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Man Arrested for Threats on White Supremacist Website
Posted by: | CommentsA man has been arrested for making threats on a white supremacist website against the President and First Lady (via @BlackInformant). This arrest is good news, in my opinion, although I’m sure that some of first-amendment-absolutists will howl that this is an infringement of free speech. Here’s the story and the screenshot via the Associated Press:
“A Kentucky man has been arrested and charged with posting a poem threatening President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama on a white supremacist Web site.
The U.S. Secret Service said Johnny Logan Spencer Jr. of Louisville wrote and posted the poem, titled “The Sniper,” on a site called NewSaxon.org.
Special Agent Stephan M. Pazenzia (PAH-zen-zee-ah) said the poem describes a gunman shooting and killing a “tyrant,” later identified as the president.
Spencer is scheduled to appear before U.S. Magistrate Judge Dave Whalin on Friday for a detention hearing. He’s in federal custody charged with making threats against the president and threatening to kill or injure a major candidate for the office of the preside. “
There seems to be some awareness, at least when it comes to the president, that racist language online is not protected speech. A jury in Roanoke, Virginia recently found white supremacist William A. White guilty on four counts of threatening and intimidation via email and online postings (as well as threats made through older technologies such as letters and phone calls) to journalists. When I was finishing my book, I made note of William White for his racist website attacking the young men in Louisiana known as the “Jena 6.” He had posted a website with their addresses and phone numbers suggesting that (white) people take violent action against them, yet he was not arrested for this. While I’m glad to see that White is finally getting his just due (he faces up to 35 years in prison for his recent convictions), it seems like a bit of justice delayed.
This is not the typical view in the U.S. of racist speech online. For the most part, most people believe that anything that’s said online is protected by the First Amendment. As I noted here back in November, the opinion in the U.S. about racist speech online usually follows along the line of this piece in the AtlanticOnline (a mainstream to left publication). In the U.S. is that many people here want to argue that the First Amendment, which is designed to protect dissent against the government, protects all manner of racist speech. This simply isn’t true.
The reality is that there are lots of legal restrictions on speech that apply to speech on the Internet, like threatening the president’s life. We in the U.S. have to begin to think more critically about our notions of “free speech” in the digital era.
Children Learning Racism
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The Intelligence Report has a very interesting article on how and where children learn racist ideas, with a focus on children of white supremacists. The report quotes a number of scholars on this how and where issue:
“Overall, there’s not a lot of evidence that, at least in the long term, kids get their prejudice from their parents,” said Charles Stangor, who runs the Laboratory for the Study of Social Stereotyping and Prejudice at the University of Maryland. “I would call it more of a community effect than a parental effect. The community fosters tolerance or prejudice.”
What is this “community”? The article cites another researcher:
That community includes peers and other adults, such as teachers, coaches and clergy, said Frances Aboud, a psychology professor at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who studies the development of racial prejudice in children. “There are so many other influences in a child’s life [besides parents], particularly once they start kindergarten.”
The account only mentions peers in passing, but research that Debi Van Ausdale did for 11 months in a multiracial daycare center showed clearly that children learn a great deal about racial matters from other children. That they form important peer groups and learn much from each other is a key finding of this study, yet these children’s groups still do not get enough attention in social science research on racial learning and systems of racial oppression. 
Children, as young as three years old, teach each other the basics of the white racial frame and the dominant racial hierarchy.
There is much else to the lives of children and racism that does not get enough attention. Teachers are quite important, and some research does focus on them and the curriculum.
And then there are the children of the supremacists. The fears and stresses of children of white supremacists are explored a bit in the Intelligence Report article:
Children of racial extremists may have to contend with other effects of their parents’ bigotry, Aboud said. “I think [they] probably become sensitive to that type of adult; other kids might not be aware that there’s that kind of extreme emotional hate toward people,” she said. “[Children of racial extremists] might have lived with more fear. They might have felt vulnerable themselves to that kind of hate: What if I cross my parents in some way — am I going to get that hate directed at me?”
This is yet another seriously under-researched area.
Woman Kills White Supremacist Husband (updated)
Posted by: | CommentsThere’s an under-reported story out of Belfast, Maine that merits some attention here (h/t: Cheryl Fuller). Amber Cummings, 32, admits to killing her husband James Cummings, a white supremacist.
On December 9, 2009, Amber Cummings walked into her husband’s bedroom and fired two bullets into his head while he slept, then fled with her 9-year-old daughter to a neighbor’s home and called police. On January 8, 2010, Cummings appeared in court and received a suspended sentence for the killing. In granting the suspended sentence, the judge said that James Cummings had subjected his wife and their daughter to years of extreme abuse. What’s noteworthy in the story for discussing here is this bit about James Cummings:
“The killing drew the FBI’s attention after Nazi mementos, radioactive materials and instructions on how to build a ‘dirty bomb’ were found in their home. ….Her husband was angered by Barack Obama’s election as president and the bomb-making materials were discovered near the time of Obama’s inauguration… “
James Cummings, then, gets added to the growing list of white people – mostly white men – who are so angered by the election of black president that they are contemplating resorting to violence. Amber Cummings reported feeling an “escalating sense of doom” about her husband’s plans to set off large scale destruction and his increasing abuse of her and their daughter. Following the sentencing, Amber Cummings referred to her husband as “mentally ill,” and that’s undoubtedly one part of the explanation for his behavior. I also want to offer another explanation that directly takes into account race, gender and sexuality. James Cummings’ abusive treatment of his wife and daughter and his white supremacy are connected to more mainstream manifestations of gender and racial entitlement.
Entitlement is the sense that one is deserving of some particular reward or benefit. In many ways, gender and racial entitlement are a defining characteristic of white men in contemporary U.S. society, whether as “white saviors” in popular culture or as “masters of the universe” in banking, white men – by their own words - see themselves as those who are most entitled to material wealth and psycho-sexual power over individual women and children. Yet, if anyone dares to point this out, there are lots of people – frequently white women – who are eager to call this is “lunacy.”
Examples from the mainstream of this sort of connection between gender and racial entitlement abound, but there is a very recent one in the news that makes this point quite nicely. John Mayer, a white male, a pop singer, most known for his ballad “Wonderland,” and for dating actress Jennifer Anniston. Mayer is about as far away from the popular notion of a ‘white supremacist’ as anyone would imagine. He’s also not visibly mentally ill. In a recent interview for Playboy magazine (to understand how the underpinnings of this magazine’s founding in a sense of male entitlement, read: Barbara Ehrenreich’s Hearts of Men), Mayer revealed perhaps more than he intended. When asked if he dated black women (actually, the interviewer revealed his own racial/gender assumptions by asking “do black women throw themselves at you?”), Mayer’s answer was no, because his (male member) “is sort of like a white supremacist,” and went on to refer to it as “David Duke.” While Mayer’s racist response has quite reasonably offended lots of people and he’s apologized for the interview, it’s emblematic of the same sort of intertwined gender and racial entitlement that extreme white supremacists like Cummings exhibit. Interestingly, while Mayer is not being portrayed as “mentally ill” for his statements in the interview, at least one report attributes his remarks to the fact that he was drinking Scotch during the interview, which brings me back to the putatively mentally ill James Cummings.
Entitlement, in its extreme form, is often associated with a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and this may have been part of what went so terribly awry with James Cummings. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss this story as merely a personal tragedy separate and apart from a broader social and political context. In that broader context, white men have a disproportionate amount of resources, wealth and privilege and feel entitled to it. Like the old joke that Jim Hightower used to tell about George W. Bush, “he was born on third base and think he hit a triple.” That’s the essence of entitlement. Whether or not Amber Cummings did the only thing she could by killing her husband, I don’t know. The fact Amber Cummings took extreme action to save her daughter and herself from – and possibly lots of other people – from her husband’s excessive sense of aggrieved entitlement and violent tendencies is a symptom of a larger set of social conditions.
Updated (Friday, 2/12/10): Another name to add to the growing list of angry, violent white men: Gregory Girard, a Massachusetts technology consultant who said he feared an imminent “Armageddon” and appears to have been active in the Tea Party movement, was found with a stash of military grade weapons, explosive devices including tear gas and pepper ball canisters, camouflage clothing, knives, handcuffs, bulletproof vests and helmets, and night vision goggles, reports TPM. Online news reports I found did not mention whether Mr. Girard was married, or whether his wife was also heavily armed.
