The poison of white identitarianism (Inaya Folarin Iman, Dec. 22nd, 2024, spiked)
A mishmash of primarily online political subcultures have emerged over the past few years, vociferously defending white identity. It shares striking similarities with woke identitarianism. These advocates share so-called progressives’ racial essentialism, their obsession with identity and their conspiratorial mindset. Some have called this emerging movement the ‘woke right’, others the Very Online right. Either way, anyone who values liberal principles should be concerned.
These new rightists’ nihilistic resentment, indeed their racial identitarianism, is in danger of being passed off as a ‘legitimate grievance’ by the broader right – as an understandable response to successive governments’ failures on immigration; as of a piece with more general public concerns. At the very least, there is a hesitance among some conservatives to call out these toxic views. […]
But identitarian rightists are not expressing legitimate concerns about immigration, governance, the economy, fairness and social cohesion. They are criticising immigration on the dubious grounds that it is a means to dilute white British culture, through the sheer weight of non-white numbers. This is the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory – a crackpot fixation once found only in the darker corners of the internet that is now being increasingly mainstreamed. Indeed, one proponent of right identity politics delivered a public lecture earlier this year, presenting migration as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Brits and warning that they are due to become ‘a minority in their own homeland’. […]
[T]o dismiss the emergent identitarian right as an insignificant minority would be to make the same mistake as many liberals and leftists once did. They dismissed wokeness as being limited to pesky, pink-haired university students, and subsequently proved unable to resist its mainstreaming.
The obvious difference between woke and MAGA is, obviously, that we actually subject black to systemic discrimination.