When we see white supremacy only in its most explicit incarnations, we lose sight of how racism operates.
I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity as a sociologist-in-training and now as a Professor of Sociology. My research included a comparative ethnographic examination of a white nationalist and a white antiracist organization, which culminated in my book, White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists, and the Shared Meanings of Race. Given this background, the events of August 12th unfolded into a spectacle that eerily resonates with the sociological findings of my earlier work, the title of which pays homage to master sociologist, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his 1920 essay, “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois asks a prescient question: “why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past?” Nearly one hundred years later, I, like many, still struggle to answer this question.
I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I am a University of Virginia alum. And for the past two decades, I have studied white racial identity.
Yet, I do offer a tripartite riposte.
While both white nationalists and white antiracists hold deeply opposed political, economic, and social worldviews on a variety of topics, both groups hold aloft a similar ideal of white racial identity. That ideal form of white identity entailed differing performances, depending on the context: a kind of messianic or paternalistic savior to people of color; a creative and cosmopolitan “borrower” of the styles and traditions of people of color in order to alleviate the self-perceived dullness or emptiness of whiteness, and ultimately; a manifestation of biological or cultural superiority by virtue of their whiteness. That ideal white person is both a goal (in the sense of trajectory) and a potent cohesive and organizing force in their lives (in the sense in which Du Bois intended) and thereby provides a double entendre for “bound” in my title. This similarity is built on common assumptions about what “race” is—from its dominant social meanings to assumptions about its biological and cultural make-up. Members of both the nationalist and the antiracist groups I studied also expressed entitlement to all issues coded as “racial” and saw any white exclusion as “reverse racism.” In both groups, it was common to view people of color, as Du Bois put it, with “amused contempt and pity.”
The individuals of both groups, understandably, denied such similarities. But when their attitudes, stories, goals, and desires were aggregated, clear patterns emerged. As C. Wright Mills so eloquently wrote in his book, The Sociological Imagination, the sociologist is able to “take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions.” In viewing these strange similarities, they gesture toward some of the major controversies that both precipitated, and came in the wake of, August 12th.
First, when Donald Trump stated, “I think there is blame on both sides," he posited a false equivalency that white supremacists and those that oppose white supremacy are of equal moral weight. Yet, as I recount in White Bound, there are indeed similarities between the proverbial white racists and white antiracists, but that resemblance is irreducible to physical violence or the direction of one’s moral compass.
Second, many white commentators and cultural critics now seem content to examine Charlottesville and the unadulterated expression of white supremacy through the lenses of either guilt or pride. An array of media voices now champion narratives dripping with a sense of “white guilt” mired in deprecating navel-gazing or celebrating a strange and unsettling self-congratulatory “white pride” of counter-protest. Both these sentiments are then bent to the service of more banal forms of white supremacy.
Many white commentators and cultural critics now seem content to examine Charlottesville and the unadulterated expression of white supremacy through the lenses of either guilt or pride.
On the one hand, those experiencing a shame of a lighter hue now wring their hands and express pessimism at a world wrought by those same hands. In speaking with white acquaintances about the violence of August 12th, many said things akin to “I hate that this is how things are,” or “What can we do about it?” Such naturalization and pessimism only makes resistance slack and lifeless, serves the status quo, and reproduces the social status of those most privileged by what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls our “racialized social system.”
On the other hand, those excited about their opposition to neo-Nazis, the KKK, and their ilk, seem bent on marginalizing the resurgence of “white supremacy” to only its most ugly and ostentatious forms. Once vanquished from the public square qua “Emancipation Park,” these cultural warriors now pat themselves on the back as they return to their segregated neighborhoods, jobs, schools, and houses of worship, even as they console one another over the death of one of their fallen.
In both instances, “white supremacy” is neither systemic nor everyday. These renderings then allow folks like Ted Cruz to say that “Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists are repulsive and evil, and all of us have a moral obligation to speak out against the lies, bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred that they propagate.” But where is Cruz’s outrage against the voter ID laws that he himself supported, which would disenfranchise our black and brown brothers and sisters? Where is the indignation in Cruz’s support for Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws, which evidence shows, are biased against people of color?
Or consider the recent covers of Time Magazine, The New Yorker, and The Economist.
These outlets seem to have only recently discovered that Trump may, in fact, have quite a cozy relationship with white supremacy. It is unsettling that his own actions, and the actions of those he has picked to surround him, seem to matter less than their words. When white supremacy is understood as manifest only in the caricatures of swastika-wielding and epithet-throwing activists, we are all left bereft of a deeper understanding of how racism operates, collectively unable to challenge what Hannah Arendt called, “the banality of evil.”
Third and last, while some have difficulty confronting normalized forms of white supremacy, some seem to have similar trouble with its extreme variants; I have become awe-struck by the level of white liberal surprise at the latter. My social media feeds are littered with folks who seem to have only recently discovered violent white racism. As one educated white liberal wrote on my Facebook wall, “I am still freaking out and I think that’s okay…. There had not been a 24 hours quite like that in our lifetime.” While I don’t know the specific noun to which “that” refers, one can reasonably infer “white supremacist violence” was the intended referent.
If so, the evidence disagrees. Over the past two decades alone there have been a spate of deaths at the hands of white supremacists. To name only a handful: In 1999, Neo-Nazi Benjamin Nathaniel Smith killed a black basketball coach and a Korean graduate student, wounding nine others in the process. In 2001, Aryan Brotherhood member, Mark Stroman, shot three South Asian men in the Dallas area, killing two. In 2009, Neo-Nazi Keith Luke raped and killed an immigrant from Cape Verde in Brockton, Massachusetts before killing a 72-year-old homeless immigrant. In 2009, white supremacist James von Brunn killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. In 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page killed six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. In 2015, South African apartheid, Confederate, and Nazi sympathizer Dylann Roof murdered nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. And earlier this year, in 2017, white supremacist James Harris Jackson stabbed a 66-year-old black stranger to death in midtown Manhattan and just two months later, a white supremacist named Jeremy Joseph Christian killed two people on a light-rail train in Portland, Oregon. If these tragedies can teach us anything, it's that the white supremacist violence on display in Charlottesville is not an anomaly.
Du Bois’ question of why white identity remains tethered to its past is an important concern with undoubtedly many overlapping answers. But at least part of the problem has to do with our habitual bifurcation of “good” and “bad” whites, our failure to see that both are deeply immersed in structural and commonplace forms of white supremacy, and our amnesia regarding the systemic repetition of violent racism. Until we can break this praxis, we are bound to see many more Charlottesvilles.
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