Russian Neo-Nazis Killed 71 in Racist Attacks in 2009
Posted by: | CommentsRacist neo-Nazis in Russia killed 71 people in 2009, according to reports from Sky News (h/t: Hope not Hate). A group known as “Slavic Union,” is intent on eliminating anyone who appears to be “non-Russian” from Russia, including through violent attacks. A leader of the group, Dmitry Dyomushkin, says that he is interested in cultivating a “respectable image” for himself and the group, claiming that 60% of Russian citizens support the groups’ goals. However, he asserts that “even with this majority we are not allowed to be part of the political process because the government has squeezed out opposition.The whole new generation of Russians are nationalists – our influence on young people is very strong.” This short video clip (3:16) about the group is chilling:
This news story also mentions that the neo-Nazi group has made digital videos of their attacks on immigrants and posted them online. Despite this bold move, no one has been arrested in this attack. This form of cyber racism, which seems to be characteristic of Russian neo-nazis, is one that I highlighted a couple of years ago on this blog. In 2007, CurrentTV featured a story called “From Russia with Hate,” about neo-nazis in Russia who are filming racist attacks on immigrants, then posting these digital videos online.
The rise of neo-Nazi violence in Russia, and the use of digital video to publicize their racist violence, is an alarming trend that warrants our attention.
White Supremacists and the Mainstream Right-Wing
Posted by: | CommentsIn an interesting new video called “White Power U.S.A.,” filmmakers Rick Rowley and Jacquie Soohen explore the contemporary white supremacist movement and the overlap with more mainstream right-wing political movements, such as anti-immigration groups (h/t to @June4th via Twitter). The video originally aired on Al-Jazeera on January 6, and is in the format of a news magazine story; it’s on the long side for web video (23:58) but well worth the time to watch:
Part of what I appreciate about this video clip is the attempt by Rowley and Soohen to connect the extremist groups with the more mainstream groups, an argument I made in my earlier book White Lies (1997). Another interesting bit near the end comes when a “new recruit” says something off the script of white supremacy, and the organizer of the group explains this by saying that people really become indoctrinated into the ideology once they’re in the organization and begin reading, and internalizing, the movement rhetoric. This is a point that I mentioned in the earlier book and develop in the most recent one, Cyber Racism (2009). This story illustrates how social movement recruitment tends to work. People are recruited into social movement organizations through personal connections: by neighbors, friends, relatives. Then, once inside the organization, they read and internalize the movement rhetoric.
Sick Heil: Racial Paranoia, White Victimology and the Hitlerizing of Obama
Posted by: | Comments[Reposted from Redroom.com]
If you get a chance, today or perhaps tomorrow, do yourself a favor. Look up some file footage, perhaps on YouTube, of Adolf Hitler, addressing his followers. I know, it doesn’t sound like the best way to spend your day, or even a few minutes of it, but trust me, there’s a point to the recommendation. While you watch, notice the unhinged shouting, the wild eyes, the veins on his neck, the psychotic bodily gesticulations. Then, take a look at footage from yesterday’s town hall meeting, called by President Obama in New Hampshire, in which he sought to lay out his case for health care reform to an audience that included supporters and opponents of his plan. Notice: no shouting, no wild eyes, no bulging jugular vein, no apparent sociopathy whatsoever. Indeed notice as the President actually seeks out questions from people who disagree with him, and then thanks them for making good points and raising legitimate concerns, even when the premises of their questions are dead wrong, and largely originated in crazy town.
Then ask yourself, is this the man that much of right-wing talk radio would have us believe is a Nazi? The political reincarnation of Hitler–ya know, the lunatic I asked you to watch first? Really? Really? Wow. Sometimes, it’s hard to know where to begin.
On the one hand, the comparisons seem literally bat-shit insane. Especially when considering that at the same time folks are comparing Obama to the world’s most infamous right-wing fascist, they are at the same time calling him a Marxist, and a left-wing radical. Oh sure, they try and say that Hitler was really a leftist, ya know, because the Nazis were National Socialists. Of course. And hot dogs are made from puppies.
Anyway, it seems at first blush to make no sense. Any reading of the Nazi era makes it all too clear how far afield from the Third Reich the Obama administration is. After coming to power, the Nazis moved to outlaw all opposition parties, suspend the nation’s constitution, round up and detain their political adversaries (or better yet, kill them), and destroy the trade unions. All this, well before initiating the murderous campaigns against Jews, Romany, homosexuals and others deemed “life unworthy of life.” Needless to say, Obama has done none of this, has proposed none of this, and only the most truly unstable person could really believe such things were just around the corner. Although there are such persons to be found in the body politic, such as Ron Paul acolytes, Ayn Rand devotees and real estate agent/dentist/professional far-right activist, Orly Taitz, surely even the most cynical would have to agree that the numbers of persons who seem to buy into this rhetoric far and away exceed the likely national percentages of the truly mentally ill.
