Growing up a white girl in small-town Tennessee, each week I watched Bo and Luke Duke’s General Lee racing down country roads on The Dukes of Hazzard. The Confederate flag on its hood was as familiar to me as Daisy’s bare midriff.

In high school, I worked as a waitress at a trucker joint off Interstate 24 between Chattanooga and Nashville, and the restaurant owner kept a large Confederate flag standing on a six-foot pole in the corner of the dining room. One morning a group of girls, just a bit older than me, came in off the Interstate—loud, unruly, and rude—and snarled at my ignorance when they asked for “iced coffee” and I brought them iced tea instead.

Cleaning their table after they left, I realized they’d taken down that big Confederate flag, wrapped it around its pole and shoved the whole contraption way up under the heavy oak table. It was perhaps the first time I realized what the Confederate flag meant—bigotry, hatred, slavery—in the world outside Hazzard County. As I watched my manager tug that huge flag from under the table and set it upright, she assured me that the flag had nothing to do with racism. “It’s about pride in our heritage,” she said, “Southern culture”—which I understood to mean that we ate a lot of fried okra and went to church on Wednesdays.

Later, to me, Southern culture came to mean additional things, like the Klan marching in nearby Pulaski, religious discrimination against my gay friends, or societal control of women’s bodily autonomy. I decided to escape if I could, maybe to a paradise that I’d heard tell of‚ a godless place where the gays had busted out of their closets and women refused to wear panty hose and men helped with the housework! California, they called it, and I couldn’t wait to go there and live happily ever after in harmony with all humanity.

But I got here to Southern California and realized that even in my left-coast fantasyland, police killed young Black women, white boys asked if I’d ever worn shoes before leaving the South, and an Asian-American grad student told me she “couldn’t hear” my argument in a professional setting because my twang was coming out.

I heard of a place called Huntington Beach in Orange County, supposedly a hotbed of white supremacists, and soon enough, I decided the Californians might be just as screwed up as us Tennesseans.

A year or so ago, I was in a bar in Newport Beach (which is a very rare occurrence, Mama, if you’re reading this) and began talking to another woman, a stranger I had just met. I mentioned something about being from the South, and she got all excited. She pulled a Confederate flag keychain from her bag and showed it to me, assuming I would share her enthusiasm for it.

“…why do you have that?” I asked. “Are you from the South?”

No, she said, she was from California. I gave her a sideways glance. Did she believe all Southerners held a deep love of the Confederacy? In my experience, it was as hard to say something about “all Southerners” as it was to say something about “all Americans.” Even if you ask two Southern women about their favorite potato salad recipe, you’ll get five answers.

When the girl didn’t get the desired reaction from me, she muttered familiar words: “It’s not racist. I just think that if you have a culture, you should keep that culture.” What culture…? I wondered. Was she talking about my culture, or at least, my experience of the South —my hilly dirt roads and my hotwater cornbread and my endless weeknight Bible studies? No. This girl had likely never passed a piece of fried okra through her botoxed lips in the entirety of her life.

“But the South is not your culture,” I said. My heritage, contradictory and confused as it was, did not belong to her. What “culture” was she talking about that she was somehow identifying with? Was she saying that white racist people should stick together and preserve their…white racist culture?

I wondered the same thing last year as I realized that most of the Nazis and wannabe Confederates marching in Charlottesville were not, it seemed, from Charlottesville. Aside from a few, like organizer Jason Kessler, the ones who were identified in the press were from places like California, New York, Nevada, Washington state, North Dakota, and of course, Maumee, Ohio. These non-Southerners had driven all the way across the country in their quest to “preserve Southern history,” only to ride roughshod over the actual, real-life Southern people of Charlottesville, who had voted to remove a Confederate statue in their own public park.

This past Sunday, as Kessler organized his anniversary “Unite the Right Rally 2,” one of his invited speakers (who, like the rest of the alt-right, it seems, simply didn’t show up, there were only about 24 people there) was Patrick Little, a California Senate candidate originally from Maine who in his own words wants to “raise Jews as livestock.”

Aside from being a disgusting anti-Semite, Little is a member of the League of the South, which as far as I can tell is an organization of a couple dozen old white guys from Alabama who want to re-establish the Confederacy and rule it by fiat. Now, why does a Maine-bred Californian like Patrick Little join the League of the South?

What exactly, does he think “the South” is?

By culture, was she saying that white racist people should stick together and preserve their...white racist culture?
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My youthful misconceptions of California as a liberal paradise have given way to a realization that too many non-Southerners, like Little and the Newport girl, have crafted a competing fantasy of my home—of the South as a white nationalist paradise, where all the white men are strong, and all the white women are good-looking, a white-celebrating world where you can tell yourself you are the master race without being laughed out of the Super Wal-Mart. A land where people of color can be shipped “back” on a boat or burned in an oven. A white supremacist culture.

I’m darkly amused by the entitlement of the non-Southerner’s racist belief that he has any right to define the South (which is much too big and diverse to be defined anyway)—like somehow he’s entitled to identify with the South and claim it as his own and define what it is, simply because he’s a racist. But I am also troubled by the way these folks, in places like California, associate their own white supremacy with my home, and of course, by default, with me.

Now, some will say if the South didn’t want to be stereotyped as a racist paradise it should have behaved better historically, and I can’t argue with that. But the South has always been more than just its long history of racism. The South has always included a heritage of resistance to white supremacist violence. After all, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks were Southerners, too, weren’t they? At the same time, there are Southerners right now in places like Charlottesville and all over the South who are redefining it as a diverse, multicultural place.

Today, people of color make up about 38% of the state of Virginia, which in 2016 went for Hillary overall by a 5% margin. 80% of Charlottesville voters chose Hillary. Even in deep-South Georgia, people of color make up about 47% of the population (defining “people of color” as everybody but “non-Hispanic whites”), and although Trump won the state, Hillary garnered 45% of the vote, improving on Obama’s 2012 performance there.

A red-painted map camouflages all the purple that today is the reality of the old Confederacy, and the Californian waving a Confederate flag wants to render all these real Southerners invisible.

The only way I know to counter this is to refuse to disappear. To say, no, if you are a racist from New York or Maine or Nevada or California, the South is not your culture—you don’t get to define it, you don’t get to define me. To make sure that any time a Confederate flag flies over a racist hate rally, whether it be in Charlottesville or the deceptively liberal bastion of Portland, there are the voices of actual Southerners (like Charlottesville’s first female Black mayor). To make sure they rise up to prove that white supremacists’ fantasy of a world devoid of people of color, LGBTQ folks, Jews, white liberals, and women who expect you to do your half of the house cleaning, is as futile as it is ugly, pathetic, and dangerous.

In October 2017, white supremacists coordinated a “flash mob” tiki torch rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In addition to chanting that they (white people) will not be “replaced” and that “the South will rise again,” and singing the de facto Confederate anthem “Dixie,” the intimate white dudebro gathering featured white supremacist leader Richard Spencer exclaiming that whites are being oppressed and erased. After sneakily assembling and “taking a stand” under the cover of night for approximately 15 minutes, the whites-only pie enthusiasts quickly dispersed like timorous cockroaches exposed to light.

Despite the clandestine nature of this klavern-like demonstration, there has been a marked increase in unapologetic public displays of white supremacist sentiment recently, directly corresponding with the advent of Donald J. Trump and the invidious views he espouses (more on that later).

Many acknowledge this, particularly those with left-leaning political sensibilities. What’s more infrequent, however, is recognition that conspicuousness shouldn’t be mistaken for newness; Trump’s campaign and presidency have merely emboldened these longstanding cultural values.

Racial minorities have always called out, critiqued, and confronted the presence of dehumanizing attitudes, codified into the U.S. social order, that systematically disenfranchise communities of color in ways that restrict access to resources, rights, or opportunities more readily available to whites.

