Tag Archives: white nationalism

Featured, Justice, Listening

Good Men, Me Too, and the Rise of Nazism

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At 5:07 am this Friday, October 20, the Nazi who attacked me in Houston back in January was booked into a jail in Alachua County, Florida. He was charged with attempted homicide in the first degree. His bail was set at one million dollars. He and two other Nazis had shot at protestors speaking up against White Supremacy when Richard Spencer came to their University of Florida campus this week.

I call William Fears a Nazi, because William Fears does not like being called a Nazi. He prefers to be called a White Nationalist, because he told me he believes the plans of Nazis are weak and small compared to what he has in store. I’m sure he also knows that there are plenty of “good, God-Fearing men” that do not want to be associated with the Nazis that their granddaddies fought, but are begrudgingly content to be associated with the White Nationalist, Alt-Right that won their party the Presidency.

In January of 2017, with the childish and snide smirk of a 5 year old who has just put a whoopee cushion on his teacher’s chair, William stood next to men, women and children holding welcome signs at the Harris International Airport. We were waiting for the release of University of Houston students who had gotten their travel interrupted by Trump’s ban, and he thought it was wonderfully clever of him to hold a Nazi poster up amongst their words of love.

William looked like a baby who has just messed his diaper, as he smirked slightly and looked back and forth, waiting to see who would be the first to notice his stench. He and his brother were trying to get someone to fight with him so they could film themselves getting punched and send it to Fox News. They wanted to do it for Big Daddy Trump: create some fake news to make his lies look real, so that people sitting comfortable on their sofas in suburbia would be afraid of us and continue to sit silently when the violence against us and eventually, he hopes, the killings begin.

Unfortunately for William, the optics did not turn out the way that he was hoping. I asked him to stay away from the Muslim women and children, happily chanting their words of welcome. I asked him if he was a White Supremacist or a Nazi, hoping to distract him from them, knowing that it might offend him. It did offend him, but not as I had thought it would. He told me that Nazis and White Supremacists were weak, that they did not go far enough. That the Alt-Right would have to push them further.

He then he told me that women were inferior and not worth engaging in conversation, so he did not have to talk to me. Without thinking it through, I did something that could have cost me my life.  I turned my back to him and informed him that we did not need to engage in discussion, but that I was not going to let him near those children either.

As much as William had wanted to get his “liberals punching Nazis” video clip for Fox News, and there was a man standing right there ready to do it, to have a woman turn her back to him seemed to be too much. Suddenly I was being violently shoved from behind as he lay hands on me. The Virgin Mary with Jesus stitched into my clergy stole by the nuns of Marianhill Monastery in South Africa whipped back and forth, until another woman with baby in arms pulled him off of me, as a cry of “He’s got a knife!” went up.

The police officers took him off without searching him for the knife and he went to creep around the parking garage, waiting for another woman to harass. Advocates spoke to City Council about him, but it came to nothing.

Good Men did not want to be associated with his behavior, but they did not want to confront him either.

So, as I’m still blessed with a life and a voice, here’s what I need from our nation’s self-described Good Men, specifically those who bear the hue that William Fears prefers:

I need you to stop telling me from your armchair that you are one of the Good Men, and start showing me.

I am not asking you to punch a Nazi so you can feel like a man either, that is exactly what he is desperately longing for you to do. We cannot give this petulant child his way. Instead, I need you to start talking to William Fears. I need you to visit him in prison. I need you to find his 12 year-old self at your local school and mentor him. I need you to talk to your son about what he is reading on the internet, and teach him to listen to women rather then feel entitled to our gratitude and silence. I need you to understand that you can never lay a hand on a woman, and still be a part of the problem. I need you to step up and take responsibility.

When I say we have a problem, when I say Me Too, and you respond by saying that “there are good men out there” and you “don’t know what made me so mad at men” then what you are saying is that you do not actually hear me. What you are saying, just like William Fears did, is that I am not worth hearing. What you are saying, just like William Fears did, is that you do not have to listen to me. If you want to change the world that William Fears is trying to create, then teach your sons the opposite. Show them what it looks like to change in response to the voices of women.

Do not strive to keep the focus on yourself as one of the Good Men, without realizing that continually centering our national narrative on the irreproachability of the Good Men is exactly what is at the root of this whole White Supremacist system.

All that William Fears is doing is taking the Good Man’s fear of critique to the extreme. Listening to all the complaints of Good Men not getting their due, and spinning it into a philosophy of what he will do to return the world to the kind of place where they do. He is not the opposite of the Good Man philosophy; he is the extreme of it.

