How People of Color Can Be Pawns for White Power

There’s nothing surprising about the Allen, Texas, shooter’s Latino roots.

Mother Jones; LM Otero/AP; Wikimedia

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Being white is extremely alluring to a certain kind of not white person. I realized this when a relative once proudly told me that Persian people, of which half of my family is, were technically among the first Aryans. Persians, they explained, literally come from the Indo-Iranians or Aryan people that came out of the Hindu Kush mountains. The empire changed its name in 1935 from Persia to Iran, which translates to “land of Aryans” in the Persian language. 

This was news to me. As a secular, mixed-race family in the wake of 9/11, we slid by the worst discrimination that Middle Eastern people and Muslims in particular endured from both government and the public. But not all of it. We, including that relative, had no illusions about not being white. But what this person wanted was to join the club on some technicality, and to enjoy the freedoms that come with being among the hegemonic identity whose interests society is designed around. 

When outlets including Bellingcat started reporting on the Allen shooter’s seeming neo-Nazi beliefs, this confounded some people. How could a Latino man or any person of color be a white supremacist? We don’t have the full picture yet of who this man was and why he shot his victims, but what we know indicates that some part of it was probably rooted in a more extreme version of the thought that went through my relative’s head: being white is not a bad deal. 

White people are often considered more employable, are more likely to receive promotions, dominate the most prestigious industries, have a larger share of wealth, are often more sought after in the dating pool, and so on and so on. Most minorities don’t want to be white, but they do want a larger share of the privileges the mainstream white world enjoys. 

A lot of people from minority communities engage in this striving, famously on the far right. Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys who also has links to further right and neo-Nazi groups, is Hispanic. White nationalist Nick Fuentes is a quarter Mexican. Long after his grandfather’s entrance to the US, he describes his family as successfully assimilated, which he has said makes him white. The extraordinarily racist far-right provocateur Laura Loomer is very open about being Jewish while maintaining a public relationship with Fuentes, who has denied the Holocaust. 

Even outside the furthest right reaches of American politics, you can find all sorts of members of different races, white or not, being racist to all sorts of other races. There is not necessarily a cross-racial camaraderie in the idea of being a “person of color.”

When you combine this with the fact that people’s conceptions of their own race also run the gamut, it increases the probability for seemingly bizarre outcomes like Hispanic and Latino white supremacists. This week, the Washington Post‘s Phillip Bump noted a 1989 study that found that Hispanic people identify as a range of races no matter their observed skin color. Even among the darkest-skinned Hispanics, over a quarter self-identified as white. If someone wants to be white badly enough, there’s nothing stopping them from thinking that they are. In fact, certain kinds of people are incentivized to do so. 

Tanya K. Hernández, a Fordham University law professor and author of the book “Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias” used a question to explain as much to the Boston Globe in 2022: “What’s the best way to distance yourself from feeling like you’re part of an oppressed group? It’s to align yourself with those who are part of the oppressors.”

These sorts of seeming contradictions are often encouraged by white supremacists. For as much as Nick Fuentes refers to minorities in slur-laden derogatory terms, he also welcomes them into his flock to serve as useful cover. The function of his movement and other white power projects are often to not bring harm to individual people of color—at least immediately—but to make entire populations suffer. At the expense of tolerating a few individual people of color, far-right groups gain chips that they can use to launder their reputations. 

In Charles Manson’s white power vision, he explicitly saw Black people as unwitting tools that would help him carry out his project. Manson’s Helter Skelter prophecy was a fantastic delusion, where Black people would get fed up with racism from whites, carry out a race war, and defeat them. Manson’s plan was to have his cult lay in hiding until the Black people had won, and then come out and rule over them, per what he believed to be the natural order.

More organized and serious white power groups may have less absurd, surreal visions for the white ethnostates they envision, but still see minorities like the Allen shooter as tools they can use to help them get there. And people like him are willing to do it, in the hope of somehow earning whiteness.  

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate