[News]USA: The race war that many refuse to see

[SougarLord]

 

America is at war. And it is not a war that began with Donald Trump or with the taking of Congress.

 

It started with slavery and it never ended. It took the form of lynchings, suppression of the vote, the Bull Connor police dog attacks in Birmingham and denial of services.

 

Today's race battles are fought by legions of white people fueled by stereotypes, lies, and conspiracy theories in vogue not just among inmates who inhabit hidden corners of the internet.

 

They are also adopted by people like the killer who shot nine black parishioners in a South Carolina church, telling police that African Americans were taking over the country and raping white women. Or the individual who shot and killed 23 people and injured 23 others at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. His target was the Mexicans, according to the authorities, because he believed they were invading the country to vote for the Democrats.

 

 

People like the mobs full of white supremacists who showed up in Congress when Trump and others falsely insisted the presidential election had been stolen, especially in minority-inhabited districts.

 

For too long, according to leading civil rights advocates, historians and experts on extremism, many Americans and white officials have ignored the fact that there is a war launched by whites.

 

Racist positions are promoted by the press and are represented in statues and symbols of slaveholders and segregationists that still persist. They help demagogues win elections for high office.

 

The result? A large number of whites fear that multi-culturalism, progressive politics, and an equitable distribution of power could end them, subjugate them. And that fear, often exploited by those in power, has repeatedly proven the worst threat to all non-whites, according to advocates of racial justice.

 

How does the country address the issue of white aggression after so many missed opportunities?

The Rev. William Barber II said that, to begin with, you have to refuse to have political debates that use lies and racist arguments.

 

"Collateral damage, when you insist on telling lies, sowing winds and filling people's veins with poison, makes the system so toxic that it unleashes violence," Barber said.

 

Historically, white supremacy goes hand in hand with the fear of the political power of African Americans. After the civil war (1861/65), in which ex-slaves won the right to vote and hold public office, the white response was Jim Crow segregation laws, the suppression of the vote and oppression through the police.

 

The January 6 protests came on the same day Georgia declared the victors of two Senate ballots, won by Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, the first African-American and Jewish from the South to reach the upper house. And a few days after the inauguration of Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman of African and Asian descent to hold that position.

 

It is noteworthy that the occupants of Congress carried at least one flag of the Confederacy, the losing side of the civil war, supporter of slavery.

 

For many in the white mob that took over the Capitol, minorities achieved inconceivable political influence in the last election.

 

"This type of collective violence, in reaction to the union of blacks, brunettes and whites who vote in favor of progressive proposals, has always been the answer," said Barber.

 

Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremisms, said we must stop using the term "culture war" to refer to violence that causes deaths.

 

"You only have to look at the corpses and the murderers to realize that the threat of violence from national white supremacists has been with us for a long time," Segal said.

 

According to the Anti-Defamation League, approximately 74% of the extremists who committed homicides in the United States between 2010 and 2019 were right-wing extremists, most of them white supremacists.

 

Christian Picciolini, a former far-right extremist who founded the Free Radicals Project to try to moderate those sectors, said it is easy to blame others and ignore supporters of far-right movements and other groups that exude hatred. It has been part of a collective refusal by whites, oblivious to the real world and threats of violence.

 

“We have to understand that if we want to avoid these things in the future, we have to examine our history. It's 400 years of what I would describe as the nation's potholes, "said Picciolini, who last year published the book" Breaking Hate, "denouncing extremism.

 

Malcolm Graham, a former North Carolina state senator, is convinced that the death of his older sister Cynthia Graham-Hurd was the result of nothing being done to curb white supremacism. The sister was one of nine people killed by Dylann Roof in 2015 during a Bible study session at Mother EManuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.

That slaughter could have been "a turning point," Graham said. But he let it go because authorities and the press made too much of the fact that the victims' families forgave the killer, instead of investigating his transformation into an extremist, Graham added.

 

In his final presentation at Roof's trial, the prosecutor said the 22-year-old was a well-known white supremacist who wanted to start a race war.

 

All their actions did was generate a debate around supremacist iconography, including the Confederate war flag, monuments and statues that appeared in photos and drawings that investigators found among Roof's belongings. In July 2015, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is of Indian descent, signed legislation that would forever lower the Confederate war flags flying on the state Capitol.

 

At times she gave the impression that the country was beginning to face racism. After George Floyd's massacre in Minneapolis last year, 111 Confederate monuments and other symbols of white supremacism were removed, relocated or renamed. But another 1,800 symbols of the Confederacy had not been touched until December.

 

“The symbols of the Confederacy are not relics of the past. They are living symbols of white supremacy, ”said Southern Poverty Law Center Chief of Staff Lecia Brooks.