At a time when unabashed racists are elated at the possibility that the president-elect will take action to create the “white country” of their fantasies, and people who share their policy views but have no hate group affiliation are being empowered, the current battle of words is an important one. Fueling it is the risk that the wrong language choices could cloud Americans’ understanding of what’s actually happening. Complicating things is the sobering reality that the threats nonwhite people face don’t change depending on what we call the people responsible for them. [...]
But there was a twist: Bannon insisted he was not a white nationalist but rather an “economic nationalist.” Trump went even further, telling the New York Times that Bannon was neither racist nor “alt-right.”
Another tug of war over labels followed when Spencer made it known that he wasn’t fond of the terms “racist,” “Nazi,” and “white supremacist” being applied to him. Instead, Spencer, who led the “Hail Trump!” Nazi salute and heads a group that promotes “America for white people,” told the Washington Post he prefers to be called an “identitarian” — a reference to a movement that has more momentum in Europe but all the same associations with racism and xenophobia. [...]
Bjork-James’s concern about the term “alt-right” is based on similar thinking: It creates the risk that more white people may become radicalized by the group. “If we help to normalize these ideas as just part of the political spectrum, then it can make it seem less radical than they are and less connected to racial violence — because if people espouse racist ideas and racial rhetoric, there’s always some kind of a correlation to racist violence,” she said. “And if we don’t describe them for what they are, we’re kind of giving other white people a path to think these are legitimate ideas and a chance that more white people will become radicalized in adopting these ideas.” [...]
The New York Times’s Amanda Taub pointed out a similar distinction, explaining that what makes the alt-right different from white nationalism is that many of its members’ first priorities and entrees into the group aren’t related to race. “The alt-right is ideologically broader than white nationalism — it also includes neoreactionaries, monarchists, and meme-loving internet trolls,” she wrote.
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