“American Whitelash”: Fear-mongering and the rise in white nationalist violence

Journalist Wesley Lowery, author of the new book “American Whitelash,” shares his thoughts about the nationwide surge in white supremacist violence:

Of all newspapers that I’ve come across in bookstores and vintage shops, one of my most cherished is a copy of the April 9, 1968 edition of the now-defunct Chicago Daily News. It’s a 12-page special section it published after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. 

The second-to-last page contains a searing column by Mike Royko, one of the city’s, and country’s, most famed writers. “King was executed by a firing squad that numbered in the millions,” he wrote. “The man with the gun did what he was told. Millions of bigots, subtle and obvious, put it in his hand and assured him he was doing the right thing.” 

We live in a time of disruption and racial violence. We’ve lived through generational events: the historic election of a Black president; the rise of a new civil rights movement; census forecasts that tell us Hispanic immigration is fundamentally changing our nation’s demographics.

But now we’re living through the backlash that all of those changes have prompted.

The last decade-and-a-half has been an era of white racial grievance – an era, as I’ve come to think of it, of “American whitelash.” 

Just as Royko argued, we’ve seen white supremacists carry out acts of violence that have been egged on by hateful, hyperbolic mainstream political rhetoric.

With a new presidential election cycle upon us, we’re already seeing a fresh wave of invective that demonizes immigrants and refugees, stokes fears about crime and efforts toward racial equity, and villainizes anyone who is different.

Make no mistake: such fear mongering is dangerous, and puts real people’s lives at risk. 

For political parties and their leaders, this moment presents a test of whether they remain willing to weaponize fear, knowing that it could result in tragedy.

For those of us in the press, it requires decisions about what rhetoric we platform in our pages and what we allow to go unchecked on our airwaves.

But most importantly, for all of us as citizens, this moment that we’re living through provides a choice: will we be, as we proclaimed at our founding, a nation for all?

      
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Story produced by Amy Wall. Editor: Karen Brenner.

      
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