The widespread bewilderment that racism is very much alive and well in 2017 reveals what I and numerous writers have repeatedly highlighted: far too few understand what racism even entails. Far too few comprehend the overarching impact of navigating a white-oriented nation that cultivates white entitlement. Far too few fully appreciate how Trump’s popularity (despite his profound incompetence) is a direct response to recent political challenges to socialized ideas of white superiority.

To better explain this ravenous thirst to maintain the inheritance of colonized glory — what Ta-Nehisi Coates refers to as the bloody heirloom — I sought insight from award-winning sociology professor, writer, and author, Anton L. Allahar. When it comes to what culture is and the influence of dominant culture, Allahar says,

“Culture is the way of life of a people. Culture comprises both material and ideational dimensions.

The dominant ideas in any culture will reflect the ideas of the most powerful, those who control the means of disseminating those ideas for if there is to be social order the less powerful must come to accept the ideas of the most powerful as the correct and right ideas. This is effected via a process of ideological indoctrination. The principal institutions responsible for the spread of the dominant ideology are the media, the educational system, the religious institutions and ordinary popular cultural fare such as movies, music, jokes and seemingly innocent play.

The dominant culture of the US was formed to give preference to and propagate the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy, a sociopolitical system in which cisgender, heterosexual white men hold social dominance at the expense of subordinating racial minorities, transgender individuals, non-heterosexual sexual orientations, and women.”

Part and parcel to these interconnected systems of oppression are racist cultural messages that present whites as whole human beings while pathologizing blackness and regarding non-whites as inferior. These ideas become entrenched in our subconscious and infiltrate our social attitudes developed through the socialization process.

A common retort I encounter is, “But this country has changed so much. Quit complaining. Racism isn’t nearly as bad as it used to be!”

Yes, this country once openly accepted and even celebrated racism. With the social and political victories of the Civil Rights era, the cultural imagination of what it means to be a racist began to transform. The U.S. underwent a cultural shift that reimagined racism to be the social equivalent to what a devout evangelical considers the most depraved idea of “sin.” Public acceptability and any association with racism developed into a social taboo.

Sadly, this social realignment was only superficial.

While it’s awesome that folks generally recognize that racism is “bad,” there was and remains a monumental failure to educate the public about the intricate nature of white supremacy intertwined with racism, the significant role it plays in this nation’s socio-historical hierarchical arrangement, and how it functions as a system that thrives even in a more subdued manner.

Racial avoidance and racial ignorance isn’t equivalent to racial consciousness and anti-racist practices. The latter acts to diminish racism, the former ensures it will persist.

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There was and remains a monumental failure to educate the public about the intricate nature of white supremacy intertwined with racism.
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To be sure, America’s “racial problem” extends beyond the right-wing political spectrum, as it’s been revealed again and again and again that left-leaning whites and racial ignorance (and thus, complicity with racism) are familiar bedfellows.

Even so, Trump’s vision for this country — encapsulated in the slogan “Make America Great Again” — offers a return to the “good ol’ days” of flagrant racism. It isn’t at all surprising that Trump successfully courts the fear, resentment, and self-interests of a white reactionary constituency that wants to upend further recession of white-centeredness.

White-centeredness is a deeply-rooted aspect of U.S. culture. White-centeredness denotes the centrality of white representation that permeates every facet of our dominant culture. It upholds as “normal” and “expected” the ubiquity of language, ideas, prejudices, preferences, values, social mores, and worldviews established by the white perspective.

What Trump offers his supporters is the golden ticket to end all golden tickets: an insular quest to prioritize and enshrine the collective interests of white America and to neutralize social changes diverging from white-centeredness.

All this, of course, is white identity politics, but this goes mainly undetected by so many white Americans who are socialized to regard the sustaining of dominant white culture as “what is expected” or “the way things ought to be.”

It is therefore no coincidence that anti-immigration sentiment, the imagined “war on drugs,” racist dog whistle politics, and the mechanisms of mass incarceration that surgically target communities of color are regarded as somehow appropriate and just within the mainstream consciousness.

Allahar addresses the contrary nature of norms that grant a surplus of meaning to whiteness at the expense of those defined as the other:

“While the U.S. extolls the virtues of democracy, equality, freedom and fairness, it is also true that various U.S. governments have been known to install and support dictators in other countries. And as the recent events of Charlottesville show, racism, fascism, Nazism and the KKK are also part of the American social fabric.

After all, the country was built on slavery, racism, Native genocide, colonialism and imperialism, even though most are in denial of these facts. And to the extent that racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia are widely practiced, young people are socialized to that ethic. Of course, not all Americans are racists etc., but the current president of the US, the key advisors he has appointed, and the 63 million Americans who voted for him bear eloquent testimony to this claim.”

The fact that Trump was ever able to sniff the Oval Office is a testament to the power of white supremacy.

The power of white supremacy is revealed in recent removals of Confederate monuments generating a spike in Confederate flag sales.

The power of white supremacy is revealed when many within white America construe kneeling during the national anthem as being more depraved and more worthy of contempt than the unjust murder of black and brown lives.

When I look at Trump, I don’t see him as the problem. Rather, in him I see the expected byproduct of white America’s desperation to consolidate the power of the white supremacist cis-heteropatriarchy before another morsel is chipped away by the “assault” of inclusion, multiculturalism, and full liberation of marginalized groups.

Those truly concerned with “stopping” Trump must also commit to dealing with uncomfortable truths that infest the context that brought him to power. Dereliction of this responsibility will guarantee that the legacy Trump exploits will continue to thwart social progress, bastardize justice, and uphold the great moral compromise that asserts white lives hold more value than others.

This story first appeared at The Humanist and is republished here with permission.

White People — We Can’t Dismantle Trump And Racism Without You

White folks, this is your mess to clean up. Y’all created it. Y’all need to fix it.

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After every blow to justice that happens in this country — Charlottesville being the latest — I join millions on social media to voice my concerns. But unlike far too many of my white friends, who often start their statements with “I can’t believe this happened” or “this is so upsetting,” my messages have to keep serving as a reminder that tyranny and oppression are nothing new.

When white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, I tried to stay silent on social media for as long as I could, curious to see how my white friends would respond. While I did see white friends posting their frustrations about Trump and his “both sides” argument, I was waiting for them to, specifically, get angry at their fellow white people––to sound a collective call for justice.

Some did, but nearly not enough.

So You Want To Fight White Supremacy

When I finally couldn’t stay silent any longer after Charlottesville, I simply posted: “White folks, this is your mess to clean up. Y’all created it. Y’all need to fix it.” Within minutes, I had a white acquaintance — whom I haven’t spoken to in years — respond with, “Don’t lump me in with those people.” When confronted with her privilege to be able to distance herself from white supremacists, she doubled down on her comments with “love not hate” rhetoric — seemingly unaware of how such language is both ignorant and harmful.

White people, know this: It is easy to “choose love” when your way of life isn’t being threatened. And when you retreat to this simplistic reasoning, you place the blame on people of color for trying to dismantle a system that hates us. White women can love everyone because “everyone” theoretically loves them back; this is not true for people of color (POC). And if a POC says they don’t love white people? They could lose their lives. There is a difference between empathy for others and using “love” as a way to shirk your responsibility to say something when faced with the opportunity to stand up for what you allegedly believe in.

It is easy to ‘choose love’ when your way of life isn’t being threatened.

This is why, on the heels of Charlottesville, so many POC took offense to Tina Fey’s “sheet caking” bit. It was a particularly stark example of a response that is all to common from white people: Just pretend white supremacy doesn’t exist.

Such responses are, ultimately, steeped not only privilege, but in a distinct inability to do the uncomfortable work of owning one’s role in the oppression of others. But the fact is, white supremacy is a system built by white people — and until that knowledge drives every response to racist events, we won’t get anywhere.

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A disproportionate number of black men in jail for selling a dime bag of weed, while a white guy makes millions owning a weed dispensary? The result of white people building a white supremacist system.

A mediocre white student with money getting into Harvard, while a black student is accused of only getting into college because of affirmative action? The result of white people building a white supremacist system.

