White supremacism: The tragedy of Charlottesville

Charlottesville is a city in Virginia of just over 48,000 people, formed as an act of assembly in 1762. It is home to the University of Virginia designed by Thomas Jefferson and gateway to Shenandoah National Park. Unlike the rest of Virginia, it was relatively unscathed by the Civil War. The first Black Church was established in 1864. Prior to this Black churches were illegal.

On 11 August 2017, Charlottesville was the location for the ‘Unite the Right’ rally and march to protest at the removal of the bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller from Emancipation Park, which had been known as Lee Park until the city council unanimously decided to change its name in June 2017. The renaming of the park and the proposed removal of Lee’s statue was a catalyst for the march, but was not the first. On 13 May 2017, alt-right white supremacist and president of the National Policy Institute, Richard B. Spencer, led a tiki-torch night rally, ‘Take-Back Lee Park,’ featuring chants, ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘Russia is our friend.’ On 8 July 2017, when the Ku Klux Klan protested there was a counterprotest and several arrests.

The August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ Rally was organised by Jason Kessler and Nathan Damigo including notable attendees, Richard Spencer and David Duke, former KKK Imperial Wizard. Kessler is president of ‘Unity and Security for America’ (see Business Insider Australia, Retrieved 23 August 2017). Nathan Damigo is founder of the California-based white supremacist group ‘Identity Evropa’ (https://www.identityevropa.com/). The protest included white supremacists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates and militias carrying semi-automatic weapons (Virginia law permits open carry of fire arms), intending to unite these groups. The alt-right protestors sported swastikas, Confederate flags and memoribilia, anti-semitic banners, Trump/Pence signs and carried torches, chanting ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Blood and soil’ and ‘Jews will not replace us.’ After a state of emergency was declared the following morning, James Field, a 20 year-old security guard, drove his Dodge deliberately into the crowd killing Heather Heyer, who died at the scene, and injuring 19 others by also reversing over members of those in the vicinity demonstrating against white nationalists.

Damigo is a 31 year-old ex-Marine and later a student of California State University Stanislaus. On return from serving a second term in Afghanistan suffering from PTSD, he was involved in substance abuse, robbed a taxi driver who looked like Iraqi, was imprisoned for six years after a dishonourable discharge. He was radicalised in prison and during his time as a Marine (Keller, 2017). The Southern Poverty Law Centre reports on the myriad of far-right activist groups – over 20 different clubs – involved in the ‘rally,’ including the neo-Nazi web sites, The Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, the National Policy Institute, the four groups that form the Nationalist Front – League of the South, the Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, the National Socialist Movement – and other groups such as Ku Klux Klan, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, the three Percenters, Identity Evrope, the Oath Keepers, the American Guard, the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, the Virginia Minutemen Militia, the Detroit Right Wings, the Rise Above Movement, True Cascadia and Anti-Communist Action. Groups counter-protesting included representatives from the National Council of Churches, Black Lives Matter, Anti-Racist Action, Antifa, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Redneck Revolt, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council and Showing Up for Racial Justice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unite_the_Right_rally).

Damigo established Evropa a self-described white identitarian movement that advertises itself to ‘become who we are’ (https://www.identityevropa.com/). The movement is strongly linked with the European Right and with Richard Spencer. Guillaume Faye’s (2011) manifesto of European white nationalism, Why We Fight: Manifesto of European Resistance ‘holds out the prospect of a racial and revolutionary alternative to the present decayed civilisation. The manifesto’s principal objective is thus to unify the resistance by developing a common doctrine that unites everyone and every tendency seeking to constitute a European network of resistance—a doctrine that goes beyond the old sectarian quarrels and superficial divisions.’

The invective against ‘Cultural Marxism’ originates in the European far-right and is very similar to the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto that describes cultural Marxism as ‘political correctness’ and seeks to critique the Frankfurt School and deconstruction as being responsible for the empowerment of ‘minorities’ against ‘white civilization’ (see Knights Templar, https://sites.google.com/site/knightstemplareurope/2083). Brevik (now known as Fjotolf Hansen) was responsible for the 22 July attack on the Workers’ Youth League camp in Utoya in 2011, when he shot 69 having murdered another eight people by earlier bombing the Regjeringskvartalet (the Government quarter) in Oslo (Revese, 2017).

