America was never “white supremacist.” Nor was any other place.
The largest mob lynching in the South was of Italians.
The 1891 lynching of 11 Italians in New Orleans, after a roundup of over 1,000 Italians, grew out of an internal conflict among Louisiana Democrats and was praised by progressives of the era.
“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins,” the New York Times editorial board railed. “Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”
Future Louisiana Gov. John M. Parker, who helped organize the lynchings, described Italians as “just a little worse than the Negro, being if anything filthier in habits, lawless, and treacherous.”
Columbus Day was created as a quasi-apology to Italian-Americans for the lynchings which held only until Democrat identity politics began tearing down statues of the Italian explorer.
The myth of white supremacy is a story retroactively invented during the civil rights movement.
The KKK targeted Catholics and Jews. It hailed the “anglo-saxon white man” rather than viewing skin color as the only thing that mattered. The black-and-white view of history in which bigotry was as binary as 1950s drinking fountains in Alabama reflected only a very brief reality during a decade or two in which the Irish, Italians and Jews had come to be accepted. An era of growing tolerance for minorities was ironically the prerequisite for both the widespread acceptance of the civil rights movement and the distortions of civil rights history that we are dealing with today.
White supremacy was a myth born out of a more tolerant era in which prejudice toward black people briefly became the most defining form of bigotry. One that most people quickly rejected.
Baby Boomers, the most influential generation in history, mistook their youthful experiences for absolute reality. Knowing nothing of history and caring even less, they used their vast cultural powers to make the 60s into the ‘ground zero’ of American history. Generations have grown up with their ahistorical view of “white supremacy” encoded in education and entertainment.
The myth of white supremacy has divided Americans into an artificial racial binary created by the aftermath of the civil rights movement. The descendants of Italians, Irish and Jews who faced persecution and lynchings are denounced for their “white privilege.” Historical revisionism has become even more grandiose with attempts like the 1619 Project to define all of American history around the racial binary. Critical race theory insists that the racial binary is inescapable.
The racial binary denies the oppression of anyone who can be seen as white. In an extreme example, Whoopi Goldberg sneered that the Holocaust was “white people doing it to white people. Y’all go fight amongst yourselves.” When the racial binary is the only measure of prejudice, thousands of years of Jewish, Irish, Slavic, Catholic, Protestant and other histories of persecution, oppression and martyrdom are irrelevant because the participants are “white.”
Outside the racial binary, no one else’s oppression matters and so no one else’s history matters.
The myth of white supremacy doesn’t just grotesquely twist American history around the racial binary, it usurps and eliminates the histories of Europe and even the Middle East. Jesus, a Jewish man, is depicted as black. Cleopatra, a Greek queen, also becomes black. The decade of distortion of the civil rights movement reaches thousands of years back to racialize the past.
And in the process it eliminates the histories and struggles of much of the world.
White supremacy is a myth. The KKK was not upholding a racial binary, but the supremacy of its particular group, Southern Anglo-Saxons with a certain pedigree, against all comers, French, Irish, Italians, Jews, blacks and anyone else who wasn’t a member of its narrow demographic. But that’s what inner city gangs also do with Latino and black gangs clashing over turf. It’s also reflected in the early 20th century urban clashes between Germans, Irish, Jewish, and Italians.
The KKK was not a unique phenomenon. Similar identity politics battles go back to the founding of America with nativists fighting off the Irish in New York City even in the early 1800s.
The Nazis, another group that tends to be used to represent a simplistic racial binary, weren’t white supremacists either. National Socialist ideology believed that Germans were descended from the Aryan peoples who had migrated out of India. That was why they adopted the ‘swastika’, a Buddhist symbol, as their emblem. The Nazis conducted extensive outreach to Arab and African Muslims, to Asian and Latin America, and recruited black soldiers into the Wehrmacht. Hitler’s closest ally outside of Europe was Imperial Japan. The Japanese and Chinese were declared to be honorary aryans.
While the Nazis were chasing people like my father, a blonde blue-eyed teenager who was valuable to the partisans because he looked a lot more like the Aryan ideal than Hitler, black entertainers were working in Berlin and Paris, and black soldiers were fighting for Germany. The Nazis despised black people and criminalized any relationship with German women, but they viewed Jews and gypsies as an urgent racial threat to be exterminated at all costs.
