Mark Robinson and the confusing rise of the nonwhite reactionary

Mark Robinson, the embattled Republican nominee for governor in North Carolina, wrote many troubling things during his days as a poster on the porn forum Nude Africa. But one Robinson comment sticks out as especially confusing: “I’m a black NAZI!”

The notion of a Black man expressing fealty to a movement premised on his inferiority feels absurd, a Chappelle’s Show sketch come to life. Yet the absurdity points to something real. As strange as it seems, there’s a disturbing number of Black and Latino Americans who hold extreme right beliefs.

Two of the most prominent antisemitic voices in the country today, Kanye West and Candace Owens, are Black Trump supporters. Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist who dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, is of Mexican descent. Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the January 6 riot, is Afro-Cuban. Mauricio Garcia, a Hispanic mass shooter who killed eight people at a Dallas-area shopping center in 2023, had posted neo-Nazi rhetoric on his social media pages before his attack.

Academic research suggests these are not merely a handful of cherry-picked examples. There are non-trivial numbers of right-wing Black and Latino people who express extreme right-wing ideas — up to and including outright bigotry.

In 2022, two academics — Eitan Hirsh and Laura Royden — published the results of a massive national survey on the prevalence of antisemitic beliefs in the United States. Their study found that antisemitic attitudes were significantly more common on the right than on the left. But it also found notable racial divides between right-wingers, with Black and Latino conservatives being about 20 percentage points more likely to express antisemitic ideas than their white conservative peers.

Recent studies have also found that, among Latinos, political conservatism predicts higher levels of racial resentment toward Black people and greater skepticism about the role of racism in the ongoing social marginalization of Black people. Another recent study found that Latino conservatives express higher rates of hostility toward undocumented immigrants than their liberal or moderate peers, as well as higher support for lowering legal immigration rates. 

A separate study of white and Black Americans found that, in both groups, “prejudicial attitudes toward Latinos … are the most consistently significant factors in shaping opinions about the number of immigrants to admit and the consequences of immigration.”

None of this is to say that most nonwhite conservatives are bigoted, or that racial minorities are more likely to hold bigoted attitudes in general than white Americans. All of the available research confirms common sense: that white people are by far more likely to be white supremacists.

But this evidence also suggests that certain things that seem like common sense — that Black people like Mark Robinson can’t be Nazis by definition — simply don’t match reality. Bizarre as it seems, given traditional extreme-right attitudes toward racial minorities, there are high-profile Black and Latino Americans who hold bigoted and extreme beliefs — and a small but notable percentage of the general population in both groups who agree with them. (Though Robinson denies writing the Nazi post, an overwhelming amount of evidence points to him as the author.)

Understanding nonwhite extremism

So how do we make sense of this phenomenon? 

One theory is that a lot of this is rooted in ideas about Americanness. Hostility toward other minority groups is, for some Black and Latino people, a way of solidifying their own place in the country — of distinguishing themselves as good Americans from the bad Other. 

Journalist Paola Ramos suggests such an explanation in her just-released book Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. After spending a day with Pedro Antonio Aguero, a far-right activist who obsessively patrols the Southern border looking for undocumented migrants, Ramos writes, “I got the feeling that by hunting them, he was distancing himself from them, and from his own foreignness.”

Some academic research points to similar conclusions. One experiment presented Latino respondents with written materials downplaying Latino status in America. Some respondents saw a news story suggesting Latino people were doing poorly in the United States on metrics like educational attainment; others saw the same story with an additional line comparing Latino and Black outcomes.

Individuals who saw the comparison story expressed notably higher negative attitudes toward Black people afterward — with the spike interestingly concentrated among liberal Latinos (who were less biased than conservatives before exposure but equally biased afterward). This, the academics theorized, is because conservative Latinos already cared a great deal about their Americanness, and so had already factored that sense of status threat into their overall worldview.

In her book American While Black, the University of Maryland’s Niambi Carter argues Black skepticism about immigration is rooted in fear that “whites may favor immigrants over black people in hiring decisions, housing, and other social interactions.” It is, she writes, a “conflicted nativism” born out of Black insecurity in their own standing and social status as Americans.

But this is just one theory, and one that doesn’t explain all the facts. Some things, like the unusually high rates of antisemitism among Black and Latino conservatives, are a bit harder to fit into the script. 

In their paper on race and antisemitism, Hersh and Royden conclude that “the roots of antisemitic attitudes among minority groups are broad rather than narrow and are not well-explained by commonly proposed theories.” Basically, they say, no one really knows why it seems that antisemitism is disturbingly popular in those groups.

In general, this is a subject that calls for caution. The phenomenon of extreme-right politics is fairly new, or at least is only newly documented. As something we’re just beginning to grapple with, we can’t really say for sure why it’s happening. Social science and journalism are hard work, and we don’t have enough of either on this topic.

The one thing we can say for sure is that Mark Robinson calling himself a “black NAZI” is outlandish — but not as outlandish as it might seem. There are more people like him, and they will play a role in defining the American right’s future.