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Racism & Antiracism: New Research
Posted by: | CommentsFor the annual ASA conference in Atlanta, the session on racism and antiracism (organized by Eileen O’Brien) was divided into two, held back-to-back in the same room. With my presentation in the second of the two, I had a chance to catch the discussion portion of the first session, with Charles Gallagher present. As expected, the room was packed (and unfortunately most left after their session had ended). I was (at least somewhat) taken aback at how optimistic Gallagher was with the alleged absence of racism among young white people today. I wish more had been in attendance for my session that followed (including Gallagher), or that I had presented my material for that session, because my research paints a very different picture of young whites than what Gallagher sees.
Granted, I’m not saying that young whites today are tripping over themselves to join the Klan or anything. But a complete absence of racism? In my presentation titled “‘It’s not on the news, so…’: Ambivalence towards White Supremacy Among White College Students,” I presented evidence about how white college students go out of their way to not see white supremacist activities, while defending their right to exist and even flourish. They seem to feel it necessary to say that white supremacists and their organizations are a serious problem in our society, yet contradict themselves when they call them impotent, ridiculous, limited to the south, etc. This contradiction creates an ambivalence towards these groups, and whether intended or not, this ambivalence towards white supremacy assists in efforts to protect white supremacist speech.
I mentioned a couple of examples from the interviews that I found to be most intriguing. The first was Odella, who told me of an incident involving “good ole southern boys” burning “a black doll” in effigy on the grounds of her high school. She immediately minimized the incident, saying it had been resolved and called it “an isolated event.” Incredibly, later on when discussing the significance of white supremacists and their organizations today, she said:
“I don’t think white supremacy is a serious problem in our society, I know it exists, but um (.) maybe I just don’t see it (.) like maybe in other places it’s more prominent, but…”
After asking her if that incident at her high school constituted white supremacy, she answered “yeah, probably” but said it was “spur of the moment” and that these good ole boys had simply made a bad decision.
The other example came from Troy, who rationalized discriminatory behavior in the pursuit of profit. When he recalled his “training” as a club bouncer he provided extensive details on who he was supposed to keep out of the establishment: baggy jeans, Fubu clothes, and Timbaland boots, and most of all, black skin. Although he seemed to struggle with the racist thinking of his boss at one time, he said “it sounds terrible but it’s kind of like the line from The Godfather ‘It’s business, not personal,’” and saying it’s alright if “they’ve got bills to pay.” He admitted that the whole point of the dress codes those establishments enforce are a way to keep blacks out (“because they can’t just come out and say ‘all right black people [don’t] come in’ so they have to make a dress code and basically they find stuff that applied to [the] black crowd and say ‘you can’t come in wearing that’”).
Although these are just a couple of examples from the research, there were many others that showed young white people are generally ambivalent towards white supremacists and their organizations. I believe that this attitude makes it virtually impossible to get the needed public policies and societal resources to fight these groups and to protect the rights of those they seek to harm. I wish I were as optimistic as Gallagher is about our young white children today, but for now I say wait 10 or 20 years and see where they will be and how they behave.
Political Candidates Now Running as Open White Supremacists
Posted by: | CommentsInteresting piece over at the Huffington Post about a white supremacist , Ryan J. Murdough, who is running for a seat in the New Hampshire State House on a platform of hate.
Several things come to mind. First of all, the organization “American Third Position” is but one more burgeoning white supremacist organization advocating a racialized version of grassroots populism. This group states that it is “represent[ing] the political interests of White Americans, because no one else will.” I do not need to explain how this logic is faulty, as Joe Feagin has already outlined this on this blog and in his most recent book The White Racial Frame. As Feagin states, there is already a party that represents the political interests of white people and it is called the current Republican Party.
More disturbing, however, is the twisting of civil rights language for the furtherance of white racism. For instance, Murdough’s equating of diversity initiatives as “anti-white” legislation. This is a reactionary technique that whites have long used to fight against the hard-won gains of people of color. And as Feagin also outlines in his book, the ascension of “post-racial” rhetoric only exacerbates these sentiments.
Murdough, and the A3P he represents, are similar to the Tea Party Movement and the emerging Glenn Beck-ers, all of whom seem to think the language of civil rights applies to perceived white racial disenfranchisement. The appearance of privileging people of color is enough to set the white racial frame in motion, rationalizing the undeserved privileges that white people have always enjoyed in this country and denying equal opportunities to non-white groups (who are seen as less deserving and inherently not allowed to reap the same rewards).
