(gentle music) - No justice, no peace.

No justice, no peace.

- A cry for racial justice some 400 years in the making moves us.

- You hate my skin so bad that you physically touched me.

- The dream of justice for all will be deferred no longer.

- A monkey, and you don't belong here, and kicking me.

- A rise of political extremism.

(crowd shouting) White supremacy.

- What are you doing in this country?

- Domestic terrorism.

- Found a sticky note on her locker that read, "Jews will burn."

- That we must confront and we will defeat.

- 2800 hate incidents against Asian-Americans.

- To overcome these challenges.

- Three people walking outside the Charter Oak Apartment saying the N-word.

- To restore the soul and secure the future of America.

- Like, I don't even feel happy here or welcome here.

- Requires so much more than words.

- We don't (beep) you here.

That's why we elected President Trump.

- Requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy.

- Racial slurs and derogatory comments made again and again.

- Unity.

- 'Cause I hear so many people say this doesn't happen in Connecticut.

- Unity.

(somber music) - For Connecticut Public, I'm John Henry Smith.

This is CUTLINE.

In his inaugural address, Joe Biden became the first president to use the words white supremacy and to list such as one of the primary problems facing our nation.

Now, my guess is when many of you think of white supremacy, you think of verbal and physical violence hurled like a grenade by people wearing swastikas, Klan robes, or other such hateful imagery, but there's also the lower key white supremacy that manifests itself in off-color jokes, coded language, and systematic unfairness.

In other words, that's the white supremacy we could and probably do see every day.

As one variety leads to the other, we are going to talk about both kinds of white supremacy in this hour, with admittedly a heavier focus on the everyday.

The very phrase white supremacy may make you uncomfortable, but after what we've seen in just the last couple of years, the violence against unarmed Black people at the hands of police, the harassment of Asians after many of our leaders took to labeling coronavirus as the China virus, the fatal shootings targeting Jewish people in Pittsburgh and Latinx people in El Paso, and the storming of the United States Capitol by a mostly white mob, many brandishing overtly racist symbols and speech in the name of patriotism.

After all of that, the time for uncomfortable talks is now because it just might be the only thing that saves us, all of us.

After all, if you think of the episodes I just mentioned as trees, it's the seeds planted by everyday white supremacy from which those trees grow.

The Anti-Defamation League says it's documented 107 cases of white supremacist incidents in Connecticut for the year 2020 That's more than three times the amount documented for the previous two years combined.

Besides the beating and racist berating of a hotel worker in Mystic during the summer of 2020, the vast majority of these 2020 incidents did not involve physical violence.

The list of incidents that did and did not make the ADL's list include current and former town leaders from Ellington and Haddam respectively sharing racist memes on Facebook, Zoom bombers peppering both a morning service at a West Hartford synagogue and a discussion with Fifth District Congresswoman Jahana Hayes with racist language, a Hartford police detective soliciting bets on where the first homicide of 2021 would take place in the majority Black and Latinx city of Hartford, and an Asian restaurant-owning couple in Seymour being blamed for the coronavirus in a string of threatening phone calls.

That's just a sampling.

To talk more about the racial climate here in Connecticut, I've invited three guests to the program.

They are Julia Wang, who has co-founded along with her Yale classmate Kathy Lu, the Immigrant History Initiative, an effort to educate and empower our communities through the untold stories of immigrant diasporas in America.

We also have with us Mark Overmyer-Velazquez, the Head of Campus at UConn's Hartford Campus.

And finally, we have Leah Ralls, a social worker and the longtime president of the Windham/Willimantic branch of the NAACP.

Welcome to you all.

I will pose the first question to all of you.

How much of a problem do you perceive white supremacist behavior in Connecticut to be?

To what degree and how do you see it affecting your life as well as the lives of folks in your communities?

Leah, I'll start with you.

- I would say that it's given me some apprehension.

It's made me think twice about where I go and when I go, particularly up here in the Northeast corner, where I live, there's always that moment to step back and say to yourself, "Is this a safe situation that you're about to walk into?"

- I come from a Mexican-American family who migrated to the United States in the 1950s, and while at the same time, I'm someone who's can be white passing and also a Latinx person in a very racist and white supremacist world.

So my own personal experience is one of mixed, of someone who's been exposed to white supremacist and racist attitudes, whether it's me speaking Spanish to my children in grocery stores and having people respond, hoping that I would speak only English as a kind of proxy for racism, to kind of more insidious I would say sort of a liberal approaches to racism where I, in my different positions, people have tokenized me as the only Hispanic or that I would only be interested in diversity and questions that really are questions for all of us.

