Let's Talk About the Radicalization of Young White Males Online

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part 2:
If you asked an Englishman in the early part of the 17th century what colour skin he had, he might very well have called it white. But the whiteness of his skin would have suggested no more suitable basis for a collective identity than the roundness of his nose or the baldness of his head. If you asked him to situate himself within the rapidly expanding borders of the known world, he would probably identify himself, first and most naturally, as an Englishman. If that category proved too narrow – if, say, he needed to describe what it was he had in common with the French and the Dutch that he did not share with Ottomans or Africans – he would almost certainly call himself a Christian instead.
That religious identity was crucial for the development of the English slave trade – and eventually for the development of racial whiteness. In the early 17th century, plantation owners in the West Indies and in the American colonies largely depended on the labour of European indentured servants. These servants were considered chattel and were often treated brutally – the conditions on Barbados, England’s wealthiest colony, were notorious – but they were fortunate in at least one respect: because they were Christian, by law they could not be held in lifetime captivity unless they were criminals or prisoners of war.
Africans enjoyed no such privilege. They were understood to be infidels, and thus the “perpetual enemies” of Christian nations, which made it legal to hold them as slaves. By 1640 or so, the rough treatment of indentured servants had started to diminish the supply of Europeans willing to work on the sugar and tobacco plantations, and so the colonists looked increasingly to slavery, and the Atlantic-sized loophole that enabled it, to keep their fantastically profitable operations supplied with labour.
The plantation owners understood very well that their cruel treatment of indentured Europeans, and their even crueller treatment of enslaved Africans, might lead to thoughts – or worse – of vengeance. Significantly outnumbered, they lived in constant fear of uprisings. They were particularly afraid of incidents such as Bacon’s Rebellion, in 1676, which saw indentured Europeans fighting side-by-side with free and enslaved Africans against Virginia’s colonial government.
To ward off such events, the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.
One of the more plausible explanations for this change, made by Rugemer and the historian Katharine Gerbner, among others, is that the establishment of whiteness as a legal category solved a religious dilemma. By the 1670s, Christian missionaries, including the Quaker George Fox, were insisting that enslaved Africans should be inducted into the Christian faith. The problem this posed for the planters was obvious: if their African labourers became Christians, and no longer “perpetual enemies” of Christendom, then on what legal grounds could they be enslaved? And what about the colonial laws that gave special privileges to Christians, laws whose authors apparently never contemplated the possibility that Africans might someday join the faith?
The planters tried to resolve the former dilemma by blocking the conversion of enslaved Africans, on the grounds, as the Barbados Assembly put it in 1680, that such conversion would “endanger the island, inasmuch as converted negroes grow more perverse and intractable than others”. When that didn’t work (the Bishop of London objected) they instead passed laws guaranteeing that baptism could not be invoked as grounds for seeking freedom.
But the latter question, about privileges for Christians, required the colonialists to think in a new way. No longer could their religious identity separate them and their servants from enslaved Africans. Henceforth they would need what Morgan called “a screen of racial contempt”. Henceforth, they would need to start thinking of themselves as white.
As late as 1694, a slave-ship captain could still question the racial logic newly employed to justify his trade. (“I can’t think there is any intrinsick value in one colour more than another, nor that white is better than black, only we think it so because we are so,” Thomas Phillips wrote in his diary.) But whiteness quickly proved itself a powerful weapon that allowed transatlantic capitalism to secure the labour – “white” and African – it needed. As the historian Theodore Allen put it, “The plantation bourgeoisie deliberately extended a privileged status to the white poor of all categories as a means of turning to African slavery as the basis of its system of production.”
The economic utility of the idea of whiteness helped spread it rapidly around the world. Du Bois was not wrong to call it a religion, for like a religion, it operated at every psychological, sociological and political scale, from the most intimate to the most public. Like a religion, too, it adapted to local conditions. What it meant to be white in British Virginia was not identical to what it would mean in New York before the American civil war, in India during the Raj, in Georgia during Jim Crow, in Australia after Federation, or in Germany during the Third Reich. But what united all these expressions was a singular idea: that some group of people called white was naturally superior to all others. As Benjamin Disraeli, the Victorian prime minister and one of the most committed race ideologists of his time, put it, “race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance”.
