NPR | The chairman of the hate group The Proud Boys identifies as Afro-Cuban. One of the organizers of the pro-Trump extremist group Stop the Steal is Black and Arab. Christina Beltran is a professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. And she uses the term multiracial whiteness to explain why some groups who are disdained by white supremacists embrace white power movements. And she joins us now to explain. Welcome to the program.
CRISTINA BELTRAN: Great. Thank you so much for having me.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what do you mean by multiracial whiteness?
BELTRAN: So there's been a whole lot of people thinking and theorizing about white supremacy. And all of these scholars share a view that I share, that whiteness is not the same thing as white people and that whiteness is actually better understood as a political project that has emerged historically, and that is dynamic and that is always changing. And so whiteness as an ideology is rooted in America's history of white supremacy - right? - which has to do with the legacy of slavery or Indigenous dispossession or Jim Crow. And I think it's important to realize just how long in this country legal discrimination was not simply culturally acceptable but legally authorized. And so we've only been practicing a more consistent form of legal equality for a relatively short time since the 1960s. So Americans have often learned how to create their own sense of belonging through violence and through the exclusion of certain groups and populations.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So what you're saying, essentially, is that people of other races and ethnicities want to benefit from white privilege by supporting it.
BELTRAN: Right.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: So we should note that you wrote an op-ed recently in The Washington Post about this, and it stirred up a heated debate on social media. (laughter).
BELTRAN: Yeah.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: I want to read what you wrote in part. (Reading) For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one's racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism.
Can you explain what you mean?
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