Finally, as mentioned in this blog many times before, this sort of white anger is particularly virulent when it comes to the Tea Party movement. This group seeks to re-establish/protect/maintain white racial hegemony in politics, ideology, and culture. That is the political subtext to the “Take back our nation” speeches and placards they carry. Even Glenn Beck, with all his “liberty and justice rhetoric” is but a white racial zealot fighting to maintain his privilege. Much like the above mentioned white supremacist, Beck plans to use the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement for his personal (and collective white racial) gain. His “Take America Tour,” which will commence with a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 2010 (the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” Speech) is in my opinion, blasphemy to the extreme.
Unfortunately, the sentiments of Murdough, Beck, and Tea Partiers will continue so long as the white racial frame remains supplanted in the political consciousness and as long as neoliberal doctrine continues to avoid discussing the reality of racial inequality in America.
Sen. Robert Byrd’s Passing and Thoughts on His KKK Legacy
Posted by: | CommentsSince the passing of Sen. Robert Byrd, his life has become a kind Rorschach Test that allows people to say what they’re thinking about race. Given Byrd’s legacy as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the U.S.’s homegrown terrorist organization, and a member of the Senate, I’ve been curious about how various media outlets would cover the news.
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photo credit: Nevada Tumbleweed!)
The right-leaning blogosphere has been quick to point out what they see as the hypocrisy of a left-leaning mainstream media for “pushing hagiographic narratives” about Robert Byrd’s past and for failing to call out Byrd for his KKK past, while left-leaning journos and bloggers have grabbed onto the trope that Byrd’s story was one of racial “redemption” as marking “the end of an era in (so-called) race relations.”
Still other observers have parlayed Byrd’s handling of his KKK legacy into an example for business leaders to follow, as in “5 Things Robert Byrd’s Life Teaches Us About Leadership.” (#3. “If your decisions were bad enough, they’ll haunt you to the end. Although Byrd changed over time, the Klan would haunt him until the end.”)
Lots of eulogies are like this one at Politico.com, which calls Byrd a “venerable institution” and this one at the New York Times which calls him a “pillar” - both referring to Byrd’s career in the Senate. This is completely understandable given Byrd’s record as the longest-serving senator. From my perspective, his vote against the Iraq war was a heroic stance and one I was heartened to see at the time. But it’s his years as not just a member, but a leader of the Ku Klux Klan that I want to address here because I think that legacy can tell us something important about racism in the U.S. Here’s the account from the New York Times obituary (June 28, 2010):
In the early 1940s, he organized a 150-member klavern, or chapter, of the Klan in Sophia, W.Va., and was chosen its leader. Afterward, Joel L. Baskin, the Klan’s grand dragon for the region, suggested that Mr. Byrd use his “talents for leadership” by going into politics. “Suddenly, lights flashed in my mind!” Mr. Byrd later wrote. “Someone important had recognized my abilities.”
Mr. Byrd insisted that his klavern had never conducted white-supremacist marches or engaged in racial violence. He said in his autobiography that he had joined the Klan because he shared its anti-Communist creed and wanted to be associated with the leading people in his part of West Virginia. He conceded, however, that he also “reflected the fears and prejudices” of the time.
Byrd apologized repeatedly for his involvement with the KKK as a “sad mistake.” However, he was largely allowed to skate on a number of issues related to his membership in the Klan. This is a reprieve that, frankly, would never happen today. For example, it’s not really clear exactly when he left the Klan, nor was he pressed to disavow his views when he went from being an official member of the KKK to when he was an upstanding (conservative) member of the Senate. While praise has been heaped on him from the left since his passing, his KKK-inspired views influenced his actions well into his tenure in the Senate.
In 1964, he voted against the Civil Rights Act, which he declared was a violation of “States’ Rights.” And, in 1967, Byrd voted against Thurgood Marshall’s Supreme Court nomination. Byrd even approached J. Edgar Hoover (director of the FBI) to see if Marshall had any Communist ties that could ruin his nomination. This is especially ironic today when Thurgood Marshall’s legacy as a Supreme Court justice is under attack by Senator Kyl in the Kagan hearings. Kyl and the Republicans want to go back to a regressive stance, in many ways replicating the very politics of the Citizen’s Council and the KKK.
