Richard Spencer leads white nationalist protest against Confederate monument removal in Virginia

Daily Kos Staff

Monday May 15, 2017 · 9:31 AM PDT

2017/05/15 · 09:31

Richard Spencer protesting in Charlottesville, Virginia — Richard Spencer leads a white nationalist protest to halt the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.

White nationalists are not allowing their Confederate heroes to be removed from public view without a fight. Since last year, they’ve been battling the dismantling of Confederate monuments in New Orleans and have terrorized the politicians, contractors, and public workers involved with death threats, car bombs, harassment, and intimidation.

Last month in Alabama, lawmakers took a page right from “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever” Gov. George Wallace’s playbook when they recently passed a bill forbidding any changes to Confederate monuments in order to “maintain the history” of the state. And on S aturday, their latest desperate and very real attempt to maintain the purity of the white race saw them brandishing torches, chanting Nazi slogans, and protesting the removal of the Robert E. Lee statues at two parks in Charlottesville, Virginia. The crowd, reminiscent of a KKK rally minus the hoods, was led by none other than alt-right poster boy Richard Spencer.

Dozens of protesters led by white nationalist Richard Spencer gathered in Jackson Park on Saturday afternoon and assembled again that night in the city’s Lee Park, where they took up torches and surrounded the statue of Confederate general Lee slated for removal by the city council, according to reporters on the scene.

The protesters chanted “You will not replace us,” “Russia is our friend,” “All white lives matter” and the Nazi slogan “Blood and soil,” MSNBC reported.

Political scientists note that there is a distinction between white nationalism and white supremacy. While white supremacy posits that whites are inherently superior to those of other races, white nationalism is about political, economic, and cultural dominance.

White nationalism, [Eric Kauffman, a professor at Birbeck University in London said], is the belief that national identity should be built around white ethnicity, and that white people should therefore maintain both a demographic majority and dominance of the nation’s culture and public life.

So, like white supremacy, white nationalism places the interests of white people over those of other racial groups. White supremacists and white nationalists both believe that racial discrimination should be incorporated into law and policy. [...]

Mr. Trump’s appointment of Mr. Bannon as his senior counselor and chief West Wing strategist has, more than anything, brought white nationalism to the forefront of conversation.

This is what is people need to understand about why this is so dangerous.

For a while, some liberals got lulled into a false sense of hope in the “post-racial” Obama era and wanted to believe these were isolated cases of fringe groups, easily written off as nut jobs, living in the back woods somewhere, hiding behind the internet. But they are no longer hiding, and it’s doubtful that they ever were. They have been emboldened by knowing they have champions in the Trump administration. They are this administration. They are the ones writing law and policy, and they are the ones enforcing law and policy. Bannon, Sessions, Miller, Pence, DeVos—there are multiple levels of disenfranchisement happening in government that will impact the lives and well-being of people of color in every way. This is not accidental. This is a well-coordinated strategy.

Massive candlit night march in #charlottesville to #SaveLeeandJackson pic.twitter.com/p0UtWepgaJ
— Jason Kessler (@TheMadDimension) May 14, 2017

Look closely: though they are trying to pretend this is peaceful protest, this image doesn’t look all that different from the images of 50 years ago when angry white mobs in the South used to use their collective power and whiteness to intimidate black people from voting, from demanding equal treatment, from simply existing. This is about so much more than statues and maintaining “history.” This is about racial superiority and hatred. This is about their desire to live in a country and world without people of color.

And they now have an administration that, while it can’t get rid of us all, is poised to help them get closer to our massive disenfranchisement. We cannot get lulled into complacency. We should be outraged. We should be furious. This is madness.

Check out our slate of Daily Kos-endorsed candidates

Comments are closed on this story.