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish organisation founded in 1913, that fights anti-Semitism, bigotry and hate, released a report in 2015, With Hate in their Hearts: The State of White Supremacy in the U.S. that ‘describes a dramatic resurgence in the extreme right since 2000 that has led to a significant increase in violence’ and highlighted several worrying trends, before the election of Donald Trump:

•	White supremacist ideology in the United States today is dominated by the belief that whites are doomed to extinction by a rising tide of non-whites who are controlled and manipulated by the Jews – unless action is taken now. This core belief is exemplified by slogans such as the so-called 14 Words: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’
•	During the recent surge of right-wing extremist activity in the United States that began in 2009, white supremacists did not grow appreciably in numbers, as anti-government extremists did, but existing white supremacists did become more angry and agitated, with a consequent rise of serious white supremacist violence.
•	Most white supremacists do not belong to organised hate groups, but rather participate in the white supremacist movement as unaffiliated individuals. Thus, the size of the white supremacist movement is considerably greater than just the members of hate groups. Among white supremacist groups, gangs are becoming increasingly important.
•	The white supremacist movement has a number of different components, including (1) neo-Nazis; (2) racist skinheads; (3) ‘traditional’ white supremacists; (4) Christian Identity adherents; and (5) white supremacist prison gangs. The prison gangs are growing in size, while the other four sub-movements are stagnant or in decline. In addition, there are a growing number of Odinists, or white supremacist Norse pagans. There are also ‘intellectual’ white supremacists who seek to provide an intellectual veneer or justification for white supremacist concepts.
•	White supremacists engage in a wide variety of activities to promote their ideas and causes or to cause fear in their enemies. They also engage in an array of social activities in which white supremacists gather for food and festivities.
•	Among domestic extremist movements active in the United States, white supremacists are by far the most violent, committing about 83% of the extremist-related murders in the United States in the past 10 years and being involved in about 52% of the shootouts between extremists and police … (ADL, 2015)

Trump’s election victory, in part based on the white vote from ‘middle America’ and especially the so-called Rust Belt, a group from the de-industrialised areas in the US and got left behind when American manufacturing went offshore and East in search of cheap labour. Arguably, this group is less educated, more open to conspiracy theories, and less likely to change their deeply seated beliefs in the face of evidence. Derek Thompson (2016) of The Atlantic argues that ‘The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.’

In his response to what both the National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Attorney General, Jeff Sessions both named as ‘domestic terrorism’ in the car ramming in Charlottesville, Thrush and Haberman (2017) argue that no US President has given white nationalism as much credibility as Trump has in his prevarication and ‘moral equivalency’ in suggesting there are ‘very fine people on both sides.’ There is no doubt that the far right has been energised by the election of Donald Trump (Bethea, 2017). Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s key advisors, took over Breitbart News (https://www.breitbart.com/) – once described by Bannon as ‘the platform of the alt-right’ (Corn, 2016; Elliott & Miller, 2016) – when the founder died and has driven it forward on the basis of a far-right agenda that attracts right-wing Americans disillusioned with main stream politics and the Washington liberal political class (Kuttner, 2017).

The tragedy of Charlottsville is not only the death of Heather Heyer who gave her life for the struggle and the injuries sustained by the 19, but is also the rise of white supremacism in the USA and continental Europe, including Russia, where the ideology is proliferating and linking up together in new international networks to propagate ideology and violence. It is no longer (and never was) merely a movement, an historical anarchronism and legacy of the US past; it is a fully fledged form of political activism, that has extensive geographical distribution, that has taken various forms – religious, political and populist – and that locates the education of ‘white chidlren’ and their future as their primary cause. David Lane’s slogan is ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’ (SPLC, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-lane).

So what does philosophy of education have to do with this, with these events, with white supremacism? It has to be more than simple clarification, or analysis. It requires action and activism. It also requires an understanding that democracy is a living experiment and that while, we cannot change the past we can atone for it and change the present and our future. This means fundamentally a recognition of ‘whiteness’ and white supremacism as a virus in modernity associated with genocide, with the Holocaust, with the Aryan myth and with assumptions of white superiority, that like a chronic bad infection needs treatment every time the body politic becomes sick.

Michael A. Peters
Faculty of Education, The University of Waikato, New Zealand
[email protected] Besley
Faculty of Education, The University of Waikato, New Zealand