Dylan Roof being escorted to a police car in a bulletproof vest after murdering six black people, while Philando Castile gets shot in the front seat of his car while reaching for his ID? The result of white people building a white supremacist system.

Whenever A White Supremacist Says…

You get the idea. And you can imagine, then, how agonizing it is when, in the wake of an event like Charlottesville, it is not white people who shoulder the burden for change — but the POC affected every day by the system white people have so painstakingly constructed.

People of color can lead the charge, but it’s going to take white people getting out there to actually make the change. I am unapologetically black, but I am a realist. I know that there is no way we’re going to dismantle these systems without white people.

So how can this be done? To start, as white people, you must change your expectations — those you place on people of color, and those you place on yourselves. Stop calling black people “too divisive” or accusing them of “making everything about race”; this is an easy way to shift blame at a time when taking responsibility is crucial for change.

I know that there is no way we’re going to dismantle these systems without white people.

While we’re at it, stop expecting people of color to be civil and calm when people are literally marching in the streets to take away our right to exist. And, while we are still trying to process our own feelings, stop expecting us to answer your questions and educate you. Lady Gaga’s tweet asking black people what non-racist white people could do to help the fight is one of the most frustrating questions asked, and we hear it all the time.

Do your homework — by, for instance, taking the time to find out who your POC friends are following, and reading and following them. The least you can do is your own digging.

More than two weeks after Charlottesville, it’s also critical that you don’t give up the fight. Keep speaking up about injustice, not just when something major happens, but today, tomorrow, and every day after. Don’t be afraid of getting “political” because you’re choosing to observe the most basic of human rights. Call people out on their prejudices; the next time you see someone call Black Lives Matter a hate group, put them on blast and tell them why it’s actually not. Force them to acknowledge the privilege their skin color affords them.

What Really Happened In Charlottesville

White supremacy wasn’t built in a day, and having one conversation one time isn’t going to magically make it disappear. Charlottesville was just the beginning, and continuing to ignore white supremacy means that these marches will grow in number and frequency. That isn’t a threat, it’s a promise. We’re dismantling hundreds of years of oppression here.

Trump’s election didn’t suddenly make white supremacy part of everyday conversation. It’s always been there — but now these people feel justified to openly spread their hate speech widely. Mostly because non-racist white folks don’t call them on their bullshit.

The only thing that will stop it is you demanding better of your people. Speak up, and speak out.

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Sometimes You Need To Use Your Voice, Sometimes You Need To Shut The Hell Up

The thing about silence — even when self-imposed — is it can too easily begin to feel too comfortable.

Sometimes you need to use your voice.

“Hey, that joke is racist!”

“Whoa bro, cool it with the misogyny.”

“How ‘bout we take a deep breath and try just *not* being an asshole, ‘kay?”

But other times—occasions when perhaps you don’t really know what you’re talking about, or when you think you know what you’re talking about but someone who really knows what they’re talking about tells you that you’ve misspoken, or maybe if you’re feeling hangry, or you simply become overwhelmed with an urge to offer unasked-for criticism, those kind of times — it’s totally okay to just…shut up. Preferable, even!

That’s what I was thinking last week when I had a dream about a red duct tape mouth, anyway.

So I made the red mouth manifest in waking life! I spent some time thinking about embarrassing things I’ve said upon speaking hastily, thoughtlessly, sometimes over-thoughtfully.

I put on some makeup!

I made myself some glitter tape eyebrows and black duct tape lashes, for flair.

Then I braved the wilds of Walmart to procure some bright red duct tape, and spent some long sticky minutes cutting it into a shape that somewhat resembles that of my mouth.

Ta-da!

Do you know what it feels like to have your mouth taped shut? Minus extra tape pulling at the skin beyond the borders of my lips, the sensation felt…surprisingly normal!

Good, even.

It might have been panic-inducing had I been suffering, say, a sinus infection, but given the not-under-duress circumstances, it felt—almost—distressingly unobtrusive. It didn’t interfere with my breathing. It wasn’t particularly uncomfortable. It was just there, a sliver of tape binding my lips together. It looked uncanny to me, disturbing in its too-close approach to normalcy.

“Wait…what’s up with your mouth?” my husband asked only *after* effusively complimenting the brows and lashes. The taped mouth didn’t immediately attract notice. Hell, it even made me look bizarrely content, in a Stepford Wives-ish sort of way.

That’s the thing about silence, I think: even when self-imposed, even when well-intentioned, it can too easily begin to feel too comfortable. It can look almost normal, even, maybe especially at times when it’s clearly not.

The world isn’t normal anymore. Or, rather, it never was, but having spent much of my life in places that prioritize politeness over discomfort and much of my own mental energy worried over phrasing things correctly and helpfully, the habit of prudent silence is a tough one to break. Odd that a literal taped-shut mouth should look more “natural” than the sight of a woman standing up and screaming—odder still considering the circumstances of the day.

Typically—in regard to a topic in which I feel ill-prepared to speak—I would hesitate to comment. But while I’m no expert on the history of white supremacy, I can’t afford silence.

I can’t afford to hesitate.

WHITE SUPREMACY IS WRONG. And my voice is needed to denounce it unequivocally—alongside yours—out loud with all the volume we can muster.

I don’t know why I dreamed of a taped mouth. I know why I remembered and acted on it: I am totally that person who takes her dreams way too seriously and also thought it could make for a clever little quip on internet etiquette. I didn’t really expect my country to explode into outright hate-based white supremacist violence by the end of the week, which probably goes to show that I haven’t been keeping my ears alert during those times I’ve held my mouth shut. Now it’s clear that I need to keep both wide open.

We have to speak out against the unspeakable before it silences us for good.

The thing about silence—even when self-imposed—is it can too easily begin to feel too comfortable.

It’s easy to keep your mouth shut. Comfortable, even! The scary part comes when it’s time to rip the tape off. It hurts a bit. But once it’s done? You’re able to use your voice freely, and it’s much easier to breathe.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/what-really-happened-in-charlottesville-66d2cbe4ac8a/ Wed, 16 Aug 2017 18:46:55 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1759 Read more]]> Residents knew violence was coming — but the city and cops refused to stop it.

For much of the nation, the events of the Unite the Right rally here in Charlottesville were unexpected — but our community has been preparing for it for months.

Despite President Trump’s insistence that both fascists and their counter-protesters were responsible for violence at the Unite the Right rally last Friday, reports from Charlottesville make it clear that white nationalists have been planning unspeakable harm toward the Charlottesville community for months. In response to these threats, Charlottesville’s citizens were quick to denounce white supremacy, and worked diligently to protect those threatened.

Back in May, a torch-wielding group gathered by white nationalist Richard Spencer protested removal of the General Robert E. Lee statue that looms over what was then called Lee Park, but has since been re-named Emancipation Park. On June 8, a few days after the name change became official, a North Carolina-based KKK group held a rally for the same purpose. Among locals, Facebook timelines were peppered with hashtags marking this as a summer of resisting hate, led by the outspoken, grassroots activists who planned to block white supremacy and stand up for the community.

So You Want To Fight White Supremacy
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According to multiple sources, Charlottesville activist organizations spent weeks presenting local authorities with blog posts, messages, and other evidence that pointed toward the white nationalists’ plans to bring violence during the weekend of August 12. This evidence included proof that this group was distributing activists’ personal information and was threatening to meet them in person.

One local activist, whose name is withheld for privacy, tells me, “We told the city for months and provided evidence all of the threats. The evidence we presented to city council is on Solidarity Cville. We hand-fed information to show them how violent these people are. [An associate] provided this to the humanitarian board and urged them to put a stop to it.” She also mentions specific threats toward members of the city council (such as Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy) and the Chief of Police, Al S. Thomas Jr., that were received independent of the evidence provided by community members.

