By Musa T. Bey

Introduction: The Myth of the “White Race”

The idea of a unified “white identity” is not a natural cultural formation. It is a historical lie. A political invention. A manufactured social construct born from conquest, colonialism, and capitalism—crafted to secure dominance, maintain hierarchy, and justify exploitation.

White identity politics, when stripped of its surface rhetoric of “pride” or “cultural heritage,” reveals itself for what it truly is: a defense mechanism for white supremacy, deployed in moments of social upheaval, demographic change, and challenges to racial capitalism.

While often disguised as a form of group self-expression or cultural preservation, white identity politics is rooted in fear, power, and historical violence. Its goal is not inclusion, but control. Not equity, but hegemony. And in the current political climate—rising fascism, white nationalist mobilization, and authoritarian drift—exposing this lie is more urgent than ever.

This article traces the origin, function, and danger of white identity politics as a tool of white supremacy. It calls for a materialist, decolonial, and revolutionary Black analysis that does not merely critique whiteness as culture but dismantles it as a political system of rule.

I. The Invention of Whiteness

1.1 Whiteness as a Ruling Class Project

The category of “white” did not exist in ancient societies. It emerged alongside European colonial expansion, the transatlantic slave trade, and the rise of capitalist economies. As colonizers carved up the globe, the invention of “white people” served as a unifying identity for European settlers, regardless of their class differences.

As Theodore W. Allen argued in The Invention of the White Race, whiteness was created in 17th-century Virginia as a ruling-class response to Black and white labor solidarity. After the Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676—where poor Black and white indentured workers rose together against the planter elite—laws were passed to elevate poor whites and permanently enslave Africans. Thus, white identity became a bribe, granting marginal privileges to European-descended workers in exchange for their loyalty to racial order.

Whiteness was never just a color. It was a political position created to divide the working class, protect the capitalist class, and justify anti-Black domination. From its inception, white identity has functioned not to liberate, but to oppress.

1.2 Whiteness and the Racial State

As settler colonial states developed—especially the United States—whiteness was codified into citizenship laws, land ownership rights, voting rights, and immigration policy. The Naturalization Act of 1790 declared only “free white persons” eligible for citizenship. The Homestead Act gave white settlers stolen Indigenous land. Jim Crow laws, redlining, and school segregation reinforced whiteness as spatial and institutional dominance.

In this context, white identity was not an ethnicity or culture, but a system of exclusion and structured advantage. It functioned to secure access to the state, monopolize wealth, and define the boundaries of national belonging.

This is why whiteness must be understood not as a “race,” but as a regime—one that depends on constant renewal, boundary policing, and mythmaking.

II. White Identity Politics: Myth of Victimhood, Weapon of Supremacy

2.1 From White Backlash to White Nationalism

White identity politics typically arises in periods of perceived loss—not actual oppression. Every major wave of white identity politics in U.S. history has been a backlash to the expansion of freedom for oppressed peoples:

Post-Civil War Reconstruction saw the rise of the KKK and Jim Crow to reassert white rule. The Civil Rights Movement gave rise to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” “law and order” politics, and mass incarceration. The election of the first Black president sparked the growth of the Tea Party and alt-right.

These movements did not emerge from poverty, but from threats to power. They represent the weaponization of white grievance and the illusion of loss—that white people are “losing their country,” “becoming a minority,” or “being replaced.”

This narrative flips reality on its head. It frames white people—historically the beneficiaries of systemic privilege—as victims, while Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities continue to bear the brunt of structural violence. It erases power, conceals history, and justifies reactionary politics.

2.2 Whiteness as Property

Legal scholar Cheryl Harris, in her foundational work Whiteness as Property, argued that whiteness functions as a form of possessive investment. Being white means access to legal rights, economic benefits, and institutional protection. When these entitlements are challenged—by affirmative action, immigration, or Black political power—white identity politics is activated as a defense.

This is not cultural pride. It is property defense. It is the desire to retain monopolies on wealth, housing, safety, education, and legitimacy—by any means necessary.