The idea of whiteness, in other words, was identical to the idea of white supremacy. For the three centuries that preceded the civil rights movement, this presumption was accepted at the most refined levels of culture, by people who, in other contexts, were among the most vocal advocates of human liberty and equality. It is well known that Immanuel Kant argued we should treat every other person “always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means”. Less well known is his proposal, in his Lectures on Physical Geography, published in 1802, that “humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites”, or his claim, in his notes for his Lectures on Anthropology, that native “Americans and Negroes cannot govern themselves. Thus, serve only as slaves”. Even Gandhi, during the early part of his life, accepted the basic lie of whiteness, arguing that “the English and the Indians spring from a common stock, called the Indo-Aryan” and that “the white race in South Africa should be the predominating race”.
As though aware of their own guilty conscience, the evangelists of the religion of whiteness were always desperate to prove that it was something other than mere prejudice. Where the Bible still held sway, they bent the story of Noah’s son Ham into a divine apologia for white supremacy. When anatomy and anthropology gained prestige in the 18th and 19th centuries, they cited pseudo-scientific markers of racial difference like the cephalic index and the norma verticalis. When psychology took over in the 20th, they told themselves flattering stories about divergences in IQ.
South Africa in 1967. Photograph: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty
For all their evident success, the devotees of the religion of whiteness were never able to achieve the total vision they longed for. In part, this was because there were always dissenters, including among those who stood to gain from it, who rejected the creed of racial superiority. Alongside those remembered by history – Elizabeth Freeman, Toussaint Louverture, Harriet Tubman, Sitting Bull, Franz Boas, Haviva Reik, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela – there were millions of now-forgotten people who used whatever means they possessed to resist it. In part, too, the nonsense logic that regulated the boundaries of whiteness – the one-drop rule in the US, which said that anyone with Black ancestry could not be white; the endless arguments over what “caucasian” was supposed to mean; the “honorary Aryan” status that Hitler extended to the Japanese – was no match for the robust complexities of human society.
Yet if the religion of whiteness was never able to gain acceptance as an unchallengeable scientific fact, it was still hugely successful at shaping social reality. Some of this success had to do with its flexibility. Thanks to its role in facilitating slavery, whiteness in the US was often defined in opposition to blackness, but between those two extremes was room for tactical accommodations. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin could claim that only the English and Saxons “make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth”, and nearly 80 years later, Ralph Waldo Emerson would insist that the Irish, like the Chinese and the Native American, were not caucasian. Over time, however, the definition of who counted as culturally white expanded to include Catholics from southern Europe, the Irish and even Jews, who for centuries had been seen as quintessential outsiders.
The religion of whiteness also found success by persuading its adherents that they, and not the people they oppressed, were the real victims. In 1692, colonial legislators in British Barbados complained that “sundry of the Negroes and Slaves of this island, have been long preparing, contriving, conspiring and designing a most horrid, bloody, damnable and detestable rebellion, massacre, assassination and destruction”. From there, it was a more or less straight line to Woodrow Wilson’s claim, in 1903, that the southerners who started the Ku Klux Klan were “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation”, and to Donald Trump’s warning, when he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, that Mexican immigrants to the US were “bringing drugs. And they’re bringing crime. And they’re rapists.”
Where the religion of whiteness was not able to win converts with persuasion or fear, it deployed cruder measures to secure its power, conscripting laws, institutions, customs and churches to enforce its prerogatives. Above all, it depended on force. By the middle of the 20th century, the presumption that a race of people called white were superior to all others had supplied the central justification not just for the transatlantic slave trade but also for the near-total extinction of Indians in North America; for Belgian atrocities in Congo; for the bloody colonisation of India, east Africa and Australia by Britain; for the equally bloody colonisation of north and west Africa and south-east Asia by France; for the deployment of the Final Solution in Nazi Germany; and for the apartheid state in South Africa. And those are merely the most extreme examples. Alongside those murdered, raped and enslaved in the name of whiteness, the total number of whom runs at least to nine figures, are an almost unthinkable number of people whose lives were shortened, constrained, antagonised and insulted on a daily basis.

