Not All White Supremacists Are White

On race and the CBP agents who shot Alex Pretti

Yesterday ProPublica reported that it had uncovered the identities of the Border Patrol agents who shot and murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last month. Jesus Ochoa, 43, and Raymundo Gutierrez, 35, have both worked for Customs and Border Patrol for years; both are from South Texas. And both, based on their names, appear to have Hispanic heritage.

That last fact has led to some comment on social media. Trump has made it very clear over the last decade that he loathes Latinos—whether their families come from Mexico, Puerto Rico, South America, or anywhere else. ICE enforcement has been harassing, and kidnapping people with brown skin; Latino men have been a prime target. Journalist Radley Balko, a journalist who focuses on civil liberties and policing, wrote “Depressing that the agents who shot and killed a pro-immigrant protester are named Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez.”

It is depressing. And (as I’m sure Balko knows) part of the reason it’s depressing is that it’s not especially unusual. Race is a social construct, not a biological truth. That means that societies and individuals both have room to negotiate who gets oppressed on the basis of race and who gets to be the oppressor. This flexibility is a big part of why white supremacy has remained a powerful force over time even as demographics have shifted and “white people” have become a smaller and smaller portion of the population. Ochoa and Garcia are only the latest in a long line of people who have pledged themselves to white supremacy without being white—or who have become white(r) in part by pledging themselves to white supremacy.

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The price of the ticket

In more than one essay, James Baldwin discusses the process by which waves of European immigrants to the US ceased to be Greeks, or Italians, or Norwegians, or Russians, or Irish, and became white. Baldwin refers to this as “the price of the ticket”—you forswear your history and heritage, including often the experience of discrimination, and in return you get to be a white American defined not by your past, but by your (supposed) superiority to and (very real) power over Black people.

That superiority and power could be expressed and demonstrated in a variety of ways. Baldwin has several essays where he discusses the fact that the face of white supremacy in Black neighborhoods was often Jewish people, who acted as agents of landlords for the actual (generally Christian) people who owned run down and lucrative properties.

An even more telling example is that of the Irish. Waves of Irish immigrants came to America in the mid-1800s following brutal famines in their home country caused by a potato blight and by English refusal to provide aid.

The English view of the Irish was powerfully racialized—images of Irish people as ape-like strongly evoke anti-Black iconography. That prejudice transferred to the Americas. Discrimination made it difficult for Irish people to get jobs, which meant that they often took up crime and sex work, which contributed to stereotypes of them as degenerate, criminal, and racially inferior. Irish were targeted by police and by Protestant groups—like firefighters—in violent riots.

Eventually, though, growing Irish populations in urban centers began to gain significant political power. They used that power to get patronage jobs in police departments, which the Irish eventually came to dominate in many cities. Where police departments in the mid 1800s were tasked with harassing and terrorizing Irish people, now Irish people, as police, often led harassment and terrorizing of Black people—as when Thomas Shea shot and killed 10-year-old Clifford Glover in New York. Shea was acquitted—as most white cops were acquitted in the murder of Black people, since brutalizing Black people was their job.

The increasing whiteness of the Irish allowed them to become police; at the same time, by becoming police and targeting Black people, the Irish solidified and demonstrated their whiteness. Now it seems obvious that Irish people are white, but in fact Irish whiteness isn’t an existential truth. It’s a process, a negotiation, and to some degree a choice.

Everyone gets a ticket

Baldwin’s discussion of the price of the ticket mostly focuses on ethnic Europeans whose skin tone is fairly light (though not necessarily that light, since this includes Greeks and Italians.) Over time, though, it’s become clear that other people from other places can also make bargains with whiteness of various sorts.

Sociologist James Loewen’s book The Mississippi Chinese, for example, explains how Chinese immigrants to Mississippi in the 40s, 50s, and 60s became small storekeepers in Black areas—occupying much the same niche that Jews often did in northern cities. Chinese people had greater access to capital than Black people; they also didn’t have the same pressure to avoid contact with Black people in non-hierarchical situations. The Chinese immigrants in Mississippi, like Jewish people in Baldwin’s Harlem, were not necessarily seen as white. But they could take advantage of economic opportunities based on being at least sort of whiteish in some situations.

Or as another example, Arab-Americans in the early 1900s were in many ways in a similar position to white ethnics in the 1800s. They faced some discrimination, and weren’t seen as exactly white, but they often had opportunities to become more white over time.

Or they did until the late 1990s, when the US increasingly began to define its national identity through Islamophobia and anti-Muslim and anti-Arab animus. Today most Arab-Americans are in many respects less white than Arab-Americans were in the 1960s—not because anyone’s skin tone changed, but because conceptions of whiteness did.

The (extremely diverse) Hispanic population in the US has also faced a range of choices and shifting constraints in relation to whiteness. Latinos in many respects are treated as non-white; for example, they are criminalized (like the Irish before them), and their levels of incarceration are (not surprisingly in Trump’s America) on the rise. On the other hand, Cuban-Americans have been embraced by the anti communist, white identity Republican party. As a result politicians like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have been treated in more or less the same way as Irish-American politicians; their ethnicity is more or less recognized, but isn’t necessarily viewed as moving them outside whiteness.

The price of whiteness in South Texas

And then there’s South Texas. Many of the people in the Hispanic communities on the Mexican border come from families that have lived there before there was a United States; the US migrated over them, they didn’t immigrate to the US. Yet, they are still often seen as non-white, and/or as outsiders.

As the Irish showed, one way to make yourself more white is to distance yourself from non-white people. The Irish became cops—and some people in South Texas have responded to Trumpism by embracing harsher penalties for immigrants and identifying themselves with the more and more openly white supremacist party.

“I liked that he said he was going to be stricter with the influx of immigrants,” one South Texan told the Guardian after listening to Trump’s early speeches in 2015. “He got me thinking, my country first. I am American. Sure I have Hispanic blood, but I am red, white and blue American.” Trump said that identifying with immigrants made you unAmerican and non-white; one appealing response for people whose whiteness was in question was to turn on immigrants to firm up their own status.

Obviously I can’t say for sure that Jesus Ochoa and Raymundo Gutierrez embraced Trumpism and anti-immigrant terror as a way to protect, and project, their own whiteness. But intentionality isn’t really that important. The fact is that Ochoa and Gutierrez are among those people who CBP might target—but they were not targeted, in part because (like those Irish cops) they chose to become those doing the targeting.

Whiteness and non-whiteness are imposed upon people. But people sometimes have options as to how they respond to that imposition. In South Texas, a fair number of people chose to stand with the cops. (Though some already regret that.)

Not everyone buys it

As Balko says, the fact that some people (Ochoa, Gutierrez, Clarence Thomas, Jonathan Greenblatt) respond to oppression by trying to join the oppressors is disheartening, to say the least. But it’s also important to remember that, just as people can choose whiteness, they can also choose to oppose whiteness.

Alex Pretti, as just one example, is a white man who defied a fascist gestapo to try to aid his neighbors and defend multiracial democracy. Lots of people in Minneapolis, with a range of relationships to whiteness, have made that same choice at significant risk to themselves. In doing so, they have marked themselves in many respects as non-white in the eyes of the gendarmes, which is why they are being tear-gassed, brutalized, kidnapped, and murdered.

It may seem confused or confusing to say that two non-white men enforced white supremacy by murdering a white person. But whiteness itself is confused and confusing. It’s not an existential truth; it’s a way to organize violence, hierarchy, and hate. Many people, with a wide range of skin colors and backgrounds, have embraced whiteness at one time or another. But many people have also chosen not to do so. I think right now that in the US the latter outnumber the former. That’s reason for hope if anything is.