The Meme Logics of Pro-White Racism Campaigns

The final speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference session is Mark Davis, whose focus is especially on the far-right ‘it’s okay to be white’ campaign. This originated on 4chan in the United States in 2017, but was endorsed in Australia also by Pauline Hanson, who asked the Senate to pass a motion endorsing it; it is preceded in its current form by Ku Klux Klan rhetoric and other far-right activism. On 4chan it first appeared in 2017.

From here, it turned into a hybrid online and offline campaign; it was endorsed by far-right celebrities including Milo Yiannopoulos, Mike Cernovich, and Lauren Southern. Southern wore a t-shirt with the slogan when arriving in Australia, and this caused outrage; Hanson responded to this outrage with her Senate motion. Overall, the campaign was professionally organised, mobilising anti-racist racism to promote white supremacism and derailing debates about racial disadvantage.

The strategies of this campaign are embedded in broader racial neoliberal arguments, but this has not yet been fully recognised by the research; the role of 4chan as the origin of the campaign is important to realise, and from there the campaign spread especially to Twitter (less so to other major social media platforms). 4chan, especially tracked the appearance of ‘it’s okay to be white’ posters as they popped up around the US, and congratulated itself for ‘triggering the liberals’; people even posted style guides for designing posters and other messaging, downloadable and printable sticker and poster templates, and rules for engaging with the campaign, in order to avoid the potential for the campaign to be connected to overtly racist messages.

This facilitated the national roll-out of a uniform campaign across the United States, which was very successful; the simplistic and restricted nature of the message was designed to generate pushback from liberals, which then produced an opening for far-right activists to exploit the apparent contradictions in such pushback. Message discipline meant that there was little opportunity for pointing to explicit and overt racism beyond the implicit message itself.

The campaign also generated some further adjacent social media posts, however, as well as pushback from opponents; such pushback was then itself positioned as further evidence of anti-white racism. Most media were circumspect in covering and framing the campaign; only Tucker Carlson at Fox News fully embraced and supported the campaign, unsurprisingly.

The campaign, then, can be understood as fitting into the overall paradigm of racial neoliberalism. This pushes the idea that white people are not to blame, and that affirmative action processes are themselves racist; similarly, this campaign engages in a kind of whiteness trolling that implicitly attacks claims of racism levelled against white people, and re-centres whiteness as a focus of victimisation by other racial groups. This also links with conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement myth. Anyone who reacts to such racist messaging is then in turn positioned as being unreasonably triggered by the campaign.

One of the aims of the campaign thus is to make race ridiculous; it shows the growing sophistication and professionalisation of far-right campaigning, and the way in which ‘fringe’ platforms are being used to orchestrate such campaigns. This poses a substantial challenge to anti-racism campaigns.