Book Review: American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress

You can demarcate different periods in the United States simply by the “whitelash” that occurs after each progression made with civil rights and when it seems like white supremacy is in its death throes. The most readily available examples include the various rises in popularity and carnage of the Ku Klux Klan, first, in response to Reconstruction after the Civil War, then in the early 1920s after the popularity of Birth of a Nation, and then in response to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In our time, there are two demarcation points: 1.) the election of the first African American to the presidency, Barack Obama, which resulted in the Tea Party movement, with ostensible anti-taxation and spending rhetoric, but which was really steeped in racism and birtherism (the belief that Obama wasn’t born in America and thus, ineligible to be president), which itself propelled Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, to the presidency (ironically, including with the help of Obama-to-Trump voters!); and 2.) the rise of the largest civil rights movement since the 1960s, the Black Lives Matter advocating for criminal justice reform, primarily involving the police, begun in earnest after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014 and through to the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, which again, along with Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency and national politics, emboldened white supremacist movements, i.e. whitelash. In his 2023 book, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery, one of the journalists who has been in the thick of it reporting on the civil rights uprising and the whitelash (he was famously arrested while covering Ferguson), explores the phenomenon of American whitelash through in-depth reporting and an erudite examination of history.

Programming note: I listened to the audiobook version, which was nicely voiced by Lowery himself.

Many people saw Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency as a different kind of demarcation line, pivoting America into a new post-race society, including Lowery points out, The New York Times. Obama, much to the consternation of some progressives on the left, positioned himself as not the harbinger of retribution for America’s racial sins — or even just a long overdue reckoning — but rather, a clean slate. America’s racial sins were more out of “innocence than deliberate” to paraphrase Lowery. That’s the story we like to tell ourselves, at least. Meanwhile, despite that, right-wing media figures, like the firebrand radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, characterized Obama as the punitive president out for retribution against whites and on an “apology tour” for America (which encompasses war issues, too). Through such a lens, the right-wing media ecosystem and regular Americans viewed anti-white animus as rampant, on the rise, and more concerning than anti-Black animus. It’s that perception of Obama, and the “vibes, man” that anti-white animus was on the rise that animated the whitelash to Obama’s presidency.

The way Obama himself tried to embody and echo the innocence narrative is how the promise of Obama met the limitations of Obama, Lowery smartly points out. After all, a few of the reported cases Lowery highlights occurred under the Obama presidency, including the Ferguson uprising.

What I particularly thought enlightening about how Lowery connected historical whitelash with modern and present whitelash is the difference in what the instigators of the whitelash sought and now seek. Historically, like with the KKK, white supremacy was wielded in a bid to return to power or maintain power — the status quo of the system. On the other hand, the white supremacists of today, who find a willing hero in Trump (I say willing instead of useful idiot), want to overthrow the system entirely because they view the system as irrevocably broken owing to its multiracial and democratic makeup.

The reason Lowery highlights particular cases of white supremacist “whitelash” is because through his reporting, he seeks to put faces to the “relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history,” including modern history.

The cases Lowery examines include: (and as mentioned, I’m listened on audio, so, it’s possible I’ve missed one here because I wasn’t able to include it in my Notes app):

