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White supremacy, immigration, Stephen Miller, and more

This week, a report by the Southern Law Poverty Center (SPLC) authored by Michael Edison Hayden revealed 900+ emails sent in 2015 and 2016 from current White House senior adviser Stephen Miller to editors at Breitbart, a very conservative news source. The emails reveal the white supremacy that undergirds many of Miller’s recommendations to President Trump which have become policy, including separating families at the US-Mexico border and a Muslim travel ban. According to the SPLC: Miller’s perspective on race and immigration across the emails is repetitious. When discussing crime, which he does scores of times, Miller focuses on offenses committed by nonwhites. On immigration, he touches solely on the perspective of severely limiting or ending nonwhite immigration to the United States. Hatewatch was unable to find any examples of Miller writing sympathetically or even in neutral tones about any person who is nonwhite or foreign-born.

There’s much more.

Several news outlets have followed up with this reporting, including the Washington Post, in an article by Kim Bellware. The Post reached out to Miller and the White House for comment. Miller declined to comment Wednesday. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said via email Tuesday that she had not seen the report but called the SPLC “an utterly-discredited, long-debunked far-left smear organization.”

Um, no it is not. The SPLC has a long and respected history of reporting on hate groups, especially in the United States.

The source of the emails was a former editor at Breitbart, Katie McHugh. Fired in 2017 for sending anti-Semitic messages, McHugh has gone through a searching of her own soul, and has renounced white supremacy and white nationalism.

Rosie Gray of BuzzFeed News has written an enlightening and deeply disturbing article about McHugh’s rise and fall in a world where nonwhite people are viewed as enemies and criminals and where Jews are seen as completely responsible for anti-Semitism, stretching the bounds of anyone’s imagination. This world is peopled with holocaust deniers and those who spew anti-Muslim rhetoric.

One group named in the article is VDare, named for Virginia Dare, the first English child born in what would become an English colony, then later the state of North Carolina. Obviously, members of VDare delight in the literal birth of whiteness in the future United States of America. Ironically, and by definition, Virginia Dare was the first immigrant born in an English possession.

The BuzzFeed article is an important read, but you’ll want to take a shower when you’re through with it.

I feel sorry for Katie McHugh; I truly do. I wish her a good life, and am sobered – even encouraged – by her willingness to leave all that hatred behind.

But I feel far more sorry for the people she and those who espouse such horrible ideas have harmed. The murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville at the Unite the Right rally was the first turning point for Katie McHugh. That rally and its aftermath was also an eye-opener for many Americans who mistakenly thought that white nationalism and white supremacy were non-factors in modern public life.

McHugh decried not the idea of the rally, but its tactics. Eventually she recognized the deep sexism, the wrongness of all its ideals, and the control and power. Eventually, she left. Eventually. But not until much harm was done by her and to her.

From the article: People like me should be given a chance to recognize how bad this is and that the alt-right is not a replacement for any kind of liberal democracy whatsoever, any kind of system; they have no chance, and they’re just harmful, McHugh said. There is forgiveness, there is redemption. You have to own up to what you did and then forcefully reject this and explain to people and tell your story and say, ‘Get out while you can.’

For those of us who watch with horror from the sidelines – what can we do?

We can educate ourselves. We can reach into our own souls, and call on the souls of other good Americans.

We can support the ideals of inclusion, welcome, peace, and diversity. We can remind each other that all people are equally important and valuable.

We can stand up. We can speak out. We can act. We can hold powerful people accountable. We can call for the ouster of white nationalists from the White House. We can say no more.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019

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Lynching as metaphor

Last week, President Trump made news by using the word lynching in a tweet to describe how he feels about the impeachment inquiry:

So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the president, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!

After the President received some pushback over using that term, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) chimed in by saying:

Yes, this is a lynching and in every sense this is un-American. I’ve never seen a situation in my lifetime as a lawyer where someone is accused of a major misconduct and cannot confront the accuser or call witnesses on their behalf.

Then, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden condemned Trump’s use of the word. Within a few hours, a video began circulating of Biden saying this about President Clinton’s impeachment in 1998:

Even if the president should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard — the very high bar that was set by the Founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense.

Biden has apologized. Is an apology enough? I don’t know. It’s certainly better than not apologizing. It’s also worth noting that these are three wealthy white male politicians who didn’t blink at using a word that conjures up a horrific history that affected a huge minority of Americans.

Here are the lyrics and a recording of “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol and first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, while lynchings were still being committed in the United States.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

If you don’t get the horror of that part of our nation’s racially motivated terrorism, you should be required to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

As the memorial’s website states, More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation. Until now, there has been no national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings. On a six-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery, the national lynching memorial is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy.

Truth-telling. Reflection. Racial terror. Refugees. Murder.

Sacred space.

Lynchings were celebrated by entire white communities, while African Americans fled or lived in fear, as whites intended. This is the dark history that is part of America’s history and heritage. Using that history as metaphor to describe a legal process—a process that includes no physical threat—demeans the terror and panic experienced by an entire population of targeted Americans.

As a writer, I’m always looking for powerful metaphors. But I’m also aware that certain metaphors are inappropriate or out-of-bounds because of what they conjure. I remember my embarrassment and shame as a young pastor joking about how something “nearly gave me a heart attack” while speaking to a woman who’d just lost her spouse to cardiac arrest. I apologized, but the hurt of my use of that particular metaphor couldn’t be retracted.

Using lynching as metaphor is outrageous. Pretending to be a victim in the same way that people were real victims of violence, assault, murder, and terror is wrong. The only appropriate way to recall the terror of lynchings is through a memorial like the one mentioned above. We honor victims through a sacred space. We give dignity to their memory by vowing that we will never allow that part of our history to be repeated. And we should never use their experiences to exaggerate our own.

Words matter. They matter especially when elected leaders use them flippantly in ways that harm entire groups of people. Disrespect is not a responsible way to lead.

Words matter. Sometimes there is a word that needs sacred space around it.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019