Category Archives: racism

Obama’s response to Charlottesville violence is the most liked tweet in Twitter’s history

The Washington Post reports: Unlike some former presidents, Barack Obama is showing no signs of completely abandoning public life.

Since leaving office, Obama has commented on major events or controversies, including the terrorist attack in Manchester, England, and Sen. John McCain’s brain cancer diagnosis. He did so again on Saturday, after the deadly violence in Charlottesville.

“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or his background or his religion … People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love … For love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite,” Obama said, quoting former South African president Nelson Mandela in tweets.


The first tweet, which shows a picture of Obama smiling at four children, has been retweeted more than 1.1 million times and liked 2.723 million times as of Tuesday evening. [Continue reading…]

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Trump claims ‘many fine people’ marched side by side with neo-Nazis in Charlottesville

 

Trump’s statements this afternoon quickly won praise from David Duke:


But his performance did not go down well on Fox News:


U.S. Senator Chris Murphy tweeted:

 

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Walmart’s CEO joins widening group to rebuke Trump over Charlottesville

The New York Times reports: Walmart’s chief executive has issued a strong rebuke of President Trump’s response to the protests that turned violent in Charlottesville, Va., saying the president “missed a critical opportunity to help bring our country together.”

The criticism came in a statement that the retailer’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, emailed to employees Monday evening, which was reviewed by The New York Times. The statement was later posted on a company website.

“As we watched the events and the response from President Trump over the weekend, we too felt that he missed a critical opportunity to help bring our country together by unequivocally rejecting the appalling actions of white supremacists,” he wrote.

Mr. McMillon’s statement came amid a backlash against the president for what critics viewed as a tepid initial response to violence at last weekend’s rally of white supremacists and right-wing extremists, which left one counterprotester dead. On Monday, the chief executives of Merck, Under Armour and Intel said that they would step down from a presidential advisory council for manufacturing.

On Tuesday, a fourth executive, Scott Paul, president of an organization called the Alliance for American Manufacturing, announced via Twitter that he would resign from the presidential council because “it’s the right thing for me to do.” [Continue reading…]

Quartz reports: The real question, according to former US Treasury secretary Larry Summers, is why any CEOs still remain. At this point, it’s clear that Trump isn’t listening to their advice, and making the case that staying on his advisory councils will have a positive influence no longer holds water. “No advisor committed to the bipartisan American traditions of government can possibly believe he or she is being effective at this point,” Summers, an economist who was also president of Harvard, argued in the Financial Times. [Continue reading…]

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Trump’s long history of racism

Jesse Berney writes: The moment that struck me in Trump’s make-up speech Monday afternoon wasn’t when he declared racism “evil” or finally name-checked the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It was his remark about the flag. “No matter the color of our skin, we all live under the same laws,” he said. “We all salute the same great flag.”

Maybe Trump should have watched the news a little more closely this weekend. If he had, he might have seen large numbers of Americans carrying and saluting flags that weren’t the Stars and Stripes. Confederate flags, obscure racist insignia and straight-up swastikas were all on display.

The racists and Nazis and white supremacists of all stripes who carried that flag were heartened by Trump’s failure to denounce them or their ideology in the immediate aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville and the murder of Heather Heyer. And his tepid, reluctant, TelePrompTer-fed denunciation of racism days later appears to have done little to discourage their belief that he supports them in the deepest, darkest, most wizened recesses of his heart.

Though it’s technically true that no one but Donald Trump knows what’s in Donald Trump’s heart, he’s given us some pretty good clues. He likely thinks swastika-toting Nazis and hood-wearing KKK members are bad guys – those are the easy targets everyone knows we’re supposed to denounce – but the entitled, clean-cut, polo-wearing, torch-bearing racists chanting about how they won’t be replaced? Those are the people who put him into office. They’re his people. And they know he’s their leader because they know Donald Trump is, like they are, racist.

Oh, they wouldn’t put it that way. They think the real racism is the affirmative action that gives people of color a chance in a world that hands people who look like me privilege from birth. They believe the real racists are the ones who declare black lives matter. (“What, ours don’t?”) But like the president they cheer, they’re racist as hell.

You don’t even have to look into Trump’s heart to see his racism. You only have to look at all the things he’s done and said over the years – from the early Seventies, when he settled with the Justice Department over accusations of housing discrimination, to Monday, when just hours after his speech news broke he is considering pardoning anti-immigrant sheriff Joe Arpaio. [Continue reading…]

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How social media helped organize and radicalize America’s white supremacists

Pacific Standard reports: White supremacy groups have a long history in the United States, yet some of the news around the groups’ most recent activity has featured a decidedly Millennial flavor. The leaders of this weekend’s demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia—during which a man drove a car toward counter-protestors, setting off a chain reaction that injured at least 19 people and killed one—had organized using a Facebook event.

Meanwhile, the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi news site, used memes to drum up enthusiasm for the demonstration. (The Daily Stormer’s domain name was originally provided by GoDaddy, before moving to Google; both companies eventually revoked the website’s registration.) And, just as the violence was unfolding in Charlottesville, the Guardian published a story about how young, white men are becoming radicalized through YouTube.

In other words, the tools of the Internet Age have helped white supremacists and other bigots to share ideas and organize. That’s the dark side of the rise of the Internet and social media, as University of California–Irvine political scientist Richard Hasen argued in a paper he posted publicly last week. Not yet peer-reviewed, the paper talks about how free communication over the Internet has undermined democracy in the U.S., in part by empowering extremist groups. Pacific Standard talked with Hasen about how violent racists—like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis—use online tools, and how we might curb those extremist groups without hindering free speech. [Continue reading…]

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Charlottesville attack shows homegrown terror on the right is on the rise

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James Alex Fields Jr., second from left, holds a black shield in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist rally took place.
Alan Goffinski via AP

By Arie Perliger, University of Massachusetts Lowell

The attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a man named James Alex Fields Jr. used his Dodge Challenger as a weapon against a crowd of protesters, underscores the growing violence of America’s far-right wing.

According to reports, Fields was a active member of an online far-right community. Like many other far-right activists, he believes that he represents a wider ideological community, even though he acted alone.

My 15 years experience of studying violent extremism in Western societies has taught me that dealing effectively with far-right violence requires treating its manifestations as domestic terrorism.

In the wake of the Charlottesville attack, the Department of Justice announced it would launch a federal investigation:

“…that kind of violence, committed for seeming political ends, is the very definition of domestic terrorism.”

This acknowledgment may signal that a growing domestic menace may finally get the attention it deserves. While attacks by outsider Jihadist groups will probably continue, domestic terrorism still deserves more attention than it’s getting.

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The seeds of the alt-right, America’s emergent right-wing populist movement

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Clockwise, from left: White nationalist William Pierce, domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh, white nationalist Richard Spencer, British journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, professor Kevin MacDonald, and Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart.
Nick Lehr/The Conversation, CC BY-NC-SA

By George Michael, Westfield State University

Over the past year, far-right activists – which some have labeled the “alt-right” – have gone from being an obscure, largely online subculture to a player at the very center of American politics.

On August 12, an amalgamation of far-right activist groups, ranging from Vanguard America to Identity Evropa, convened in Charlottesville, Virginia for a “Unite the Right” rally. The event took a tragic turn tragic when a 20-year-old white supremacist from Ohio plowed into a crowd of counter-demonstrators, killing one and injuring 19.

Long relegated to the cultural and political fringe, alt-right activists were among the most enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. Former Breitbart.com executive Steve Bannon – who declared the website “the platform for the alt-right” – is the President’s chief political strategist.

I’ve spent years extensively researching the American far right, and the movement seems more energized than ever. To its critics, the alt-right is just a code term for white nationalism, a much-maligned ideology associated with neo-Nazis and Klansmen. The movement, however, is more nuanced, encompassing a much broader spectrum of right-wing activists and intellectuals.

How did the movement gain traction in recent years? And has the alt-right already changed America’s political landscape?

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Why the Nazis came to Charlottesville

Siva Vaidhyanathan writes: “Should we go downtown?” my wife asked over breakfast on Thursday. “Remember, after the election, when we said we would stand with our neighbors when they were threatened? Are we being true to our commitments?”

For weeks, we had read reports from white supremacist groups that they were coming here by the hundreds or thousands to start a fight. They promised to come armed. The racist Daily Stormer website has been calling 2017 the “Summer of Hate,” and Charlottesville would be ground zero.

How should we respond? All summer, we and the other residents of this college town have been discussing our choices across tables, on Facebook, on local radio shows, in church groups and at community meetings.

