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>> February is Black History Month all right, but 2020 and 2021 are going to be black history years.

Tonight, Eric Ward, a Senior Fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Director of the Western State Center on the Dynamics of Race Right Now, and U.W.

Professor, Christopher Parker, on how the nationalist piece of the conservative movement has been telegraphing a veer to the extreme for decades.

Black history in the context of today is the discussion on Northwest Now.

[ Music ] >> Here's what's in the news for African Americans these days.

Number one, African Americans lag far behind the curve on COVID vaccinations.

Number two, righteous protests against the killings of blacks by police meet with wide disapproval from many whites, with a very tiny minority of them perfectly willing to use those protests as cover to destroy property and push a nihilistic and deeply antisocial anarchist agenda.

And number three, conservative national politics remain dominated by a barely subsurface desire for white control and a rolling back of black progress.

So it is in that news environment that we have a public affairs discussion about what's happening right now in black history, and how you might be surprised to learn it ties into other ideas, like anti-Semitism, for instance.

Joining us now is Eric Ward, Executive Director of the Western State Center, a nationally recognized expert on the relationship between authoritarian movements, hate, and preserving an inclusive democracy.

By my reading, when you really look at hate groups and radical political ideology, in this country, one way or the other, it all traces back to race.

That's-- that's where the genesis of a lot of this lies.

You wrote an article recently where you took what I might call the wrapping off of this, though, and said listen, it's not just people of color now.

We're talking about the democracy, this country.

Expand a little bit about that, and talk to me a little bit about how you see that.

>> Yeah, we are in this, this moment, right now, where the big debate is who is an American, and what will America look like?

Who is American has been a debate that many of us are aware of.

We've seen this debate occur around Black Lives Matter, and the rise of social protest.

In fact, one of the most significant civil rights mobilizations since the 1960s.

But this question of who is an American, and who gets to belong has been one that we have hotly debated.

What we haven't debated though is, what is America?

And it is a question that now has landed on the doorsteps of every American, every person who resides in this country.

And in short, my argument is this.

That the success of the 1960s civil rights movement created a backlash.

This backlash is known as white nationalism.

It was the response to the victories of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

It responded by trying to maintain the idea of white superiority.

It couldn't acknowledge that it had lost the political struggle to other black Americans.

Therefore, it created a conspiracy that placed the blame on Jews.

If white supremacy, the system of discrimination that functions historically in present day, was written on the paper of race, this white national social movement wrote its narrative on the paper of anti-Semitism.

It blamed Jews as being the masters, the puppet-masters, right?

Of black people, Latinos, immigrants, union members, women, the list goes on.

For the white nationalist movement, it doesn't seek to take us back to the days of Gone With The Wind, right?

It seeks to overthrow the United States of America, and replace it with a government that will engage in the creation of an all white nation, free of people of color, and Jews, altogether.

In short, if white supremacy is about exploitation and discrimination, white nationalism is about ethnic cleansing.

And white nationalist movement in the United States has been growing from the margins to the mainstream ever since the victories of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

In the Pacific Northwest, it has been more apparent over the last decades.

>> I might suggest that it's just the opposite.

That it's not succeeding.

And this frustration with democracy and pro-democratic ideas in this country comes out of a knowing realization that that system, that idea, is losing in the real world.

So this might feel like a trend to a lot of people.

It felt like a trend in the 80s with Robert Matthews, and in the 90s, you know, with the Christian Identity Movement in Idaho, and all those things.

But what I suggest is that it's maybe really a death spasm of the white supremacist's dream.

How do you see that?

>> We should understand, I agree with you and you are exactly right when you say that white supremacy is dying.

White supremacy is the rule of law.

Now, certainly, we should not ignore that white supremacy still impacts the lives of people of color, black, indigenous, other people of color, in very real ways, each and every day.

It actually impacts the lives of many Americans, but it's most felt there.

But we should understand that white supremacy in the collapsing system has created a backlash.

And it is that backlash that is white nationalism.

Will white nationalism be successful?

I don't think so.

That wouldn't be my prediction.

And, we should understand, though, that it could cause a lot of harm.

And it could divide Americans at a time where we really need to be united around complex issues that are really impacting us.

Whether we're talking about the pandemic, that is, COVID-19; whether we are talking about economic instability, that has been caused by the long quarantine period that has needed to happen; or whether it is around demographic anxiety, the shifting nature and makeup of the United States.

