Tim Wise: White Supremacy, the Right and their War on Pluralism

Connect with the movement at RefuseFascism.org and support:

Venmo: @Refuse-Fascism
Cashapp: @RefuseFascism
Paypal: paypal.me/refusefascism
Web: donate.refusefascism.org

Music for this episode: Penny the Snitch by Ikebe Shakedown.

Transcript:

Episode 70

SPEAKERS

Sam Goldman, Harry Dunn, Tim Wise

Tim Wise 00:00

The voter suppression initiatives the anti anti-racist education or just anti-truth initiatives…if you can control the narrative, if you can control the story that gets told, then you control the country. These are all ways to limit democracy, limit what people are taught, limit what people can say in protest and limit who’s able to actually choose the leaders of the country.

Sam Goldman 00:42

Welcome to Episode 70 of the Refuse Fascism podcast. This podcast is brought to you by volunteers with Refuse Fascism. I’m Sam Goldman, one of those volunteers and host of the show, Refuse Fascism exposes analyzes, and stands against the very real danger and threat of fascism coming to power in this country. In today’s episode, we’re sharing an interview with Tim Wise, anti-racist educator and author. We discuss the Republi-fascist voter suppression bills, anti-protest laws, the attacks on the teaching of any real history of this country, and the continued role racism plays in the United States, the white supremacy this fascist movement foments and relies on.

It’s summer 2021. School board meetings are wrapped with white parents decrying Black Lives Matter boogeymen and theories they don’t even pretend to understand; the specter of “Marxist indoctrination.” Fascist governors ban mask mandates at these very schools, exalting the right to kill millions across the country, while fascist Congress people defy the mask mandate in the same building their hordes invaded on January 6. And their movement of millions replicates this across the country. Right along with deadly COVID cases, these fascists continue to brazenly spread Trump’s toxic lie of a stolen election. Where’s the common thread here? And what does it have to do with fascism? Fascists, in order to succeed, must bludgeon the truth. They unleash their mobs and threaten violence as part of building their movement in an effort to consolidate the power they do have at any given moment. Remember, the rule of law depends on truth and evidence.

For fascism to seize power, both must be obliterated. Before we share today’s episode, I did want to touch briefly on some of the developments of this past week. On Tuesday, the House Select Committee held its first hearings on the events of January 6. Sergeant Gonell, Officer Fannone, Officer Hodges and Sergeant Dunn shared their experiences of the deadly assault on the Capitol called for by then-President Trump to violently overturn an election he falsely claimed was stolen. Let’s listen to Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn testifying during the hearing:

Harry Dunn 03:17

More and more insurrectionists were pouring into the area by the Speaker’s lobby near the Rotunda and some wearing MAGA hats and shirts that said Trump 2020. I told them to just leave the Capitol, and their response, they yelled, “no man, this is our house. President Trump invited us here. We’re here to stop the steal. Joe Biden is not the president. Nobody voted for Joe Biden.” I’m a law enforcement officer. And I do my best to keep politics out of my job. But in this circumstance, I responded. “Well, I voted for Joe Biden. Does my vote not count? Am I nobody?” That prompted a torrent of racial epithets. One woman in a pink MAGA shirt yelled “You hear that guys? This nigger voted for Joe Biden.” Then the crowd, perhaps around 20 people joined in screaming “Boo! Fucking nigger!” No one had ever, ever called me a nigger while wearing the uniform of a Capitol Police Officer. In the days following the attempted insurrection, other Black officers shared with me their own stories of racial abuse on January 6. One officer told me he had never in his his entire 40 years of life, been call a nigger to his face, and that streak ended on January 6. Yet another Black officer later told me he had been confronted by insurrectionists in the Capitol who told him “Put your gun down, and we’ll show you what kind of nigger you really are.”

Sam Goldman 05:10

I found this part to be powerfully revealing of the deep white supremacy in this whole fascist movement. At another point during his testimony, Officer Dunn said that the difference between this protest and all previous marches on Washington that could have turned violent was that the Trumpers were, “emboldened by people in power” and he also said: “they have marching orders.”

Poetically, and with painful precision in my opinion, Jeff Sharlet continues to expose how this vicious Christian nationalism was central to an a driving force for the January 6 failed coup attempt with this piece in Vanity Fair’s Hive this past week. He writes:

“The insurrection, insisted Officer Daniel Hodges, was religious. ‘It was clear the terrorists perceive themselves to be Christians’ he said, in a testimony acutely sensitive to the symbolic language of the mob. ‘I saw the Christian flag directly to my front, another red ‘Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,’ a staple at Trump rallies. Another Jesus is king.’ From early on insurrectionists mistook themselves for missionaries, ‘some of them would try to recruit me, said officer Hodges, one of them came up to me and said, ‘are you my brother?’ When it was Hodges’ turn at the front, in the ‘meat grinder’, where an insurrectionist literally tried to rip his head off, they still attempted to evangelize, ‘even during this intense contest of wills, they sought to convert us to their cult. One man shouted “we all just want to make our voices heard and I think you feel the same. I really think you feel the same.”‘ But what was ‘the same’? Hodges has called it a ‘white nationalist insurrection’. That it was also a Christian nationalist one is no contradiction. ‘The insurrectionists,’ says Anthea Butler, the U Penn historian of religion and the author of White Evangelical Racism, ‘played out what American history has been for white supremacists, Christian nationalism steeped in racism from slavery to the present. But today, the Capitol Police officers showed us there’s a straight line from the Confederacy to the January 6 insurrectionists.'”

Again, this was from Jeff Sharlet’s piece in Vanity Fair’s Hive this past week. And what were the fascists doing during these hearings and shortly after? Well, even before the hearings last weekend, most aptly encapsulated by Chauncey DeVega’s Salon article titled Donald Trump Rallies the Troops in Phoenix. Unfortunately, that’s not a metaphor. He was rallying his troops. It’s clear that the moment of danger has not passed. Hardened with a trial run behind them, Trump continues to stoke his crowd with equal parts vengeance and delusion. This rally was largely ignored by mainstream media, which, as DeVega, also noted, “reflects a logic where if Trump and his Neo fascist movement are ignored, the danger to the country will go away. It will not.”

The day of the hearing, the 4G gang –Greene, Gates, Gohmert, Gosar — a fascist conspiracy-bound loose cannon congressional representatives, attempted to hold a press conference outside the Department of Justice, trying to turn reality on its head and claim the violent insurrectionists are the victims in all this. I want to give a big cheer to those who shut down at that press conference with their protests and noisemaking. But not to be outdone, the same day the House GOP conference chair, Elise Stefanik, exhibited gaslighting at its finest claiming, “…the American people deserve to know the truth that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as Speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6.” Umair Haque aptly tweeted during the hearing, “This testimony gives you an insight into the kind of people America’s now dealing with. What they’ll do. If they’re willing to kill politicians and Capitol police, imagine what they’ll do to the rest of us. Not a joke. These are genuine fascists. America’s ISIS.”

We’ll have more to say on the testimony and the hearings more broadly in upcoming episodes. Meanwhile, the DOJ said this week the IRS must turn over Trump’s tax docs to Congress. So he’s done, right? Oh, justice is so sweet. He goes to jail. Wait, hold on a minute. How the hell is that going to bring about accountability for a fascist coup attempt? How will this stop the movement of millions of fascists? It won’t. Okay, but we now know that Trump told the Justice Department to call the election corrupt, and leave the rest him. So Trump has got to be indicted any day now. Right? At this rate, that will not happen unless there’s a major demand for it from the people.

Lastly, we can’t have an episode these days where we don’t talk about Texas. Tim and I touch on this in the interview, but we spoke before the latest round of action where governor Greg Abbott — or should we call him the President of the Republic of Texas? — signed a ‘show me your papers’ executive order, codifying the racial profiling of any non-Aryans. Not only is this horrific in its own right, not only is he using the pandemic that he is fanning the flames up as a cover, essentially calling immigrants “diseased,” but he did this in a way that clearly oversteps the federal government’s mandate to manage immigration. It’s a clear power play to take more power into the hands of the fascists, wherever they hold power, provoke the Democrats into a weak-willed confrontation, the only kind they know how to do, and fire up the fascist base. The echoes of secession, and the Civil War could not be louder.

With that, here’s my conversation with Tim Wise. Today we’re getting into the fascist offensive white supremacists have launched across the country on education and its connection to voter suppression and criminalizing dissent. 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020. As Coco Das, a fellow editor for RefuseFascism.org has written: “They’re a grotesque expression of the worst of this country, of its ugly narcissism, its thuggish militarism, its ignorance and refusal to give a shit about the rest of the world. They carry the torture of slavery, genocide, and Jim Crow terror, gunned up and maskless, they exalt above all the right to kill.” The Republi-fascist party has been purged of dissenting voices. The mass fascist movement has hardened in the wake of their January 6 coup attempt. Fascist initiatives seething with the most open and vicious white supremacy around restricting voting rights, immigration, criminalizing protests and whitewashing history are rapidly advancing in state houses across the country. The election of Biden has not eliminated the danger. It is only bought us some time. To help us deepen our understanding of the scope of this attack, the motives behind it, why this matters and what’s needed, I’m honored to be chatting today with Tim Wise. Tim is an anti-racism educator, speaker and author of seven books, his latest book being Dispatches from the Race War. Welcome, Tim, thanks for joining us.

Tim Wise 13:15

You bet. Thank you for having me.

Sam Goldman 13:18

As we sit now, 17 states have enacted 28 new laws making it harder for people to vote, disproportionately people who are Black, brown, or indigenous. Eight states have passed laws cracking down on protest activity since the beautiful uprising for Black Lives last summer. And similar bills are pending in 21 states. Efforts in 27 states to restrict education on racism or as some have framed it, bias, or the contributions of specific racial or ethnic groups to US history, or the big bucket term: “related topics,” which as an educator is one of the most deeply concerning to me. So let’s start with: Can you walk us through what’s happening here? For a lot of people, I think it’s like a culture war that’s come out of nowhere.

