The Intersectionality of Hate
“The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
These are not the words of the teenager who walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday to hunt down Black Americans, although they might as well be. These are the words of Tom Buchanan, a rich, repugnant character in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby.
Shortly before the massacre in Buffalo, authorities say, the shooter published a 180-page document that is an unpleasant mixture of the disconcertingly new and the horribly familiar. Underneath the superficial novelty of the suspect’s alleged actions (livestreaming the atrocity on Twitch, publishing the manifesto on Google Docs) and his vocabulary (his complaint about buying a “cucked” assault rifle that he had to modify, for example) is a sprawling, discredited ideology that was once entertained by respectable people and has now crept back toward the mainstream.
[Graeme Wood: Why Tucker Carlson should want the Buffalo manifesto made public]
The manifesto—which motivated ’s Buchanan—and the anti-Semitism that so often accompanied it. The document contains pages of memes about Jewish control of the world, plus scientific-looking scattergraphs of IQs broken down by racial group. Call this the intersectionality of hate: Just as academics have pointed out that marginalized identities (race, class, sex, disability) can overlap and reinforce one another, so too can old hatreds. Far-right movements are flexible about identifying the “other” from which their adherents are supposedly under threat. Many fascists see liberated women as a symbol of social decadence and decline. The KKK also targeted Jews. That an anti-Black racist like the Buffalo shooter would also be in thrall to anti-Semitic tropes might seem surprising, but intersectional hate is a totalizing ideology. Every new talking point is woven into the same tapestry, in which white men are at the center, protecting “their” women, and everyone else is at the margins.