What we understand is that there are certain groupings, and individuals, including politicians, who would rather divide us than allow us to come together to solve these problems.

It's why white nationalism remains a threat, even as white supremacy, the system continues to crumble and fall.

>> What do you make of current politicians?

Some successful ones on the Republican side, who at this point, this may change, but at this point, Mitch McConnell came around a little bit, but refused to denounce some of the loonier Q-Anon conspiracies, but even beyond that, some of the more subtle, some of the more subtle things that we see happening when it comes to these ideas.

Do lawmakers and on the Republican side, need to be courageous enough here to walk away from a certain amount of the base?

>> Yes.

So we have seen some Republican elected officials who have decided that redeeming the soul of America is more important, right?

Than attempting to maintain their political career by benefiting off of bigotry, right?

And anti-democratic, small D, practice.

We honor those Republicans, and we understand that it is a very difficult proposition to do so within their party.

Nearly a third of Republicans believe in some aspects of the Q-Anon theories out there.

This false idea that Donald Trump is a secret superhero, waging a global battle against a secret elite who are engaging, right, in the abuse and harassment of children, through sexual abuse.

This is a false conspiracy that is grounded in an anti-Semitic narrative called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

We are gladdened to see some Republicans speak up against that.

To speak out against the insurrection that has happened, and to call out the lie that these elections were somehow stolen from Donald Trump.

But they are a small minority, and it behooves all of us to support them in this moment, because we need those leaders to stand up inside of their party.

But we should understand that even as we celebrate that, and we support that, we have to deal with accountability.

There are individuals in our country who attempted to overthrow the United States of America.

They attempted to hold elected officials hostage.

They threatened to kill those elected officials.

There were pipe bombs that were planted in front of the Republican National Committee, and the Democratic National Committee.

These are individuals who have armed themselves, and positioned themselves as seditionists, seeking to overthrow the United States government.

These individuals need to be held accountable.

For what occurred on January 6, over 140 law enforcement officers injured, one killed, 5 people killed in total.

People have to be held accountable for this.

>> We are a Pacific Northwest-based show, and you lived up here for a number of years, put this a little bit before us, if you would, into the context of the Pacific Northwest.

This is Black History Month, and I think a big mistake that we make sometimes is thinking that this is new, but this region has been a hot bed of racist and anti-Semitic, and anti-Black ideologies in certain corners, for a long time, has it not?

>> Absolutely.

We should remember in many ways Oregon just south of Washington State can be considered the first white nationalist state.

Meaning, when it entered the Union, within its Constitution was a law that forbade black people to even travel or reside inside the state of Oregon.

That was finally overturned, but we should know that it had a huge legacy.

The arrival of Richard Butler, a pastor from Orange County, who relocated to Northern Idaho in the 80s, launching the Aryan Nations, and the idea of the Northwest Imperative, the idea that the Northwest should be an Aryan homeland.

He followed up that by inspiring his followers, and those who supported him, into acts of violence.

Murders, car bombings, armored-- bank robberies, et cetera.

The Pacific Northwest has a long history.

And what the rest of the nation never realized, but I think understands now, is that what transpired on January 6 in the Nation's Capitol had been practiced on the streets and the rural roads of the Pacific Northwest for nearly three decades.

>> Southern Poverty Law Center has a new report out and it says, interestingly enough, the number of hate groups actually seems to be going down, but the white nationalist and Neo-Nazi groups are perhaps making a tactical decision here about being a little more diffuse, a little less organized.

How do you analyze the numbers you see there?

>> Yes, so we should understand that the number of organizations are going down.

But that also means that the number of chapters and units within some organizations have increased.

So it's not that people are abandoning white nationalism.

I think it can be best understood that organizations are no longer needed.

The white nationalist movement has fully entered the mainstream of American life.

It means people do not need to be members of organizations in order to engage in network.

That has caused some people to disengage.

Also the cost of civil suits or organizations that have crossed the line from belief into actual violence, has taken its toll.

And the white nationalist movement has tried to buffer itself from the cost of that violence by de-networking itself, right?

Not having a full entity upon which can be held accountable in a court of law.

But the third is this.

The advent of social media platforms, like Parler, Telegram, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and others, has meant that people can find each other, through other means.

