Actually, “Whites” Hate “Whites” the Most
By: Sam Mckenzie Jr.
Tags: Equality, White Supremacy, Race, Whiteness, Racism

Actually, “Whites” Hate “Whites” the Most

And that’s always been the case

Trump needs the non-existent problems he creates. He recently tweeted that Al Sharpton “Hates Whites & Cops!” And his violent hit-and-run maneuver dodges the damning fact that — whites hate whites the most. All of history up to the present backs up that statement.

Whites have practiced their hate on each other and for each other in word and deed. Look at indentured servitude. Then look at how white elites invented and used whiteness. White elites made whiteness to protect their assets, to oppress Black people and people of color, and to thwart working-class solidarity across skin-color groups. That hateful whiteness is still working today.

This hatred of whites by whites has been at the highest levels. In the book The History of White People, the historian Nell Irvin Painter shows whites putting certain whites at the top of the racist hierarchy and claiming other whites were lower. Among several pieces of historical evidence, Painter quotes Theodore Roosevelt who — in his book The Winning of the West — wrote these words about white Southerners in the 1880s:

[P]eople drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps ever were brought to America—the mass of convict servants, redemptioners, and the like, who formed such an excessively undesirable substratum to the otherwise excellent population of the tidewater regions in Virginia and the Carolinas. Many of the Southern [slur] or poor whites spring from this class, which also in the backwoods gave birth to generations of violent and hardened criminals, and to an even greater number of shiftless, lazy, cowardly cumberers of the earth’s surface.

Whites invented and used slurs against each other. No one had to release recordings of Roosevelt; he wrote and published his thoughts himself. Roosevelt didn’t love all whites, and he wasn’t alone. True to form, the whites in charge restricted immigration by whites they hated. And true to form, whites also experimented on and sterilized whites they classified as stupid and deficient.

History shows the policies of whiteness hurting whites. In 1948, the activist and writer Harry Haywood published his book Negro Liberation which included a blistering indictment of white supremacy and its impact on Southern whites. Haywood found that Southern whites had more sickness, more death, more underfunded schools, more exploited women, lower wages, and less democracy than the rest of the country. Haywood diagnosed white supremacy as the cause for the Southern condition and position.

Haywood wasn’t wrong. White supremacy requires whites to step on each other. We know from history, white supremacy lynched and murdered whites who stepped out of formation. And whites battled and killed each other in the Jim Crow South and around the country.

Today, white policies still hurt whites. White lawmakers know their white policies harm other whites — and they don’t care. In the book Dying of Whiteness, the sociologist and physician Jonathan Metzl documents how the politics of whiteness kills whites through a lack of health care, reckless gun laws, and austere funding for schools.

Metzl outlines how backlash politics can boomerang. With their votes, whites aim and throw white boomerangs — that bang them and pang them where it counts. Metzl goes so far to say that “Anti-blackness, in a biological sense, then produces its own anti-whiteness.” Even when whites hate people who aren’t white, they still end up hating themselves in some ways.

And it’s no better with voting because there are powerful whites who aren’t interested in a democracy that includes all whites. That has always been the case. In the book Democracy in Chains, Nancy MacLean shows how certain whites today don’t want all whites to vote, especially young students. Carol Anderson makes the same point in her book One Person, No Vote.

In MacLean’s book, she details the history of how the Koch brothers, and others, are rewriting the rules and rigging the courts to ensure democracy can’t block their itches for riches. For them, liberty is having the freedom to make as much money as possible, at whatever cost and damage, and they don’t care about whites who aren’t at their level.

With class warfare between white elites and other whites, we have more whites hating whites again. That much is clear in Nancy Isenberg’s book White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

Even white-supremacy culture hates and harms whites. White-supremacy culture demands white standards for beauty, work, and life. Those white standards aren’t loving, and they create mental and physical issues for whites too.

From history to the present, other whites and whiteness are the real problems for whites. Whites should fight against other whites and fight against whiteness. Whites need to worry about what other whites are doing to them, especially white-male shooters, the Republican Party, and Trump.

James Baldwin is still right, “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”

Trump uses Black and Brown people to distract from his insecurities, his deficiencies, his bad behavior, and his hatred of whites. His hatred for whites is clear in his policies, his statement about “a dumb Southerner,” and his professed love for “the poorly educated.”

Let’s also remember that Trump attacks and demonizes many Brown and light Brown people who have legally checked the white box. And like whites hating whites, he still hates them. Trump’s hatred of Black and Brown people reflects his hatred for people — whites included. The same is true of many whites.

No Black person or person of color has hated whites more than whites have hated themselves. History is proof and so are the policies. Whites have the hatred of whites covered. And no one can do it like they can.