Translucence: A Case for the Capture of Political Rhetoric by White Supremacy Ideology

Submitted to It’s Going Down

If America has a foundational ideology that informs its historical memory, it is that of white supremacy. Through this mythological narrative racial resentment can be/has been used by political elites to stoke popular indignation to such a fervor that a blatant and aggressive redistribution of wealth from the most vulnerable to the most wealthy can be sold to an ailing and maligned population through a neoliberal grammar that has been reinforced by an evangelical faith-based epistemology. White supremacist ideology has also been used to mobilize a base of primarily white voters to promote Donald Trump from his previous position of a real estate developer/brand and reality show cast member to the President of the United States.

White America has been conditioned to believe that the genesis of their problems is not that of the political and corporate elites, but that of the Other, contemporarily known as African Americans (Black Lives Matter), Muslims, or Mexicans. For over forty years, Americans have become so atomized through the neo-liberal narrative of hyper-individualism and consumer culture that we take our social cues not from human interactions but from a corporate media that extubates stereotypes and perpetuates racial anxieties and fear. The imperative to love thy neighbor has become one of fear they neighbor who lives on MLK drive, who works picking our produce, who practices a faith outside of evangelical Christianity (particularly Islam.) The relational logic that white supremacy provides to white America, and to those that genuflect to its manifestations in hopes that they will gain a seat at the table, rests on a historical amnesia, specifically that of colonial imperialism, which has been deployed against the subaltern to capture their resources through exploitation, slavery, and genocide, e.g., the attempted genocide of the American Indians, chattel slavery, and Asian internment camps.

Although an early critical historical pedagogy would assist in developing a critical consciousness, instead of the justification of white supremacy, and in doing so begin to mend the deep divisions in the country, the American history of oppression as is currently taught in public education is couched in language of inevitability, a type of manifest destiny.  Stripped of nuance and its provocative reality, history is normalized by the American curricula as unavoidable. The great man history perspective is used as a framework to shorthand history in public education due to its funding source, i.e. the federal government, allocating funds for primarily STEM education, yielding to the “hard skills, “operating under the premise that automation will not make swaths of the educated workforce superfluous. Many of those educator/functionaries of state propaganda watched in horror as the ideology of white supremacy, and by extension white nationalism, vaulted Donald Trump into the presidency; a presidency that was assisted by the alt-right who express  a neo-fascist, white supremacist narrative predicated on an image of an America in distress- a body politic dying under the strain of a shifting demographic of takers, not creators.

Driven by this manufactured anxiety and coupled by the dearth of economic opportunities subsequent to the flight of manufacturing sector, rust and sun-belt Americans have surrendered social provision after social provision, and if the executive orders signed by Trump during his first week in the White House are any indication, they will soon have to surrender even more. The Trump presidency is a natural corollary to the unattended racial resentment simmering under the belief of White American exceptionalism. This resentment has been supported and encouraged by the emergence of far-right media, none more than the current Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the president of the United States, Steve Bannon.

Before Bannon went to the White House, and incidentally is speculated to have written Trump’s inauguration speech, he was a Goldman Sach’s banker and executive officer of Breitbart News, an influential site that dwelt in the realm of “alternative facts” and provided the platform for the rise of the alt-right, an unabashed White Supremacist[1] “movement” that has gained momentum during Trump’s campaign and eventual electoral college win of the presidency. Despite a political history of dog-whistle politics and racially coded language, under Bannon’s tutelage, Breitbart has distilled and propagandized white supremacist ideology into a form easily understood by prairie populists and coastal elites. Incidentally, when analyzed by the Flesh-Kincaid grade level calculator, Trump’s inaugural speech scored an eighth-grade readability level.[2]

Aside from the obvious issue of catering to the prejudiced, bigoted, racists in an accessible dialogue, the new rhetoric is a Trojan horse for fascism. As Robert O Paxton wrote in his book Anatomy of Fascism, the symbols of the American brand of fascism will not be symbolically expressed by swastikas, but will come wrapped in “… Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.” [3]  To be considered a “patriot” one has to uncritically subsume an individual’s natural predilection to personal survival to an ideology; an ideology that is increasingly beholden to a regressive, maladaptive economic choice- a choice that puts a premium on diversionary social constructions, i.e., race and religious orientation rather than the socio-economic reality of post-industrial America and the very real culpability of political and economic elites.

[1] A faction of the group prefers the term white nationalist; however, the distinction is negligible.

[2] Source: Trump’s speech fed into http://www.readabilityformulas.com

[3] As quoted in: Giroux, H. (2016). America at War with Itself. San Francisco: City Lights Open Media.