 

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Part 4:

It was not until the aftermath of the second world war that frank endorsements of white supremacy were broadly rejected in Anglo-American public discourse. That this happened at all was thanks largely to the efforts of civil rights and anti-colonial activists, but the war itself also played a role. Though the horrors of the Nazi regime had been more acute in their intensity than anything happening at the time in the US or the UK, they supplied an unflattering mirror that made it impossible to ignore the racism that was still prevalent in both countries. (A New York Times editorial in 1946 made the connection explicit, arguing that “this is a particularly good year to campaign against the evils of bigotry, prejudice and race hatred because we have recently witnessed the defeat of enemies who tried to found a mastery of the world upon such a cruel and fallacious policy”.)
Political appeals to white solidarity diminished slowly but certainly. In 1955, for example, Winston Churchill could still imagine that “Keep England White” was a winning general-election theme, and even as late as 1964, Peter Griffiths, a Conservative candidate for parliament, would score a surprise victory after endorsing a nakedly racist slogan. By 1968, however, when Enoch Powell delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech – in which he approvingly quoted a constituent who lamented that “in 15 or 20 years’ time, the black man will have the whip hand over the white man” – he would be greeted by outrage in the Times, which called it an “evil speech”, and expelled from the Conservative shadow cabinet. In the US, too, where a century of racial apartheid had followed a century of slavery, open expressions of racism met with increasing public censure. Throughout the 60s and into the 70s, Congress passed a series of statutes that rendered explicit racial discrimination illegal in many areas of public life.
This gradual rejection of explicit, government-enforced white supremacy was hugely consequential in terms of public policy. Yet it did not mean that whiteness, as a political force, had lost its appeal: in the weeks after Powell’s speech, to take just one example, a Gallup poll found that 74% of Britons supported his suggestion that brown-skinned immigrants ought to be repatriated. It also left unresolved the more difficult question of whether whiteness was truly separable from its long history of domination.
Instead of looking too hard at the sordid history of whiteness, many white people found it easier to decide that the civil rights movement had accomplished all the anti-racism work that needed doing. The result was a strange détente. On the one hand, whiteness retreated as a subject of public attention, giving way to a new rhetoric of racial colour-blindness. On the other hand, vast embedded economic and cultural discrepancies allowed white people continue to exercise the institutional and structural power that had accumulated on their behalf across the previous three centuries.
A 1972 demonstration in support of Enoch Powell. Photograph: Evening Standard/Getty
Similarly, while blatant assertions of white power – such as the 1991 gubernatorial campaign of David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, in Louisiana – met with significant elite resistance, what counted as racist (and therefore subject to the taboo) was limited to only the most flagrant instances of racial animus. Among liberals and conservatives, racism was widely understood as a species of hatred, which meant that any white person who could look into his heart and find an absence of open hostility could absolve himself of racism.
Even the phrase “white supremacy”, which predates the word “racism” in English by 80 years and once described a system of interlocking racial privileges that touched every aspect of life, was redefined to mean something rare and extreme. In 1923, for example, under the headline White Supremacy Menaced, the New York Times would print an article which took at face value a Harvard professor’s warning that “one of the gravest and most acute problems before the world today” was “the problem of saving the white race from submergence in the darker races”. In 1967, the US supreme court invalidated a law that prevented whites from marrying people who were not white, on the grounds that it was “obviously an endorsement of the doctrine of White Supremacy”, and two years later, the critic Albert Murray would use the phrase to describe everything from anti-Black prejudice in police departments to bigoted media representations of Black life to influential academic studies such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s The Negro Family.
By the 80s and 90s, however, at least in white-dominated media, “white supremacy” was reserved only for the most shocking and retrograde examples of racism. For many people who grew up at that time, as I did, the phrase evoked cross burnings and racist hooligans, rather than an intricate web of laws and norms that maintained disparities of wealth, education, housing, incarceration and access to political power.
Perhaps most perverse of all was the charge of “reverse racism”, which emboldened critics of affirmative action and other “race-conscious” policies to claim that they, and not the policies’ proponents, were the true heralds of racial equality. In 1986, Ronald Reagan went so far as to defend his opposition to minority-hiring quotas by invoking Martin Luther King Jr: “We want a colour-blind society,” Reagan declared. “A society, that in the words of Dr King, judges people not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.”
Of course not everyone accepted this new dispensation, which scholars have variously described as “structural racism”, “symbolic racism” or “racism without racists”. In the decades following the civil rights movement, intellectuals and activists of colour continued to develop the Du Boisian intellectual tradition that understood whiteness as an implement of social domination. In the 80s and 90s, a group of legal scholars that included Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Cheryl Harris and Richard Delgado produced a body of research that became known as critical race theory, which was, in Bell’s words, “ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalised in and by law”.
Alongside critical race theory, and in many ways derived from it, a new academic trend, known as whiteness studies, took shape. Historians working in this subfield demonstrated the myriad ways in which the pursuit of white supremacy – like the pursuit of wealth and the subjection of women – had been one of the central forces that gave shape to Anglo-American history. For many of them, the bill of indictment against whiteness was total: as the historian David Roediger put it, “it is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false.”
In the fall of 1992, a new journal co-founded by Noel Ignatiev, one of the major figures in whiteness studies, appeared in bookstores around Cambridge, Massachusetts. Called Race Traitor, the magazine wore its motto and guiding ethos on its cover: Treason to Whiteness is Loyalty to Humanity. The issue opened with an editorial whose headline was equally provocative: “Abolish the white race – by any means necessary.” This demand, with its echoes of Sartre by way of Malcolm X, was not, as it turned out, a call for violence, much less for genocide. As Ignatiev and his co-editor, John Garvey, explained, they took as their foundational premise that “the white race is a historically constructed social formation”, a sort of club whose membership “consists of those who partake of the privileges of the white skin in this society”.
A waiting room in Durham, North Carolina, in May 1940. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty

 

