Dylann Roof, the terrorist that attacked and murdered 9 Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina framed his actions in a supposed defense of White people who are increasingly constructed as victims. In a posted internet manifesto, Dylann spoke of “integration” bringing “White people down to level of brute animals” and connecting it to the failing “school system” and an over-all conspiracy to undermine the White society. He further says, “the fact is that how good a school is considered directly corresponds to how White it is,” which is then connected to White flight into the suburbs, where good schools are to be found (without Blacks). Declaring, “I hate with a passion the whole idea of the suburbs, and viewing it as being “nothing but scared White people running. Running because they are too weak, scared, and brainwashed to fight.”
Segregation, for Dylann and many a racist is argued to be “a defensive measure” and “did not exist to hold back N…..s” but it “existed to protect us [Whites] from them.” The argument put forth by Roof for segregation is not only to “protect us [Whites] from having to interact with them, and from being physically harmed by them, but it protected us from being brought down to their level.”
Critically, the manifesto offers a sweeping racist worldview as Dylann includes an anti-Semitic section calling for destruction of “Jewish identity” so they wouldn’t cause much of a problem” while, at the same time, admitting not “to understand why Jews do what they do” and “are enigma” to him. In another passage, Roof offers a perspective on Hispanics in America. The Hispanics, for Dylann, are divided into “good” and “bad” ones but nevertheless are deemed “a huge problem for Americans.” In discussing the Hispanics, Dylann is positive about the presence of Whites in their mixt but nevertheless concludes, “they are still our enemies.” Rounding the racist tour with East Asians, Roof pontificates: “I have great respect for the East Asian races. Even if we were to go extinct they could carry something on. They are by nature very racist and could be great allies of the White race. I am not opposed at all to allies with the Northeast Asian races.” Here, one can smell from Roof’s note on Asians the residues of the “model minority” myth that shapes the attitudes and perspective of many Whites when expressing their views on the subject.
The manifesto was intended as a call to action to save the White race, which in Roof’s view “it is far from being too late for America or Europe” to reverse the trend. Remarking, “I believe that even if we made up only 30 percent of the population we could take it back completely. But by no means should we wait any longer to take drastic action.”
The attack and murder of 9 Blacks worshippers at the church is situated as an action in defense of the White race which is supposedly losing grounds and victimized by the on-going catering to Blacks and minorities in the US and Europe. White victimhood narrative has become dominant and is parodied around in conversations, sophisticated writings, media talking heads and crude Internet postings like the one attributed to Dylann.
Dylann narrative is very similar to Anders Behring Breivik manifesto and the claims of the white race being undermined, which led him on 22 July, 2011 to kill 69 participants in Workers’ Youth League in Norway. Breivik’s manifesto had an admixture of Islamophobic, anti-Black, anti-semitic and White supremacist content, which points to the cementing of the victimhood narrative among a section of whites in the US and Europe.
A similar narrative is appears in Brenton Harrison Tarrant manifesto, the 28-year old who is responsible for attacking two mosques on the 15th of March, 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand. The White victimhood narrative, which was on the margins, is now mainstream and the claims of reverse discrimination and a conspiracy to replace the White race altogether is taken to be the starting point for many debates, be it on immigration, schooling and budget allocations.
How accurate is the notion that Whites are losing ground to blacks and are victims in this supposed race war? Aside from demographics, what are the criterions by which we can measure a racial group relative standing in society, progress and future potential? Could it be that blacks are taking over the country and Whites are reduced to powerlessness in the process!
White Victimhood in Numbers?
An article in the New York Times examining the existing inequalities between blacks and white concluded, “the unemployment gap is virtually unchanged over the last 40 years. The income and wealth gaps have actually widened. So has the gap in educational attainment.” To put the NYT conclusion in proper context, the data debunks any notion of White victimhood, as a group, and how the constructed narrative is a figment of racist imagination and is driven by political actors interested in maintaining power.
While one can account for a rising number of white poor households and increasing hardships in the middle class but this is completely unrelated to supposed benefits or favors extended to Blacks or minorities; rather the primary culprit has been shifts in the economy and the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs overseas by the 99% mostly White corporate elite.Shifting the blame and targeting minorities is an old and well-tried tactic that can be traced to the earliest period in USA’s history.
The empirical data from a varies of sources shows that Whites, as a group, are not victims of any racial takeover and continue by all measures to increase their share of wealth, top tier positions in the US and centers of power. The glaring inequalities, for the racist, are explained away by asserting White racial superiority; rather than considering the accumulative economic, political, and social effects of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow laws and structural exclusions (mind you some have went to make the argument that structural racism does not exist).
At a certain level, the victimhood narrative works well to mask the inherent structural racism that continues to reproduce inequalities at every turn. On the other hand, it helps mobilize resentment among poor and lower middle class whites so as to keep the focus on sustaining the structures of inequality. Serving a ready made toxic racial venom makes it possible to assign to Blacks the insidious role of threatening or unmaking the American dream of a white picket fence and a piece of paradise on earth. Consequently, this racism permits or gives consent to all measures to counter the supposed Black threat and including among other things police violence and the prison industrial complex.
In this manner, Blacks end up being brutalized twice, once through the historical continuity of accumulative racism emerging from slavery all the way to the present, and secondly, by constantly being condemned for supposedly disrupting the white picket fence American dream for Whites. In both counts, Blacks end-up paying a heavy price for no other reason than being Black in a country that celebrate equality and diversity but practices and sanctions structural racism and atmospheric violence.
