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They are Coming Out of the Woodwork




Richard B. Spencer is, perhaps, the leading advocate of what has become known as the Alt-Right movement.  At a rally in Washington, D.C., recently, he said that America belonged to White people, whom he called, "children of the sun".  White people, he said, were a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized, but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were awakening to their own identity.  

 I will let Mr. Spencer speak for himself.  Joseph Goldstein reported what he said.  

At the conference on Saturday, Mr. Spencer, who said he had coined the term, defined the alt-right as a movement with white identity as its core idea.
“America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”
But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.”
“To be white is to be a creator, an explorer, a conqueror,” he said.
More members of the audience were on their feet as Mr. Spencer described the choice facing white people as to “conquer or die.”
Of other races, Mr. Spencer said: “We don’t exploit other groups, we don’t gain anything from their presence. They need us, and not the other way around.”
And if talk like that is not enough to cause one to ask what the recent election shook loose from the woodwork, then we really are in bigly trouble.

 It is true that we have always been a nation of immigrants.  Strictly speaking, only Africans have the right to claim they came from nowhere else.  The rest of us walked all over the globe, from our beginnings in Africa.  But what we have never done, adequately, is to clarify what precisely it is that we are, as a nation of immigrants.  The earliest generation that founded us as a nation held slaves.  That still sticks in our craw.  It festers in our souls.  Just being a conglomeration of diverse human beings does not define what it is we want to become together.  Even our Constitution did not make it plain that women and Blacks were on equal footing.  In fact, it excluded it.  So that there still are people talking fascist talk about a superior white race is not surprising.

 It is, though, frightening, and disgusting, and it is clear evidence that we have serious thinking to do.



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