Rights attorney’s newsletter exposes white supremacy, one week at a time
What do Ohio teens chanting slurs at black and Asian high school athletes have in common with the anti-immigrant fanaticism that intensified with the president’s lie about a border agent’s death?
And how are those incidents associated with a tiny neo-Nazi group that has been linked to at least five killings, including the death of a college student in Santa Ana?
Welcome to This Week in White Supremacy, a weekly newsletter from Oakland’s Equal Justice Society, a social justice nonprofit that pushes progressive policy and legislation on behalf of underrepresented minority groups.
The newsletter tracks the rising tide of white supremacy.
Since the feature began three months ago, it’s become a weekly reminder of the racism that exists in this country — and that has been exacerbated by the current president of the United States.
The newsletter’s content is dead serious. People have died fighting against white supremacy, most notably Heather Heyer, the woman who was run over by a car at a white nationalism rally in Charlottesville, Va., in August.
The newsletter is written by Eva Paterson, a civil
rights lawyer who’s been fighting for racial justice for four decades.
“Part of it is my way of dealing with the madness,” Paterson told me when I asked why she started the newsletter. “You wake up every morning, and you read about all the crazy things that Trump is doing, but it’s not just Trump. There’s a sizable portion of our population that supports what he’s doing.”
As a student at Northwestern University, Paterson debated Vice President Spiro Agnew on TV in 1970. After she graduated from UC Berkeley School of Law in 1975, Paterson did legal aid work in Alameda County before spending 26 years at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
She’s filed lawsuits to desegregate San Francisco schools and to get blacks and women jobs with the San Francisco Fire Department.
When she founded the Equal Justice Society in 2000, Paterson wanted to build a civil rights organization that was focused on collaboration and communications.
“We felt we needed to have more sophistication in how we communicated to people,” Paterson, 68, said.
One way to cut through the clutter of information bombarding our phones and computers is to talk directly to readers in a newsletter.
Paterson modeled This Week in White Supremacy after the Weekly List by Amy Siskind, an advocate for women’s and LGBTQ rights. Siskind’s list is a weekly tracker of what she refers to as the “eroding norms under the current regime.”
That regime is led by a reality TV star who floated down the gilded escalator at Trump Tower in New York City to announce his candidacy for president. He did so by disparaging Mexican immigrants. On that day in 2015, this politician made white supremacy and white nationalism palatable to many Americans.
“One of the things that is most troubling is that he is a role model for some kids who are saying, ‘The president says this, so it must be right,’ ” Paterson told me. “The presidency still carries a lot of power. He is emboldening people.”
Paterson went further in her description of a man who has assailed black athletes and entertainers for protesting police brutality. After Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, the president put equal blame on the anti-hate demonstrators and the white supremacists. During his campaign, he belatedly and reluctantly — under pressure — disavowed support from David Duke, a well-known white nationalist. He’s used derogatory language to refer to Haiti, El Salvador and African countries — questioning why the United States is taking immigrants from these countries rather than people from places like Norway.
And his Twitter account has shared racist imagery with millions of followers.
“He is a white supremacist, racist liar,” she said of the president. She repeated the sentence to make sure I quoted her correctly.
“People seem to be nervous to say that,” Paterson said. “One of the reasons I’m such a blessed person is I work for an organization where I can say that plainly. He is a white supremacist.
“This Week in White Supremacy lets people know what’s going on,” Paterson said. “Open your eyes. It’s not just crazy Trump sleeping with porn stars.
“Unfortunately, there’s more than we can even put in every week. It’s overwhelming, but I also think that there are people in the middle who can be brought back to sanity.”
One week at a time.