In a different supreme court vote in 1991, Byrd voted against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and said, quite famously, “I believe Anita Hill.” Perhaps even more remarkably, Byrd called out Clarence Thomas for his deeply cynical use of the term “high tech lynching” to refer to the confirmation hearings and basically accused him of “playing the race card.” Oh, the irony runs deep and wide here.
As late as 2001, Byrd got in a lot of trouble for an interview for “Fox News Sunday” in which he said the following when asked about “race relations”:
“They are much, much better than they’ve ever been in my lifetime,” Byrd said, but added that he believed people talk about race too much.
“My old mom told me, ‘Robert, you can’t go to heaven if you hate anybody.’ We practice that. There are white niggers. I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time. I’m going to use that word. We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I’d just as soon quit talking about it so much.”
Of course, what he got into trouble for is the use of a slur – but it’s what’s at the end of the quote that’s telling, “I’d just as soon quit talking about it so much.” In many ways, this marks the real move of Sen. Byrd into the mainstream of race-talk in the U.S. This is where most people are around race in the U.S., they’d just as soon quit talking about it so much. And, that goes double for any discussion having to do with actual KKK or white supremacist groups, people in the U.S. prefer to not talk about these and pretend they don’t exist.
By 2008, Sen. Byrd was endorsing a fellow Senator, Barack Obama, for President. This unlikely friendship is the almost irresistible coda to Byrd’s life, as if to say, “it doesn’t matter that he was a leader in the KKK, he was friends with Obama.” This friendship is what ultimately marks Sen. Byrd as “not racist” in the public imagination.
But, the whole narrative of “redemption” rings a bit hollow to me. It’s not that I don’t think redemption is possible, I do. I’m just not persuaded by the evidence in Byrd’s case.
To me, what’s compelling in Byrd’s life is that he appeared to at least give some thought — more than most privileged white folks do — about race. He seemed to make some move toward transformation of his own views on race, however flawed, self-serving, and incomplete those efforts were. Yet, we actually learned so little of what this process was like and what drove him to engage in this process. Even in his own account of his KKK leadership he attributes the pull to “anti-Communism” rather than anything to do with race, or his own racism. Of course, all is made whole in the end because of his friendship with one (extraordinary) black man.
There is much that’s lost, however, in the stories being told about Sen. Byrd’s legacy – from the right and from the left - in the days since his passing. From the right, there’s a harangue that it’s “hypocritical” to call out racism among some politicians (e.g., Strom Thurmond, Trent Lott – R) but not others (e.g., Robert Byrd-D). And, indeed it is. But this doesn’t amount to “racism” on the left.
On the left, the hagiography obfuscates what is actually a complicated, nuanced, imperfect story about race, racism and civil rights, and replaces it with one that’s denuded of the ugliness of actual racism.
The facts of Sen. Byrd’s life are that he was both a leader of the KKK and a leader in the Senate. His views changed some, but not completely, as he moved from one of these American institutions to the other. And, for a considerable portion of his life – and the better part of the 20th century – there was considerable overlap between his views in the KKK and his views as Senator. The sooner we come to terms with Sen. Byrd’s KKK legacy, and the ways that white supremacy are woven into the very fabric of this nation’s institutions, the sooner we can set to work dismantling the vestiges of that legacy.
More on Rand Paul and Racism Issues
Posted by: | CommentsThis Dailykos blogger lists these Rand Paul events. The Maddow discussion was blogged on previously by Adia and others, but there is more…… The plot thickens:
Strike #1. Rand Paul’s campaign spokesperson Chris Hightower was fired for posting “Happy Nigger day” with Lynching pics at Facebook along with posts describing how he liked to go to the local mall in KKK garb.
Strike #2. On The Rachel Maddow’s Show and NPR Rand Paul, repeatedly, objects to Title II of the Civil Rights Act, stating that Businesses should be able to discriminate based on race. Upon learning of the controversy he had stirred by airing his pro discrimination views, he backtracks and goes into hiding/damage control.
And now Strike #3. Rand Paul has received funds and promotion from white supremacists, Neo-Nazi’s and KKK leadership via Stormfront.org
Is this US political scene getting closer to tragic political events in Germany in early 1930s?
