In a strong showing of cross-faith solidarity, a group of Muslim organizations joined to raise funds supporting the rebuilding of predominantly black churches in the South that were hit by devastating fire damage after the Charleston massacre. Only a week old, the campaign has surpassed its initial fundraising goal of $50,000 and been profiled in publications ranging from Mashable and Buzzfeed to RT and Al Jazeera America.
The campaign, started during Ramadan, was founded by a network of organizations and activists that include Ummah Wide, Muslim ARC and the Arab American Association of New York. The campaign, according to its fundraising page, was launched out of an obligation to both help communities of faith rebuild and to uplift racial and religious justice. mentioning the#WhoIsBurningBlackChurches Twitter campaign as well:
As Muslims we know the importance of protecting the vulnerable and respecting people who call on God in their various tongues. We want for others what we want for ourselves: the right to worship without intimidation, the right to safety, and the right to property. We must always keep in mind that the Muslim community and the black community are not different communities. We are profoundly integrated in many ways, in our overlapping identities and in our relationship to this great and complicated country. We are connected to Black churches through our extended families, our friends and teachers, and our intertwined histories and convergent present. Too often cowards inflict us with a crippling fear, but with encouragement and support from likely and unlikely places fear cannot stop us.
The campaign is encouraging people to use #WhoIsBurningBlackChurches on Twitter. The hashtag has been used widely all over social media by those demanding an explanation and full investigation of the fires. The page further includes a statement from noted theologian Imam Zaid Shakir, who implored American Muslims to support the churches out of a sense of shared suffering:
“The American Muslim community cannot claim to have experienced anything close to the systematic and institutionalized racism and racist violence that has been visited upon African Americans. Unless, of course, we are talking about those of us who members of the African American Muslim community. As a whole, however, we understand the climate of racially inspired hate and bigotry that is being reignited in this country. We want to let our African American brothers and sisters know that we stand in solidarity with them during this dark hour.”
Dylann Roof is just the latest in a long line of men clinging to dangerous ideology that spiraled out of control
CHAUNCEY DEVEGA
Dylann Roof (Credit: AP/Chuck Burton)
Dylann Roof was not silent before he murdered nine black people in their church, shooting and reloading multiple times, destroying their bodies with his white rage. He did not shout obscure or difficult to translate Latin phrases. Dylann Roof was not a blank slate or deep and nebulous well who left no written justification or explanation for his evil deeds. White racial terrorist Dylann Roof told his African-American victims why he was going to kill them. As though it was a type of forced civic duty and obligation, Roof said to his victims: “I have to do it.” He then shared his grievances: “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go.” Then he let off a fusillade of bullets.
A superficial reading would suggest that the “our” is simple to decipher: Roof is channeling his white nationalist understanding of “America” as a country synonymous with and exclusively for “white” people. This is the logic of the phrase that “America is a white man’s country.” The “our” also signifies the control and possession of white women’s bodies and personhood by white men.
The idea of black men raping white women is a centuries-old white American fantasy: It is the justification for the lynching tree, where thousands of innocent black men were made into “strange fruit.” The lynching tree also reinforces a cultural lie, that white women are the most desired among all others, and tries to conceal how many white women from both before the founding of the United States, through to the Age of Obama, willingly have had relationships with black men, a perfectly banal observation that nonetheless enrages white supremacists.
Nationalist and politically chauvinistic ideologies tend toward patriarchy and sexism. White nationalism is no exception. As such, Dylann Roof’s white racial terrorism is an act of violence, and one that is grounded in a particular understanding of gender: “Male” or “female” are designations of human, sexual, biological difference. “Masculine” and “feminine,” however, are social constructs that are not fixed, which change over time, and in response to particular arrangements of social and political power. Here, gender is a type of performance (in its most binary and simple form) as a given person acts “male” or “female.” And toxic masculinity is a performance that emphasizes violence, control over others, sexual aggression and a lack of emotion and vulnerability. Dylann Roof—with the guns, violence, resentment, right-wing politics and racism—is the extreme embodiment of toxic white masculinity.
