🔒 What Does White Identity Even Mean?

I’ve developed a sense of unease whenever I see a young white man with a shaved head.

I know that’s not fair. Some guys look great bald. I have friends who do it. It’s not an unusual style. It’s not a square moustache or a sonnenrad tattoo. In the vast majority of cases it is, of course, entirely benign. That’s part of the problem and, I’m sure, this is intentional.

On 31 August, Australia was subjected to a nationwide series of ostensibly “anti-immigration” rallies that were actually organized by neo-Nazis and the mainstream didn’t know this until the last minute. Due in part to the media exposure, the whole “March for Australia” rally went down like a wet fart compared to what the 1488 crew were hoping for. Still, thousands of people seem to have rocked up. I don’t know how anyone continues to believe that events like these can be clean. How many knew and didn’t care?

A shameful day, punctuated with predictable violence, the worst being when a pack of around fifty Nazis descended upon a peaceful camp of indigenous Australians in Melbourne and just started beating them mercilessly in an astonishing act of cowardice.

Then the media, with the help of antifascist group the White Rose Society, started naming names. Some of these men are the types of people you would expect, like Stirling Cooper, an Andrew Tate-style manosphere influencer. But then, there are others. Like this happy, smiling dentist.

Formerly employed by a small family dental practice in Balalrat, Dr Lomax, reportedly, “enjoys all aspects of dentistry with a particular focus on holistic and preventative dentistry. His patients love him for his eye for detail, reliability and calm manner. Outside of the clinic he enjoys camping, maintaining physical fitness, spending time with his family and getting to know all the cafes in Ballarat.”

Here he is attempting to break a woman’s face with his fist:

Grinning coyly in his scrubs, he looks like the friendliest person in the world. You would have no way of imagining that the happy guy with one rubber-gloved finger in your mouth has designs on exterminating groups of people he sees as racially inferior. At least you know he has the strongest imaginable motivation to whiten your teeth. But it is particularly chilling to know that these people are in medical settings. If there are dentists, how many doctors are there? How many non-white people trust them with their health? How many school teachers are there? How many kindergarten teachers?

These monsters are, of course, emboldened by much higher-profile white identitarians like Elon Musk, Tommy Robinson, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, who bang on constantly about the need to reclaim our white pride and assert our white power, to push the other races out, to outbreed them.

And yet, something that I have never been able to figure out from all this thrashing—What even is white identity, anyway? What does white even mean?

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