In
lithos' diary published on Sunday, I posted a
comment and rec'd my first-ever troll-rating. Since I also rec'd 48 positive recs for the same comment, I was taken aback, wondering what I'd written to so inflame the troll-rater. While someone was quick to suggest that it may have been an error of haste (wherein s/he had moved on too quickly), Cecrops Tangaroa suggested that my nickname may have spawned the troll-rating:
There's a notorious white-supremacist group called VDARE, after Virginia Dare, and someone might have thought you were plugging them.
My response:
'YIKES! - NO WAY!'
My nickname: a) I live in Virginia, and b) dare is a contraction of my real first name and sums up how I am bound to live out my convictions - always 'daring' to speak truth to power. I wasn't even aware of this group.
So, yeah, I feel really stupid to NOT have known about this nasty group. Forgive me for being ill-read (snark) about hate groups. But now I'm in need of your advice: Should I change my user ID? Or is it time to liberate Virginia Dare?
From Wikipedia's entry on our namesake:
Virginia Dare (August 18, 1587 - unknown) was the first child to be born in America of English parents on Roanoke Island in the Colony of Roanoke, now in North Carolina. ... Virginia Dare's life remains a mystery. Nine days after her birth, on 27 August 1587, her grandfather, Governor John White, left the colony for England, acting as Roanoke's agent in obtaining further aid and assistance for the colony. He arrived in England that November as the nation was about to go to war with Spain. It was not until August 1590 that White reached Roanoke with a relief expedition. It found no trace of the settlers--only the word "croatoan" carved on a post. The infant Virginia Dare had vanished along with all other Roanoke colonists. Some believe that the survivors of the "Lost Colony" were absorbed into the Croatoan tribe. Others believe that the colonists moved to another nearby island, although no trace was found. Archaeologists excavating a site on nearby Hatteras Island have uncovered an old gold ring believed to belong to an individual known in England as early as approximately 1520, so the theory that they were absorbed by the Croatoan Indians has gained some credence in recent years.
As a historian and Cherokee descendent, I've always been amused by the myth-making re: Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony. (Case in point: as a young man, Andy Griffith performed in the outdoor drama in Manteo, NC, that purports to portray this bit of history.) If indeed Virginia Dare and any other survivors were taken in by Natives, they quickly ceased to be 'white' by way of speedy cultural assimilation. To me, the real back-story is that poor Virginia and her fellow colonists would hardly have been the first or last to be rescued by Natives along the east coast; indeed many Spanish, Portugeuse, English, Nordic, English, French, and African mal-adventurers were willingly absorbed into indigenous communities if they were respectful and willing to try to live in harmony. The ugly downside to the back-story is that such survivors became 'ambassadors of death' in that they helped to spawn virulent epidemics of measles, smallpox, and other European maladies that cut through Native communties with appalling results.
So it is especially galling for me to see the name of our erstwhile heroine taken by those who would spurn this tradition of hospitality and reciprocity. I cannot bring myself to supply a link but, for the purposes of explication, let's go back to Wikipedia:
VDARE is an editorial collective website which advocates for reduced immigration, including heightened selectivity in legal immigration into the United States. VDARE was created by former Forbes editor Peter Brimelow through his Center for American Unity. The political viewpoints of the collective range from paleoconservatism to isolationism, and from immigration reduction to anti-immigration. VDARE is widely supported in the immigration-reduction movement through links and reprints of its articles. ...
Critics of VDARE charge that it publishes racist or racialist material. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization, claims that VDARE was "once a relatively mainstream anti-immigration page," but by 2003 had "become a meeting place for many on the radical right." The SPLC criticizes VDARE for publishing articles by Jared Taylor, head of American Renaissance, and the late Sam Francis, former editor of the newsletter of the Council of Conservative Citizens, both of whom the SPLC considers to be white supremacist. VDARE is also criticized by the SPLC for publishing articles by authors who deal with race and intelligence. The SPLC lists "VDARE/Center for American Unity" on a list of organizations it calls "hate groups."
VDARE claims to be neutral on all issues save immigration reduction. VDARE columnist James Fulford has responded to the SPLC's criticisms of racism and hate stating that they're unavoidable for immigration reformers due to that "the majority of Americans are white, and the majority of immigrants are non-white." ...
VDARE contributors have responded to charges of racism by pointing to that VDARE carries original articles by authors of a number of ethnic backgrounds, including Filipina American Michelle Malkin, Hispanic George Borjas, Native American David A. Yeagley, and Japanese American Lance T. Izumi.
