Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Fox, and “Hate Group” Labels

• • activism

I am no historian, but I have a feeling that people have been hating each other for hundreds of thousands of years. Only after a wave of hate-related crime in the 1980s did the term “hate crime” become widely used. Curiously enough, while the original purpose of the term was to classify a set of crimes perpetrated against minorities, people are starting to use the term in an attempt to perpetuate violence against minorities, specifically Black people.

What am I talking about? I am writing to answer Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s question on Fox & Friends, “Why has the #BlackLivesMatter movement not been classified yet as a hate group? I mean, how much more has to go in this direction before someone actually labels it as such?”

(Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Fox News)

Hasselbeck was responding chiefly to two recent events: a #BlackLivesMatter protest march at the Minnesota State Fair and the shooting of White Police officer Darren Goforth. During the protest, some marchers chanted “pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon” in reference to police officers. This chant disturbed viewers who were still shaken by Goforth’s death, particularly because his suspected killer is Black. Although Hasselbeck gave her opinion following these two specific events, her bewildered tone implies that she thinks the #BlackLivesMatter campaign should have been labeled a hate group long ago.

It does not help Hasselbeck’s case that she made these comments on Fox News, a network that the political left scorns for misrepresenting information to promote their political agenda. To no one’s surprise, left-leaning news sources have come to the defense of the #BlackLivesMatter movement with characteristically refined rebuttals that most Fox supporters probably won’t ever read. Unfortunately, the mere setting of her question fuels all sorts of polarized hate—Republicans versus Democrats, supporters versus skeptics of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, fans of Fox News versus fans of the Huffington Post, and Whites versus people of color.

But regardless of which news network pays Elisabeth Hasselbeck or who Elisabeth Hasselbeck is, it is undeniable that she asks an important question. So let us investigate: Why hasn’t the #BlackLivesMatter campaign been labeled a hate group?

Simply put, because the primary purpose of #BlackLivesMatter is social change, not hate or violence.

Hate groups have one primary focus: promoting hate against groups of people. The Southern Poverty Law Center, co-founded by the late Civil Rights hero Julian Bond, defines hate groups as organizations or movements that aim to “attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for [things they can’t change].” These things may be race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender, among others.

Part of Hasselbeck’s mistake is that her ears perk up to one chant at one rally of a movement that has been at work for years. In other words, she fails to see the big picture of #BlackLivesMatter. If the chanting at the #BlackLivesMatter protest in Minnesota represented the core of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, then it would be right to call the group a hate group; however, no matter how hateful the chant seems, it does not represent the group’s primary purpose: profound and lasting revision of the systems and institutions that disempower Black people.

In Hasselbeck’s defense, verbal violence can incite physical violence. Ehud Sprinzak, a counterterrorism expert, makes an important distinction between verbal and real violence. Verbal violence uses extreme language to imply a real physical threat or to call indirectly for others to harm someone physically (see Ehud Sprinzak, Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination  New York: The Free Press, 1999). Sprinzak notes that while most people know not to confuse this with real violence, verbal violence has the potential to incite less discerning people into acts of real, physical violence. So, it is possible that chanting “pigs in blankets, fry ‘em them like bacon” might compel someone with a loose screw to turn metaphor into murder. However, I repeat that literally or figuratively frying police officers is not the chief aim of #BlackLivesMatter. Its aim is to change American policies such that it is no longer unobvious that Black lives matter.

Why might Elisabeth Hasselbeck believe that #BlackLivesMatter is a hate group? Personally, I interpret her reaction as par-for-the-course human behavior: cherry-picking events that support one’s preconceived notions and ignoring events that contradict them, all for the purpose of nestling oneself more comfortably into the fluffy bed of “us and them.”

Let me explain. Hate groups rarely classify themselves as hate groups without adding some kind of justification or qualification. For example, religious hate groups might justify their hatred by saying that they hate the behavior, not the person. In other words, they believe they are doing what’s right, protecting what is sacred, promoting the greater good, or building solidarity amongst themselves—and that justifies their hatred. That said, in order to classify a group as a hate group, the person classifying it cannot be a member. Therefore, when someone classifies a group as a hate group, he or she makes a strong statement that he or she does not identify with the cause of that group. “Hate group,” in a broad sense, means “not my group.”

In light of this, Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s question merely serves as a ten-foot-pole with which she can push away #BlackLivesMatter and everything it stands for. Whether she uses the label “hate group” or “terrorist organization” or “fanatic” or “anarchist” or “extremist” or “Communist” does not matter—all that matters is that she uses a buzzword on a conservative news channel that triggers her audience to harden themselves against the enemy and empty themselves of any sympathy they once had for #BlackLivesMatter. After all, how could anyone sympathize with a “hate group”? You would have to be very confused and closed-minded to do that, right? You would have to be un-American, because Americans aren’t hateful. We are reasonable people who love liberty, not like those extremists.

By using the term “hate group” to make the #BlackLivesMatter campaign seem alien to American values—a rhetorical technique called “othering”—Elisabeth Hasselbeck prevents her audience from seeing any value in the social changes that #BlackLivesMatter intends to bring about. She uses the term as propaganda to prejudice her audience against the movement and, indirectly, against Black people as a cause worth fighting for. By placing #BlackLivesMatter among hate groups, Hasselbeck confirms that the present system—her system, the status quo—is diametrically opposed to the empowerment of Black people.

Hasselbeck might as well have asked, “Why has the #BlackLivesMatter movement not been officially written off by some authority as a movement we shouldn’t take seriously?”

The answer to that question, of course, is this: because #BlackLivesMatter is a movement that we should take seriously. It has not been called a hate group because its mission is constructive, not destructive. #BlackLivesMatter activists want to reform the system, not kill police officers. They want safety for Black people, not peril for Whites. We can never forget about it, and the movement will end when being Black in America is no longer a burden of fear, but a privilege and a joy.

~ Lessie Branch,is a Public and Urban doctoral candidate at The Milano School of International Affairs, Management and Urban Policy and teaches at Monroe College.

 

The Epidemic of Colorblindness

• • colorblindness, Middle Eastern Americans, Muslim Americans, political parties, racial profiling, systemic racism, white supremacists

There is an epidemic in our country. Other epidemics like obesity and AIDS create injustice in the body, but this one creates injustice in our society and the ways in which we relate to one another. We have a name for this disease: colorblindness.

What are the symptoms of colorblindness? The most notable is the refusal to admit that the color of a person’s skin affects that person’s opportunities in America. Other symptoms include a callous rationalization of racial violence, a denial of one’s own racial prejudices, a minimization of ubiquitous bigotry, and, in extreme cases, a belief that race is a personal choice.

Let’s take a look at some recent cases of this rampant disease. Several weeks ago, Tahera Ahmad ordered a can of soda on a United Airlines flight. For sanitary reasons, she requested an unopened can, but she was denied. “Big deal,” you might think. “It’s probably just some obscure airline regulation about canned drinks, right?” Unfortunately, no. This was a symptom of America’s insidious disease.

In Ahmad’s words,

This isn’t about me and a soda can. It’s about systemic injustice that is perpetuated throughout our community.

That systemic injustice is influenced in part by color-blindness, which allows the privileged to overlook or even to justify their most horrific prejudices. On this United Airlines flight, nobody stood up for Ahmad when another passenger told her to “f… off” and said that Ahmad “would use [the unopened can] as a weapon.” How can anyone claim that racist institutions can be relegated to a “dark chapter in America’s history” when blatant discrimination like this occurs on a major American airline? The answer is simple: the narrative of colorblindness states that color doesn’t matter anymore, that minorities have won the battle for equal treatment, and that they no longer have any reason to think they are oppressed.

It appears that United Airlines has a bad case of colorblindness. It is an institution and its top priority is not social progress; it is self-preservation. In their apology to Tahera Ahmad, representatives of United did not mention anything about discrimination. They did not mention racism or Islamophobia. For them, it was a matter of rudeness and bad customer service. They simply did not see that being non-White and Muslim has a painful effect on American citizens.