We could join many of our neighbors for teach-ins at the university, discussing racial history, prospects for diversity and paths toward justice. The University of Virginia had arranged a slate of public programs to give people a safe place to convene, commune and debate while armed, angry white supremacists invaded our downtown, just a mile and a half from the university.

Or we could join thousands of our neighbors who had pledged to confront the Nazis, risking broken bones, pepper-sprayed eyes, arrest or worse. We had friends and neighbors on both sides of this choice. And we saw virtue in both actions.

One school of thought says we should deny these extremists attention, as if attention were the oxygen that feeds their flaming torches. The other calls for direct confrontation: Show them they are unwelcome, outnumbered, and that the community is bravely united in disgust.

Denying hate groups attention might work if everyone agreed to do so. But as long as television cameras — or even just regular people streaming on Facebook Live and posting to YouTube — were going to witness the events, and as long as others were committed to confronting the white supremacists, there would be oxygen.

Plus, as we had learned from previous such assaults on our community, the hate groups were not just after attention. They wanted conflict. They came to hear the sound of flesh being struck, bones being broken. So the idea of denying them attention seemed less significant as the event drew closer. Still, there were compelling reasons to avoid confrontation.

“They will have guns,” I said to my wife. “That’s the defining issue for me.” She agreed. The fact that we have a child who is committed to social justice and curious about politics tipped the balance. For her sake, we could not risk putting ourselves in danger, especially when we had an opportunity to enrich her experience with peaceful community engagement.

I now believe we made the wrong choice. [Continue reading…]

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FBI and DHS warned of growing threat from white supremacists months ago

Foreign Policy reports: The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in May warned that white supremacist groups had already carried out more attacks than any other domestic extremist group over the past 16 years and were likely to carry out more attacks over the next year, according to an intelligence bulletin obtained by Foreign Policy.

Even as President Donald Trump continues to resist calling out white supremacists for violence, federal law enforcement has made clear that it sees these types of domestic extremists as a severe threat. The report, dated May 10, says the FBI and DHS believe that members of the white supremacist movement “likely will continue to pose a threat of lethal violence over the next year.”

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which attracted hundreds of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other members of the so-called alt-right, sparked violent clashes over the weekend. A woman, Heather Heyer, was killed by a car that drove into a crowd of people protesting the rally.

James Alex Fields Jr., the driver of the vehicle that struck Heyer, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

Since the outbreak of violence over the weekend, President Trump has been heavily criticized for not condemning racist groups. “We must remember this truth: No matter our color, creed, religion or political party, we are ALL AMERICANS FIRST,” he tweeted.

The FBI, on the other hand, has already concluded that white supremacists, including neo-Nazi supporters and members of the Ku Klux Klan, are in fact responsible for the lion’s share of violent attacks among domestic extremist groups. White supremacists “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement,” reads the joint intelligence bulletin. [Continue reading…]

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Bannon has to go — says Rupert Murdoch

The New York Times reports: Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.

For months, Mr. Trump has considered ousting Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a “platform for the alt-right.” Mr. Trump has sent Mr. Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president.

So far, Mr. Trump has not been able to follow through — a product of his dislike of confrontation, the bonds of foxhole friendship forged during the 2016 presidential campaign and concerns about what mischief Mr. Bannon might do once he leaves the protective custody of the West Wing.

Not least, Mr. Bannon embodies the defiant populism at the core of the president’s agenda. Despite his marginalization, Mr. Bannon consulted the president repeatedly over the weekend as Mr. Trump struggled to respond to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. In general, Mr. Bannon has cautioned the president not to criticize far-right activists too severely for fear of antagonizing a small but energetic part of his base.

At a recent dinner at the White House with Mr. Kushner and Mr. Kelly, before Mr. Trump decamped for a working vacation at his private golf club in Bedminster, N.J., the president listened while one of the guests, Mr. Murdoch, a founder of Fox News, said Mr. Bannon had to go.

Mr. Trump offered little pushback, according to a person familiar with the conversation, and vented his frustrations about Mr. Bannon. Mr. Murdoch is close to Mr. Kushner, who has been in open warfare with Mr. Bannon since the spring. [Continue reading…]

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Trump attacks black CEO of Merck, then (proving he can read) parrots the words ‘racism is evil’

The New York Times reports: Several of the president’s top advisers, including his new Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, pressed Mr. Trump to issue a more forceful rebuke after his comment on Saturday that the violence in Charlottesville was initiated by “many sides,” prompting nearly universal criticism.