And then I also experienced it acutely through my students at UConn Hartford, which is a majority Black and Brown campus in a majority Black and Brown city and how they experience it, whether it's lack of access to education, jobs, challenges in their family, being hit harder by COVID, and a number of other things that I'm sure we'll get to.

- Julia, your thoughts.

- Since 2020 started, we have been tracking the statistics of hate incidents against Asian-Americans in the country broadly and particularly on the East Coast.

And we saw reports saying that 2,500 hate incidents had been reported between March and August of 2020, and people reporting 200 times increase in hate incidents against Asian-Americans in New York City alone.

So we were really kind of concerned about what this trend meant for our community.

And then at the same time we had parents and educators really coming to us and expressing their concerns for the safety of their kids and also expressing concerns that they're not able to put language and context to what is happening now.

And that's why we kind of had this workshop, not only to kind of provide a space for people to talk about what it means to be Asian-American or what issues Asian-Americans might face when it comes to racism, but also I think giving people the framing that they often don't have access to.

- Leah, you spoke at a Killingly Board of Education meeting back in 2019 about racial microaggressions from white students towards students of color, like the open use of the N-word and other things.

- We did make some headway with the students, but we did find out that the students who basically let us know that they were gonna continue on using this language, this is what their family subscribes to.

- I recall hearing you talk about a meeting with the former first selectman of Scotland about a picture on his Facebook page featuring him and some others posing in front of a Confederate flag.

How receptive was he and his allies to your thoughts on why that was hurtful?

- Dan himself was very apologetic.

Being an elected official, he knew that was a bad decision.

That was just a bad decision for him to engage in that with his friends and family.

However, there is a larger conversation to be had and the other members in the picture, some were not as receptive to hear how damaging that picture was to the community.

- What did they say?

What did they say in protest?

- Well, "I grew up with that flag.

There's nothing wrong with that flag.

I don't know why you're offended by that flag."

And they needed an education and we gave it to them.

And as a result of it, we were able to bring Black History celebration to the town of Scotland.

We realized that when we have these conversations, sometimes we're preaching to the choir.

But a lot of times we get those one or two participants who we help to change their perspective.

- Mark, you were the chair of the West Hartford School Board at one time.

One of the troubling, dare I say, white supremacist behaviors that I've noticed as someone who moved to this area, this state back in 2018, and was looking for a town to live in and a place to send my child to school, was some of the school rankings that you see published in both print and online.

A family moving to an area that wants a good school reads these things.

All the schools, in my experience reading these sites, that are ranked very well, you look at the demographic makeup of the schools and they tend to have extremely small minority populations.

Which leads me to wonder if in some way, unspoken way more than likely, it is the criteria for the ranking.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

- Yeah, a wonderful question.

I have, as you might imagine, a lot of thoughts on this.

I mean, first of all, that for me, I would wanna know what people think what the term good means, right, to get to your point.

That this notion that good only means high test scores.

And we know that high test scores with SAT and other kinds of scores typically correlate to wealth, white populations, et cetera.

I mean, when I was in West Hartford, and I certainly lived there and chose to live there for a variety of reasons, one thing that struck me is that you're right.

Even in the town of West Hartford, there's a real disparity in the kinds of students and student bodies and families that live in certain parts of town.

And so the conversations there were highly racialized as well.

And moreover, this notion that suburbs like West Hartford or Farmington or Avon or these other ones that are even more white increasingly have a kind of isolated mentality that they don't exist within a larger demographic ecosystem.

So for example, in the areas in and around Hartford, they exist because Hartford exists, right?

A lot of the people who live in West Hartford like myself come into Hartford, do their work, and then then leave.

And this is against the backdrop of a larger history of things like redlining and exclusionary zoning where Blacks and other folk of color weren't allowed to live in certain places like West Hartford and other suburbs, creating these historical inequities and creating the kinds of systems that we have in schools.

So schools now today bear the burden of those, for me, those larger histories of racist housing practice, zoning practices, et cetera.

- There's a movie called "The Good Shepherd" about the beginnings of the CIA starring Matt Damon, produced by a Robert DeNiro a few years back.

And in it, a Italian gentlemen who was being asked for his help in the Bay of Pigs, says to Matt Damon something to the effect of, "All these other demographic groups, Italians, Greeks, Black people, they all have strong cultures and things that they lean on."

And then he looked at the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Matt Damon's character and said, "What do you people have?"

And he said, back to them, "We have the United States of America.

The rest of you are just visiting."

Do you ever feel that way?

What do you feel about that statement?

Julie, I'll start with you.

- So, I mean, I respond to that statement in a lot of different ways, but it kind of reminds me of something that an educator that I spoke to once who said that there's been a lot of violence done when you think about kind of the American identity, because the kind of process of sort of creating the culture of whiteness means erasing a lot of sort of cultural and sort of ethnic heritage that very much defined America sort of throughout its history and its early history.

So I don't know.

I think in a way it feels like something that I think people who identify as white should reflect upon and what that process has meant, right, for kind of your own identity and how that's defined around a particular, I guess, like a particular feeling that's tethered to racism.

- What Julia mentioned was very eloquently, I think, getting to the point of what the larger question is.

So my other hat is I'm a historian and scholar of immigration, and in particular Mexican migration.

And so when I think about Matt Damon's response in that particular movie, yeah, it's one of violence.

It's one of aligning the nation to a position of whiteness as power and privilege and therefore erasing Blacks, Latinx, Asian-American, people who are not white as subordinate.

- Leah, you have the final word on this.

- I'm not gonna give you this scholarly answer, I'm gonna simply say my people didn't ask to come here, you brought us here, you made us come here.

This is our country.

We don't have anywhere to go back to.

So when you make those statements, you are speaking falsely about where my people belong.

- So this summer, there were several protests and demonstrations, Black Lives Matter protests.

Joanna's Cafe had a crowd there.

Obviously as we marched past, there were lots of exchanges back and forth.

After that, I think a week went by and we organized a silent sidewalk protest.

- Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I am so glad to all who came out.

- Hundreds of feet down the road, we could hear them screaming (crowd cheering) jeers and we were outnumbered, right?

And it was mostly older white men (crowd shouting) not wearing masks, right?

We're in the middle of a pandemic.

The Connecticut State Police tried to facilitate what I believe they thought would be some sort of dialogue.

Before we marched over to the restaurant, we were essentially assured that the counter protesters were only there for the safety of the restaurant.

The patrons were just wound up, (crowd shouting) looking for a fight.

I think one of the most striking things for me that day was the lack of policing, and by that I mean you just saw large men running across the street at high schoolers with Black Lives Matter signs.

And that was the huge difference was just the makeup of the crowd and just how hostile they were.

People looked at us as if we were the enemy, not as if I was friends with their kid who graduated Somers High School.

Many of the people during the third protest who drove by clearly drove by 'cause they were looking for issues, threw things, aimed their cars at people, and there was never any accountability for that.

Which I think is a general theme we're seeing is that there's just a lack of accountability.

Perhaps you've heard it said since the capitol riot that "this is not who we are" and "this is not America".

But history tells a different story.

There are far too many examples of angry, white mob violence against communities of color in America to list them all here.

But among the worst: 1864: The Sand Creek Massacre in what is now Colorado by US armed troops of an estimated 500 Native Americans two thirds of which were women and children.

From 1882 to 1968 white terrorists lynched 3,446 Black Americans.

At least those are the ones we know about Many of these events were quite public and quite festive.

1898: Over 2,000 white supremacists overthrew the legally elected city government in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Full of Black elected officials.

In the process they killed around 300 Black people while burning their neighborhoods and businesses to the ground.

One of the leaders of the massacre went on to become governor of North Carolina His statue looked on during the capitol riot of January 6th.

Similarly murderous events happened far and wide in the late 1910s and early 20s in places like Elaine, Tulsa, Rosewood, and Chicago.

The violence came to New London Connecticut in 1919.

No one is reported to have died but accounts of the day report a white mob dragging Black guests from the Hotel Bristol into the street and beating them severely.

- Whenever I see images like the marching men in Charlottesville carrying tiki torches and shouting, "Jews will not replace us," or I read vitriolic comments online at the mere suggestion that former NFL QB Colin Kaepernick might've had a point with his peaceful protest against racial injustice, or that he deserves another shot in the NFL after four years of watching numerous lesser players get NFL deals but not him, when I hear and read all these things, I not only ask myself, "Why are these folks so angry," but I also ask why these fellow Americans seem to increasingly relish living in that state of constant anger.

Let's take a stab at answering that and other why questions with two men from academia who have devoted their careers to pondering such things.

We welcome to the program William Horne, a Villanova postdoctoral fellow concentrating on African-American history.

He's also the co-founder of The Activist History Review.

And joining him is Matthew Hughey an associate professor of sociology at UConn, who's extensively studied race and racism.

And I'd like to start by asking both of you what are people who practice white supremacy so mad about?

- Well, the question of anger as it relates to white supremacy is one that's fairly complex, but in large extent, it boils down to what I call the crisis of whiteness, that white people largely in the Western world, and especially in the United States, have been raised to believe that they are superior and should be entitled to all the benefits of society.

And this is such a level of entitlement that it's actually quite lofty and nearly impossible to reach in our current state of race relations.

So when people don't achieve those, they act out and they often scapegoat people of color, any kind of others, immigrants, non-Christians, et cetera.

