The year in hate and extremism report
Pretty much everything that we do here at The Civil Conversations Project is to help folks understand….REALLY understand way down in the marrow of their bones, just how embedded “America’s race thing” actually is and how harmful it is to the country and to them and you personally.
I’ve had scads of white people express to me how distraught they are about race. How deeply concerned they are, and then…meh. They understood, but they just didn’t understand way down where the marrow lives. They cared, they just didn’t really care.
After George Floyd was slowly and excruciatingly tortured to death, I had many people call me and express their sorrow over what a hard, awful, and miserable life I must have been subjected to. I wasn’t. These were folks who knew me and know that I’ve mostly led the life I wanted to lead and mostly it’s been good…except when I’ve made less than good decisions.
Yeah, my four years in the Marines and an extra four days as punishment for being bad. (When I got back from a year of combat in Vietnam, I wasn’t amenable to cleaning toilets, so I went AWOL for a while) were pretty race-based unpleasant.
There was the fella in Idaho who I taught skiing with at Bogus Basin who told me that he’d been nigger fishing on his days off. Evidently that’s a term for fishing with a worm…the so-called lazy way to fish.
There was the time in Orange County CA that I staggered out of a strip club with a handful of other Marines, put my inebriated arm around one of them – a friend - and he turned around and punched me in my face followed with a, “Keep your filthy hands off of me.”
And yeah, maybe a zillion others. But my point is now and always has been that “America’s race thing” deeply affects every American. And it sure as heck keeps us from being that shining beacon and land of merit-based opportunity that we like to brag we are. The times my life has ebbed, and there have been a few, had nothing at all to do with race, other than that our race thing is like a wet, moldy, wool blanket that lays over and affects everything.
My hope and intent is that you’ll get it…REALLY get it, and that our “race thing’ will become more than just a “meh”.
So, along those lines today I want to share with you a bit of information. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the nation’s leading watch dog of America’s hate and hate groups released their annual The Year in Hate and Extremism report. America is now host to 733 known hate groups. They come in all sizes and flavors. You can pick your hate. Black people? Of course. Jews, Muslims, gays, transgender, women. Two groups specialize in hating white people. 295 of those 733 hate groups fall in the category of ‘General hate’. They just hate everything and everybody.
One of the leaders of the hate group The Oath Keepers who is now on trial for helping plan and instigate the January 6th insurrection wore a hat to the party emblazoned with, “I don’t believe in anything. I just came for the violence.”
You may be assuming that there are more hate groups every year. You’d be wrong. Their numbers and ranks did in fact spike when Obama - a Black man – ran for and then won the presidency based on hope and doing better. They spiked again when Trump – a racist white man - ran for and won the presidency based on a campaign of racial fear, resentment, and hatred. But the numbers of hate groups has been declining over the past several years, so good news…right? No, not right.
According to the SPLC, “Rather than demonstrating a decline in the power of the far right, the dropping numbers of organized hate and anti-government groups suggest that the extremist ideas that mobilize them now operate more openly in the political mainstream.”
Yeah, it’s become socially acceptable to hate. That can’t be good for America. And it can’t be good for you.
A few years ago, David Brooks, best-selling author and columnist, wrote this, “I’ve been traveling around the country for the past few years studying America’s divides — urban/rural, red/blue, rich/poor. There’s been a haunting sensation the whole time that is hard to define. It is that the racial divide doesn’t feel like the other divides. There is a dimension of depth to it that the other divides don’t have. It is more central to the American experience…we can appreciate the truth that while there have been many types of discrimination in our history, the African-American (and the Native American) experiences are unique and different. Theirs are not immigrant experiences but involve a moral injury that simply isn’t there for other groups.”
“We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation — the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as model and fuel for other injustices.”
We are, in fact, a nation coming apart at the seams and race provides a model and fuel for other injustices. And the Black American experience is indeed at the core of this fragmentation.
Meh!