The Imaginary Sons of Sweyn Forkbeard

 

With a name like “Before We Were White”, it is to be expected that this blog and podcast gets noticed by “white” supremacists and “white” Christian nationalist ideologues.

Once they discern the true nature of the project (perhaps feeling they have been sneakily lured into some progressive honeytrap) they tend to offer some parting shots before they swiftly exit.

I often find myself conflicted when trying to decide whether the people commenting from this ideological position should be ignored, muted, or simply blocked.

Ignoring no longer seems to be an option, when so many of the MAGA persuasion are now open apologists for “White Christian Nationalism”.

From Project 2025, to the quasi-fascist, Opus Dei inflected conservative Catholicism of J. D. Vance and two-thirds of the US Supreme Court, we are becoming encircled by a cultural movement which perceives Christianity not as a set of moral principles, but as a symbol for a fetishized and largely imaginary past which can be used to indoctrinate the present.

The childish or undeveloped mind tends to view the world through a Manichean lens, in which all is light or dark, good or evil, truth or lies, man or woman, strength or weakness, win or lose, black or white…

People who frame the world in such terms are attracted to historical narratives and epic tales of cataclysmic conflicts ending in dominance and submission.

Every aspect of the self-identity of such people is coded to align with dominance or superiority.

“Christianity” must equal “God’s dominion”. “His” trampling of non-believers under “His” feet.

“Nation” must equal “earthly dominion”.  The richest country.  The most powerful military.

“White” must equal “racial” superiority.  “Whites” must be seen as civilizationally more advanced and innately more intelligent than other “races”.

This is a mindset which loves clear hierarchies in terms of social position and gender roles.

The European Middle Ages represent a Golden Era in the minds of such people.

The “white”, northern European Christian warlord crusader stands thus as the ultimate symbol of empowered masculinity.

The right gender.

The right “race”.

The right religion.

The right social structure.

Hierarchical, authoritarian, “white” male dominance.

*****

Look closely at many members of the police and armed forces in the USA.

Look at various militia and “patriot” groups.

Look at “politicians” like Pete Hegseth.

Nordic runes and other Nordic/Germanic/Crusader symbols are everywhere.

Of course many will deny that such iconography and symbolism automatically relates to “white” supremacy or any other sketchy ideology.

Maybe people who use physical force on other human beings as part of their job description simply like to identify with what they perceive as the ultimate “warrior cultures”?

Even if this were true in the majority of cases (which this writer doubts based on his own time in the army), it is still clearly associated with an equally creepy need to assert “white pride”.

At this point, I can imagine one of these men asking “And what’s wrong with ‘white pride’?  Aren’t Black people always talking-up ‘Black pride’?”.

That question has been put to me so many times over the past decades, that I probably have scar tissue on the brain from replying.

White is not an ethnicity.

Black is not an ethnicity.

Those are skin colors, and extremely broad indicators of vast population groups spanning continents.

Black people have felt the need to assert pride in their skin color (not their ethnicity!) because for centuries, people of light skin have told them their blackness was a mark of inferiority.

No one of broadly European ancestry was ever systematically enslaved, belittled, or degraded due to their “whiteness”.

“White” people were sometimes enslaved as war captives.

“White” people were sometimes enslaved as “infidel Christians” by Muslim Arabs.

“White” people were transported to colonies as involuntary indentured servants.  Not for being “white”, but for being Scottish or Irish.

So putting it bluntly, to claim “white pride” is a bit ridiculous.

You may as well get tattoos proclaiming your deep pride in having a long nose.

“White” isn’t an ethnicity.  Red hair and freckles isn’t an ethnicity.

Even the terms “German”, “Saxon”, or “Viking” do not denote actual ethnic groups.

*****

It is beyond laughable that anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America would use iconography associated with medieval Germanic Europe as part of their “identity” or cultural inheritance.

Scandinavian runes, Viking imagery, tattoos of St. George crosses or pathetic muscle-bound weightlifter-inflected fantasy artwork depicting Frankish crusaders, Saxon warlords, and Norman knights have precisely nothing to do with the centuries-long intermixing of hundreds of ethnicities in America.

Unless of course the intent is to equivalate Manifest Destiny with Crusader violence?

The National Socialists (Nazis) of 1920s and 1930s Germany loved this sort of thing, with composers like Richard Wagner being much admired for offering an artistic pseudo-history of ancient Germania and Scandinavia peopled by “pure”, but utterly imaginary ancient folk heroes.

Explaining the difference between the fake concept of “race”, and population groups, nationality, ethnicity, tribalism, and culture is so complicated that I started a blog and podcast.

In order to claim an “ethnicity”, surely a person should be able to demonstrate one or more things:

– immersion within a specific ethnic community’s culture, or (at the very least),

– a majority of ancestors from that claimed ethnic group

THIS WILL ALMOST NEVER BE POSSIBLE FOR LONG-TIME AMERICANS, BECAUSE THEY ARE A PROFOUNDLY MIXED PEOPLE.

I’ve shared a table below showing the number of ancestors all of us have, as we travel back through the generations.

 

Can any American seriously claim that half, or even a quarter, of their 8,192 eleventh great-grandparents came from one single culture or ethnic community?

“Before We Were White” offers this public challenge to any self-identified American “White Christian Nationalist” who believes they are ethnically or “racially” pure:

If at least half of your family has been in America since colonial times (pre-Revolution), prove that none of those ancestors were people of color.