And those propagating the comparisons–the Limbaughs and Becks and Savages, and Hannitys (who have the top four radio talk shows in the nation right now)–despite their fervent commitment to right-wing ideas, surely cannot believe that an American Reich is on the horizon. In short, they can’t possibly be serious.
So why then, do they keep saying it? It is this question that I’ve been pondering for the past few days. What could possibly be the purpose of making an argument that has so little intellectual validity; so little indeed that it can be easily shot down by the average 12th grade European history student (who, it should be noted, would have as much education as either Limbaugh or Hannity)? What would be the value, symbolically speaking, of putting forth on protest signs this Obama=Hitler meme, and visually representing that meme, straight down to the little mustache, side-swept hairdo and swastika adornment?
And then it struck me. This analogy, as absurd as it is factually, and as offensive as it is historically, makes almost perfect sense politically, to a movement that is trying desperately to create a groundswell of support behind the notion that white people are the new victims of massive discrimination, the new victims of the Obama era: the ones who don’t get picked first for the Supreme Court, and who can no longer take for granted their hegemonic power. And that is precisely the kind of movement they are trying to build, what with their equally facile rantings that white men, according to Limbaugh, are being sent to the “back of the bus” under Obama, because he literally hates white people, and that white men are now experiencing, to hear Pat Buchanan tell it, “exactly what black folks” experienced during the days of Jim Crow. Within a politics of white resentment and white victimology, the Hitler meme works. After all, Hitler was not just a fascist, but is understood to have been a racial fascist: one whose dictatorial and murderous schemes were directed at a distinctly racialized “other.” So to make the black man atop the U.S. political system into Hitler, is to plant the idea in white minds that he too will be a racial fascist. And if that is the case, the question is quite obviously begged, which race will he be coming for? Ah yes, white man, see? Now are you scared?
By playing upon white fears–fears of a black President with a funny name, fears of a country that within about 30 years will no longer be majority white, fears of the inability to take for granted that our Leave-it-to-Beaver, Norman Rockwell, Boy Scout-approved national narrative will continue to predominate–the right hopes to prove resurgent, and the GOP hopes to remain a living entity. They have all but abandoned any hopes of attracting large numbers of people of color. The writing in that regard is on the wall and they seem to very much know it. So they have retreated into the laager–South African imagery very much intended here–and decided to go all in as the party of nostalgia, a white nationalist party, in effect, whose only hope is to claim that the nation has lost its greatness, and that everything that made America, well, America (ya know, back in the days of segregation) has been lost. And that such a transformation, from a formal white supremacist state, to a multicultural society, is of course a bad thing.
In addition to rallying the troops of white backlash, the Obama/Hitler analogies also serve another function, one that would be immediately recognizable to most any psychologist. That function is called projection: when someone recognizes a trait within themselves, and then, ashamed of that trait seeks it out in others and locates it there, displacing the shame and self-hatred that might otherwise manifest onto someone else.
For these right-wing louts to accuse President Obama of being a racist, let alone a potentially genocidal one at that, is the ultimate in projection. After all, it is the right whose authors regularly publish books with hateful and prejudicial comments about racialized others, not Obama, whose own writing reveals a deep and abiding love for his family–all of it, including the white half.
It is the right that channels Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebells, every time they spew lies about the health care bill’s euthanasia provisions, or about how Obama is going to confiscate all the guns, or casting doubt on Obama’s citizenship, or about how Mexicans are looking to “reconquer” the American southwest, or about how illegal immigrants are a major source of leprosy and disease. All of these things have been debunked, time and again, and yet they are repeated daily, as if facts don’t matter. Because to anti-intellectual brownshirts, they don’t.
It is the right channeling the thuggishness of the Nazi bullies by sending folks to public forums to shout and disrupt, and to intimidate people by carrying weapons.
It is the right that would like to smash the trade unions.