Illiterate Rand Paul’s Racist America: A Recollection of Real Jim Crow
Posted by: | CommentsHere is a personal testimony and historical accounting about the world the openly segregationist Rand Paul and his (literally) “Confederates” wish to see in the US, one where whites (especially white men ) trample the rights of Americans of color and others to dignity and equality guaranteed by all serious bills of human rights. This is by an African American blogger at DailyKos, Meteor Blades, and right on target.
If Paul and his confederates want to overcome their extreme and apparently intentional historical illiteracy and racist philosophy, they might start by reading some of this serious history of Jim Crow, here and here.
White Supremacist Tied to Arizona Anti-Immigration Law
Posted by: | CommentsWhite supremacist, J.T. Ready, is one of the key players behind Arizona’s new anti-immigration law. J.T. Ready lead a recent neo-Nazi rally in Riverside, CA. Ready, a resident of Mesa, Arizona, is also one of the leaders of the anti-immigration movement in Arizona and a key figure behind the recent legislation. Rachel Maddow reported some of this in her segment on April 22 (clip is 9:08, bit about J.T. Ready is at about 3:20):
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As John Carlos Frey noted earlier in April, hate crimes against Latinos in Arizona are up 40%, yet John McCain and his primary challenger, JD Hayworth, claim they are tough on undocumented immigrants and neither of them have the courage to denounce the racially motivated legislation.
The involvement of J.T. Ready is more than a case of “one bad apple” in an otherwise good system. J.T. Ready – an avowed white supremacist – has a political agenda that is completely consistent with the mainstream conservative movement in Arizona. This overlap between the extreme white supremacist movement and the more mainstream expressions of whiteness is a point that I noted this in my earlier book, (White Lies, Routledge, 1997). While most want to dismiss white supremacists as ‘fringe’ groups that have nothing to do with the mainstream, in fact, the ideology of these groups is much closer to core American values than most choose to recognize.
Antiracist Action and Lives Lost: William L. Moore
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At DailyKos today Blueness reminds us of how brave Americans can be in the struggle for racial equality. On this day, some 47 years ago the courageous William Moore, a postal worker and civil rights activist from Baltimore began his walk from Chattanooga to Jackson, Mississippi. He had a letter for one of our leading autocratic, white supremacist politicians, heading up a totalitarian Jim Crow system, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi– a letter pressing him for racial desegregation. This was Moore’s third freedom walk:
On Moore’s final walk, as soon as he crossed the state line into Alabama, he was assailed by white motorists who denounced him as a “nigger-lover,” and pelted him with rocks. On April 23, radio station WGAD in Gadsden, Alabama received an anonymous phone tip as to Moore’s location. Reporter Charlie Hicks drove out to find Moore walking along a rural stretch of Highway 11 near Attalla. Moore told Hicks, “I intend to walk right up to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi and ring his door bell. Then I’ll hand him my letter.” …. Less than an hour after Hicks left him, a motorist found Moore’s body about a mile farther down the road, shot twice in the head at close range with a .22 caliber rifle. The gun was traced to one Floyd Simpson, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, with whom Moore had discussed integration, interracial marriage, and religion earlier in the day.
“I don’t see how anybody,” Simpson later said, “could believe in such things as intermarriage between the white and Negro races unless he was being paid for it. I told him they are having trouble in Birmingham, and I advised him to turn back as he would never get through Birmingham.”
Moore’s letter to Governor Barnet thad this message:
the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights. . .. Be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.
Blueness continues with the follow-up:
Over the next month, 29 other people, black and white, tried to complete Moore’s walk. All carried signs reading “Mississippi Or Bust.” All were arrested and jailed.
And of course there was little white support, even from “liberal sources” for such protests, something we should not forget either:
The New York Times opined that Moore had died on a “pitifully naive pilgrimage”; two years previously, in the wake of brutal assaults on Freedom Riders, a Gallup poll found that 63% of white Americans who were aware of white civil-rights activists, like Moore and the Freedom Riders, disapproved of them. Just weren’t ready yet, most white folk.
Many whites still are not prepared for a truly desegregated society. Moore was 36 years old, a CORE member and veteran civil rights activist, and he was white. (see here).
