Take note, my fellow white folks – those thugs in Minneapolis aren’t the Gestapo – they’re the Klan. Most Americans have felt horror and revulsion at the scenes of state violence playing across our screens in recent months. But how many of us have understood that the roots of that authoritarian violence were planted right here in America centuries ago, from the seeds of the false stories of race, white supremacy, and the Lost Cause of the Confederacy?
Comparisons of current events to the foreign evils of Nazi Germany abound, but we should instead be connecting to our homegrown institutions of indigenous removal, slave patrols, Jim Crow segregation, and the many other tools of government violence that our country has mustered against People of Color for more than 400 years.
My argument here is not original – in the last week I have seen several Black voices call out this problem here on Substack. We need to listen to them.
Dr. Stacey Patton, a Howard University professor and journalist, writes on Substack: “When folks [compare today’s America to Nazi Germany], what they are doing is framing evil as something that’s foreign, exceptional, and imported rather than something indigenous, cultivated, home grown, and structurally American.”1