The same culture that makes the rise of Nazism possible in this nation is the one that tells you that you are a Good Man and that you do not have to listen to me. That raises young, white men to believe that it is their role to protect me and treat me like a lady, as long as I do not step out of line.

Meanwhile, here I stand, face to face with William Fears, unafraid of the wounds to come, while you sit on the sidelines waiting to use those very wounds to silence me. Waiting to rub salt in by telling me that you too do not have anything to learn from me; by telling me I am irrational; by telling me “I don’t know who made you so angry baby.” Pitying yourself for the way that women do not act like ladies anymore, while I stand here with a knife at my back.

The very system that puts me in danger, claims to protect me. It silences me by telling me to be grateful that Good Men want to treat me like a lady, while simultaneously using protecting my body as a justification for violence against others. The same culture that makes the rise of Nazism possible in this nation is the one in which the penultimate “Good Man”, retired General John F. Kelly, can get on television and reminisce about the days when women were treated with dignity and honor while simultaneously dehumanizing a Black woman because Black women are not who he is talking about.

Why should we be suprised? The narrative of Good Men in our nation was built by men who regularly assaulted Black women in the slave quarters, and Indigenous women on the plains, and then came back to bed to snuggle up with their white wife, relying on her to say he is a Good Man. The Good Man counted on us to make it possible for him to get up and do it again the next day. Our affirmation of his goodness made him feel confident to stand before God on Sunday without a care in the world. Don’t you think that broke something within us? Don’t you think we, all of us, need to be healed? Don’t you think it is time for a new story? Don’t you think you should stop relying on white women to tell you that you are a Good Man? Clearly, we have been lying to you for centuries, anyway. Maybe we should all start listening more to Black women like Representative Frederica Wilson if we want to get to know ourselves better.

Try this: Stand up from the leather office chair behind your pastoral desk. Stand up from the armchair where you are reminiscing about the good old days when I stayed in my place. Stand up and go find William Fears, wherever he is in your community. It may be awkward, it may be hard, it may even be dangerous. Yet, if I can do it, so can you. We need you to do it now, because when William Fears was a little boy, you taught him in so many ways that he did not have to listen to me. Now he has taken it to the extreme and is ready to kill to prove you right. It is time for you to show him he is wrong.

My friends at the airport were good people, precisely because they would never expect me to call them Good Men. Precisely because they would not have presumed to tell me what to do with my body or whether I could place it in harm’s way. Precisely because they were not about to disrespect my non-violence by punching him, but they were not going to let him stick a knife in me either. We were in it together.

Maybe all of us could stop worrying about who are the Bad Men and the Good Men, and all of us try together to be good people instead. That is not a title to be either earned or demanded, rather it is a life to be lived.

Do not insist on maintaining the role of a bystander in the struggle we face.

Do not try to change the topic to the fact that you do not feel like your goodness is acknowledged, in order to avoid acknowledging and facing our righteous indignation.

Do not tell me you are a Good Man, show me you are a good person.

 

Featured, Listening

The Super-Virus of White Nationalism

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White Nationalism and White Supremacy are not identical beasts. I am not sure if I could explain why, but I could feel it in my bones facing him. It felt as if we have been treating White Supremacy with too many antibiotics and had created a drug-resistant super-virus. It felt as if our desire to sooth the discomfort of the prejudices in our country had led us to ignore the root cause and the growth had festered. My soul aches.

For the past 24 hours, I’ve been highly aware of a spot on my right side, at the bottom of my ribcage. Judging from our respective heights and the position of our bodies, it’s where I imagine the knife that the crowd said they saw in the self-described White Nationalist Nazi’s hand would have gone if a mother holding a baby had not pushed him away from me before people started the outcry that they saw a knife. Like a ghost limb, I feel a wound that is not there. I suppose the wound is in my heart.

At the entrance to the airport, where we held signs with verses of love, and cheered when detained students were released, I turned from the police officer guiding the Nazi away from the crowd and rested my weary head on a friend’s shoulder.

For weeks I’ve been seeing people joke about wanting to punch a Nazi, but after being close enough that I could have done so, I do not feel like its funny. I only feel really, very sad. I’m sad for him, and I’m sad for me. I wish the officer that stepped in had searched his coat pocket where he stowed whatever was in his hand, rather than just patting down his pants pocket and directing him away. Maybe it would have created a much needed intervention.

I had started to talk to him, hoping there was some way to connect, some way to reach him. I could not find a foothold. I felt helpless to do anything other than place my body between him and the many children that were around the airport entrance with signs. When he asked me whether I understood evolution, and whether I grasped that I was inferior to him because I was a woman, I turned around. I told him I was not going to engage him any further, but I would place my back between him and the crowd.

