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WASHINGTON: The first black woman is in a major party presidential bid, Americans of all races are showing support for the Black Lives Matter movement, and at the same time, white nationalists are increasing recruitment efforts and public activism .
That national endorsement of America’s stated goal of equal rights for all has been met with an increase in hate-related activities is part of a decades-long pattern in the United States, say six scholars and historians: any expansion of civil rights for a minority. group leads to increased intolerance.
“Every wave of civil rights progress brings us a little closer to real fairness, but there will always be a backlash from those who feel threatened by that progress,” said Cynthia Miller-Idriss, director of research at the Laboratory for Research and Development. Innovation of Polarization and Extremism. at the American University of Washington.
People who feel vulnerable to change become “eager to recruit and radicalize support to stop things, including through the use of violence or radicalized propaganda,” he said.
After the first black president, Barack Obama, was elected in 2008, the number of hate groups “skyrocketed,” Miller-Idriss said, just as Ku Klux Klan activity spiked again after the 1954 decision to Brown against the Board of Education desegregation of schools and during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
The backlash occurred after women gained the right to vote and also as LGBTQ rights expanded.
One of the things that makes this time so heated is that there has been greater acceptance by politicians, businesses and whites in general supporting racial justice movements than in the past, historians and rights experts said. civilians.
The United States is built on the “great societal challenge of creating a successful, harmonious, multiracial democracy,” said Simon Clark, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP).
The backlash against that accelerated during the Black Lives Matter protests and “it’s both political and violent, social,” he said.
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Protests against excessive use of force by police and racism swept the United States and the world this summer after a black man, George Floyd, was killed on May 25 while a white police officer from Minneapolis, Minnesota , knelt on his neck.
The latest police shooting of a black man, Jacob Blake, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on August 23 has sparked more protests that have turned violent at times.
Two white nationalist groups, who want an independent state for whites, told Reuters their numbers are also increasing, which Reuters could not independently confirm.
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The National Socialist Movement Corporation and ShieldWall Network said that many of the new prospects reject the Black Lives Matter protesters primarily out of fear that the demonstrations will impose their freedoms, such as the right to bear arms.
“I have weapons. I have a lot of bullets and armor too. And if people come down my street looking for trouble, I will fight,” said Burt Colucci, who describes himself as a commander of the Corporation. said a potential recruit told him in a recent phone call.
The New York-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented 3,566 “extremist propaganda incidents and events” in 2020, compared to 2,704 in the same period in 2019.
Almost 80 percent of the cases this year involve white nationalist ideology, the civil rights organization found. Anti-Semitic incidents and terrorist plots and attacks, among others, made up the rest, the ADL said.
MARCH IN WASHINGTON
Patriot Front, a white nationalist group, marched on Washington in February, and in recent months the group’s flyers and brochures have been found on college campuses from Arizona to Vermont.
White nationalist groups posted messages on Facebook this summer advocating bringing weapons to Black Lives Matter protests and held rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania in July.
While America’s racial and ethnic diversity is growing, whites remain in the majority – about 60 percent of all Americans, according to the Pew Research Center analysis published a year ago.
A third of eligible voters in the Nov. 3 election, in which Sen. Kamala Harris of Jamaican and Indian descent is running on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s ballot, will be non-white, according to Pew, compared to a fourth. part in 2000.
Most Americans say they accept diversity, according to a Reuters / Ipsos opinion poll last year on race, society and their political commitment. Sixty-three percent said that the statement “I prefer to live in a community with people who come from diverse cultures” reflects their point of view.
Among registered Democrats, that yes answer jumped to 78 percent, while among Republicans it fell to 45 percent.
In the election campaign, Biden accused President Donald Trump of stoking divisions. The Trump campaign has said that the president “works hard to empower all Americans.”
“LISTEN TO THE RAGE”
“I’ve never seen the country so divided, not just divided, but accused on all sides,” said Billy Roper of the Arkansas-based white nationalist organization ShieldWall Network.
Yet the United States has been at a similar crossroads before, say academics and historians interviewed by Reuters.
The Ku Klux Klan, founded at the end of the US Civil War, is the oldest and most violent of the white extremist organizations, according to the civil rights group of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
The KKK, hell-bent on reversing the progressive policies of the federal government during the period known as Reconstruction, used violence against blacks in the southern states, particularly to deny them the right to vote just won.
Women’s voting rights, granted in 1920, coincided with a rise in the word “bitch” in newspapers across the country, Rep. Pramila Jayapal said recently on the floor of the House of Representatives because, according to her, voting “It was too much power for too many men across the country.”
During the early years of the civil rights movement, a number of monuments were erected in the south honoring the war heroes of the Confederacy, the states that supported slavery that lost the Civil War, according to an SPLC report.
At least 780 monuments remained in public places in the South and elsewhere in the United States as of February 2019, according to the report, among other Confederate symbols that are deeply divisive. Of those monuments, 604 were dedicated before 1950, but another 28 were unveiled between 1950 and 1970 and 34 after 2000.
The national legalization of gay marriage in 2015 contributed to a powerful resurgence of conservative politics and legal challenges to LGBTQ rights, advocates said.
Colucci says his group has seen an increase in calls and emails following protests for racial justice and growing public and corporate support for Black Lives Matter and other groups.
“Some of those emails, I mean, you could hear the anger,” he told Reuters.