Tim Wise 14:07

There’s a lot of ways we could trace this and locate the roots of all this, I think Carol Anderson, a brilliant scholar at Emory in Atlanta, in her book, White Rage, really talks a lot about what I think is the critical thing to get our head around, which is that at every point in American history, whenever there has been progress made particularly by Black folks, and that progress, you know, maybe sometimes quite real and other times it may be more symbolic, but if it is perceived as a significant step forward for Black people in particular, there is this concomitant white rage, white backlash that happens. Anderson takes it from the period after abolition, the backlash to Reconstruction, the backlash to the Great Migration when Black folk started moving north, that was met with pogroms, racial riots, racial violence, and course the backlash after integration in the civil rights movement, the backlash after affirmative action, the backlash after the Obama election. Even though that didn’t really move the needle on overall racial inequity, it was certainly seen by millions of white folks on the right as this symbolic chipping away at the edifice of white hegemony and white domination. So all of that has led to this very predictable backlash.

What makes now somewhat unique, though, even though it has this long trajectory, is that unlike all of those other periods, this one is perhaps more fraught with danger, because for the first time in that long litany of white rage incidents that Carol Anderson talks about, and that I just mentioned, white America is actually being confronted right now with real demographic and cultural transformation that frankly, wasn’t really happening 50 years ago, or 100 years ago. So backlash as white people 70 years ago, or something, or 100 years ago, against the Great Migration was sort of silly in retrospect, because white folks still obviously had hegemony. But right now, we know in 20 years whites are going to be less than an absolute majority of the population, only a plurality. And for people who have had hegemony, 100%, or 90% of the good stuff, to say, you’re only going to get, you know, 65%, your share, or even 70, or 75% is like the end of the world. And so I think that change, the cultural shift, we are increasingly a multicultural society in every way, shape, and form to the point where you really can’t look at popular culture, entertainment, cuisine, fashion, anything else and really tease out any one particular cultural thread. That may be for some of us fantastic, but for those who have gotten high on and addicted to the ability to define the country as theirs and to see themselves as the floor model of what an American is, that’s like the end of the world. I wrote about this a bit in my book, Dear White America, that there will come a point when the right realized that it really couldn’t win at the ballot box any longer, certainly not in terms of the popular vote, the Electoral College being a different thing, that they might have their own ballot or the bullet moment, to paraphrase Malcolm X — not that they would know where that came from — but they might have a moment like that where they say to themselves, man, you know, we can’t win, so we have to rig the game, or else we got to start shooting, or perhaps both.

The things that you mentioned, the voter suppression initiatives, the anti anti-racist education, or just anti-truth initiatives that you mentioned, that’s all part of this last gasp effort to rig the game and to hold on very much like white South Africans did for a long time, before the fall of apartheid. It’s an attempt to police the borders, both literally with anti-immigrant rhetoric, for instance, but also the metaphorical borders of the nation, which are drawn in the classroom, right? Who are we, as a country, these folks are trying to police those borders and say “on the one hand, we’re going to try to keep certain people out of here, but if we can’t, by God, we’re going to tell you the story of the country, and we’re going to define what we are, we’re not going to let you do that.” That’s what they’re saying. And so it all is part of that, I think going back hundreds of years, but really reaching this apex right now.

Sam Goldman 18:05

Do you see there being a layer in addition to the demographic and the cultural shift to there being hard-fought fights for some concessions that were made for Black people to have rights? There is an increase in the power that not just whites have in this country, and they’re seeking retribution for people even having the crumbs that they’ve been given?

Tim Wise 18:32

Well, I think there’s a fear of that. Whether or not that’s real is a totally different thing. In ‘Dear White America’, what I talked about when I wrote that book, which was, you know, almost a decade ago, now, the way I talked about it was that there were sort of four things happening at once that were creating this perfect storm for white anxiety. This is during the Tea Party stuff; so before Trump. I already mentioned two, the demographics and the cultural shift. The other two were the economic meltdown, the globalization of the economy that was confronting white America, or certain segments of white America with a level of insecurity that, frankly, white folks had not really experienced since the Great Depression. So 80 years where that level of uncertainty just really had not been a white thing. It had been pretty normative for Black and brown folk, but not for white folks.

The other thing was the political transformation symbolized by the rise of Barack Obama, again, not really changing the fundamental contours of racial inequity, but the idea that the symbolic leader of the “free world” of this country was going to be a guy with an exotic name and an exotic background. It didn’t look like the other presidents who had been before him. All of that sort of confronted white people with the realization that the political power, the cultural power, the demographic domination, and the economic security that we had gotten used to, we’re all now sort of not as certain, even though we were still going to have a disproportionate amount of power. God knows when you look at who’s in the Senate, you look at who runs the country, you look at the actual sources of power, it’s still very much white dominated. But again, if you’re used to hegemony, pluralism feels like oppression.

Think about last year with the uprising in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. What I think really scared these folks was that you had millions of people, including millions of young white people in particular, who had not necessarily been active in the racial justice movement before. But because we were all in this sort of lockdown space, because of COVID, people were paying very close attention much more. So we didn’t have the background noise of our daily lives going on. So you had millions of people that were able to focus in, not only on that 9 minutes and 29 seconds of a snuff film, that was taken, thankfully, so we know what happened in the killing of George Floyd, but understanding the broader issue. When those folks on the right saw 23 million, by some estimates, people over the course of several months, going into the streets, public demonstrations, rallies, protests, etc, other public events, including a lot of white folks, that, of course, was seen as this political challenge. It’s not just those Black folks anymore. It’s not just those brown folks anymore. They’re these white folks who were also asking questions like, what is allyship? What is solidarity? What is my role in this? And as long as white folks weren’t asking that question, white political leaders were like, whatever, you know, we know how to handle the Black folks when they scream and yell, but now that it’s become this broad, multiracial coalition really pushing things into the forefront that weren’t being discussed before. Really challenging the criminal justice system, talking about alternatives to law enforcement as a mechanism of public control issues. Like reparations being put onto the front burner, not that we’re anywhere closer to that than we were a year ago. But the fact that that’s being talked about, that demonstrates that the Overton window, as they call it, has shifted to some extent on these issues. And they’re trying very hard to shift back.

Sam Goldman 21:46

I really appreciate you walking through kind of how people’s thinking was changed. One of the things that I recall was this reckoning, not just with the current state of white supremacy, but its roots from the conception and people dealing with history that they may not have known or thought about before. I think that there’s profound implications when people start to realize maybe it’s not the shining light on the hill. One thing that I’ve been wrangling with, and perhaps you have, too, is those that call these conversations a “distraction.” When a conversation comes up about something which is so important that we all should be focusing on, which is this violent, open, blatant white supremacy, which anyone should be able to see, in my opinion, at the heart of these assaults on education, voting or protests, they’ll say that it’s a distraction from where they see the real work should be in like bringing the country together, or making some progress in the small time we have, or something like that. What do you say to those people?

Tim Wise 22:53

Well, everybody has their own version of this distraction argument, there’s a conservative version of it, there’s a liberal version of it, and then there’s a leftist version of it, and I think they’re all wrong. The conservative version, of course, is the more we talk about racism, the more divided we are as a country, we should not talk about this, we should talk about what brings us together and not what drives us apart. Which is very convenient when the system has generally worked for you. It’s always nice to not focus on the divisive stuff when you’re on the top of that pile. So that’s obviously a non- starter for anyone who believes in equity. Because look, those same arguments were said to Dr. King and the movement 60 years ago. Why are you being divisive? Why don’t we talk about what brings us together? Then the liberal version is the version that says: Well, we can’t talk about all this systemic racism stuff, because we need to get this infrastructure bill passed, or we need to undo some of the damage that Trump did. And we got to really support Biden, so we can’t talk about these big issues. And look, I believe strategically, it’s very important that we think strategically, we don’t want to empower congressional Republicans, we don’t want to make the midterms a disaster, even for an inadequate Democratic Party. I don’t want to see the right become more powerful, because we insist on a purity of message that doesn’t consider things strategically. But at the same time, we can’t allow ourselves to say, well, we’ll get to racial issues later, but we’ve got to deal with this other nice stuff first, because that’s what we’ve done all through history. Every time you look at history, anytime the word compromise exists, any compromise at all, that exists with that terminology always compromises the interest of Black people.

Then there’s a left version of this, which says: Well, this is a distraction from the millionaires and the billionaires and the oligarchs, and why don’t we just talk about the 1% and all that. What that ignores is the reason we do not have a broad-based movement for class justice and socio-economic justice in this country is white supremacy. If you look at the history, it is in fact white supremacy and the doling out of just enough privilege to white people, including white workers, just enough, I’m not saying it’s a lot but just enough to keep them in line, and to keep them from joining in solidarity with Black and brown folks who are also working class and struggling. When you say, well, we just got to deal with the rich, and this is all about class, it’s really the only color that matters is green and let’s just go after the capitalist oligarchs and all that, you’re missing is that the reason that doesn’t happen is white supremacy which has given white working people an alternative identity to which they can cling, other than working class. As opposed to the European nations where Marxist thought first developed, you didn’t have that as a division, it was either you’re either the elite or you’re the peasants. And if you’re the peasants, you know, you’re not going to get a better deal unless you have a revolution. But in this country, we have a bunch of off ramps in this culture that allow white workers to go well, I could fight the class struggle, but damn, there’s a detour right there that says white, I’ll just take that one. Or I’ll just take the one that says Christian, or the one that says straight, or the one that says male. I’ll use my whiteness as property, as Cheryl Harris says, my masculinity as property, my heteronormativity, my Christian hegemony, there are all these things that get in the way of class solidarity. And unless we challenge them directly, and you can’t do that, if you’re not willing to talk about them, then we’re never going to get the kind of class unity that we need to actually deal with larger issues of economic injustice.

Sam Goldman 26:15

I was smiling, as Tim was talking now, because I think that a lot of people think that you can separate white supremacy from this system of capitalism. Listeners may think that too. Personally, I don’t think that you can. And I think that you can’t fully address white supremacy without addressing the system. And I don’t think that you can address the system without addressing the white supremacy. I was wondering when we look at what’s happening in our classrooms or in the universities, and the banning to me, which is of critical thinking of history. I’m wondering how you think those are connected with voter suppression and criminalizing protest? Are they connected? I mean, on one level, we could just say, yeah, that’s white supremacy. But why is this such an essential battle for those seeking it out?

