Tuesday, August 15, 2017
By Austin C. McCoy,
Truthout | News Analysis
White supremacist James Alex
Fields Jr.'s murder of 32-year-old Heather Heyer and near-massacre of
antiracist protesters at the "Unite the Right" rally in
Charlottesville turned the mobilization into a flashpoint for politicians on
both sides of the aisle, as well as for media outlets. Heyer's death shifted
the mainstream portrayal of Charlottesville from a "street fight between
the right and the left" to a terrorist attack aimed at the antiracist
left.
Donald Trump, of course, did
not make this shift. Although he has supplied swift responses to the attacks
that have occurred in places like Paris, the president initially remained mum
about Heyer's murder and the dozens of people who were injured in the white
supremacist attack.
Trump's conspicuous silence
and weak response led both conservatives and liberals to frame their
conversations on Charlottesville through discussions of the president's lack of
moral leadership. Republicans and Democrats, such as Senators Orrin Hatch and Marco
Rubio, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe condemned Trump for his initial silence. Once Trump
finally issued a response condemning what he described as
"violence on many sides," he attracted more criticisms from both liberal and conservative
politicians and pundits for failing to identify that white supremacists were at
fault and suggesting that both the left and the right were to blame.
While Trump's comments were
indeed egregious, mainstream narratives about Charlottesville that focus
primarily on Trump's bad character and the actions of one murderous racist
(Fields), leave something to be desired: They obscure the need to creatively
confront and defeat the white supremacist right. These limited narratives belie
the structure of white supremacy in the US. Ultimately, this framing tells many
of us on the left what we already know: Neither liberals nor conservatives have
a real strategy for eradicating white supremacy at its root.
Like many Americans, I was
horrified to hear about the murder of Heather Heyer and the injuries to other
anti-racists and anti-fascists resisting white supremacists in Charlottesville,
Virginia, on Saturday. As an organizer working to confront racist police
violence in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I have seen tense moments where drivers have
threatened to ram their vehicles into marchers exercising their right to
protest, so I knew that this violence was not a case of a few "rotten
apples;" the threat of it persists everywhere.
Fields' evil deed recalls this
nation's deep history of state-sanctioned white supremacist violence aimed at
people of color, especially African Americans, and the left. Friday night's
tiki-torch march and Saturday's deadly assault recall the wave of race riots as
well as the first Red Scare after World War I. Part of the white nationalists'
vision, at least as described by white supremacist leader Richard Spencer, is
to create a white "ethno-state." Driving through a multiracial
flank of radicals could represent a pursuit of this goal, or at least an attempt
to create the space needed for further white nationalist organizing.
However, the framing of
Saturday's attacks by liberal and conservative politicians and pundits does not
really present death as a logical outcome of white supremacist organizing and a
white nationalist White House. The overwhelming emphasis on the actions of the
driver, as well as on Trump's responses, reduces the problem of eradicating
white supremacy to one murderous act by an individual and a lack of moral
leadership from an immoral president, not the product of structural racism.
Rather than seeing white supremacy as a system, many analysts are describing
Friday's and Saturday's events as the result of an emotion: "hate."
Critiques of Trump focused on
his days-long inability to reference Neo-Nazis or the Ku Klux Klan, eventually
forcing him to deliver a new statement. But what is the point of pushing
Trump to denounce white supremacists, when he clearly does not have the moral
authority to criticize them? Trump helped popularize birtherism, which offered
a basis for Republican Party obstructionism during the Obama era. Trump-fueled
birtherism also helped delegitimize certain policies, such as the Affordable
Care Act.
Trump has employed white
nationalists, such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, in his administration.
His administration has sought to implement a constellation of policies that can
only be described as an attempt to explicitly center white racial nationalism
in domestic and foreign affairs. These policies include the Muslim travel ban,
the continuation of restrictive immigration and aggressive deportation, a turn
toward resurrecting racist drug war policies, and the Department of Justice's
flirtation with suing colleges and universities over their use of affirmative
action policies. Trump is also "seriously considering" pardoning
racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
Calling on him now to denounce
a part of his electoral base that he helped cultivate with his birtherism --
without rolling back any of the aforementioned policies -- seems like an empty
gesture. Would we take seriously a well-known jewel thief's disavowal of the
latest bank robbery because the robbers killed a hostage? Probably not. So, why
should anyone believe this president if he says he condemns white
supremacists?
We are mistaken to focus on
Trump's inability to do the easiest thing ever -- call folks who wave Nazi
flags "Nazis" and white nationalists who commit murder "white
supremacist terrorists." We are also mistaken to reduce Heyer's murder and
white nationalist organizing to "hate" and a product of
"fringe" and "bad" beliefs. We will not defeat white
supremacy by just trying to shoo all of the "bad racists" back out of
public life.
Black- and people-of-color-led
movements against state violence have illustrated how white supremacy is
resilient and powered by acts of institutional violence. These acts are
perpetrated by policies constructed and enacted by both Democrats and
Republicans. Bill Clinton was not wearing a KKK hood when he signed the 1994
crime bill, which fueled the mass incarceration of people of color. George W.
Bush was not waving a Nazi flag when he and Congress enacted the Patriot Act, which
led to egregious forms of racial profiling of Arab and Muslim folks after 9/11.
While the KKK and other white supremacists have a history of using violence to
block African Americans' property, labor and voting rights, the federal
government has not always needed the KKK to enact discriminatory policies.
So, yes, we must use a
diversity of creative tactics to resist white supremacists whenever and
wherever they organize, but that is not the only strategy. Eradicating
institutional racism -- especially as it is related to a host of other legal,
political and material structures, such as private property rights and
policing, restrictive immigration and deportation, wage and property theft,
deindustrialization and the assault on organized labor, the patriarchal assault
on reproductive rights, the theft of Indigenous land, imperialist wars, and
other crimes committed by capitalists and the state -- offers us the best
chance to eradicate the foundation of white supremacy.
Without the acts of the
criminal state to stand on, white supremacists will not have a platform to
build a movement. Denying white supremacists' racist symbols and ideas is
important. I am a fan of confederate flag burners. But we may be able to
prevent more acts of white supremacist violence if we finally eliminate their
structural foundation.
This elimination will not be
initiated by Democrats or Republicans. The focus on Trump's behavior reflects
the lack of a structural analysis. This should not surprise us. Before Black
Lives Matter's emergence, Republicans mainly operated on the official line that
the United States was colorblind, while Democrats, colleges and universities,
and much of corporate America embraced superficial notions of diversity and
multiculturalism. In recent years, however, resistance to economic injustice,
deindustrialization, mass incarceration, racist police violence, Islamophobia,
restrictive immigration and deportations, and theft of Indigenous land for
corporate gain has shattered both of these visions.
As Democrats scramble to
adjust their racial politics, we should, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor emphasizes
in her piece demanding "No More Charlottesvilles," confront the
violent right whenever and wherever it emerges. And while we are opposing the
violent right, we should continue to offer our alternative: a working
class-focused multiracial solidarity politics that aims to enact racial justice
and economic democracy for everyone. Working from these strategies, hopefully,
we will be able to prevent future Charlottesvilles.
This is a tall order, because
structural transformation is difficult. Let's not take the easy way out.
Austin McCoy is an activist in
Ann Arbor and a history instructor at the University of Michigan. He is also a
contributor for Black Perspectives. Follow him on Twitter @AustinMcCoy3.
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