The Conversation - Among the Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 were members of right-wing groups, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and Three Percenters.

The increasing violence and visibility of these groups have turned them into symbols of white supremacy and racism. They were involved in the deadly Unite the Right march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and street clashes with racial justice protesters in Portland, Oregon, last year. At a Trump rally in Washington, D.C., in December, Black Lives Matter banners were torn from two historically Black churches and destroyed. The Proud Boys’ leader has been criminally charged in those acts.

Many Proud Boys reject the label “white supremacist”, arguing their aim is to “save America” and to defend “Western values.”

White supremacy was itself a longstanding Western value. And white people don’t have to be white supremacists to benefit from the ways it still shapes American society.

White supremacy, then and now

As an ideology, white supremacy is the belief that white people are inherently superior to people of color. It relies on the notion that distinct races of people exist, and ranks those categorized as “white” at the top of the racial hierarchy.

For hundreds of years, American leaders overtly embraced white supremacy. It was used to rationalize the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans and their descendants from the Colonial period to the 19th century. In an 1858 debate, President Abraham Lincoln said, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”

Known for abolishing slavery, Lincoln’s position may come as a surprise. But many U.S. abolitionists wanted white people to maintain power in government and everyday life, including after Black people were freed from bondage.

After abolition in 1865, white supremacy continued in official and unofficial ways. It drove the legal racial segregation of Jim Crow and the banking practice of redlining, which robbed Black families of the loans necessary to buy homes in certain neighborhoods. White supremacy also underlay the forced assimilation and killing of Native Americans.

Outright racist policies were banned after the civil rights era of the 1960s. But systemic racism remained. Today’s well-documented inequalities between Black and white Americans in savings, longevity, home ownership and health are directly related to the white supremacist hierarchy created centuries ago.

Hidden white supremacy

White people need not endorse white supremacy to benefit from this hierarchy. As psychologist Beverly Tatum has explained, the privileges afforded to whiteness are so much a part of the structure of U.S. society that many white people don’t even notice them.

For example, a white man is unlikely to be stopped and frisked by police. A white high school student probably won’t be asked if she’s in the right room on the first day of an honors class. And it likely won’t occur to either to reflect on these privileges.

A white person is similarly unlikely to wonder why no one ever asks “but where are you really from?” after introducing themselves. And a white child likely won’t notice that nearly everyone in their textbooks looks like them.

All of these affronts, both minor and major, are experiences many people of color face throughout their lives.

Not noticing one’s racial privilege does not make a white person a white supremacist. That racial privilege affects countless aspects of daily life does, however, mean that U.S. society is still shaped by white supremacy.

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The Mantra of White Supremacy

The idea that anti-racist is a code word for “anti-white” is the claim of avowed extremists.

The Atlantic - Below a Democratic donkey, the Fox News graphic read ANTI-WHITE MANIA. It flanked Tucker Carlson’s face and overtook it in size. It was unmistakable. Which was the point.

The segment aired on June 25—the height of the manic attack on, and redefinition of, critical race theory, which Carlson has repeatedly cast as “anti-white.” It was one of his most incendiary segments of the year. “The question is, and this is the question we should be meditating on, day in and day out, is how do we get out of this vortex, the cycle, before it’s too late?” Carlson asked. “How do we save this country before we become Rwanda?”

Some white Americans have been led to fear that they could be massacred like the Tutsis of Rwanda. CRT=Marxism, Marxism→Genocide Every time, read a sign at a June 23 Proud Boys demonstration in Miami. Other white Americans have been led to fear America’s teachers—79 percent of whom are white—instructing “kids to identify in racial terms,” as Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona, said in May. “You are good or bad, depending on what you look like. At this point it is straight up anti-white racism. I don’t think we’re allowed to say that. But let’s call it what it is.”

Even when GOP politicians and operatives don’t openly “call it what it is,” they end up echoing Masters nonetheless, saying without saying that “critical race theory is explicitly anti-white,” to use the words of Christopher F. Rufo, a travel-documentary filmmaker turned leading critic of CRT. At his final campaign rally, in Loudoun County, Virginia, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin said, “What we won’t do is teach our children to view everything through a lens of race where we divide them into buckets and one group is an oppressor and the other is a victim and we pit them against each other and we steal their dreams.”

Republicans provoked a backlash against CRT, which they also call anti-racism or wokism. Their backlash won 2021 elections. “But it wasn’t a backlash of parents,” William Saletan found in his close study of polling data. “It was a backlash of white people.”

How many Americans know that the claim that anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology? Americans are familiar with white-supremacist movements like the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Proud Boys. But they don’t seem to recognize white-supremacist ideology—the most venomous form of racist ideology. I suspect that many Americans don’t know how much white-supremacist ideology shapes their political thought and America’s political discourse, and allows juries to exonerate racism and convict anti-racism.

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Vox - How white supremacy tried to divide Black and Asian Americans — and how communities worked to find common ground.

Against the backdrop of anti-racism protests last summer, racist violence was surging in Chinatowns and Asian American communities across the country.

