The White Supremacist March was Only the Most Visible Tip of the Racist Iceberg

I just experienced a friend of my friends trying to minimize and normalize the danger and extent of the Charlottesville white supremacist rallies, and would like to share my response. Even as I wrote, I was taken aback by how many examples I could list off the top of my head of white supremacists infiltrating the government and influencing its actions.*

The argument was made that people are over-reacting and being far more afraid than the situation warrants because the white supremacist marchers are too incompetent to be scary because they were polo-shirt wearing basement dwellers who bought foreign designed and foreign made Tiki-torches to their nativism and nationalism marches. Further, it was argued that people systematically incorrectly estimate the probability of danger because the the news doesn’t cover everyday events and so newsworthy events get tons of coverage despite — by definition — being rare.

I’ll acknowledge the point that the white nationalists marching with Tiki-torches didn’t look like the most terrifyingly bad-ass people to run into in a dark alley. (Though I still wouldn’t want to be surrounded by a mob of them with torches, and the guys with assault rifles and bullet proof vests still freak me out because there is an average of more than one mass shooting per day in the US and are essentially always perpetrated by white men, and frequently right wing ones). I’ll also happily acknowledge that the newsworthy events are not a representative sample of world events, a fact which systematically misleads our predictions due to the availability heuristic, and that the application of that fact to the right’s fear of immigrants or the wacky left’s (and others’) fear of vaccines is absolutely correct. However, I am arguing that is is a case where the newsworthiness distortion is in fact skewing things the other way because the daily acts of racism that underlie the march aren’t covered by the news.

Yes, those bigots are unquestionably worthy of mockery. Only the most weak, pathetic, fragile, least able to compete fairly, lazy, selfish, morally bankrupt, delusion-dependent, and ignorant rely on maintaining systematic discrimination. They do it because we all like to think that there are positive things about us, ways in which we are better than other people, but that’s not true of them. The only way those bigots can feel superior to anyone is through the unjust and undeserved superior treatment they receive from their white privilege and male privilege. They are terrified that the world has started to recognize them as the losers they are and is (painfully slowly) moving towards treating people equitably. “When You are Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression” ~ Unknown

Nonetheless, the white supremacist marchers are dangerous and terrifying because they are the explicit tip of the racist iceberg. No one thinks melting ice or trees dying from drought and beetle infestation or starfish liquefying from warm water diseases spreading north or temperature graphs are bad-ass or look like they could beat us up (okay, maybe the calving ice), but any rational person is terrified of the probable consequences these indicators foretell. The white supremacists were chanting ‘blood and soil’, which is a translation of the nazi propaganda for rural Germans to rise up against cosmopolitan Jewish people and immigrants. The nazi comparison is vastly overused, but when we have people chanting ‘Heil Trump’ while waving the actual nazi flag and the president says that the people who oppose them are equally bad, then the comparison is apt and hard to avoid. If hundreds are willing to say those things publicly, think about all the unspoken racism that inspired 63 million people voted for the blatantly racist and otherwise bigoted candidate. The absolutely most charitable interpretation of their vote is that they prioritized other things over not supporting racism. The rally made even television news organizations — which have a fetishized neutrality in the name of impartiality but at the expense of truth —finally start in broadcasting what reputable newspapers have been publishing since election day: the idea that people voted for President Joffrey not in spite of his bigotry but precisely because of it.

The background for this march is a country where we have statues to those who fought for slavery and where the police have little to no consequences for murdering people for being black even when those black people do everything right. For every white supremacist rally there are dozens of unjust police brutality and murder cases that pretend that black lives don’t matter, hundreds of racist policies and judges, tens of thousands acts of discrimination in housing or hiring practices or education opportunities or law enforcement, hundreds of millions of racist jokes and microaggressions that reinforce negative stereotypes, and millions of people minimizing or ignoring the problem, which is definitely at the other end of the spectrum of racism from the proud bigots marching, but which is still contributing to a racist society. The racist iceberg is normal. It is widespread. The march is an indicator that the iceberg has grown enough (and information travels easily enough) that it’s tip cannot be ignored from a distance by people who would really like to ignore the whole issue, which is the newsworthy change.