The color line is not separate from gender: The two are deeply connected to one another in the United States and the West more broadly. Dylann Roof’s performance of gender involved an understanding that he should have power over and was inherently superior to people of color because of his skin color. Moreover, as understood by his racist political ideology, Dylann Roof was granted an additional claim on power and authority because he is a man. Roof’s racism and sexism thus intersect in what philosophers Carol Pateman and Charles Mills have described as“racial patriarchy.” This is a system of racial domination in which people of color are subordinate to whites. It is also a relationship where white men have more power than white women. But all white people have a higher place than any person of color—either male or female. Women of color occupy the basement level of a society organized around a system of racial patriarchy.
This system, in its most unapologetic and honest form, is the dream of white nationalists.
But while tethered to ideals of the past, white nationalism also lives in the present; thus, it must deal with and negotiate questions about feminism, immigration, cosmopolitanism, globalization and other related matters if it is to remain viable as a community and belief system. Consequently, white nationalism has its own type of “gender troubles.” Can one be a feminist and also a white nationalist? Are white men and white women equal because they are both “white”? Should white women be subordinate to white men? These are the types of questions that white nationalists have been debating with one another online and in other spaces. Dylann Roof’s manifesto demonstrates knowledge, however superficial, of these various currents and controversies in contemporary white nationalist “political thought.”
These discussions of racial patriarchy among white supremacists are not new; Nancy Maclean explored the Ku Klux Klan’s struggles with questions of gender in the first part of the early 20th century in her book “Behind the Mask of Chivalry“:
Klan tracts and speakers dwelt far less on men’s behavior than on women’s. This was in part because male roles were changing less than female roles, and in part because Klansmen were more interested in controlling others than in self-scrutiny. Nevertheless, they expounded a particular model of masculinity. Klansmen expected women to marry, to provide for their families, and to exercise control over their wives and children. “God intended,” affirmed one Klan minister, “that every man should possess insofar as possible, his own home and rule his own household.”
Rule over one’s women was mandated by another staple of the Klan’s conception of masculinity: “honor,” or, as it was sometimes called, “chivalry.” Honor dictated a commitment to protect the virtue of “American” women. Historically honor in fact rested on a man’s ability to control the sexuality of his female relations…
Although hostile to sexual emancipation, the Klan was not an outright foe of all women’s equality. The order’s commitment to moral uplift in fact led it to support rights for white Protestant women…Nonetheless, recognition of women by Klansmen was always shot through with ambivalence. Klansmen’s ideal, after all, was the nineteenth-century petty proprietor—whether farmer, artisan, or merchant. His vaunted independence as a citizen presumed his control over the labor and behavior of the dependents in his household. However much Klansmen might try to cooperate with women who shared their social goals, female initiative set them on edge; the undertow of patriarchal prerogative impeded full solidarity.
Dylann Roof was attracted to white nationalism and white supremacy because of a sense of alienation and anger at the world. Although he was born middle class, Roof somehow came to feel that America — because of immigration, changing demographics and pernicious fictions about “black crime” — had abandoned him. In Roof’s mind, he was forced into action, to be “heroic,” “the Last Rhodesian,” launching an attack on unarmed black people.
Roof’s actions were those of the “angry white man” on steroids. While his feelings of toxic white masculinity could have been insulated by the relative privileges of being born into the middle class, he was instead suckered into a sense of white racial victimology, entitlement and identity politics by the right-wing media and online racist propaganda. Never did he think to identify the system he venerated, racial patriarchy, as the source of his own alienation. Instead, like so many other angry young men like him, he bought into it wholeheartedly. Roof’s translating this anger into violent action is (thankfully) a rare event in the United States. But, as sociologist Michael Kimmer detailed in his book “Angry White Men,” this sense of (white) grievance and anger is all too common.
