There's
no way to march with KKK members and Nazi flags in a non-hateful way.
“I came to this march for the message that white European
culture has a right to be here just like every other culture,” a white
nationalist protester in Charlottesville told Newsweek. But, he claimed, he’s “not an
angry racist.”
White nationalists often use this messaging. They claim they
aren’t racists; they just want to celebrate white European culture and
heritage.
What’s unreasonable about that, they say? Shouldn’t every group
of people be allowed to celebrate their own culture?
There are two problems here.
One is historical baggage. History doesn’t have many examples of
people innocently “celebrating white European culture,” but it does have an
awful lot of examples of ugly and sometimes violent racism perpetrated by white
people of European descent. Slavery. Jim Crow. Lynchings. Hitler.
That isn’t to say that Americans of European heritage don’t
have a culture to celebrate. Not at all.
They just generally celebrate it based on national traditions
and not in a generic, pan-white-people sort of way. You might celebrate Irish
culture on St. Patrick’s Day, for example. Or you could celebrate French
culture on Bastille Day with French wine and food.
In America, we celebrate the Fourth of July with fireworks and
Thanksgiving with turkey. But these holidays are for all Americans, not just
the white ones.
America has never been a white country. It was once entirely
populated with Native Americans. Then the first Europeans arrived, and they
soon brought the first enslaved Africans.
All of those groups, as well as all
of the people who followed later, contributed to making our country and our
culture what it is today.
Second, the goal of “celebrating white European culture” is a
thinly veiled lie.
It’s a lie because the marchers were carrying Nazi flags, flags
associated with the genocide of 6 million Jews and countless others the Nazis
wanted to remove from humanity’s gene pool.