White nationalist blogger and Unite the Right rally organizer Jason Kessler’s right to free speech was cited as leaving the city vulnerable to potential lawsuits. If they denied the rally permit, the city could end up with a mess of legal fees. So, the threats were essentially ignored, and the rally scheduled as planned.

The community-at-large seemed to disagree with the decision. Rachel Zaslow, who acted as a street medic during the protests, believes that free speech has its limits. She tells The Establishment, “Speech is powerful and performative. When speech turns into or incites violence and harms other people, then we have a responsibility to stop it. The city, the government, has a right to stop it.”

But Charlottesville officials were not planning to stop it.

‘When speech turns into or incites violence and harms other people, then we have a responsibility to stop it.’
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In the meantime, the local social justice community was motivated to try other tactics to shut down Kessler, including confronting him at restaurants with anti-racist chants. They also continued to show up to city council meetings and speak out against the string of hate-based events being permitted to happen in the city. Activists of all races wanted it to be clear: Jason Kessler and his supporters are not welcome here.

A Friday Surprise

Most Charlottesville residents didn’t expect the Friday night tiki-torch march that overtook Nameless Field at UVA, preceding Saturday’s rally. But sources say law enforcement and local activist groups received an advanced tip that the rally was going to happen. However, without confirmation of a location, plans for police protection were inexplicably absent, and counter-protests were difficult to arrange.

When word traveled through campus, a group of about 20 UVA students organized and bravely stood up against about 200 angry white supremacists with tiki torches.

The severely outnumbered students were chanting “Black Lives Matter” in response to the supremacists’ Nazi-esque “Blood, not Soil” and “Jews will not replace us” refrain. When face-to-face with the alt-right, the students suffered through being pepper sprayed, having torch gas thrown at them, and being thrown to the ground.

The KKK Rally In Charlottesville Proves Why #NoConfederate Is Needed
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A member of multiple local activist groups tells us that a number of antiracist activists were nearby attending an interfaith church service. They were willing and wanting to help the students. Instead they were on lockdown, stuck inside the church. There were many requests to bend the rules of the lockdown, but with the nature of threats outside unknown, security at the church refused to let the students in for protection or let the antifa groups out to help.

Civil rights activist and Harvard professor Cornel West was among those locked in the church. In a Democracy Now interview, West stated that, “For the most part the police pulled back… Just allowing fellow citizens to go at each other.”

In the interview video, West, who has maintained his position on the front lines of democratic freedom and justice for decades, also proclaims: “I’ve never seen that kind of hatred in my life.”

A Call-to-Action

When continued attempts to get either Kessler or the City to cancel the event didn’t work, it was clear that intense organization and rallying of the antifa community was needed. White nationalist blogs showed they were getting hyped up and ready for a battle, explicitly stating “this is war.”

A local anarchist collective, unnamed to respect their privacy, put out a national call for additional counter-protesters and anti-fascist support. Black Lives Matter representatives from places like Baltimore and New York showed up to support our local activists. Medics from other states drove in to provide support in case there were assaults.

Many hands were at work in the organization of an effective counter protest, such as the UVA professor who arranged for all day permits at two other downtown parks to provide safe spaces and medic tents for counter protesters. More than one interviewee names the atypically powerful and efficient combination of social justice networks in Charlottesville as masters in tackling the overall job of providing training, resources, and safety in numbers to those who came to protest the invasion of Nazi ideology. Like the city, Charlottesville’s organizations are small but clearly mighty.

Where Were The Police?

With civil rights activists so well-prepared and organized, it begs the question: How did the police prepare? While we do know that local and state law enforcement were on the ground at the rally, there appears to be very little evidence that they intervened throughout the many altercations that occurred.

I asked each person I interviewed that exact question. Although they were all at the protest at different times, for different reasons and in vastly different locations, every individual initially replied with a light chuckle and the words “I don’t know.”

Zaslow, the volunteer street medic, says she reached Emancipation Park at about 8:30 in the morning, along with the clergy of Congregation C’ville and Cornel West. The police in riot gear were nowhere to be found on the street outside the park. Instead, they were met with a small army of what she believed to be white nationalist militia — fully armed with machine guns, ammunition, and a hefty dose of intimidation.

When ‘Free Speech’ Kills
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Eventually, Zaslow noticed a handful of police officers behind the large fences that had been erected to block off the park. The officers had little visibility to see what was going on beyond the fence.

Zaslow and the interfaith clergy she was accompanying were verbally assaulted in the most vile of manners by Nazis as the rally-goers entered the park. She tells me the white supremacists came in like a planned parade, each group carrying their flags or banners as they entered in intervals. Some groups were particularly rowdy and abrasive, such as the League of the South. “They had clear shields, sticks, clubs, and baseball bats. The antifa group tried to form a wall so they could not pass. Anyone who got in [League of the South’s] way, they pepper sprayed.”

Charlottesville-based documentary photographer Ézé Amos was also a part of that scene. He was physically assaulted when a man from one of the fascist groups punched his camera into his face. Amos tells The Establishment that he was continuously threatened. When he got caught in the pepper spray crossfire and no law enforcement intervened, true fear set in.

“It made me really scared. That’s when I realized there is no protection.”

Still, Amos continued the heavy work of documenting the results after the rally was declared unlawful — and as opposing groups took to the streets with little direction, protection, or plan for what was to happen next.

‘That’s when I realized there is no protection.’
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A member of the press, Amos followed the white supremacist rally leaders to McIntire Park, the location to which, earlier in the week, city officials attempted to relocate the rally permit. He watched, and photographed, as white supremacists gave their planned speeches.

Again, since Amos was now away from downtown, I asked: “Where were the police?” His response: “Nowhere.”

Without a law enforcement background, it seems reasonable that at least a handful of officers would have been at this second location. The city considered McIntire park the best place for the rally. For days, there was some confusion over whether the rally would take place at McIntire or Emancipation Park, making it likely that even just a few stragglers would end up at McIntire.

One counter-protester, who declined to be named due to safety concerns, only saw the police in riot gear as she marched with the Black Lives Matter group on the Downtown Mall (a block over from Emancipation Park). Officers were methodically sweeping the mall and clearing people out, and staying in close proximity to the primarily black group in the earlier part of the day. The next time she noticed a significant police presence was about 20 minutes after the car attack that killed one person and wounded many others, her friends among them.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative
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Having attended the rally in July, she says this is a “stark contrast” to last month’s KKK rally, where the cops seemed to be all over.

“You could not turn around without seeing one. Riot cops were quick to be out there and quick to push you around, whether you were doing anything or just standing. They were just pushing people out of the way. This time, I barely saw them. Even when we walked near Emancipation Park.”

“I don’t know where they were, but they weren’t protecting the community.”

Another man interviewed saw police on top of buildings near the Downtown Mall, but few on the ground where he was, just steps from both the site of the car attack and the now viral assault of 20-year-old Deandre Harris.

One woman, Dana Wheeles, stated that there were “Lots of fights breaking out…Time and again, wherever I was, the police were nowhere to be seen. They set it up for all of the fascists to be fighting in the streets.”

Everyone I spoke to agreed. The police were inactive and, in most cases, invisible.

‘Time and again, wherever I was, the police were nowhere to be seen.’
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When asked to compare the police presence this Saturday to that of a Black Lives Matter protest, Zaslow gives a powerful and finite response. “It’s a false equivalency, because these people showed up to harm vulnerable communities. They want to eradicate and kill. [They are] chanting ‘blood and soil’ and ’you will not replace us’…And for the most part, they [the white supremacists] have the protection of the police. The police did not kill or hurt anyone [at this rally].”

She continues, “Black Lives Matter is in protest to direct threats to the lives of black people. Black Lives Matter is to protest white supremacy. If it gets violent, it’s because there is a threat. As we can see at Black Lives Matter protests, cops show up ready to harm. There’s no allowing violence, allowing punches to be thrown. No clubs and bats allowed. It would be shut down. It’s impossible to compare the two.”