Tim Wise 27:09

I mean, if you think about it, the three sort of key pillars of democracy are free speech, and protest, voting, and education. Those are three critical components to any functioning democracy. So if you don’t want democracy, if you don’t believe in it, and you never believed in it, then you need to attempt to control those three areas. So if you crackdown on protests, or at least certain protests, you don’t crack down on insurrection protest at the Capitol, but you crack down on anti-racism protests or whatever else, that’s one way that you try to limit democracy. If you crack down on voting, and you try to limit it to the “better” people, which is what these folks believe. Look, let’s be very clear, some of them were willing to admit it. During the Tea Party stuff, you had Tea Party leaders, Judson Phillips was one for instance, Brian Fisher of American Family Association. Rush Limbaugh, before his death, he had said at one point on the radio, that maybe we ought to think seriously about property requirements to vote. This is stuff that has already been ruled unconstitutional, but which they’re quite openly talking about, again, well, maybe you need to own property to vote. And maybe we need to have a literacy test. Which of course, they I presume, will write. They’ll determine what’s important historical knowledge to know. Because I can write a literacy test as well that I promise they would all fail, but I’m not going to be the one writing it, neither are you. So if you openly advocate that, you’re saying we don’t really believe in the right of everybody to choose who’s going to govern them. So you’re attacking that. And who are the people they don’t want to vote? Well, they don’t want Black and brown folk, of course, they don’t want working class folks. So let’s restrict early voting, which is not only disproportionately used by Black and brown folk, but also by working class folk who maybe can’t get off work on election day. And so they use one of the earlier days to do that. Let’s try to make it harder for students to vote. Because we know young people disproportionately vote in a way that they don’t like. I mean, it’s all very transparent.

The education piece is the other leg of democracy. If you can control what is taught, then you don’t have to worry about the vote. You don’t have to worry about what they’re going to do on election day, because you’ve already sold them your narrative. So all they know is what you tell them. The schools are the one area that the right realize is that progressive voices can actually get heard. We’re not going to be heard as often on talk radio, we’re not going to be heard as often and as dramatically in a lot of mass media. I’m talking about real progressive voices, not just sort of liberal voices, but by God, you know, in the schools, yeah, because we actually believe in scholarship and went into those fields when they were running off the run Wall Street. They got a lot more money out of the deal, but we did get a little influence, at least in that one area. And that’s the one area that they want to now crack down on. So it makes a lot of sense if you can control the narrative, if you can control the story that gets told, then you control the country. I mean, there’s that old saying and I can’t remember who said it, but I don’t need the guns if I can write the song. If I can write the nation’s songs, then I have a certain amount of power. And there’s a truth in that. Songs, tell stories, books tell stories, you know, narratives tell stories. And if you’re able to craft narratives, you can influence the culture. And that’s one area where progressive folks have had a little bit more luck, let’s say, than on Wall Street or in the halls of political power, and now they’re trying to come for that. So I think that’s the connective tissue here. These are all ways to limit democracy, limit what people are taught, limit what people can say in protest and limit who’s able to actually choose the leaders of the country.

Sam Goldman 30:31

I’ve been thinking a lot about Texas lately…

Tim Wise 30:35

I try to think about Texas as little as often.

Sam Goldman 30:38

Not just because the news came out that the Senate in Texas passed a bill to eliminate a requirement that public schools teach that the Ku Klux Klan and its white supremacist campaign of terror were morally wrong. This is part of them cutting other things like the I Have a Dream speech and the United Farmworkers history, I think Susan B. Anthony’s writings were also cut. These cuts to giving real education, as opposed to this Republi-fascist indoctrination are not an anomaly. It’s part of a whole package happening in Texas, from the attacks on abortion rights, which goes so far as really codified vigilantism, where people are offered a $10,000 bounty for the hunting of people that assist women in gaining abortion; this on top of the “fetal heartbeat” bill. They’ve already made sweeping efforts in mandating “patriotic education” and outlining telling the truth. You’ve got voter suppression. Probably the most extreme voter suppression because it includes in addition to all the other elements like early voting being banned, and outlawing passing out water, all of that stuff that we’ve seen elsewhere. There’s language that enables a judge to overturn an election, not with evidence that fraud actually happened, but with a “determination” that enough ballots were illegally cast, that it could have made a difference. And they’re building a border wall. So, it’s really sweeping how big of a foothold they’re making in Texas. And I know Texas isn’t the only place, but it is sweeping. And I was wondering, what makes Texas so Texas? Why are fascists able to make so much headway and they’re not only in like the white supremacist indoctrination of youth, but across the board? And what lessons should we be learning from that?

Tim Wise 32:30

Well, I lived in Texas for five months in 1992, longest five months of my life. I was in Houston. Harris County is an interesting place to be if you want to observe the way white supremacy operates. Particularly in law enforcement, it’s very hard to miss. I have lots of dear friends in Texas, lots of folks who do amazing work in Texas, but I think they’re up against it there. Both because of the history: The reason white folks went there in the first place was because they wanted to bring enslaved persons into the territory and carve out a space for themselves as enslavers, as kidnappers, as traffickers of other human beings. So there’s a history there. And we see that when you look at the secession documents, and the resolutions that were passed when Texas seceded from the Union, it’s one of the most blatantly white supremacist documents that you’ll ever read. You know, all of the southern states that seceded, certainly did so for the same reason. We lie about it now, but they were very clear back then that it was about maintaining the system of enslavement and white supremacy. There were five states that actually reported out real sort of wording as to why they had done it. Texas was one of them, and they made it exceedingly clear. What Texas is doing now — which of course, they would want their children not to learn about — their lawmakers said that they were doing it for that reason. It’s a stunning document.