Guns are central to toxic white masculinity, as well as the broader white supremacist and conservative politics that Dylann Roof exemplified. In the United States, guns have a deep historic relationship to the maintenance and enforcement of hierarchies of race, class and gender. They were a tool for committing mass genocide against First Nations peoples, for example. They were given to white indentured servants in the 17th century as a way of cementing their identities as “free” people who could then be used to oppress and control black slaves and other people of color. Guns have been a tool for American plutocrats and the 1 percent to control the working classes and the poor. The gun is also a powerful symbol of masculinity and virility: A recent ad campaign by the manufacturer of the AR-15 rifle featured a picture of the weapon along with the tag line: “Consider your man card reissued.”
The corporate news media does not want a sustained discussion of gun violence as a type of public health crisis. The corporate news media is also unwilling to discuss how domestic terrorism by right-wing white men is now the United States’ leading threat to public order. Very troublingly, the corporate news media considers it impolitic to explore how the right-wing echo chamber is radicalizing and weaponizing its followers.
And there most certainly will not be a “national conversation” about toxic white masculinity and mass murder in the mainstream news media.
Chauncey DeVega is editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes, whose work has been featured by the NY Times, Alternet, the BBC, the New York Daily News, the Utne Reader, the Week, and The Atlantic Monthly. Chauncey DeVega is also a regular guest on Ring of Fire Radio and TV. He can be followed on Twitter and Facebook.
The Confederate flag remains a source of controversy in American politics. Is it still appropriate to fly it? John Fugelsang explains it all. Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday: http://bit.ly/AyDtFF
Since 9/11, more Americans have died at the hands of homegrown “white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims,” the New York Times reported this week. Citing a count provided by Washington research center New America, the Times confirmed that with the race-base mass murder in Charleston, S.C. last week, 48 Americans have now been killed by “people espousing racial hatred, hostility to government and theories such as those of the ‘sovereign citizen’ movement,” as compared to 26 Americans who have been killed by “self-proclaimed jihadists.”
Those figures might come as a surprise to most Americans. Indeed, the media narrative since 9/11, and certainly the conservative media account, has been that Jihadists are waging an escalating war on the U.S. By contrast, how often in recent years have news consumers seen or heard extended debate and discussions about right-wing or white supremacists killers in the U.S.? Killers who appear to be twice as deadly to Americans as jihadists?
“There’s an acceptance now of the idea that the threat from jihadi terrorism in the United States has been overblown,” Dr. John Horgan of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell told the Times. “And there’s a belief that the threat of right-wing, antigovernment violence has been underestimated.”
The New America research findings confirm what Media Matters has been highlighting for years: From neo-Nazis killers, to a rash of women’s health clinic bombings and attacks, as well as assaults on law enforcement from anti-government radicals, acts of right-wing extreme violence continue to unfold regularly in the United States.
And Media Matters has also been shining a spotlight on the fact that not only does Fox News downplay homegrown acts of right-wing, anti-government and white supremacist violence, treating them as rogue, isolated events (if covering the events at all), they also hype beyond proportion and common sense attacks by Muslims in America.
That attack mode allows Fox to accuse President Obama of being “soft” on Islamic terror. (Obama’s administration is too “politically correct.”) It also lets Fox advocate for bugging mosques and eliminatingother Constitutional rights. Recall that it was on Fox that viewers were told, “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
Right-wing violence? Fox News doesn’t recognize a clear and present danger.
That double standard was on display this week when Megyn Kelly devoted almost her entire Fox News program Wednesday night to an interview with Traci Johnson, who was attacked last year by a co-worker at Vaughan Foods processing plant in Moore, Oklahoma. The attacker was Alton Nolen who had been recently been fired over racial comments. Nolen then went home and retrieved a large kitchen knife. He returned to the workplace and began attacking his former co-workers. He beheaded one woman and injured Johnson before he was shot by a company official. Nolen later confessed to the attack.
