Tag: white supremacy

It Has Always Been About Slavery

The following article by Cynthia Tucker was posed on the National Memo website August 18, 2017:

“Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
— Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, 1861

Credit: Reuters

As if he had not already dumped enough fuel on a raging inferno, President Donald Trump has now taken up common cause with the Lost Cause: the historically inaccurate, myth-driven campaign to sanctify the Confederacy. The president was apparently not satisfied with merely showing his sympathy for white supremacists, insisting that their ranks include some “very fine people.”

A day or so later, he went on Twitter to bash the movement to take down Confederate monuments and statues — though he had previously said those decisions should be left to local authorities. Trump tweeted that he was “sad” to see the “history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments.” Continue reading “It Has Always Been About Slavery”

CAP’s Neera Tanden Reacts to Trump’s Latest Comments on Charlottesville

The following statement was posted on the Center for American Progress was posted on their website August 15, 2017:

Washington, D.C. — Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, released the following statement in response to President Donald Trump’s latest remarks regarding the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia:

Progressives in this country have one aim: to expand the circle of equality and opportunity in America.

Continue reading “CAP’s Neera Tanden Reacts to Trump’s Latest Comments on Charlottesville”

Here’s what white supremacy looks and sounds like now. (It’s not your grandfather’s KKK.)

The following article by Daniel Kreiss and Kelsey Mason was posted on the Washington Post website August 17, 2017:

President Trump points to members of the media as he answers questions in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on Tuesday. (AP)

In a remarkable exchange with the press Tuesday about the deadly violence in Charlottesville over the weekend, President Trump said, “I’ve condemned neo-Nazis. I’ve condemned many different groups. Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”

On one level, the president is right. Not all the right-wing groups ostensibly there to protest the planned removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee were neo-Nazis or white supremacists, as we have traditionally understood them.

But the face of white supremacy has changed in important ways. The Charlottesville “Unite the Right” event was designed to reconstitute and rebrand various white right-wing groups under the banner of the “alt-right” and make the movement more publicly visible. This newer, more diffuse, younger and technologically enabled movement — promoted by prominent White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, among others — seeks to advance white identity politics through appeals to equality, democratic multiculturalism and freedom of speech. Continue reading “Here’s what white supremacy looks and sounds like now. (It’s not your grandfather’s KKK.)”

Trump and race: Decades of fueling divisions

The following article by Marc FIsher was posted on the Washington Post website August 16, 2017:

Last summer, when Donald Trump’s comments about Mexicans and Muslims led to widespread accusations that he harbored racist attitudes, the candidate pushed back. “I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered,” he said.

As evidence, Trump cited an endorsement he’d received from a weekly newspaper published in Ohio by Don King, the legendary African-American boxing promoter.

“Now, Don King knows racism probably better than anybody,” Trump said in an interview with The Washington Post. “He’s not endorsing a racist, okay?” Continue reading “Trump and race: Decades of fueling divisions”

Trump puts a fine point on it: He sides with the alt-right in Charlottesville

The following article by Philip Bump was posted on the Washington Post website August 15, 2017:

President Trump first asked reporters to define the “alt-right,” before saying members of the “alt-left” were also to blame for violence in Charlottesville, while taking questions from reporters on Aug. 15 at Trump Tower in New York. (The Washington Post)

It was inevitable that President Trump’s brief news conference on Tuesday concerning national infrastructure would, instead, be redirected to a discussion of the violent protest in Charlottesville this past weekend and his delayed criticism of the racist and pro-Nazi groups that were central to it.

It did not seem inevitable, though, that Trump’s responses to questions about those protests would cement as correct the general interpretation of his first comments on the matter: He’s sympathetic to the goals of the men who marched Saturday night carrying Confederate and Nazi flags — and even to the “peaceful” torchlight protest on Friday in which marchers chanted anti-Semitic and Nazi slogans. Continue reading “Trump puts a fine point on it: He sides with the alt-right in Charlottesville”

Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster

The following article by Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush was posted on the New York Times website August 14, 2017:

Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist, has been criticized as being emblematic of the far-right nationalism that turned violent in Virginia last weekend. Can he salvage his role in the White House? By A.J. CHAVAR and CHRIS CIRILLO on Publish Date August 14, 2017. Photo by Al Drago/The New York Times.

Rupert Murdoch has repeatedly urged President Trump to fire him. Anthony Scaramucci, the president’s former communications director, thrashed him on television as a white nationalist. Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, refused to even say he could work with him.

For months, Mr. Trump has considered ousting Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist and relentless nationalist who ran the Breitbart website and called it a “platform for the alt-right.” Mr. Trump has sent Mr. Bannon to a kind of internal exile, and has not met face-to-face for more than a week with a man who was once a fixture in the Oval Office, according to aides and friends of the president. Continue reading “Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster”