THE GHOST DANCE OF WHITE SUPREMACY
By Kenneth J Uva
In the late 1800s, faced with military defeats, loss of territory, hunger, and general despair, the Ghost Dance took hold among Native Americans in the West. This was a religious movement intended to reunite the living with the spirits of the dead in order to bring peace and prosperity and to end the westward expansion of white Americans into the lands inhabited by Native Americans for centuries. The Ghost Dance was a sad expression of loss and desperation in the hope of restoring the people to the better times of their history.
In the past few days, among other provisions to limit the votes of African Americans, the Georgia governor signed a bill that prohibits providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote.
Are we seeing the Ghost Dance of white supremacy?
The trend of the last several years has been the extreme efforts of the supporters of white supremacy to push their agenda through means that political scientists would call beyond the legitimate parameters of debate. In the 2000 presidential election, the results were truly controversial. There was an argument about a few hundred votes in Florida. Yet, Democrats accepted the ruling of the Supreme Court, despite the flawed reasoning and questionable ethics of members of the court majority. In the 2020 presidential election, however, 147 House Republicans voted to overturn the election results despite a 7 million vote popular margin. This vote was in spite of the more than 60 court rulings, including that of the Supreme Court, which found no rigging or other nefarious practices leading to Joseph Biden’s election. Yet the vast majority of Republican House members went along with the lie that Donald Trump won the election.
This lie, created by Trump, and its acceptance by the majority of Republican law makers, resulted in the violent attempted takeover of the US Capitol. The videos of the extreme actions, the use of bear spray, the clubbing of the Capitol police, the shouts to hang Vice President Pence, for example, showed the escalation of the actions of the Proud Boys and other related white supremacists, far beyond the “Brooks Brothers” riot during the 2000 Florida recount.
The January 6 insurrection followed numerous incidents involving white supremacists over the past few years. The “Jews Will Not Replace Us” march in Charlottesville and the attempted takeover of the Michigan state capitol and the plan to kidnap the governor are two other examples of the resort to violence on the part of white supremacists since Trump became president.
The Georgia law was passed in direct response to the fact that the campaign to bring African American voters to the polls resulted in a Deep South victory for the Democrats. Even more importantly, this increase in turnout resulted in the election of two Democratic senators giving the party control of the upper house. How are Republicans responding to all this? By introducing hundreds of laws making it harder to vote—voter ID laws, limiting early and absentee voting, shortening voting hours, etc.
What is the takeaway from all of this? Trump ran a campaign with a racist tone. He started years ago with his assertions, never proven of course that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. His campaign speeches were filled with rhetoric about the danger from the southern border, from the “rapists,” “murderers,” and “drug dealers” crossing into our country. His wall was going to protect us from all that.
Trump is not the cause of racism in this country but he encouraged it. Inspired by their president, white supremacists came out into the open. As Trump said about the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, there are good people on both sides.
Trump’s continued pounding the drum of a rigged election and his encouraging a large mob of armed white supremacists to march to the Capitol is largely responsible for the wave of their activity, identified by domestic security agencies as a danger to our security.
Why has Trump found such fertile ground among white supremacists? And why have the vast majority of Republican voters and Republican officials marched in step with his divisive policies and lies?
Demographic trends expect that by 2045, the United States will be a majority minority country. That means that less than half of the population will be non-Hispanic whites. The United States had an African-American president and now has a mixed race, but non-white vice president. Voters of color by their primary vote in South Carolina and in their general election votes in many other states were the margin of victory for President Biden. He was elected without a majority of white voters. In fact, whites were the only racial group that gave a majority of its votes to Trump.
We are witnessing the perceived decline of the average white person. There is no evidence that there is a decline in income or other measures such as health, but the key word is “perceived.” There are whole swathes of white people who feel that the rise of other people means a decline for them as if prosperity and happiness is a zero-sum game. Race has always been the dirty secret of the United States. How else does one explain how people who live in places farthest from newly arrived immigrants are the most hostile to them? Or why do states that benefit the most from government programs consistently vote for the Republican Party, the party that always calls for cuts in programs for health, income equality, and education?
To the loss of perceived status, we can add the assault on values. To Evangelical Christians, same-sex marriage, and the rights of the LGBT community, now including transgender equality is further evidence of the decline of their dominant position in the country. Saying that if you are against same-sex marriage, don’t marry a person of the same sex, does not assuage the perception that their world is collapsing around them.
The result of all this is an increasing effort to hold back the tide, by claiming the election was rigged, and by preventing the votes of people who are perceived as rising. The rise of armed militias, mostly of angry white men, and the increased threats of violence are all part of the same cultural consciousness that the world is slipping away.
This is the modern Ghost Dance. The effects are yet to be fully known but so far, there is not much cause to be encouraged.
