Gavin Evans examines a modern plague that has deep roots in faux biology and some seriously fraudulent social science.
If anyone, in this day and age, had decided to give their newest book a deliberately provocative title, choosing “White Supremacy” could be a finalist for such a dubious honour. In fact, academic and journalist Gavin Evans has just done that, subtitling his volume: “A Brief History of Hatred”, just in case a potential reader was insufficiently unnerved by Evans’ choice of a title or confused into believing it was some kind of perverse handbook.
It is intriguing, however, that the late Stanford University historian, George M Fredrickson, some 50 years earlier, also used the same title for his own groundbreaking comparative study of the evolution of racialised government in South Africa and the US (along with a briefer shout-out to Brazil’s experiences).
When his book was published, Fredrickson explained that he had deliberately chosen the term “supremacy” — as opposed to “racism” — to indicate that, at least in its earliest days, “race” in any kind of sophisticated (albeit false) biological sense had been just one of the factors that initially shaped both America’s and South Africa’s colonial societies, along with their economies and legal structures. However, over time, the result was the creation of increasingly institutionalised, formally structured slavery systems and the consequent formalised racial hierarchies that flowed from those decisions and choices.
As a journalist and academic now teaching in Britain, Evans has taken a significantly different approach and focus from Fredrickson’s — although the two books would usefully be read in tandem, but with Fredrickson’s historical study first to set out an historical landscape.
Deep examination
Instead of employing a deep examination back through many centuries to trace the origins of racial thinking, Evans traces the evolution of the contemporary ideology of white racialism/racism back through the beginnings of 19th century “scientific” racial theories. This leads Evans into the origins of thinking about eugenics and the strains of thought that underlaid the thinking about and misuse of IQ theories and measurements. And all of this was built upon a growing appreciation for the hereditary nature of various traits as explored by scientists, but then put to work for socio-political purposes in discriminating against groups of people — and then on to the pseudo-biology that underpinned the Nazi “Final Solution.”
In doing his immersion into 19th century thinking, Evans draws extensively upon race theorists in the US, Great Britain, and Germany who influenced each other or provided the raw material for later racial theories. This even includes stops along the way to incorporate ideas drawn from the early thinkers about genetics, including Charles Darwin. That naturalist, of course, had got it right about evolution and the African origins of humanity, but at the same time he was also tainted by 19th century ideas about a hierarchy of races in terms of their respective intellectual capacities.
In the contemporary world, such ideas have become the foundation for the very real — and dangerous — phenomenon of angry yet lonely young men who do terrible things in the name of racial ideologies. And, yes, they almost always are young men — in America, in Britain, in Scandinavia, in New Zealand, throughout Western Europe, and in South Africa. (An exploration of how the South African charge of white genocide has now taken on a peculiarly political texture with the Trump Administration in the US comes in Molly Olmstead’s recent article in Slate.)
Inevitably, such individuals most often progressively become ensnared in dark web conversations and alt-right manifestos urging a fight back against the potent yet imaginary “white replacement theory” and similar perspectives flogged by proponents of racial thinking.
Sometimes, but not always, those manifestos and social media messaging also demonstrate more bog-standard conspiracy thinking. This includes themes like the charge that Jews (presumably wherever they live) are secretly in control of the world’s financial structure — and through that global and national politics, as they simultaneously manipulate intellectually inferior, inevitably darker-skinned people, to Jews in taking over the world.
Further… building on their respective childhoods, these individuals often demonstrate those “lone wolf” tendencies that add a complex psychological dimension to their fears, angers, delusions, and then their actions. Such deep psychological roots make it that much harder to dispel such notions in the minds of such angry individuals. (The reader’s mind may well drift to thoughts about psychological training and conditioning reminiscent of the plot of “Clockwork Orange” or to Pavlov and BF Skinner’s famous operant conditioning training with dogs and pigeons, as well as humans in the case of Skinner.)
Lone wolf
While the term “lone wolf” has become increasingly common usage to describe such people, this reviewer has the feeling that such souls actually behave more like lost puppies than lone wolves. They are desperately trying to connect to someone, to something, or to some kind of belief system that may give them reassurance in a world that otherwise offers them few handholds (or restraining devices for their delusions), save via connecting through social media with other equally deluded young men and their would-be influencers.
