author of the book,
Cruelty as Citizenship: How Migrant Suffering Sustains White Democracy, states:
Whiteness is not the same thing as white people and that whiteness is actually better understood as a political project that has emerged historically, and that is dynamic and that is always changing. Whiteness as an ideology is rooted in America's history of white supremacy - which has to do with the legacy of slavery or Indigenous dispossession or Jim Crow.
It is important to understand just how long in this country legal discrimination was not simply culturally acceptable but legally authorized.
Multiracial Americans have learned how to create their own sense of belonging through violence and through the exclusion of certain groups and populations.
This phenomena of multicultural conservatism - which is the kind of conservative politics of reaching out to other racial minorities practiced by folks like Jack Kemp or George W. Bush - was an effort to recognize the specific histories and backgrounds of particular racial populations and to say that they could be part of the GOP.
For folks like Afro-Cuban Henry (Enrique) Tarrio, former chairman of The Proud Boys, now convicted seditionist, who doesn't want to be recognized for his racial distinctiveness - the very act of sort of identifying him as Latino, as African American - that folks in this group have a certain discomfort with that very logic. They want to be understood as simply Americans outside of those kinds of identity categories.
Minority politicians like Clarence Thomas, Tim Scott, and Ben Carson, and others like them, desire the approval of their white peers and have bought into the idea that they’re “not like the others” of their own racial or ethnic group.
The US Census’ 2020 report revealed that people who identify as White alone declined for the first time since the Census began in 1790. The majority of Americans under 18 are now people of color, and people who identity as multiracial increased by 276% over the last decade. These Census figures seemed to validate a common assumption: The US is barreling toward becoming a rainbow nation around 2045, when White people are projected to become a minority. That year has been depicted as “a countdown to the White apocalypse."
Whiteness isn’t a fixed identity; it’s like taffy - it expands to accommodate new members, if they have the right look. Whiteness has expanded to include Irish, Italian and Jewish people - groups that once weren’t considered fully White in the US. The US has broadened its definition of White people throughout history enough to maintain power over Black, Asian and Latino people.
Why do so many racial groups gravitate toward Whiteness? It’s due to a racial hierarchy that places Whiter-looking people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. This is explains why while supremacy has expanded to include multiracial supremacists.
Europeans created this hierarchy around 500 years ago to justify slavery and colonialism. This hierarchy is where we get the modern conception of race – how a person’s inherent worth, intelligence or attractiveness can be determined by the pigmentation of their skin.
People of color are playing increasingly visible roles across the spectrum of far-right activism. Today, non-White activists speak for groups of radicalized MAGA supporters, parts of the “Patriot” movement, and, in rare cases, neo-Nazi factions. Although a few have concealed their identities, many others proudly acknowledge their backgrounds and offer themselves as counterpoints to charges of pervasive racism in right-wing movements.
The “multiracial far right,” as it’s sometimes called, adds another layer to an already fraught debate over how to address violent extremism, the top domestic terrorism threat.
The common refrain that white supremacy is a main driver of the far right is complicated when Black or Brown figures speak publicly for Stop the Steal, the Proud Boys, Patriot Prayer and other factions that are under scrutiny. The trend is forcing new ways to think about, and talk about, the far right’s appeal.
Right-wing activists of color said it was especially galling to be called racist by White social justice protesters. The real racism, they countered, is denying them the agency to follow whatever ideology they choose - no matter how repugnant it is to liberals.
The mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 was overwhelmingly White, but the official speaker lineup for the rally that day was more diverse.
Vernon Jones, a Black former Georgia state lawmaker, and Katrina Pierson, a Black adviser and former spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, were among the speakers parroting the baseless assertion that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Another familiar face was main rally organizer Ali Alexander, born in Texas as Ali Abdul-Razaq Akbar, of mixed Black American and Middle Eastern descent.
Filipino American pundit Michelle Malkin, for example, has defended the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, supported the post-9/11 racial profiling of Arabs and Muslims, and promoted anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about George Soros. Michelle Malkin's standing on the White right is that they’re constantly willing to attack other people of color and say anti-Black things in ways that kind of ingratiate them to White conservatives.
"The fact that far-right extremist groups are forced to diversify means they’ve already lost the war," Beltrán said, “even white supremacy is now multiracial.”
