Backgrounder: the right in America
With far-right groups attracting a storm of publicity over recent months, two historians offerffff their opinions as to why, 150 years after the abolition of slavery, white nationalism remains such a potent force in the United States
Thenotion that Confederate monuments and the Confederate flag itself are innocuous symbols of southern history and heritage in the United States is simply not true. Not only was the Confederacy founded on the idea of racial inequality, but monuments to it arose especially at moments in American history when southerners sought to defend white supremacy.
After the US Civil War, African-Americans and their allies made an attempt to establish black citizenship and found an interracial democracy during the period known as Reconstruction. Unlike Britain, the United States government did not compensate former slaveholders, a majority of whom had committed treason in taking up arms against it. What followed was the biggest uncompensated confiscation of property in American history – 4 million slaves valued at more than $3bn dollars.
During Reconstruction, former slaves became American citizens and an era of progressive legislation dismantled the state and society the slaveholders had made. Civil rights laws ensured legal protections to not just former slaves but also free AfricanAmericans, who had been treated as second-class citizens. For many white Americans, these developments represented a world turned upside down.
But with the fall of Reconstruction after 1876 – when a contested presidential election led to the withdrawal of federal troops and ‘ home rule’ for the South – most white southerners sought to undo these gains. A programme of racist terror enforced by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, laws to disenfranchise African-Americans, and the institution of racial segregation, debt peonage (a form of financial servitude like bonded labour) and convict labour, went hand in hand with raising monuments to the Confederacy. Most Confederate monuments were built around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, a period known as the ‘nadir’ in black history.
At the same time, attempts were made to sanitise the image of the Confederacy. Mythology surrounding the South’s ‘Lost Cause’ captivated Americans across the nation. The cause of the war, slavery and its emancipatory meaning was forgotten by most except African-Americans and their allies. The Civil War was increasingly seen as a conflict pitting ‘ brother against brother’, and white reconciliation came at the cost of black rights and lives.
Not until the Civil Rights era in the mid-20th century did a mass non-violent movement of southern blacks and some white supporters compel the federal government to pass a flurry of legislation to create an interracial democracy. But the Civil Rights movement also evoked massive white resistance in the South. The Confederate battle flag was often displayed as a sign of that resistance.
The growth of American democracy has always been contested and fraught with setbacks. That is revealed by the current debate over Confederate symbols – and whether they deserve state recognition and ought to be displayed in public spaces. Unlike Germany, the United States has not yet come to grips with the symbols of its sordid past of racial oppression. It is hardly surprising that neo-Nazis and assorted white supremacists of the so-called alt-right, increasingly belligerent and prominent recently, have adopted Confederate symbolism.
For many white Americans, moves towards an interracial democracy in the late 19th century represented a world turned upside down PROFESSOR MANISHA SINHA
Whitesupremacy tarnishes every era of United States history. Even at the outset of the government’s founding, white privilege prevailed. The constitution counted an African slave as less than a full person, quite literally designating them as three-fifths. The Native American genocide and relocation perpetuated throughout the 19th century deliberately advantaged white settlers over indigenous people. Anti-Asian sentiment convulsed western states fearful of labour shortages in the early 20th century, and the surge of Ku Klux Klan activism and criminality demonstrated how broad-based white supremacy had grown. Lynching occurred in the North and the South.
While white supremacy has always existed in the United States, waves of hate have often come about when public debates about equality and prosperity surface. For example, the Klan revival in the 1910s and 1920s followed mass migration within the United States and waves of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. The Klan exploited public fears over jobs and changing community dynamics.
Although the Great Depression eroded its influence, the KKK was resuscitated after the Second World War, when Civil Rights became a national issue. Federal intervention was required to force social integration, and, since then, white supremacy has often been linked with libertarian and anti-government movements.
The story of Randy Weaver is a prime example of the confluence of racism and libertarian ideology. He joined the army during the Vietnam War, and although he never saw combat, the experience instilled a desire to serve the criminal justice system. Ultimately, Weaver wanted to become an FBI agent, but the expense of university forced him to drop out. In the 1980s he moved to a 20-acre property in rural Idaho called Ruby Ridge where, disaffected by his poverty, Randy and his wife Vicki worshipped a kind of evangelical mysticism that imagined the United States as a modern-day Babylon. In time, the Weavers began attending Aryan Nations white supremacy gatherings that gave direction to Weaver’s disaffection, placing the blame for his failures on ethnic, religious, and racial minorities.
On 21 August 1992, a shoot-out between the Weavers and FBI agents (who had infiltrated the Aryan Nations) led to a 10-day standoff, during which Vicki Weaver, her son Sam, and a marshal were killed. Throughout the siege, the Aryan Nations protested against the intervention as an attack on white people. Ruby Ridge even inspired other white supremacists like Timothy McVeigh, who detonated an enormous bomb at the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168.
So white supremacy has imbued the American experience. Today, many of its adherents support a reduction of government power, seen as an obstacle to white domination. But for every neo-Nazi march, there has been a counter reaction, be it the civil rights mantra of ‘We Shall Overcome’ or the Obama campaign slogan, ‘Hope’.
The Ku Klux Klan revival in the 1910s and 1920s followed mass migration within the US and waves of immigration from Europe DR MICHAEL CULLINANE