“Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white,” the billboard alongside I-20 at Birmingham, Alabama. The message could not be clearer if it bore a picture of Adolf Hitler and the words “The Jews are our Misfortune” – the intention is to convince the audience that white people face an existential threat that must be countered.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), have identified the origins of the message in a 221-word Mantra written by white supremacist Robert Whitaker. The Mantra has inspired racial killings, including the 2011 deaths of 77 people in Norway.
The Mantra’s message — and the Alabama billboard — have been heavily promoted by Timothy Gallaher Murdock, who runs an online community for racists called White Rabbit Radio.
“The point of the message is when white people are called racist to give them something to say, something to say to defend themselves so they don’t just sit silently keep getting beaten over the head over and over again,” Murdock told WBRC on Monday. “You know everyone has come to the conclusion that racism is only in white countries, only in white people’s churches, houses and businesses, and white people are generally the only ones who face this charge generally on behalf of white anti-whites as well.”
In which case, why not have a billboard that says: “We’re all racists, let’s stop it and just love each other?”
Because this is nothing to do with pointing out the frailty of prejudice within all of us, but instead to hold on to the vestiges of structural racism that keeps African Americans and other non-white groups in poverty and out of power in large tracts of the country.
Birmingham, with it’s history of racial persecution towards African Americans, has some nerve putting up such a sign. This is a city that where KKK members were still lynching black people in the 1980′s, the home of the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing and Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor – and of course, the Freedom Riders.
Over the past year, similar billboards have also appeared in Knoxville and Arkansas.
The Mayor of nearby town Leeds has denounced the billboard.
“While this billboard is actually in Birmingham, the impression to passersby is that it is within our city limits,” Leeds Mayor David Miller said in a statement obtained by The Birmingham News. “The City of Leeds is a community with a long history of racial harmony, and wants to make it clear to all that it has no connection with this sign and categorically and unequivocally denounces the racist message portrayed on this billboard.”
Mayor Miller said he was seeking more information about who put up the billboard.
To get a better idea of the logical fallacies and persecution complex at the heart of this community of white supremacists, the video below is how White Rabbit Radio promotes the billboard’s message by putting it to a funky musical back track. Of course, where the logic of ‘Africa for Africans, Asia for Asians’ falls down, is that White European Americans are the immigrants to North America – they are not indigenous, and in fact it took a genocide of the Native American population to seize the country. By their own logic – these white supremacists should be packing themselves off back to Europe.
