White Supremacists/Nationalists/Alt-Right folks LOVE to compare themselves and their plight to that of African-Americans in their demand for “ethno-states”. They devalue actual, living, breathing Euro-descended people in the process.
The thing is, if the slave trade hadn’t happened, if our African ancestors’ families were not forcibly broken up, would we even be describing ourselves as “Black” or even “African-American” in the first place?
We would have been Yoruba, or Asante, or Dahomean, or Kongo, or whatever other ethnicities we would have brought with us to the Americas. We would not have been put through such a genealogical ringer in which only the words “nigger”, “Negro” or “colored” matter in their description of one of a similar skin color.
Instead, our post-slavery ancestry is all we really have. Even the angriest Black Nationalist is doing a lot of (slipshod but well-meaning) compensation for what was taken from us in over 246 years of slavery on the North American continent.
What similar trauma troubles those who yearn for “White Pride Worldwide” or “A White Homeland for Ourselves and Our Children”?
What great historical, enduring cataclysm happened to Europeans or to people of European descent that would see a minority clamor for a militarized “safe space” in the 21st century?
Was it 9/11? Was it the refugee crisis ensuing, eventually, from Euro-American adventures in Iraq + the chaotic proxy war in Syria?
Or was it the Ashkenazi minority and their sufferings of Christian European hypocrisy over millennia? Even now, the genocidal resentment against Ashkenazi Jews among White Supremacists is just as rabid as it is senseless and unfounded in logic. “Show us where the big bad Jew hurt you.”
Nothing has been lost from White rule. It’s still a White Man’s world. It’s still a White Man’s country.
These White Supremacists – the National Policy Institute, for one – are acting like they’ve been losing so much ground for so long, and that Trump will gain back what they’ve imagined as losing.
But their imagined traumas simply don’t compare. And the pain they wish to inflict upon not only people of color but also other White people for flouting their ideals is unjustified and unjust.