He could have done anything to that back; I understand that now. It was the most peaceful thing I felt like I could do. I was not alone, I had plenty of people looking out for me, and another man began to engage him. He assumed at first that the man was there to support him because of his appearance and went in for a handshake; but the large, white man actually had a “Not One Inch” shirt on and was there to push back against fascism. “Nah bro, I’m not with you,” he had said to him. I do not know what I should have done. The White Nationalist felt dangerous. He told me he had been on the same websites that I knew had radicalized Dylann Roof. He told me that he believed in fighting for there to be all white nations in the United States and Australia.

Like my siblings in the back seat of my mother’s car growing up, he started saying “why are you pushing me” while pushing me. It gave the illusion that I was the one moving him. I stayed in front of him. I was not sure what to do, but I figured that if he was at a point where he was shoving me, I didn’t want him shoving the women and children around me that were cheerfully chanting that “Love not hate, makes America great.”

It was only afterwards that I would understand that he was trying to get us to attack him, when his friend told a spectator that they (what I would call a cell of white men radicalized on the internet) were trying to get footage of themselves being attacked to send to Fox News.

He kept pushing at me as I stayed between him and the crowd until he was shoving me and my body was whipping back and forth like a rag doll.

Just then one of the mothers with children that I was trying to keep him away from pushed him off of me, his sign with the Nazi SS symbol tearing from his hands as she did so.

Then there was an outcry about a knife, an officer appeared, I tried to explain to the officer that the men who had stepped between the White Nationalist and the women and children and I were being protective not aggressive, and the officer guided the young man away.

The children were crying. It was so upsetting. I did not feel tough, or strong, or brave, I just felt really, very sad.

Making enough assumptions to bury himself, he had thought he would catch me off guard with his embrace of evolution. Yet, I knew where his comment about evolution and my inferiority came from. It was an old staple of racist theory in the United States ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson studied Scottish scientist Robert Chambers racist theory that “The stars and all the heavens had developed from spontaneous electrical generation, giving rise to every form of life through means of elaboration from the lowest, simplest organism to man’s apex in Europe.”*

He did not know that people in airports keep asking me where I go to school because they see me desperately studying to try to understand the roots of dangerously flawed logic like that which had infected this young man. Still, I did not know how to reach him. I’ll study harder. I’ll love harder.

Samuel George Morton, the most revered of the white supremacist school of anthropology developing in the 1800’s in the United States, argued that the superiority of the Europeans was due to their Egyptian origins. In his Crania Egyptiaca, he claimed that the Egyptians only looked like they had curly dark hair because they were wearing wigs over their straight, blonde hair.** People really believed this… !?!?

*Side. Eye.*

Josiah Nott of South Carolina argued that the Torah applied only to white Westerners and that non-white people had other scriptures that told their stories… yes, he claimed the Pentateuch told the origin story of his ‘real America’ while excluding the Jewish community that actually wrote and preserved the Torah.***

As intellectually cartoonish as these thoughts seem, they were respected in their day, leading Emerson to write that the lives of the poor were “not worth preserving,” and leading Theodore Roosevelt to a preoccupation with “race suicide.”

Perhaps the truly alarming thing is not that White Nationalism is rising, but rather that it has always been here. Seeing it upon the desk of history, we have shifted the papers to hide it from view; but it has remained, residing in the minds and writings of some of those scholars for whom our history books reserve the most praise. Their unquestioned legacies lending unquestioned legitimacy to current teachers of radical racism that follow their defunct and disproved ‘science’ based in head measurements of stolen skulls.

I sincerely believe that we will not defeat White Nationalism without facing that aspect of ourselves, of our past, of our history.

I have seen that whether it be Ida B. Wells use of investigative journalism, or Zora Neale Hurston’s use of anthropology, solid facts do have an impact upon culture. Information – truth – does matter. Facing the truth does help. The work of those women and many other men and women did help us.

Yet, we need so much truth right now. How will we make our cousins see it?

We have to face the truth about ourselves. We have no entitlement to goodness, and neither do our heroes. We’ve got to face who we are and who we have been as white people in this nation if we are going to find out who we could be.

I do not have all the answers, but I’m not going to stop trying to find them. No matter how much it hurts. Six months from today, I fully expect to look back and say, “you knew nothing six months ago”: just like I said six months ago, and six months before that.

 

*Painter, Nell Irvin. The History of White People, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, p. 178

**(Ibid) p. 193

***(Ibid) p. 195