The Need To Teach America About The Evolution Of White Supremacy.

When I was in fifth grade, we were watching the series Roots in what became a startling show of the terror inflicted by white people upon the Black population they had kidnapped and forced into slavery. 

In the middle of the unit, our school day was interrupted as news spread about the Oklahoma City bombing. 

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, including 19 children.

At age ten, I had a hard time understanding what happened.  It seemed that everyone around me calmed me down by saying it was just the work of a crazy person.  He was just imbalanced, and just like that, I didn't really think about McVeigh again. 

I turned back to Roots, horrified at both the actions and inactions of people of history.  Believing and hoping we had moved on.

In 1999, I was a freshman in high school, when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 13 people.

Again, the reasoning given was about the imbalance, about bullying and about the media.  There was considerably less importance placed on the obsessions about Hitler and far right ideas.

In 2015 Dylan Roof killed 9 people in a church after first praying with them, in an effort to start a race war. 

I thought it was just the act of a loner.

There was no talk about white supremacy anymore because, while all these events were happening around us, we were taught that essentially Martin Luther King Jr, along with Rosa Parks, solved racism in America. 

We were taught that racists were now only a very small minority; that they existed only in the past and that we had moved on. 

The idea of the KKK, of Neo-Nazis, and the idea of the far-right existing within America was simply not brought up as a realistic thing in my education. We were taught that they were simply a relic of the past and not worth our time.

I remember thinking American History X was just that.  A movie.

At no point, was I taught the name George Lincoln Rockwell, a former Navy man, and the founder of the American Nazi party, whose influence and ideas can be seen all over the far right and a person whose influence is still wreaking havoc long past his death. 

Louis Beam, likewise, was absent from my history books, even though he was a former member of the US military in Vietnam where he served as a helicopter door gunner, would come home to not only become a domestic terrorist as a member of the KKK, but then also built his own organized militia to promote racist military style trainings in kids as young as 8.  He is also credited with being one of the first proponents to a leaderless resistance strategy that is employed in many different factions.

This has done us all an incredible disservice from understanding where some ideas and thoughts come from.

The "free speech on college campus" idea isn't new.  But it's important to understand that Rockwell wanted to exploit that idea and was the first to do so.  It's also important to understand how Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as others, did not play into his hand so as to diminish the power of the propagandist.

It's important to realize that both the El Paso shooter, and the Christchurch shooter both believed in a variation of the original lie of white genocide that Rockwell espoused.  They believed that the Jews are behind everything and that they are using blacks to carry out that will.

To this day, I'm guessing the great majority of Americans have no idea that the El Paso shooter, the Christchurch shooter, Louis Beam, Eric Harris, Dylan Roof and Timothy McVeigh all read the same book written by a Neo-Nazi named William Luther Pierce who was a direct associate of Rockwell. 

I believe we need to address this shortfall, as white supremacy is a real threat to democracy.  I believe the best tool is education.  We need to have the hard conversations, especially with our friends and family about where this hate has come from, what this hate sounds like, and why this hate has been so difficult to extinguish.

Easily the best source of information for me researching the bulk of this material has been the journalist Robert Evans.  While he had previously covered the Ukrainian Revolution of 2014 as well as the war in Iraq, he has spent the last few years reporting domestically and starting his own podcast called Behind The Bastards.

However it is his other Podcast, The War On Everyone that really spells out the role White Supremacy and Fascism has played in American Culture.

Evans absolutely has a bit of Hunter S. Thompson to his reporting, however he is great at citing sources, and giving greater context to things that might not be as readily apparent.  He is also honest enough to say when he simply does not know because he couldn't find any sources.

His dedication to revealing detailed information about some of the worst possible topics helps to illuminate our own world in a new light, and calls attention to our own biases and flaws.

These are trying times.  Confusing times.  But if we understand our past, it can help guide us in the present, and preserve a better future.