Black nationalists like Marcus Garvey admired Hitler. And the Nazis tried to influence African-Americans. “There have never been lynchings of colored men in Germany. They have always been treated decently,” Nazi propaganda aimed at African-American GIs claimed. “So you don’t have to be afraid to be with Germans.”
Liberal Jews struggle to tell the story of the Holocaust in the face of a dishonest mythical racial binary that groups Jews and Nazis together. And there is no way to tell that story or any other, those of lynched Italian immigrants, the Swedish immigrants on the plains, the Irish fighting for their rights, and the manifold conflicts that shaped Europe and modern civilization, not to mention the entire history of the Middle East, without demolishing the big lie of the racial binary.
America was not defined by “white supremacy” and nor was any other place. The KKK and the Nazis were not “white supremacists,” they were upholding power for their own group while persecuting and killing a broad spectrum of people from other groups. Having light colored skin did not mean getting a free pass from the KKK, let alone the Nazis who killed millions of people, the vast majority of whom would be considered white by today’s woke cultural establishment.
What we think of as “white supremacy” is a racist movement that arose largely in response to the civil rights movement. It quickly became marginalized and while its proponents hate black people, they also hate Jews. Recent domestic terrorist attacks carried out by self-identified white supremacists have been evenly divided between targeting Jews and black people.
A growing number of white supremacists are Latino making the racial binary even more senseless. But the idea of Latinos as a non-white race is an absurd addendum to the racial binary which is entirely detached from European and Latin American history and can be traced back to a liberal search for new minorities to recruit in the wake of the civil rights movement. Having decided that Latinos are non-white, liberals are confused when some Latinos decide that they are not only white, but members of a white master race. But the entire concept of La Raza or ‘The Race’ came from a Mexican intellectual who was an enthusiast of Nazi Germany.
Marcus Garvey, the founding father of black nationalism, and Jose Vasconcelos, the founding father of La Raza’s Latino racial nationalism, were both admirers of Hitler’s racialism. Contrary to the myth of white supremacy, in which white racialism is evil and those of other races is good, white supremacy, black nationalism and Latino racial nationalism derive from the same sources.
Racists of all races admire other racists. The greatest woke lie may be that the alternative to racism is anti-racism. Liberals used to know that the alternative to racism is not hating others.
But rather than admit that white supremacy and the racial binary are a myth and that the country is dealing with intergroup conflicts, as it always has, and that the boundaries between those groups are often artificial, Democrats and the media are doubling down on the racial narrative that lies at the heart of their power base that the civil rights movement still defines our history.
When we stop treating people as heroes or villains based on their skin color and actually look at what they believe, we will actually be able to address real bigotry, instead of convoluted exercises in racial power politics like redefining black racism as reverse racism or anti-racism.
Bigotry is inherent in human nature. No one of any race, ethnicity or creed is immune from it, but that doesn’t mean that we need to be bound by it. The impact of different bigotries can be defined by power, but power comes in different forms, and it has been a very long time since any large racial group in America was powerless: either politically or physically.
America doesn’t face a problem of white supremacy, but a multitude of quarreling groups who distrust each other and who have come to believe that success is a zero sum game. Democrat identity politics is so busy creating new groups from sexual fetishes and immigration that it never gets around to noticing that none of the existing groups get along with each other.
Diversity has ceased to unify, as it briefly did during the high points in American history, and has become a politically convenient source of division. The emphasis on a racial binary only makes all of that worse by turning Italians, the Irish, the Jews and, these days even Asians and Latinos who can be accused of “internalized whiteness” into scapegoats for Democrat social disasters.
White supremacy isn’t the issue, identity supremacy is. Generations have been told by the Democrats, by their educational systems and entertainment that they are defined by identity politics and that positive change will come when they narrowly fight for the interests of their group, while suspecting the worst of members of other groups, especially white people.
Non-white people are taught to believe that white people are hoarding power. In San Francisco, black people are being urged to demand slave reparations from the Asian population. Women are encouraged to resent men. Transgenders are told to hate women. Within the LGBTQ movement, gay men have become scapegoats. California just passed a ban on “caste discrimination” among Indians. This is what the utopia of the perpetually aggrieved looks like.
This isn’t white supremacy: it’s identity supremacy. And if we don’t move beyond it, there will be no nation, only one long endless civil war across the fractured territories of what was America.
