Distractions, Denials, Revisions, And Reversals: How White Supremacists Win
As I watched commemorations and commentary on events that happened 100 years ago while dealing with current events, I felt as if I were in an everything old is new again Ground Hog Decade or Century. News commentators discussed how the Tulsa terrorist attack on the area called Black Wall Street in 1921 was either not reported or was covered as a race riot where (in one Oklahoma newspaper) blacks were the villains while Trump-worshipping Republicans and conservative news media either tried to ignore the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol or portrayed the insurrectionists as patriots, tourists, and (in the most ridiculous fantasy) BlackLivesMatter and Antifa activists posing as Trump supporters. As I battled the employees of a corrupt, racist property management company (Condominium Management Services) and the “fixer” lawyers (Kriger Law firm) who enable them, I learned about the theft of a black family’s land in Huntington Beach 100 years ago. And as I heard about plans for Republican politicians to ban the study of critical race theory in public schools while bigots like Megyn Kelly removed their children from private schools to protect them from learning the truth about racism in the not so United States of America, I remembered that in the 19th Century it was illegal for blacks to learn to read and write and that toward the end of the 20th Century there was the “cultural literacy” versus multiculturalism debate among academics, where those of us who wanted to expand and diversify the canon had to deal with know-it-all white male educators like Allan Bloom (THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, 1987) and E.D. Hirsch, Junior (CULTURAL LITERACY, 1987) who thought they could determine what all of us needed to know, no matter who we were, where we lived, and what career we planned to pursue. It’s clear that the more America and some Americans change, the more racists stay the same. The more historians, teachers, and journalists reveal the truth about our racist past and present, the more racists try to deny, distract, and revise the truth. And the more we progress toward a more moral and perfect union, that “promised land” where all people are treated equal, the more white supremacists like politicians Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and Lindsey Graham, so-called journalists like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, and organizations like the KKK, the Proud Boys, and the Oath Keepers try to reverse our progress. That’s why white supremacists are still winning.
Of course, despite the white supremacists’ attempts to obstruct and sabotage us, we have made considerable progress toward racial equity since the 19th and 20th Centuries. Black people not only can read and write, we can also teach white students how to read and write. And we can write history and literature, sometimes revising the stories told by white writers. In my 20th Century American Literature classes, I usually paired what I called “dominant culture” (i.e. white) texts with those written by blacks or other writers of color, showing how the white texts were revised. Richard Wright’s NATIVE SON (1940), for instance, revises Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), and August Wilson’s FENCES (1985) revises Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949). But white writers can also revise writers of color as I showed with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s GREAT GATSBY (1925) and James Weldon Johnson’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN (1912). Through his portrait of Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed that even a white man couldn’t just show up in New York society and be accepted by the rich white folks the way the ex-coloured man was when he passed for white in Johnson’s novel. Fitzgerald’s response to Johnson’s tale of a black man passing for white, marrying a wealthy, beautiful “lily white” woman (who dies after having two children), and living successfully as a businessman is similar to the response of some contemporary white journalists to the 1619 project, a version of American history that focuses on slavery instead of Christopher Columbus, the Puritans, and the Founding Fathers. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black female journalist who developed that project, was just denied tenure at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her scholarship has been viciously attacked by mostly white men who are probably as bothered by her race and gender as they are by the truths she revealed about American history. Some revisionists are even suggesting that slavery was good for blacks (even a few black fools are making that point) and/or that the Southerners were really the ones who wanted to free the slaves.
While the journalists and commentators (historians, politicians, educators) that I watch mostly on MSNBC are currently rejecting attempts to revise history and deny the truth about American racism, they are still too easily distracted by news that doesn’t matter as much as the dangers of white supremacist terrorism and the attacks on our democracy by racist Republican state legislators and governors, which represent the most serious attempt to reverse progress toward a truly equal American society since Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow at the end of the 19th Century. Last week, the MSNBC anchors planned to spend most of May 25 focused on the anniversary of George Floyd’s becoming a civil rights martyr. They announced these plans in advance. “Coincidentally,” on that day someone in the Manhattan district attorney’s office leaked the information that a grand jury was being formed to investigate Trump. It wasn’t clear who leaked that information, which should not have been leaked, but I suspect it was a soft bigot (the information also could have been leaked earlier, and the soft bigot could have been the journalist who decided to publish it on the Floyd anniversary) who didn’t want to watch a whole day of news about a black man being murdered by a racist white cop. Instead of briefly mentioning the grand jury news and focusing on Floyd, the MSNBC anchors all threw away their scripts and focused on Trump; they spent at least half of their May 25 shows speculating about what was going to happen with the grand jury as if they couldn’t have that discussion the next day or the day after that since the jury probably won’t indict anyone for months. That distraction reminded me of the 2016 Hillary’s e-mails media distraction that allowed Trump to win the electoral college and the 2017 METOO media distraction that allowed us to ignore Charlottesville, the mass murders in Las Vegas, and the fact that a year earlier white women and white evangelicals voted for a confessed sexual assaulter because he promised to stop the browning of America. Even now some news media commentators are still being distracted by sex. Although no one (not even Rachel Maddow, who is practically hyperventilating) is more focused on how dangerous this attack on our democracy is than MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, she still had time in her one-hour (minus time for commercials) show this week to spend a segment on the Matt Gaetz sex scandal. Really? If Gaetz isn’t eating children and drinking their blood (which is possible since the Republicans project all of their sins onto Democrats), who cares about his sex life. The Republicans aren’t going to demand that he resign, and he’s not the one blocking the Republican Senators from voting for a 1/6 commission. Everyone needs to stay focused on the threats to our democracy and to the lives of people of color, Jews, and Muslims by white supremacists.
The murder of George Floyd by a racist cop was one of those “inflection” moments in American history that can lead to major change. I was astonished by how quickly everything changed last summer. Suddenly we were celebrating Juneteenth, Target and Walmart were carrying books about race, and Mitt Romney marched with the BlackLivesMatter protesters. White folks who thought they weren’t racist or who thought everything would be fine if we black folks and our too progressive white allies just stopped talking about race suddenly woke up and started talking about race; some apologized for being asleep for so long. Everyone was now saying what I’ve been saying for years. We’re not colorblind, and we don’t treat everyone the same. Like black lives and black votes, race does matter. Of course, there is always a backlash to change, and the more mostly nonblack people marched, and the more talk there was of race and racism, the more dangerous the white supremacists became. Like the trapped rat in the opening scene of NATIVE SON, they started attacking, leading finally to the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol by the unpatriotic, racist white people I call TRASH (see 1/17/21 blog post).
Of course, we’d been moving toward that attack since at least the eighties, the last period when a major reversal of progress toward equality occurred. The election of Ronald Reagan, the attack on affirmative action, and the rise of groups like the skinheads during the eighties all were leading to Donald Trump and the Proud Boys in the 2020’s. The failure to tell the truth about racism in the past allowed racists to hide in plain sight during the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, eventually enabling not so secret white supremacist (in the eighties he took out newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and said on television that he wanted people to hate those very young, too dark for some people’s taste falsely accused boys/young men) Trump to move into the White House and start undermining our democracy.
Our democracy continues to be in danger, so it’s important that we stay focused on telling the truth about the racism of the past and the present. We all need to do our part—teachers, journalists, documentarians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. We social media warriors also need to keep posting and tweeting the truth. I’m encouraging several celebrities (LeBron James, who executive produced one of the Tulsa documentaries, Spike Lee, who has produced at least three great documentaries, and Michael Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary attacking Bush’s wars) to produce a documentary on the mirror image dates 1/6/20 and 6/1/21. I’ve also suggested that everyone should make this June 14, Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, Pro-Democracy and Pro-Voting Rights Day. The Vice President and President should make speeches explaining how we can show our love for the flag (not by hugging and kissing it) by protecting our democracy and making it easier for all eligible American citizens to vote.
Too often the white supremacists have won the propaganda war. It’s time that the “real” Americans, the true patriots, start winning by telling the truth about our past and our present so that we can progress toward a more just, equitable, multicultural, mixed race future.
Of course, despite the white supremacists’ attempts to obstruct and sabotage us, we have made considerable progress toward racial equity since the 19th and 20th Centuries. Black people not only can read and write, we can also teach white students how to read and write. And we can write history and literature, sometimes revising the stories told by white writers. In my 20th Century American Literature classes, I usually paired what I called “dominant culture” (i.e. white) texts with those written by blacks or other writers of color, showing how the white texts were revised. Richard Wright’s NATIVE SON (1940), for instance, revises Theodore Dreiser’s AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY (1925), and August Wilson’s FENCES (1985) revises Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949). But white writers can also revise writers of color as I showed with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s GREAT GATSBY (1925) and James Weldon Johnson’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN EX-COLOURED MAN (1912). Through his portrait of Gatsby, Fitzgerald showed that even a white man couldn’t just show up in New York society and be accepted by the rich white folks the way the ex-coloured man was when he passed for white in Johnson’s novel. Fitzgerald’s response to Johnson’s tale of a black man passing for white, marrying a wealthy, beautiful “lily white” woman (who dies after having two children), and living successfully as a businessman is similar to the response of some contemporary white journalists to the 1619 project, a version of American history that focuses on slavery instead of Christopher Columbus, the Puritans, and the Founding Fathers. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black female journalist who developed that project, was just denied tenure at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her scholarship has been viciously attacked by mostly white men who are probably as bothered by her race and gender as they are by the truths she revealed about American history. Some revisionists are even suggesting that slavery was good for blacks (even a few black fools are making that point) and/or that the Southerners were really the ones who wanted to free the slaves.
