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In what is perhaps a sad sign of our still-racist times, outspoken Indiana lawyer and prosecutor Tony Zirkle, who attended the Naval Academy and has a Georgetown University degree, is running in the Republican party primary as a candidate for Congress in Indiana’s 2nd Congressional District. According to news reports, Zirkle openly asserts that:

whites are victims of a “genocide,” that the races should be segregated into different states and that pornography is a Jewish plot against women. . . . On top of all that, Zirkle accepted an invitation to address a group of swastika-wearing, Sieg-Heiling Nazi party members at a celebration of what would have been Adolf Hitler’s 119th birthday on April 20 in Chicago — birthday cake and all.

The news report continues:

The personal-injury lawyer says he’s running for Congress to combat “the genocide of the white race” that pornography is causing — an “unholy pornocaust” against white Christian women. “We now have a small army of male black porn stars that are sifting through five, ten, fifteen thousand women,” he said. “One man can now genocide the wombs of thousands of women,” infecting them with sexually transmitted diseases that leave them barren. He calls it “Porn mule womb slaughter . . . the most effective weapon of mass destruction.”

This is right out of the most extreme version of the white racial frame. We see clearly how central “dangerous” black men are to white minds like that of Zirkle. Well, a reader might say that he is very unusual and has likely been rejected by almost all Republicans. Not exactly. He got 30 percent of the vote in the 2006 Republican primary. Moreover, the news account notes that:

. . . he doesn’t think he is too far out of the Republican mainstream. . . . He believes the solution to STDs and out-of-wedlock births is to separate blacks and whites into segregated states, but he says that’s fully in the tradition of the party. “The original Republican party” felt the same way, he said. “Abraham Lincoln called for African-Americans to be deported back to Africa.”

Like many confused white men, he seems to be focused on black men–even though the issues of STDs and out of wedlock births, significant issues in white America, obviously have nothing to do with black men (who are already living in a very segregated society thanks to whites). And he has the story of Lincoln a bit wrong. Lincoln did favor encouraging African Americans freed from slavery to go back to Africa and colonize, but he did not call for forcible deportation. Although a complex man, Lincoln was often white supremacist in his framing of African Americans and of U.S. society, an issue that most Americans today do indeed lack information on.

Republican party officials have officially endorsed another Indiana candidate, Luke Puckett, and disavowed Zirkle. Yet, he is likely to garner many white Republican votes.

Zirkle is not alone in his radical views. Cliff Schecter, a political commentator and columnist for Knight Ridder, has pointed to other political ties between Republicans and white supremacists:

From the many years [Senator John McCain] rejected a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (pretty much the entire 70s and 80s) to his serial flip-flops on the Confederate Flag in 2000 . . . to his close association with a white supremacist named Richard Quinn, who found himself hired as a political advisor by McCain in 2000 (and still is from what I can tell) after openly praising David Duke (he called him a “maverick”) selling t-shirts praising the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and writing/editing for a magazine (Southern Partisan) that reminded us that slave masters just really weren’t all that bad.

These stories have gotten, compared to the Dr. Wright and Senator Obama relationship, little mass media attention. Apparently for those who control the media it is more OK for a U.S. political party to be associated with avowed white supremacists than with a Black minister (like Dr. Wright) who has attacked that white supremacy and the white racism that much research shows still undergirds this society.

There’s quite a controversy brewing within academic circles about a tenured full professor of psychology at Cal State U. Long Beach, Kevin McDonald, that raises important questions about the creation of knowledge, the academic enterprise and race. McDonald, who is an evolutionary psychologist, contends that Jews are a separate race driven by genetics and evolution to band together, both for “group survival” and to undercut white, Western culture. Further, he asserts that the Third Reich’s Nazi movement developed specifically to counter “Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy.” He claims to be “agnostic” about whether or not the Holocaust happened, and yet, testified on behalf of infamous Holocaust-denier, David Irving. Not coincidentally, McDonald says that he testified in support of Irving because he was motivated by a desire to defend academic freedom, not deny the Holocaust. Although McDonald includes a disavowal on his website that he does not “condone white racial superiority, genocide, Nazism or Holocaust denial,” his actions - and his research - suggest otherwise, as Scott Jaschik demonstrates in his piece in Inside Higher Ed (Feb.14). Jaschik points out that a favorable story about McDonald’s work appears on Vanguard News Network, a white supremacist website. And, in Heidi Beirich’s thoroughly devastating piece on McDonald for SPLC’s Intelligence Report, she notes that his work is more popular than Mein Kampf with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In fact, David Duke draws heavily on McDonald’s work for his own antisemitic and racist autobiography, My Awakening, and the condensed version, Jewish Supremacism. And, according to Beirich’s report, in 2004 white supremacists David Duke (former Klansman and Louisiana legislator), Don Black, Jamie Kelso (of Stormfront, the main online portal for white supremacy) and Kevin Alfred Strom (of the neo-Nazi National Vanguard) all attended a ceremony in which McDonald was honored by The Occidental Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. McDonald is pictured here receiving the award, alongside Virginia Abernethy, a self-described “white separatist.”


As you might expect, the controversy is widely being framed as an issue that tests the bounds of academic freedom. This is both an obvious, and a deeply problematic, way to frame this particular case. On the one hand, McDonald is an academic with tenure (and a promotion by his peers to full professorship) who has controversial and unpopular views and should, within the rules of the academy, be allowed to express those views.


On the other hand, framing McDonald’s vile “scholarship” as within the bounds of what is acceptable and even protected within the academy is deeply problematic given the context of his position within a public university with a commitment to human rights, diversity, and to offering an equal educational environment for all who enroll there. I’m generally quite critical of absolutist defenses of “free speech,” and am persuaded by critiques of the first amendment grounded in critical race theory.


Yet, I find this particular case vexing Continue Reading »

On Sunday, I caught one of the featured panels at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, which I wrote a little about here. The panel featured several people involved creating “user-generated content” including the engaging cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch (from Kansas State University), who created the mesmerizing and wildly popular Web 2.0 video; Sara Pollack, YouTube’s film manager; Sameer Padania from Witness, introducing the new participatory online video site for human rights organizations The Hub; and Michael Smolens, founder and CEO of dotSUB, a sort of wikipedia-like translation site for films; and, Jenny Douglas, introducing her new site called KarmaTube. While the panelists tended to focus on the democratizing and emancipatory potential of digital video and video sharing sites, in the Q&A afterward there seemed to be some desire to talk about the negative potential of the medium. For example, Sameer Padania screened a horrific video of police brutality from Egypt that is intended to highlight human rights abuses and prompt action by people opposed to such abuses. I wondered about the people who click on such horrific videos to enjoy them or laugh at them; and, I wondered about the ways that seemingly straightforward “video evidence” like the Rodney King video, get discredited by oppressive political regimes, like the Egyptian police or LAPD. This view was certainly not well-represented on the panel, but to be fair, that wasn’t the intention.

Despite the up-with-people quality of a lot of discussion about digital video, the reality is that there’s no shortage of people using these sorts of digital video sharing sites for nefarious ends, among them neo-Nazis, skinheads and white supremacists who want to use digital video to spread racist propaganda. For example, CurrentTV (Al Gore’s venture and my current default cable channel) is running a video “pod” (their term for a short digital video segment) called “From Russia With Hate,” about neo-Nazis in Russia who are filming racist attacks on immigrants, then posting these digital videos online. (I’m posting the link but not the video because it contains violent scenes that I don’t want to reproduce here.) This is a well-done bit of investigative journalism by the reporter Christof Putzel, and while these are quite disturbing to watch, the intention of the filmmaker is clearly to be critical of the neo-Nazis. The CurrentTV site shows that approximately a month after posting, the video has received 3,844 views and there are 32 comments. All the comments are supportive of the filmmaker’s point of view, and several even remarking on their “unease” with voting “for” the video on the website as they fear this implicates them somehow in the neo-Nazi violence.

I raise this example here to address some of the nuances of online video for addressing racism in the digital era and offer some complexity to the panel presentation from Sunday. On the one hand, Putzel’s investigative journalism and digital video distributed through cable networks and online via CurrentTV offer support for the argument about the democratizing and emancipatory potential of online digital video. This approach both highlights the problem of racist violence and offers people an opportunity to take some, albeit limited, action by posting comments in support of the critique of neo-Nazism. And, as Putzel mentions near the end of the report, one of the central figures he interviews is later arrested for “inciting ethnic hatred,” so there is some material result of his reporting in the effort to stop neo-Nazi violence.

On the other hand, there is a way in which the very possibility of digital video and the presence of digital video cameras gives rise to racist violence. Several of the scenes that are shown in Putzel’s piece have clearly been staged for the (neo-Nazi’s) digital camera. In one scene of racist violence on a train, the digital camera operator is already in place near the (eventual) victim of the violence, and stands waiting, filming both the unsuspecting victim and the approaching gang of neo-Nazis. While it is possible that this violence might have happened without the presence of the camera (or the potential to upload it), the fact that the violence happens in such a seemingly staged manner implicates the digital video in the violence. And, in the gravest negative consequence, after the arrest of one of the figures in Putzel’s piece, another neo-Nazi video is released in which two immigrants are killed on camera and this is uploaded to the web. No one has been arrested for these murders; and, to date, no one knows who made the digital video of these racist murders.

Several of the panelists on Sunday mentioned that we are still in the early days, indeed “way before the beginning,” of the convergence of digital video, Internet and television. I couldn’t agree more. And, what this means in terms of racism, and resisting racism, is still unfolding.

I blogged recently over here about the overt sort of cyber racism of the backlash against the Jena 6 and their families. This is kind of overt cyber racism is typical of the white supremacists like Bill White who is targeting these families by posting their addresses online. In a more subtle form of cyber racism akin to white liberal racism, the progressive (predominantly white) blogs have been largely silent on the Jena 6 story, as Pam notes on her blog, Pam’s House Blend.  As I argue in a forthcoming piece called “Race, Civil Rights & Hate Speech in the Digital Era,” in the MacArthur series on Digital Media & Learning, white supremacy has entered the digital era. And now, cyberspace is a contested terrain in the landscape of racial politics in the U.S. and globally.

And, as if to illustrate the previous post I made about the rise of anti-semitism globally, neo-Nazis have been arrested in Israel, the New York Times is reporting.

Eight young men, ages 16 to 21, were arrested between July 23 and Sept. 6 on charges of attacking “religious Jews, homosexuals, Asians and other foreigners.” All are immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union.

One police official quoted in the story speaks to the incredulity many of us feel at this story when he says: “It’s difficult to believe that Nazi-ideology sympathizers can exist in Israel, but it’s a fact,” Revital Almog, the police official who directed the investigation, told Israel Radio.

Police also reported that these neo-Nazis “had contacts with neo-Nazi groups abroad” but they don’t say how. I think it’s safe to assume that they were in contact via the Internet with these other groups. And, the police also found videos of the youths attacking their victims, which raises some interesting questions about hate crimes and spectatorship. Perhaps the original hate crime (attacking a victim based on identity) is only satisfying for the perpetrators if they can watch themselves enacting this violent display, or, more probably, watch others watching them in this position of power.