Group Behind White Genocide Billboards Tries To Explain Its Actions

By 2050, experts predict the United States will be a majority-minority country, a rainbow nation. Most of the rainbow, however, will still be white. According to Pew Research, by 2050 “non-Hispanic whites, who made up 67 percent of the population in 2005 will be 47 percent in 2050.” Hispanics will go from 14 percent to 29 percent, blacks will hold steady at about 13 percent by the time 2050 and Asians will go from 5 percent to 9 percent.

Somehow some people see those numbers and cry “white genocide."

After the latest racially charged, anti-diversity billboard was installed along an Alabama highway—and then taken down five days later on Jan. 14—Hatewatch reached out to the White Genocide Project (WGP), the people claiming responsibility for the sign.

On the eve of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday, someone calling him/herself “Steve Goode” responded by email to an interview request and explained his reasons for the billboard.

“We started the site because we wanted to voice our concern about the trends towards a White minority across dozens of White majority countries,” Goode wrote. “If trends towards a White minority status were isolated to just one or two countries, we would be less inclined to believe it was about getting rid of White people as a race.”

Goode said the group was started in January 2013, and the way he described its operations, WGP sounds like it may have well adopted the “leaderless resistance” approach made popular by Louis Beam, an iconic figure of the radical right who helped guide the white supremacist movement into the computer age.

“In our movement there are no bosses telling employees what they should do,” Goode wrote. “Much of our activity is by individuals who agree with us and want to help spread the message in their own way. In other words, everyone is their own boss.”

Goode said the members of the group are anonymous out of fear of being fired or beaten up, “because many bad things can come of publicly being pro-White.”

“Several people have written to me that they support us,” Goode said, “but say they are afraid of what will happen to them if they go public.”

It is a bizarre position for something that is so glaringly public.

On Jan. 9, the small city of Springville, Al., about a 30-minute drive from Birmingham, discovered a new and unsettling billboard along I-59. It read, “Diversity Means Chasing Down The Last White Person.” Goode said the phrase was first featured in a blog post on Bob Whitaker’s site devoted to “fighting white genocide.” Whether Whitaker came up with it or someone else, Goode said he did not know.

Whitaker, a longtime segregationist, is the author of a piece called “The Mantra,” which includes the phrase “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white” and has become a touchstone for nearly all manner of white supremacist.

The phrase has appeared on several billboards across the country; it has been written on sheets hung from highway overpasses; for a time it even appeared on white supremacist Craig Cobb’s house in Leith, N.D. The phrase also was used on a billboard recently near Leeds, Al., before the sign was taken down after a few weeks of considerable protest and pressure from city officials. Goode said his group of online segregationists had nothing to do with that billboard.

The owners of the billboard personally took it down and refunded the money, several thousand dollars. The owners told a television station from Birmingham that they were not racist and had been bombarded with angry telephone calls, including some threats.

“We have no plans for any projects like this at the moment,” Goode wrote in a separate email, “but we will offer our support to any people who agree with us and want to spread our message.”

In The New York Times on Martin Luther King Jr. Day yesterday, Jelani Cobb, an associate professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut, wrote about how the “growing fears of struggling whites” could impede civil rights advances.

“A democracy in which the traditionally empowered class is outnumbered is traditionally a less liberal place, not more…” he wrote, adding. “…It’s no coincidence that the super-heated opposition to immigration reform coincides with the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, and with public opinion polls in which a substantial number of whites say they believe they are the primary victims of racism in the United States. If anything, demographic trends will intensify these dynamics.”