In July, an 89-year-old Chinese woman was set on fire while walking on the street after being slapped in the face in Brooklyn, New York. The two assailants, she said, didn’t say a word before attacking her. She scrambled to put out the fire, but it left a large burn mark on the back of her pink blouse — a grisly reminder of the attack.

It was not an isolated incident. Between March 19 and December 31, 2020, there were more than 2,808 “firsthand accounts of anti-Asian hate,” according to a report by Stop AAPI Hate, an organization that has been tracking reports on anti-Asian violence — a 150 percent rise since 2019. From being barred from establishments to being spat or coughed on, Asian Americans have reported physical and verbal harassment throughout the pandemic, as they’ve been used as a xenophobic scapegoat for the spread of a virus that originated in China. According to one survey conducted last April, 32 percent of Americans have “witnessed someone blaming Asian people” for Covid-19, and 60 percent of Asian Americans have witnessed this behavior.

This year, the attacks have seemed to take a more gruesome and visible turn: A 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face as he rode the subway in New York; a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman was robbed in a parking lot in San Jose ahead of Lunar New Year; and an 84-year-old Thai man was shoved to the ground in San Francisco, which resulted in his death.

These attacks may have been spurred by the coronavirus pandemic and then-President Donald Trump repeatedly using racist terms for the virus, but anti-Asian sentiment in the United States is not new — just look to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigrants from becoming US citizens, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order in 1942 that put Japanese Americans into internment camps.

“When the pandemic emerged and the president began calling the virus ‘kung flu’ or ‘China virus,’ those who were aware of how race operates knew that we were about to experience a surge of racism that we haven’t seen in a while,” said Pastor Raymond Chang, founder and president of the Asian American Christian Collaborative, a faith-based group advocating for Asian American communities while also leading Black and Asian solidarity. “Racism against Asian Americans has always been a part of the fabric of our society. It just depends on whether it’s overt and violent, or subtle and kind of flies under the radar.”

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Told to go back to your country.

Accused of spreading COVID-19.

Spat upon.

For Asian American and Asian people in the U.S., COVID-19 is far from the only danger of the worldwide pandemic.

As anti-Asian sentiments and incidents of violence associated with the pandemic increased in the U.S., Russell Jeung co-founded Stop AAPI Hate with the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, Chinese for Affirmative Action and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University in March 2020.

On Tuesday, Jeung, a sociologist and professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, gave the keynote at this year’s UW–Madison Diversity Forum — “Ending Asian Hate: The Asian American Community Responds.”

“I’m still sort of stupefied how much anger and hate is directed towards Asians,” Jeung said. “It’s really chilling and has been really painful for me.”

Stop AAPI Hate tracks COVID-19-related hate, violence and discrimination against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States, develops community resources and advocates for policy interventions to end racism. During the pandemic, more than 9,000 incidents have been reported, with Jeung pointing out that it’s only a fraction of what people experience.

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SPLC - White nationalist groups espouse white supremacist or white separatist ideologies, often focusing on the alleged inferiority of nonwhites. Groups listed in a variety of other categories—Ku Klux Klan, neo-Confederate, neo-Nazi, racist skinhead and Christian Identity—could also be fairly described as white nationalist.

The number of white nationalist groups dipped in 2020, down 27 groups from 2019. While COVID-19 partially explains the change, most of the decline was due to the disbanding of American Identity Movement, one of the largest and mostly active white nationalist groups in the country in recent years. This year, activity plummeted until Patrick Casey finally announced the group’s dissolution in November. Much of that energy has shifted toward the so-called Groyper movement, which is not organized into a formal group.

Chapters of The Right Stuff also declined as the leaders focused their energy on their podcast platform and the National Justice Party. They have also faced criticism from other white power activists for placing monetary gain above growing their movement.

Many white nationalist groups have failed to find footing on mainstream social media sites and fled to platforms like Telegram and Parler.

White nationalists have had difficulty raising money online because many payment processors have banned them from their services. Most now rely on cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin and Monero.

The federal government provided a boost to 14 hate groups, including American Renaissance, by providing them with PPP funds meant to provide relief from the pandemic.

The white nationalist movement is on two different tracks. One is focused on harnessing populist anger and frustration at Trump’s loss to channel people into their movement. Figures like Nick Fuentes are attacking mainstream conservatives while painting themselves as the future of the right in America. Most of the people associated with this part of the white nationalist movement do not belong to groups and likely will not join any in the near future.

The other part of the movement believes in the strategies of accelerationism. While some join groups like The Base, the movement is increasingly decentralized. Most adherents exist as part of the online accelerationist subculture, where they absorb extremist ideas without some of the risks involved in joining a group. This does not mean the movement is any less dangerous; lone actors motivated by white power ideology remain a persistent threat.

There is increasing overlap in the rhetoric of these two tracks. Among the whole of the white nationalist movement there is a growing belief that “political solutions” are no longer viable – an idea that seems especially convincing in the aftermath of Trump’s loss. Intimidation and other acts of violence are increasingly accepted on the far right, perhaps best exemplified by its embrace of Kyle Rittenhouse. Increasingly violent language is common within the movement’s rhetoric and anti-democratic ideas will likely seep further into the political mainstream.

