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| A KKK member at Saturday's Unite the Right rally |
It could be argued that the vile sickness of white supremacy the world witnessed has its origins in the same state where scores of Neo-Nazis, KKK members and alt-right bigots gathered to unleash their fury yesterday.
It was just about 132 miles southeast of Charlottesville that Dutch traders first sailed up the James River with a group of about 19 African slaves seized from a Spanish ship, and brought them to Jamestown, Virginia in 1619.
Those Africans, brought there to augment the labor force of indentured white servants working to clear land for England's Chesapeake Bay colonies, were just a small portion of the 10 to 12.5 million African men, women and children estimated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to have been kidnapped and transported to North, Central and South America and the Caribbean between the 15th and 19th centuries.
As the fledgling nation's agricultural economy expanded, the need for enslaved African labor exponentially increased, spawning an ideology of white supremacy used, in part, to justify the massive contradiction of a country founded on lofty principles of democracy and religious freedom being built on a foundation of enforced human bondage and suffering that would last over 250 years.
The ideology of white supremacy was necessary to maintain and rationalize not only the institution of slavery, but also the systematic destruction of Native American culture and the marginalization of immigrants.
But even after the abolitionist movement expanded to America from England, even after an estimated 620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, even after Jim Crow, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the Women's Suffrage movement, the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the Korean War, the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War - even after all of that, the ideology of white supremacy has festered in this country.
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| Chief Justice Roger Taney |
There are numerous cases of courts justifying the seizure of Native American lands and the repeated violations of treaties negotiated between various tribes and the U.S. government.
In The People of the State of California v. George W. Hall in 1854 the Supreme Court of California ruled that Hall, a white man convicted and sentenced to death for murdering a Chinese miner named Ling Sing, could not be convicted because Chinese Americans or Chinese immigrants (like blacks and Native Americans) did not have the right to testify against white citizens in a court of law.
Hall had been convicted based on the testimony of three Chinese witnesses.
More famously in 1857, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for the 7-2 majority, ruled that Dredd Scott (an African-American slave who sued his owner Irene Emerson for his freedom after she refused his offer to purchase the freedom of him and his wife Harriet Robinson) had no right to sue in court because "a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S], and sold as slaves" could not be be a citizen regardless of whether he was free.
The Dredd Scott Decision as it came to be known, emboldened southern slave owners who were fearful of the growing abolitionist movement and it served as a landmark moment in the opposition to slavery in the north - it also sparked the Secessionist movement that led to the Civil War five years later in 1862.
More recently, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century, the Republican Party has unapologetically and repeatedly tapped into the toxic vein of white supremacy to sew racial divisions as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy used to leverage political power and economic gain.
It was even given the more easily-digestible term "Southern Strategy", which was used by both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in an effort to lure white voters who'd traditionally supported the Democratic Party by using race as a wedge issue.
So while the ideology of white supremacy has been interwoven into the fabric of American history and Donald Trump alone cannot be held responsible for the riots that gripped Charlottesville on Saturday, he none the less "owns" those riots.
From the moment he opened his 2016 presidential campaign by accusing Mexican immigrants of being rapists and drug dealers, he openly tapped into and sought to cultivate, racism and bigotry.
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| Trump with Neo-Nazi advisor Sebastian Gorka |
Not only did he re-tweet statements from known Neo-Nazis and white supremacists, he made some of them his closest advisors in the White House.
Individuals like counterterrorism advisor Sebastian Gorka, whose alignment with Vitézi Rend, a Hungarian Neo-Nazi group, prompted 55 members of Congress to send a letter to Donald Trump urging that he fire the anti-Semite from his staff - calls echoed by various Jewish groups as well as the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
There's also Stephen Miller, a brooding anti-immigrant peddler of bigotry whose personal ethnic and racial bias was on full display during a contentious exchange with CNN's Jim Acosta that made headlines just last week.