ChrisFromCincinnati says
WOW. Daniel Greenfield – WELL WRITTEN. Thank You for addressing this issue factually and responsibly and head on!
My favorite paragraph is: “White supremacy isn’t the issue, identity supremacy is. Generations have been told by the Democrats, by their educational systems and entertainment that they are defined by identity politics and that positive change will come when they narrowly fight for the interests of their group, while suspecting the worst of members of other groups, especially white people.”
Amen. I have shared this story around to many good friends. People need to understand THE TRUTH. Thank You.
gravenimage says
+1
DazzleMe says
Great article
Wellington says
Demonstrating again that the present Democratic Party of the USA is the greatest enemy of the USA. It is the present Democratic Party “led” by the dysfunctional and despicable Biden which is pushing identity politics above all others, though there are certainly other culprits like the MSM, sports franchises, Big Tech, Big Business (Hell, even beer producers), the educational establishment in general, et al.—but then aren’t all of these “entities” in bed with the Democratic Party?
And thus it comes down here to, yes, the single greatest threat to the continuation of the American Republic as a true representative democracy. That single greatest threat is the Democratic Party of the USA. One knows this by now or should know it.
James Lincoln says
Wellington says,
“…the single greatest threat to the continuation of the American Republic as a true representative democracy. That single greatest threat is the Democratic Party of the USA.”
Yes.
Didn’t used to be true, but is true NOW.
The dwindling number of “reasonable” JFK type Democrats either didn’t get the memo – or refuse to believe it.
somehistory says
Mr. Greenfield, I usually find what you write informative and on the mark.
This time, however, I find a few things with which, to some degree, to disagree.
Firstly, not all “baby boomers” are as you describe. The generation begins with 1946 and goes to 1964. Not everyone in that generation is low on knowledge and cares little. Many of that generation have a well-founded store of information regarding history and many actually care about the Truth. So, my point is, to use a qualifier…some, many, a lot, etc. Please don’t lump us all together.
Also, people blame Southerners for the racial feelings against Black people.
I am one of many Southerners who have never had a bias toward Blacks, have many friends who are Black and grew up wondering *why* there were separate rooms, drinking fountains, etc. I taught respect for others to my children, and have bi-racial grandchildren. Southerners weren’t and aren’t now, the problem.
I have a very good friend who is Black. She has lived in the South (US), the North (US) and Italy. She told me the worst racists are in the North.
It’s the heart that matters, and some people just have hearts that are not pure.
Also, there have has always been a target of those in power positions…the poor. The poor have always been regarded as unworthy, unkempt, dishonest, etc. The fact is, many White people are some of the poorest in the country and everyone looks down on that group. They have little to no power, but generally aren’t in other people’s faces, demanding it, either.
Anyway, that’s my two cents. This entire subject could be a book in order to fully cover it. Might take more than one.
Ray Jarman says
+1
Somehistory, When you said that you are from the South with no animosity towards blacks, it reminded me of my grandmother in the little town of Kinston, N.C. Back in the 1950’s when she and my grandfather owned and operated a tobacco farm, many of those that I worked with on the farm in the summer were black children but I never thought about color only other good children with whom I was working. When someone with whom she knew became sick or needed help, she always did what she could and the color of their skin never mattered. I know that there were quiet a number of whites who were bigoted and as Daniel Grenfield stated, the Jews were persecuted as badly as the black people were.
somehistory says
Thank you, Ray. Sounds like we had a similar childhood.
My family were sharecroppers. My father was like a foreman to the owner of the property and hired outside help when we needed it. Many he hired were Black; but like you, I didn’t see them as any different. When I was about 8, they put me to washing the strawberries. One of the men who came to work, had huge hands and helped me with the washing; his hands could hold as much as the quart cup I used. He was so kind and soft-spoken and his color never mattered to me. I have since met and became friends with many Black and Brown people.
Now, if we say we don’t “see color,” we are called racist.
My grandmother had a Black friend. When she was sent to a hospital for tb, which she didn’t actually have, this lady came in and taught my mom, who was a teenager, how to cook.
I believe that people like you and I are richer now for what we had in those days
gravenimage says
Good exchange, Somehistory and Ray.
James Lincoln says
somehistory says,
“The fact is, many White people are some of the poorest in the country and everyone looks down on that group. They have little to no power, but generally aren’t in other people’s faces, demanding it, either.”
