We Cannot Turn A Blind Eye To The Purveyors Of White Nationalism

The Apocalypse by Hieronymus Bosch

White supremacy, dressed up in the modern, Internet garb of “white nationalism,” has not returned to America; it never left. How I wish it had…how I wish that all of us who believed in our heart of hearts that by 2019 what I saw—what my generation saw and spoke against, protested against, fought hard against, and sometimes died against—50 years ago would have been carried away by the cleansing winds of history, deposited in the deserts of dead and desiccated memories, and covered up by the sands of time. We know this to be a futile dream, a dream of avenging angels standing with the oppressed, their swords of righteousness cutting down the haters and procreators of racial villainy. It seems all our socially conscious efforts to redeem white America’s injustices toward minorities—to speak truth to ill-gotten power and falsely legitimized authority—were little more than ephemeral gestures, like seeds of good will scattered on granitic rocks of white supremacy.

I lived next door to it in Shreveport, Louisiana, when I was 15 and young men were being lynched a few hundred miles away; I saw it on “White Only/Colored Only” signs in too many places to remember now; I saw it on the face of Mayor Daley at the Democratic National Convention; I saw it on the faces of white men and women when John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., were assassinated; I saw it at the entrances to colleges where young Black men and women were denied entry; on the brave posture of a small Black girl on her way to an “integrated” school; I saw it wherever Black men and women were being beaten and jailed and red-lined; I saw it on the faces of Lincoln Rockwell's Nazi followers in Arlington in the late 60s; I saw it on the faces of countless Southern governors, senators and congressmen when I was on the Hill and working in the news media. I saw it on the faces of too many Northern, New England, Midwestern, and Far-Western politicians as well. I saw it on the faces of classmates at a private boarding school in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a Jesuit school in Louisiana, a middle school in Lincoln, Nebraska, and at a high school in Northern Virginia (as progressive as it was for its time, it could not filter out the ignorance of racial animosity).

Many of us thought at the time that America had reached a tipping point when Lyndon Johnson (as flawed a man as there ever was), used the power of the presidency to push through civil rights legislation. We thought, naively perhaps, the songs of our time—Blowin’ in the Wind, Turn, Turn, Turn, The Times They Are a-Changin’, We Shall Overcome, Teach Your Children, and so many more—were beginning to inoculate the public against racial animosity, social divisiveness, economic inequality, and the cancer-like disease of white supremacy, nationalism, and hatred.

I admit I was not completely “listening” to what the protests were all about—I was “hearing” but not listening. I was reacting, not pro-acting. When I first heard Nina Simone sing Langston Hughes’s poem, The Backlash Blues, in the late 1960s, I could not fully appreciate the depths of those lyrics:

Mr. Backlash, Mr. Backlash
Just who do think I am
You raise my taxes, freeze my wages
And send my son to Vietnam

You give me second class houses

And second class schools

Do you think that all us colored folks

Are just second class fools

Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you

With the backlash blues

When I try to find a job

To earn a little cash

All you got to offer

Is your mean old white backlash

But the world is big

Big and bright and round

And it’s full of folks like me

Who are black, yellow, beige and brown

Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you

With the backlash blues

I could not fully appreciate those lyrics because I was: a) White; b) privileged and comfortable; c) never going to Vietnam because my lottery number was so high (364), and I was in college; and d) convinced that the world was turning toward, not away from, the notions of white supremacy and white nationalism, because, after all, weren’t we all holding hands and singing songs and marching and becoming believers? My teenage self sat in a coffee shop in Arlington, with my 12-string Gibson, and sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “This Land is Your Land,” and even “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime?” in the hopeless imagining that I was a part of the folk era that was contributing to a new world a-coming.  

Even though Steven Still’s song, “For What It’s Worth,” made famous by the Buffalo Springfield, was not actually about Vietnam, it’s opening line “There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear,” and its concluding refrain, “It’s time we stop, hey, what’s that sound, everybody look what’s going down,” transcended the actual event of police action against curfew-evaders on the Sunset Strip in 1966, to become a mantra for those wishful thinkers raging against violent authority.

"Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

Step out of line, the man come and take you away."

As I sit here writing, I look at that last line and think of all the Black men and women and children, all the immigrants, all those who don’t match the right profile, who have been pulled over, handcuffed, jailed or threatened with deportation…and I know there never was, and aren’t now, any songs that will change the minds of those who seek supremacy over others.

Still, we all have our own songs that inspired—and continue to inspire—us to think we are beating back the darkness, anger, and hatred. I know some of those 1960s and ‘70s lyrics seem, today, to be trite and ignorant and rose-colored; but if you did not live through that time, if you are younger and look at us older folks as if we were just hapless and clueless kids, you are selling us short because we did really, truly, honestly believe we were pulling down on a transformative lever. Why did we believe that?

My lever reference is from a statement attributed to Archimedes, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Our lever was political potential; our fulcrum was national awareness, and the motive power to pull down on that lever was the effort of the combined mass of all of us who believed in our unified ability to move the nation away from hate and toward peace, to lift the world we knew into a better place. Laugh at our innocence if you will, but so many of us embraced a mutual commitment to create a better world for the next generations.  

