Wednesday’s PBS NewsHour featured a chat with radical (Pulitzer Prize-winning) journalist Wesley Lowery about his new book on how white Americans and the Republican Party became scared and possibly dangerous racists after Barack Obama’s election. Lowery was making the book-tour rounds publicizing American Whitelash. Lowery, formerly a journalist for the Washington Post, recently became executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, which was partnered with the left-leaning PBS investigative series Frontline.
NewsHour interviewer Geoff Bennett welcomed him like an old friend.
William Brangham gushed: On our Bookshelf tonight, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery examines the pattern of racist violence that follows racial progress in America, including the recent white supremacist violence that surged following Barack Obama's presidency….
Bennett repeated the mantra in his first question to Lowery.
Bennett: In the book, you look at how and why racist violence has spiked since the election of Barack Obama, and you write: "The election of a black president did not usher us from the shadows of our racist past. Rather, it led us down a perilous path and into a decade-and-a-half and counting of explicit racial thrashing." Pick it up from there.
Wesley Lowery: Think about what we have seen in the time since President Obama's election, the rise of a nativist movement hyper-concerned with immigration and refugees that vowed to ban Muslims from coming into the country, and ultimately was able to elect President Trump. We have seen a rise of a civil rights movement, of young, energetic, diverse activists attempting to push the country forward on various issues of justice and to push the country beyond perhaps what it imagined it might be willing to consider not that long ago, right?
Certainly, many of the movement protests after George Floyd’s death were “energetic” in the destruction of urban businesses.
Lowery relayed an anecdote about Marcelo Lucero, “an Ecuadorian immigrant who was murdered in Long Island not long after Barack Obama was elected, days after the election, prior to the inauguration.
Then he made a facile leap between supposedly “dehumanizing rhetoric” and murderous violence.
Lowery: ….Local politicians began adapting really dehumanizing rhetoric, so much so that the local high school kids started going out, seeking immigrants to attack and beat up. And one night they found Marcelo Lucero. And, so, so much of this book is about what our role is, those of us in the public square, public officials, and our role in acknowledging that when we allow dehumanizing rhetoric to take over our politics, the result is that people are dehumanized, and some, some people among us stop treating those people as humans.
Bennett: The federal government, as you well know, has warned about this. Both the DHS and FBI have warned about the increased activity and recruitment among white supremacist groups, among right-wing militia groups….
Lowery, a leftist, also respectfully cited the government’s domestic surveillance organizations (oh the irony), and claimed expression of “white supremacist ideas” had risen since the Black Lives Matter movement, but doesn’t go into detail.
Surely he doesn’t mean that any criticism of the corrupt BLM movement is racist?
Bennett ended the chat with gush: "The book is American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress, already a New York Times bestseller. Congratulations."
This friendly chat with a far-left race-baiting guest was brought to you in part by BNSF Railway.
A transcript is available, click “Expand” to read:
PBS NewsHour
7/26/23
7:47:23 p.m. (ET)
William Brangham: On our Bookshelf tonight, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery examines the pattern of racist violence that follows racial progress in America, including the recent white supremacist violence that surged following Barack Obama's presidency.
Lowery recently sat down with Geoff Bennett to discuss his findings, which he details in his new book, "American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress."
Geoff Bennett: Wesley Lowery joins us now.Welcome back to the "NewsHour."
Wesley Lowery, Author, "American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress": Thanks so much for having me.
Geoff Bennett: In the book, you look at how and why racist violence has spiked since the election of Barack Obama. And you write: "The election of a Black president did not usher us from the shadows of our racist past. Rather, it led us down a perilous path and into a decade-and-a-half and counting of explicit racial thrashing." Pick it up from there.
Wesley Lowery: Think about what we have seen in the time since President Obama's election, the rise of a nativist movement hyperconcerned with immigration and refugees that vowed to ban Muslims from coming into the country, and ultimately was able to elect President Trump.
We have seen a rise of a civil rights movement, of young, energetic, diverse activists attempting to push the country forward on various issues of justice and to push the country beyond perhaps what it imagined it might be willing to consider not that long ago, right?
And so we have been in this era, where, following a Black president, we have now been locked even further into the conversations about race and racial justice across the country. One of the things that's also true, right, we still live in a majority-white country.
And we have seen in the polling that in the years since Barack Obama's election, white Americans have become increasingly racially anxious, concerned, right? By the end of the Obama presidency, 55 percent of white Americans say that they believe they are racially discriminated against, right?
So the essence of having one Black guy run the country meant that all the white people thought they were now racial minorities and facing systemic discrimination, right? And that speaks to — and one of the things I look at, it speaks to a changing — a changing nature of our politics.
