Wondering about white supremacy? Proud Boys define themselves as “men who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world. (They’re weak on chronology.) Per their “about us,” they denounce “racial guilt” & “venerate the Housewife.” Many appear to enjoy hitting people.

I’ve only run into Proud Boys close up, reporting a Florida Trump rally. I found myself walking toward it with a large group. They were talking about finding reporters to “fuck up.” I did not volunteer myself.

The Proud Boys I was walking amongst were not all white, a point the group emphasizes as if it disproves white nationalism. It does so no more than Black cops in apartheid S. Africa proved it wasn’t racist.

I think often if what Skid Row community organizer Pete White of @LACANetwork said of the (POC) LAPD killers of Charly Keunang, an unarmed Black man: “it’s not the color of the cop, it’s the color of the uniform.”

When white supremacy mobilizes state or organized violent forces on behalf of its principles (the ideal of a mythic “we” that “created the modern world,” defined as Greco-Roman), it will almost always recruit some non-white participants.

In the case of state power such as the LAPD, that’s because the rhetoric of the force can be construed as pro-democracy even if in practice it sometimes or even often serves white supremacist ends.

The Proud Boys declare themselves “anti-racist” right after they denounce “racial guilt” & frame their collective identity as “creators” of “a modern world” defined by them as centered in historically white nations & rooted in the whiteness of ancient Greece & Rome.

So what does “anti-racist” mean to the Proud Boys? Same thing those who’ve either benefited from white supremacy *or believed they could* have always said: “I don’t see race.” Which is a way of denying the effects of whiteness (on us all).

Which is why, mixed among the mostly white Proud Boys looking to attack journalists, there could be some Latinx men. The white nationalism of the Proud Boys allows non-white participants—on white supremacist terms.

I’m white, so I can’t say why a BIPOC person might want to embrace white supremacist terms. But I have a little related experience, growing up a Jew in an anti-Semitic town. Or, as I learned to say as a child, a “half-Jew.”

Surrounded by bullies who called me “kike,” I took to calling myself “half-Jewish.” Implicitly, I was saying I was half *not* Jewish, half like them. I was identifying with my bullies. It’s not uncommon at all.

Proud Boys, like Trump, use same logic to persuade just enough non-white people that they can be on side of bullies instead of bullied to do the real work, which is persuading white people they’re not racist for embracing white nationalism.

This isn’t a contradiction within white supremacy; it’s the heart of it. No, wrong metaphor: it’s the screaming void of tautology and Möbius strip morality twisting around within the empty cave where a heart should be.