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Part 4

For Ignatiev and Garvey, whiteness had been identified with white supremacy for so long that it was folly to think it was salvageable. “So long as the white race exists,” they wrote, “all movements against racism are doomed to fail.” What was necessary, in their view, was for the people called “white” – people like them – to forcefully reject that identification and the racial privileges that came with it. Whiteness, they suggested, was a fragile, unstable thing, such that even a small number of determined attacks – objecting to racist educational programmes at a school board meeting, say, or capturing racist police behaviour on video – ought to be able to unsettle the whole edifice.
But while whiteness studies produced much work that still makes for bracing, illuminating reading, it was soon mocked as one more instance of the very privilege it meant to oppose. “The whole enterprise gives whites a kind of standing in the multicultural paradigm they have never before enjoyed,” Margaret Talbot wrote in the New York Times in 1997. “And it involves them, inevitably, in a journey of self-discovery in which white people’s thoughts about their own whiteness acquire a portentous new legitimacy.” Even Ignatiev would later say he “wanted nothing to do with” it.
By the mid-2000s, the “colour-blind” ideological system had become so successful that it managed to shield even the more obvious operations of whiteness – the overwhelming numbers of white people in corporate boardrooms, for instance, or in the media and tech industries – from much censure. In the US, when racial disparities could not be ignored, it was often suggested that time was the only reliable remedy: as the numerical proportion of whites dwindled, so too would their political and economic power diminish. (Never mind that whiteness had managed to escape predictions of demographic doom before, by integrating groups it had previously kept on its margins.)
Meanwhile, younger white liberals, the sort of people who might have read Bell or Crenshaw or Ignatiev at university, tended to duck the subject of their own racial identity with a shuffling awkwardness. Growing up white in the decades after the civil rights movement was a little like having a rich but disreputable cousin: you never knew quite what to make of him, or the extravagant gifts he bought for your birthday, and so you found it easier, in general, just not to say anything.
The absence of talk about whiteness was so pervasive that it became possible to convince yourself that it constituted one of the central obstacles to racial progress. When I was in graduate school during the early 00s, toward the end of the whiteness-studies boomlet, I often heard – including from my own mouth – the argument that the real problem was that white people weren’t talking enough about their racial identity. If you could get people to acknowledge their whiteness, we told ourselves, then it might be possible to get them to acknowledge the unfair ways in which whiteness had helped them.
The trouble with this notion would become clear soon enough, when the presidency of Barack Obama offered the surest test to date of the proposition that whiteness had separated itself from its supremacist past. Though Obama’s election was initially hailed by some as proof that the US was entering a new post-racial phase, it took just a few months for the Tea party, a conservative movement ostensibly in favour of small government, to suggest that the opposite was closer to the truth.
In September 2009, Jimmy Carter caused a stir by suggesting that the Tea party’s opposition was something other than a principled reaction to government spending. “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter said. (Carter’s speculation was later backed up by research: the political scientist Ashley Jardina, for instance, found that “more racially resentful whites are far more likely to say they support the Tea party and rate it more positively.”)
A Tea party march in Washington to protest against the healthcare reform proposed by Barack Obama in 2009. Photograph: Michael Reynolds/EPA
The white backlash to Obama’s presidency continued throughout his two terms, helped along by Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and the Republican party, which won majorities in both houses of Congress by promising to obstruct anything Obama tried to accomplish. Neither project kept Obama from a second term, but this does not mean that they were without effect: though Obama lost white voters by 12% in 2008, four years later he would lose them by 20%, the worst showing among white voters for a successful candidate in US history.
At the same time, Obama’s victory suggested to some observers the vindication of the demographic argument: the changing racial composition of the US appeared to have successfully neutralised the preferences of the white electorate, at least as far as the presidency was concerned. (“There just are not enough middle-aged white guys that we can scrape together to win,” said one Republican after Obama’s victory.)
What’s more, the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, which attracted international attention in the summer of 2014, prompted a torrent of demonstrative introspection among white people, especially online. As the critic Hua Hsu would write, half-teasingly, in 2015, “it feels as though we are living in the moment when white people, on a generational scale, have become self-aware”.
Not for the first time, however, what was visible on Twitter was a poor indicator of deeper social trends. As we now know, the ways in which whiteness was becoming most salient at mid-decade were largely not the ways that prompted recent university graduates to announce their support for Rhodes Must Fall on Instagram. Far more momentous was the version of white identity politics that appreciated the advantages of whiteness and worried about them slipping away; that saw in immigration an existential threat; and that wanted, more than anything, to “Take Back Control” and to “Make America Great Again”.
It was this version of whiteness that helped to power the twin shocks of 2016: first Brexit and then Trump. The latter, especially – not just the fact of Trump’s presidency but the tone of it, the unrestrained vengeance and vituperation that animated it – put paid to any lingering questions about whether whiteness had renounced its superiority complex. Ta-Nehisi Coates, who more than any other single person had been responsible for making the bumbling stereotype of whiteness offered up by Stuff White People Like seem hopelessly myopic, understood what was happening immediately. “Trump truly is something new – the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president,” Coates wrote in the autumn of 2017. “His ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”
In 1860, a man who called himself “Ethiop” published an essay in The Anglo-African Magazine, which has been called the first Black literary journal in the US. The author behind the pseudonym was William J Wilson, a former bootmaker who later served as the principal of Brooklyn’s first public school for Black children. Wilson’s essay bore the headline, What Shall We Do with the White People?
The article was meant in part meant to mock the white authors and statesmen who had endlessly asked themselves a similar question about Black people in the US. But it was not only a spoof. In a tone that mimicked the smug paternalism of his targets, he laid out a comprehensive indictment of white rule in the country: the plunder and murder of the “Aborigines”; the theft and enslavement of Africans; the hypocrisy embodied by the American constitution, government and white churches. At the root of all this, he wrote, was “a long continued, extensive and almost complete system of wrongdoing” that made the men and women who enabled it into “restless, grasping” marauders. “In view of the existing state of things around us,” Wilson proposed at the end, “let our constant thought be, what for the best good of all shall we do with the White people?”
Much has changed since Wilson’s time, but a century and a half on, his question remains no less pertinent. For some people, such as the political scientist Eric Kaufmann, whiteness is what it has always pretended to be. Though he acknowledges that races are not genetically defined, Kaufmann nevertheless sees them as defensible divisions of humanity that have some natural basis: they emerge, he suggests, “through a blend of unconscious colour-processing and slowly evolved cultural conventions”. In his 2019 book Whiteshift, Kaufmann argues that the history of oppression by white people is “real, but moot”, and he advocates for something he calls “symmetrical multiculturalism”, in which “identifying as white, or with a white tradition of nationhood, is no more racist than identifying as black”. What shall we do with the white people? Kaufmann thinks we should encourage them to take pride in being white, lest they turn to more violent means: “Freezing out legitimate expressions of white identity allows the far right to own it, and acts as a recruiting sergeant for their wilder ideas.”
From another perspective – my own, most days – whiteness means something different from other racial and ethnic identities because it has had a different history than other racial and ethnic identities. Across three-and-a-half centuries, whiteness has been wielded as a weapon on a global scale; Blackness, by contrast, has often been used as a shield. (As Du Bois put it, what made whiteness new and different was “the imperial width of the thing – the heaven-defying audacity.”) Nor is there much reason to believe that whiteness will ever be content to seek “legitimate expressions”, whatever those might look like. The religion of whiteness had 50 years to reform itself along non-supremacist lines, to prove that it was fit for innocuous coexistence. Instead, it gave us Donald Trump.

