Guest MINDSETTER™ Stewart: James Baldwin & Neo-Nazis in Prov on Same Weekend
Saturday, April 01, 2017
I am not one to burn bridges with those who would otherwise be worthy of a modicum of respect even if I might not agree with them. Yet the past several days, beginning with March 25 and ending with March 27, make me recognize and admit better a hundred bridges than a flaming cross and all the white tears shed over felled viaducts be damned.
I attended the Make America Great Again rally at the State House organized by shock jock John DePetro on Saturday and was both heartbroken by the rally and enthused by its counter-protesters. When I saw a well-organized column walking up the street waving their Donald Trump signs and American flags, I felt a weight dropping below my diaphragm like never before. First, it shocked me that so many people who make it their daily habit to say how much they hate going into Providence precisely because of their xenophobia and racism decided to go into the city. Second, it saddened me to see that, despite years of efforts on the part of both my comrades and myself, that we have so much farther to go. And third, it frightened me when I saw that this crowd was not a docile and composed group but rather a raucous, belicose mass that included some who would have rather quickly beat someone to a pulp if they had a chance. Here on display for all to see were the anxieties, fears, and resentments of the white middle class of the Ocean State who deposit their animus on migrants, Latinx, and Black people rather than the neoliberal politicians who have shredded the strands of the social safety net in service of the 1%. The German social democrat Bebel famously quipped that anti-Semitism was “the socialism of fools”. With the way these members of the Trumpenproletariat were carrying on about “ill-ee-gullz” it was clear that this was quite a foolish crowd. Among their number were slickly-dressed and adamant neo-Nazis. They present themselves as “alt-right nationalists” but it is not to be framed in any other fashion, they admire the people who were given state power in the 1930’s and who my grandfather shot at as a soldier in the 1940’s. John DePetro is giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Among the signage was one placard that I rather glumly nodded agreement with. It was a picture of Gina Raimondo’s face imposed on an image of the Wicked Witch of the West that said ‘Not My Governor’. In a single image we have summed up the exact answer for what is going on in our politics. The Democratic Party has tilled, fertilized, and dutifully watered for the past quarter century the ground now sprouting this neo-fascist weed. I personally do not truck with the mad delusion that Sen. Bernie Sanders would have changed human history if he had been the presidential nominee in 2016. But I also know in my bones that consensus politics and compromise on the welfare state to benefit the financial elites has brought us to this place. The Arabic saying “When you point one finger, three point back at you” seems particularly apt for this moment. Any Democrat who refuses to take a long hard look in the mirror after this election and accept their role in facilitating the rise of these dubious alt-right characters with neoliberal fiscal policies that preyed upon the middle class and therefore fostered a turn towards reaction is promoting a further slide to the right. The notion that all third party voters would have otherwise voted for Clinton is simply bunk because it conveniently leaves out the third option that an overwhelming majority of the population actually chose, staying home and not voting at all.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBrandon Bell, chairman of the Rhode Island Republican Party, must denounce and excommunicate from his party these fascists. He carries on about people who refused to be quiet for the National Anthem while the very allowance of such monstrous sorts is nothing more or less than taking a massive ritualistic defecation upon the grave of every World War II veteran in America. I have photographic and video proof of these people being at a rally he spoke at and I am deathly serious about this.
I have respect for the Progressive Democrats and their efforts and I think that it is time for us, following the developments of the last weekend, to build a broad-based united front that embraces multiple political parties and tendencies working for progressive change in the Ocean State, from the Progressive Democrats to Greens to Socialist Alternative and even the left element of the Libertarians in some instances. The Democratic Party of Rhode Island is never going to change unless it is forced to by external pressure that is pragmatically coordinated with the Progressive caucus’s efforts. A constituency which would never in a million years vote for another party is known as a captive caucus. Unless you are making the Democratic Party beg for your votes, money talks and all else walks. Again and again over the past eight months we have seen the Progressive Democrats repeat that “Next time it will be different” while their party treats them like lepers and moves further to the right, epitomized by Speaker Nicholas Mattiello’s xenophobic campaign mailings last fall. Anyone who doubts that Democrats can continue to go farther to the right with a captive caucus pleading for a move to the left apparently never heard about what Bill Clinton did to Welfare in this country and what Hillary Clinton was planning to do to Social Security if elected. Refusing to allow Progressive Democrat voters to build a united front with third parties is to court disaster. More than once I have encountered those within the Trump resistance who blame the Green Party for the election of Trump, which is disproven by simple electoral analysis, and also engage in a strange anti-Russian hysteria that effectively marginalizes and hinders progressive support for causes like single-payer healthcare in the name of a false-flag national security crisis of pathetic proportion. The refusal to build a multi-party coalition with independent progressives will only further promote the Democratic Party’s drift to the right and therefore the growth of Republican-facilitated extremism. In terms of political physics, this is a simple notion of pressure being applied within and outside a party in the name of equilibrium. To quote the great writer and political leader from Martinique, Aime Cesaire, “There is a place for all at the Rendezvous of Victory.” Rhode Island as the ultimate safe state must start to make the Democrats tack to the left by challenging them in both the primaries and general elections. Speaker Mattiello’s heated race with Matt Frias demonstrated that his constituents are looking for an anti-Democratic Party candidate in the general election and, if that voice is not coming from the left, it will certainly come from the right.
