American Whitelash

Wesley Lowery, American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, NY: Mariner Books, 2023), 237 pages The book opens by recounting the Grant Park celebration following the 2008 election of President Barak Obama. The narrative contrasts those who saw the election as an opportunity to ease the racial divide with the many white men and a few white women who saw the election as a threat to their identity and class status. The election of a president with a black father and a white mother brought a surge of anger and hatred and paved the way for a Whitelash filled with violence, and Trump. The author quotes Obama from his memoir. “It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.” A quote from a poet and essayist, Camonghne Felix, explains “What we expected of the Obama administration was beyond what the framework of the presidency allowed.” How true. Presidents take an oath to preserve, protect and defend our Constitution, which falsely suggests there is presidential power to do. The book has five parts divided into numbered subsections and an epilogue, all of it covering just 237 pages. Part I establishes the threat of terrorism with a review of white supremacy as practiced in the United States. At the end of Part I Lowery explains the book is “an exploration of the horror that our era has wrought and an attempt to place a decade of American carnage in the context of America history; . . . My goal is to be neither comprehensive nor encyclopedic. This book is an attempt to put human faces on the relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history.” Part I ends at page 27 and readers should know the remaining 210 pages puts a depressing and violent human face on the United States. In part II readers visit Patchogue, Long Island, where they meet Joselo Lucero and his son Marcelo. They are immigrants from Ecuador. Narrative follows a gang of middle class white teens, some with Swastika tattoos, roaming about intentionally looking for victims to assault. One of the group named Jeff Conroy stabbed and killed Marcelo Lucero. The narrative follows a journalist's investigation of the boy's racist and white supremacist views, and the prosecution and trial of a hate crime manslaughter and gang assault. Part II and all the remaining parts fill in related historical material of racism, cite criminology research and provide examples of the current status of white supremacy. Lowery's white supremacy discussion establishes white supremacy as a dangerous and more violent extension of the more common racial prejudice that has always plagued America. Part III - White Radicalization - builds a narrative around the saga of white supremacist Wade Michael Page. Page carried out a mass shooting after invading the temple of Sikhs in Oak Park, Wisconsin. Part IV - An American Nazi's final bark - builds another narrative around white racist, Glenn Miller, who attacked a Jewish Community Center and assassinated Jewish people there. Upon his arrest he informed police “My name is Glenn Miller. I’m an anti-Semite. I hate goddamn Jews. How many did I get.” As with Part II, Parts III and IV, add related discussion of related study and writing in the causes and consequences of right-wing extremists and the need for more aggressive counter measures. Part V - A Movement Rises – narrates a history of the Black Lives Matter campaign, which began shortly after the Obama inauguration with the deliberate murder of Oscar Grant by BART transit police at Fruitvale station. A bystander recorded the Fruitvale murder with a phone camera. There would be more video recorded murders that would go online. Lowery interviewed some of the victim’s families giving an especially personal side to their horror and rage. Readers will find assassination discussion of Eric Garner, New York; Trayvon Martin, Sanford, Florida; Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri; Shawn Washington, St. Louis; George Floyd, Minneapolis; Jamar Clark, Minneapolis; Philando Castile, St. Paul, Minnesota; Heather Heyer, Charlottesville; Breonna Taylor, Louisville, Kentucky. Only a page of a twelve page epilogue has what I would expect to find in an epilogue. All but a page recounts another assassination of a young man named Richard Collins III and its depressing aftermath. The one page ending takes a couple of sentences to write the depressing reality of what so many suspect already that politicians like Trump will continue to exploit and encourage bigotry and the murderous acts of white supremacists. Lowery’s last sentence reads “And as long as there are elements within our mainstream politics and media willing to cynically play to those fears – unwilling to call racism and bigotry by their rightful names – we can expect additional bursts of white racial violence, the horrific calling card of our era of American Whitelash.” Author Lowery does a good job narrating and documenting the evidence for the many episodes of white supremacist violence he recounts in the book. As a journalist he covered many of the events, which allows a first-hand account. The book has endnotes by page number but does not have an index, a decided disadvantage because it makes it difficult to follow names that appear and reappear in the narrative. The book includes authors and titles of related work at various places around the book. I counted at least twenty of them and they appear in lieu of a bibliography. We learn from a white supremacist interviewed for the book they avoid formal organization as too easy to infiltrate and prosecute. Instead, they use social media to spread their violent aims and hope converts will plan their own assassinations. As Lowery explained at the beginning, he wanted to let readers understand “the relentless cycle of violence that has defined American history.” He did that well but I would expect those who finish the book will be evaluating the chances for civil war and realize Trump has spent the last eight years preaching white supremacy.