While organizations have certainly declined, the number of individuals and their impact continues to grow somewhat, and we should be concerned about that.

They're just finding new ways to connect.

>> So we have this unprecedented, from what I can tell, national security bulletin coming out about domestic terrorism.

Focused on white nationalism.

And also the fact that this was known about, we've seen it coming, it's been telegraphed, it exists, and it happened.

What do those two things, what does that say about, you know, how this was allowed to happen.

Why was this allowed to come to fruition?

Why do we keep talking about this problem, thirty, forty, fifty years later?

>> We should understand that if we want to understand the growth of the white nationalist movement we have to acknowledge two things.

The first is, our failure to make real a multi-racial democracy.

That is people-centered, accountable, and transparent, has left our country and our democracy vulnerable to white nationalists, who say that the idea of a real democracy is simply unattainable, we need to prove them wrong by dealing with the last vestiges of segregation in transportation, housing, education and employment.

But it's not just dealing with segregation.

It's also dealing with the unconscious bias that has left law enforcement to believe that white nationalists are somehow less of a threat to our communities and to our country than those marching for racial justice.

Right?

We should understand what happened on January 6, right, this breaching, this attempt to overthrow the U.S. government, was not a debate around policy.

It was an attempt to overthrow our very institutions.

In the same way the lack of ability of law enforcement in our government institutions to take white nationalists seriously is not only impacted communities of color-- hasn't just impacted the black and indigenous communities in America-- it has also impacted white people.

Over 45 law enforcement officers have been killed by white nationalists in the last 10 years.

Yet, almost uniformly, law enforcement officers still opinion publicly that those marching for racial justice are somehow more of a threat.

When we ask ourselves why white nationalists are doing so well, it is because we continue to signal to them through our institutions that they are welcome in our communities, and that they have space.

These groups don't come to town bringing bigotry with them.

They merely organize the bigotry that already exists.

>> In the interest of having a balanced discussion with you, too, let's face it, there is a fringe, radical, hateful left.

They are out there, they are anti-democratic, just as anti-democratic, and have their own agenda, and their own goals.

What is the Western Center's view of the radical left, and how do you assess that threat going forward?

>> Western State center is an organization that believes that democratic practice, right, is what is critical to the United States, and it's what's critical to racial and gender equity in the United States.

We also understand that there are anti-democratic elements across the political spectrum.

Anti-democratic and nihilistic movements within the left are not new, in the 1960s, we had the SLA and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, to name one example.

We have seen radical leftists who were radical in the 60s, and their own memoirs critique some of the excesses and the anti-democratic small-- tendencies of social movements on the left.

We think that it is time for all of us across the political spectrum to do some deep soul searching.

The idea that political violence, whether you're talking about the loss of life, or whether we are talking about property damage, and vandalism, simply have no place right now in the political conversation and within the common good.

We simply have too many real issues that we need to contend with as Americans.

And violence does not offer any solutions.

What it does is it hardens us and prevents us from finding our common good.

We don't need to convert one another to each other's political ideologies in the Pacific Northwest.

What we need to do is to find our shared values.

And then act accordingly.

>> Let's continue our discussion now, and speak with the University of Washington's Professor Christopher Parker, who has written several books on black history and right-wing reactionary politics, and appeared in PBS's The African Americans, with Henry Louis-Gates, Jr. You draw a long timeline backwards to where we are today.

A lot of people kind of, I think, have this impression or want to say hey, this is new, this craziness is nothing that-- it hasn't been in the works a long dang time.

Based on my analysis of what you're writing is, it has been in the works for a while.

>> Yeah.

Thank you for having me, Tom.

Yes, this has been around for a very long time.

I don't know if people just don't want to recognize it.

I don't know if people are just ignorant, I don't know.

It really doesn't matter.

But this has been around for quite some time.

We go all the way back to the Know Nothing party of the 1850s, and then come forward, and connected to the, of course, you know, what happened during and in the aftermath of reconstruction, and then we have, of course, the Klan of the 1920s.

Now, a lot of people don't know about the Klan of the 1920s, but the Klan of the 1920s was different from the one that was started in the aftermath of Reconstruction.

It was also different from the one that was reconstituted in 1950s, and it's in fact, it was a national movement, and pretty much everybody who was anybody was in the Klan of the 1920s, if one was a white person.

Except for women.