It is the right that stood by while the last president circumvented the Constitution on such matters as wiretaps, torture, the primacy of international treaties to which the U.S. is a party, and the suspension of habeas corpus for suspected “terrorists.” Read More→
Pat Buchanan Does it Again: Defending White Male Privilege
Posted by: | CommentsIn this video from MSNBC (on the long side, 16:08, but worth it), Pat Buchanan ardently defends white male privilege (h/t @kellieparker). And, Rachel Maddow offers a substantial challenge to him:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
I’ve written about Pat Buchanan here before, both here (online) and in my first book, White Lies (Routledge: 1997). In that book, part of what I did was lay out the ways that extremist white supremacist discourse in movement publications was similar to mainstream political discourse about race, and I mentioned then-presidential-candidate Pat Buchanan as one of those examples. I also investigated the ways that gender and race intersected in both extremist and mainstream discourse. In the video clip above, Buchanan goes on about the “white men who built this nation” and I have to say that what came immediately to mind for me was an image from a white supremacist publication (such as Tom Metzger’s “White Aryan Resistance,” or “WAR”) that I included in that book (on pages 34-35). Here’s a bit of the passage:
“The image is of a white man, with airplances and bridges in the background, and the accompanying text reads, ‘White Men Built This Nation, White Men Are This Nation!” (emphasis in the original). the images conveys several messages. It signals a link between race, ‘whiteness’ and masculinity, specifically ‘white men,’ such that white men are the central, indeed the only actors visible. …[The illustration] presumably refers to those materially involved in ‘building’ an infrastructure, those who literally ‘built’ the bridges, airplanes, and skyscrapers featured in the background. Meanwhile the image simultaneously obliterates the labor of racial and ethnic minorities, both men and women, whose labor did, in fact, build this country.”
Once again, there is little if any distinction between the argument that Pat Buchanan is making on MSNBC and the one that extremist white supremacist publications are making. Both are interested in defending white male privilege while ignoring the talents, hard work, and accomplishments of people of color whose labor has made this country wealth, yet who are, much too often, excluded from reaping the benefits of that labor.
Cyber Racism: Racist Activists Using the Internet
Posted by: | CommentsChristopher Wolf, head of the Anti-Defamation League’s Internet Task Force, has an article on the Internet facilitating racist speech, such as that of James Von Brunn, self-proclaimed white supremacist, anti-Semite, and accused murderer at the Holocaust Museum. Such white supremacists were once
relegated to using the mail to communicate his rage with like-minded haters. The only place for him to have his benighted views applauded was in sporadic clandestine meetings. The Internet changed all that. Like his fellow bigots, Von Brunn found the Internet a boon to his warped causes. His maintained a hate Web site, “Holy Western Empire,” where he touted and provided excerpts from his book that denied the Holocaust and praised Hitler.
Wolf assesses what he sees as the operation of the Internet as a new propaganda machine
not under the central control of a political party or group. It gains its power by being viral in nature. Everyone can be a publisher, even the most vicious anti-Semite. . . . Any hater and propagandist can reach a mass audience, even an audience that didn’t think itself receptive to such hateful ideas. . . . Those who harbor anti-Semitic beliefs are comfortable expressing themselves in cyberspace, where they can provoke a reaction from others or find like-minded individuals to affirm their beliefs.
He makes an important point about the impact this has on people’s sense of anti-Semitism’s normality:
The perniciousness of anti-Semitism on today’s Internet is that the more one sees it, the more one is likely to consider it normal, and acceptable. Good people are numbed by the proliferation, and daunted by the task of responding. Others consider it a reflection of what is acceptable in society.
This is certainly true for other forms of racist thinking and framing. Wolf later adds the usual comment on how the first amendment protects most hate speech, and thus calls only for education as a solution:
The First Amendment protects essentially all hate speech, except that consisting of direct threats against specific people. . . . There is a role for Internet users, for Internet companies and for educators. We should speak up when we see hate sites, explain to our kids what they are seeing, and counter the vicious lies.
He accents education, leaving alone the first amendment issues. Well, there is much more that we can do, such as get rid of this antiquated first amendment argument and join most of the world’s other countries in banning extremist hate speech. There is nothing “political” about most of it, and it is political speech that the first amendment protects. As I pointed out before, other countries often have much more diverse and open political speech, debates, and parties than we do – and they enforce laws against racist hate speech. We are behind and primitive in this area of the law and government policy. We are not the world’s leader in many such legal areas, so why do we insist we are. Ethnocentrism squared?
