For many people, this idea triggered an immediate negative reaction: How could someone with the name “Mauricio Garcia” — a Hispanic name — be a white supremacist? In some quarters, that The Post was offering such a possibility was somehow demonstrative of this newspaper’s purported interest in elevating unsupported racial claims.
In reality, the idea that someone named Garcia might be sympathetic to white-supremacist views is unexpected but not inexplicable. The Post has previously explored the ways in which non-White Americans at times ally with extremists who would seem to be their natural enemies. But the point can be made succinctly by considering two things: “White” is not as hard and fast a racial category as many assume, and “white supremacy” is about power as much as it is about race.
‘White’ is often malleable
Particularly for most White people, “White” isn’t complicated. The racial identity is a mix of skin color and heritage and seems concrete. For most White people, in fact, “being white is having the choice of attending to or ignoring one’s own whiteness,” as Robert W. Terry wrote in 1981. “To be white in America is not to have to think about it.”
Terry’s quote was a useful framework as I was exploring America’s racial history and trends for my recent book “The Aftermath.” For those in the category of “White” as it is currently understood, the idea that “White” is hazily bounded seems ridiculous or opportunistic.
But there’s lots of evidence to the contrary. For example, the Census Bureau made a simple data-collection change between its 2010 and 2020 surveys, increasing the amount of volunteered racial information it processed from respondents. That helped contribute to a huge surge in the number of Americans who identify as “White and some other race” — in part because the country has gotten more diverse but in part simply because we’re doing a better job recording this data.
It’s useful to consider the history of being White in America. A century ago, immigrants from Italy and Greece were considered inferior to the majority-White population in the United States, even if they had white skin. As historian David Roediger wrote in his book “Colored White”: “When Greeks suffered as victims of an Omaha ‘race’ riot in 1909, and when eleven Italians died at the hands of lynchers in Louisiana in 1891, their less-than-white racial status mattered alongside their nationalities.”
Hispanic Americans often find themselves at the blurry edges of Whiteness. How Hispanic Americans are considered by others is often centered on skin color but also context: where and how that consideration is taking place. But self-identification is also complex. Pew Research Center found that Hispanic identity fades over time in the United States, for example.
In writing my book, I also came across a 2008 paper from Tanya Golash-Boza and William Darity that pointed to a useful experiment undertaken in 1989. Hispanic participants in the survey were asked to identify their race: White, Black or something else. At the same time, the person conducting the survey recorded their own observations about the respondents’ skin color.
The result, as seen in this chart from the book, was that even among the darkest-skinned respondents, identification as “White” was more common than identification as “Black.”
There are a lot of things that might explain such responses, but the broader point is clear: Racial identity and expected race often don’t align. Another experiment conducted by the Census Bureau found that neighbors of mixed-race Americans were often more likely to identify those Americans as Black or Hispanic than did the mixed-race people themselves.
All of this nuance about race, though, assumes that the “white supremacism” is perhaps exclusively about racial boundaries. But it often isn’t.
White supremacy is also about power
One of the most prominent adherents of white supremacy in the United States at the moment is the right-wing agitator Nick Fuentes. Former president Donald Trump earned days of negative press after Fuentes joined him and the musician Ye for dinner at Mar-a-Lago. The last name “Fuentes” is Hispanic, as is Fuentes’s family background.
Or consider the Proud Boys, headed by Enrique Tarrio, son of immigrants from Cuba. The group insists that its activism is not about race, but, instead, about “Western chauvinism.” That’s spin: If you are biased in favor of “the West,” whom are you biased against? When former Iowa congressman Steve King (R) said he was defending Western civilization, his explanation was usefully contextualized as being a shorthand for whiteness.
What Fuentes and Tarrio advocate is not that Hispanics should be subjugated to White Americans. Instead, it’s often about bolstering structures of power that largely benefit Whites. It’s also about dominance, of course, often manifested as antisemitism (as Fuentes embraces) or hostility to immigration. White supremacy is often rooted in personal insecurity.
People can be forgiven for finding the idea of a non-White white supremacist confusing. This confusion, though, stems from overly rigid understandings of both “White” and “white supremacist.”
We don’t yet know specifically what drove Garcia to gun down shoppers in Texas on Saturday. But we do know that it is not at all impossible for someone with a Hispanic name to embrace white-supremacist rhetoric.