And, all the while, some Leftists still brand these poor powerless Whites as “entitled”, “White supremacists”, etc.
somehistory says
James, that is so very True. My family and I worked hard for our “privilege” we supposedly have. They say we are “entitled” and I ask, “to what?”
gravenimage says
Too true, James and Somehistory.
DazzleMe says
Somehistory
I agree about the BabyBoomers about low knowledge and cares little. That is not true at all, I certainly care and I’m a BabyBoomer.
I agree that racial feelings did not come from Southerners, I’m from Mississippi and I’ve never been bias. Southerners are not the problem. Democrats are!
You are correct in what you’re saying!
somehistory says
Thank you DazzleMe. In all my years of living in the South…where I was born, my mom, grandmother, her mom, and on back were born…I have only one time in my life, in my presence, heard anything said against Black people.
Of course, people in politics…like biden and some of his very close friends…have said plenty. But they are not/were not, the people on the street in the South.
Racism is mainly manufactured by those who profit from the clashes between races.
For some time, people seemed to be getting along; and then bo came along and boom. jesse jackson, al sharpton, m waters, jackson lee, and others make a profit from the idea that Whites hate Blacks and the feeling is so inbred…as oprha said, ‘whites are steeped in it”…that no matter how much we want to be unbiased, we can’t help ourselves and should just be offed.
Those are the ones who “don’t care” about history or people.
Jim says
Joe Biden and the democrats have prejudices against conservatives and they use their racial binary as an ideological weapon to obtain power. The details of their ideology are opportunistically chosen and can be changed or abandoned at will to fit the ideological needs of the moment.
David M says
The Democrats started the KKK & opposed the abolition of slavery, and they hate that fact.
https://patch.com/georgia/loganville/why-the-democrats-started-the-kkk-oh-you-didnt-know-that_e37487c3
Joe Biden is a hypocrite for talking about white supremacy when one of his heroes was former KKK Exalted Cyclops Robert Byrd. Nancy Pelosi liked him too.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/07/03/watch-joe-biden-call-kkk-member-and-democrat-robert-byrd-a-friend-and-mentor-n2571780
Jayell1 says
Why do we talk about ‘supremacy’ anyway, unless someone has got thoughts of ‘supremacy’ on their mind?
‘It takes a thief to catch a thief’ as they say, and maybe those with frustrated ideas above their station will project their own megalomaniacal ambitions onto those who’ve achieved what they see as ‘supremacy’ only because of what these more capable people have achieved. It tells us everything about those screaming ‘supremacist’ and nothing at all about those who’ve managed to get to the top through ability.
Ray Jarman says
It should be remembered that until 1961, there was never a Catholic president and to this day there has been no person of the Jewish faith been elected to the office. For a long time the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormon) were to be exterminated in Missouri. I also remember that it was said even the North that it was cheaper to hire an Italian than to own a black slave. Daniel Greenfield certainly hit the nail on the head with this article.
overman says
“That was why they adopted the ‘swastika’, a Buddhist symbol, as their emblem”
Daniel is brilliant as always, but i think he’s mistaken about the swastika.
The swastika is much older than Buddhism.
Because it represents the Truth and Light, hitler reversed it for occult reasons, so that it’s true meaning was twisted into the complete opposite of it’s Spiritual Symbolism.
“The truth is Swastika is a Hindu ritual word and an ancient symbol of Hinduism. It is an auspicious symbol which has been in use since the early Vedic period (about 2500 BCE or so). lt has been popular and widely used across many cultures in the Indian subcontinent for millenniums.
However, the Swastika that we know today did not originate from them. India has been the only country where the word and the symbol have been used uninterruptedly at least for 4000-5000 years 1.There is no evidence that Swastika has been used on such a massive scale and for so long by common people anywhere else except in India. Because of its widespread popularity and positive image, it found its way into Buddhism and Jainism also. These religions did not invent Swastika as some want to argue. They adapted it”.
gravenimage says
The Swastika is found all over the world. The Nazi version was an adaptation of the Teutonic “Hammer of Thor” symbol.
Tim Heydon says
Yes, but if the idea of white supremacy dominates, why shouldn’t I as a white person be a white supremacist.
The binary ideology makes it a choice between white supremacy and non white supremacy. Since I am a white person, of course I am going to choose white supremacy over the alternative; non-white supremacy.