• The hate crime killing of Marcelo Lucero, a Hispanic man, in Long Island in 2008. Despite one of the defendants, Jeffrey Conroy, literally having a Swastika tattoo and targeting Latinos, he was still painted by his defenders as not racist. Lowery rightly asks then, what the heck makes you a racist if that doesn’t? Fortunately, he was found guilty. Which things like that (a jury finding him guilty) and the fact that Obama did win the presidency two terms in a row, makes people argue that talk about white supremacy is overblown. And yet, the whitelash is occurring.
• The Oak Creek Sikh gurdwara mass shooting in Wisconsin in 2012, where Michael Page, who was submerged in the white supremacist fever swamps, killed six people. He hated Muslims, and like a lot of idiot white supremacists, he conflated Sikhs with Muslims. Lowery’s recounting of the shooting was chilling, especially how almost robotic and hollow Page seemed while doing the killing.
• The Overland Park Jewish Community Center shooting, where Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. attempted to kill Jewish people in Overland Park, Kansas, and incidentally, the three people he shot and killed weren’t even Jewish. Miller, not surprisingly, was a former and unrepentant Klansman, who arrogantly defended himself in court in an attempt to bolster his racist, anti-Semitic rhetoric.
• The 2015 shooting of Black Lives Matter protesters in Minneapolis, who were protesting the shooting by police of Jamar Clark. Of course, Minneapolis would also be where Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin. Black Lives Matter protests then, and later after Floyd’s killing, were prime moments for white supremacists to clash in a “whitelash” response. In fact, when I was a reporter for a county near Cincinnati, a little village, Bethel, made national news in the summer of 2020 for hosting a Black Lives Matter rally, which was disrupted by hundreds of white bikers, who thought, like many white Americans in response to the protests, they were antifa being bussed in from the cities to destroy the village. It was awful, and naturally, the police weren’t prepared.
• Perhaps the most infamous example under Trump of “whitelash” is Charlottesville, where open and avowed Neo-Nazis marched through the town talking about blood and soil and how the Jews wouldn’t replace them. The latter idea, known as the Great Replacement Theory, has been mainstreamed by the likes of Tucker Carlson and others within the right-wing fever swamps. The protests and counter-protests reached their fatal climax when Heather Heyer was killed by white supremacist, James Alex Fields Jr., who plowed his car into counterprotesters, injuring 35 people and killing Heyer. Thereafter, Trump obfuscated on the issue, and then said there was “blame on both sides” and “very fine people on both sides.” Trump and his apologists have tried to gaslight people who take that quote at face value — calling Neo-Nazis “very fine people” — but anyone who was participating in the Unite the Right Rally are racists at best and neo-Nazis at worst; ergo. (Also, even defenders of Confederate statues, where Trump’s addled brain segued into, are attempting to uphold the instigators of the Civil War, who fought the United States in a bid to create an empire built on slavery.)
• The murder in Maryland in 2017 of Richard Collins III by white supremacist, Sean Urbanski.
• Lowery also talks about the death of Oscar Grant by police in 2009 in Oakland, and Michael Brown in 2014 in Ferguson.

What’s important to remember, whether it’s Conroy, Miller, Fields, or Urbanski, is that white supremacy is inherently violent, and it’s only a matter of time until it turns from vitriolic rhetoric and harassment to overt violence. In other words, the ideology of white supremacy is built on the belief that white Christians are superior to other races, ethnicities, and religions. That ideology doesn’t allow for coexisting in a society with other races, ethnicities, and religions, hence the desire now to overthrow multiracial America and the democratic government its built upon (delivering these multiracial outcomes). Or the historical fact of mob violence with no due process. That is what makes white supremacy, and the whitelashes that occur throughout American history so pernicious and dangerous: they inevitably lead to violence! And Lowery points out how the federal government, primarily the FBI who would deal with it, has not taken the threat seriously, despite cases like the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Of course, 9/11 and the overwhelming focus on Muslims, and then later, the overwhelming focus on “illegal immigration” and Black Lives Matter protesters, didn’t and hasn’t helped matters.

Lowery also touches on another area that is specifically hard for authorities and our politics to take seriously: the pipeline between the military and white supremacy, and between the military and white supremacist attacks. But the pipeline makes sense to me on a basic level. The federal government trains people to be killers, and then when those killers return home, unable to assimilate back into normal society, they find brotherhood among the fever swamps created by white supremacist groups. They’re already primed to defend the country against (perceived) enemies, foreign and domestic.

Lowery’s book is a must-read for anyone who wonders how we went from the naive promise of Obama’s presidency to Trump, the Birther President, and the resulting white supremacist and whitelash conflagrations, both with necessary historical context and with intimate, empathetic modern reporting.