Why White America Demonizes The #BlackLivesMatter Movement
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After the declaration of unlawful assembly was made, and the racist contingent declined to disperse willingly, police did tear gas the white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups at Emancipation Park. However, it seems cops also failed to follow any dispersal tactics, sending a river of armed, angry, aggressive fascists into a sea of those who were there to reject their message of hate.

And according to Zaslow, this declaration of unlawful assembly came more than an hour after the fascists began throwing water bottles (both disposable and not) and pepper spray bombs out beyond the park barricade, and into the crowd of counter protesters.

Supremacy On The Streets

Nazi groups relied on a plethora of different tactics to terrorize their opposers and the City of Charlottesville. Some wore full masks, which is illegal in Virginia, and tried to steal the phones of those recording them. Others can be seen on livestream videos beating anti-fascist protesters.

Wheeles tells us she saw “Nazis banding together to ram through groups of counter-protesters.”

There was a constant barrage of verbal attacks, screaming in the faces of even the peaceful protesters, and harassment of anyone who showed up to to stand up to hate. They even made it a point to march to Charlottesville’s largest housing project with the intention of starting fights with black residents. The residents of Friendship Court, the housing project, quickly chased away the racists, but not before a large group of antifa had followed behind in an effort to help protect the neighborhood. It was on the return walk to the Downtown Mall from Friendship Court that the now infamous car assault and murder occurred.

She Persisted

Days later, at 4:30 in the afternoon, Charlottesville’s downtown mall has confounding energy. There’s the familiar feeling of walking the mall with the normal sights of parents chasing children as they zig-zag happily along the brick paths and a street musician playing for tips. And there are few indications of the weekend’s events, which is both jarring and unacceptable.

Looking down Fourth Street, small groups of mourners gather near reporters and their camera people preparing for the evening news. The roadway is covered in chalked condolences, prayers, and proclamations that love will always overcome. A stunning number of flowers surrounds the entire street, along with speckles of melted candles that have left tear-like drips behind. The stop sign has been refashioned to read: “Stop Hate.” A photograph of Heather Heyer, looking young and vibrant, is propped up in the middle of it all. Not too far away someone has just chalked in, “And nevertheless, she persisted.”

The stop sign has been refashioned to read: ‘Stop Hate.’
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This small street carries the rawest of emotions, directly contrasting the everyday mood of the rest of Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. Here, nearly everyone is crying or choking back tears. Here, nearly everyone is speechless in a way that makes the air heavy with sorrow. Here, you are humbled by the guttural magnitude of loss.

Here, for at least a moment, the questions about this weekend’s events become singularly focused.

Further down the street, closer to the Mall, the sidewalk is overwhelmed with bouquets along with small notes and cards. Personal effects unwillingly abandoned by those who were forced to leave the protests by ambulance lean up against a brick wall. Chalk hearts and messages border the smaller memorial. Most notably, there’s a yellow chalk writing near the curb which reads: “Heather Heyer-A HERO.”

Every person who’s misused arguments for free speech to defend white supremacists has some of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands.

flickr / Henry Burrows

The way we were going, this was always going to end in blood. Every person who’s ever misused arguments for free speech to defend Nazis or white supremacists — just so they could puff out their chests and apocryphally quote Voltaire with smug certitude — has some measure of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands.

The road that James Alex Fields Jr. sped down was paved with countless editorials in major newspapers and magazines that positioned student movements or black women on Twitter as existential threats to “free speech.” It was paved by those who said they were less afraid of Richard Spencer than the man who punched him. It was paved by countless people saying, “they’re just words” or “it’s just the internet, it’s not real life” in defence of extremists’ vitriol, never realizing that such statements are not mere words on the wind: they are promises.

After all, how many times have we seen white people online call for mowing down protesters? What happened in Charlottesville wasn’t even the first time someone went out and actually did it. As a recent Slate article notes: “On July 10, 2016 — the same day a South Carolina fire captain threatened to run over BLM protesters who had shut down Interstate 126 — an SUV driver in southern Illinois plowed through a group of BLM protesters after yelling ‘All lives matter, not blacks, all lives.’”

That was over a year ago, and we should have seen then how hateful social media slogans quickly become action.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Heyer’s murder, a Springfield, MA policeman wrote on Facebook — in response to a news article about the terror attack — “Hahahaha love this, maybe people shouldn’t block roads.” He added, to someone trying to argue with him, “How do you know [the driver] was a Nazi scumbag? Stop being part of the problem.” An incredible two step: celebrating a woman’s murder, and then tut tutting someone who insulted her murderer while retreating behind formless relativism.

The many instances of whites letting loose their hatred online and calling for the mowing down of protesters are wishes being loosed into the ether. Eventually, they’ll coalesce into a deed. As I said, they are not just words, they are promises, given force and urgency by the overheated rhetoric that prevails on social media, where even the most extreme racists are given free reign to agitate without limit.

Years ago, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center made abundantly clear that hate sites like Stormfront were a common denominator for the spate of white nationalist terrorism we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic. The SPLC describes what should now be an all too familiar profile of an angry young white man with internet access:

“Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described ‘lone wolves,’ but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.
And then he gets a gun.”

This was written in the days before GamerGate and the alt-right co-optation of 4chan, but the analysis readily applies to these larger, more easily accessible echo chambers, which have now claimed whole fiefdoms on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; their combined reach vastly outstrips that of the two decade-old Stormfront.

It was an important first step that GoDaddy and then Google booted the white supremacist Daily Stormer from their hosting services after the site’s role in radicalizing Fields — and celebrating his rampage — was made abundantly clear. That decisiveness was vital, and an even stiffer moral spine will be needed in the days and weeks to come. The time for pretending this group of white-right terrorists are playing the same game of democratic discourse was over decades ago, but some continue to refuse to wake up and acknowledge this reality.

Sacrificing Lives for Liberal Principle

In truth, we need to add the ACLU to this list of naysayers; they actually defended the Nazi and white supremacist mob, fighting the city of Charlottesville when they tried to move or cancel the march. Now, the rally they fought for — because of vague, abstract “free speech” principles grounded in a liberalism allergic to meaning — has claimed a life and seriously injured many others.

Liberals like Jonathan Chait, Jon Ronson, and Michelle Goldberg deserve their share of criticism for their spinelessness. Free speech absolutism originates, after all, from both Constitutional minimalism and a particular school of liberalism that sees principle as an end in itself — but there are leftists who are quite keen on the usual cliched arguments as well.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative

Glenn Greenwald, for instance, defended the ACLU at length for their choice to defend both the extreme right troll Milo Yiannopoulos and the Charlottesville march. He likens us — those who openly criticize the reductive use of the Constitution to support hate crimes — to people who attack the ACLU for defending the civil liberties of terror suspects, or who attack the Council on American-Islamic Relations as “terrorists.”

Take note of the following, content-free argument I’m sure you’ve never heard before: “One of the defining attributes of fascism is forcible suppression of views.”

(Running over a young socialist woman does indeed suppress her views, but Greenwald is wringing his hands here for her murderers, keep in mind.)

Or this equally vacuous cliche:

“Is it not glaringly apparent that the exact opposite will happen: by turning them into free speech martyrs, you will do nothing but strengthen them and make them more sympathetic? Literally nothing has helped Yiannopoulos become a national cult figure more than the well-intentioned (but failed) efforts to deny him a platform.”

As someone who watched Yiannopoulos’ rise, I’ve borne witness to the fact that no one with any real power stood up to him and his abuses; this absence is what abetted his growing popularity. The passive permission granted to him by social media platforms, universities, and the press carried with it an imprimatur of approval and acceptability. The grating noise you heard was the sound of the Overton Window shifting.

Greenwald’s words are interchangeable with those of any number of liberals he otherwise abhors and disdains as warmongering crypto fascists — a fact I find darkly amusing. But he makes a more novel argument here that’s also worth quoting:

“It’s easy to be dismissive of this serious aspect of the debate if you’re some white American or non-Muslim American whose free speech is very unlikely to be depicted as ‘material support for terrorism’ or otherwise criminalized.”

