On New Year’s Eve (December 31), the alt pop star Grimes made a not-so-shocking admission on X (formally known as Twitter) that she is “happily proud of white culture”. The statement was made in response to critics who have labelled her a ‘Nazi’ for her engagement with racist, alt-right memes and for her past relationship with Elon Musk, who coincidentally endorsed similar pro-white remarks in November 2023 (the billionaire agreed with a post that claimed that Jewish communities push “dialectical hatred against whites”, replying, “You have said the actual truth”).

“I’m called a Nazi because I happily am proud of white culture,” wrote Grimes on X. “But every day, I think fondly of the brown king Cyrus the Great, who invented the first ever empire, and the Japanese icon Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the first novel ever. What if humans just loved each other? History teaches us that we have all been, and always will be – great.”

When asked to delete her post, she responded with the same tiresome rhetoric white people have used for centuries while they oppress people of colour, reminding her critics that we should “love each other” and that “we belong together”. But historically, white people have used the rhetoric of ‘love’ to hide their desire to maintain white supremacy. They advocate for us to love each other and reject ‘division’ and ‘divisiveness’, but what they call ‘division’ or ‘divisiveness’ is often just marginalised people politically mobilising against white supremacy. The rhetoric of love, used by Grimes in this context, has nothing to do with love at all, but with the maintenance of our oppressive status quo.

Grimes’ main argument is that every race within history has done horrible things to their own race or another, so why should white people feel more shame than others? But while most races have committed atrocities against one another, only some still benefit from systematic inequalities that create wealth, health, financial and academic gaps, which translate to a poorer quality of life for those who are so often non-white, working-class, disabled and LGBTQ+. White people created these gaps, and they are maintained by white people like Grimes and Musk, who continue to ignore the existence of systematic inequalities, so what is there to be proud of?