That’s the root of what Texas is doing today. It has always been a place where the leadership sought to maintain white supremacy. And let’s be very, very honest, if Texas goes — I mean, this is why they’re pulling out all the stops there, with voter suppression, with the education restrictions, with everything, with all of the legislation that they have been considering is because — they realize if Texas goes “blue”, which again, I mean, putting aside how utterly non-revolutionary the Democratic Party is, for Texas, for those Republicans, if that state goes blue, even though it’s never going to be as progressive a state, even if it went Democrat, as some other states would be, the mere fact with its Electoral College votes that Texas could flip, if the demographics continue to shift, if the organizing work on the ground continues to move, and if all white folks keep saying they ain’t getting a vaccine, if Texas flips, it’s over. And these folks know it’s over.

There’s no way that the Republican Party can ever win again, if they lose Texas. They’re re-doing the Alamo shit right now because they know if we lose this one, it’s over, and so they are going to continue to pull out all the stops. And I don’t just mean legal ones. I mean, probably some, there are prepared to engage in real violent activity to maintain what they know is sort of the firewall against, again, not social justice, democracy, but just the firewall against the Democratic Party. Because if that one goes, it’s done, and I think they realize that. Which is why some folks down there keep talking about seceding again, or whatever, you know, we got to get out of this country. Well, you know, that’s why they say that because they realize that they are sort of that firewall against the possibility that we could move toward real multiracial democracy in this country. And just to clarify, the people that are saying that are the “right.”

They know, I mean, I think they realize that that’s the importance of keeping that state in the hands of Republicans is that that state plays such an outsized role in national elections. If it were to flip Democrat, the Republican Party would be done. What they would then have to do, and this will happen, by the way, if Texas does flip, then Republicans will be the first ones arguing to abolish the Electoral College. They will absolutely positively support abolishing the Electoral College as soon as Texas flips. Or they will decide, well, we should split Texas into three states, Austin over here, maybe Houston over here, and then “everything else will be us” kind of thing. And they’ll try to gerrymander the whole state into three separate entities. I mean, something absurd will happen. But that’s why, because again, and this is what I think, you know, so often is missed. In this country, we talked about right and left. And if you ask people sort of, you know what a conservatives believe. And they say, well, small government. All that it has nothing to do with the size of government. I mean, conservatives are fine with big government as long as it’s doing what they want it to do. But what the right and left had been historically, going all the way back to France, where these terms are coined after the revolution, and during the period of the revolution, is that those on the left seek to upend existing hierarchies of domination and subordination, and those on the right generally seek to maintain traditional hierarchy. They view it as: these are the better people, whether that’s the monarchy in France, or whether that is King George, you know, the royalists would have been on the “right” in that particular dynamic. Whether that’s the southerners wanting to succeed, because the “white man should rule”; whether that’s people believing that the wealthy should rule because they’re better; that men should be on top and dominate society in a patriarchy; that straight folks, Christians, etc.

If you’re on the right, you are in all likelihood, someone who believes in the maintenance of traditional hierarchy. And if you’re on the left, you believe that traditional hierarchy is flawed and ought to be challenged. And that is the fundamental dividing line. So when these folks are gathering to restrict who’s going to vote, to restrict whether women can control their own bodies, to control what’s going to be taught in the schools and cutting taxes on the wealthy, not caring about the taxes that affect lower income and working class folks, all of that has in common one thing. Everything that those on the right are doing is about maintaining that traditional hierarchy of white and male and straight and Christian and wealthy, and everything that those of us who are challenging that are saying is none of that traditional hierarchy is valid or legitimate. And that’s where ultimately people have to make their decision. If you’re happy with the way that the traditional hierarchy works, then by all means, you should be a conservative. If you have any problems with it, then you might want to rethink your attachment to that. Which means that if you’re a working class person struggling to survive and pay your bills and can’t afford health care, can’t send your kid to college, can’t pay your mortgage, you might want to rethink that attachment to Trumpism and to the right because the traditional people who’ve been running this thing haven’t really come to your aid and they’re not going to, right?

Sam Goldman 38:42

I wanted to close out with something that really caught my attention in your piece, The Problem is the Other CRT, “conservative race theory.” And you wrote: “So why is this not being screamed from the rooftops in response to the recent anti anti-racist backlash? First, because we’ve been bogged down trying to demonstrate how the things being critiqued aren’t really critical race theory, or insisting that CRT isn’t really being taught in middle and high schools. While true, this is a losing strategy of value to no one but scholars and academics.” I felt like yes, yes, yes as I was reading it, and I think it would be helpful if you could talk a little bit about what you think the response to these attacks should be?