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2020 white nationalist hate groups

Southern Poverty Law Center

View all groups by state and by ideology.
*Asterisk denotes headquarters​

Nielsen - From attacks on Chinese laborers in 1885 to the more than 3,000 anti-Asian hate incidents in the last year, attacks against the Asian American community are not new. But while this is not the first time in U.S. history that the Asian community has been subjected to violence, recent research shows the quantity and context of inclusion on TV for an identity group plays a  role in learning—and unlearning—racist stereotypes that harm Asian Americans.

One clear challenge to disrupting stereotypes is the exclusion of diverse Asian American experiences from U.S. television content. Add amid the disruption of production schedules during 2020, Gracenote Inclusion Analytics reveals that share of screen* for Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) remains limited. Particularly, East Asians and Southeast Asians appeared in leading roles on TV at a fraction of their presence in the U.S. population.

After more than a year living with the disruption and threat of COVID-19, our increased media consumption still offers two primary parallels of representation for Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) on television—news headlines and commentary stigmatizing the pandemic as the “China” or “Wuhan” virus and television roles that perpetuate the “model minority myth.

But representation in TV programming isn’t the only place where progress is needed. A recent study published to PubMed by a group of academics found that increased media rhetoric in response to the pandemic has played a direct role in the escalation of violence and bias against Asian Americans. Researchers found a direct correlation in the increased media usage of terms like “China Virus” and “Kung Flu” with the increase in bias against Asian Americans. So much so that after years of declines of this sentiment, the initial weeks of pandemic coverage using this racist language in the media was powerful enough to erode more than three years of prior declines. This language directly evoked and activated a long historical legacy associating Asians with disease and xenophobic fear dating back to the “Yellow Peril.” 

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NBC Bay Area - Thousands of people marched and rallied against hate Sunday in Los Gatos.

40 different groups helped organize the march through the streets of Los Gatos and a rally at the civic center.

“We know that silence is deadly. If left unchallenged, these hostilities persist and grow,” Diane Fischer, co-organizer of Sunday’s rally.

The show of solidarity comes after several incidents this year that included disruptive town council meetings with protesters speaking out against The Black Lives Matter movement and the LGBTQ community.

In one meeting, community members targeting mayor Marico Sayoc and her family and there were also protests outside her home.

Just this Halloween, Los Gatos High School was vandalized with racist and homophobic graffiti. Silent complicity creates pain,” said Sayoc.

Sayoc talked to NBC Bay Area about the city’s work to make Los Gatos a community for all people and about the huge turnout in support of that goal.

“We should be able to rise above and celebrate each other regardless of our racial background, religion or the people we love. So, this validates that it is needed, and I will continue to do it,” she said.

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Goldbridge Institute Board of Director member Judy Rickard

Goldbridge Institute Board of Director member Nebi Alemu and Executive Director Johnny Wang

Politics, both domestic and international, have certainly changed over the last few years. It’s almost impossible to enter a discussion or read a report on current trends in foreign policy and national security without two points being raised: one that domestic extremist violence is now considered the top terrorist threat to the U.S. homeland, and two, that the world is entering a new era of great power competition. What is not frequently discussed is how these two trends are intricately linked, and how addressing one can aide the United States in the other.

Authoritarian governments, primarily led by Beijing and Moscow see themselves in competition with the United States for key relationships with countries around the world. For decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an assumption that the international standard for progress and reform was the adoption of democracy and liberal market reforms. Today, that is no longer the case. Authoritarian regimes are offering an alternative vision for how to organize society and for a government’s relationship with its people. Their proposition is simple: Yes, it may be more repressive and there are fewer freedoms than with liberal democracy, but it is also more orderly, efficient, and able to handle big problems.

But it is more than simply promoting their own model. Authoritarians also seek to tear down America’s comparative advantage in this this perceived battle of ideas, its self-proclaimed strength as a beacon of democracy, freedom, and equal rights. By doing so they are working to undercut the image America seeks to projects to the world, and the very idea promoted by Democrats like John F. Kennedy and Republicans like Ronald Reagan that America should serve as a shining city upon the hill. If the United States and democracy is not viewed as offering freedom, liberty, or equal rights, then it’s all a sham and the model that it professes is a sham too.

This is why foreign, authoritarian-run media covered the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol so extensively and sensationally. Chinese State-owned outlets described it as an “internal collapse” of the American political system. Chinese outlets were even sent instructions for their coverage of the Capitol Insurrection to emphasize attacking democracy and promoting the idea that censorship is a superior political tool compared to freedom of speech. RT and Sputnik, Russia’s vaunted international propaganda outlets, similarly promoted such messages, covering the Jan. 6 insurrection with headlines describing it as “a date which will live in infamy,” “the date the Second Civil War began,” and “a symptom of a bigger problem.” The Russian government goes beyond simply promoting damaging messages in news coverage, but even tries to exacerbate racial tensions in the United States through its social media manipulation. It is home to leaders of American Neo-Nazi and extremist organizations. Russia’s disinformation networks also specifically target minority groups, especially African Americans, in their disinformation campaigns. There are even reports that Russian intelligence may be financing certain hate groups in the United States, specifically trying to push them towards violence.

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