That pressure reached boiling point early Monday after the president attacked the head of Merck pharmaceuticals, who is black, for quitting an advisory board over his failure to call out white nationalists.

Merck’s chief executive, Kenneth C. Frazier, resigned from the president’s American Manufacturing Council on Monday, saying he objected to the president’s statement on Saturday blaming violence that left one woman dead on “many sides.”

“America’s leaders must honor our fundamental views by clearly rejecting expressions of hatred, bigotry and group supremacy, which run counter to the American ideal that all people are created equal,” Mr. Frazier said in a tweet announcing he was stepping down from the panel. Mr. Frazier is one of just a handful of black chief executives of a Fortune 500 company.


Less than hour later, Mr. Trump, responded on social media as he departed his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., for a day trip back to Washington.


Mr. Trump’s shot at one of the country’s best-known black executives prompted an immediate outpouring of support for Mr. Frazier from major figures in business, media and politics. “Thanks @Merck Ken Frazier for strong leadership to stand up for the moral values that made this country what it is,” Paul Polman, the chief executive of Unilever, wrote on Twitter.

It’s not unusual for Mr. Trump to attack, via Twitter, any public figure who ridicules, criticizes or even mildly questions his actions. But his decision to take on Mr. Frazier, a self-made multimillionaire who rose from a modest childhood in Philadelphia to attend Harvard Law School, was extraordinary given the wide-ranging criticism he has faced from both parties for not forcefully denouncing the neo-Nazis and Klan sympathizers who rampaged in Charlottesville. [Continue reading…]

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On the internet, everyone knows ‘you’re a racist’: Twitter account IDs marchers

NPR reports: They didn’t wear hoods as they chanted “Jews will not replace us.” They weren’t hiding their faces as they waved Confederate flags, racist signs and swastikas. They looked straight at a sea of cameras as they made the Nazi salute.

As Matt Thompson wrote for The Atlantic, the white supremacist march and rally this past weekend wasn’t a KKK rally: “It was a pride march.”

The bare-faced shamelessness was the point. But it was also an opening.

On the Internet, some people are crowd-sourcing efforts to identify and shame the people participating in the rally. Most prominently, on Twitter, the account called “Yes, You’re Racist” has been soliciting help and posting IDs. “I’ll make them famous,” the account pledged.


So far, at least one protester is no longer employed after being publicly named and shamed. [Continue reading…]

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Donald Trump is a racist — there is no mystery

Yesterday, CNN reported:

A coalition of major civil rights and faith groups on Sunday called on President Donald Trump to “directly disavow the white supremacists” who participated in violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend — a reference to Trump’s remarks condemning the deadly clashes on Saturday.

“It represents a failure of leadership from the nation’s chief executive,” the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, an umbrella group, said in a statement. “It is long past time for Trump to personally and unequivocally denounce white supremacy, violent extremism, and hate in all its forms.”

The group also called for the ouster of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka, who have drawn criticism from civil rights organizations for their associations with the alt-right, a hodgepodge of far-right, white nationalist groups that drafted off the President’s 2016 campaign to rise to national prominence.

For Trump to disavow white supremacists — to claim he has no connection with their current rise even while selecting the likes of Bannon, Gorka, and Stephen Miller as close advisers — would be dishonest. For him to denounce them after having persistently courted their support would be disingenuous.

What civil rights leaders are calling on Trump to do is something he cannot with credibility claim: that he is not a racist.

The unpalatable truth is that when Donald Trump was elected president, he won the support of voters who either welcomed his racism or at the very least were willing to turn a blind eye to it.

Just over a year ago, during the presidential campaign when Donald Trump repeatedly attacked Gonzalo Curiel (the Indiana-born judge presiding over a case against Trump University) who Trump believed couldn’t be impartial because of his Mexican ancestry, House Speaker Paul Ryan had no difficulty in describing Trump’s remarks as the “textbook definition” of racism.

Long before then and up to the present day, Trump’s racism has been no harder to detect than the odor of a man with insufferable foul breath.

And yet, in spite of this and in spite of a mountain of evidence that no one can dispute, Trump’s racism is still treated by many politicians, journalists and pundits like one of those ultimately unanswerable questions — like whether a dog has a soul.