The parade of bigots are dangerous and terrifying because they have support in the white house, including three advisers (Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and Sebastian Gorka) who have openly expressed white nationalist views including literally organizing pro-racist rallies and web forums with the same people who organized this march and who now write speeches and policy for the president, Attorney General Jeff too racist to be a judge in the 80s Sessions who is on record as being fine with the kkk and is enacting racist law enforcement policies such as mandatory minimums despite those policies being proven ineffective at reducing crime, CIA director Mike Pompeo who ran and won a racist campaign for the house of representative against an Indian-American opponent, Kris Kobach who is trying to suppress voting rights for people of color nationwide the way he did to 18,000 people in Kansas, anti-science EPA head Scott Pruitt who cut the entire Environmental Justice Program that for twenty-three years prosecuted cases where pollution clearly disproportionately affected marginalized communities, a broadly discriminatory Department of Education head Betsy DeVos who thinks that historically black colleges from a time when people of color were barred from all other colleges were “pioneers of school choice”, Department of Education appointees Teresa Unrue and Kevin Eck and Department of Energy appointee William C Bradford who each posted extremely racist memes and comments on social media, Department of Energy head Rick Perry who tried to dismiss the racist terrorist who murdered nine black people as an accident before the terrorist admitted to racial motivation and who owns a ranch with a name I won’t even type and he failed to change that name or paint over the sign for more than a decade, Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson who says slaves were immigrants “seeking dreams and opportunity” and thinks that poverty is a state of mind that has nothing to do with well-documented racist housing policy, judicial nominees such as racist conspiracy theorist John K. Bush and illegitimate Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch who strongly opposed anti-Apartheid divestment and civil rights protests including black students being kicked out of student housing at his college, Department of Agriculture chief ‘scientist’ Sam Clovis who pushed birtherism and other racist conspiracy theories. Most significantly, white nationalist views are supported by President Joffrey himself who nominated or appointed all the preceding people precisely because of their far right and racist views, proposed that the Homeland Security program cease to monitor and oppose white nationalist terrorists to focus solely on radical Muslim terrorists despite the fact that the former have killed five times as many people in America than Muslim terrorists since 9/11 and the fact that the FBI is currently investigating the widespread infiltration of white supremacists in law enforcement, started his political career with the racist birtherism conspiracy which he peddled for five years, made dozens of blatantly racist statements over the course of the campaign, repeatedly retweeted white supremacists and shared anti-Semite memes, failed to denounce the racists acts done in his name upon his election, invited racist celebrities to the White House, created a publication to highlight and sensationalize crimes committed by immigrants despite the fact that immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native born Americans in an alarming parallel to the nazi practice of publishing real and fabricated crimes committed by Jewish people (which is again the rare nazi comparison that is unavoidable rather than exaggerated). and currently equates the violent nazis, the kkk, and confederate apologists who literally chanted ‘Heil Trump’ while doing the nazi salute with the people who oppose that bigotry and talks about “Cherishing our history” in the context of taking down a racist confederate monument. The march was dangerous because these bigots won the presidential election and are emboldened to win more.

Finally, even if you aren’t convinced by all this evidence of the severity of the threat of white nationalism, please ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen if — despite the mountain of evidence I posted to contrary — we are in fact overestimating the threat of white supremacists? Our response to white supremacists should be to support equitable policies, call out instances of bias whenever we experience them, call people in to self-correcting their thoughts and actions to reduce our own implicit bias, help elect people from historically marginalized communities, and listen to the experiences of people who have experienced bigotry and validate their worth as humans. These are all worthwhile activities in any case. I’m reminded of the Joel Pett cartoon about global warming that reads, “What if it’s all a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”

(*A note on credible sources: I had to re-check many of these examples to be sure of accuracy and to cite trustworthy sources for every point, and in the process learned about approximately a quarter of them for the first time. Some of the links are not facts to bolster my case but are opinion pieces that explain a concept, so I did not vet their hosting platforms as thoroughly. Also, I linked one (accurate!) Fox News article along with all the reputable sources because it may be more persuasive to the people who most need to hear it. The other television news was to cite the fact of the segments’ existence, not to use them as a source. Reddit is an aggregate site, so I’m supporting the veracity of the links, not the platform.)