Wolf is mostly on target here, but he does not probe deeply enough. Our own Jessie has a new book out, Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights, that goes much deeper into these Internet issues, showing how they are actually integrally linked to and created by the racist system that predates them by centuries. Technology is not as important here as the reality of systemic racism and a very deep white racial frame in this society. They use technology, technology does not drive them.
In her book and posts here Jessie has pointed out too that these white supremacists are no unsophisticated bumpkins, but know what they are doing and use the Internet well. They also reflect and represent the larger racist society. Jessie makes quite clear in her book and posts that the Internet is not some happy technological reality/future that has managed to be developed only by racially liberal and open-minded folks, and thus is without institutionalized racism.
In a recent post Jessie has gone well beyond Wolf in suggesting the need for action to deal with these new white supremacist developments:
There is also a real danger that ‘mere words’ on extremist websites can harm others in real life …. And, for this reason, I’m in favor of a stronger stance on removing hate speech from the web and prosecuting those who publish it for inciting racial hatred and violence. In my view, websites such as von Brunn’s constitute a burning cross in the digital era and there is legal precedent to extinguish such symbols of hate while still valuing free speech (see Chapter 9 in Cyber Racism for an extensive discussion of efforts to battle white supremacy online transnationally).
Jessie’s book expands on all these ideas, and is by far the best thing out there dealing with systemic racism and the new technologies around the Internet.
Von Brunn, Bad Apples, and Hegemonic Whiteness
Posted by: | CommentsAt least for this week, the nation focuses on the fatal shooting of officer Stephen T. Johns at the Holocaust museum on 10 June by alleged gunman, and white supremacist, James W. Von Brunn. Various networks such as CBS, Fox , MSNBC , and ABC provide palatable narratives on how such a distasteful act came to pass. For example, on NPR’s 12 June edition of “Tell Me More” Mark Potok, from the Southern Poverty Law Center and Randy Blazak, a sociology professor at Portland State University, spent the allotted radio time responding to host Michel Martins’ introductory question: “… there are plenty of people who seem to want to ‘talk trash,’ you know in leaflets, on websites, or whatever, but do we have any sense of why and when this crosses over into violence, is there some tipping point?”
Martin’s query seems to miss the point. Reflecting on the program and what is left unsaid helps us recognize how framing Von Brunn as the proverbial “bad apple” mystifies white supremacy in the everyday. Dominant folk wisdom tells us “racism” is something practiced by overt hate-mongers, therefore Von Brunn is merely a manifestation of a rare kind of white male exceptionalism. This portrayal creates a picture of social reality in which battle lines are clear: the racists are easily identified, victims sympathetically portrayed, and the difference between the “good” and “bad” whites is certain.
Such thinking can hold severe repercussions. For example, the Department of Homeland Security was recently pressured to backtrack on an April report which suggested (drawing from examples like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh) that disaffected veterans with military training might serve as recruiting targets for right-wing, racist extremists. Many folks, particularly American Legion National Commander David K. Rehbein, took issue with the report’s insinuation that mainstream, patriotic, even military veteran, whites could become vehicles for white racial supremacy and domestic terrorism.
Moreover, in my doctoral work, “White Guise: The Common Trajectory of the White Antiracist & Racist Movement,” I found that white male racists and white male anti-racists relied on strikingly similar racist worldviews. (For example, both groups relied upon and often accepted views of blacks and Latin@s as culturally or biologically dysfunctional and dangerous, while simultaneously treating racial “otherness” as a kind of “epidermal capital” which served as a temporary alleviation of their collectively-shared understanding of whiteness as “bland,” “boring,” and “meaningless.”) These shared dimensions of what I call “hegemonic whiteness” were solidified in the nation’s founding as a white male supremacist state. And while these racialized and gendered violent foundations may be invisible to most, their influence is continuously present among varied contexts of predominantly white male groups like white supremacists, American Legion outposts, and even some “white antiracists.”
From this perspective, the logic motivating Von Brunn, evident in his book “Kill the Best Gentiles,” his website, and various leaflets such as the one he left in his car on 10 June that states “The Holocaust is a lie. Obama was created by Jews. Obama does what his Jew owners tell him to do,” is commensurate with the dominant logic and performances expected of white men across varied contexts. Whether acting on the impulse that whiteness is a stigmatized or even oppressed racial identity in need of (violent) defense, believing in the biological or cultural pathologies of non-whites, justifying segregation as “natural,” harboring a white-savor complex, or appropriating items and practices marked with the “exoticism” of racial “otherness”—the various dimensions of “hegemonic whiteness” are not limited to that of Von Brunn, and Von Brunn is anything but a “bad apple.”