This is as insulting as it is fantastical. Most of the noble warriors for abstract free speech I’ve encountered, who especially elevate the speech of Nazis and their ilk to prove their virtuous fealty to a principle, are white. In truth, it’s marginalized people, queer/trans people and women of color like myself, who often look askance at the tremendous amount of ink spilled by white men like Greenwald defending the untrammeled rights of people who A) say they want to kill us and take away our rights, and B) do so on a regular basis.

We don’t look at Nazis being too scared to march and think “there but for the grace of God go I,” but instead think, “good, I can breathe that much easier.”

His defense of the ACLU here also makes no note of how their Virginia chapter was apparently trolling the counter-protesters hours before Fields’ terror attack, snarkily pointing out how a black counter-protester was carrying a bow and arrow.

In addition to functionally narc’ing for the very police state Greenwald claims to abhor, it expresses the same tut tutting of our self-defense and political expression liberals love to indulge in. At the risk of stating the obvious, it wasn’t that counter-protester who ended up killing anyone; it was the ACLU’s client and object of Greenwald’s fetish principle.

There is a difference between defending the civil liberties of someone accused of terrorism (I have no doubt Fields, as a white man, will be accorded every democratic legal courtesy) and saying that a group of people who we know will likely be aggressively violent and bigoted should be permitted to congregate—with weapons—in a public square rich with targets.

Further, Greenwald’s direct comparison of the defense of Muslims (a vastly diverse group of 1.6 billion people who, in the West, comprise a religious minority routinely subject to discrimination and abuse) to the defense of Nazis (a discrete affinity group united by racial supremacism with murderous intent towards those self-same minorities), and the racism directed at the former to justifiable outrage at the latter, is completely obnoxious.

Much like his comparison between Nazis and left wing activists.

Since Greenwald is so eager to liken us to Dick Cheney, I might point out that this invidious equation of fascists, socialists, and communists is itself a popular right wing talking point. But one need only say this: there are many kinds of socialism and communism that are not Stalinism; there is no expression of fascism but Hitlerism. We can and should be able to make moral judgements accordingly.

Our deaths — the deaths of trans folks, POC, and members of other marginalized communities — are the true content of Nazi, white supremacist, and neo-Confederate speech. Their rallies are “peaceful” in the way Richard Spencer’s promise of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” is peaceful.

Contrary to Greenwald’s bizarre fantasy about how all non-whites agree with his absolutism, we understand that reality and organize around it. Securing unlimited rights for Nazis does not guarantee my rights; it forfeits them. Bear in mind who Fields targeted with his car: a group of protesters, many of whom were women and people of colour carrying “Black Lives Matter” signs.

There are many kinds of socialism and communism that are not Stalinism; there is no expression of fascism but Hitlerism.

As I was at pains to point out months ago, this vision of untroubled free speech always runs afoul of the fact that there are rights conflicts in any democracy. No one person can have unlimited rights, lest they inevitably interfere with the rights of others. In this case, the privileged indulgence in the rights of Charlottesville’s Nazi marchers conflicted quite directly with the right to life putatively enjoyed by the counter-protesters (who all comprise direct targets of Nazi violence).

What Liberals Don’t Get About Free Speech In The Age Of Trump

How many of us must die before liberal and left wing white men realize that they’re not the ones being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice so they can hold on to a parlor game principle? Why do they not see that the “free speech” argument creates a moral loophole large enough for these murderers to drive through?

Jeremy Christian, who murdered two men on a light rail train in Portland, OR, reportedly said “Get stabbed in your neck if you hate free speech” to police, days after attending a “free speech rally” in the city that hosted extreme right wing groups. These people are adopting this term for a reason. When we use “free speech” as moral spackle to cover up the true content of these people’s’ beliefs and deeds, they will take that as a cue and use it accordingly.

This nonsense will keep getting people killed until we grow up as a society and accept that we can make decisive moral judgements about speech acts. Taking action against Nazis is not a slippery slope; it’s a sticky floor. It is the ethical ground on which we must stand in order to take our bearings.

A Foolish Consistency

The catastrophic failure of mealy mouthed “both sides”-ism, which Greenwald’s editorial is but the liberal version of, was revealed this week when Trump’s initial condemnation only blamed nameless “many sides” for violence that had a single source.

To look at how white supremacists, neo-Confederates, and Nazis cheered on that statement, even though it (in some vague, abstract way) condemned them, is instructive. It tells you how and why they thrive on moral ambiguity and relativism, why condemning “both sides” is illusory in its fairness and how it actually emboldens the true culprits by enabling them to skulk in the shadows of namelessness.

Why do they not see that the “free speech” argument creates a moral loophole large enough for these murderers to drive through?

One of the last social media posts that Heather Heyer made was the popular slogan “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Her final act was to march with Black Lives Matter protesters and members of the local DSA chapter — which has fundraised a storm for Heyer and her family. Meanwhile ten others remain in hospital, like Natalie Romero, a Latina student at UVA who joined the counterprotest.

It didn’t have to come to this.

But every inch of permission granted by our liberal thought-leaders, and the leftists who’ve abetted their arguments, every bit of digital earth ceded by Twitter, Google, and Facebook, every “it’s the principle of the thing!” argument made by well-meaning whites in defense of our would-be assassins, brought us closer and closer to the point where Charlottesville was inevitable.

As so many of us pointed out, the Klansmen, Nazis, and neo-Confederates were marching en masse in broad daylight without hoods or masks. That boldness has its origins in the permission granted by powerful institutions and prominent commentators who said the “marketplace of ideas” would crush Nazism, in Twitter’s ongoing failure to stamp out the Nazi presence on the platform, in the excuses made by liberal/left commentators eager to score easy points off of student activists rather than do the hard work needed to fight an actual threat to freedom.

All this in the name of that foolish consistency that Emerson excoriated so long ago, as if discernment were not also a moral and intellectual skill.

I could say “the time for illusions is over” or some such thing, but people of color have been dying for decades so that people like Greenwald or Chait could cling to a fantasy of “free speech” that never includes us when we need it most, that privileges the speech rights of our murderers over our right to live. It needs to stop now.

I am not the price to be paid for the hobgoblin of your consistent arguments.

Looking For A Comments Section? We Don’t Have One.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/the-establishment-when-free-speech-kills-9cb1353086e9/ Tue, 15 Aug 2017 18:53:20 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1767 Read more]]> Every person who’s misused arguments for free speech to defend white supremacists has some of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands.

The way we were going, this was always going to end in blood. Every person who’s ever misused arguments for free speech to defend Nazis or white supremacists — just so they could puff out their chests and apocryphally quote Voltaire with smug certitude — has some measure of Heather Heyer’s blood on their hands.

The road that James Alex Fields Jr. sped down was paved with countless editorials in major newspapers and magazines that positioned student movements or black women on Twitter as existential threats to “free speech.” It was paved by those who said they were less afraid of Richard Spencer than the man who punched him. It was paved by countless people saying, “they’re just words” or “it’s just the internet, it’s not real life” in defence of extremists’ vitriol, never realizing that such statements are not mere words on the wind: they are promises.

After all, how many times have we seen white people online call for mowing down protesters? What happened in Charlottesville wasn’t even the first time someone went out and actually did it. As a recent Slate article notes: “On July 10, 2016 — the same day a South Carolina fire captain threatened to run over BLM protesters who had shut down Interstate 126 — an SUV driver in southern Illinois plowed through a group of BLM protesters after yelling ‘All lives matter, not blacks, all lives.’”

That was over a year ago, and we should have seen then how hateful social media slogans quickly become action.

Meanwhile, in the aftermath of Heyer’s murder, a Springfield, MA policeman wrote on Facebook — in response to a news article about the terror attack — “Hahahaha love this, maybe people shouldn’t block roads.” He added, to someone trying to argue with him, “How do you know [the driver] was a Nazi scumbag? Stop being part of the problem.” An incredible two step: celebrating a woman’s murder, and then tut tutting someone who insulted her murderer while retreating behind formless relativism.