And then there are people out there, other movements, people who really are avowed white supremacists who look at this and they smile.The idea that so many Americans would be so anxious, so concerned, that these things will be in the forefront this way, they think they can use that to recruit. And, ultimately, we end up seeing a lot of violent acts being committed by people who join those movements
Geoff Bennett: In the book, you also capture the stories of people who fell prey to this racist violence.
What story stood out to you?
Wesley Lowery: I think a lot about the story of Marcelo Lucero, who was an Ecuadorian immigrant who was murdered in Long Island not long after Barack Obama was elected, days after the election, prior to the inauguration.
And as much as this book talks about the rise that comes following Barack Obama's election, it — I tried to be careful and to be clear that Barack Obama inherits a set of issues that were already at play. And so you see Marcelo Lucero, who comes to this country with his brother to seek freedom and seek liberty, and, ultimately, at a time when people in that part of the country were very anxious that their property values might fall because of immigration, that there was going to be a competition for resources.
Local politicians began adapting really dehumanizing rhetoric, so much so that the local high school kids started going out, seeking immigrants to attack and beat up. And one night they found Marcelo Lucero. And, so, so much of this book is about what our role is, those of us in the public square, public officials, and our role in acknowledging that when we allow dehumanizing rhetoric to take over our politics, the result is that people are dehumanized, and some of — some people among us stop treating those people as humans.
Geoff Bennett: The federal government, as you well know, has warned about this. Both the DHS and FBI have warned about the increased activity and recruitment among white supremacist groups, among right-wing militia groups.
Tell me more about how this threat has proliferated in this social media age, in this age where people feel emboldened to say things they wouldn't, say and do things they wouldn't normally otherwise. And how is the federal government confronting the challenge?
Wesley Lowery:
Of course. We have seen an unquestionable rise. We've seen the FBI director and DHS come out and say that currently the biggest terroristic threat to the United States of America is from white supremacist terror and domestic terror, not foreign or Islamic terrorism.
And those threats can be difficult and be difficult to grapple with, in part because there are First Amendment concerns that might not exist in a more international context, in part because there is a hesitance sometimes and a desire not to label people who might fall on a certain side of the political spectrum as potentially dangerous, right?
And so we have seen this kind of time and time again, where law enforcement has been hesitant to aggressively combat and disrupt such movements and such spaces.
Increasingly, as you allude to in your note, we now see people gathering in online spaces, that these are not hierarchical, big organizations in most cases, but, rather, the white supremacist movement has adopted what one of its leaders called leaderless resistance, this idea they're going to put out all this propaganda, they're going to make it available on the Internet, and enough aggrieved people will locate it and find it and know what to do.
And we have seen this over and over and over again. In Charleston, Dylann Roof starts Googling for information about — quote, unquote — "Black-on-white crime" because he's been following media coverage of Trayvon Martin's death. And that leads him to these dark corners of the Internet that proselytize about the violent threat that Black people present to white people and the violent threat that immigration presents to the — quote, unquote — "white race," because, again, we know that race is not biological that way.
And, before long, he's writing a manifesto where he's talking about the — quote — "Jewish problem" and he's walking into a Black church and massacring people, right?
And, so, so much of this movement today is about using these online spaces to proselytize and radicalize without ever having to give direct marching orders.
Geoff Bennett: What sparked your interest in this? What motivated you to write this book?
Wesley Lowery: So, my first book was about the rise of Black Lives Matter as a movement.
And as 2016 gave way to 2017, I was thinking a lot about, what does it mean to be a writer and a journalist who looks at issues of race and justice? And, increasingly, we were seeing these cases and these incidents of people being attacked or the expression explicitly of these white supremacist ideas that had been socially taboo previously, that there was a clear emboldenment of this movement because our politics was playing footsie with it.
That we're seeing white supremacists gather in D.C. around the inauguration giving "Heil Hitler" salutes. We're seeing a Muslim woman being attacked on a train in Portland. We're seeing the shootings in Pittsburgh and Buffalo and El Paso.
And so I thought that it was important to use whatever talent or space or resources I had to try to tell some of those stories, to record them for history, but then also to try to put them in concert with each other, to explain, if we're living in a moment of increased racial grievance in this space, we should understand it, because, if we understand it, perhaps we can do something to combat it.
Geoff Bennett: The book is "American Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress," already a New York Times bestseller. Congratulations.
Wesley Lowery: Thank you so much. I know the viewer is going to help us keep — keep ourselves on the list. (Laughter)
Geoff Bennett: Wesley Lowery, it's good to see you, as always.
Wesley Lowery: Thank you man.
