As a black woman, I’m used to living with racial hatred against me and mine. It’s just one of those things that is part of the wallpaper of my life. When you are black it just “is”. It doesn’t take over my life, and I don’t worry about it daily. It’s just the the way my world is ordered-with an underlying malaise you start learning to live with as soon as you are old enough to know you are somehow “different”. Have lived through segregation and Jim Crow signs, seeing the Klan up close, and being spit on, beaten and jailed when fighting back. I’ve had partners and friends shot down by racist cops. I deal with racial microaggressions daily.
I also know that on the left that we have white allies against racism, and that’s important. But too often that alliance is to stop racism against blacks, or latinos or asians or native americans, and there is not enough discussion about how racism and white supremacy affects white people.
Perhaps more white people will wake up to the danger to their lives, their world if they realize that white supremacists don’t just kill the Goodmans and Schwerners and Liuzzos of “our side” of the struggle against injustice. They don’t just massacre Sikhs in a temple.
Read the SPLC report: Users of leading white supremacist web forum responsible for many deadly hate crimes, mass killings
Nearly 100 people in the last five years have been murdered by active users of the leading racist website, Stormfront, according to a report released today by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project. Registered Stormfront users have been disproportionately responsible for some of the most lethal hate crimes and mass killings since the web forum became the first hate site on the Internet in 1995, a month before the Oklahoma City bombing. The report found that hate killings by Stormfront members began to accelerate rapidly in early 2009, when Barack Obama took office as the nation’s first black president.
A similar racist web forum, Vanguard News Network (VNN), was used by neo-Nazi and former Klan leader Frazier Glenn Miller, who has been charged with the Sunday murder of three people he mistakenly believed were Jews in Overland Park, Kan. Miller, who apparently changed his last name in recent years to Cross, logged more than 12,000 posts on VNN, whose slogan is, “No Jews, Just Right.” “Stormfront is the murder capital of the racist Internet,” said Heidi Beirich, report author and Intelligence Project director. “It has been a magnet for the deadly and deranged. And VNN is almost as bad.”
Stormfront users have included Wade Michael Page, who shot to death six people before killing himself at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012; Richard Andrew Poplawski, who murdered three Pittsburgh police officers in 2009; and Anders Behring Breivik, who bombed a government building in Norway, killing eight people, and then massacred 69 people, most of them teenagers, at a summer camp in 2011.
Read the data they’ve compiled on White Homicide Worldwide:
A typical murderer drawn to the racist forum Stormfront.org is a frustrated, unemployed, white adult male living with his mother or an estranged spouse or girlfriend. She is the sole provider in the household. Forensic psychologists call him a “wound collector.” Instead of building his resume, seeking employment or further education, he projects his grievances on society and searches the Internet for an excuse or an explanation unrelated to his behavior or the choices he has made in life.
His escalation follows a predictable trajectory. From right-wing antigovernment websites and conspiracy hatcheries, he migrates to militant hate sites that blame society’s ills on ethnicity and shifting demographics. He soon learns his race is endangered – a target of “white genocide.” After reading and lurking for a while, he needs to talk to someone about it, signing up as a registered user on a racist forum where he commiserates in an echo chamber of angry fellow failures where Jews, gays, minorities and multiculturalism are blamed for everything
The rabidly imbalanced legions inspired by Stormfront and other whites supremacist hate groups are egged on by the paranoid ravings on hate-talk radio and on the teevee nightly on Fox get white folks killed too. Look at Las Vegas. At the Georgia Courthouse. (Sadly there was no mass public outcry about the Sikh temple massacre. They were othered by being brown with turbans.)
As long as cops are required to be public servants of a government which allows a black man to sit in the White House, they are targets of white supremacists with visions of a new world order with them back on top where they believe they should be-by right.
The right of whiteness.
