Oh, huh, I guess while I was gone, a bunch of posts were split into a separate GD topic? I’ll have to read that later: Does "White Culture" Exist?
As for the rest of it…
As they should be 
And thank you, but there’s plenty I don’t know too! I post here in part to share, in part to learn. I just think it’s an interesting if difficult discussion that’d be impossible to have anywhere but here (i.e., it would be a true nightmare on reddit or Facebook).
It’s probably both? There’s inevitably overlap. Even the same individual may go from one to the other on the escalator of radicalization (and hopefully back down again at some point…).
Like:
Not only is this equivalence an over-generalization (maybe not much of one, granted), it also becomes a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy in that if there’s no socially acceptable place for non-white-supremacists to gather to date only other white people, then the only places left for them to gather without shame would be the MAGA and Nazi type places.
I think it’s only human nature to want to seek out your in-group, and if they can’t find that in the mainstream without shame and ostracization, they’re going to move more and more towards the fringes, where they get love-bombed and radicalized into a brotherhood of hate.
I mean, yes, and no. It’s an oversimplification for the sake of discussion, but also… I think it’s a large part of why MAGA was so successful and seemingly took so many non-conservatives by surprise.
There was so much pent-up guilt and shame from decades of liberal thought that for someone to come along and suddenly openly embrace, celebrate, and proudly wear their “whiteness” and “non-wokeness” must’ve been an irresistible seduction and catharsis.
It’s as if a quarter of the country suddenly went “oh wow, I don’t have to feel bad about myself anymore?” — of course that is going to be more appealing to a large swath of the population than “You’re the oppressor, you’re privileged, and even if you don’t feel that way, you’re still partially responsible because it’s systemic and societal.” I’m paraphrasing there, but that was a large part of the discourse from the cultural left not so long ago, before the anti-woke counterattack flipped the narrative and won quite decisively.
There’s probably another half of the population in the middle who didn’t really strongly feel that way, but were outshouted from both sides and forced to choose a side. Add in the faux-populism and blue-collar dog-whistling of the MAGA movement vs the cultural focus of the left… it isn’t hard to see how that snowballed into Trump 2.0, the tradwife movement, etc.
In the US, it’s just my lazy shorthand for the post-Obama DEI period through the post-covid years, and the accompanying corporate policies and cultural momentum then that gave rise to things like an explosion in DEI consulting firms, increased “rainbow capitalism” at Target and other big retailers, etc. Intersectionality was briefly a buzzword then. Companies and federal agencies, too, were trying to jump on the bandwagon. The “woke” term itself was originally a self-signifier for the left before being co-opted by their opponents as a pejorative.
Needless to say, that era has now ended, with the federal government dismantling all the DEI programs and tying university funding to anti-woke policies, etc. Retailers, too, have pulled back on their diversity programming (“rainbow capitalism”) once the cultural push receded.
I don’t know how it was experienced elsewhere, but as a working-age adult here (and also a recent college grad at the time), it was a very visible shift in priorities, messaging (both what to say and what to not say), etc., compared to the decade before or after it. I don’t know what else to call it if not an “era” — it was probably hoped to be the start of a new epoch, but the conservative pushback was so abrupt and so severe that not only did the woke movement lose almost all the ground it gained over that period, they lost a lot of hard-won victories from the past too.
There were only two in my area (to my surprise — it’s pretty purple here, and I expected there to be a lot more). The one lady whose profile I read seemed almost “rural normal” (horses, church, family, etc.)… aside from the long list of white-supremacist-adjacent Facebook groups she was also a part of… it wasn’t all that different from similar profiles I’ve seen on OkCupid, aside from the obvious white signaling (that probably would never have been allowed on Match Group sites).
I didn’t get to see the other one before the archive went down (at least temporarily; not sure if it’s back up).
(Edit: It came back up. Browsed a few more. Most were white identity focused. Some were scary. A few were just lonely and nondescript)
Admittedly, that does feel different. My lame-ish excuse / attempt to ward off cognitive dissonance, maybe, is that in the real world, public retail space is finite and there’s a danger of altogether excluding people from an entire community if such things were legal.
Online “real estate” is less finite, and the existence of a whites-only site doesn’t really “crowd out” a more welcoming space.
Along those same lines, I don’t feel as icky about private clubs based on some selective criteria — whether race or wealth or alma mater or whatever. Yes, such an all-white club could be the KKK, but it may also just be your local Lions or Moose lodge or such, depending on the era and place. (And probably there’s overlap.)
I remember that being true in the distant past (2010s and prior), but are you sure that’s still a thing? OkCupid, for example, used to have that, but I don’t think they do any longer. Whether that’s a cultural backlash or simple corporatization following their Match.com acquisition, I don’t know.