Take a few minutes to check out Scott Johnson's article on Miller that was published in the March 29th issue of the Hollywood Reporter - Johnson interviews members of the Santa Monica Synagogue, the progressive temple that Miller's family belonged to when he graduated from Hebrew School back in 2001.
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| Anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller |
Johnson notes that a broad cross-section of Jews in LA recently formed Jews United for Democracy and Justice (JUDJ), a non-profit formed in response to the Trump administration's executive actions to put harsh restrictions on Muslims seeking to immigrate to the US.
It's the people like Gorka, Bannon and Miller (and there are others) who surround Trump that have made appealing to white supremacist ideology a central plank of his presidency who bear responsibility for creating the kind of environment where members of the KKK and Neo-Nazis openly tout their support for Trump.
Former KKK Imperial Wizard David Duke, who attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville on Saturday, actually told reporters that the riot was part of an effort to bring Trump's calls to "take America back." into fruition.
As you know by now, those efforts turned downtown Charlottesville into a scene of violence and death as protesters and anti-racist counter-protesters engaged in periodic fights; some witnesses say police stood and watched when fighting broke out between both groups before the start of the rally around 11am.
A 20-year-old man named James Alex Fields drove a Dodge Challenger into a group of anti-racist counter-protesters at a high rate of speed, injuring 19 people and killing 32-year-old Charlottesville resident Heather Heyer before he attempted to flee the scene.
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| Vanguard America terrorist James Alex Fields |
As the Anti-Defamation League reports, Vanguard America (VA) is an organization comprised mostly of 18 to 24-year-old white men.
According to the ADL the group is aligned with the Neo-Nazi National Front and has been targeting young white men on college campuses and leaving anti-Semitic flyers and stickers at Jewish centers and places of worship.
On July 2nd they hung a banner at a Holocaust memorial in Lakewood, New Jersey.
Tragically, two Virginia State Police officers were also killed when the helicopter they were piloting in the area went down as they were monitoring the riots.
What makes the whole affair even more tragic is the fact that once again, Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists who came from different parts of the country (some armed with semi-automatic rifles).
He had the nerve to trot out his rarely-seen wife Melania to issue a generic statement against violence.
And more troubling, Trump refused to call Fields using his vehicle to try and kill people a terrorist act; when Islamic terrorists mowed people down in London he was quick to call it terrorism.
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| A young girl holds a "Hate has no home here" sign on Saturday |
The void of leadership from the White House and Department of Justice in response to violence by white supremacists during this administration has been glaring and disturbing.
The pain of losing my father to cancer when I was 28-years old remains the most difficult experience of my life.
Born in the segregated south in a rural North Carolina farming community in 1932, he was only 64 years-old when he died - almost a year to the day of his retirement after a long career as an executive with the Boy Scouts of America.
Throughout his life my father had to fight entrenched racial discrimination as a student, professional and family man to achieve the success he obtained.
While I often tell my friends whose parents are still living that I'd give anything to spend just a few minutes talking with my father, I'm glad he's not here to see what's become of the country he loved and proudly served as a soldier.
I'm thankful he's not here to have seen racial hatred crawl out from under the rock and roam the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia in broad daylight leaving injury and death in its wake.
To me it's a relief that he's not here to see the results of a presidency that has made it a policy to try and normalize the fringe views of those who hate others based on their religion, ethnicity or skin color.
A White House aligned with ignorance rather than enlightenment, and hatred rather than love.
While I often tell my friends whose parents are still living that I'd give anything to spend just a few minutes talking with my father, I'm glad he's not here to see what's become of the country he loved and proudly served as a soldier.
I'm thankful he's not here to have seen racial hatred crawl out from under the rock and roam the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia in broad daylight leaving injury and death in its wake.
To me it's a relief that he's not here to see the results of a presidency that has made it a policy to try and normalize the fringe views of those who hate others based on their religion, ethnicity or skin color.
A White House aligned with ignorance rather than enlightenment, and hatred rather than love.
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