April 15th: White Nationalists Marching

• • denialism, politics, popular culture, white supremacists, whites

BlackAgendaReport executive editor, Glen Ford, has a hard-hitting take on the rather overt, substantially white nationalist movement that is reflected in much of the Tea Party movement:

The campaign to bring White nationalism, the founding ideology of the United States, fully out of the closet, kicks into a higher gear on the Right’s anti-holiday, April 15. Newt Gingrich and the various tribes of White Rightists unveil their “Contract From America,” a scaled-down version of the manifesto the Republicans rallied around to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1994. … It is written largely in code, the language of obfuscation that American racists speak in an attempt to hide their white supremacist beliefs….

He notes too some of the mythology around the movement:

Corporate media almost universally describe the Tea Partyers as “anti-government” – which is nonsense. They oppose the government providing assistance – economic, legal, educational, real or imagined – to those that are “undeserving,” which in their world consists mostly of folks that can be defined by race, language or religion …. Naturally, the average Tea Partyer – when sober – will deny having “a racist bone” in his body, but any group whose unifying characteristic is daily engorgement on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck is, by definition, racist.

However,

What the Tea Partyers really oppose is a social contract among all the resident peoples of the United States. In this, they are indeed the direct political progeny of the Founding Fathers and the great mass of white settlers, who found the very concept of full U.S. citizenship for Africans and Native Americans monstrously repugnant, a devaluation of their superior white selves.

And today,

The white nationalists want their white nation back. But they can’t have it. And, since there can be no bargaining on that issue, there is no reason whatsoever for Blacks and browns and people of good will to engage or humor the Tea Party’s white nationalists. There is nothing to concede to them, and nothing they can offer us to which we are not already entitled. … Just as they reject a national social contract with non-whites, they reject any compact with other peoples of the world, particularly the non-white ones.

Civil Rights Leader Benjamin Hooks Has Died

• • African Americans, civil rights, obituary, resistance



NPR has this important story today on one of the premier leaders of U.S. civil rights struggles, Benjamin L. Hooks (1925-2010):

Benjamin L. Hooks, a champion of minorities and the poor who as executive director of the NAACP increased the group’s stature. . . . “I don’t know anybody who lived a more triumphant life,” former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young told NPR. … Hooks became [NAACP] executive director in 1977, taking over a group that was $1 million in debt and had shrunk to 200,000 members. … He pledged to increase enrollment and raise money for the organization. . . . “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again,” he said. “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”

Hooks view of the current scene resonates well with the need for much more civil rights organization:

“Now, the fight is not over water fountains, it’s not over riding the bus, it’s over who’s going to drive that bus,” he said. “Now, once we start digging into these economic issues, resistance may grow.”

He was a path breaker in his own life:

In 1965 he was appointed to a newly created seat on the Tennessee Criminal Court, making him the first black judge since Reconstruction in a state trial court anywhere in the South. … nominated Hooks to the Federal Communications Commission in 1972. He was its first black commissioner, serving for five years before resigning to lead the NAACP. … Hooks also created an initiative that expanded employment opportunities for blacks in Major League Baseball and launched a program where corporations participated in economic development projects in black communities.

The NAACP has continued to be a source of white supremacist attacks since the 1960s:

In 1989, a string of gasoline bomb attacks in the South killed a federal judge in Alabama and a black civil rights lawyer in Savannah, Ga. Another bomb was intercepted at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla., and an Atlanta television station received a letter threatening more attacks on judges, attorneys and NAACP leaders. “We believe that this latest incident is an effort to intimidate our association, to strike fear in our hearts,” Hooks said at the time. “It will not succeed. We intend to go about our business.”