News21: Hate in America - This documentary covers the legacy of hate, and how it shaped America

I strongly recommended folks to see this documentary that, among other things, illuminates the connection between fundamentalist Christianity and violence. This is not unlike the kind of violence and terror that people in our country more commonly associates with Islamic extremism. In this case, what we are seeing is homegrown extremism, unfortunately, connected to a long legacy of settler colonialism and white supremacy.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy by Eugene Robinson

I certainly hope that Eugene Robinson is correct when he suggests that Trump's "appeals to racial animus" are no longer working for him.  He has done so much damage.

We can only hope that Trump is not only the last president of the Confederacy, by that his job comes to a screeching halt in November.

-Angela Valenzuela

Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy

By 

Eugene Robinson 

Columnist

June 11, 2020 at 3:27 p.m. CDT

It should have happened 155 years ago, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, but maybe — just maybe — the Civil War is finally coming to an end. And perhaps Donald Trump, not Jefferson Davis, will go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy.

Symbols like flags and monuments matter, because what they symbolize is our vision of ourselves as a nation: the heroes, battles, movements, sacrifices and ideals we honor. So when I see multiracial crowds toppling the statues of Confederate soldiers and politicians, when I see respected military leaders arguing that Army posts should no longer bear the names of Confederate generals, when I see NASCAR banning displays of the Confederate battle flag at its races — witnessing all of this, I let hope triumph over experience and allow myself to imagine that this may indeed be a transformational moment.

Like the Civil War itself, “Lost Cause” symbology is simply and entirely about white supremacy. It has nothing to do with “heritage” or “tradition” or any such gauzy nonsense. The heavily armed “liberate Michigan” mob that invaded the statehouse in Lansing, egged on by President Trump, had no historical reason to be waving the Confederate flag. That banner represents the knee that has been kept on the necks of African Americans not just for eight minutes and 46 seconds, the time Derek Chauvin spent crushing the life out of George Floyd, but for 401 years.

Default Mono Sans Mono Serif Sans Serif Comic Fancy Small Caps

Default Small Medium Large X-Large XX-Large

Default Outline Dark Outline Light Outline Dark Bold Outline Light Bold Shadow Dark Shadow Light Shadow Dark Bold Shadow Light Bold

Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%

Default Black Silver Gray White Maroon Red Purple Fuchsia Green Lime Olive Yellow Navy Blue Teal Aqua OrangeDefault 100% 75% 50% 25% 0%

Opinion | In Atlanta, this is why we protest

The killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police and vigilantes are part of bigger injustices felt by these black Americans. (Joy Sharon Yi, Kate Woodsome/The Washington Post)

Full coverage of the George Floyd protests

Lee’s surrender ended nothing, because the nation did not even begin to grapple with white supremacy. Reconstruction was strangled in its infancy; true racial reconciliation was never even attempted. The statue of Davis in Richmond, brought down by protesters Wednesday night, was not erected until 1907. Like almost all of the Lost Cause monuments, it was built during the revanchist era, when Southern whites were celebrating their reestablished dominance over African Americans via repressive Jim Crow laws and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan.

Many recall that the Confederate flag at the South Carolina statehouse was taken down in 2015 following the massacre of nine African American worshipers by a white supremacist at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston. Few realize that the racist flag had been installed at the statehouse not in 1861 but a century later, in 1961, when black South Carolinians like my parents were agitating for the right to vote.

The killing of Floyd has provoked a national moment of reckoning with police violence and white supremacy. But the position of the Trump administration is that systemic racism does not even exist — that our unexamined and unaddressed racial problems all come down to a few “bad apples” here and there.

Perhaps in an attempt to gain political advantage — and perhaps, as much evidence suggests, because it’s what he truly believes — Trump has used this moment to side with Lost Cause white supremacy. His all-caps tweets for “LAW & ORDER” sound like George Wallace when he was governor of Alabama; his demand for a militarized response to the protests reminds me of Bull Connor, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who attacked nonviolent civil rights protesters with water hoses and vicious dogs.

When it was reported that high-ranking Army officials are open to stripping the names of Confederate generals from military posts such as Fort Bragg, Fort Benning and Fort Hood, Trump reacted instantly. He tweeted Wednesday that he “will not even consider the renaming of these Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations.”

Trump claimed, ridiculously, that the names are somehow part of the nation’s “history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom.” He may be historically ignorant enough not to know that the generals in question were traitors as famous for the battles they lost as for any of their triumphs; that ultimate victory went to the Union, not the Confederacy; and that the whole point of the rebellion was to deny freedom to African Americans. Or he may know these facts but believe his political base doesn’t.