Anything that doesn't align with a kind of white supremacist ideal.

So that anger often stems from this perceived lack of opportunity, and ironically a sense of victimization within white communities.

- William, do you wanna chime in on that?

- Yeah, absolutely, thank you.

I think one of the main points I try to emphasize in sort of mapping and understanding the history of white supremacy is that it pays to be white and angry.

And we saw in the mob that attacked the Capitol, people who were very wealthy and very well-dressed, very well connected, and that very much fits with the longer history of white supremacy in our country.

It's a very much fed by white elites who profit off of this sort of racist worldview, both sort of directly in peddling lies, but then also indirectly by maintaining their own power.

- Well, Dr. Hughey, you recently wrote in one of the local papers something to the effect of, quote, "The local conflicts that have emerged recently in Connecticut reflect the fraught ways in which whiteness has developed as a racial identity over the past few hundred years."

Could you expound on what you've seen in Connecticut that leads you to that conclusion?

- Well, this is a phenomenon that's been in the making for the past few decades from the kind of anti-income tax rally of 1991, which was one of the biggest rallies in state history, to the private school movement and even private busing, to the rise of the Klan, the Conservative Citizens Council, the National Alliance, World Church of the Creator, various white supremacist groups, but also a rise in all white organizing that doesn't explicitly have a racial agenda.

That we see more and more homogeneous white spaces that become in a way a kind of incubator for white nationalist and white supremacist thinking.

And I'm afraid in our current trajectory, that's only going to worsen and we're gonna see more and more episodes of violent conflict, if not simply inciting violence in the Nutmeg State.

- You were recently quoted in one of the local papers as saying, "White people often translate any gain or an attempt to gain freedom and equality by people of color as an attack or a loss for them.

They see racial justice issues as a zero-sum game."

Tell us more about that point of view.

- Well, the project of whiteness itself has been built upon kind of othering from people of color, setting itself up as distinct, as normal, as different, as closer to the ideal citizen, the most moral person, et cetera.

And that has been built upon excluding resources from people of color.

And because of that historical construction, when people of color are perceived, or if they are actually making any type of socioeconomic gains, that is often translated as taking away from whiteness, from taking away things from white people.

So although not every single resource is a zero-sum, that's often how it is translated because of the historical linkages of whiteness in relation to resources in the United States.

- You hear all these calls right now after January 6th for unity.

How do you achieve unity if there's a powerful group that looks at life that way, as we win, you lose?

- I mean, I think we saw exactly this sort of power dynamic at work during and towards the end of Reconstruction, where we would see white mobs attacking and murdering on a massive scale Black activists and politicians.

And then when their murdering spree was over, they wouldn't be held responsible and in fact would call for unity, a unity with their Northern counterparts in whiteness, in the power of whiteness, as sort of an American national religion.

And that whiteness is absolutely premised on the idea that everyone else loses, and that when everyone else loses, all white people win.

- Dr. Hughey, I wanna stick with you for a second.

Police accountability in Connecticut.

Black leaders in Connecticut, have called for increased police accountability.

There has been legislation passed over the summer, and there's been quite a bit of pushback from right-wing, from right-leaning people on this issue.

What has been your reactions as you've watched the police accountability debate play out?

- Well, it's saddening but I'm unsurprised.

I think it kind of fits in step with this kind of white reactionary mentality that's not endemic only to Connecticut, but the nation writ large, in which policing is often implicitly seen by a lot of white communities as their own private security force.

And when there is any type of accountability that is asked for, then all of a sudden you see people reacting.

If policing, and if protests over this type of policing, really are just about policing and not about race, then you would see a lot more opposition and at least commentary on the role that police play and don't play in white communities because poor white people are often subject to a lot of abuse by the police.

But when it comes to helping out or rectifying issues of injustice and helping out our Black and Brown brothers and sisters, then that's when you start to see a lot of protests that the police are being picked on or not given a fair shake.

So it really seems to come down to a double standard that is about race at the core of it.

- What do your disciplines individually say about the little things in white supremacy that lead to big things like we saw January 6th?

- I think we see moments of white supremacist backlash when it appears that we're making gains as a democracy, gains towards a more equal society, gains in civil rights.

And so we see moments of that during Reconstruction, after the Civil War, when Black Americans are holding public office and voting and white America absolutely loses it and unleashes a wave of violence against Black Americans.

You see that again after World War II when Black Americans come home and they want access to the GI Bill, they want access to decent schools for their kids, right?

And then we sort of see, again, kind of like a Southern strategy at work there, right?

We see a massive alignment or a realignment of politics around the politics of whiteness.

And again, I can't help but notice, right, and I think many of us do, that this sort of latest resurgence of a more violent white supremacist movement coincides with the election of President Barack Obama.

