BRITNEY COLEMAN & CARLOS VALDES ↳ Starkid: Homecoming (2019)

Why I’m not going to the anti- UniteTheRight protest and I think you should stay home too

In response to the hateful and violent message of Unite the Right, counter-protestors who represent anti-racist interests confronted the demonstrators.  This led to arguments and a brawl, and then, around 1:45pm, James Alex Fields Jr, a white man from Ohio drove a car into the crowd, killing Heather D. Heyer, a young white woman from Charlottesville and an ally in the fight for the disenfranchised and for racial and social justice.  In the hours that followed, politicians from the right and the left have condemned the “Unite the Right” demonstration and the terrible actions of Mr. Fields.  In response to the violence, Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan tweeted, “Our hearts are with today’s victims.  White supremacy is a scourge.  This hate and its terrorism must be confronted and defeated.” Many non-profit and advocacy groups organized counter protests here in New York City and across the country to denounce white supremacy, racism and bigotry.

While I think the message of these anti-racist protests is important, I want to suggest that perhaps they are bit misguided.  Most Americans already agree that white supremacy, at least as it is espoused by people like David Duke, Richard Spencer and now these “Unite The Right” demonstrators is a deplorable and false idea.  Even Paul Ryan, who I believe is one of the most racist people in our government, has spoken out against this overt white power agenda, calling it a “scourge”.  Yet just weeks ago, Paul Ryan supported a bill that would have stripped healthcare away from 24 million Americans, thousands of whom are poor Black children who rely on Medicaid to fund critical student support services that help secure their right to equal education, in order to provide a superfluous tax cut to rich white male billionaires.  Mitch McConnell, along with 50 other Senate Republicans voted to debate an even worse version of the House bill that would have literally sentenced people who rely on the ACA to death, for no other reason than that they wanted to taint Barack Obama’s greatest legislative accomplishment.  While Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and the other republicans do not openly align themselves with white supremacist ideals, they support the gerrymandering of districts and the rollback of protections of the Voting Rights Act, a cornerstone of the Civil Rights Movement and one of the beacons of progress that this white supremacist backlash aims to suppress.  They have calculated gerrymandering efforts underway in key districts to neutralize Black votes, while also voting for legislation that strips away anti-discrimination statutes, healthcare and education for poor children, while expanding mandatory minimum sentences, defunding opioid treatment programs, and a whole host of connected actions that have the collective effect of stripping away any progress, real or perceived that non-white, rich, male people have made towards social equality. It is disingenuous for Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz and others to denounce white supremacy and then to support the Trump’s executive order to ban Muslim people from entry to this country on the basis of religion, to support an immigration policy that privileges those who already speak English and skilled labor over unskilled labor, to support an education policy that defunds the public schools that serve children without economic privilege, and a healthcare bill that strips the most vulnerable children of their ability to see a doctor.  These kinds of actions and policies represent, in my mind, white supremacy at its most potent.  

Ever since the terrible sleepless night that we saw 45 ascend to the presidency, there has been a palpable resurgence of white supremacist beliefs into the mainstream discourse. The first time I ever heard of David Duke was when he endorsed Trump’s bid for the presidency, though I studied the backlash to reconstruction that birthed the Ku Klux Klan when I was in college.  I’m positive that before that endorsement and Trump’s refusal to denounce it gained national attention, I could have convinced at least 10 people in Brooklyn that the Ku Klux Klan no longer existed.  This is due in part to ignorance, but mostly to the fact that the Ku Klux Klan is considered now even by white racists (not all white racists are vocal about or even conscious of their racism), to be a fringe group that does not reflect the values of American national identity.  They weren’t getting a lot of airtime on mainstream media in an America that uses the rhetoric of “colorblindness” to actually deny that racism is even a problem anymore.  Months after the election, Richard Spencer, who I also had never heard of before, was suddenly on CNN debating with Roland Powell if whites had been responsible for technological, scientific and agricultural advances that white historians and whites within the contemporaneous record, had already documented as the work of non-white peoples. A quick Google search will reveal that first irrigation system was created in Egypt and that written language was developed in Mesopotamia, and yet, here was Spencer charging that white people had created everything of value of mankind.  Even more fascinating, there was Roland Powell looking like he was about to pop a blood vessel from sheer frustration.  In other words, he wasn’t, as he perhaps should have been, laughing at the clearly counter-factual, ridiculous case for white superiority that Spencer was making, that a high school student with a modest understanding of American history could disprove.  

The injection of confidence that 45 put into white supremacists with his hate speech against women, Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, disabled people, and anyone else who was not a cis-gendered, rich, white male, is very real and has consequences.  Hate crimes are on the rise.  Stories of young boys attempting to assault women by grabbing their genitals, photographs of mosques defaced or burned, assaults of Muslim people, particularly women, seemed to be peppered throughout my Facebook timeline for the months directly following the election, and many of these tragic and senseless acts of violence and harassment have been reported nationally.  There can be no question that white supremacists identify with and feel emboldened by Trump and the ideas that he represents.  I would also argue that the support for repeal of the Affordable Care Act in the absence of any viable replacement, the resurgence of mandatory minimums and the rollback of civil asset forfeiture statutes that required police prove a crime was committed in order to seize property, the defunding of AIDS prevention and women’s education programs in countries in Africa and around the world, as well as countless other initiatives that seek to strip protections for the poor and most vulnerable populations among us, are an outgrowth of white supremacist ideals that are encoded within not only the Trump agenda but the Republican party as a whole.  In February the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed a bill that would prevent states and cities from setting up automatic retirement plans for small business workers who do not have access to 401K’s.  This is just one of many examples of legislation targeting a program that experts agree helps the economy, helps the American middle class and helps our country, because it was an Obama-era initiative.  These legislative moves that are reaching every area of our lives from education to healthcare to environment and criminal justice, are undergirded by a racist backlash to any progress real or perceived toward upsetting a power structure that privileges white, straight, rich cis-gendered males.  In my view, it is the insidious expansion of policies and practices that can only be called racist and violent, that drive the wealth gap between rich and poor, erode any progress toward racial and environmental justice that has been made in the last 50 years and particularly in the last eight, that most deserves our protest and attention.

Marching against, debating, tweeting about and railing against the David Dukes and Richard Spencers and “Unite the Right” folks of the world obscures the real issue.  The unintended result of protesting this kind of overt racism is to get “Unite the Right” trending on Twitter, their faces on the front page of the New York Times, and empower folks like Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz to speak up and say, “not me”, while also supporting policies and practices that continue to embolden these kinds of fringe groups.  My hope was that we would have stayed home and scoffed, or better yet, had internal meetings about organizing a march against the wretched tax reform that republicans are aiming to push through this fall.  This is not to say that those efforts are not already underway, or that we are not organizing within ourselves all the time, but it is to say that when we put this kind of hatred on CNN, on our Twitter and our Facebook, it feeds into the idea that America is consumed in a race war and that these people have some kind of legitimacy within that fight.  It gives power to the idea that we should be having a conversation about the people marching with torches against the dismantling of confederate statues, and not about white supremacy in its most effective form: racism cloaked in racially neutral language.  

To be clear, I do not admonish anyone for marching to express their disgust Unite the Right and the racist ideology they represent.  My heart and prayers are with those who were injured and with Ms. Heyer, who died simply trying to speak out for the cause of justice and equity.  However, I want to push us to think about what the effect of a demonstration like this could be: to make national news, to convince us that we are hated, to disempower those who would seek to speak out the cause of justice.  How does giving these people a platform on our social media, telling their stories on major cable networks, further that agenda?

The true purpose of the so-called “Unite the Right” white supremacist demonstration that took place in Charlottesville, VA this past Saturday, was to grasp at the antiquated notion that white men have an inalienable right to power and privilege and to affirm that whiteness itself is still at the center of “real” American identity.  This country is changing, both demographically and culturally.  As a country founded on immigration, enslavement and genocide, America has always struggled to reconcile whites as the true Americans and all other people as inferior, while also requiring the presence of non-white people to fuel the economy, culture and vitality of American society.  While I can only loosely use the term “protest” to describe what happened in Charlottesville, it really was about “protesting” the upending of white privilege.  These “protestors” know as well as you or I that there is no biological or historical basis for white men’s inherent superiority to any other group of people, but they need to believe it is so, because without that sense of power, what is this country? What is their place in it? What does America become without whiteness at the center?  Arguably, it is America’s relationship to Blackness that defines its national identity but that’s another blog post.  

Also, I caution myself and anyone against any activism that Paul Ryan can get behind.  That usually means it’s all bad.