The many instances of whites letting loose their hatred online and calling for the mowing down of protesters are wishes being loosed into the ether. Eventually, they’ll coalesce into a deed. As I said, they are not just words, they are promises, given force and urgency by the overheated rhetoric that prevails on social media, where even the most extreme racists are given free reign to agitate without limit.

Years ago, a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center made abundantly clear that hate sites like Stormfront were a common denominator for the spate of white nationalist terrorism we’ve seen on both sides of the Atlantic. The SPLC describes what should now be an all too familiar profile of an angry young white man with internet access:

“Assured of the supremacy of his race and frustrated by the inferiority of his achievements, he binges online for hours every day, self-medicating, slowly sipping a cocktail of rage. He gradually gains acceptance in this online birthing den of self-described ‘lone wolves,’ but he gets no relief, no practical remedies, no suggestions to improve his circumstances. He just gets angrier.
And then he gets a gun.”

This was written in the days before GamerGate and the alt-right co-optation of 4chan, but the analysis readily applies to these larger, more easily accessible echo chambers, which have now claimed whole fiefdoms on Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit; their combined reach vastly outstrips that of the two decade-old Stormfront.

It was an important first step that GoDaddy and then Google booted the white supremacist Daily Stormer from their hosting services after the site’s role in radicalizing Fields — and celebrating his rampage — was made abundantly clear. That decisiveness was vital, and an even stiffer moral spine will be needed in the days and weeks to come. The time for pretending this group of white-right terrorists are playing the same game of democratic discourse was over decades ago, but some continue to refuse to wake up and acknowledge this reality.

Sacrificing Lives for Liberal Principle

In truth, we need to add the ACLU to this list of naysayers; they actually defended the Nazi and white supremacist mob, fighting the city of Charlottesville when they tried to move or cancel the march. Now, the rally they fought for — because of vague, abstract “free speech” principlesgrounded in a liberalism allergic to meaning — has claimed a life and seriously injured many others.

Liberals like Jonathan Chait, Jon Ronson, and Michelle Goldberg deserve their share of criticism for their spinelessness. Free speech absolutism originates, after all, from both Constitutional minimalism and a particular school of liberalism that sees principle as an end in itself — but there are leftists who are quite keen on the usual cliched arguments as well.

Why Punching Nazis Is Not Only Ethical, But Imperative
theestablishment.co

Glenn Greenwald, for instance, defended the ACLU at length for their choice to defend both the extreme right troll Milo Yiannopoulos and the Charlottesville march. He likens us — those who openly criticize the reductive use of the Constitution to support hate crimes — to people who attack the ACLU for defending the civil liberties of terror suspects, or who attack the Council on American-Islamic Relations as “terrorists.”

Take note of the following, content-free argument I’m sure you’ve never heard before: “One of the defining attributes of fascism is forcible suppression of views.”

(Running over a young socialist woman does indeed suppress her views, but Greenwald is wringing his hands here for her murderers, keep in mind.)

Or this equally vacuous cliche:

“Is it not glaringly apparent that the exact opposite will happen: by turning them into free speech martyrs, you will do nothing but strengthen them and make them more sympathetic? Literally nothing has helped Yiannopoulos become a national cult figure more than the well-intentioned (but failed) efforts to deny him a platform.”

As someone who watched Yiannopoulos’ rise, I’ve borne witness to the fact that no one with any real power stood up to him and his abuses; this absence is what abetted his growing popularity. The passive permission granted to him by social media platforms, universities, and the press carried with it an imprimatur of approval and acceptability. The grating noise you heard was the sound of the Overton Window shifting.

Greenwald’s words are interchangeable with those of any number of liberals he otherwise abhors and disdains as warmongering crypto fascists — a fact I find darkly amusing. But he makes a more novel argument here that’s also worth quoting:

“It’s easy to be dismissive of this serious aspect of the debate if you’re some white American or non-Muslim American whose free speech is very unlikely to be depicted as ‘material support for terrorism’ or otherwise criminalized.”

This is as insulting as it is fantastical. Most of the noble warriors for abstract free speech I’ve encountered, who especially elevate the speech of Nazis and their ilk to prove their virtuous fealty to a principle, are white. In truth, it’s marginalized people, queer/trans people and women of color like myself, who often look askance at the tremendous amount of ink spilled by white men like Greenwald defending the untrammeled rights of people who A) say they want to kill us and take away our rights, and B) do so on a regular basis.

We don’t look at Nazis being too scared to march and think “there but for the grace of God go I,” but instead think, “good, I can breathe that much easier.”

His defense of the ACLU here also makes no note of how their Virginia chapter was apparently trolling the counter-protesters hours before Fields’ terror attack, snarkily pointing out how a black counter-protester was carrying a bow and arrow.

In addition to functionally narc’ing for the very police state Greenwald claims to abhor, it expresses the same tut tutting of our self-defense and political expression liberals love to indulge in. At the risk of stating the obvious, it wasn’t that counter-protester who ended up killing anyone; it was the ACLU’s client and object of Greenwald’s fetish principle.

There is a difference between defending the civil liberties of someone accused of terrorism (I have no doubt Fields, as a white man, will be accorded every democratic legal courtesy) and saying that a group of people who we knowwill likely be aggressively violent and bigoted should be permitted to congregate—with weapons—in a public square rich with targets.

Further, Greenwald’s direct comparison of the defense of Muslims (a vastly diverse group of 1.6 billion people who, in the West, comprise a religious minority routinely subject to discrimination and abuse) to the defense of Nazis (a discrete affinity group united by racial supremacism with murderous intent towards those self-same minorities), and the racism directed at the former to justifiable outrage at the latter, is completely obnoxious.

Much like his comparison between Nazis and left wing activists.

Since Greenwald is so eager to liken us to Dick Cheney, I might point out that this invidious equation of fascists, socialists, and communists is itself a popular right wing talking point. But one need only say this: there are many kinds of socialism and communism that are not Stalinism; there is no expression of fascism but Hitlerism. We can and should be able to make moral judgements accordingly.

Our deaths — the deaths of trans folks, POC, and members of other marginalized communities — are the true content of Nazi, white supremacist, and neo-Confederate speech. Their rallies are “peaceful” in the way Richard Spencer’s promise of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” is peaceful.

Contrary to Greenwald’s bizarre fantasy about how all non-whites agree with his absolutism, we understand that reality and organize around it. Securing unlimited rights for Nazis does not guarantee my rights; it forfeits them. Bear in mind who Fields targeted with his car: a group of protesters, many of whom were women and people of colour carrying “Black Lives Matter” signs.

As I was at pains to point out months ago, this vision of untroubled free speech always runs afoul of the fact that there are rights conflicts in any democracy. No one person can have unlimited rights, lest they inevitably interfere with the rights of others. In this case, the privileged indulgence in the rights of Charlottesville’s Nazi marchers conflicted quite directly with the right to life putatively enjoyed by the counter-protesters (who all comprise direct targets of Nazi violence).

What Liberals Don’t Get About Free Speech In The Age Of Trump
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How many of us must die before liberal and left wing white men realize that they’re not the ones being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice so they can hold on to a parlor game principle? Why do they not see that the “free speech” argument creates a moral loophole large enough for these murderers to drive through?

Jeremy Christian, who murdered two men on a light rail train in Portland, OR, reportedly said “Get stabbed in your neck if you hate free speech” to police, days after attending a “free speech rally” in the city that hosted extreme right wing groups. These people are adopting this term for a reason. When we use “free speech” as moral spackle to cover up the true content of these people’s’ beliefs and deeds, they will take that as a cue and use it accordingly.

This nonsense will keep getting people killed until we grow up as a society and accept that we can make decisive moral judgements about speech acts. Taking action against Nazis is not a slippery slope; it’s a sticky floor. It is the ethical ground on which we must stand in order to take our bearings.

