TWO You Will Not Replace Us! An Exploration of Religio-Racial Identity in White Nationalism (original) (raw)

The Religion of White Rage

Vice News Tonight produced a documentary entitled "Charlottesville: Race and Terror," featuring several interviews from prominent white nationalists and spokespersons for the "Unite the Right" rally. 1 Early footage from the segment captured crowds of whites, mostly male, carrying Tiki torches and chanting the following: "Jews will not replace us!," "Blood and Soil," and "Whose streets?! Our streets!" The 2017 protests and riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, featuring the display of white nationalist fervor, which has only swelled post-election 2016, has yielded strong scholarly interest in the interplay between right-wing politics, racial demagoguery, and racialized violence. What is also striking are the deeply felt sentiments and the entrenched sense of insularity that drives white nationalist efforts to cultivate political and ideological resources toward the building of a white nation-state in America. Underscoring many of these efforts is an existential concern about the displacement of Western cultural vitality. Thomas Williams traces the white nationalist rallying cry centering on white "replacement" to French existentialist thinkers such as Renaud Camus, who, in response to demographic shifts in Europe, due to the infl ux of black and brown immigrants, lamented, as recently as 2012, le grand remplacement, or the great replacement of Europeans from their native environs. 2 The possibility of white ethnic and civilizational substitution, to restate, is an existential crisis. Given the implications of this intense racialized sense of meaning and its concomitant geography of space and place, or the constitutive frames of reference meant to order and sanction some bodies and not others in particular locales, another potential area for further thinking involves the interrogation of possible religious undertones that may underscore expressions of white nationalism