On Monday evening, as a sort of respite from a weekend loaded with trauma, I took the rare trip to the movies to go see Raoul Peck’s outstanding documentary James Baldwin: I Am Not Your Negro. Using archival footage and previously-unpublished writings, Peck creates a mosaic recounting Baldwin’s analysis of not just his slain friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. but his understanding of America and what W.E.B. Du Bois called the problem of the twentieth century, the color line. What particularly gripped me were moments when Peck highlights protests of Southern whites who brandished Nazi swastikas on English-language placards demonizing school integration. Peck, who hails from Haiti, the land liberated from the Triangle Trade by the first successful slave rebellion, spares the viewer nothing in his portrait of a society that Baldwin observed as mad almost half a century ago, an insanity that might have been temporarily arrested but of late has been unloosed with a greater velocity upon our streets and polling places. The late author understood with a depth and acuity only indebted to the brutality he experienced in our white supremacist society as a Black man that the delusion of race, a mass-hypnosis akin to none other, would compel his fellow man to cannibalism with mere mild suggestion that otherwise would perhaps manifest as love. As such Peck’s film is a soothing balm to heal the pain in my own soul after this past weekend.
If there is one point to be emphasized again and again after this weekend, it is that there is no scientific or medical basis for the notion of race. The neo-Nazi claims otherwise and argues that human beings can be taxonomically subdivided on the basis of features such as the shape of nose, width of eye, or shade of skin. The foundation for such claims amounts to nothing more valid than saying the sun orbits the earth or that a man can breathe under water. Yet for all these neo-Nazis, be they the militantly overt Klansman or the deceptive, subtle alt-right ideologue, such logic defines their ultimate apocalyptic vision, a race war mimicking Manichean visions of human relations.
The word reparation, for reasons that are frankly and simply tied to this type of craziness among us, is tied to the notion of monetary payment in the conventional wisdom. But the root word, repair, bears many more meanings that I prefer for this context. I owe a reparation to my friends and neighbors of color for my own refusal to recognize the developing fascist presence within our municipal affairs in the past 24 months. For reasons tied partially to naive hope and partially to a criminally willful ignorance, I did not want to see amongst our white friends and neighbors their facilitation and abetting of this enemy. Indeed, the blame lies not as much with the neo-Nazi, who may be so insane he actually does not know better, as with the white liberal-progressive who does understand the direction we are going in and yet sacrifices the most vulnerable in our society on the altar of white manners and politeness. It is the white liberal-progressive like myself who speaks of “maturity” and “free speech” so to justify the propagation of genocidal rhetoric. It is the white liberal-progressive like me who does not want to confront and vigorously challenge a family member, a neighbor, a coworker, or a friend who says “Trump is not that bad” and that we should “give him a chance”. It is people like me who sit in enclaves of prosperity while people of color continue to fight a daily battle with poverty, malnutrition, medical under-treatment, mass incarceration, school privatization, and gentrification of their neighborhoods by real estate developers, the healthcare industry, the private universities, and many other white supremacist power structures. It was I who said that we should take caution in tossing around labels like fascist immediately after the election owing to the sensationalism of a liberal press, who promoted the rise of the “pied piper candidate” Donald Trump in coordination with the DNC, which turned these words into the ideological equivalent of a classroom spit-ball. And it was I who, owing to the ideology of white supremacy, behaved in ways I now regret and feel deep shame for on a regular basis.
Whether I can ever totally repair the damage I did, knowingly and unknowingly, is a question that will haunt me for a long time. I feel a funereal pall over everything I do now. But that is something Baldwin points to in Peck’s film quite clearly when he indicates the confounding fact that people of color do not themselves go completely mad en masse from the pain they face every day. For me to recognize and feel such sadness in only a fractional sense is nothing more or less than an honor because it means I am beginning to grow up and become more human rather than white. Or in simpler words, no pain, no gain.
Andrew Stewart is a member of the Rhode Island Media Cooperative, an organization created for freelancers by freelancers which you can join for free.
Related Slideshow: Winners and Losers in Raimondo’s FY18 Budget Proposal
Related Articles
- Dear President Trump, Build the Algonquin Pipeline: Guest MINDSETTER™ Morgan
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Barden: My School Choice Story
- A Love Letter to the Right: Guest MINDSETTER™ Steve Forleo
- The Banality of Trump: Guest MINDSETTER™ Geoff Schoos
- This Less Perfect Union: Guest MINDSETTER™ Jim Wright
- In Defense of Sean Todd: Guest MINDSETTER™ Jim Wright
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Sen. Sheehan: Raimondo’s Free Tuition Proposal Makes RI an Educational Leader
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Steven F. Forleo: Trump is a Machiavellian Poseur
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Congressman McGovern: America Cannot Afford Trump’s Nuclear Arms Race
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Tom Kenney: Pare & Elorza Still Have No Clue About the Fire Department
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Seyler: Critical Spending Requires Critical Thinking at CCRI
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Yarn: Hitting the Ground Running
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Van Leesten: Governor’s Proposal Will Unleash Opportunity for All
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Stewart: Why I Oppose Raimondo’s Free College Scheme
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Stewart: Patrick Kennedy Should Learn from Family History
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Morse: Dying to Help
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Casimiro: Food Pantry Demonstrates Power of Community
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Sen. Ciccone: Elorza is Wrong to Close Plainfield Street Ramp on 6-10 Connector
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Sen. DiPalma: We Must Not Become the ‘Party of No’
- Despite Rhetoric, School Leaders Stand with Undocumented Community Members, Guest MINDSETTERS™
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Ford: No More Reefer Madness - Legalize Marijuana
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Magee: RI’s Strong Defense & Undersea Technology Cluster
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Taub: I Call Upon Mayor Elorza to Create the Prov Jewish Council
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Stokes: Black History Matters in Rhode Island
- Guest MINDSETTER™ Kenney: Why is Pare Still Working