~ Matthew W. Hughey is assistant professor of Sociology and African American Studies at Mississippi State University. He can be reached at MHughey@soc.msstate.edu. (See his blog at http://mississippilearning.wordpress.com/).
White Prof, White Pride
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Today’s Inside Higher Ed includes an article about Robert S. Griffin, a tenured professor who has taught education classes at the University of Vermont for nearly 40 years and written extensively and sympathetically about white nationalism and white supremacy. Griffin’s own (non-University) website includes a links page to a number of white nationalist and white supremacist organizations and websites, including David Duke’s website and Stormfront: White Pride Worldwide (both of whom I discuss at length in Cyber Racism). The image included here is of Griffin appearing on a 2006 cover of American Renaissance (image used without permission, from here). The Southern Poverty Law Center includes Jared Taylor’s American Renaissance as one of the four leading proponents of “academic racism.” Here’s what the SPLC has to say:
Jared Taylor, the man who heads the New Century Foundation and edits its American Renaissance magazine, presents himself as a cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on the taboos of his time without stooping to racial epithets and the like. But, in fact, he is a man who promotes the “clear conception of the United States as a nation ruled by and for whites,” …
This is the pose that Griffin has adopted as well, that of the “cosmopolitan, open-minded thinker not afraid to take on taboos.”
In his 2006 article called, “A Knock on the Door: Writing for AR – Coming out of the closet is not always easy,” that accompanies the cover image above, Griffin reflects on the fallout from his initial experience of writing for American Renaissance and the mainstream press that followed it. By likening this writing to ‘coming out of the closet,’ Griffin acknowledges the illicit nature of his collaboration with the magazine but this only fuels his certitude about his views.
Griffin mainly uses the article to quote himself being quoted. The crux of his argument boils down to calling him a neo-Nazi or a white supremacist or a hatemonger is mere “namecalling and mudslinging.” Furthermore, Griffin claims that he is simply engaging in “ethnic pride,” and attempts to call him to task for this are part of a “double standard” in which “pride and self-determination” are good for minority folks, “but the very same things in white people are bad.” He then quotes his own attempt at humor in an interview:
“The late comedian Lenny Bruce told a joke about a guy who, when caught in the act of cheating by his wife, says to her, ‘Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?’ I’d like to think that in matters of race more and more white people are getting past the Orwellian newspeak that has been coming at them for decades and starting to look hard at reality for themselves. That is what I’m doing.”
And then, Griffin ends on a self-congratulatory note:
“I was beginning to stand up for myself — and my race. Not bad.”
The Inside Higher Ed article interviews Heidi Beirich, director of research for the Southern Poverty Law Center, who says:
“no mystery” in her mind that Griffin is a neo-Nazi. “It’s an amazing thing to see a tenured professor at a serious university writing a fawning biography of a neo-Nazi nut — just shocking,” she said.
Beirich urged The University of Vermont to investigate the professor’s classroom activities and condemn his work. Yet, the university as an institution and at least one colleague of Griffin’s are standing by him and defending his views as bringing “a perspective to multicultural issues that is different from what dominates the field.”
The problem here, in my view, with people who are appalled by Griffin’s views — and they are appalling — is that they the standard white liberal response is insufficient to to the task because it only concedes Griffin’s premise. Calling him a “neo-Nazi” allows Griffin to continue to claim the high ground in this debate and assert that he is “interested in ideas” while others are merely engaged in name-calling. Similarly, attempts to discredit his assertions of ethnic pride within the context of multiculturalism-absent-an-analysis-of-power is equally fraught. In a multi-vocal world where “all voices” are valued equally, there is no basis for critiquing white pride.
The key that’s missing in this debate is an analysis of power and white privilege, and these have everything to do with knowledge. Epistemologies of race, that is, how we know what we say we know about race and racism, are rooted in profoundly different experiences for whites and people of color living in a social context of racial inequality. Within such a context, some people experience the constant drumbeat of racism as part of their everyday life, while others enjoy the privilege of ignoring race and racism on a daily basis. The danger in views like those of Griffin’s is in the pernicious way that his claims to “knowledge” challenge important values that are politically hard won, values such as racial equality.