III. Liberal White Identity Politics: The Other Face of Supremacy

3.1 The Soft Power of White Innocence

Not all white identity politics is far-right or overtly racist. Liberal white identity also operates to center white emotions, protect white fragility, and maintain white comfort in spaces of anti-racist struggle.

This is the politics of:

“I don’t see color,” which denies systemic racism; “Not all white people,” which derails accountability; “White allyship,” when performative and self-centered.

These approaches often displace the center of struggle away from the oppressed and onto the feelings of white people. They create a culture where white guilt becomes more important than Black liberation, and where inclusion becomes a substitute for structural change.

Even “progressive” white identity politics, when left unchallenged, can act as a barrier to revolutionary transformation by reducing anti-racism to individualized behavior rather than collective power struggle.

IV. The Role of White Identity Politics in Maintaining Racial Capitalism

4.1 Divide and Rule: Class Collaboration and White Nationalism

White identity politics is not only racial—it is profoundly economic. It functions to recruit white workers into cross-class alliances with white elites against Black, Indigenous, and migrant workers.

Historically, the promise of racial privilege has been used to undercut labor solidarity and suppress multiracial rebellion. In return, white workers are given relative advantage, but are still exploited—just less viciously. They become junior partners in the capitalist empire, guarding the plantation even as they work it.

This is what Du Bois called the “wages of whiteness”: not only material advantages (like jobs, housing, policing), but psychological wages—the sense of being “better than” the other.

In moments of capitalist crisis, white identity politics offers an escape hatch: blame the Black poor, blame immigrants, blame women, blame trans people, but never blame capitalism itself.

4.2 Fascism and the Ethnicization of the State

White identity politics, when weaponized by the state, takes fascist form. It ethnicizes national belonging, defines who is “really American,” and escalates the criminalization of “others.” The state becomes not a neutral arbiter, but the guardian of the white nation.

This is the logic behind:

“Make America Great Again” (restore white dominance), Border walls and refugee bans (racialized nationalism), Curriculum bans on Black history (control of memory), Police repression of Black uprisings (defense of order).

In this sense, white identity politics becomes not just a discourse but a strategy of governance—a racialized authoritarianism designed to consolidate power and suppress dissent.

V. Revolutionary Struggle and the Necessity of Dismantling Whiteness

5.1 Whiteness Cannot Be Redeemed—It Must Be Abolished

A truly liberatory politics must confront whiteness not as an identity, but as a system. We are not interested in making whiteness “inclusive,” “anti-racist,” or “ethical.” We are interested in abolishing it—as a structure of domination and division.

This does not mean harming or excluding individuals who are racialized as white. It means organizing them to break allegiance with white supremacy, abandon the false promise of privilege, and join the struggle for liberation and justice.

Abolishing whiteness is a call to:

Disinvest from white power structures, Build cross-racial working-class solidarity, Embrace truth-telling and reparations, Dismantle the institutions that uphold racial hierarchy.

As Noel Ignatiev wrote, “Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity.”

5.2 Building a Revolutionary Multiracial Left

We must reject both the white liberal project of reform and the white nationalist project of revival. In their place, we must construct a revolutionary, multiracial, decolonial movement rooted in:

The leadership of the Black and Indigenous working class, The insights of revolutionary feminism and abolitionism, A commitment to internationalism and ecological justice, A strategy that targets racial capitalism at its core.

This is not colorblind. It is color-conscious. It understands that race is not just a social construct—it is a social relation, imposed by systems of domination and remade by systems of resistance.

Conclusion: The Struggle is Against the Lie

White identity politics is a lie—a lie crafted to protect empire, divide the masses, and reproduce racial capitalism. It is not a cultural truth but a political weapon. It has no innocent form. Its power lies in its ability to present itself as natural, neutral, or benign—when in fact it is an instrument of hierarchy, exclusion, and repression.

Our task is not to reform the lie or make it more inclusive. Our task is to destroy it. To name it. To study its mechanisms. To break its hold on the oppressed and confused. And to build the collective power needed to end the system that created it.

Revolution is not only about toppling regimes. It is about exposing myths. And perhaps the most dangerous myth of all is that whiteness is a legitimate identity, rather than what it has always been: a lie told in the service of domination.