Last week, news broke that Donald Trump’s advisors were mulling over the idea of a Muslim registry. The proposal, which was suggested by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was reportedly introduced as a way of helping the president-elect with the “extreme vetting” of immigrants. Despite sounding like a sinister joke, Trump’s incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus admitted last weekend that he wouldn’t be “ruling out” the idea (because, according to him, the faith of Islam can be “problematic”). 

Although the proposal is unlikely to get pushed through, it’s sparked concerns over the cabinet’s backwards attitude to US Muslims. In an act of retaliation, New York multimedia artist Candace Thompson has challenged the country’s deep-rooted hypocrisy, making her own satirical “National Registry of White Males”. This, she claims, will help draw our attention to America’s most dangerous demographic of all: straight, white men. 

“Forget the nation of Islam, our most immediate threat to domestic security is and always has been white, straight men,” she wrote in a Facebook post. “That is why I have decided to do my part as a Red Blooded Patriot by creating The White Male Registry. It is a simple google form complete with questions that will help identify just how much of a threat to American security any individual white male may pose to the general public.”

Her registry is aimed at white men, or people who enjoy the benefits of “white male privilege”. It asks applicants a number of qualifying questions, including how often they make “derogatory” comments, and whether they’ve committed any hate crimes.

“There has been much gnashing of teeth, threats, mansplaining and personal attacks from the alt-right, white supremacist, meninist set. But they can, to put it quite frankly, eat my fucking shorts” – Candace Thompson

According to Thompson, the project has two objectives. Firstly, to “seriously call into question the Muslim registry currently being proposed by the Trump administration” and to reveal its “implicit racism and irrationality”. Secondly, to “ask white men examine their privilege from a gut level” rather than an intellectual one. “Even my own ‘woke’ male friends have expressed that the registry made them understand in a new way how it feels to be ‘othered’,” she tells Dazed. “It can be very hard to understand what it feels like if you have never or rarely experienced it.”

The project has already gone viral, attracting 700 entries in the first 24 hours. “I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from left-leaners – people who believe in the principle of social equity and want to see that agenda pushed forward,” she explains. “And then, of course, there has been much gnashing of teeth, threats, mansplaining and personal attacks from the alt-right, white supremacist, meninist set. But they can, to put it quite frankly, eat my fucking shorts.”

Thompson, who is currently enrolled in Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts MFA programme, adds that she hopes the project will help inspire others to take action. “I hope that this election and the enabled rage and ignorance so blatantly on display by the alt-right put a fire under us all to actually get out there and do what needs to be done to stop them and take back our country,” she says. “Maybe, just maybe, this means the time for complacency is over.”

Check out the National Registry for White Males, or sign up yourself, here