White Supremacy in the United States

White Supremacy in the United States

Written by Alfonso Elizondo

In 1871, one hundred and fifty horsemen were roaming the streets of York County, South Carolina, in the United States. They had their faces covered with masks and white cloth hoods. They were moving slowly looking for a black man. They had violently entered the house of a black man who had been freed by the victory of the American Union Army. It was the home of a man named James Williams, who had escaped to fight with the army that defeated the slave States.

Near Williams’ s  home, a dozen riders separated from the group, including the slave master and large-plantation owner Rufus Bratton, who was at that time one of the senior officers of a radical group founded a few years earlier: the Ku Klux Klan. They entered Williams’s house, lifted the floorboards and found Williams, forcibly removed him and that night he died, hanging from a tree.

One hundred and fifty years later, in 2015, a man opened fire on a church killing nine people, including the minister of the congregation. However the US media declared that it had been ‘an attack on the faith’. But they did not mention that the church attacked in Charleston had been founded by a black minister named Denmark Vessey, who died for supporting freedom for the slaves in 1822 and in July of that same year his church was burned by a mob of white men.

In 1963, when Martin Luther King delivered his famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, another church was attacked in Alabama, claiming the lives of four African American children. For centuries, attacks against minority groups have been a problem that no one has been able to solve. The group most attacked has been the AfricanAmerican community, leading Dara Lind of Voxto state that for whites ‘any demonstration of pride that is not theirs has been a reason for revenge’.

In the elections that followed the emancipation of the slaves by Lincoln there were more than 130 attacks by white supremacists against the AfricanAmerican population. And one of the most violent organizations has been the Ku Klux Klan, a movement that bases its racist ideology on white, Christian supremacy and on its freemasonry rituals. That explains why there is never any talk of racist terrorism in the US.

After the September 11, 2001 attack carried out by Osama Bin Laden, it was reportedwidely in the media that the terror had been caused by a minority of Muslims residing in the United States, which is totally false, since the so-called War on Terrorism was invented by George W. Bush and legitimized by the American media which instilled great fear among the people who were hurt by the attack in New York. Noam Chomsky called this the manufacture of consensus, which unleashedhatred against a demographic group that came from countries located in the Middle East, especially those with a Muslim majority.

This huge falsehood does not mention that only 1% of the United States population is Muslim. Pew Research notes that 49% of Americans believe that some Muslimsharboranti-US sentiments. Another poll revealed that 58% see them as fanatics and 42%, especially those over age 50, are afraid of extremist Islamic groups. But the fact is that there are 101 hate groups targeting religious communities exclusively.

Although much of this fear remains as such, a good part turns into hatred, especially among the poorly educated white middle class. The United States is a country, that despite the progress it has made with regard to racial discrimination, still retainsmany expressions of hate. From 2000 to 2015, 70% of hate crimes were perpetratedby white supremacists, while only 13% were carried out by radical Islamic movements.

Hate groups in the US have grown significantly in recent years; there were 457 in 1999 and there are now 917. The fastest growing group are the 193 listed as Black Separatists by the Poverty Law Center and they express their hatred against whites and Jews. The other white supremacisthate group is the Ku Klux Klan which has reached 130 organizations in the country.

But the Ku Klux Klan is not the only organization that preaches white supremacy and attacks African-Americans, migrants, Jews, Muslims, Catholics and members of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community. Although the Southern Poverty Center – which studies hate groups in the US – does not differentiate between black hate groups, it does so in the case of whites. White hate groups make up 450 of the 917 ethnic hate organizations, including theNeo-Nazis, the National Socialist Movement, Racist Skinhead, Neo-confederates and radicalized Christians.

Addendum: In a second instalment I will discuss the political, economic and social effects of this phenomenon of white supremacy.