'Colonialism had never really ended': my life in the shadow of Cecil Rhodes
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Yet even this does not fully answer Wilson’s question. For if it’s easy enough to agree in theory that the only reasonable moral response to the long and very much non-moot history of white supremacy is the abolitionist stance advocated in the pages of Race Traitor – ie, to make whiteness meaningless as a group identity, to shove it into obsolescence alongside “Prussian” and “Etruscan” – it seems equally apparent that whiteness is not nearly so fragile as Ignatiev and Garvey had imagined. Late in his life, James Baldwin described whiteness as “a moral choice”, as a way of emphasising that it was not a natural fact. But whiteness is more than a moral choice: it is a dense network of moral choices, the vast majority of which have been made for us, often in times and places very distant from our own. In this way whiteness is a problem like climate change or economic inequality: it is so thoroughly imbricated in the structure of our everyday lives that it makes the idea of moral choices look quaint.
As with climate change, however, the only thing more difficult than such an effort would be trying to live with the alternative. Whiteness may seem inevitable and implacable, and Toni Morrison surely had it right when she said that the world “will not become unracialised by assertion”. (To wake up tomorrow and decide I am no longer white would help no one.) Even so, after 350 years, it remains the case, as Nell Irvin Painter argues, that whiteness “is an idea, not a fact”. Not alone, and not without much work to repair the damage done in its name, it still must be possible to change our minds.
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Mitch McConnell: 1619, American slavery starting point, not an important date in history
“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion..."

Michael Clevenger, Louisville Courier Journal

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Monday he doesn’t think 1619 is one of the most important points in U.S. history.

That's the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to and sold in the Virginia colony, a point often considered as the beginning of American slavery.

“I think this is about American history and the most important dates in American history. And my view — and I think most Americans think — dates like 1776, the Declaration of Independence; 1787, the Constitution; 1861-1865, the Civil War, are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” McConnell said during an appearance at the University of Louisville.

Senator Mitch McConnell speaks at a press conference after touring the Regional Biocontainment Lab - Center for Predictive Medicine at the University of Louisville on Monday, May 3, 2021

Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal

“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that the year 1619 was one of those years.

“I think that issue that we all are concerned about — racial discrimination — it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it,” he continued. “We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.”

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Kentucky’s longtime senator was referring to The 1619 Project, a New York Times initiative that emphasized the importance of the year American slavery began as well as slavery’s long-term consequences for the country. It also examined and reframed U.S. history through that lens.

The 1619 Project’s creator, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize for an essay she wrote for the project.

Last week, McConnell and almost 40 of his fellow Senate Republicans sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing a proposed plan to prioritize educational efforts that focus on systemic racism in U.S. history.

A spokesman for The New York Times defended The 1619 Project in the wake of McConnell’s letter, saying: “It deepened many readers’ understanding of the nation’s past and forced an important conversation about the lingering impact of slavery, and its centrality to the American story.”

University of Louisville political science professor Dewey Clayton said 1619 is "clearly a pivotal year" and called McConnell's statement about it Monday "shocking."

"Well, I think the comments are shocking, given the fact that Sen. McConnell is a learned man," Clayton said. "That was the year that slaves were first brought to the Eastern shores and offloaded at Jamestown.

"You can't move forward from that point without understanding what that meant to America, what that meant to commerce in this country, what that meant to the South ... For McConnell to dismiss that — I find that deeply disturbing."

Clayton noted the U.S. Constitution — which, as McConnell pointed out Monday, was established in 1787 — codified slavery and included several clauses directly related to it.

Likewise, Clayton said Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, wanted to include language in the Declaration of Independence that criticized the king of England for the British slave trade. However, the Declaration couldn't get sufficient support if such a condemnation was included, so it wasn't.

And, of course, slavery played a pivotal role in the Civil War.

"There is this sort of backlash to people who want to sort of really tell the truth about what happened in this country ... even if it’s not all beautiful, because it’s not," Clayton told The Courier Journal. "We have to expose the total truth."

"Essentially, we’re starting to see this sort of blowback because some people are not comfortable having the truth being told," he continued.

McConnell is far from the first GOP politician to criticize the 1619 Project. Former President Donald Trump was especially critical of it, and Clayton indicated Kentucky's powerful senator is sending a signal, with his recent comments, to the Republican base.

State Rep. Attica Scott, D-Louisville, slammed McConnell's comments Monday on Twitter, saying: "(McConnell) hates Black people — as do far too many people of his ilk. If he could, he’d probably erase our very existence from history — that’s what his comments this morning say to me and mine. While we’re here, what the hell are 'exotic notions?'"

Terrance Sullivan, executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights and cofounder of the bipartisan coalition AntiRacismKY, tweeted: "The "core underpinning of American civic education" should be based in the truth. Pretty simple concept."

"The true 'exotic notion' is what we were taught in history books thus far. Ignorance is not bliss for some of us," Sullivan also said on Twitter. "Without 1619 — they wouldn't have felt this country could sustain itself enough to make 1776 or 1787 even happen."

McConnell made his latest comments about this issue Monday morning at the University of Louisville’s ShelbyHurst campus, where he toured its Regional Biocontainment Lab, one of a dozen such facilities nationwide.

University officials said the lab has worked on testing vaccines and therapeutics during the coronavirus pandemic, as part of its efforts to assist with that crisis.

Senator Mitch McConnell speaks at a press conference after touring the Regional Biocontainment Lab - Center for Predictive Medicine at the University of Louisville on Monday, May 3, 2021. UofL President Neeli Bendapudi is at right.

