Free speech and loss in white nationalist rhetoric

ABSTRACT

This article analyses how anti-blackness structures the desire for free speech within white nationalist ideology. The essay traces the linkages between the rhetoric of a mission statement for a white nationalist webzine edited by a professor of psychology and that professor’s published academic work on ethnic identity. The central argument of the essay is that taken together, these texts construct an antisemitic fantasy of a crisis in free speech, in which free speech is an object of desire because of its promise to recuperate a loss rendered unto the white nation, anchored by an attachment to the anti-black bio-evolutionary origin myth of humanness.

KEYWORDS:

• Antisemitism
• anti-blackness
• platform studies
• psychoanalysis
• white nationalism

Notes

1. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.

2. MacDonald, “Mission Statement – The Occidental Observer.”

3. Flores, “Between Abundance and Marginalization,” 5.

4. See note 1 above, 127.

5. Wynter and McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe For Our Species?”, 34.

6. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.”

7. Ibid., 276.

8. Ibid., 276–78.

9. See note 5 above, 21.

10. See note 7 above, 319.

11. Ibid, 317.

12. Ibid, 316–17.

13. Ibid., 326.

14. Marriott, “Inventions of Existence,” 59.

15. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Vol. Book XVII), 124-125.

16. George, Trauma and Race, 3–6.

17. Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 124; Zupancic, What is Sex? 108.

18. Marriott, Whither Fanon, 325. For more on the term “racial blackness,” see Barrett, Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity.

19. Wilderson, Afropessimism, 16.

20. Ibid., 94.

21. Ibid., 92.

22. Sexton, “Affirmation in the dark,” 98.

23. Towns, “Towards a Black Media Philosophy,” 14.

24. Heng, The invention of race in the European Middle Ages; Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti- Jewish Iconography; Robinson, Black Marxism; Cohn, Warrant for Genocide; Beller, Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction; Langmuir, Towards a Definition of Antisemitism.

25. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.”

26. Veracini, “The other shift;” Becke, “Dismantling the Villa in the Jungle;” Erakat, “Whiteness as Property in Israel;” Mevorach, Black, Jewish, and interracial; Kaye/Kantrowitz, The Colors of Jews.

27. Bouteldja, Houria, Whites, Jews and us, 66–69.

28. Moshin, “Hello Darkness.”

29. Li, “The interface affect of a contact zone,” Gillespie, “The politics of ‘platforms’”.

30. Newton, “Why Deplatforming 8chan Can Be Effective”; McCullagh, “Deplatforming Is a Dangerous Game”; Thompson, “A Framework for Moderation”; Goldberg, “Social Media & Free Speech – Deplatforming.”

31. Beller, The message is murder; Fuchs, “Capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour”; Noble, Algorithms of oppression; Robinson, “The next economic crisis.”

32. Ibid., “Mission Statement – The Occidental Observer.”

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique; MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone; MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents.

38. George, Trauma and Race, 5.

39. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique, 58.

40. See note 2 above.

41. MacDonald, The Culture of Critique.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid.

44. MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology”; MacDonald, “An Integrative Evolutionary”; MacDonald, “The Numbers Game.”

45. MacDonald, “The Numbers Game,” 421.

46. Ibid., 422.

47. MacDonald, “Evolution, Psychology,” 219.

48. MacDonald, “An Integrative Evolutionary,” 76–77.

49. MacDonald, “Psychology and White Ethnocentrism,”15-17.

50. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 119; Marriott, Whither Fanon, xi.

51. See note 39 above, 246.

52. MacDonald, “American Racist.”

53. See note 2 above.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid.

56. Kelsie, “Blackened Debate”; Athanasopoulos, “Smashing the icon of Black Lives Matter”; Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality”; Marriott, Whither Fanon, 275.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

E. Chebrolu

E. Chebrolu is a graduate student in Communication.