Tim Wise 39:30

I think, number one, we have to reframe the debate around anti-racist education, as opposed to critical race theory, which again, as I say in the piece, it’s not really what’s being attacked anyway, it’s anti-racist education, or it’s just simply accurate history, it’s just truth. We have to reframe it. If we’re getting bogged down into a discussion about the minutiae of Derrick Bell’s theories, and Kimberly Crenshaw’s theories on intersectionality, again, that’s great for your grad school seminar. It is meaningless in the larger world of politics. So we have to talk about what this really is. Which, again, is an attempt to whitewash history so as to control the future. The research shows that when young people learn about injustice, past and present, and the combination of those two things, that young people, because we know young people have an innate sense of fairness, until we, as a society, wring that out of them like water out of a sponge, that is their natural default. So when they learn about injustice, they want to do something about it. That’s why they don’t want kids to learn about this stuff. Because they know that if they learn about it, they will lose them as reactionary robots for their particular agenda. Young people will decide to try to make the world a better place. Young people will try to take the country into the future. These are people who tell you they want to go back. That’s why they say make America great, again. Again, is a directional reference. It points to the past. Young people, by definition, don’t want to go backward, young people want to go forward, especially if you tell them that they can make the world better, and so you don’t want them to know that. That’s number one, making clear that we expose what the actual agenda is, putting the other side on the defensive

That’s why in that particular piece, I said, and I think this is critical, if you’re going to reject the fundamental argument of critical race theory or anti-racist education, which is that racism is a systemic force that continues to produce inequity in this country — that’s the baseline, sort of foundational argument — if you’re going to reject that, I want you to look me in the face, and I want you, on camera, to admit to America why you think we still have racial inequity in all of these areas: wealth, health, education, income, poverty, unemployment. Because the only possible answer that you can offer, if it ain’t racist, if it’s not systemic racism, the past and present unfairness combining to produce that outcome, what is it? And the only possible answer is this. If it ain’t America, something’s wrong with Black people. And I want you to have to say that. I want you to say that on camera. I want you to tell that to people at the same time that you’re telling me that it’s racist to say white people have privilege. Okay, so it’s racist to say that white people have privilege but it’s not racist to say Black people are broken, that Black people are defective, that Black people are culturally pathological. You’re talking about Black folks, mommas and neighborhoods and communities, and so you’re ripping on Black people, you’re saying Black people are to blame for Black people’s situation. But that’s okay to teach that, but it’s not okay to teach that white folks set up a system of white supremacy? Explain that to me. So that’s about flipping the script.

And then the other thing you know, that I mentioned in another piece, a week or so before the one you referenced, was: Look at what Dr. King was talking about when he described this country — everybody on the right tries to crib this one line from the I Have a Dream speech, which by the way, was not called that until years after it was delivered, that was not the big part of the speech in Dr. King’s own mind when it was written and when it was given. That one line “we should judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.” To hear right wingers tell it that’s like the only thing the man ever said. It’s like he was a preacher. But he never preached apparently, on Sunday, never gave a speech until he gave that one. And it was one line. And he stood up and he said it and then they shot him. And that was it. That was the end of it. But the reality is — Dr. King said, and I quoted this from his last article that he ever wrote — which was not published until after he was murdered, but he wrote it before he was killed, obviously — and what he said was that racism was as native to the soil as pine trees, and sagebrush and buffalo grass, I think is the exact phrase. He said that White America was poisoned to its soul by racism.

Now, those are two things that if you say that in a classroom, they’re accusing you now of pushing critical race theory and saying America is inherently racist, and white people are racist. Well, no one’s talking about inherently anything. Nobody’s inherently racist. If you push racism, it’s because you’ve been taught racism, you’re not born with that in you. And so none of us believe in the inherent evil of any human. At least I don’t. The only people I know who think that humans are inherently evil are fundamentalist Christians and evangelicals who take the Bible seriously and believe that we’re all doomed to hell because of Eve eating an apple off the tree. Those are the only people I know who actually believe that human beings are inherently evil, and they’re the same people criticizing us for pointing out some historical truths about America. So I think it’s about saying, look, we have to say these right wingers, if they had their way they would ban Dr. King; at least the real Dr. King, they’ll let you have the phony one, but they’re going to ban the actual Dr. King who said these things. So we’re not going to let teachers teach that part. Well, let him teach the one line and tell kids: Oh, Dr. King said this that and the other. And then if somebody says, you know, teacher, I was online, you know, and I happened to find this quote from Dr. King, and it says white America is poisoned to its soul by racism and racism is native to the soil of America as pine trees and buffalo grass and sagebrush, what is the teacher going to go? I can’t, sorry, I can’t, I can’t respond to that, we can’t talk about that. That Dr. King, you know, the early Dr. King we like, the late Dr. King was a critical race theorist and we, you know…this is absurdity.

So it’s about putting the other side on the defensive. Making them answer to what Dr. King said. Making them say that they would ban that from being taught. When Idaho passed its bill, one of the things that they were upset about, one of the lawmakers stood up and complained about the teaching of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ in a literature class. This is not Robyn D’Angelo and Ibram Kendi and Derrick Bell and Kim Crenshaw. This is Harper Lee, for God’s sake. This is a white Southern woman who wrote a white savior novel. If there’s anything wrong with ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, it’s that the Black characters have no agency and the only hero was the white guy, Atticus Finch, and that’s a criticism I’ve heard, but no, their criticism is not that. Their criticism is this makes white people look like they were oppressors. That’s actually one of the things they said: Oh, my goodness, this makes it seem like white people were picking on the innocent Black man. Well, Tom Robinson was innocent. He really didn’t rape Mayella Ewell, so no, sorry, for those who haven’t read the book, spoiler alert, but they kill him anyway. And so that’s actually what happened in the novel. Now keep in mind, it’s a novel, but it takes place in 1930s. Alabama. Are we really not even able to say that 1930s Alabama was sort of a shitty place to be Black? Is that something we’re not allowed to talk about? Apparently, in Idaho, they’re very upset.

I live in Nashville. In the county next to us there’s a big uproar because elementary school kids are being taught using this curriculum called the Wit and Wisdom curriculum. And one of the books in the Wit and Wisdom curriculum is ‘Ruby Bridges Goes to School’. It’s about Ruby Bridges, the Black woman who, yeah, who integrated New Orleans schools. You know, there’s a famous Norman Rockwell painting that I think most of us are familiar with, of Ruby Bridges being taken into school that day, with tomatoes being thrown on the wall and the ‘N’ word being scrawled behind her, and the National Guard walking her in, and yet they’re upset. And their argument was, well, they don’t like kids being taught this book because there’s no redemption for White people at the end. So in other words, we can’t tell Ruby Bridges actual story, unless we add like some happy ending where the White people are like: I’m sorry, I threw that tomato, I realized that was wrong, and I shouldn’t have done that. So in other words, we have to not tell the truth. I want the right to answer that. Explain to me why we can’t tell the truth about what happened to Ruby Bridges. Explain to me why we can’t have a book like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, or why we can’t talk about what Dr. King actually said, as opposed to us being in this defensive mode, where we’re like, well, but you’re misinterpreting critical race theory. Stop, just stop. That’s not what this is about. And they admitted, you know, they admitted they’re going after anything that tells the truth about this country’s history. They have no problem with dealing with subjects, they just want to have their version told. Which is, you know, essentially their version of American history that if it had to have a theme or a title, it would be: mistakes were made. But you know, gee, everything’s fine now, and so nothing to see here. That’s their version of history, and it’s entirely false. It’s the kind of thing that if any other country did it, you know, if Germany had done that: well, mistakes were made, you know, Sobibor was sort of a detour from our normal awesomeness. We’re very sorry about Treblinka. You know, gee, but you know, nothing to see. We would think that was absurd. But that’s what we do in this country, and we think nothing of it.

Sam Goldman 48:14

Thanks so much, Tim, for joining us and sharing your perspective and your expertise with us. Really appreciate it. You can follow Tim @TimJacobWise on Twitter and read more from Tim at TimJWise.medium.com. And a link to Tim’s latest book is in the show notes. Thanks for listening to Refuse Fascism. As fall approaches, as students and faculty alike prepare to return to the school houses and the academies. We know this battle over the truth will only intensify. Now is the time to speak the truth of the nature of this country, to boldly tell and spread this truth and fight for it to be taught including by defying these bans, and defending those who are taking risk to teach history. We’ll be featuring more regarding resistance, especially from educators and upcoming episodes. And when I encourage folks to learn more about and join in with the Teach the Truth Pledge days of action, August 27 through the 29. You can learn more at TeachTruthPledge.org.

If you want to hear more on critical race theory and anti-racist education, check out Episode 64 where I chat with Dr. Chanel Wilson, Assistant Professor of Education and director of the Africana Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College. We have a new review for the Refuse Fascism podcast we just had to share with you: Lacy in Michigan wrote, “Thank you. Really great to have a podcast that focuses so intently on the number one danger we face right now. For people like me who look at the rise of fascism as a real live threat, it’s refreshing and validating to hear intelligent conversation that informs, educates and inspires. Keep up the great work.” Thanks Lacy in Michigan.

If you feel like they do and want to help the show, it’s simple. You can rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, or your listening platform of choice. And of course, follow subscribe, so you never miss an episode. You can chip in to support the show by clicking the donate button at RefuseFascism.org or Venmo. Refuse-Fascism cash app, RefuseFascism, and be sure to let us know it’s off of hearing this podcast. As always, I want to hear from you. We’d love to hear your ideas for topics, guests, along with questions you want us to engage. Tweet me @SamBGoldman, or you can drop me a line at [email protected]. Or leave a voicemail with your thoughts on this episode, or the show in general by calling 917-426-7582. You can also record a voice message by going to anchor.fm/RefuseFascism and clicking the button there. You might even hear yourself on a future episode. Thanks as always, to Lina Thorne, Richie Marini, and Mark Tinkleman for helping produce this show. Thanks to the incredible volunteers we have transcripts available for each episode, so be sure to visit RefuseFascism.org and sign up to get them in your inbox each week. We’ll be back next Sunday with an interview with jat Ali, and Coco Das, editor for RefuseFascism.org will be co-hosting, as I’ll be away. Until then, in the name of humanity, we refuse to accept a fascist America.