A subset of Americans has been pushing for a race war in America. This is nothing new; it goes back before Charles Manson and the Tate-Labianca murders. Though the victims were white, the plan was to frame Black people and incite a race war. That was in 1969.
Dylann Roof entered Mother Emanuel AME Church and killed nine members, hoping to jump-start a race war that would get him out of jail no matter his sentence. He was not concerned about being taken alive, which is a different issue. He also needn’t have worried about going hungry as officers stopped to get him some Burger King. Here’s what his lawyer said.
“When Dylann Roof represented himself at his capital trial, he was a 22-year-old, ninth-grade dropout diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorder, autism, anxiety, and depression, who believed his sentence didn’t matter because white nationalists would free him from prison after an impending race war.” That was in 2015.
Efforts to begin a race war started immediately after the end of the Civil War in 1865 and have never stopped. When Black people formed their own “well-regulated militias” like white people, they were wiped out by other militias and members of the Georgia National Guard. When Black people legally went to the California state capital with guns in 1967, the Mulford Act was immediately passed and used to take guns from the hands of Black people. The race war was never going to be fair; one side was going to have most of the guns.
Black towns and communities have been wiped out; in Colfax, LA (1873), Wilmington, NC (1898), Elaine, AR, (1919), Ocoee, FL (1920), and the Greenwood District of Tulsa, OK (1921), Rosewood, FL(1923), not to mention significant attacks in larger cities like Atlanta and New York. These were skirmishes in the race war, which has been ongoing since America began.
Since America’s beginning, many white people have begun stockpiling guns; one of the primary reasons was a fear of revolt of enslaved people. White people were almost always outnumbered on large plantations and in the South, some states. They armed their slave patrols and their households; white supremacy was often preached in their churches. Guns and God were made to fit together, overriding the commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”
Now there are calls on social media and in the comments section of blogs calling for civil war or just war. If there were a Venn Diagram with circles of those calling for civil war and race war, the overlap would be telling. These are the same people, and they want the same things.
Those desperately supporting Trump’s policies are most supportive of his immigration policies, funding charter, and private religious schools while taking funds from public schools. They appreciate his support of white supremacists and white nationalists, and he placed them in top spots in his administration.
The civil war (race war) is already being fought on multiple fronts. The courts are actively working to allow voter suppression and eliminate affirmative action. Schools are altering a curriculum that already said little about America’s racial past to where they teach almost nothing at all, diluting what they do say.
Look at what one of the most vocal supporters of the lawlessness of Trump and his cronies and see what he said about race.
“Let them call you racist. Let them call you xenophobes. Let them call you nativists. Wear it as a badge of honor. Because every day, we get stronger, and they get weaker.” — Steve Bannon.
Look at the groups supporting civil war (race war); they include the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and Boogaloo Bois. They advocate white supremacy, and the Confederate Flag holds just as much sway as the American flag.
Some dismiss the percentage of white supremacists that walk among us. They say the dues-paying members of the Ku Klux Klan are down while ignoring the growth of hate organizations is way up. They applied no meaning to the Confederate flags at Charlottesville and did the same at Mar-a-Lago. Nazi flag-waving supporters have shown up in Orlando and Tampa. After appearing to support Ron DeSantis in Tampa, he said his opponents were attempting to smear him “as if I had anything to do with it.” His spokesman had more to say.
“Do we even know they’re Nazis? I trust Florida law enforcement to investigate and am awaiting their conclusions.” — Christina Pushaw, DeSantis spokesperson.
One thing missing in the uproar about the search warrant issued for Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago is how it’s being used as a recruiting tool in the race war that is nearer than we think. I need to declare that every Trump supporter is not automatically a white supremacist or Neo-Nazi. I’ll add, however, that every white supremacist and Neo-Nazi is at home in a crowd of Trump supporters.
When you see the crowds of supporters at Mar-a-Lago, and protesters at FBI offices across the country, take a good look; you know who they are. There will be at least one Confederate flag to give them away. And when they say they want a civil war, they really mean the other thing.
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This post was previously published on Black History Month 365.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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Photo credit: iStock
We have two countries. One is autocrat and race-oriented, and the other is creative and rights-oriented. What is the ratio of one to the other? Can we keep fighting like this? How can we deal with how different we actually are? Which way will we go?