Posted on October 14, 2017

It’s Like an Army

Winston Taney, American Renaissance, October 14, 2017

In a recording that aired Tuesday at the Black Entertainment Television Hip-Hop Awards, Eminem blasted out a “freestyle” rap against Donald Trump and his deplorable supporters. In the rap — which has been widely praised by legacy media such as the New York Times, CNN, and Washington Post — Eminem expressed support for President Obama and the NFL protests, accused President Trump of being a racist fanatic, and called out Alt-Right torch-bearers for apparently “ignoring our past historical, deplorable factors.”

Had any other rapper made these accusations, there almost certainly would not be the same media attention. But this is not just any rapper.

This is Marshall “Eminem” Mathers, the blue-collar white guy from Warren, Michigan (not Detroit — more on that below). This is the rapper who shocked the nation almost 20 years ago by rapping directly to white America. As he put it in a song entitled “White America,” Eminem never dreamed “in a million years I’d see/So many mother**kin’ people, who feel like me/Who share the same views and the same exact beliefs/It’s like a f**king army marching in back of me.”

Eminem’s anti-Trump tirade was such a significant event because if there was anyone in the entertainment industry who was supposed to represent the rage and identity of white working-class America, it was Eminem.

While Sam Francis was writing about the Middle American Revolution that would come when the Republican Party finally tapped into the silent rage of the traditional population of the United States, Eminem was rapping about the same thing. And he was doing it much more effectively than any Republican politician — that is, until Donald Trump came along.

Indeed, Eminem, though using a black art form, did not rap to black America. Blacks refused even to play his music on rap stations, claiming that he was a wannabe — yet another Elvis stealing what belonged to them. No, Eminem was speaking through his music to white America. We, and our brethren in Europe, are the ones who made Eminem the most successful rapper ever, at one point matching even the Beatles in popularity.

Why was Eminem so popular? Part of it was his undeniable talent as a wordsmith, but a much bigger component, which he readily conceded, was that he was white. As Eminem boldly explained in that same “White America” song: “Look at these eyes, baby blue, baby just like yourself/If they were brown Shady’d lose, Shady sits on the shelf.” He was so successful because he “could be one of your kids/White America, little Eric looks just like this.”

When I was in high school, I was one of those “little Erics” who worshiped Eminem. Over the years, I have come to realize that I worshiped Eminem because of a sickness I shared with millions of Millennial/Generation X white Americans. I, like so many others, was trapped in the malaise of multiculturalism and had no outlet for my frustration — no medium for my nationalism, masculinity, and identity. I looked to Eminem for guidance because, as he proclaimed, we “share the same views and the same exact beliefs.” In a healthy society, I would have found solidarity in faith, heritage, and nation. In our sickened society, I found solidarity in Eminem, a con artist who used our dispossession to make himself rich while further polluting and conflating white identity with African ways and values.

I know this sounds very abstract. Let me explain. First, I repeat something that has been said many times before in American Renaissance: A diverse American high school is nothing like how it is depicted on television. As a white student in a diverse school, you don’t walk to class cheerily smiling at the blacks and browns, celebrating the wonderful panoply of colors. Rather, you navigate each day, each class, each walk down the hall, with an acute sense of caution and alienation. This table is reserved for blacks; that hall is reserved for browns. You keep your head down in class. When the day is over, you run home through the parking lot.

When I discovered Eminem’s music in high school, I truly but foolishly, thought I had found a kindred soul. He tapped into my rage. He proclaimed for all to see that he would not tolerate being disparaged as just another “white boy” — the type of disparagement common at my high school. His music prompted criticism from the Left, because he was pushing an implicit white identity — the frustration that boils from a people being deprived of their own politics, space, and identity.

This all came to the fore after the success of the movie 8 Mile, when black rappers began calling Eminem a “culture stealer.” They tried to dismantle him, leading to the discovery that Eminem in his early 20s had regularly used the n-word (in the forbidden –er way) and had condemned miscegenation. And perhaps most damningly in the rap world, they discovered that Eminem had grown up on the Warren and not the Detroit City side of 8 Mile Road.

This was a big deal because Warren represented the rejection of diversity. Warren was incorporated in 1957, directly in response to the Supreme Court’s decision to compel school integration in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). As racial integration came to Detroit, the whites fled, and many of the working-class auto workers moved just across the city line, 8 Mile Road, to create Warren — a working-class community that was so ardent in its racial segregationism that it was dubbed “Warren-tucky.”

Indeed, in the 2016 election, Warren, Michigan represented the heart of Trump country, leading Trump to hold a massive rally there just a week before the election. As one New York Times profile of Warren voters explained, Trump could see Warren’s problems “right off the bat.”

To get a sense of what Warren was like in Eminem’s childhood, consider how in 1970, two years before he was born, whites made up 99.5 percent of the city’s total population of 179,270. In the next 10 years, whites continued to resist integration, resulting in a Supreme Court case over whether Detroit’s surrounding suburbs had to bus their white children into overwhelmingly black Detroit City schools. In a controversial Supreme Court decision, Milliken v. Bradley (1974), the Court held that the Brown decision did not require such inter-jurisdictional integration, thereby ensuring that in 1980, when Eminem was eight years old, his school was still 98.2 percent white. By the time Eminem was 18 years old and had decided to become a rapper, his hometown of Warren was still 97.3 percent white. By contrast, Detroit, just a couple of miles from where Eminem grew up, was over 75 percent Black.

America is now about 60 percent white, and white babies are already a minority as soon as they are born. My high school was under 30 percent white. We are suffering from the diversity agenda that Eminem was able to avoid through the resistance of his people. But he was close enough to the black experience to tap into multicultural confusion. So many of us have accordingly looked to Eminem, one of the few celebrities from a white working-class background, for strength and guidance.

And what does he do after we have made him into another Elvis Presley? Once he sees an opening to curry favor with the New York Times crowd, he betrays us and condemns Trump supporters for “ignoring our past historical, deplorable factors” — while sitting in his gated community and placing the burden of dealing with it on the next generation. He’s not fighting the power. He’s fighting his people. It’s Boomer rap.

Credit Image: © Pjp Photos/Rex Shutterstock via ZUMA Press

That brings me to the political significance of Eminem’s anti-Trump tirade. In the video that aired Tuesday, while this 44-year-old curmudgeon with a savings of over $200 million huffed and puffed about President Trump’s insensitivity, several black men stared menacingly in a parking lot. Unlike the one I ran through to get home each day, these angry blacks were supporting the white boy. So who were they staring at with such menacing looks? The same people Eminem was yelling at: us.

That is why the elite liberal media, after years of calling Eminem a homophobe, misogynist, and racist, can now praise him — because as much as the American Left hates homophobia, misogyny, and racism, they hate us more.

The entire Hollywood-sports-music-media complex has made perfectly clear what they think about us. As Eminem rapped in Tuesday’s tirade: “I’m drawing in the sand a line: you’re either for or against [Trump]/And if you can’t decide who you like more and you’re split/On who you should stand beside, I’ll do it for you with this/F**k you!”

It is time we respond. No more channeling rage and identity through someone else. From now on, it comes from us. After nearly 20 years, I’ve learned my lesson. White America must build a community of people who truly “share the same views and the same exact beliefs.” If we do that, it really will be like “a f–king army marching.” But it will be facing Eminem and his corporate homies rather than behind him.