Another incident of colorblindness was highlighted in some of the responses to the recent shooting in South Carolina. The culprit, a young White man named Dylann Roof, shot and killed nine Black worshippers during Bible study. To give you some background, by Roof’s own account, he was not raised in a racist home or educated in a racist school; he was a racist by choice. After reading racist texts about the “Jewish problem” in 1940s Europe, Roof accepted a racist ideology and wrote his own racist manifesto, in which he systematically described the unique failings of everyone who was not White. This racism and nothing else motivated his murder of nine Blacks in a historically Black church.

The reality is clear, but America’s severe case of colorblindness produced an incomplete and distorted response from its politicians. Lindsey Graham (SC-R) claimed that Roof was just “one of these whacked out kids” and “obviously twisted.” Jeb Bush called it “tragic,” and Rick Perry called it “unspeakable.” Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Mike Huckabee sent their heartfelt prayers via tweet, and Rick Santorum called the event “an attack on religious liberty.” Ben Carson called it an act of “hate” and “intolerance.” To Donald Trump, it was “incomprehensible.” To Hillary Clinton, just “heartbreaking.”

But what is truly tragic, unspeakable, whacked out, twisted, incomprehensible, and heartbreaking is the fact that only one presidential candidate, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), responded to this undeniably racial attack by bringing up race. He had the sense to describe the incident as a “reminder of the ugly stain of racism on our country” and of the fact that we are “far from eradicating racism.” Thank you, Bernie.

As for the other future leaders of our country, it appears that they, too, have been infected and debilitated by a resistant strain of color-blindness. They refuse to admit that the color of a person’s skin still affects that person’s opportunities in America. They rationalize racial violence as religious intolerance, mental disturbance, or unexplainable hatred. They deny the terrifying strength of racial prejudices. They minimize the role of bigotry. It seems they are blind to the racial realities of our times, and they are of no help to the non-Whites who still struggle, on a daily basis, for equality, freedom, and justice.

In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr. gave the commencement address at Oberlin College. He said:

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through…tireless efforts and persistent work… [and] without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the primitive forces of social stagnation.

The more the Civil Rights movement sinks into the background of our minds as an event in “history,” the more the epidemic of colorblindness incapacitates us. So long as our government and corporations deny their daily institutional complicity in the racial violence we see nearly every day in America, we will remain trapped in a cycle of oppression and denial.

I agree wholeheartedly with Dr. King. Colorblindness is like any other epidemic. It will not eradicate itself over time. It needs treatment, and it needs it now. Every day that we spend waiting for a cure is another day that the disease of color-blindness has triumphed. What should you do? A better question might be, What can you do? Because you should do everything you can.

First, it is essential to write your representatives and demand that they publicly admit the persistent problem of racism in America. Demand that they serve the diverse body of voters who elected them—not just the interests of Whites or otherwise privileged people. Demand that they open the political discussion to include race and that they address the shambles in which America’s current racial understanding lies.

Second, talk about race. Have earnest discussions, and follow them up with action. Remember that a thousand mile march begins with a single step. Let’s take a step today.

Race and the Ghost of Jim Crow

• • African Americans, racial socialization, racism, white privilege, white supremacists

According to political conservatives, racial discrimination is no longer an institutional issue, and there is no longer any need for policies that provide socioeconomic protections for Blacks. Political conservatives also say that if any racial discrimination is happening, it is being committed by only a few bigoted individuals. These individuals, they say, have been socialized to hold such bigoted notions and believe that Blacks are lazy and inferior and that it is okay to commit racist acts against them.