A Foolish Consistency

The catastrophic failure of mealy mouthed “both sides”-ism, which Greenwald’s editorial is but the liberal version of, was revealed this week when Trump’s initial condemnation only blamed nameless “many sides” for violence that had a single source.

To look at how white supremacists, neo-Confederates, and Nazis cheered on that statement, even though it (in some vague, abstract way) condemned them, is instructive. It tells you how and why they thrive on moral ambiguity and relativism, why condemning “both sides” is illusory in its fairness and how it actually emboldens the true culprits by enabling them to skulk in the shadows of namelessness.

Why do they not see that the 'free speech' argument creates a moral loophole large enough for these murderers to drive through?
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One of the last social media posts that Heather Heyer made was the popular slogan “if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Her final act was to march with Black Lives Matter protesters and members of the local DSA chapter — which has fundraised a storm for Heyer and her family. Meanwhile ten others remain in hospital, like Natalie Romero, a Latina student at UVA who joined the counterprotest.

It didn’t have to come to this.

But every inch of permission granted by our liberal thought-leaders, and the leftists who’ve abetted their arguments, every bit of digital earth ceded by Twitter, Google, and Facebook, every “it’s the principle of the thing!” argument made by well-meaning whites in defense of our would-be assassins, brought us closer and closer to the point where Charlottesville was inevitable.

As so many of us pointed out, the Klansmen, Nazis, and neo-Confederates were marching en masse in broad daylight without hoods or masks. That boldness has its origins in the permission granted by powerful institutions and prominent commentators who said the “marketplace of ideas” would crush Nazism, in Twitter’s ongoing failure to stamp out the Nazi presence on the platform, in the excuses made by liberal/left commentators eager to score easy points off of student activists rather than do the hard work needed to fight an actual threat to freedom.

All this in the name of that foolish consistency that Emerson excoriated so long ago, as if discernment were not also a moral and intellectual skill.

I could say “the time for illusions is over” or some such thing, but people of color have been dying for decades so that people like Greenwald or Chait could cling to a fantasy of “free speech” that never includes us when we need it most, that privileges the speech rights of our murderers over our right to live. It needs to stop now.

I am not the price to be paid for the hobgoblin of your consistent arguments.

Serving up hour-long doses of Black pain for amusement is deeply irresponsible, when that pain remains so deeply real.

flickr/AHummons Photography

Last night, members of the “alt-right” and KKK gathered in Charlottesville outside of the University of Virginia for a “Unite the Right” rally, organized against the removal of a Confederate statue at Richard Spencer’s alma mater. Virginia’s governor Terry McAuliffe released a statement advising people to stay away from the rally that will carry into Saturday due to those “who may seek to commit acts of violence against rally participants or law enforcement” — a statement that sounds like it is in the best interest of the protesters.

So far there has not been any forceful police intervention. There has been no tear gas. No one has called these men thugs. Although the Charlottesville Police Department has just issued a Declaration of Local Emergency, one doesn’t need to imagine what immediate actions would have been taken if Black people stormed an area with flaming torches. We have seen what happens to protesters with the wrong skin color, even when they are acting peacefully. These men (and possibly women too) no longer even bother wearing their hoods, like the KKK once did to hide their identity. The world we live in now lets them boldly put their racism, bigotry, and hatred on display, knowing there will be little consequence for their actions.

One doesn’t need to imagine what immediate actions would have been taken if Black people stormed an area with flaming torches.

According to several tweets from people who were at the rally, pro-white chants echoed through the air, including “White Lives Matter” and “Jews will not replace us.” Meanwhile, the hashtag #unitetheright spread across social media. And then, another hashtag re-emerged on Twitter: #NoConfederate.

That this rally is taking place just weeks after a major network announced plans to create a show imagining what it would be like if the South did not lose the Civil War says a lot about the state of America in 2017.

On July 19, HBO announced its plans for a show requiring creators and writers to fantasize about slavery still existing. As the network announcement put it, the series would feature “an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution.”

The laundry list of reasons Confederate should never have been greenlit is long, and seems self-explanatory, echoing in many ways the fight of activists like Bree Newsome to have confederate flags taken down.

Chief among these reasons is the fact that slavery didn’t just disappear when the Civil War ended; it just looks different now. Systems of oppression have been reborn in new forms, like the prison industrial complex and institutional racism. The descendants of slave owners continue to benefit from generational wealth, profiting off the oppression of Black people. The fact is, our country has yet to figure out a way to even the playing field for Black people after the dissolution of the institution of slavery.

Welcome To The Anti-Racism Movement — Here’s What You’ve Missed

Confederate has subsequently been met with sweeping and justified backlash — not just for its patently problematic premise, but also because it would be executive produced and written by the creators of Game of Thrones, which has received criticism for making very little room for people of color, specifically Black characters. Moreover, over the course of seven seasons, the Black characters who have been featured have been restricted largely to the roles of servants. (Confederate would also be executive-produced by Nichelle Tramble Spellman and Malcolm Spellman, who are Black, a fact that has not assuaged concerns over the show’s direction.)

But even after #NoConfederate was promoted by activists on Twitter—including the creator of the #OscarSoWhite hashtag April Reign (@ReignOfApril) and Rebecca Theodore (@FilmFatale_NYC)—a statement was issued by producers stating that the show will go on:

“We have great respect for the dialogue and concern being expressed around Confederate. We have faith that [writers] Nichelle, Dan, David and Malcolm will approach the subject with care and sensitivity. The project is currently in its infancy so we hope that people will reserve judgment until there is something to see.”

I have zero interest in finding out whether my legitimate outrage over such a ridiculous and exploitative premise is premature. However, there is a silver lining in all this — it was announced this week that a secret project by Will Packer (Girls Trip, Straight Outta Compton) and Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks, Black Jesus) had been greenlit by Amazon — and it essentially posits the exact opposite premise. The show will be titled Black America, and envisions what the world would look like if Black people actually received the reparations they were promised upon being freed from slavery, showing a completely fictional scenario in which Black people thrive without having to contend with the systemic hardships of white supremacy. Instead of the billionth piece of entertainment that portrays Black history as nothing more than slavery, Black America could actually uplift Black people.

In contrast to the problematic Game of Thrones producers behind Confederate, the creative duo at the helm of Black America seems uniquely well-suited to tackle this controversial topic, thanks to their experience with projects that have deftly explored fraught racial themes. I am confident in their ability to represent not only Black people and their unseen potential, but also to embody the humanity of the Black community in their storytelling.

Already, the interviews coming from the creators of Black America show promise, as they have explicitly included discussion of the dangerous impact Confederate could have on present times. Like many others, Packer and McGruder have said they won’t be tuning in to Confederate. “The fact that there is the contemplation of contemporary slavery makes it something that I would not be a part of producing nor consuming,” Packer told Deadline. “Slavery is far too real and far too painful, and we still see the manifestations of it today as a country for me to ever view that as a form of entertainment.”

My Independence Day Is Not The Fourth Of July — It’s Juneteenth

Many are saying there’s a double standard here: Why do we believe a show like Confederate is abysmal, whereas a show like Black America should be celebrated? The answer is fairly simple, and in many ways connects to the heinous KKK rally that’s taken place in Charlottesville.

Since reparations never happened, Black America is an actual fantasy, envisioning a world that does not exist. But America stealing Black people to have them enslaved and build their plantations, and then remaining systemically racist decades after? That’s not fiction; it’s reality. Serving up hour-long doses of Black pain for amusement is deeply irresponsible, when that pain remains so deeply real.

If you need evidence of this devastating fact, look no further than the KKK rally in Charlottesville — at the faces of its unmasked white nationalists who are calling for the death of Black bodies, and who are being protected by the government and police as they do.

Confederate asks us to imagine a world in which the South did not lose, and white supremacy won. The rally in Charlottesville — and the systemic forces protecting the white nationalists behind it — proves that we are living in it.

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