While most of the United States celebrated Dr Martin Luther King’s birthday on Monday, a reminder came from Spokane about the violence that still simmers in the nation. City workers preparing for a parade in honor of MLK discovered a backpack with what looked like several wires sticking out from it. After the police were called in, it was discovered that the backpack was indeed a bomb. Police officials described the bomb as a legitimate threat, intended create mass casualties. As of yet, there is no conclusive evidence as to what the motivation was behind the bomb, but the FBI is now running the investigation and have stated that they are not ruling out involvement by local white supremacist organizations.
It should be no surprise to anybody that white supremacist organizations may have been involved in the most recent scare. Within the last year, another bomb has been left next to a court house, and there were at least two protests staged by white supremacists within the weeks leading up to the the MLK parade. But even as it should be no surprise, the reaction to these frightening events have been somewhat muted.
While the media is discussing the most recent bomb scare, it is not generally placing the scare in a broader picture of current race relations in the US.. And local media seems very concerned with how this incident is reflecting on the area in the national and international media rather than the possible effect the threat of violence has on those who are not white and/or those who are anti-racist. It may be tempting to dismiss these recent events as something that represents only a few scary hardcore skinheads or something that is emblematic of the region of Spokane, but to do so would do little more than silence a very much needed discussion on the role of racial hatred and violence in the US in a post-Obama world.
Washington (and neighboring Idaho) has a long history of white supremacist organizing. The dissolving of Richard Butler’s Aryan Nations in 2000 helped spur formation of the Volksfront–another white supremacist organization–that shares similar goals to the Aryan Nations, but seems to be not only more virulent but also more organized. With factions throughout the US and even the world, the Volksfront is a problem that is not going away any time soon.
And yet, the Spokane area is not alone in its struggles with white supremacist organizing. Arizona is still recovering from the Gabrielle Gifford shootings–and although we have yet to hear what the official motivation of the shootings was, after the story broke my inbox was immediately flooded with frantic emails from other pro-immigration activists. Was this shooting related to immigration? As the sketchy details became a little more clear, the question changed slightly to how was this shooting related to immigration? We all knew instinctively that even if the shooter had no political motivations at all, in the context of the situation in Arizona, the shootings were no surprise at all.
Because although it (again) has not made national media on a significant level, the Minute Men and the American Border Patrol (both designated as hate organizations by the Southern Poverty Law Center) both have visible presences in the mainstream political arena in Arizona. State representative, Russell Pearce has clear ties to white supremacists, and Gifford’s election opponent, Jesse Kelly, invited guests at a political rally to shoot M-16s in the name of “helping to remove” Giffords from office. He also had the backing of the Minute Men. Unfortunately, Kelly has not gotten nearly as much attention as Sarah Palin in the wake of the shooting, even as Palin does not have any obvious ties to white supremacist organizations nor has she been known to even court their members.
Michigan had a run in recently with a local militia organization, seeing several members of the Hutaree militia arrested for plotting a violent overthrow of the government. Minnesota too has a long history of white supremacist organizing in the state and again, there was a blurring of the line between politicians and white supremacist organizations when a top rightest blog endorsed a neo-Nazi politician. There is, in fact, not one state in the Union that doesn’t have at least one white supremacist organization, and as the Southern Poverty Law Center shows, infiltration of the mainstream by white supremacist ideology (if not the white supremacists themselves) is increasingly (and rather horrifyingly) common.
Spokane human rights activist Tony Stewart has stated about the bomb scare that, “here we are facing something that is not to be taken lightly.” He knows, just like those of us working on immigration in Arizona know, that even if this bomb has nothing at all to do with politics, it emerges from an atmosphere of heated racist rhetoric and violence. Violent white supremacy has not only been on the rise, but has become normalized in the mainstream. It is imperative to put these incidences into a national context in addition to a local context, and to look at them from the perspective of infiltration of the mainstream by blatantly white supremacist organization rather than as a few fringe radicals acting “crazy.”
But we won’t be able to understand how to most adequately handle the rising tide of white supremacy in the US without being fully cognizant of the facts. It is understandable to feel shame when a problem from home suddenly becomes exposed to the world–but the more important thing to concentrate on now is the threat of violence against those who are not white and/or anti-racist and how to stop that violence. To do this, we must recognize that current legislative efforts by congressional groups such as SLLI (or State Legislators for Legal Immigration) to revoke the citizenship of children of undocumented workers is intimatly connected to this bomb scares (and the Gifford’s shooting and the increase in white supremacist organizations over the past two years) and vise versa. When you compromise on one front, you are necessarily compromising on the other.