Have you watched this segment from the BBC in which a black German woman confronts Neo-Nazis and KKK members? If you have watched the clip, what are your thoughts and feelings about it?
In the United States, the triumphs of pluralism and a liberal democratic consensus around the color line as forced into being by the long Civil Rights Movement, and a centuries-long Black Freedom Struggle, ought to be celebrated. Black and Brown folks forced the United States to live up to the democratic creed promised by a full and inspired reading of the Constitution: they saved the country from its own wicked origins as a racial state and a white racist "democracy" founded upon the twin sins of black chattel slavery and genocide against First Nations peoples.
A celebration of this history by its warriors who are still alive and with us, through the voices of the ancestors which we can still hear if we choose to listen, and as lived by the heirs of the Black and Brown Freedom Struggles, can be intoxicating. However, as offered by Dionysus or Pan, it is very easy to get drunk on the ambrosia and other intoxicants offered up by post racial, post civil rights era, America.
The obvious. A black man in President of the United States of America. Why not gloat a little bit...or perhaps even a great deal?
Liberal Schadenfreude can be very tempting.
White racists are reduced to shooting cockroaches on their walls with BB guns. The KKK claims it is "misunderstood". White Supremacists are profiled on TV shows like 60 Minutes and their young sons shoot them dead.
Outliers and throwbacks like Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling are mocked and subsequently run out of town on the proverbial rail. Overt White Supremacy is considered such a thing of the past that a significant number of white Americans actually believe that they are somehow "oppressed" in the Age of Obama.
The latter is of course an absurd claim with no empirical support; however, the ridiculousness of such language is an ironic indication of how the Black Freedom Struggle has been so triumphant that foolish and stupid beliefs about the existence of a thing called "reverse racism" are now entertained and accepted as reasonable claims by too many Americans on both sides of the color line.
Throwing rocks and garbage at white caricaturized bigots is easy sport. But, what of the frightening fact that White Supremacists have evolved, remain very dangerous, and the triumphs of the Civil Rights era and "multicultural" America may just be a lull, a moment of detente, in a battle that is still being fought but by other more quiet and stealthy means?
The color line continues to over-determine the life chances of white people relative to black and brown Americans. The evidence is abundant. In almost every sociological and demographic category, from wealth and income to life expectancy, institutional White Supremacy has structured American society such that those who are considered "white" are advantaged relative to people of color.
The number of white hate groups has increased in the United States since the election of Barack Obama.
While the frontstage of White Supremacy--the KKK and other racial terrorist organizations--are depicted as anachronistic outliers of an antiquated racial age by the mass media, the White Right has succeeded in fully taking over the Republican Party, and has refashioned it as the premier White identity advocacy group in the United States of America.
The Republican Party is a White Supremacist organization, and a party in government (one of the only two main political parties in the United States) whose resonance with its public is based upon the whole union of White Supremacy and Conservatism. Moreover, the Tea Party GOP, the most extreme faux-populist element of the Republican Party, are an AstroTurf organization comprised of useful idiots who are doing the bidding of the Koch brothers.
The latter are plutocrats who can trace their political lineage back to the White Supremacist John Birch Society and White Citizens Councils of Jim and Jane Crow America.
The following observation is a truism, a cliche, and a bit of folksy wisdom which persists because it explains so much about the world: the devil's greatest trick was convincing mankind that he (or she) did not exist.
The danger of liberal Schadenfreude in the face of White Supremacy is that too many folks are celebrating a grand victory in the war against white racism fought by their parents, grandparents, and other ancestors which this generation inherited...but did not spend blood or treasure to secure.
The reporter who interviewed KKK members and Neo-Nazis should be applauded for her courage.
However, could it be that White Supremacy evolved, its most dangerous agents either working actively or in passive agreement through banking, police departments, government, finance, real estate, human resources departments, the military, and the educational system to consciously (and subconsciously) maintain and protect White Privilege, as well as the material and psychological privileges that come with being "white" in America?
I doubt that such people would agree to appear in a news clip or documentary where they are outed for the benefit of the viewer who wants to believe that White Supremacy and racism are political dinosaurs of some long ago past.
I wonder, is it possible to celebrate the past victories against White Supremacy in the United States (and elsewhere) while still keeping a keen eye and focus on how those elements remain a clear and present danger in the present?