While the journalists and commentators (historians, politicians, educators) that I watch mostly on MSNBC are currently rejecting attempts to revise history and deny the truth about American racism, they are still too easily distracted by news that doesn’t matter as much as the dangers of white supremacist terrorism and the attacks on our democracy by racist Republican state legislators and governors, which represent the most serious attempt to reverse progress toward a truly equal American society since Reconstruction was replaced by Jim Crow at the end of the 19th Century. Last week, the MSNBC anchors planned to spend most of May 25 focused on the anniversary of George Floyd’s becoming a civil rights martyr. They announced these plans in advance. “Coincidentally,” on that day someone in the Manhattan district attorney’s office leaked the information that a grand jury was being formed to investigate Trump. It wasn’t clear who leaked that information, which should not have been leaked, but I suspect it was a soft bigot (the information also could have been leaked earlier, and the soft bigot could have been the journalist who decided to publish it on the Floyd anniversary) who didn’t want to watch a whole day of news about a black man being murdered by a racist white cop. Instead of briefly mentioning the grand jury news and focusing on Floyd, the MSNBC anchors all threw away their scripts and focused on Trump; they spent at least half of their May 25 shows speculating about what was going to happen with the grand jury as if they couldn’t have that discussion the next day or the day after that since the jury probably won’t indict anyone for months. That distraction reminded me of the 2016 Hillary’s e-mails media distraction that allowed Trump to win the electoral college and the 2017 METOO media distraction that allowed us to ignore Charlottesville, the mass murders in Las Vegas, and the fact that a year earlier white women and white evangelicals voted for a confessed sexual assaulter because he promised to stop the browning of America. Even now some news media commentators are still being distracted by sex. Although no one (not even Rachel Maddow, who is practically hyperventilating) is more focused on how dangerous this attack on our democracy is than MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, she still had time in her one-hour (minus time for commercials) show this week to spend a segment on the Matt Gaetz sex scandal. Really? If Gaetz isn’t eating children and drinking their blood (which is possible since the Republicans project all of their sins onto Democrats), who cares about his sex life. The Republicans aren’t going to demand that he resign, and he’s not the one blocking the Republican Senators from voting for a 1/6 commission. Everyone needs to stay focused on the threats to our democracy and to the lives of people of color, Jews, and Muslims by white supremacists.
The murder of George Floyd by a racist cop was one of those “inflection” moments in American history that can lead to major change. I was astonished by how quickly everything changed last summer. Suddenly we were celebrating Juneteenth, Target and Walmart were carrying books about race, and Mitt Romney marched with the BlackLivesMatter protesters. White folks who thought they weren’t racist or who thought everything would be fine if we black folks and our too progressive white allies just stopped talking about race suddenly woke up and started talking about race; some apologized for being asleep for so long. Everyone was now saying what I’ve been saying for years. We’re not colorblind, and we don’t treat everyone the same. Like black lives and black votes, race does matter. Of course, there is always a backlash to change, and the more mostly nonblack people marched, and the more talk there was of race and racism, the more dangerous the white supremacists became. Like the trapped rat in the opening scene of NATIVE SON, they started attacking, leading finally to the 1/6/21 white terrorist attack on our Capitol by the unpatriotic, racist white people I call TRASH (see 1/17/21 blog post).
Of course, we’d been moving toward that attack since at least the eighties, the last period when a major reversal of progress toward equality occurred. The election of Ronald Reagan, the attack on affirmative action, and the rise of groups like the skinheads during the eighties all were leading to Donald Trump and the Proud Boys in the 2020’s. The failure to tell the truth about racism in the past allowed racists to hide in plain sight during the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, eventually enabling not so secret white supremacist (in the eighties he took out newspaper ads calling for the execution of the Central Park Five and said on television that he wanted people to hate those very young, too dark for some people’s taste falsely accused boys/young men) Trump to move into the White House and start undermining our democracy.
Our democracy continues to be in danger, so it’s important that we stay focused on telling the truth about the racism of the past and the present. We all need to do our part—teachers, journalists, documentarians, athletes, actors, musicians, and other celebrities. We social media warriors also need to keep posting and tweeting the truth. I’m encouraging several celebrities (LeBron James, who executive produced one of the Tulsa documentaries, Spike Lee, who has produced at least three great documentaries, and Michael Moore, who won an Oscar for his documentary attacking Bush’s wars) to produce a documentary on the mirror image dates 1/6/20 and 6/1/21. I’ve also suggested that everyone should make this June 14, Flag Day and Trump’s birthday, Pro-Democracy and Pro-Voting Rights Day. The Vice President and President should make speeches explaining how we can show our love for the flag (not by hugging and kissing it) by protecting our democracy and making it easier for all eligible American citizens to vote.
Too often the white supremacists have won the propaganda war. It’s time that the “real” Americans, the true patriots, start winning by telling the truth about our past and our present so that we can progress toward a more just, equitable, multicultural, mixed race future.
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