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White supremacy’s winning streak

There’s a sort of online consensus that 2016 was a particularly awful year, one which saw the death of seemingly every generation-defining celebrity above 50, and an election in the United States and referendum in Great Britain very few predicted correctly. While 2017 hasn’t been any more forgiving to most people, there’s a segment of the population who’s loved everything that’s happened recently: white supremacists.

After a long, hard eight years in which an African-American held the highest position in their land, American white supremacists have launched the most unanticipated and fiercest comeback since… this month’s Superbowl.

Consider the four month run they’ve put together. They successfully aided in making an entire country skeptical of the first female presidential nominee in its history by pointing to her emails, all while abetting the election of the most racist and under-qualified candidate in recent memory. This candidate — who’s now president — boasts an immediate circle of advisors that includes Steve Bannon, the creator of one of the bastions of online white supremacy in Breitbart, and Jeff Sessions, a man who was accused of being too racist to be a judge by none other than Coretta Scott Kin in 1986. Do you know how hard it is to be considered too racist for the U.S. South in the ’80s?

They didn’t stop there though. Like all comebacks, they’ve only gotten better with momentum. In January, the all-star roster of white supremacists that advise the U.S. president managed to anger nearly every category of people they hate, inciting large scale demonstrations and protests by everyday Americans for the rights of women, and shortly thereafter, for the rights of Muslims and other religious minorities. At one of these protests, Richard Spencer, a Nazi supporter and another all-pro white supremacist, was punched on live TV, prompting a debate on the internet about whether Nazi supporters should be punched or not, which is insane, but that’s kind of where we are right now. Debating whether advocates of ethnic cleansing should receive any sort of sympathy or compassion only attests to how great a stretch white supremacists have had.

But the climax of the white supremacist winning streak — it’s heat check moment — happened at Superbowl LI, which pitted a Trump supporting owner, coach, star quarterback and a team supported by a number of white supremacists (including the previously mentioned Richard Spencer) against the heart of Southern African American culture and history in the city of Atlanta. Atlanta is home to the second highest black population of any American city and has had an African-American mayor for 34 of the past 42 years. It’s the literal and figurative birthplace of Martin Luther King, the congressional seat for the most prominent living civil rights era activist in John Lewis, and is the originator of many of the most recent pop culture trends and hip hop superstars (see: Migos and the Golden Globe winning TV series, Atlanta). Atlanta is the antithesis of white supremacy, which only makes the win by the white supremacist-approved Patriots — in arguably the greatest comeback in NFL history… during Black History Month no less — that much sweeter for them.

But we should have saw this coming. Rationality and conventional wisdom were thrown to the wayside when 2016 began. In the span of nine months, Cleveland finally won a championship of some sort, the Chicago Cubs broke their 100 plus year championship curse, we found out Jay-Z cheated on Beyoncé, and Leo actually won an Oscar. None of these things would have happened during any other year. In fact, white supremacists having an amazing four month stretch doesn’t even crack the top three craziest events of the past year. It’s somewhere in the early teens, just ahead of the worldwide outrage over the death of a gorilla. So kudos to them. But hopefully they start losing again soon.

4 Comments

  1. Your claims are silly and without factual foundation. Trump is a racist? Breitbart is a bastion of white supremacy? Sessions is racist ‘cuz someone said he was racist 31 years ago? Give me a break. White supremacists duped everyone into thinking Hillary was rotten? Wait, I thought that was the Russians… The Patriots winning a football game was white supremacy (was that the Russians too?)? It’s crazy to debate whether or not you should punch people who disagree with you?

    Sorry, Abdul. Try again when you get a whiff of reality.

  2. “Debating whether advocates of ethnic cleansing should receive any sort of sympathy or compassion only attests to how great a stretch white supremacists have had.”

    This is not the issue. Punching (Assaulting) people who share an opposing viewpoint is wrong, regardless of how utterly stupid and backwards that viewpoint is. Sympathy and compassion are not relevant. Upholding basic constitutional rights is the main issue. Opposing ideas with violence instead of rational, reasoned discourse is a very slippery slope. Punching people is not ok.

    1. Great theory– if you could have a rational, reasoned discourse with any of these people, but you can’t. Those of us Americans who have watched our country descend into chaos were perfectly OK with seeing one of those unrational, unreasoned and unrepentant symbols of hate punched. Because were the shoe reversed, they have no problems whatsoever doing the same or worse to liberals.

      1. That’s absurd logic. Laws dictate that such behaviour is wrong. Also, you shouldn’t need laws to tell you that.

        One difference between the left and the right at the present is that the right denounces and disavows violence/extremism from those on its side while the left often encourages and condones violence/extremism on its side.

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