Analysis: “The McVeigh Tapes”
Posted by: | CommentsTonight, MSNBC aired “The McVeigh Tapes,” a television documentary about the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Lou Michel, author of American Terrorist, recorded the interviews with McVeigh while he was in prison awaiting execution. The description of the piece from MSNBC’s site says:
“Drawing from 45 hours of never-before-released interview audiotapes recorded during McVeigh’s prison stay, the film reveals the bomber’s descriptions of the planning and execution of the horrific attack and offers insight into how a decorated American soldier became a dangerous, anti-government terrorist.”
The show did much more of the former, focusing almost exclusively on “descriptions of the planning and execution of the horrific attack” and very little on “how a decorated American soldier” became a terrorist. The 2-hour news show was a standard re-enactment of the events leading up to the attack. There were two elements to the story that made it cable-television-worthy: 1) the audio tapes and 2) the computer graphics in which an actor played Tim McVeigh, and then graphic artists altered the face to look more or less like McVeigh. Personally, I found the computer graphics distracting (my partner said “it’s working for me,” so clearly, people disagree on how effective these were). The really compelling story at the heart of this, though, was the juxtaposition of McVeigh’s cold, emotionless voice recounting his actions set against the horrific damage done to the victims, many of them children. People today in Oklahoma City continue to walk through the pain that he left in their lives, either through injuries that linger or through the grief they continue to carry for loved ones. For his part, the McVeigh in the tapes is beyond remorseless, he’s “content and peaceful” that he has succeeded in carrying out his plot to take as many people with him as possible in his “state-assisted suicide.”
The events of April 19, 1995 are methodically retold here with little that’s actually new. There is an enormous amount of detail on how they (McVeigh and his accomplice Nichols) built the bomb inside the rented Ryder truck, so much detail in fact, that I winced while listening to it wondering if it were offering a blueprint for others watching the show. This reenactment is serviceable enough, as such things go, but not really compelling television. The reason that I, and I suspect millions of others, tuned in was for the second part of the tease – the “how a decorated American soldier” became a terrorist bit. This is where viewers with any interest in the racial ideology that motivated McVeigh will be disappointed because it is a story completely denuded of any discussion of race.
At the time of the bombing, Timothy McVeigh was not officially a member of any white supremacist group. Yet, he was radicalized by his reading of The Turner Diaries, a dystopian white supremacist novel written by William Pierce under the pseudonym “Andrew McDonald.” The Turner Diaries depicts a violent revolution and race war, that leads to the elimination of all Jews, non-whites and ‘white race traitors.’ In the week after the Oklahoma City bombing, an article in The New York Times called the novel “explicitly racist and anti-Semitic.” The article in The New York Times went on to note that the Oklahoma City bombing had been “foretold” in this “Bible of the Extreme Right.” One of the central ideas in The Turner Diaries and in white supremacist ideology is the equivalency of “government” with “Jewish interests,” or simply “Jews.” In fact, in this rhetoric the federal government is often referred to as “Z.O.G.” which stands for “Zionist Occupied Government.” The language about “anti-government” in white supremacist rhetoric is almost always code for “anti-Jewish.” A key theme in this racial ideology is that “Z.O.G.” is trying to ruin the white race by encouraging “race-mixing” (marriage and children across racial lines).
The importance of this text to McVeigh’s radicalization as a white supremacist terrorist cannot be underestimated. According to reports at the time and from monitoring organization, ADL, in the days before the bombing, McVeigh mailed a letter to his sister warning that “something big is going to happen,” and sent her an envelop with clippings from The Turner Diaries. When she learned of her brother’s arrest in connection with the bombing, McVeigh’s sister burned the clippings. F.B.I. agents also found a copy of a passage from The Turner Diaries in the car McVeigh drove on the day of the bombing. And, during the bombing trial, several of McVeigh’s friends testified that he had sent them copies of Pierce’s novel with notes encouraging them to read it. Testimony also showed that McVeigh sold The Turner Diaries and Hunter, Pierce’s follow-up to The Turner Diaries, at weekend gun shows. One of the chief reasons McVeigh went from being an American soldier to a terrorist is because he read The Turner Diaries.