Just hours later, however, NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. If there is one sporting venue that Trump might think of as a safe space, it would be a NASCAR race — until now. Heck, I might even go watch a race when the pandemic ends.

Trump must be bewildered. Unsubtle appeals to racial animus (remember his “birther” lies) have always worked for him in the past, but now he seems to be flailing. If it turns out that the Lost Cause is finally, truly lost, then so is the president who made himself its champion.

Read more from Eugene Robinson’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.

What UVA did wrong when white supremacists came to campus by Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis

I agree with yesterday's Los Angeles Times Opinion-Editorial by professors Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis.  Specifically, they critique President Sullivan's NOT naming the problem for what it is.

I encourage you to read, "Charlottesville Was Not a “Protest Turned Violent,” It Was a Planned Race Riot.  Isn’t it time for the media to be honest and call white supremacists the domestic terrorists that they are?" by Zenobia Jeffries in YES! Magazine (August 12, 2017), who also doesn't mince her words on the matter.

Like Republican Corey Garner is doing (read story here), we must call out white supremacy for what it is in all its manifestations.  The events in Charlottesville are inescapably about racism and extreme-white politics and how hate-filled and lethal they are. 

When we consider that nationally, 83% of our college and university presidents are white, according to 2016 data from the American Council on Education, it is incumbent upon them to both anticipate and respond swiftly and boldly to racism and xenophobia—beginning by a naming it as such whenever and wherever it rears its ugly head.  Our universities should also focus on having diverse leadership and faculty.

-Angela Valenzuela

What UVA did wrong when white supremacists came to campus, by Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis

Shaun R. Harper and Charles H.F. Davis III

“White lives matter, you will not replace us,” chanted white nationalists as they marched through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Va., with tiki torches Friday night. On Saturday, Ku Klux Klan members and others displaying Confederate flags, swastikas and an array of hate symbols gathered for a rally in Emancipation Park in that small, majority-white college town.

In a four-sentence statement on the university’s website, UVA President Teresa A. Sullivan deemed the campus march “intolerable” and “entirely inconsistent with the university’s values.” Sullivan also added that she was “deeply saddened and disturbed by the hateful behavior displayed by torch-bearing protesters that marched on our grounds this evening.”

But Sullivan’s message, and subsequent university postings Saturday, failed to explicitly name white supremacy as the motive of the protesters and made no mention of race. We suspect that many black parents who are about to drop their 17- and 18-year-olds off for move-in day and the fall term at UVA in the next week are worried. They have heard nothing from campus leadership that is likely to assure them that UVA is firmly committed to addressing racism when it occurs on and around campus.

The posted statements don’t say that the “hateful behavior” of the “Unite the Right” marchers targeted people of color. When black freshmen at the University of Pennsylvania received messages containing racial slurs and threats of lynching last November, Penn’s President Amy Gutmann and other administrators repeatedly called these acts racist and acknowledged that black students were victims of the digital attacks. Higher education leaders must explicitly and specifically denounce racism as alt-right and other white nationalist groups bring hate to campus.

The UVA statements do nothing to debunk Ku Klux Klan members’ and others’ claims about the status of white people. By far, whites make up the largest racial group at UVA, campus statistics show. There were 13,098 white students during the 2016-17 academic school year, compared with 1,323 blacks and 1,285 Latinos. Furthermore, last year only 87 of the university’s 2,754 faculty members were black. White men made up 49.1% of the faculty. These numbers make clear that white lives, especially white men’s lives, do in fact matter at UVA and in Charlottesville, and are in no danger of being replaced. The university must deploy these facts against the alt-right’s erroneous assertions.

In moments of racial crisis, students and faculty — especially people of color — look to senior administrators for guidance and reassurance. They expect courageous leadership and the responsible use of evidence. Mishandling these situations in raceless ways does nothing to confirm, for instance, that black lives matter. It signals to students and faculty that their university is either too unaware, too afraid or insufficiently skilled to talk about racism, let alone to address it. According to 2016 data from the American Council on Education, 83% of college and university presidents in our nation are white. Campus chief executives, including those who are people of color, join white nationalists in preserving and exacerbating white supremacy when they neglect to name and boldly counter racism.

Shaun R. Harper and Charles H. F. Davis III are professors at USC’s Rossier School of Education. They lead the USC Race and Equity Center.