What we didn’t count on—what so many of us believed could not transmogrify, in the grotesque sense of the word, over the next 50 years—was the sub-surface roiling of white hatred, white xenophobia, white fear, white insecurity-turned-bitter. We thought our marches trampled it; we thought our newly-enlightened educational systems and civil rights breakthroughs had quashed it; we thought we’d left it by the roadside to wither and disassemble and disintegrate. Let entropy take it down to its fundamental atoms and the absolute zero of existence.

It's not gone. It wasn’t just living in the shadows, either; don't fool yourselves. It's been as close as your grocery store, your church, your courts, your strip-mall restaurants and dry cleaners, your children's schools. Your polling places.

One only has to recall the white-shrouded candidacy of Roy Moore in Alabama, or the presidentially-commended viciousness of Arizona’s Joe Arpaio, or the comments by Fox’s Jeanine Pirro directed toward Representative Ilhan Omar's wearing of a hijab, or the gutlessness of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to push back against his party’s reluctance to call out the pusillanimous and pustulating specters of racism, misogyny, educational and economic inequality, and white privilege wherever they skulk in America.

As I was drafting this blog, an old friend of mine…a far wiser man whose intellect and international experience soars above mine, emailed me to share a note his niece wrote about this subject. I quote it here:

“I absolutely agree that the terrors of white supremacy are nothing new, and yet, with each new iteration of its horrors, I still find myself shocked and gutted. 

White supremacy in America isn’t shocking, but what IS deeply dismaying to me is the moral cowardice and cynical self-interest of our elected officials who are, for one political calculation or another, not taking meaningful and immediate action to recognize this presidency as the TRUE national emergency that it is and to issue full-throated daily condemnations of it, and to begin impeachment proceedings immediately. 

The media, as usual, remains shockingly and appallingly complicit in normalizing and downplaying the truth of the white nationalist scourge that has become terrifyingly emboldened because of this president, and even the most liberal-leaning media still treat the subject with kid gloves and refuse to name it as the single greatest threat to our standing as a nation in the world, and to our ability to survive as a nation at all. 

It’s clear to me that the gun-obsessed white supremacists in this country are itching to re-litigate the Civil War, and think they can achieve a different outcome this time; what remains unclear to me is what the rest of us are going to do about it.” 

I agree with the comment about media complicity and normalization of horrific events. It is something, speaking as a former newsman, that both baffles and stings me…and I’m sure my colleagues with whom I came of age in the business, all agree.

Many of us remember when the media writ large was generally honorable and/or reliable in reporting events as they were, even with the inherent biases of publishers and producers.  Yes, there were yellow journals and scandal sheets that preyed on a sensation-seeking audience, but nothing then compares to the graphic, gleeful, almost hate-extolling media outlets of the 21^st century. The rise of the Internet, the uncontrollable spewing of social media, the inflammatory rhetoric and stiletto-like flicks of dehumanizing language that are broadcast from the very wells of the House and Senate floors sadden me as they do millions more of us here in the States and around the world. 

It seems sometimes to me that America has become a gyroscope no longer fully spun up and stable and precise in its position. Rather we are spinning down, tilting, wobbling, wandering aimlessly across the global tabletop. This directionless amble away from our founding principles can only lead to a terrible, inescapable conclusion—Americans may not be the ones capable of righting ourselves to our original image, becoming vulnerable, instead, to the rough hands of others who see in our instability and teetering, an opportunity to use our weakness for their own designs. I fear very much for that. The nationalism that awaits will not be ours if our leaders continue to ignore what is needed to re-spin the promise of democracy; not a white democracy, not a monied democracy, not a privileged democracy, but a fair, just, inclusive, responsible, and accountable democracy.

We must resolve to recognize white supremacy, or white nationalism, for its manifold appearances in our society.

It poses as poverty; it poses as privilege; it poses as stupidity, and it poses as knowledge. It poses as the best of the past and it poses as the hope for the future. It poses in rags and it poses as high fashion. It poses with a sneer and it poses with a smile. It runs for office on the fumes of impossible promises, and it gets elected on the sad dreams of misbegotten glory of fools and haters and idiots.

What happened in New Zealand is what happens in our hometowns when innocents of the wrong color, faith, ability or mere happenstance of birth are mowed down like spring grass, under the cruel, and hand-sharpened blades of hate. It is nothing new.

No, white supremacy has always been with us...it only needed a champion of the highest rank--a seemingly untouchable torchbearer--to give it the brand of righteousness it has been seeking, a sense of entitlement and empowerment to lay its atrocities before us...unafraid of consequence, because its master holds the highest office and lets loose the dogs of discord and death with his every breath.

If we want, truly, to banish those nationalist hounds of Hades…each a Cerberus intent on disemboweling all national comity, truth, justice, economic stability, equality, and electoral fairness…we must stop recognizing, nominating, and electing men and women whose goals are to normalize and perpetuate the white-power policies of the past and who seek office only to establish a perverted form of executive and legislative authority over a cowed and eyes-averted nation.