Here’s a suggestion: If you’re a white Trump fundraiser whose last name is “White” and you’re hawking the idea of seceding the richest, whitest neighborhood from America’s Blackest city, retweeting white supremacists ain’t the best way to help your cause.
Bill White, the GOP consultant who wants to create a standalone city out of Atlanta’s affluent Buckhead community is finding that out. On New Year’s Day, he retweeted then deleted a post originally from the website VDARE which suggested that violent crime in Atlanta and other cities is caused by the fact that the city is majority Black.
Local news orgs caught a screenshot before White could hide his hand:
The tweet wasn’t just problematic; it helps uncover the real intention behind White’s Buckhead City movement.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution describes the VDARE site this way:
VDARE is an anti-immigration website founded in 1999 that routinely engages in white identity politics and has published the work of white supremacists and anti-Semites.
The site is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first white person born in a European colony in North America. Although little is known about her, Virginia Dare has been used as a symbol of white purity for generations of bigots.
Peter Brimelow, the founder of the site, has denied that VDARE is a white nationalist publication, although he has hosted content written by white nationalists and he has appeared in conferences alongside figures such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor who espouse the creation of a white ethnostate.
Brimelow, himself, has claimed America cannot withstand a future where the country is not explicitly white.
White apologized for the retweet, telling the AJC he regretted it and “simply retweeted something too fast.” But how long does it take to figure out that a racist tweet is racist? Googling “VDARE” turned up 1.65 million results in 0.35 seconds, including a Wikipedia page that describes it as “associated with white supremacy, white nationalism Neo-Nazism and the alt-right,” and stories from the NY Times, Washington Post, Vox and the Southern Policy Law Center that call it out for racist and anti-Semitic extremism.
Since, it’s impossible White didn’t have time for a quick Google or couldn’t have known what VDARE is, we know he was dog-whistling. He’s not alone; even the Black Dems who ran for mayor in ATL opposed Buckhead cityhood but used “crime in Atlanta” as a go-to talking point. The messaging around Buckhead cityhood has always been that secession is necessary because Atlanta can’t control crime, even though Atlanta Police Department data shows that the zone that includes Buckhead has less violent crime than any other part of the city.
So what’s the ‘black folks bring crime’ schtick really a cover for? Securing the bag is a safe answer.
An infographic from the AJC spells out that a new Buckhead city would be 88 percent white, compared with Atlanta’s current 38 percent, while taking 41 percent Atlanta’s total assessed property values with it.