Having a Black man as a president, I think seems to white America, many white Americans, as a loss and as a threat.

And if they think about this as truly a zero-sum game, then something's being taken from them and given to someone else and their idea is that they're going to go out there and protest with guns and take it back.

Dr. Hughey, I throw the same question to you.

What is your research?

What is your course of study?

What has it taught you about how smaller things like jokes and memes, what does your research tell you about how those things play into white supremacist violence?

What do you think of that?

- I think simply put, they're the bricks and mortar that build the house of white supremacy.

Part of my work as a sociologist is I also kind of moonlight on the side as an expert witness for a lot of racial discrimination cases.

And it's kind of stunning to see, regardless of context, regardless of time or place, that the same types of racial discrimination, the same types of memes and jokes and threats, are used over and over again throughout time and space, simply because I think they resonate with the wielders of those jokes, of those insults, because they think that they will actually somehow work and terrorize Black of Brown people like they used to.

And they still do intimidate, and they still are illegal, and they still are incredibly painful, but I think what sociology is also showing is that there is always resistance to these, that movements like the Black Lives Matter movement, just like in the Civil Rights movement, just like in the Abolitionist movement, people are pushing back against these smaller everyday threats against them and mobilizing.

And this is going to simply continue and repeat itself in so long as we do not deal with the core issue of justice and equality in our country.

- What does your research tell you about how the problem of, I won't say the problem of white supremacy gets solved, but how it gets minimized to the point where society can progress in a little bit neater fashion where things become a little bit more equal in this country?

- I think it has to start with justice.

We don't get unity without justice.

There are sort of two moments that come to mind when the state prosecutes white vigilantes, and we get a more robust and equitable democracy in those moments.

During 1871 early Reconstruction, the state passes the Klan Acts and prosecutes white supremacist violence and it stops.

So when the Justice Department forms the Civil Rights Division and finally starts prosecuting these cases, then we absolutely see a more robust and diverse and equitable democracy at work.

We can have that, but it absolutely requires that we commit to justice before we cry for unity.

- Over the summer of 2020 with all of the racial unrest, I found myself really wanting to do something about it.

And so there were several incidents in town that happened.

We had an incident where BLM banners were taken down and a group of us went and put them back up.

We also did a Silent March for all of the victims of police brutality.

And so these events, coupled with the town creating a Racial Equity Task Force that I was selected to be on, really kind of thrust me into this arena that I really wasn't familiar with.

And one day I went and got the mail, and I was actually feeling really good because I had gotten my official papers welcoming me to the task force.

I had received a fantastic note from a really dear friend of mine.

And then I opened up this strange looking envelope and I pulled out this card.

It looks like an oversized raffle ticket that said, "(beep) Hunting License" on it.

On the back of it was a note saying that this was not a threat, it was an insult and that I know all about insulting people.

Admittedly, my first reaction was kind of a chuckle because whoever thinks that they're going to receive something like this in the mail?

Who even thinks that something like this exists outside of a museum, right?

I showed it to my husband, still in shock, and just his face really is what registered what I was really dealing with.

So obviously me being me, I did my research.

I found the origin of the note.

It's given as like a door prize to some racist cookout in the South that was going on in the nineties, and they decided that they wanted me to have it.

I think that people like to think because it's was 2020, it's 2021, we're in Connecticut, things like that happened such a long time ago, I wanted people to be aware that this is still around and this is very likely my neighbor, our neighbor, somebody that you would never think.

- To delve deeper into the whys of white supremacy, we're joined now by two former openly white supremacist folks, Scott Ernest and Shannon Foley Martinez.

Welcome to the show, and I'll ask you both this question to start off.

Why are white supremacists so mad?

- The whole ecosystem of violent white supremacy is full of people who just are angry and rage-filled, often having multitudinous layers of trauma of their own, and that one of the things that we know is that like hurt people hurt people.

That a lot of it is just this projection of self-hatred out onto the rest of the world.

- Well, one of the problems that ends up happening is that there there's a lot of people out there that are desperate for help, and there's a lot of people out there that take advantage of that and lie.

So they might tell you that they and only they can help you, and if there's somebody else telling you that, "No, we can actually help you," then they basically say, "No, those people are all bad.

They're actually out to put you in into camps or to squash your religion," various things like that.

And so you have all these people that they do have grievances, in most cases they have grievances, and just people take advantage of that and lie to them.

- I wanna give you both a chance to talk about your paths to white supremacy.

Scott, I'll start with you.

You said you spent a lot of time on an online forum called Stormfront where you met others like you and thus became radicalized.

How important was that as a path to white supremacist radicalization?

- It's extremely addicting.

