Young White Supremacists Build a “Whites-Only” Town, But They Can’t Agree on Who Gets In

A documentary about a white ethnostate accidentally became a lesson on how absurd the whole concept of race even is.

Dec 18, 2025

Yesterday, Channel 5 released a documentary that quickly became one of the most discussed videos on the internet. It showcases a group of young white nationalists in rural Arkansas attempting to build what they call “Return to the Land,” a private community explicitly restricted to people of “European heritage.” The footage is uncomfortable and occasionally absurd. But buried in the cringe is a moment that cuts to the very heart of America’s oldest lie.

When the interviewer asks the community’s leader, Eric Orwoll, a seemingly straightforward question—"Who counts as white?"—he stumbles.

“Probably fine”. The man building a whites-only ethnostate cannot tell you with certainty who qualifies. He’s making it up as he goes. And that, whether he realizes it or not, is exactly how race has always worked in America.

The Myth of the Caucasian

The term “Caucasian,” which Orwoll and his followers invoke with an almost religious reverence, has a rather embarrassing origin story. In 1795, a German anatomist named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach coined the term after examining skulls from around the world. He named white Europeans “Caucasians” because he believed the Caucasus Mountains, near where Noah’s Ark supposedly landed, had produced the most “beautiful” specimens of humanity. His only reasoning was a single Georgian woman’s skull that he deemed aesthetically superior to others in his collection.

That’s the “science.” A German man in a powdered wig looked at a dead woman’s skull and decided her bone structure was so aesthetically pleasing that everyone who looked vaguely like her must be the original flavor of human, with all other races representing unfortunate “degenerations” from this ideal. The entire edifice of scientific racism, with its calipers and craniometers and doctoral dissertations, traces back to one man’s aesthetic preferences about the deceased. Even Blumenbach himself acknowledged that the differences between human groups were so gradual and indistinct that any classification would be “very arbitrary.” Yet here we are, two centuries later, watching men in Arkansas invoke a term born from one naturalist’s romantic attachment to a dead Georgian woman’s cheekbones.

Legally White, Socially Disposable

The confusion Orwoll displays on camera is a feature of a system that was always held together by spit and circumstance. Consider the history he himself clumsily references: the Irish and Italians.

In the mid-1800s, Irish Catholic immigrants flooded into American cities fleeing famine. They were met with cartoons depicting them as apes, job listings that specified “No Irish Need Apply,” and a widespread belief that their Celtic blood made them fundamentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. The Irish were legally white, they could naturalize as citizens under the 1790 Naturalization Act, but socially, they occupied a gray zone of conditional belonging.

Italian immigrants faced similar treatment decades later. In the South, particularly in Louisiana, Italian laborers were assigned to jobs traditionally held by Black workers, prompting some employers and politicians to question whether Italians were really “white” at all. In 1891, after eleven Italians were acquitted of murdering a police chief in New Orleans, a mob broke into the prison and lynched them, one of the largest mass lynchings in American history.

These groups did, by and large, eventually achieve “full whiteness,” but not through any scientific revelation or sudden genetic clarity. They earned it the old-fashioned way: by distancing themselves from Black Americans and proving their usefulness to the existing racial order. They assimilated into suburban whiteness after World War II, their children benefiting from GI Bill mortgages and redlined neighborhoods that excluded Black veterans from the very same opportunities. Whiteness, it turned out, was less about bloodlines than about knowing which side of the color line to stand on.

The One-Drop Rule and Other Absurdities

If the Irish and Italians complicate the fantasy of a fixed white race, the one-drop rule obliterates it entirely.

For much of American history, a single drop of “Black blood” was enough to legally classify someone as Black, regardless of how they looked, how they identified, or how many generations separated them from an African ancestor. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made this explicit, defining whiteness as having “no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” The only exception? Descendants of Pocahontas. Virginia’s landed gentry, many of whom had spent generations claiming descent from the Native American princess as proof of their American authenticity, couldn’t bear to classify themselves as non-white.

The absurdity of the one-drop rule was laid bare in courtrooms across the country. In 1861, a white man named Robert Schell walked into a San Francisco barbershop and shot the Black proprietor, George Gordon. Witnesses saw everything. But under California law, Black people could not testify against whites. The only white-presenting witness, James Cowes, was subjected to a humiliating physical examination after the defense claimed he was secretly Black. Supposed racial experts examined every hair on his body, eventually concluding that one curly strand proved African ancestry. Cowes was barred from testifying. The killer received two years.

Defining whiteness was theater, an elaborate performance of racial certainty that required constant maintenance precisely because the underlying logic was always fiction. The courtroom became a stage where witnesses could be disqualified by the texture of a single hair, and where freedom hinged on the opinions of men who called themselves “experts” in something that did not exist.

Building a House on Sand

This brings us back to Arkansas, where a few dozen people are attempting to construct something stable on the most unstable foundation imaginable.

The men and women of Return to the Land believe they are building something permanent, a community where their children can be taught that their ancestors did great things. But their entire project rests on a category that has never been fixed for more than a generation. Today’s certain boundaries are tomorrow’s historical curiosities. The Irish became white. The Italians became white. Who will be next? Who will be cast out?

Sources

Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. “De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa” (1795). Translated by Thomas Bendyshe, London: Anthropological Society, 1865.
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. “Blumenbach and the Concept of Race.” Johann-Friedrich-Blumenbach Institute of Zoology and Anthropology.
Petrella, Christopher. “The Ugly History of the Pledge of Allegiance — and Why It Matters.” The Washington Post, November 3, 2017.
Gold Chains: The Hidden History of Slavery in California. “The Crime of Testimony Laws.” ACLU of Northern California.
African American Registry. “The ‘One Drop Rule’ in America.”
Encyclopedia of Arkansas. “One-Drop Rule.”
Southern Poverty Law Center. “Inside Return to the Land.” October 7, 2025.
Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan. “Whites Only Town.” 2025.