Well, I reckon that VDare's founders and contributors would hardly be the first racists to adapt tokenism for their purposes, no? Heidi Beirich and Mark Potok of the SPLC offer further insight into the misuse of poor Virginia Dare:
Peter Brimelow in 1995 published the bestselling Alien Nation, a book that argued that America is historically white-dominated and should stay that way... [though] well reviewed in many places, it included strong veins of racism and xenophobia.
He described the role of race as "elemental, absolute, fundamental." He said that white Americans should demand that U.S. immigration quotas be changed to allow in mostly whites. He argued that spending tax dollars on anything related to multiculturalism was "subversive." He called foreign immigrants "weird aliens with dubious habits."
He worried repeatedly that his son, with his "blue eyes" and "blond hair," would grow up in an America in which whites had lost the majority.
At one point, he wrote that if one enters an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, just like entering the New York subways, "you find yourself in an underworld that is not just teeming but also almost entirely colored." ...
He [has also] said tax money spent to help blacks and the poor "has done little good and much ill."
In 1999, Brimelow started the Center for American Unity, where he remains president today. The center's most important project was a Web page called VDARE, named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World in 1587.
Brimelow has written that he once planned to bestow Dare's name on "the heroine of a projected fictional concluding chapter in Alien Nation, about the flight of the last white family in Los Angeles." He was, he said, "dissuaded."
So he was dissuaded from using her name for a fictional character but was willing to appropriate the name of one of America's earliest immigrants to launch an anti-immigration site. Seemed odd so I just had to find out. Brimelow explains on the VDare website (again, no links will I provide but since we're all googling fiends, do I really need to?):
Multiculturalists will be happy to know that there is always the possibility that the colonists survived, merging with the local Indians. There are fables that Virginia Dare as a young woman got involved in a love triangle with a warrior and an angry medicine man, who transformed her into a white doe. And there have been serious suggestions that The Lost Colony is the answer to the historical problem of the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, an English-speaking group of unclear origin.
Anthropologists call such groups "tri-racial isolates." Significant of the times, and perhaps of federal subsidies, the Lumbees seem recently to have been emphasizing their claim to pure Indian status.
So Virginia Dare could be symbolic of the coming racial nirvana that immigration enthusiasts are forced to start fantasizing about when you compel them to look at the statistical consequences of current policy.
Or perhaps not. The actress Heather Locklear (Melrose Place, etc.) is claimed as a prominent Lumbee. But if, through some miracle of genetic recombination, Virginia Dare is reborn in Ms. Locklear's beautiful face, John White might well have recognized her.
VDARE has come into existence because many great and developing issues of the day are no longer covered in the Establishment Media--whether liberal or "conservative."
However, you can sometimes see them naively reported in the local press. Thus Long Island's Southampton Press (Donna Giacontieri, Is Town Seal Offensive? September 24, 1999) has carried a story about a local version of the Virginia Dare phenomenon: the local "Anti-Bias Task Force" called on the town to abolish its seal, which depicts a Pilgrim and the words "First English settlement in the State of New York."
The grounds: it "features an offensive representation of one gender, one race and one historical period . . ."
"One historical period . . ."?
Yeah. It's called America.
Hmmm. Brimelow would have us believe that Heather Locklear's 'beautiful white face' demonstrates the superiority of Virginia Dare's genetic stock and the triumph of white(r) immigrants over miscegenation AND signals the rescue of 'whiteness' from the condescension of historians and policy-makers.
This is a crock of bull. Here's this historian's reply to Brimelow and his group:
Lesson # 1: America is that place where people ain't ever going to get white enough but they have a really ugly history of trying.
Lesson # 2: America is a two class, two caste society. Two classes: men and not-men. Two castes: people-of-color and the un-colored. Un-colored men rule but rarely easily. Our understanding of this lesson has the potential for violently disrupting any perceived notions of 'us' versus 'them.'
Lesson # 3: The American Revolution was not an event or even a series of events that ended in 1781. It is an ongoing process that won't be over until more fat Senators sing soprano and the Seminoles regain control of Florida.
And finally, Lesson # 4: A truer history of America can be located in the ongoing (and oh, so tiresome) struggle between white-winged patriarchy (Euro-American) and the communitarian ethos of 'metis' matriarchy (Indigenous). Not THE history, I know, but certainly a potential way of looking through the strangling triangle of race, class, and gender.
Bottom line, I want to shout f*** you to Brimelow but I'm loathe to abandon Virginia Dare to his malappropriation of her symbolic potential. So help me decide with the following poll and in your comments below.