This issue is sustained as a question on the basis that we lack enough knowledge about Trump’s interior life, which is to say that in order to know whether he is a racist we would supposedly have to be able to gain insight into what animates his very being. Only God knows whether Trump is a racist, so the implicit argument seems to turn.

This is nonsense.

Why?

To determine whether someone is a racist is a determination, first and foremost, about behavior.

To doubt, for instance, whether the birther campaign that Trump led was anything less in substance, appearance, and intent, than a racist attack on Barack Obama is a form of denialism — a refusal to accept the implications of evidence that very few people ever had any difficulty in interpreting.

Even though racism is defined in terms of beliefs, it is clear that in practice we only attach significance to such beliefs if they result in some kind of tangible expression.

If somewhere there are racists who racism leaves no discernible trace in the world, such a subtle form of racism would hardly be worthy of the name.

Since Trump on countless occasions has acted like a racist, we don’t actually have to know anything about what he thinks in order to say unequivocally that he is indeed a racist.

Under pressure or political guidance, any statements that he might make now to distance himself from the hatred he has with such determination fomented, will be utterly hollow words.

The real question is for the Republican party itself: whether it chooses to remain America’s white party, or whether it’s ready break away from the many currents of bigotry it has harbored for so long.

If it chooses the latter, it’s time for the Republicans to dump Trump.

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The alt-right stands at a crossroads

The Atlantic reports: Members of the alt-right like to depict their movement as an irreverent response to political correctness.

On Saturday, in Charlottesville, Virginia, James Alex Fields Jr. drove a car through that façade, in a terrorist attack that killed Heather Heyer and injured 19 others who had gathered in opposition to the white-nationalist movement.

It was a defining moment, but not a moment for a pause. More alt-right rallies are scheduled for the coming Saturday, in at least nine cities. These events will provide an important barometer for the future of this movement, depending on how many people turn out, who those people are, and how they conduct themselves. For the alt-right, the coming weekend represents a critical test—which may reveal it gathering force, dissipating, or changing in significant ways. By Saturday night, it may be clear where it’s headed.

The alt-right has become an umbrella community for the American far-right, a loosely defined movement with a strong center of gravity online and which encompasses a large number of subnetworks.

Some of these subgroups identify primarily as the alt-right, but many are affiliated with more specific strains of white-nationalist ideology—including the Ku Klux Klan, Odinists, Neo-Nazis, and more, many in full regalia lest anyone miss the point. [Continue reading…]

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‘Look at the campaign he ran’: Charlottesville mayor is becoming one of Trump’s strongest critics

The Washington Post reports: A white nationalist site calls him “anti-white.”

An article it published in May outlines some highlights of Michael Signer’s term as the mayor of Charlottesville: his endorsement of a $10,000 donation to pay for legal costs to help immigrants and refugees, and his decision to declare his city a “capital of the resistance” just days after President Trump was sworn into office.

For those reasons and others — including Signer’s Jewish heritage — the writer declared: “This is what the enemy looks like.” [Continue reading…]

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Police stood by as mayhem mounted in Charlottesville

ProPublica reported on Saturday: There was nothing haphazard about the violence that erupted today in this bucolic town in Virginia’s heartland. At about 10 a.m. today, at one of countless such confrontations, an angry mob of white supremacists formed a battle line across from a group of counter-protesters, many of them older and gray-haired, who had gathered near a church parking lot. On command from their leader, the young men charged and pummeled their ideological foes with abandon. One woman was hurled to the pavement, and the blood from her bruised head was instantly visible.

Standing nearby, an assortment of Virginia State Police troopers and Charlottesville police wearing protective gear watched silently from behind an array of metal barricades — and did nothing.

It was a scene that played out over and over in Charlottesville as law enforcement confronted the largest public gathering of white supremacists in decades. We walked the streets beginning in the early morning hours and repeatedly witnessed instances in which authorities took a largely laissez faire approach, allowing white supremacists and counter-protesters to physically battle.

Officials in Charlottesville had publicly promised to maintain control of the “Unite the Right” rally, which is the latest in a series of chaotic and bloody racist rallies that have roiled this college town, a place deeply proud of its links to Thomas Jefferson and the origins of American Democracy.