So when you get started in it, the rhetoric, you get excited, the dopamine in your system just goes wild.

Whenever you start down the path, you try to just overdo it and get more and more and more involved.

And eventually, I ended up becoming a moderator and ended up a recruiter for a hate group up in Montana.

And that only happened after a decade of basically just learning the ropes and starting to feel that this excites me.

Owning the libs is a very important thing in the movement.

And it really does, it's an addiction.

It's an addiction and it actually spreads a lot like an infection too.

- And for me, that trajectory was that I grew up in a dysfunctional household where my earliest memories, I felt like the black sheep in my family.

I didn't really feel like I belonged there.

And then when I was 11 years old, we moved halfway across the country, and that sense of not really belonging expanded out into the greater world.

And then when I was 14 years old, I was sexually assaulted by two men at a party that I went to.

They were white men.

Sometimes people ask that, That there wasn't like a direct correlation that way, that it's more this multitudinous layers and experiences of trauma.

I felt so personally worthless and I hated myself.

And the angriest people on the periphery of the punk rock music scene where I hung out were the white power skinheads.

And I think like the rage within me really resonated with the rage that they displayed.

I remember having the thought like, "Well, who's worse than the Nazis?

They have to take me in," because I felt so worthless, right?

And so I started spending more and more time around these guys and began listening to white power music and reading some of the literature that was there, began getting versed in some of the language and conspiracy theories about it all.

And what I didn't know and I didn't identify was happening was that I was radicalizing, that I was building a physical echo chamber that I would exist in for the next nearly five years where everything I input was all part of this community, and inside of it, it was normalized.

Everything that I did every day was filtered through this lens.

And that lens was normalized by having this very closed social network of people.

And this ideology was a very easy thing to hold onto that offered an explanation for why I felt like the world...

It gave me targets to blame for why I felt like the world was an inherently unsafe and threatening and dangerous place.

It would take me after I left the movement to really like grapple with the shame and the understanding like, "Oh my gosh, this wasn't just a set of ideas.

This had very real impacts and that those impacts were horrible and vile."

- Hey Scott, I was struck by the following passage on a write-up on you.

In the Tampa Bay Times, they said, "In recruitment mode, Ernest sought out low-info people, uncritical thinkers who might mistake Stormfront's erstwhile newspaper for a legitimate source.

Online, spreading propaganda was frictionless, so much simpler than the Klan's literature drops of yore.

He played 'Dungeons & Dragons' with acquaintances and slowly let his ideology leak out."

I found that absolutely chilling.

Could you tell us more about that?

We're talking about a lot of people that they get their news from Facebook, their uncle shares it and so they read it and they immediately believe it.

They don't ever actually do any research on their own.

And those are the types that you tend to target.

Another way of targeting is to find something in common with your targets.

So in my case, "Dungeons & Dragons."

I probably wouldn't broach it during the game, but then afterwards, I might say, "Hey, have you ever heard of the website Stormfront?

You might find something interesting there and that'd be a good place for you to go and learn things."

Again, you're targeting people that are not gonna question too much about what they see.

They're the type that would read what they see on Stormfront and think, "Wow, that is definitely happening."

- How do you de-radicalize these people?

- We've gotta change our culture.

When it comes to getting people out, they have to be willing to listen.

They have to be willing to change.

It doesn't really do a whole lot to actually even reach out to people.

Really, they have to come to you.

And so part of that is we have to change the education system.

We have to increase critical thinking.

We have to get people to be able to read a article from a website and realize whether that's real news or whether that's fake news, whether it's something that's written as propaganda, or whether it's actual facts.

- One of the best things that we can do is just talk to our kids about this as a potential reality.

Like I give lectures and teach from middle school all the way up through university.

And when I ask people about their online habits and I ask them, "Who's encountered racist and antisemitic comments and content online," 100% of the hands go up.

So I would assume as a parent that your children will interact with these ideas and with these communities, so have an action plan and talk about what you would like your child to do when they encounter this.

Do you want them to screenshot it, report it, tell you?

And as white parents, definitely to commit to your own anti-racist learning in an ongoing way and let your kids see that, and let them see the missteps and mistakes that you made, and talk about that and engage their help in learning better ways of being in the world.

- Now so far, we've done a lot of identifying the problem, and now I wanna talk about how we fix this.

And to help me with that, I welcome to the program two deep-as-the-ocean thinkers on this subject.

Coming to us from East Haddam is author, activist, and too many other titles to name Drew John Ladd, and from her home in California, we have world-famous diversity educator, Jane Elliott, she of the famous exercise where she made her blue-eyed third grade students inferior to the brown-eyed students for the purpose of the exercise to give them a taste of what people of color go through in this country.