Michael Clevenger/Courier Journal

McConnell held a press conference after his tour of the lab, during which he talked about the 1619 Project as well as President Joe Biden’s big infrastructure plan and the need for people who haven’t been vaccinated against COVID-19 yet to go ahead and do that.

Infrastructure and the Brent Spence Bridge

The Brent Spence Bridge in Northern Kentucky has long been overstressed by the traffic it handles day after day, and it has been in need of a significant upgrade or replacement for years.

But McConnell made it clear Monday he isn’t willing to back Biden’s multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure proposal, period, even if it were to include serious funding for the Brent Spence Bridge, which connects Kentucky with Cincinnati.

Instead, he advocated for a much smaller, roughly $600 billion infrastructure plan Senate Republicans have floated.

He indicated that while federal funding potentially could be provided for the Brent Spence Bridge in an infrastructure package if congressional Democrats and Republicans are able to reach a deal, some degree of state and perhaps local funding is likely to still be needed to finance such an undertaking in Northern Kentucky.

A red line Senate Republicans aren’t willing to cross, McConnell said, is any attempt to pay for new infrastructure investments at the national level by chipping away at the 2017 tax cuts Republicans passed during former President Donald Trump’s term in office.

“We’re happy to take a look at an infrastructure package that’s what basically both sides agree is infrastructure, and we’re not willing to pay for it by undoing the 2017 tax bill,” McConnell said Monday.

He and other conservatives repeatedly have criticized Biden’s proposal, saying it includes funding for a ton of things that aren’t actually infrastructure projects.

When The Courier Journal asked if he’s willing to consider and negotiate on an infrastructure package that goes above Republicans’ proposed $600 billion price tag, he said: “No, no. If it’s going to be about infrastructure, let’s make it about infrastructure. And I think there’s some sentiment on the Democratic side for splitting it off.”



In the ‘red zone’ for vaccinations


McConnell, who’s a big fan of football, used a sports metaphor as he described why it’s vital for more people in Kentucky (and nationwide) to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

“We’re in the red zone here — that’s the last 20 yards before you score. We’re not in the end zone yet. And I think it is disturbing to see that vaccinations seem to be receding because everybody kind of thinks it’s over.”

He urged people to “finish the job” by getting vaccinated, which will help finally bring an end to the coronavirus pandemic.

“I’m perplexed as to why we can’t finish the job, but I think we just keep talking about it … and make it as available as possible,” he said of the COVID-19 vaccines, which anyone who’s at least 16 years old is now eligible to get.

Reach reporter Morgan Watkins: 502-582-4502; mwatkins@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @morganwatkins26.

 

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This

keeps

happening








#BothSides

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nati...8fe402-ae83-11eb-b476-c3b287e52a01_story.html


Alamo renovation gets stuck over arguments about slavery
Members of the Sons of the Republic of Texas, a lineage society for descendants of the state’s founders, gather beneath the Cenotaph monument on Alamo Plaza. (Tamir Kalifa for The Washington Post)
May 8, 2021 at 5:01 p.m. EDT

But Texans are deeply divided over how, exactly, to remember the Alamo. A $450 million plan to renovate the site has devolved into a five-year brawl over whether to focus narrowly on the 1836 battle or present a fuller view that delves into the site’s Indigenous history and the role of slavery in the Texas Revolution.

Generations of Texas schoolchildren have been taught to admire the Alamo defenders as revolutionaries slaughtered by the Mexican army in the fight for Texas independence. But several were enslavers, including William B. Travis and Davy Crockett — an inconvenient fact in a state where textbooks have only acknowledged since 2018 that slavery was at issue in the Civil War.

In July 2015, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization named the San Antonio Missions — including the Alamo — a World Heritage Site. (Reuters)
Indeed, an enslaved man named Joe, who was owned by Travis, survived the battle of the Alamo and became one of the primary sources of information about the 13-day siege, inspiring dozens of books and movies, including the John Wayne classic.

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Key members of the state’s GOP leadership and some conservative groups are insisting that the renovation stay focused on the battle. A bill introduced by 10 Republican state lawmakers would bar the overhaul from citing any reasons for the Texas Revolution beyond those mentioned in the Texas Declaration of Independence — which does not include slavery.

“If they want to bring up that it was about slavery, or say that the Alamo defenders were racist, or anything like that, they need to take their rear ends over the state border and get the hell out of Texas,” said Brandon Burkhart, president of the This is Freedom Texas Force, a conservative group that held an armed protest last year in Alamo Plaza.

Democratic elected officials in San Antonio want the Alamo story to be told from other perspectives. Indigenous leaders, for example, want the site to show respect for its ancient role as a burial ground. Meanwhile, historians argue that support for slavery was indeed a motivating factor for the Texas Revolution, a fact that should be acknowledged at the site, even if it tarnishes some giants of Texas history.

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“Sometimes we try so hard to create perfect heroes, and in trying so hard to create perfection, we force ourselves into a corner where it’s difficult to accept the reality that people are not perfect,” said Carey Latimore, a history professor at Trinity University.

“As we become more diverse as a nation and a people, we’ve got to learn how to talk about these difficult conversations, but we’ve got to talk about it with nuance. And that’s what’s missing right now in our society, is the nuance.”

Elected leaders have talked for decades about redeveloping the Alamo complex, which lies in the heart of San Antonio, not far from the famous River Walk. But those plans have always presented logistical challenges — the Alamo is owned by the state, while the adjoining plaza is owned by the city — as well as ideological ones.

