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White pride andwhite power are expressions primarily used bywhite separatist,white nationalist,fascist,neo-Nazi, andwhite supremacist organizations in order to signalracist orracialist viewpoints.[2][3] It is also a slogan used by the prominent post–Ku Klux Klan groupStormfront and a term used to make racist/racialist viewpoints more palatable to the general public who may associate historical abuses with the termswhite nationalist,neo-Nazi, andwhite supremacist.
Some advocates of white power have been committed to overthrowing theUnited States government and establishing awhite ethnostate usingparamilitary tactics.[4]
Sociologists Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile identified "White Power! White Pride!" as "a much-used chant of white separatist movement supporters",[5] and sociologist Mitch Berbrier has identified the use of this phrase as part of a "new racist ... frame-transformation and frame-alignment by (a) consciously packaging a 'hate-free' racism, (b) developing strategies of equivalence and reversal–presenting whites as equivalent to ethnic and racial minorities, and (c) deploying ideas about 'love,' 'pride,' and 'heritage-preservation' to evidence both their putative lack of animosity toward others as well as their ethnic credentials."[6] In asocial psychology experiment that tested how white participants could be influenced to identify with white pride ideology, social psychologists framed white pride as follows:[7]
[P]eople who openly express White pride seem invariably to be those alienated from the mainstream culture—KKK members,skin-heads, and White supremacists—people trying to grab onto some basis for feeling good about themselves when conventional avenues such as successful careers and relationships are not working well for them. Consequently, the vast majority of people who avow White pride seem also to explicitly avow racism.
Sociologists Monica McDermott and Frank L. Samson documented the rhetorical evolution of white pride movements thus, "Because white pride has historically been predicated upon a denigration of nonwhites, the articulation of the duties and requirements of whiteness reflects a desire to correlate a conscious white identity with positive attributes."[8]
Political and social scientists commonly argue that the idea of "white pride" is an attempt to provide a clean or more palatable public face forwhite supremacy or white separatism and that it is an appeal to a larger audience in hopes of inciting more widespread racial violence.[9] According to Joseph T. Roy of theSouthern Poverty Law Center, white supremacists often circulate material on the internet and elsewhere that "portrays the groups not as haters, but as simple white pride civic groups concerned with social ills".[10]
Philosopher David Ingram argues that "affirming 'black pride' is not equivalent to affirming 'white pride,' since the former—unlike the latter—is a defensive strategy aimed at rectifying a negative stereotype". By contrast, then, "affirmations of white pride—however thinly cloaked as affirmations of ethnic pride—serve to mask and perpetuatewhite privilege".[11] In the same vein, Professor of Education atUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Cris Mayo, characterizes white pride as "a politically distasteful goal, given that whiteness is not a personal or community identity, but has been a strategy to maintaininequities of privilege and power."[12]
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Political scientistsCarol M. Swain and Russell Nieli, in their text on white nationalism, identify the idea of "white pride" as a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. They argue that over the course of the 1990s, "a new white pride, white protest, and white consciousness movement has developed in America". They identify three contributing factors: an immigrant influx during the 1980s and 1990s, resentment overaffirmative action policies, and the growth of the Internet as a tool for the expression and mobilization of grievances.[13] According toJanet E. Helms, founding director ofBoston College's Institute for the Study and Promotion of Race and Culture, a white person "must become aware of his or her Whiteness, accept it as personally and socially significant ... Not in the sense of Klan members' 'white pride' but in the context of a commitment to a just society."[14] Among people who strongly identify as white, research differentiates between a power cognizant group and a prideful group. The prideful group is more likely to devalue diversity and to show prejudice, while the power cognizant group is more likely to value diversity.[15]
Sociologist Luigi Esposito ofBarry University writes that "the emphasis on white pride or white identity resonates with supporters of the alt-right because racial tribalism is regarded as an antidote to theneoliberal emphasis on competitive individualism and self-serving behavior that presumably threatens the interests of whites."[16]
The slogan "White Pride Worldwide" appears on the logo ofStormfront, a website owned and operated byDon Black, who was formerly aGrand Wizard of theKu Klux Klan.[17] The North Georgia White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan describe themselves as "a patriotic, White Christian revival movement dedicated to preserving the maintenance of White Pride and the rights of the White Race".[18] A 2002 study identified white pride as a motivation for racialhate crimes on a US college campus,[19] while in a different study on internet racism, the slogan was identified as being part of an emergingtransnationalist trend in white supremacist movements.[20] The slogan was also documented to have been used inhate speech incidents atNew York University,[21]Vassar College,[22]Temple University,[23] theUniversity of Oregon,[24] and theUniversity of Tennessee,[25] and it was a slogan used in posters put up by a white supremacist organization at dozens of US colleges.[26]
CertainDenver Nuggets jerseys were named "white pride" byAdidas and were listed as such on the team's website in 2016, after which internet outcry prompted the team to rename the jerseys.[27] Similarly, a fitness room inRiver Falls, Wisconsin was renamed to avoid the racist connotations of it being referred to as the "White Pride Fitness Room".[28] The slogan was chanted along with "White Power" by up to 100neo-Nazis rallying inManchester, United Kingdom in March 2015[29] and was the theme of a March 2016 event inSwansea[30] and a March 2017 event inEdinburgh,[31] all of which were organized by theNational Front. In an exposé fromThe Week, James Poulos warned that "Europe is on track to rediscover what looks to us like a highly unsettling form of white pride."[32]
The white power movement that emerged from the Vietnam era shared some common attributes with earlier racist movements in the United States, but it was no mere echo. Unlike previous iterations of the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist vigilantism, the white power movement did not claim to serve the state. Instead, white power made the state its target, declaring war against the federal government in 1983.
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