The Donald Sterlings and Robert Copelands of the United States have been undoubtedly shaped by a racist culture. The U.S. government sanctioned discrimination and gave Whites permission to denigrate Blacks openly. But these sorts of people don’t hold those beliefs anymore, right? After looking at demographics information, I’m not so sure. Consider this: according to the U.S. Census taken in 2010, there were more than 23 million Whites over the age of 70 in America. By contrast, there were slightly more than 39 million Blacks in all age brackets. Why is this significant? Because the number of Whites 70 years and older equals more than half of the total Black population, who are potentially voting on or in some way influencing policies that affect all Blacks. Whites born in the early 1960s (those over age 50) would have also been socialized and participated in the practice of Jim Crow Racism. They number more than 56 million.

Let’s remind ourselves what was going on when these older Whites were young. Whites currently over the age of 50 engaged in race relations in the context of Jim Crow. Until the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Jim Crow continued legally and unrestricted. Brown v. Board of Education was aimed at the integration of public schools in the South, but it had broader implications as well, which included the end of Jim Crow laws. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Jim Crow became a federal offense. This, of course, did not end racism. Despite being “illegal,” Jim Crow discrimination continued unofficially in small towns up until the 1990s.

If this lingering Jim Crow representation does not bother you enough, remember that these 80 million plus individuals had families, friends, and children. The racism of their social milieu became ingrained in their minds, and from them it spread passively and actively to their children and families: passively by imitation, actively by subtle, deliberate instruction. The end of legal, public discrimination has not prevented private discrimination from flourishing beneath the surface and continuing to have an effect on public policy, albeit in a subtler, more insidious way.

In light of this, it is evident that racism has strong institutional support. More than 80 million people in the United States were taught early on that it is okay to discriminate. Not only was it okay, but it is normal and expected. I don’t mean that every White person born during the era of legal racial discrimination is automatically a racist bigot. There have always been Whites who recognized the injustice of discrimination from the start. But if these Whites are of the same ilk as Donald Sterling and Robert Copeland, socialized during the 1920s through the mid-1960s when it was legally permissible in the United States to commit racial discrimination, then I have to raise a point against the political conservatives: More than 80 million people is certainly not “a few bigoted individuals.”

This institutional support aside, we cannot ignore the ugly fact that people can be racist, even violently racist, without this socialization. Dylann Roof, the White who wanted to start a “race war” by shooting nine Blacks in Charleston, South Carolina, was 21 years old. Not only that, but in a document reported to be his manifesto, he writes, “I was not raised in a racist home or environment.” Instead, he writes, he got his ideas from books. Contrary to how Roof is presented by various media outlets, he was not mentally disturbed or psychologically unstable. He was just plain racist. And Roof is surely not the only racist in America. Racial discrimination is therefore not just an artifact of Jim Crow socialization; it is a persistent cultural phenomenon that can overtake people of any age and any family background.

It is certainly not legally permissible now to discriminate against Blacks without a bona fide occupational qualification as it was back then, and it is not socially acceptable now as it was then to openly disparage Blacks or otherwise discriminate against them. But this does not protect Blacks from the political power of the racist vote, and it does not shield them from a bullet fired from a racist gun. It does not ensure that children will learn in their classrooms to actively accept those who look differently from them and to judge them “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” It does not ensure that Blacks will earn anything more than 64 cents on the dollar compared to Whites in similar professions. But it does ensure that privileged people will push aside racial issues as a thing of the past, what our President has called “dark chapters in our nation’s history,” embarrassing mistakes that we don’t—and shouldn’t—bring up anymore.

It should alarm us that a large group of privileged people who were socialized in a racist culture still hold significant representative power over Blacks. It should alarm us, and it should remind us that the abolition of Jim Crow is not a good enough reason to think that Black people in America can ease up on the struggle for freedom and equality. Blacks cannot passively accept the racist ideology according to which race “no longer matters.” Race does matter, and it will probably always matter, and Blacks need to lobby actively for policies that protect their socioeconomic interests against the real threat of racial discrimination.
What is lacking in numbers needs to be made up for in tenacity.

Lessie Branch is a Racial Policy Scholar whose research interests focus on race and class disparities in general and the discordance between Black racial attitudes and Black economic progress specifically. Lessie is on faculty at Monroe College in the School of Business and Accounting.