This is a good example of the pervasive myth of white innocence that has been so foundational throughout the West’s history: economic anxiety, anti-elite backlash, or just liberals being mean – whatever animates their extremism, white people cannot be blamed for their actions.
https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1446407681779064847
This is an article about the Far Right in Australia, but countless versions of this piece have been written about rightwing extremism in Germany, in the UK, and of course in the U.S., where this particular genre of apologist tale has been a staple throughout the nation’s history.
The dogma of white innocence holds that we have to go look for innocent explanations, explanations that portray white people as fundamentally decent, leave their innate goodness intact, and depict them as ultimately blameless for their actions and the very outcomes they pushed.
And so we are told they were driven by sheer desperation, economic anxiety, by circumstances outside their own control, deceived by sinister forces – or pushed to the extreme by Liberal overreach, by Liberals being condescending, arrogant, or just mean. “That’s how we got Trump.”
Whatever the specifics of the apologist tale, the result is the same: Regardless of how racist the concrete outcomes of policies and the candidates they support, no matter how extreme the political action in which they engage, reactionary white people are never to be blamed.
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