By now, you’ve probably heard of the dozens of “White Student Unions” cropping up across Facebook. They’ve been garnering (mostly negative) attention throughout the media both in campus newspapers and elsewhere. Berkeley’s Daily Californian ran an article where the President of the UC Students’ association referred to such groups as a “slap in the face.”

Why is that? According to the UC Berkeley White Student Union statement of purpose, the group only wants to create “safe spaces” for those of European descent. It also affirms a commitment to “diversity,” saying such things as “we like all people, we just also like being white.” The website Medium ran an article referring to these groups as ‘trolls’ and nothing more than racist propaganda.

This begs the question, do we as Europeans have a right to assemble for our own interests? The media/academic complex seems to answer with a resounding “no.” Trolls or not, these groups serve an important purpose and that is to deconstruct the language of “diversity” and “tolerance” and reveal the inherent will to power behind them, and expose the decades long use of such language in the dispossession of our people from our historical institutions.

In a way, what we are seeing is a form of identitarian situationism, which uses such acts to deconstruct and accelerate the consciousness of our people. Like the neverending “meme wars” on twitter and throughout the Internet, such acts raise the contradictions inherent in our opponent’s discourse and serve to consolidate our own identities against those of our political opponents.

Even such mundane acts as reporting FBI crime statistics have become revolutionary acts, as Donald Trump is learning. The more we push back and use the reigning liberal hegemony’s grammar against it, the more it’s foundational myths are undermined; in today’s world of rapid information sharing, such acts can awaken more of our people than ever before.

However, these are only first steps to realizing who we are as a people. By defining what we are not and pushing back against those who would say we have no identity or right to organize for our own interests, we begin to become who we are and will need to be.