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The original plan, announced in 2017, called for repairing the Alamo, fixing up the plaza and building a world-class museum for artifacts, including a collection donated by rock musician Phil Collins, an Alamo enthusiast. It represented a rare alliance between the state’s Republican leadership and one of its more liberal cities, with San Antonio committing $38 million to the budget and the state of Texas pitching in $106 million. That left at least $200 million to be raised through donations.

But aspects of the plan quickly met with outrage, especially its treatment of the Cenotaph, a 56-foot monument to Alamo defenders erected in the plaza in 1940.

Under the plan, the Cenotaph would be moved 500 feet south and deposited in front of the historic Menger Hotel. The idea was to make the plaza “period neutral” and help visitors imagine how the Alamo looked as a mission and fort. But conservative groups rallied in armed protest and turned up at public meetings chanting “Not one inch!”

Were the Alamo defenders ‘heroic’? Texas considers dropping the word from its school curriculums.

State leaders took up the cause, including Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R), who has closely aligned himself with former president Donald Trump. Last year, Patrick threatened to wrest control of the Alamo away from the General Land Office, which is led by George P. Bush, a potential political rival and son of former Florida governor Jeb Bush. Patrick took to Twitter to criticize Bush’s “lousy management.”

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Meanwhile, Alamo Plaza became a focus of San Antonio’s Black Lives Matter protests. Last summer, the Cenotaph was spray-painted with graffiti decrying white supremacy.

The struggle over the Cenotaph ended in September when the Texas Historical Commission, a state board whose members are appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott (R), voted to deny a permit to move it. Nearly half of the board members of the nonprofit raising funds for the Alamo renovation resigned in protest — raising doubts about where the rest of money would come from.

The board’s decision necessitated a new vote by the San Antonio City Council to authorize the project. Bush and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg threw their political muscle behind reviving the project. In early March, Nirenberg took the unusual step of replacing a city council member, Roberto Treviño, who had been leading two committees coordinating the project and had been staunchly in favor of moving the Cenotaph.

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On April 15, the city council voted to go forward with a new plan that leases much of the plaza to the state for at least 50 years — and leaves the Cenotaph in place.

“The plan itself is much more than a single monument,” Nirenberg said in an interview. “My view, which is shared by the vast majority of San Antonians and Texans, is that regardless of your feelings on the Cenotaph moving, it’s not moving. This is the most significant piece of land in the entire state of Texas, and it deserves the reverence and dignity of a preservation project that has been a generation in the making.”

The day after the council vote, Nirenberg appeared with Bush and Patrick in Alamo Plaza to unveil a new exhibit with a replica of a cannon that fired upon the Mexican army. Bush and Patrick traded compliments, with Bush declaring that “there’s nobody in the state Capitol who cares more about Texas history” than Patrick.

University of Texas says ‘The Eyes of Texas’ will stay. So will the fight over it.

Meanwhile, issues of race and slavery at the Alamo remain unresolved.

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The Tap Pilam Coahuiltecan Nation, an Indigenous group, is still fighting to have the complex treated as a cemetery and to tell the story of the Indigenous people buried there, said Ramón Vásquez, one of its leaders.

“The site is much bigger than just the 1836 battle,” he said.

Treviño, who represents much of central San Antonio, said his push to move the Cenotaph had been aimed at telling a more “inclusive story.” He also supported carving into the monument the names of enslaved people and Tejanos — native Texans of Mexican descent — who were present at the 1836 battle.

These days, Treviño wonders whether the city would have been better off redoing Alamo Plaza on its own.

“The issue for the project has been that there’s a lot of moving parts, and a lot of people who have tried to insert their version of history,” he said. “You have to remember that this city is predominantly Hispanic. And for many years, it has not felt like it’s seen itself in that story.”

 

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An Elementary School Teacher’s Secret Life As A White Nationalist Writer

 

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newrepublic.com
The Fox News Guest Behind the Republican Frenzy Over Critical Race Theory
Alex Pareene

4-5 minutes

Last September, an obscure, 36-year-old documentarian named Christopher Rufo landed a slot on Tucker Carlson Tonight. Knowing the president would be watching, he sounded the alarm about an ideology almost as obscure as he was: “critical race theory.” Rufo, who describes the theory as the notion that the United States was “founded on white supremacy and oppression,” begged Donald Trump to take action. Critical race theory, he warned, had become “the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy.” The next morning, Rufo got a call from Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff; just a few days later, the White House issued a bizarre memo instructing public agencies to root out the theory from government trainings.

In the months since Rufo’s TV appearance, roughly a dozen states from Idaho to Tennessee have passed or considered legislation banning critical race theory from schools and government institutions. Almost overnight, Rufo has become the standard-bearer for a hysterical movement to solve a problem that may not even exist—and in the process, charted a course for the right in the Biden era. With a likable moderate in the White House, the task for operatives like Rufo is to gin up evidence of an overwhelming conspiracy everywhere else, convincing voters that the left has taken over the school and the workplace.

Rufo has had an unusual career: He came up not through the traditional conservative blogosphere but as a man-about-town documentarian, who made a film about roughing it in Mongolia that The New York Times called “self-involved” and a PBS documentary about inner-city poverty. Last year, after the Floyd protests, he learned that the city of Seattle was hosting racial sensitivity trainings where white employees were urged to practice “self-talk that affirms [their] complicity in racism.” Supported by Patreon and, more recently, by a Manhattan Institute fellowship, Rufo started collecting tips from other “whistleblowers” about funky language in diversity trainings from Cupertino, California, where third-graders were asked to rank themselves according to privilege, to New York City, where a principal urged parents to be “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition.” (Rufo did not answer questions about whether he has other affiliations or funding sources.)