But the white supremacists who flooded into the city’s Emancipation Park — a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee sits in the center of the park — had spent months openly planning for war. [Continue reading…]

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Charlottesville and America’s long history of homegrown fascism

Joshua Zeitz writes: These people are not from here,” Rep. Thomas Garrett affirmed in the wake of an American Nazi and Klan rally that descended into smoke and violence in his Virginia congressional district on Saturday. “It blows my mind that this many racist bigots actually exist in this country.” White supremacists, he continued, do not reflect “who we are as Americans.”

It’s a little surprising that Garrett is surprised. Even as he spoke, a photograph circulated of the congressman meeting recently with Jason Kessler, a white supremacist from Charlottesville who organized the rally. The purpose of the meeting, Garrett’s office insisted, was unrelated to yesterday’s rally; the two men discussed a range of issues, including President Donald Trump’s anti-terrorism and immigration restriction initiatives.

To be fair, Garrett might not perceive the tight spectrum that runs between between racialist policies and white supremacist violence. He may also genuinely believe that aggrieved white men marching in lock step by torchlight do not reflect “who we are as Americans.” Indeed, many public figures on both the left and right—people like Sally Yates, Tim Kaine and Ana Navarro, whose anti-racist and anti-fascist credentials are unimpeachable—echoed this well-meaning sentiment.

But as the historian and New Yorker staff writer Jelani Cobb observed, “The biggest indictment of the way we teach American history is that people can look at #Charlottesville and say ‘This is not who we are.’” It is part of the myth of American Exceptionalism that blood and soil movements like Nazism are foreign to the United States—that jackbooted fascism of the variety that infects democratic institutions is an invasive weed that can be easily plucked out of our national garden.

To affirm that this is not who we are, one has to erase the history of American race relations from our very recent, collective past. [Continue reading…]

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Charlottesville and the effort to downplay racism in America

Jia Tolentino writes: In 2005, I moved to Charlottesville for college, and felt that I’d landed in paradise. Back in Texas, where I grew up, the captain of my cheerleading squad had a Confederate flag hanging in her bedroom; Virginia at first seemed very liberal to me. I had such low standards for moral decency that frat boys drawling about the “War of Northern Aggression” seemed innocuous, almost quaint. The University of Virginia fetishizes its past—people refer to Thomas Jefferson, the school’s founder, as “T.J.,” and a popular dress code for football games was “guys in ties, girls in pearls.” The official culture of the school positions American history and institutional convention as deeply and exclusively charming, and it relies on a mask of gentility to keep this story up. There were blatantly racist incidents at U.V.A. shortly before I arrived and while I was there: two of the richest frats had “blackface incidents” in 2002; the next year, a black woman running for student office was attacked near the Rotunda by a white man who reportedly said, “No one wants a nigger to be president.” In 2006, a local establishment instituted a dress code with the intended effect of keeping black people out of the bar. But these things were played down as impolite and anomalous, with the same sort of “This is not us” language that’s circulating today. Charlottesville was a beautiful town full of good white people who believed in political progress, and if people of color could just hold tight and respect that, we wouldn’t have to make anyone uncomfortable. Everything would be just fine.

We are seeing now what emerges from the American fetish for tradition, which is, in part, a fetish for the authority of the rich white male. While I was at U.V.A., the fact that slaves had built the school was hardly discussed, and the most prominent acknowledgment that Jefferson was a slave owner came on Valentine’s Day, when signs went up all over campus that said “TJ ♥s Sally.” The town has been repeatedly, publicly wracked with awful tragedies—murders, kidnappings—centering on white female victims, but when the same things happen to black women in town, it barely makes the news. (In the exhaustive aftermath that followed Rolling Stone’s discredited story of fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, hardly anyone thought to mention that the first rape known to have occurred on the campus was the gang rape of a seventeen-year-old slave.) There is a racial slant in Charlottesville’s policing: consider the department’s stop-and-frisk numbers, or the brutal assault by Alcohol and Beverage Control officers on a man named Martese Johnson, in 2015. And yet, for much of Saturday, as white men carried assault weapons and brandished symbols of catastrophic violence, the police stood by calmly; at one point, they retreated from the fray. In this respect, the spectacle succeeded in proving the ongoing reality of white supremacy in America. The message is sickening and unmistakable. Black demonstrators protesting the murder of teen-agers are met with tanks and riot gear; white demonstrators protesting the unpopularity of Nazi and Confederate ideology are met with politesse. [Continue reading…]

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