White Supremacy Is About More Than Idiots in Cosplay
There is, according to news accounts, a draft memo floating around the Department of Homeland Security naming white supremacists as the gravest terror threat to the United States.
The timing on this is a tad inconvenient, given the Trump administration’s overt appeals to gun-toting provocateurs, a declaration of war on anti-racist education, and a mad rush to negate policies that might be considered as chacks against segregation.
Later drafts of the document, according to Politico, have replaced the term “white supremacist extremists” with “domestic violence extremists.” Although the term Antifa does not appear in any of the early drafts, I’ll bet it ends up being listed in an attempt to provide “balance.”
Over the last four years, law enforcement records prove that violence linked to white supremacy has eclipsed jihadi violence as the predominant form of terrorism in the United States. The rhetoric associated with the “you will not replace us” school of racism is now considered acceptable on Fox News and other Trump-supporting media.
Nikki Ramirez, a researcher for Media Matters for America, said in an op ed at Business Insider:
As the language of "great replacement" has become commonplace throughout right-wing media, the rhetoric has also made the leap from commentators to policymakers. President Donald Trump himself retweeted proponents of the theory even before the 2016 election, and in 2018 he directed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate the baseless conspiracy theory that genocide is being committed against white farmers in South Africa — a policy that originated in a segment on Carlson's prime-time Fox News show…
...From Matt Gaetz's national stage to the local politics of Florida's state Senate, conservative figures are now cheering on policies using language evoking the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, and their promotion of these talking points as an electoral issue means the hawkish anti-immigrant rhetoric that used to live primarily in fringe conservative media spaces is now a staple of conservative politics.
Talk show host Tucker Carlson has gone so far as to praise the actions of 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, currently in jail awaiting trial for driving across state lines and killing two people at a protest in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. A “Christian” crowdfunding website and Rittenhouse's lawyers say they've crowd-sourced nearly $1 million for the shooter’s legal-defense fund.
While white supremacists and their more genteel cousins, nativists, have always been a part of the Trump base, the president’s rhetoric in recent weeks has served as a clarion call for them to go to action. Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country are being met with groups of self-described patriots intent on provoking conflict.
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Moving from the street protests to book clubs, the Trump administration has heard the increasingly frantic calls from the Heritage Foundation and others about Americans’ growing interest in understanding the role racism has played in our history.
Having people realize that racism is not per se an individual condition as opposed to a societal reality is the last thing these apologists for hate want to see; it threatens the future they seek.
Here's the suit and tie version of the call to crush anti-racism:
Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project, which rewrites American history to place slavery at the center of the country’s storyline, is a major on-going project of the New York Times Magazine. Named after the year when Africans were first brought as slaves to the colonies, it misleadingly pretends that this date, not 1776, is the true founding of America. This clear attempt at replacing America’s narrative with a counter-narrative is also a curriculum—one already being taught in 4,500 classrooms across the country and adopted by five education districts.
And the long march of the counter-narrative is not limited to these 4,500 classrooms. Sit in any meeting of the local board of education across America and you are likely to hear long diatribes about “equity,” “systemic racism,” “implicit bias,” “culturally responsive teaching,” and other touchstones of the new left. This is being taught to our children from a very young age.
It should surprise nobody that President Trump has sprung into action on this topic. He took to Twitter to threaten funding for schools using the Pulitzer Prize winning 1619 Project as part of their curriculum, citing us evil liberals in California as an example.
For those readers unfamiliar with the 1619 Project, this snip from an op ed from Seth Cohen at Forbes is a good explainer:
The 1619 Project is a long-form journalism and multimedia initiative of The New York Times Magazine, started in August of 2019, 400 years after African slaves first landed on the shores of America. In its own words, the project “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Recently, the 1619 Project teamed up with the Pulitzer Center to develop school curriculum to use 1619 Project content in classrooms.
Trump’s Sunday morning tweet continues a trend of his administration’s provocative actions regarding educational approaches to racial injustice in America.
For example, on Friday, the Trump administration announced that it was planning to cease diversity training that it deemed anti-American. In a two-page memo addressed to the leadership of federal agencies, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought specifically directed federal executives to begin the process of identifying contracts with race-related content that it finds offensive.
The administration’s attempt to shut down the conversation about racism and the systems that enable it amounts to trying to catch a train that’s already left the station.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, sales of books relevant to this topic increased by an astounding 6,800%.
Zoom-based book clubs, a widespread cultural phenomenon in the wake of COVID-19 lockdowns have taken discussions about system racism into parts of society not connected with street protests.
Talk can be a poor substitute for action, and “raised consciousness” isn’t a cure for much of anything. Saida Grundy’s The False Promise of Anti-Racism Books in the Atlantic makes the case for further steps:
Overemphasis on awareness can also lead to a preoccupation with the racist symbolism of certain sports mascots, band names, brand logos, and public spaces, while obscuring the deeper forms of harm behind these iconographies. Consider the public consciousness about Confederate statues: It has resulted in the widespread removal of these monuments, but it has also meant that people have stopped short of examining their more insidious effects. These statues were part of a highly organized and aggressive lobbying campaign by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC)—a nationwide organization founded by pro-slavery white women—to promote the “Lost Cause of the Confederacy.” The Lost Cause was a venomous mythology that minimized slavery and venerated those who fought to preserve it. But public commemoration of Confederates was just the tip of the iceberg—the UDC’s main goal for the Lost Cause was to target public-school curricula.
The UDC stealthily pressured school boards to purge all texts that it claimed as doing “injustice to the South” and replace them with neo-Confederate propaganda that cherished slaveholders as martyrs and celebrated slavery as benevolent to African Americans. The statues of tyrannical white supremacists like Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis were but ornaments topping off the UDC’s national policy victories. To topple those statues today—without overhauling the textbooks and curricula that soft-pedal slavery and omit its devotion to anti-Black violence—seems equally ornamental.
Anti-racism efforts that are watered down by “listening” and “learning” treat justice as though it can be acquired through the awakening of people’s hearts and minds—instead of through a clear-cut democratic process. Following the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946, German youth in the ’60s sparked a new era of collective accountability by asking their parents “What did you do in the Third Reich?,” triggering a national reckoning over Jewish persecution. The German government paid out billions in Jewish reparations for its war crimes. And after decades of denazification and restructuring government, industries, and institutions, Germany now requires Holocaust education in all secondary schools.
In my vision for the future, generations to come will ask their parents “what did you do during the Trump years?” or “what did you do after George Floyd was murdered?”
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Lead Image Credit: Ted Eytan, Creative Commons License