The past year has produced a remarkable amount of hand-wringing and self-flagellation among middle-class white people, not all of it productive. But Rufo has framed these isolated instances of identitarian malapropism as evidence of an overarching Marxist plot to replace the “categories of bourgeoisie and proletariat with the identity categories of white and black.”

He says he has provided feedback on at least 10 of the critical race theory bills moving through state legislatures. He is adamant that they do not seek to govern what can be taught in the classroom, and from a textual standpoint, he may be right: The Idaho bill prevents schools from teaching “that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior”; the Texas bill, meanwhile, stops schools from saying any individual is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive.” The rhetorical gambit is for the text to mimic the facially neutral language of civil rights even as the rhetoric around the bill conjures up a Marxist menace.

Of course, it remains unclear who would enforce these laws. But Rufo and his fellow crusaders don’t seem particularly interested in that. The single greatest threat to the Republican Party is its newfound electoral weakness in the suburbs; in order to regain strength in those areas, especially during a midterm that will draw out a more educated segment of the electorate, the conservative movement must convince suburban voters that the other side represents an unthinkable Marxist menace. With a slew of state bills and an obsessive focus on a few isolated statements by misguided public employees, Rufo is attempting to convince swingable voters that liberals and leftists have engineered a totalizing takeover of public institutions. As in the days of Joseph McCarthy, the question is not whether the menace exists but who can be made to believe it exists. Rufo has made it his business to find it everywhere he looks.

 

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How square dancing became a weapon of white supremacy against an anti-Semitic jazz dance conspiracy

How square dancing became a weapon of white supremacy against an anti-Semitic jazz dance conspiracy

By Jack Smith IV
Dec. 15, 2017



“Jazz is a Jewish creation,” automative tyc00n Henry Ford wrote in his anti-Semitic publication, The International Jew. “The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”

Ford had a solution: square dancing. He saw jazz and its related dancing styles as a force for moral decay, and sought to cure it by bringing back traditional folk dances. In doing so, Ford rewrote the cultural history of the dance form and set the stage for a pantheon of racist ideas that still animate modern white supremacist movements.

Most Americans rightly think of jazz as an African-American art form. But Ford, the only American personally praised by in Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, saw jazz dancing as part of a conspiracy to throw America into a dark age.

Henry Ford, the nation’s first billionaire and the publisher of such anti-Semitic literature as ‘The International Jew.’Getty Images
Ford sparked a national movement in the by pouring a small fortune into revitalizing square dancing in the 1920’s, decades after it was abandoned by American pop culture. He funded radio shows and dance clubs and invited hundreds of dance instructors to his home. Thirty-four colleges added “early American dancing” to their curricula.

Ford’s attempt to vitalize square dancing as a white supremacist project made headlines again in the last few weeks after Wonkette’s Robyn Pennacchia excavated it for her Twitter followers. Pennacchia was researching the history of state symbols when she realized that her state, Illinois, had an official state dance.

“Henry Ford thought that because jazz was getting all these people to go out and drink and smoke cigarettes and have sex, that replacing jazz with square dancing and old-time music and things he thought of as more white and more gentile would make people more moral again,” Pennacchia told Mic on Thursday. “Because he was creepy and racist and hated Jewish people.”

As it turned out, 28 states had made square dancing the state dance as a part of a larger push in the late 1960’s to make folk dancing the country’s national dance. President Ronald Reagan capitulated briefly in the 1980’s, declaring square dancing the national dance.

The states in dark green are where the traditionalist dance movement was able to lobby for square dancing to become the official state dance.George Steptoe/Mic
So where do Jewish people come into all of this? In The International Jew, Ford outlined a conspiracy wherein Jewish elites were attempting to re-engineer society to replace white protestants with a compliant black underclass. He wrote:

If the conditions in America continue to develop along the same lines as in the last generation, if the immigration statistics and the same proportion of births among all the nationalities remain the same, our imagination may picture the United States of 50 or 100 years hence as a land inhabited only by Slaves, Negroes and Jews, wherein the Jew will naturally occupy the position of economic leadership.
If that sounds absurd, consider that this is still popular theory with modern white supremacists, who’ve held rallies in Tennessee and Charlottesville, Virginia, where a popular chant was “Jews will not replace us!”

Ford was a great innovator of racist ideologies that are popular today. The perceived demographic threat to white Protestants outlined above is still trotted out regularly by the far right in describing Europe’s refugee crisis. He also was an early articulator of the theory that African-Americans only vote for Democrats in order to expand the welfare state.

The ultimate irony, of course, is that square dancing isn’t a lily-white style of dance at all. It was largely invented by slaves, who used the “swing your partner do-si-do” call-and-response technique to do away with the need for a dance instructor. White people found all of that shouting vulgar, until they’d fully adopted the dance style themselves. It’s a story of appropriation that’s repeated every generation since with blues, rock, rap and countless other black innovations.

In an attempt to cure the United States of an alleged plague of immoral music, Ford re-enacted the same trope used by white supremacists throughout world history: Selling a vision of a racially homogenous future using a fable about an America that never existed.

Dec. 19, 2017, 10:25 a.m.: This article has been updated.

 

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