Fox News immediately led the right-wing charge to declare the Vaughan Foods attack to be an act of ISIS-like terror. (Nolen was a recent convert to Islam.) Devoting an extraordinary amount of TV time to wildly hyping the crime, Fox hosts like Kelly and Sean Hannity created special programming to cover the story. (i.e. “Terror In The Heartland.”)
But in the end, law enforcement found no evidence that Alton’s killing was terror-related, and labeled the killing a workplace attack. Appearing on Fox News after the attack, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that, while Nolen “was looking at the extremist ideology,” “there is no evidence at this point that he was directed by a terrorist organization to do what he did or that that was the principle motivating factor.” The FBI also found no links to terrorism.
Yet there was Kelly this week – months after the crimes — speaking over ominous background music and once again suggesting the Moore, Oklahoma attack had been the product of “radicalized” terror. In other words, Fox has been reduced to creating incidents of Islamic terror in the United States, while at the same time Fox plays down glaring examples of deadly right-wing violence.
The steady pattern of those political attacks may be one reason the Department of Homeland Security this yearissued an intelligence report warning about the rising right-wing terror threat. Fox News immediately objected, with host Eric Bolling insisting there hadn’t been any recent examples of homegrown terror to justify the government’s warning. Co-host Greg Gutfeld agreed, claiming liberals can only name two far-right terrorist events ”over four decades.”
Seriously?
On a September night last year, 31-year-old marksman and “survivalist” Eric Frein ambushed two Pennsylvania state troopers outside of the Blooming Grove barracks in northeastern Pennsylvania. After the assassination, the state police commissioner reported the shooter had “made statements about wanting to kill law enforcement officers and to commit mass acts of murder.” Another official noted the shooter has a “longstanding grudge against law enforcement and government in general.”
Claiming to be acting under the bloody “banner of Liberty and Truth,” Jerad Miller and his wife Amanda entered a restaurant Las Vegas in June, 2014 and executed two local policemen while they ate lunch. During the ambush, one of the shooters reportedly shouted that the “revolution” had begun. A week before the killings, the shooters posted a manifesto on Facebook where they announced “….we must prepare for war.” Jerad Miller, who traveled to Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch that spring to join the militia protests against the federal government, declared: “To stop this oppression, I fear, can only be accomplished with bloodshed.”
The ambush in Las Vegas came just two days after Dennis Marx, a member of the “sovereign citizen” anti-government movement, opened fire on a courthouse outside of Atlanta. Sovereign citizens are militia-like radicals who don’t believe the federal government has the power and legitimacy to enforce the law.
On August 5, 2012, Wade Michael Page pulled up outside the Sikh temple in Oak Creek, WI, and started killing worshipers. Page murdered two Sikhs outside the house of worship and then killed four more inside, including the president of the temple. According to acquaintances, the 40-year-old killer hated blacks, Indians, Native Americans and Hispanics, and was interested in joining the Klu Klux Klan.
On May 20, 2010, two West Memphis, Ark., police officers were shot and killed by a father-son team of AK-47-wielding sovereign citizens during a routine traffic stop.
Two months later, dedicated Glenn Beck fan Byron Williams stocked a pickup truck with guns and ammo and set off up the California coast to San Francisco in order to start killing employees at the Tides Foundation in hopes of sparking a political revolution. En route to his target, Williams got into a 12-minute firefight with California Highway Patrol officers.
The shocking list goes on and on and on. Sadly, the church massacre in Charleston now ranks alongside a litany of homegrown radical attacks. They’re the type of attacks Fox News doesn’t want to focus on.
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush.”
This blog is devoted to legal, historical and human rights matters, in which issues of general concern are addressed freely and spontaneously. It is intended to further an informal exchange of views in the democratic spirit of freedom of opinion and respect for the opinions of others, in an effort to understand rather than condemn, to propose constructive solutions rather than grandstand. The perspective is both from inside and outside the box and the added value lies more in the questions than in the answers.
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