So, if we viewers were interested in understanding “how a decorated American soldier” became a terrorist, it seems that at least some discussion of The Turner Diaries and the white supremacist ideology behind it would be in order. Not so in “The McVeigh Tapes,” In the 2-hour show, there’s one glimpse of the computer-graphic-McVeigh sitting on his bunk while in the army reading a copy of The Turner Diaries, yet no mention at all of race or antisemitism or white supremacy. All descriptors of McVeigh’s ideology are scripted as “his anti-government views,” a description that is misleading for the half-truth it tells.
This omission of any discussion of race is so systematic and total throughout the 2-hours of the film that it must be intentional. The question is why? Why intentionally leave out this important element in understanding how McVeigh became a terrorist?
The best answer I (and those in discussion on Twitter hashtag #OKC) came up with is that MSNBC has a primarily white audience that is uncomfortable with discussions of race, racism, antisemitism or white supremacy. While perfectly capable of listening to a discussion about “anti-government views,” the explicit, straightforward discussion of the racial ideology that animated McVeigh and inspired his horrific act is too much for us as a nation. As @Sonyers put this to me: “A lot of people don’t have the courage to see the reality of race. It’s ugly and powerful.” I guess that’s true. It’s a shame though. We could understand more if we had an analysis that included a critical understanding of race. Specifically, we could understand more – not less -if we had an analysis of the racial ideology of The Turner Diaries how it “foretold” the Oklahoma City bombing.
What “The McVeigh Tapes,” leaves us with is a description of the excruciating detail of each minute leading up to that moment on April 19th, 1995 but almost no analysis of what would prompt a young, white, man to target a federal building with a daycare center in it, or why so many would rally today, in 2010, to “celebrate” that heinous act fifteen years ago.
Beyond Good and Evil Whites
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’ve been reading the news lately, I’m sure you’ve run across at least some coverage of a rather raucous Neo-Nazi rally that took place around noon on 17 April on the south lawn of Los Angeles City Hall. Approximately 50 members of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) attempted to stage a permitted rally, where they evinced their white nationalist call for all people of color to be forcibly removed from the Southwestern United States.
However, according to officials and media reports, about 500 predominantly white counter-protesters shouted down the NSM with cries of “racists go home” and “stop the Nazis” before things turned a little ugly—both police and the white supremacists were pelted with rocks, bottles, eggs and other items by the counter-protesters. Los Angeles Police Detective Gus Villanueva reported that several people received minor injuries and some were arrested (all those arrested were counter-protestors). In the wake of Saturday’s clash, an anonymous policeman was quoted in one report as saying, “It’s just one group of racists protesting another group of racists.”
(Photo Source: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times / April 17, 2010)
That quotation caught the blogosphere ablaze, with left-leaning sites such as the Daily Kos proclaiming:
“… this is disturbing, beyond the obvious false equivalency being made as if Neo-Nazi’s are the same as those people who are offended by Nazi’s, and those people who are organizing for immigration reform,”
and respective comments on right-leaning blogs like Free Republic and American Power that the police officer’s remark was the “best line ever” and that the counter-protesters “are more dangerous, despite what the MSM keeps feeding us about ‘right-wing terrorists’ and ‘tea party violence’.”
What this kind of media framing accomplishes is the dichotmatizing of racial conflict qua whiteness into a war between the quintessentially “good” versus “evil” whites. Once the comparison is made, it begs us to answer the question: who is worse? Such discussive and ideological missteps then threaten to trap us in a public discourse in which talking heads battle back and forth over who is the “real” racist, a point that writer Ta-Nahesi Coates makes frequently at his blog for The Atlantic. Sociologists have long noted this phenomenon, Alastair Bonnett (2000: 10) writes the story of racism and antiracism is:
“…staged with melodrama, the characters presented as heroes and villains: pure anti-racists versus pure racists, good against evil.”
So also, Jack Niemonen (2007: 166-166) remarks that we often:
“… paint a picture of social reality in which battle lines are drawn, the enemy identified, and the victims sympathetically portrayed. … [distinguishing] between ‘good’ whites and ‘bad’ whites.”
Of course, there is hardly any question that racism exists, only over where it is, and who wields it—and that finding it is a matter of utmost importance. In “Beyond Good and Evil” (1886), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote:
“It might even be possible that what constitutes the value of those good and respected things, consists precisely in their being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil; and apparently opposed things—perhaps even in being essentially identical with them.”