Mrs. Elliott, I find it so moving and so instructive that you conducted this exercise the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, and that I've read you paid a pretty severe cost for doing what you thought was right in this instance, didn't you?

- Oh, not really.

People stopped talking to me, but some of the people who stopped talking to me didn't have much to say anyway.

- (laughs) I understand, I understand.

Drew, you famously were not invited last year to a Black justice rally in East Haddam, despite being one of the only Black people in town.

You showed up anyway and gave this really impassioned speech.

What has being that much of a minority in a conservative Connecticut town done to your level of hope that white supremacy can be quelled after it's flourished for the last four years?

- I wouldn't say it's inspired much in terms of hope, but I think especially in the last year with at least Black Live Matter becoming more public, we've seen a lot more white allyship, the behavior of white allyship and the manifestation thereof, so we're seeing a couple of structures start to be questioned, nothing yet to be dismantled, but I'm hopeful that that momentum is going to continue.

- Mrs. Elliott, you've been actively trying to get white people to recognize the supremacy they benefit from and the biases that they hold, and you've been doing it for over a half a century now.

So I'll sort of pose the same question to you that I posed to Drew.

The recent swell of outwardly expressed racism in this country, has it made you more or less hopeful?

- Well, it's made me extremely hopeful.

I think that the anger that people are showing at what happened in Washington, DC, and what happened when that young man was killed deliberately, by somebody putting his knee on his neck for nine and a half minutes, showed what we call white people that it really is happening, that Black people, so-called Black people, have been telling us the truth all along.

We should have listened to them.

And only when we get into so-called white people's heads that there's only one race, it's the human race, and all these others that we have identified are color groups, when we get that into people's heads, we will have done away with racism.

You and I are 30th to 50th cousins.

Whether you like it or not, I am a member of your family.

There's only one family on the face of the earth, the family of man, and that's what it says in the Bible.

Now, if you don't wanna believe the Bible, that's up to you, but if you're going to beat me over the head with the Bible, as an evangelical you need to know that I've read those verses and I've read some that you choose to ignore.

- So the big question for both of you, what do we do?

Drew, you wrote a missive called, "A Letter to White People Who Aren't Racist," and here's the part that particularly is relevant, I feel, to this discussion.

You said, quote, "Here are some very easy things you can do right now to make life uncomfortable for racists.

Stop, inviting them to dinner.

Cite their racism.

Stop associating with them."

How realistic do you think that is in 2021?

- Extremely.

We've reached a point now where we have seen the tangible costs of racism.

It isn't this thing that we've pretended it is, which is sort of this social discomfort or things like that.

But people are literally losing their lives.

There's a financial cost of this.

It's far-reaching.

We cannot allow them, the people who are supporting this, the people who are feeding that machine that's literally taking the lives of minorities and other people, and invite them to lunch.

In the same way that we wouldn't invite somebody who attacks children to dinner or lunch, or we wouldn't invite somebody who mistreats women to dinner or lunch, we should also do the same thing to racists.

Making social space for racists and there being no social cost for racism, I think is a travesty, and I'm almost shocked that the we can say on the one hand that we recognize that racism is a problem in America, and at the same time we invite these folks to dinner.

Racism isn't just a concept happening disembodied, but rather it has actors, intentional actors that we need to hold accountable.

And if racism is evil, than just don't invite evil people to dinner.

To me, that seems like simple math.

- I think that the last four years hopefully will be for the future of this country what the Holocaust was for me.

I was born the year Adolph Hitler came to power.

So for 12 years, I watched my father just infuriated of what was happening in Germany and then throughout Europe.

I think in the future, people who were watching this thing for the last four years will say, when they see it start again in 30 or 40 or 50 years, they'll say, "Hold the phone, here.

We've been through this before.

We watched this in 2020, 2016 to 2020.

We aren't going to let this happen again."

This is a really good experience and a really good example of how you do not treat other people and what you do not do to a country.

- What do all of us Americans, regardless of our racial demographic, all of us Americans who want to live in harmony, what do we do with the hardcore supremacists who after years of consuming hate-filled, misleading information only see the world from an I win, you lose zero-sum point of view?

Drew, do you wanna take that first?

- There was nobody out there that's racist that think they're doing the right thing or that feels like it's a true thing.

And even if they are there, there has to be some kind of consequence.

Right now, racists pay nothing for being racist in public or elsewhere.

And until we have that kind of consequence, until we are ready to commit to the pain of change, which sometimes is gonna include cutting certain people out or making there be a social cost for these kinds of behaviors, we will continue down this path of just denigrating people who don't deserve it.

- Yeah, how do you convince white America that they have a skin in this fight?

This is not just something that they need to be ally ship for for our benefit, this is something that benefits them as well.