Women weren't allowed to be in the Klan per se.

But they had an auxiliary Klan that let women into it.

So this is something that has been around for quite some time.

>> So, I wanted to remind you, and refresh you, about the title of your book involving the Tea Party.

You looked at, you know, the start of the Birther Movement, and some of the elements that were creeping into Republicanism through the Tea Party takeover of the party.

What were some of those elements.

Did they telegraph the reality of today?

>> Oh yes.

This, yeah, there's no question about that.

I mean, so some of the elements are, this idea that, like, so conservatives are generally less idealistic and more pragmatic, shall we say.

But these people, these reactionaries, as I call them, are really idealistic.

In that there is a certain kind of America that they see, and the transition from the America, you know, where you always hear these references to, you know, with Tea Party was, take our country back, right?

In time, or from whom.

I prefer to think about it both ways.

But the MAGA movement, right?

Make America Great Again, right, which suggest that there is something wrong with it now, which suggests that they want to go backwards in time, to when it was great.

All right?

And so, a real American as far as, I'm using your quotes here, as far as the MAGA, or true Trump supporters, and as far as the Tea Party was concerned, someone who was white, male, middle class or better off, Christian, native born, heterosexual.

That is the typical real American, as far as they're concerned.

And if one cannot check all those boxes, one is therefore not a real American, and one is therefore encroaching on their ideal of America, and their ideal of America as far as they're concerned, is fading away.

They've, they are concerned with this belief that they're losing quote, end-quote, "their America."

So this is about a sense of cultural dispossession if you will.

Right?

>> One of the reasons I look back at the 2012 election, though, with so much interest now, it's a particular area of interest to me, when you really see the stark choice here between, you know, Romney, as the choice of the Republicans to run against Obama.

Four years later, fast forward, we have Trump.

That was really a major shift there.

And a major happening, I think in the American body of politics.

Give me some thoughts on that.

>> So, yes, so first you had McCain, right?

And then you had Romney, and then what happened was, you know, the Republican party, you had these elements that were already there, as part of the Republican Party, the Tea Party, right?

They were already there.

They weren't too hot on, on Romney, right?

But as soon as Trump became visible, right?

They jumped on Trump's bandwagon.

Now, I want to say this right now, that initially, Cruz was the Tea Party's darling, right?

The 2016, right?

But when they heard Trump saying what he was saying, he was saying everything that they believe, but he was very, very up-front about it.

He didn't hide it.

There weren't these dog whistles.

He said what they were thinking, right?

And they shoved Cruz to the side.

And latched on to Trump.

>> Last question for you here, how will we look back at the Trump years, do you think, when it comes to black history?

I sometimes wonder, is the pandemic going to kind of paper a lot of this over?

And it will almost be like the lessons of the past might be repeatable, because we're so focused on the pandemic?

Or no.

Will this be a big turning point in the moral arch of the universe, when there is a turning away from Trumpism, or a turning to of Trumpism.

How do you see it?

I'm asking you to read your crystal ball a little bit.

>> [Chuckles] I think this has a real potential to be an inflection point.

Not only-- well, for the country and for black people.

And I say this as an inflection point that has a great potential to be that simply because, I mean the terror, so the threat that Trump and Trumpism poses to the black community really sort of drove black turnout.

When you really think about who the real patriots are of this period, if you think about the coronavirus, and the disproportionate threat that it poses against the black community or that it is, to be to the black community, and yet we still got out and voted and in the numbers that we got out and voted?

That just tells you the sense of existential threat that the black community felt from Trump, and feels from Trumpism.

>> Interesting point.

Professor Parker, I appreciate your time in joining us here on Northwest Now.

>> It's good to be here, Tom.

Thank you.

>> Every year on this program, we detail how all the trends remain the same.

That African Americans as a whole remain behind the curve when it comes to education, incomes, overall health, wealth accumulation, employment, you name it.

The bottom line is that while well-meaning people see those things as problems, the sad fact is that a lot of Americans see that as the way things should rightly be.

Even today, 158 years after emancipation.

I hope this program got you thinking and talking.

To watch this program again, or to share it with others, Northwest Now can be found on the web at KBTC.org, and be sure to follow us on Twitter, at Northwest Now.

Thanks for taking a closer look on this edition of Northwest Now.

Until next time, I'm Tom Layson, thanks for watching.

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