Accordingly, my own sociological research (Hughey forthcoming – opens pdf) bears out an eerie resemblance between White Nationalist and White Antiracist understandings of white racial identity. In previous posts here, I’ve shared research based on fourteen months of ethnographic study amidst a white nationalist and a white antiracist group. From this research, I found that both groups often relied on similar “scripts,” if you will, to construct a robust and strikingly similar understanding of white and nonwhite identity on a personal, interactive, micro-level.
Now don’t get me wrong.
Both pose different kinds of threats and there remain deep differences between White Nationalists (not to mention within that “movement”—it’s a heterogeneous bunch) and White Antiracists (so too, they are diffuse and varied) (for more on these points see: Zeskind 2009; O’Brien 2001). Yet, members of both engaged in what I call an “Identity Politics of Hegemonic Whiteness.” That is, they both possess analogous common-sensed “ideals” of white identity that function to guide their interactions in everyday life. These “scripts” serve as seemingly neutral yardsticks against which cultural behavior, norms, values, and expectations are measured. Hence, white identity is revealed as an ongoing process of formation in which (1) racist and reactionary scripts are used to demarcate white/non-white boundaries, and (2) performances of white racial identity that fail to adhere to those scripts are often marginalized and stigmatized, thereby creating intra-racial distinctions among whites.
We seem to resist this understanding because of the seductive reach of pop-psychology explanations about racism. For example, in The Nature of Prejudice (1954: 9) Gordon Allport remarked that prejudice is an individual “antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization.” A facile reading of Allport’s work has, unfortunately, saturated our culture and has turned many a layperson into self-professed experts of “hate.” In this model, “racism” is assumed to belong to the realm of ideas and prejudices and is little more than the collection of a few nasty thoughts that a particular “bad apple” individual has about another person or group. With this understanding in play, we can too easily come to think of racism as a bad thought or moral failing, and then proceed to divide the world into those that are “sick” with the “disease of prejudice” and those that are “healthy” anti- or non-racists. As Desmond and Emirbayer (2009: 342-343) recently penned in the Du Bois Review:
“This conception of racism simply will not do, for it fails to account for the racism that is woven into the very fabric of our schools, political institutions, labor markets, and neighborhoods. Conflating racism with prejudice … ignores the more systematic and structural forms of racism; it looks for racism within individuals and not institutions. Labeling someone a “racist” shifts our attention from the social surroundings that enforce racial inequalities and miseries to the individual with biases. It also lets the accuser off the hook—“He is a racist; I am not”—and treats racism as aberrant and strange, whereas American racism is rather normal.”
Simply put, white supremacy is the ether which we all consume.
Beliefs that racism is perpetuated by “stereotypes” and “prejudice”—that we all carry along in the black-box of our minds—absolves our social structures and culture of any blame. Concentrating either on neo-Nazi’s or counter-protestors or trying to weigh and balance which one is more or less racist, misses the point completely. And while the anonymous officer’s comment that “It’s just one group of racists protesting another group of racists” remains a violent oversimplification and slander ignorant of the nuances and difference, perhaps such a remark might invite us to consider the habitual, unintentional, commonplace, polite, implicit, and supposedly well-meaning dimensions of racist ideologies and practices that collude with the dominant expectations of white racial identity.
~ Matthew W. Hughey, PhD is Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliate faculty member of African American Studies and Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. His research centers on racial identity formation, racialized organizations, and mass media representations of race. He can be reached at MHughey [at] soc.msstate.edu. His website is http://mwh163.sociology.msstate.edu/
>>>PS: If anyone is attending the Southern Sociological Society Meetings in Atlanta this week, I invite you to my panel where I will present some of my research on this topic. The title of my talk is “Beyond Good and Bad Whites: Ugly Couplings of Racism and White Identity.”
Programming Alert: The McVeigh Tapes
Posted by: | CommentsIf you’re following the news about the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, you’ve no doubt heard about the MSNBC documentary, “The McVeigh Tapes.” If not, here’s a little info about it. It’s a film based on audio tapes with McVeigh and then a combination of an actor and computer graphics re-enacting the events of April 19th. It’s narrated by MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow. It airs tonight at 9 ET/PT and at 8 CT.
I’ll watch the show as it airs and post live updates to Twitter. You can follow me there at: @JessieNYC. After the show, I’ll do a recap and compile comments in a post here.
