Grassroots/Hank Kalet

The Race Card

Lori Kaye was shot to death during Sabbath services in a synagogue outside San Diego April 27, six months to the day after a gunman slaughtered 11 Jews who were worshipping at a Pittsburgh synagogue. Both acts were carried out by white supremacists, part of a broader trend driving a rise in hate crimes around the country.

Churches, mosques and synagogues have all been targeted, as have people on the street. Violent assaults like the San Diego Sabbath shootings rightly draw the headlines, but they also can obscure the much broader context — which leaves us vulnerable to an emboldened strain of racism.

ProPublica reported at the end of March that there were “no fewer than five killings in which victims’ race, ethnicity or national origin appears to have been a factor” through the first three months of the year. This is consistent with what the Justice Department has reported (hate crimes rose in 2017) and statistics released by the Anti-Defamation League in April.

According to the ADL, “Violent attacks against the Jewish community in the United States doubled last year, while overall attacks that also include vandalism and harassment remained near record-high levels.” The group said there were 1,879 anti-Semitic incidents, which included harassment, vandalism, and assault last year, down 5% from 2017. However, it remains among the highest total since the ADL began tallying bias incidents, and it includes a doubling of physical assaults over the previous year.

Consider this list:

The Pittsburgh shooter, in a variety of social media posts, blamed Jews for an “immigration crisis,” saying Jews were seeking to bring in Latino immigrants to replace white workers — an eerie echo of chants from the 2017 Charlottesville, Va., rally and a chief claim of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a major anti-Semitic tract.

Two African Americans were shot to death in a Kentucky Kroger’s, killed by a man who initially attempted to enter an African American church and who made it clear to others that he was targeting African Americans.

A Trump supporting white supremacist was arrested and charged with sending pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and to George Soros, the Jewish bogeyman of most rightwing conspiracies.

The president himself targeted Soros rhetorically in the fall, linking Soros and his money to a fabricated plot in which the financier was paying refugees to travel north as part of a larger plot.

Recently, in addition to the San Diego shooting:

Three black churches in Louisiana were set ablaze between March 26 and April 4 in what police believe was an intentional attack by a white man whose social media allegedly featured racist content.

Eight people were injured when a man drove his car into a crowd in Sunnyvale, California, April 23. Police said the driver, a black veteran of the Iraq war, targeted what he thought was a Muslim family. He was charged with eight counts of attempted murder.

There were no operational links to tie the perpetrators together, but they are part of a broader trend and are tied to systemic issues that we must confront, which requires that we reconsider the assumption that hatred resides only in our hearts and that the key to healing is to heal these individual hearts.

The increase in bias and hate crime incidents both here and abroad is being fueled by political leaders who play to the nationalists in their own countries. This includes President Donald Trump, who has made clear his own racism on numerous occasions, while also dog-whistling to white supremacists that he shares many of their views.

What we are witnessing is a manifestation of a deeper problem. These -isms are deep-rooted. They remain central to our politics and have been baked in to our government, economy, and culture.

When the white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va., two years ago chanted “Jews will not replace us,” they were staking out space in the American political firmament, making explicit an argument the right has been making in more subtle ways for years.

Attacks on affirmative action that pit working class whites against blacks, crime bill language that essentially criminalizes blackness, the war on drugs, the domestic war on terror, the singling out of George Soros and other rich Jews (as US House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy did in the fall), readied the soil for Trump’s rhetorical and legal excesses on immigration, race, and religion. Jessie Helms, Storm Thurmond, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, the House Freedom Caucus — they raked and hoed and even planted some seeds. Trump has harvested the first crop and has planted more, with even deeper roots and more deadly leaves.

These politicians were and are not outliers. They were the leaders of their parties and even the nation. What they say and do is both a product of the intellectual firmament in which they work, and also a driver of those arguments. They normalize the racism, make it easy for the racist to act.

It’s not enough for Joe Biden to call for a moral rebirth. That’s the same stale nostalgic lie we have been living with for years.

Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; blog, hankkalet.tumblr.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Patreon, patreon.com/newspoet41.

From The Progressive Populist, June 1, 2019

Populist.com