President Trump and Charlottesville: The Failure to condemn white supremacists

Adam Beddawi
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read

As a student at the University of Virginia, the events of last Saturday shook both me and the community I have adopted as my own. Many of us awaited word from President Trump in the wake of the “Unite the Right” rally, the swarm of people who descended upon downtown Charlottesville, and the terrorist attack which left one dead and 19 injured. In my view, the President had a chance to contribute positively to the framing of the day’s events from the most important seat at the table. I would not say I was expecting him to seize the opportunity — things did not go so well the last time the President had an emotional reaction to something — but perhaps my mind became open to new things immediately after senseless trauma. However, in his prepared statement delivered the day of the attacks, presented below, he made a particularly glaring, if unsurprising, omission.

“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time.”

I will disregard the President’s prepared statement on Monday in which he condemned hatred, bigotry and violence and “by the way”’d the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. It should not take the President of the United States three days to condemn hate groups who were explicit in their action. Trump condemned Kenneth Frazier, the CEO of Merck and a member of his American Manufacturing Council, before he condemned the KKK, neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Frazier, a man of color, left the council due to the President’s failure to condemn those at fault in the violence. In light of Trump’s past actions, then, his words delivered Monday afternoon ring hollow. And this is only more clear from his statement Tuesday, which made clear that what he said Saturday (and I will now discuss) is what he really believes, in any case.

Thus, it is President Trump’s first statement that remains worth considering for my purposes here. By saying that “many sides” were at fault for the hatred and bigotry, the President implied that a melting pot of views were present and they all were culpable for the violence. However, reliable testimony from my peers at U.Va. suggests that, in fact, white supremacist groups were largely culpable for the domestic terrorism which struck Charlottesville.

The most prominent omission in the President’s statement, as noted by numerous members of his own party, was specificity. By not condemning white supremacists for their antagonistic role in the weekend’s events, he allowed his message to take on a life of its own. Shortly after giving his statement, noted white supremacist Richard Spencer wondered on Twitter if the President was actually condemning the counter-protesters in his comments. The founder of the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, celebrated the President’s failure to disavow them by name.

I splintered at the President’s omission of the word “white supremacist.” My view is that, by calling out white supremacists by name, President Trump could have made a clear statement about who were the perpetrators of state violence and that his administration would not feed into their legitimacy. However, I recall a similar moment when, during Barack Obama’s presidency, I chafed at Donald Trump and other Republican politicians demanded that President Obama outright disavow “radical Islamic terrorism” and “radical Islamic terrorists” by name. My view at the time was that, by calling out radical Islamic terrorists by name, President Trump would have contributed to an American Islamophobia which demonizes many innocent Muslims as belonging to a radicalized religion.

To me, this raised an important question of whether or not there was tension in my own view. Is it hypocritical of me to demand this particular clarity from Donald Trump, but not from Barack Obama? To answer this question I want to only consider the relevant facts of the matter rather than my own feelings. What would be the function of using or omitting either of these terms in political discourse? Are these terms even semantic equivalents such that the comparison between them is legitimate?

For this latter question, I think the answer is no. The term “white supremacists” is unambiguous to the extent that it very clearly selects out a specific group of people. To be a white supremacist, particularly in the case of those in Charlottesville last Saturday, is to hold and espouse certain beliefs, attend the rallies and, in some cases, to act violently in order to maintain the legitimacy of those beliefs. This is perhaps the type of disposition which led them to earnestly chant “you will not replace us” and “blood and soil” when it was neither clear in what sense they were being replaced nor on what grounds their blood entitles them to any soil. There is little ambiguity between that type of person and one similar in kind.

Radical Islamic terrorism, however, is an ambiguous term in that it does not select out a clearly identifiable swath of people. For one, it is not manifestly clear which terms are the modifiers and which terms are being modified. Is it the “terrorism” or the “Islam” that is radical? The term “white supremacism” is not ambiguous in this same way. There is no “supremacism” that the term “white” is modifying while leaving room for misconception. To refer to “white supremacists” is to select out a group which is unambiguously a certain way. To many of the same people who demand use of the term “radical Islamic terrorist,” however, the clear differences between a radical Islamic terrorist and a non-radical Muslim may be indiscernible.

For the former question, I believe the answer has already borne out.

President Trump neglected to condemn white supremacists and white nationalists by name, and the result was a declared victory among those groups. The result of President Obama neglecting to condemn radical Islamic terrorism by name was, due in large part to the ambiguity of the term, harder to gauge. No terrorist groups actively celebrated President Obama’s naming omission, perhaps because there was no tangible benefit to its inclusion.

Myself, my peers, and all residents of what is supposedly “one of the 10 most charming cities in America”, will have to deal with the ramifications of last weekend’s horrible violence. The violence was not random, but rather the result of political and racial tensions roiling underneath Charlottesville’s charming visage. Those tensions will not go away, but they could have been abated, or at the very least repurposed toward action. Failure to do so rests with the current President who, during his predecessor’s term, demanded that the term “radical Islamic terrorism” be used, but hypocritically insists on terminological flexibility now.

)
Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade