Implicit Whiteness in Scott Brown’s campaign

The day before the election I happened to catch Keith Olbmermann at his smirking best — looking intensely into the camera and declaring that Scott Brown and all the people voting for him are racists. What’s the evidence for this? You see, Brown used a pick-up truck in his commercials. (Gasp!!) You know, pick-up trucks are pretty much the same as men in pointy hoods burning crosses. Next thing you know, candidates will seek endorsements from country music singers and NASCAR drivers.

What’s going on here, of course, is implicit Whiteness — implicit whiteness of a certain sort, that basically says “I, Scott Brown, am the candidate of the White working class.”

As I noted previously, the enraged Whites who are expressing themselves in the tax revolts and town hall meetings of 2009 are middle- and lower-middle class. These people are less able to avoid the costs of multiculturalism: They can’t move to gated communities or send their children to all-White private schools. Their unions have been destroyed and their jobs either shipped overseas or performed by recent immigrants, legal and illegal.They are very angry — but they can’t discuss the real reason they are angry: mass immigration and the dispossession of people like themselves and their culture.

Unfortunately, there were no exit polls for this election. It would be fascinating to see the racial breakdown. In the 2008 presidential election, 80% of the electorate in Massachusetts was White. Working class Whites voted overwhelmingly for Obama: 75% for incomes between $30-50K; 65% for incomes betwen $50-75K.

Obviously, that did not happen this time around. Although it’s still a long shot, we can hope that eventually candidates will be able to explicitly assert the legitimacy of White identity and White interests.