I see nothing in the way non whites treat whites when the former are in power that leads me to believe whites would be treated with the respect that they now treat blacks and others.
The binary ideology actually polarises, creating supremacy attitudes.
gravenimage says
I don’t think any of have to embrace racial supremacy just because it is depressingly common.
fadeye@yahoo.com says
Like Dinesh D’Souza says in the documentary Death of a Nation,. Every single ill that the democrats have created like slavery, the KKK, Jim-Crow laws and segregation,. They now blame on America not on themselves: the democrat party!
They are disgusting, corrupt and LYING!
Jim Harmon says
Whadda crock.
gravenimage says
Anything in particular?
Jim Harmon says
400 years of black slavery. Check into it.
gravenimage says
Most Africans were enslaved by other blacks. Then, the West has *ended* and repudiated slavery, long since. Would that this were true in Africa and in Islam.
Jim Harmon says
All true. But white supremacy nonetheless was not a myth.
gravenimage says
The Myth of White Supremacy
…………………………………….
All true–fine article, Daniel Greenfield.
Walter Sieruk says
The very concept of “White privilege”is a hoax. There is no such thing.
To only give three of many examples to back that above statement up .
First, during the 1980’s ,I had worked the “dead man’s shift “at a restaurant and got to know a number of police officers.. One “rookie” police officer, in training, and a Black woman, and she didn’t want to be bothered to respond to an police calls the police car received on its radio . Therefore , naturally , they fired her.because she was intentionally useless on the police force.
Nevertheless, her sister filed a lawsuit for “race discrimination” against the police department . In of all the facts , she was still restored to the police force and was still too lazy to respond to calls.
Second, during the late 1990’s I knew an own has college education and wanted to have a job working for the State . In spite of him being very qualified for the job is always want to a Black person who had only a high school diploma .
Third, in this century I know a security guard who works at a city hospital . He informed me of an incident on a Black man who went to the security boss office and demanded a security job at a much higher pay than all the other beginner security officers get
The boss said “That’s not how in works for beginners . A beginner starts a a lower pay and in time with merit , gets paid more. That Black man replied that “That’s not the way ait will work for him because he has someone related to him who works for the NAACP and he would file a lawsuit against the hospital for race discrimination if he’s not hired at high pay. He also said that “the hospital might win that lawsuit but the hospital higher up would still be embarrassed about that lawsuit.”
Therefore he unjustly got that job an unfair high pay.
So the idea of “White privilege” is a fiction. back in America in the 1920’s 30’s and 40’s the concept of it was valid , in some places in the United States but it isn’t anymore.
.
Walter Sieruk says
In the twenty -first century the concept of “White privilege” in the United States is nothing but a politically correct fiction and myth..
Three examples of this are ,first in the year 2017 in the citiy of San Francisco an illegal immigrant who entered America from South ofthe US / Mexican border in cold blood shot and murdered an American citizen who was a young White woman, Her name is Kate Steinle
That vicious and murderous illegal migrant in the PC American court out off with total impunity . . the US courts are now a politically correct hoax and joke.. No justice for Kate. So much for bogus claim of “White privilege.”
The second example, of the fiction of “White privilege” is on January 6, 2021 in the US Capitol building a Black Capital police officer Michael Byrd who even had a history of being a disciplinary problem.shot and murdered a young woman,Ashli Babbitt, who was a unarmed and non -violent American patriot.
The rigged left -wing system let Byrd off the murder he commited “scot free”
Byrd is even a member of that White people hating Louis Farrakhan cult called “Nation of Islam.”
That cult is even rejected by leaders of Sunni and Shiite Islam as “fake Islam”
Since Byrd is a member of the anti-White people cult .Most likely his crime of murder was “racially motivated ” Hate crime charges in addition to a murder charge should have been filed against Bird, but none were.
If a White police officer shot and killed and unarmed Black person , definitely Hate crime in addition to murder charges would have been filed against him’
Third, in that very same day 1/6/21 in Washington DC in a tunnel a leftist police officer beat to death and unarmed helpless White Woman , Rosanne Boyland and that murderer also got cleared by the left wing PC court .
Both of those Black ” officers had literally got away with murder of two White people. So much with that false idea and pseudo claim of “White privilege.”
gravenimage says
All good points, Walter. I remember the terrible Kate Steinle case here.