Of course one key element in actual killing sprees by such people comes from their use of weapons — most frequently relying upon the lethality of modern firearms. Almost always, too, in their writing and actions such lost souls also demonstrate a love of firearms and explosive devices. One thought, of course, is to make it that much harder for people with such alarming tendencies and ideas to have easy access to high-powered rifles. Absent access to such weapons, the killing sprees would become that much harder to carry out, perhaps, although some have chosen to use swords, pangas and bayonets — and a truly determined individual can often find their way to firearms. And, now, increasingly, a motor vehicle driven into a crowd at a sporting event, a holiday market, or just a busy downtown street is becoming a political act on behalf of some kind of ideology. This isn’t quite nihilism. Rather, it is making use of the tools at hand to strike a blow for something.
But the use of motor vehicles leads us to another question — and that is whether such killings are a unique feature of young, misled western men, or, whether there is a broader question here, especially since some of these mass vehicular killings have been carried out by young Muslim men who believe they are following their own dark webs of racial/religious/ethnic teachings and influencers.
The question is not simply one of white supremacy, per se, but the idea of true believers of some doctrine or philosophy who are prepared to kill innocent people in the presumed furtherance of their beliefs, regardless of the personal cost. That should point us to the idea there is more to this phenomenon than simply white racialism and white supremacy.
Is it not also the difficulties such young men have in connecting to more “normal” social structures and why those darker more violent alternatives become so attractive to them. If Evans had also included the way some in Eastern Europe and Russia have absorbed a Slavic version of White supremacy as propounded by writers favoured by Vladimir Putin, or even the versions of such thinking in some of Asian societies, Evans’ White Supremacy would have been an even stronger, more universally applicable work, although admittedly it would have been a much longer one.
Populist critics
Jennifer Szalai, reviewing Quinn Slobodian’s own new book, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right, in the New York Times notes Slobodian’s final chapter “traces how right-wing figures across the world have positioned themselves as populist critics of ‘neoliberal policies’ even while they pay frequent homage to Austrian economists like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, who laid the foundations for the neoliberal tradition, with its gospel of free markets.
“This so-called New Right has adopted the furious nostalgia of a backlash to what (Argentinian President Javier) Milei has called a ‘global hegemony’ while embracing radical deregulation.” This may put energy into the normalisation of violence, the addition of a kind of libertarian ideology, and that perennial, a “rage against the machine” as we once would have called it half a century earlier.
Societies and governments that hope to combat these dangerous tendencies must find ways that can draw such alienated individuals back into the larger, broader texture of political, economic, and social thinking in societies, rather than driving them further and further into the rabbit holes they enter. This will not be an easy or simple task, especially when mainstream politicians insist on giving credence to their ideas or fears.
Evans deserves credit for tackling this topic, even if the more universal picture is beyond this text. But he, too, is challenged about how to bring such lone wolves or lost puppies back into the fold before they wreak yet more damage.
Nonetheless, by the time Evans reaches his postscript, he becomes modestly optimistic. As he writes, “Racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia might seem like immovable forces, particularly for their victims. Every time a young white man opens fire with an assault rifle on black or brown or Muslim, Sikh, Asian or Jewish people, or a policeman shoots dead an unarmed black man, or a race science author insists that one population group is innately smarter than others or naturally more violent or inherently more acquisitive, and every time a television pundit tells his viewers of a conspiracy to replace ‘legacy’ Americans or Europeans with people of different races and religions, it must feel like nothing has changed. It must feel like racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia simply cascade through the generations, always on the hunt for new territory.
“And yet, it can and does change, often for the better. In Germany, Britain and the US between the wars, perceptions about the superiority of the white race and beliefs in race-based eugenics were part of conventional wisdom. But this changed through seeing the implications of eugenics in Nazi Germany, and it is continuing to shift…”
We can only hope that, over the longer term, Evans is right, and that despite all the hate speech and racial, ethnic, and religious invective in the darker corners of the internet and talk radio — often infecting more presumably normal political discourse by leading politicians in many nations — wiser, more rational heads will, in the end, prevail. DM
White Supremacy: a Brief History of Hatred, Gavin Evans, 2024, is published by Jonathan Ball Publishers and Icon Books Ltd