Jewish Americans know that they too are at risk. The anti-black haters in this country also reject Jews by spewing virulent antisemitism. Jews are still not white in their book, and any one not a wing-nut Christian loses their white hang-out card. But supremacists also target law enforcement, and the police shootings have been of mostly white cops. No coincidence that the ADL released this after the Las Vegas shootings:
ADL Says Las Vegas Shootings Underscore Growing Trend of Right-Wing Extremists Targeting Police
“The two police officers who lost their lives are only the latest in a series of casualties in a de facto war being waged against police by right-wing extremists, including both anti-government extremists and white supremacists,” said Mark Pitcavage, ADL Director of Investigative Research. “Some extremists have deliberately targeted police, while others have responded violently when meeting police in unplanned encounters. The killings are not the effort of a concerted campaign, but rather a series of independent attacks and clashes stemming from right-wing ideologies.”
Jerad and Amanda Miller — identified by their Internet writings as anti-government extremists of the “Patriot” movement variety — are suspected of fatally shooting Las Vegas Police Officers Alyn Beck and Igor Soldo and a civilian before taking their own lives on June 8.
Based on their Internet writings, the Millers believed in common militia-type conspiracy theories about the “New World Order,” including “concentration camps” for Americans, coming martial law and “chemtrails,” among others. The most recent entry on Jerad Miller’s Facebook page on June 7 chillingly read: “The dawn of a new day. May all of our coming sacrifices be worth it.”
The GA Courthouse shooter, Dennis Marx, has been tied to the Sovereign Citizens, who have a history of violence
When a sovereign feels particularly desperate, angry, battle-weary and cornered, his next government contact, no matter how minor, can be his final straw. The resulting rage can be lethal. In 1995 in Ohio, a sovereign named Michael Hill pulled a gun on an officer during a traffic stop. Hill was killed. In 1997, New Hampshire extremist Carl Drega shot dead two officers and two civilians, and wounded another three officers before being killed himself. In that same year in Idaho, when brothers Doug and Craig Broderick were pulled over for failing to signal, they killed one officer and wounded another before being killed themselves in a violent gun battle. In December 2003, members of the Bixby family, who lived outside of Abbeville, S.C., killed two law enforcement officers in a dispute over a small sliver of land next to their home. And in May 2010, Jerry and Joseph Kane, a father and son sovereign team, shot to death two West Memphis, Ark., police officers who had pulled them over in a routine traffic stop. Later that day, the Kanes were killed in a fierce shootout with police that wounded two other officers.
They have a warped history
The ideas of the “sovereign citizens” movement originate in the ideology of the Posse Comitatus, an anti-Semitic group that raged through the Midwest in the late 1970s and 1980s…Sovereign citizens also often distinguish between so-called “14th Amendment citizens,” who are subject to federal and state governments, and themselves, who are also known as “organic citizens” – an ideology that causes adherents to claim that black people, who only became legal citizens when the 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War, have far fewer rights than whites. Some of the more famous adherents of sovereign citizens ideology include Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and members of the Montana Freemen.
Virulent racism against black folks doesn’t just affect us people of color. Those same supremacist white nationalist and sovereign terrorists are also anti-LGBT and anti-women.
If you aren’t black or a person of color-you need to think about this-in your own self interest. They could decide to kill you. Someone you know or love or work with or live next door to may be the next person gunned down or caught in the crossfire, or bombed. This is not about “lone wolf” mentally deranged loners. Don’t kid yourselves. And it isn’t just about guns (though these people should have zero access to them and we need to take on the NRA), since virulent haters use bombs and other means to kill.
Take off the blindfold.
You are either part of the problem or part of the solution-but first you need to accept that there is a problem, and it isn’t just one for black folks or brown folks, or red folks or Muslims, Sikhs or Jews.
I was thinking about Martin Niemöller’s words:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me–and there was no one left to speak for me.
If you are white substitute and change that to:
First they killed and dispossessed Native Americans…
then enslaved, lynched and still target blacks…
(insert groups)
and close with…”then they came to shoot me”
Cross-posted from Black Kos
13 comments