In 1866 in Memphis, Tennessee Klan led mobs including white policemen rampaged through the Black sections of town leaving the burned-out husks of Black churches and schools. 46 people died and 70 more were wounded. The same year, on July 30, a white mob in New Orleans attacked a Black suffrage convention killing 37 Black people and three of their white allies. In the fight over elections in the South thousands upon thousands of people died.
In Louisiana over a thousand Black people lost their lives. In Arkansas over 2,000 people were murdered. In Georgia, the number of threats and beatings was even higher. In reaction to a campaign of terror conservative Democrats captured legislatures and Governorships pushing through a series of laws and constitutional amendments supporting white supremacy and “small government” that, nevertheless, instituted almost absolute control over Black lives.
There always seem to be folks eager to reimagine the American Civil War with a win for the Confederacy. They don’t need to. The Confederacy may have lost the battle, but, in many ways, the Klan won the war. Reconstruction lasted twelve years. Jim Crow, the reassertion of white dominance, lasted for eighty-eight. Racial bigotry, which permeates America from how federal laws were constructed to the social mores of everyday interactions, continue.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Studies carried out by sociologist and Ku Klux Klan scholar David Cunningham along with colleagues Rory McVeigh and Justin Farrell show how counties with active Klan in the 1960s, half a century ago, differ even today from those in which the Klan was not active. One, Klan counties have higher rates of violent crime. A lack of trust in the infrastructure leads to higher levels of vigilantism. This is also seen in cities like Chicago where a corrupt police force has undermined people’s trust in the system leading them to “handle” situations themselves.
Second, Klan counties have strong conservative support. The South as a whole tends to vote Republican (since the flip since the 1970s of Republican and Democrat marketing outreach). But the Republican shift is much more pronounced in counties and parishes where the Klan was active. Cunningham concludes that “As a result, by the 1990s, racially-conservative prejudicial* attitudes among southerners strongly correlates with Republican support, but only in areas where the KKK had been active.”
Today we see the same rhetoric and paranoia on the upswing that precursors the rise of the Klan: hateful speech towards immigrants and minorities, rising crime (though still much lower than it has been in the recent past), violent acts targeting minorities and women, moral upheaval, and the implacable grind of a shifting world. As the philosophers say, the only constant is change. Alas, people will indulge in their worst impulses to keep change at bay. Even when the changes are positive.
Cunningham notes that there are more Klan organizations today than there have been in the Klan’s history in the US. The organized Klan movement saw a concerted boost in the last five years. Most of these groups, however, are small and not particularly powerful. Unfortunately, as we have learned from other terrorist organizations, small cells can do a lot of damage. Particularly with people like white “nationalist” Louis Beam pioneering use of the internet as a tool for connection.
Back in the day Bob Jones, leader of the 60s era North Carolina Klan, the largest and most powerful of the time, warned that people should fear his disbanding of the Klan more than his amassing of power because it was only the presence of Klan hierarchy that stopped those under his aegis from reigning chaos on the world. (Considering the violence of the Klan under his leadership this was disingenuous at best.)
While the history of the Klan shows that they tend to rise again the modern Klan can appear, to be lost in the shuffle of the myriad other white supremacist hate groups like the Neo Nazis, the Proud Boys, or those that hide themselves under the alt-right banner. The one constant across the waves of the Klan’s resurgences has been the use of violence and intimidation to defend and promote white supremacy. It started out as a terrorist organization and hews to those roots to this day. However, modern bigots eschew the blunt racism and misogyny of the Klan for the alt-right. Since the Klan’s heyday of millions of members in the 1920s each successive wave of the Klan has been significantly smaller.
The alt-right, short for “alternative right,” is a rebranding of Klan ideals of white supremacy by those seeking to mainstream their ideology. Those in the alt-right have a might equals right creed that allows hate and violence to continue to be acceptable tools of political conquest. Yet they avoid racial terminology instead using phrases like “western culture”, “traditional Christian values” (of the type that supported colonialism, genocide, and slavery), and “cultural Marxism” (a term descended directly from actual Nazi propaganda).
The alt-right embraces the hypocrisy of claiming victimhood while damning actual victims and believes more strongly in the myth of reverse racism than the reality of systemic racism. These are concepts that they have been effective in bringing mainstream. The idea of a besieged white majority is a Tucker Carlson mainstay and was the basis for Trump’s entire 2016 presidential campaign.
In fact, many on the alt-right have taken the language of the Left. For example, demanding “safe spaces” or claiming the denial of their freedom to spew hate speech. In this they have been extremely successful in normalizing racist ideology. That said, the methodology is still to use fear of change to stoke rage and to do it under the umbrella of Christian patriotism. At their core is not only the notion of a white identity, but of white racial superiority.
It’s a mash-up of the white supremacist playlist of eugenics,** social Darwinism, a twist on the “white man’s burden”, and fake news previously known as lies and propaganda. Scapegoating immigrants and minorities for societal issues like inequality brought about by their own policies has become a standard of modern right-wing politicians like Trump, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and Dutch opposition leader Geert Wilders.
There is a lot more to say about modern white supremacy. Like how it is linked to the “manosphere” and its deep hostility to women. How US governments at the state and federal level continue to fail to perceive white supremacy and right wing hate groups as the violent threat that they are and the reasons behind this failure. The fact that even leftist media tend to use the milder language of “alternative right” to describe groups and policies that are, at their core, a mix of bigotries including misogyny, xenophobia, religious discrimination, and many types of racism.
To end on a positive note, thanks to the ubiquity of cameras America and the world are facing an onslaught of the reality of the violence of American anti-Blackness. The gratuitous, slow motion murder of George Floyd, the arrogance of his killer as he gazed into the camera, underscored how impervious those in power feel. It has stripped the denial, the claims that “it’s not that bad”, that insulated many white American liberals.
There has been the beginning of recognition of the structural nature of racism in the US and elsewhere. More, younger people are more open than ever to changing the structure. Polling by the Pew organization has shown that American attitudes towards immigration and racial integration have become more open among those both left and right.
Things are changing for the better.***
-Notes-
*fixed it
** Back in the late 19th and early 20th century eugenics, and to a lesser extent social Darwinism, were liberal causes. This is America and it is the rare middle or upper class white person who openly accepts a true equality between those of a different race or ‘lower’ class. Liberals, in the name of progress and under the guise of eugenics, did horrible things that modern conservatives love to bring up. What they don’t like to mention is what conservatives were up to at the time. (Or now…) Kind of like modern Republicans calling themselves the party of Lincoln, pointing to a distant history of Democrats upholding slavery, and ignoring the blatant racism (and classism) of the Republican platform of the last several decades.
***I really wanted to end positively but the fact is we’ve been here before. We fought a war that freed people who were enslaved then sat passively by while the Klan instituted racial apartheid. Every federally commissioned investigation after a so-called race riot, which historically often constituted white mobs attacking Black people and neighborhoods, has said basically the same thing. That such explosions of violence will end when government enforced and supported oppression does. Progress is being made but, too often, the white power majority is content to settle for “equal enough” for those that it deems other. Complacency on the left gives the Klan, the Proud Boys, and the alt-right field of misogynistic, bigoted, xenophobes time to organize and promote their agenda. As Mad Eye Moody put it, this demands “CONSTANT VIGILANCE!”. (JK Rowling sucks, not Harry Potter.)
Sources
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