You will not be able to do it.

You’re not who you wish you were.

And you’re certainly not primarily – or even a meaningful fraction – Norse or Norman or Saxon by descent.

You’re an American with serious masculinity, educational and cultural issues.

 

*****

Even if a person could demonstrate that ALL of their ancestors came from Central or Northern Europe, this still would not mean that they are in any sense “racially pure”.

Since so many “white pride” Americans seem quite taken with Frankish and Norman imagery, let’s take a brief look at the French people to explain why these particular Americans are, well, so ill-informed…

What is a French person?

The largest “ethnic group” in the modern state of France is the group of people who speak the Central/Northern dialect of a language which only came into being over the course of many centuries – through migration, invasion, and immigration.

The oldest attested ethnic group in France were the Gauls, who spoke a Celtic language. The conquering of Gaul by the Romans under Julius Caesar in 50 BCE saw the development of a Gallo-Roman society over the subsequent four centuries.

In other words, the Romans settled their new frontier with people from all over the Roman Empire, which stretched from the Middle East to NW Europe to North Africa at the time.

It is worth mentioning here that Iraqi soldiers in the Roman army were scribbling graffiti on walls in Scotland nearly 2,000 years ago, and the Mediterranean city of Marseille (Massalia) had been founded by Greek traders 600 years before the time of Julius Caesar.

In what would only be called “France” many centuries later, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire during the 5th century CE saw a massive inward migration of Germanic tribes from the east such as the Burgundians, Franks, Suebi, and Visigoths – with a late influx of Vikings during the Middle Ages.

Before the age of the printing press began to unify it linguistically, France was a patchwork of ethnic groups speaking innumerable languages, dialects, and mixed sub-dialects. Evidence of this can be seen in the many languages and regional dialects still spoken today:

Alsatian (Alemannic) [Germanic]

Auvergnat (Occitan) [Romance]

Basque (Palaeo-European) [no known linguistic relatives]

Breton (Brittonic) [insular P-Celtic]

Catalan [Western Romance]

Corsican (Italo-Dalmatian) [Romance]

Franco-Provencal [Romance]

French Flemish (Dutch dialect) [Germanic]

French (official langues d’oïl) [Romance]

Gascon (Occitan) [Romance]

Lorraine Franconian (West Central German) [Germanic]

Norman (langues d’oïl) [Romance]

Occitan (langues d’oc) [Romance]

Picard (langues d’oïl) [Romance]

Poitevin-Saintongeais (langues d’oïl) [Romance] one of the main groups ancestral to Acadians/Louisiana Cajuns

Because the majority of the “French” Huguenots (French Protestants) who ended-up in North America were from the south and southwestern parts of France, this means many of them almost certainly spoke a language other than “Standard French”.

All of this perfectly encapsulates why ethnic or “racial” purity was an illusion long, long before the concept began to take root in places like Anglo-America.

A “French Huguenot” arriving in Virginia colony during the 1600s might be lighter-skinned than most Africans, but nonetheless might be a mixture of genes from anywhere across the Northern European, Eastern European, and Mediterranean world – including the Roman Middle East and North Africa.

 

When people used the words “England” or “France” during the 1600s and 1700s, they were describing a POLITICAL identity which was only PARTLY related to the ethnic or cultural identities on the ground at the time.

 

*****

Those who still insist on romanticizing the Vikings would do well to read books like “The Viking Way” by Professor Neil Price.

The nature of Scandinavian magic and religious practice during the Middle Ages is far too gruesome and depraved to include here in detail.

Widow and child sacrifice, ritual gang rape of slaves, infanticide of mostly females (leading to a male-skewed population and all the problems which come with that)…

To those inclined to say we should not measure past societies by today’s standards?

Fair enough.

But when even contemporary Arab travellers among the Vikings were utterly horrified by the things they saw in a society undergoing Christianization at the time, it might be worth wondering why…

White Christian Islamophobes who believe themselves the inheritors of a “white” Northern European medieval “bloodline” (and pathetically fetishize it) would do well to remember that during a time of savagery and yes, depravity, in the far north of Europe, the caliphates in Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) were the main center of science and learning in wider Europe at the time.

And “White” Christian nationalists who see themselves as the inheritors of the slightly later Frankish Christian crusader class and culture – a culture which would later give its name to France?

“White” Christian US nationalists are living in cuckoo land.

Frankish warlords who formed the basis of later central European royalty are almost never the class of people whose descendants ended-up on ships to America.

The origins of far, far many more Americans are to be found among various peasants, religious extremists, indentured servants, kidnapped street urchins, mixed-ethnic coastal and river smugglers and pirates, ruthless speculators, and transported criminals (including beggars, vagrants, and prostitutes).

And almost all of these mostly underclass people intermixed at some stage with African and Indigenous American peoples, not to mention Jews, Romani Gypsies, South Asians, and a hundred other ethnic groups never mentioned under America’s racial caste categories…

The USA could have done what every other place in the world has done at one time or another.

It could have truly embraced its own special mix of people who have come together to form a brand new “ethnicity in the making”.

But no. The artificial constructs of “race” and “racial castes” are so powerful that instead of accepting who they truly are, many Americans choose to continue constructing fake identities, harking back to fake ancestry and fake history.

White supremacy is not only wicked.

It’s downright ill-informed and stupid.