- It's gonna solve itself, make no mistake about this.

Within 30 years, melanin-meek people will have lost their numerical majority in the United States of America.

And that's one of the reasons you're having this upheaval right now is because those of us who call ourselves white are scared to death of what's going to happen when people of color get power.

And I will never forget the woman at the University of Houston who said, "Well, if those people get power, aren't they going to wanna treat us the way we've treated them?"

I said, "That's your fear is that they're gonna want anything, (Drew chuckling) they're going to want to get even.

So I said to the audience, 1500 people and half of them Black, I said, "Well, every person in this room who considers himself or herself Black and who wants to get even with all white folks, please stand."

Three young Black males stood.

The rest of them just looked at him like, "Are you crazy?"

And I said to this woman, "Are you more comfortable now?"

And she said, "Yes, I am."

I said, "Now, let's be honest about this.

Will every Black person in this room who wants to get even with one or two white people, please stand."

They all leap to their feet, (Drew laughing) cheering and laughing (indistinct), high-fiving one another.

And all of a sudden it was like, "Yeah, there it is, that's what we want."

And white people have to know- - Mrs. Elliott.

I'm so glad you said that, though.

I just wanted to jump in.

I'm so glad you said that because I have heard that this thought process is out there, and I can tell you from my little corner of the world and my family and the people that I know and just my understanding of how we as a group tend to think, I mean, we just wanna live, you know?

- I know that, and you- - We just wanna eat, go to school, have a little money for entertainment, and take a vacation every now and then.

We wanna live.

Time wasted on revenge, it's not time well-spent.

- But you see, that is not the fear that you're gonna feel that way.

White people are afraid that you're going to want to get even.

We have to convince white people that not everybody thinks the way white people do.

You have to realize that on the third day of the exercise when I did the blue-eyed, brown-eyed exercise, on the first day, the kids who were on the bottom were making plans, the boys were in the boys' restroom, what they were gonna do when they got on top.

On the day they were on the top, the next day, they didn't get even.

So when we had the discussion, I said, "Why didn't you guys get even with one another?

You said you were going to."

And they said, every year, "We found out how it feels to be on the bottom and we didn't wanna make anybody feel the way we felt when we were on the bottom."

- Wow.

- Now if, yeah, see, if white people could just look at that and realize that Black people raise our children, Black people do the work that's done in this country, Black people saved this democracy in November and January.

By going to the polls in huge numbers and voting the way that would save this democracy, they saved this democracy.

I will be indebted to them for as long as I live because they stepped up and said, "No, this isn't fair, this isn't good for any of us.

We're gonna put a stop to it."

And they did.

We have to realize that it's that kind of excellence that we have ignored or denigrated in this country for the last 300 years.

It's time to get over it.

And Black people haven't been here just since slavery.

They were here from between 20,000 to 10,000 years before white folks got here.

Native Americans came from Africa, just like all the rest of us did.

So let's start telling the truth instead of perpetuating this lie.

- Drew, did you have anything you wanted to add?

- I do.

So, I have a particular challenge and I think Black people who are in my situation have a particular challenge in engaging white people and getting them to do stuff.

Like, I live in a town of about 10, 11,000 and there are 50 Black people.

Oh, 48 'cause a family just moved out.

(John laughing) So, we don't exist really.

So wherever I go, plus I'm kilted, so wherever I go, I stand out, and it's always a conversation about my blackness, my belonging, where did I come from, all this other kind of stuff.

- Let's just make sure people are clear about that.

So, you wear a kilt, like a Scottish kilt.

- Oh, yes.

- Right.

- I'm 11% Scottish, I wear a kilt.

- There you go.

- I've been wearing a kilt every single day for the last year and a half.

I have 18 of them, and it's my favorite thing to wear.

But in this town, what I find is white folk are willing to step up to the line and say, "This is wrong," but not commit to the pain of change.

That is, pay the price of flipping this over so that we include more people, that we invest in more people, that we bring more people in, and that sometimes we take a loss because of the cost of racism.

That's a difficult thing to sell, pain, you know what I mean?

But at the same time, that's the only way to bring this together is to say, "This is harming all of us.

When we're harming Jeniqua, when we're harming Drew, or when we're harming all these people, we're harming ourselves."

We have to recognize that these aren't disparate groups, but these are our circles.

This is our community, ours.

How can we let this happen where we live?

We really need to take responsibility for making us us rather than just saying it and doing the work of unity rather than just the dream of it.

- If your reaction to this program is more anger and more hate, I urge, I beg you to replace that with more conversation and more understanding.

There's enough room for all of us if we focus more on what we have in common than on what divides us.

That's our show, I'm John Henry Smith, thank you for watching CUTLINE: Everyday White Supremacy.

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