Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 23

While the dynamics of White Christian privilege have been in play for a long time, xenophobia and racist rhetoric experienced a new resurgence during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. Little of the rhetoric was new, but it had not been spoken by such prominent figures—including a US presidential candidate and then president, along with his political allies—in at least half a century. The stakes go up, and the very real physical and emotional risk to religious minorities is magnified, when elected officials—not schoolyard bullies or racist neighbors—use their position of authority to vilify a group. There is a causal connection between Trump’s emboldening of his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant base and the increase in hate speech and hate crimes. Data correlating anti-Muslim rhetoric in time with terrorist attacks show barely a blip after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 or the Charlie Hebdo attack in in France in January 2015, in which journalists and cartoonists were killed by two Muslim men upset by cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. By contrast, when then-candidate Trump barnstormed the nation making xenophobic speeches in 2015, data show a dramatic jump in anti-Muslim rhetoric.⁷² Hostile political rhetoric increases the frequency of hate crimes targeting immigrants of all religious backgrounds, particularly Muslims.⁷³ By contrast, when former president George W. Bush publicly defended Islam in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, hate crimes dropped.⁷⁴

One of the most visible and violent manifestations of these trends took place in August of 2017. I was preparing for my fall semester classes, beginning at the end of the month. Toggling over to my social media feeds, I could hardly believe the images: White supremacists and neo-Nazis in a torchlit procession and rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The New York Times headline read “White Nationalists March on University of Virginia.”⁷⁵ The chants included the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” and “Jew (You) will not replace us.” The scenes evoked memories of the Hitler Youth and the Ku Klux Klan, both paramilitary organizations that were formed to protect not just White people, but specifically White Christians.

The catalyzing event was a “Unite the Right” rally, organized by members of the “alt-right,” a loose coalition of political conservatives and White supremacist organizations, to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a public park. They marched across the University of Virginia grounds, carrying tiki torches, swastikas, and semi-automatic rifles and chanting slogans. The rally and march turned violent when a group of counter-protestors also showed up. Incidents continued over the weekend; protesters and counter-protesters could be seen fighting until the crowds were dispersed by the police.⁷⁶ On its second day the encounter turned deadly, when a White supremacist drove into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring many more. Charlottesville would later be acknowledged as the largest White supremacist gathering in a generation.⁷⁷

The public discussion of these events, and their meaning, was vigorous, in particular after the president stated a moral equivalency between the neo-Nazi ralliers and their opponents: “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent.”⁷⁸ This remark, and a later comment in which the president referred to “very fine people on both sides,” signaled the president’s support of White nationalists. The president’s statements contributed to the normalization of White Christian supremacist rhetoric across the country.

But the debate and the news coverage omitted a key element of how we must think about, talk about, and understand the events in Charlottesville and the twenty-first-century American “alt-right” movement. Many different words were used to describe the rally, including “White nationalist” and “Neo-Nazis.” These terms are silent on the religious dimensions of alt-right belief. Based on the chants alone, people of color were not the only targets: so were Jews. It is clear that this was not just White supremacy but White Christian supremacy in action. We need to call it what it is. In Antisemitism Here and Now, historian and noted Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt writes:

we must forthrightly acknowledge those on the right who say they are merely trying to protect “European culture” as the antisemites and racists that they are. It was not by chance that those who gathered in Charlottesville in 2017 to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee also chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or that when Richard Spencer ended a speech at an alt-right conference in Washington, D.C., shortly after the 2016 presidential election with the cry “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory,” some of those in attendance responded with the Nazi salute.⁷⁹

So, how did we get from Vicki’s fellow Southern Baptists, who did not like her working with my father, to the deadly violence at Charlottesville? Part of the answer is the political rhetoric of recent years. But we must recognize that Vicki’s congregation and the men in Charlottesville exist on the same spectrum of thought and approaches comprising the philosophy of White Christian supremacy. Treating supremacy as a violent project—as something the Klan does, but “kind” White Christians do not, recognizes only its extremes.

The attitudes of White Christians who would never pick up a tiki torch or fly the Confederate flag nevertheless give license to those who would. Institutions are made up of people. The problem is not limited to the elected officials who engage in explicit anti-Muslim or anti-Hindu rhetoric; it is also those officials who are less interested in the concerns of their religious minority constituents. Movements to preserve certain Confederate monuments or the Confederate flag in the name of “tradition,” resistance to diverse prayer in legislatures, and the way people look down on their religious-minority neighbors are all part of the same phenomenon. We need to acknowledge White Christian supremacy in all the places it exists, and we specifically need to see that Christianity is virtually always there alongside White supremacist thought in xenophobic movements. Finding these supremacist attitudes and rules wherever they exist in the crevasses of everyday life is the essential first step in addressing these problems.