I have mentioned many times before in this
blog that I find precious little joy in writing during the Age of Trump. I’m
not honestly sure, but I feel as if I’ve opened up every blog post in recent
memory with some variation of that line. I’ve spent the last two years well
outside of my comfort zone—I’ve trashed the Republican Party, condemned the hostile
takeover of said party by Trump and his fascist goons, and last month I even
found myself discussing the merits of tweeting a WWE gif that shows the
President of the United States punching someone with the CNN logo for a face. This
is madness; it is the world turned upside down. And now, as I desperately look
anywhere for a reprieve, I find myself called upon to tackle the easy,
always-enjoyable topic of white supremacy. Yes, folks, that was sarcasm.
I’m quite sure I don’t have to explain to
any of you why I’m writing about such a grisly topic this week. The events in Charlottesville earlier this month were
a stark distillation of our hyper-polarized nation at its very worst—a heinous
display of racial animus, violent unrest, and pure, undisguised hate. This wasn’t
just harmless picketing and chanting; it was terrorism. It left a dozen and a
half people seriously injured and unthinkably cost an American citizen her
life. I am shocked and ashamed that an act of such blatant retrograde bigotry
occurred merely an hour away from the city I call home. But, as I’ve said, we’re
in the Age of Trump.
And how does Trump respond to a gathering
of violent white supremacists in his backyard? By blaming violence “on both sides,” only condemning white supremacists a few days
later, and then giving a press conference doubling down on his initial impulse
to distract us from homegrown race terrorists by pointing fingers at the “antifa”
(anti-fascist) counter-protestors. He even went so far as to say there were “very
fine people” on both sides, which presumably implies there are some “very fine”
race terrorists out there. This is insane, unpresidential, and mind-boggling in
its obtuseness. Here we see a certain President of the United States—a man who
has been consistently dogged by accusations of racism, fascism, and xenophobia—given
a golden opportunity to speak out against all of the unsavory elements with
which he finds himself associated, and what did he do? He took the silver
platter that had been handed to him and he took a giant, steaming, metaphorical
shit on it. He spat in the eyes of anyone (read: most everyone) who is offended
or outright harmed by the behavior of overt white supremacists. He spurned the
memory of the American citizen who was murdered
by one of them. Make no mistake: if it hadn’t been clear already, this man is
not worthy of any American’s respect. He is a fraud, a worm, a charlatan of the
lowest order, a speck of filth more debased than the dirt beneath the soles of
my shoes. That’s what a good condemnation looks like.
But that’s not even what upsets me the
most. What truly baffles me is that I find various denizens of the American
Right—bloggers, journalists, Facebook commenters, friends—following Trump’s
lead in steering the discussion about Charlottesville away from white
supremacists and toward vague Black Lives Matter and antifa bogeymen. Not only
is this a false equivalence (a darling term of the American Left that I use
with just a little bit of vomit in my mouth), it is completely tone-deaf and
not worth anyone’s time. And that should be a no-brainer. When a group of
avowed white supremacists stage a protest, turn violent, and plow a car into an
innocent American citizen, I find myself caring very little what the “other
side” was doing to incite them. If some of my cohabitants on the Right want to
have a discussion about the tactics used by BLM and antifa and whether or not
they are misguided, that’s all well and good. It’s a discussion I’m very
willing to have, but for god’s sake, not now. That particular topic has almost nothing
to do with what happened in Charlottesville. And attempting to distract from a
very real act of domestic, white supremacist terrorism is not only harmful, but
constitutes an act of complicity in that terrorism. The first, second, and
third thoughts we should all be having as reasonable human beings in response
to these events are: white supremacy and
terrorism are bad. This one’s easy, folks.
I increasingly fear, though, that this is
what being a part of the American Right has come to be. These days, we find
ourselves called upon to defend white supremacist terrorists. They are, after
all, a vocal and important part of President Trump’s base. What’s more, it
seems they have hijacked the ongoing discussion regarding Southern heritage as
well. (Let’s not forget the rally in Charlottesville was organized in response
to the proposed removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.) As someone who has defended
both the Republican Party’s small-government platform and the right of
Southerners to preserve elements of their Confederate heritage, I despair at both
of these developments. It is quite impossible for me to stand by a party and a
cause that are both in bed with the scum of the Earth.
I’ve written before about the relationship
between Confederate memorabilia and race terrorists. In “We Are Not Dylan Roof,”
I defended Southern heritage as a product of regional pride, not racist hate. I
did, however, ask this question: “Is there perhaps some unseen font of
particularly vile racism that lurks somewhere in American society—somewhere
where Dylann Roof was able to tap into it and feed his own demented hatred?”
While I thought then that the answer to that question might very well be yes,
never in my wildest dreams did I imagine it would be confirmed in such stark
and blatant terms a mere two years later. In a weird way, maybe I owe President
Trump a thank you for bringing this scum to light. They have helped me realize
that even though a well-intentioned Southerner like myself can admire a statue
of Robert E. Lee without harboring any resentment toward by brothers and
sisters of color, this doesn’t mean we might not be better off without public
memorials of past sins. And maybe I was a fool in the first place for believing
that if I defended the display of monuments to men who fought to own slaves, I wasn’t
throwing my lot in with a bunch of full-throated racists and bigots. Obviously
I was always aware that a small, unsavory minority of the American Right
consisted of this ilk, but I never thought I’d live to see a time where they
were brought enough into the mainstream to be vocal and accepted as legitimate.
Well, if that’s truly the case—if defending my old party and my heritage puts
me in bed with open white supremacists—then I’m out.
Postscript:
I know it probably seems downright vapid for me to act surprised that I’m being
joined by racists in defending statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and
Jefferson Davis, but I promise you I’m going for something more nuanced than
that. In my view, even if Confederate statues were constructed by white
supremacists one hundred or so years ago, a contemporary defense of Confederate
statues would ideally come from a sense of regional pride and historical
inclusion, not white supremacy. Perhaps I was naïve in thinking that most of my
allies felt the same way. Maybe most of them do feel this way, but that’s
irrelevant if they’re going to waste their time obfuscating about what happened
in Charlottesville.
