Listening to the land: eco-rooted activism at the Charis community in Charlottesville, Virginia

2021 ◽  
Vol 103 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-195
Author(s):  
Grace Aheron
Keyword(s):  
Community Organizing ◽  
Intentional Community ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Systemic Oppression ◽  
The Right

The Charis Community is an intentional community on Episcopal Church property founded in 2014 in Charlottesville, Virginia. What began as a modest agrarian ministry on six acres of land grew into a powerful ministry of antiracist and antifascist community organizing through the white supremacist Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Through telling the story of Charis, I argue that our land-based ministry necessarily drew us into fighting many forms of systemic oppression. As we grew closer to the land and grew in our understanding of our stewardship of the land, the stories the land held—stories of oppression and resilience—shaped our vocation of fighting for justice.

A Call from the Task Force

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
Task Force ◽  
Freedom Of Speech ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Virginia Beach ◽  
The Right ◽  
Constitutional Protections ◽  
The City

This chapter introduces the task force created by Governor Terry McAuliffe in Richmond, Virginia that are tasked to study the racial violence in the city of Charlottesville during the summer of 2017. It mentions the violence in Richmond that claimed the life of Heather Heyer when a white supremacist, James Alex Fields Jr., slammed his speeding car into a crowd of counter-protesters confronting a “Unite the Right” rally. This chapter explains the work of the task force, which requires them to deeply investigate the constitutional protections of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and the rules of engagement governing what society could or could not do when confronted with racial supremacist groups rallying in a city. It also describes the famous free speech case called Virginia vs. Black involving vicious racist hate speech. The case involved a cross-burning rally of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in rural western Virginia in 1998 and a second cross-burning incident in Virginia Beach in the yard of an African American, James Jubilee.

Supremacy and the Origins of American Slavery

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 754-758
Author(s):  
Michael Guasco
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Connective Tissues ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Relationship

Katharine Gerbner has provided readers a much-needed treatment of the relationship between Protestant Christianity and the emergence of White Supremacist racial ideology in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Scholars have long perceived the general outlines of the story that unfolds in Gerbner's book, but no one has highlighted the connective tissues with as much care and detail. With her book, it is now much easier to see what we once could only imagine to be there: Christians (Protestants in this telling) played a singular role in the articulation of a racial ideology that would eventually become a widespread rationale for slavery throughout much of the Atlantic world. There are surprises in this tale, such as the seemingly paradoxical role played by historical actors who scholars often credit with being on the right side of history—the Quakers and Moravians, for example, who are typically cast as characters intent on destabilizing slavery. Not so, according to Gerbner. In this way, she does marvelously well to show how Protestant Christianity was never really above the fray and that those we might like to imagine were the progenitors of an eventual antislavery critique were also critical conduits in the development of modern-day racism.

Dancing with Jim Crow: The Chattanooga Embarrassment of the Methodist Episcopal Church

2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-173
Author(s):  
Paul W. Harris
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Equality ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The South ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Heated Debate

AbstractAfter the Civil War, northern Methodists undertook a successful mission to recruit a biracial membership in the South. Their Freedmen's Aid Society played a key role in outreach to African Americans, but when the denomination decided to use Society funds in aid of schools for Southern whites, a national controversy erupted over the refusal of Chattanooga University to admit African Americans. Caught between a principled commitment to racial brotherhood and the pressures of expediency to accommodate a growing white supremacist commitment to segregation, Methodists engaged in an agonized and heated debate over whether schools intended for whites should be allowed to exclude blacks. Divisions within the leadership of the Methodist Episcopal Church caught the attention of the national press and revealed the limits of even the most well-intentioned efforts to advance racial equality in the years after Reconstruction.

Affect, Animality, and Islamophobia

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 25-38
Author(s):  
Matthew Hotham
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Muslim Americans ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Dietary Restrictions ◽  
The Right ◽  
Affective Relations

American internet Islamophobia is fascinated with Muslim attitudes towards animals – especially pigs. Through an examination of internet memes found on right-wing and white supremacist websites and social media groups, this essay argues that affective relations to certain animals are part of what mark the Muslim as other and worthy of hate in American Islamophobic rhetoric. More importantly, this Islamophobic pig imagery, which often mischaracterizes or willfully misrepresents Muslim dietary restrictions, reveals that Islamophobic internet memes are not primarily aimed at Muslims nor are they first and foremost an expression of fear of Islam. Instead this Islamophobic rhetoric takes the form of an inside joke, affectively linking those who are “in” on the joke, uniting them in a jovial transgression of “politically correct" norms. This form of Islamophobia might be better termed “Islamophobophilia,” since it marks some Americans as insiders and others as outsiders. It is a method for non-Muslim Americans to signal to other other non-Muslim Americans that they are the right kind of American.

The Charleston Massacre

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-13
Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
African Americans ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Second Amendment ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
The Right

This chapter talks about Dylann Storm Roof, a white supremacist, who brutally murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015. It discusses Roof's actions that renewed debates over guns, the Second Amendment, and the right to bear arms. The Charleston massacre changed the dynamics of American debate over symbols of the Confederacy, including the Confederate battle flag and monuments to Confederate leaders such as Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee. This chapter also looks at events prior to Roof committing the murders, in which he toured South Carolina historical sites with links to the Civil War and slavery, posting photographs and selfies of his visits. Roof's online website, which was infested with attacks on African Americans, Hispanics, and Jews, described the story of his racist radicalization.

Women in White Supremacist Movements in the Century after Women’s Suffrage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Blee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Women ◽  
African American Men ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leadership Positions ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Nineteenth Amendment ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Right ◽  
Formal Leadership

White women have long been associated with organized white supremacism in the United States, but their connection to these politics changed around the time that the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote. Until the 1920s, white women were primarily used by racist men as symbols of white vulnerability in the face of legal gains by African American men. They rarely participated actively in white supremacist politics. From the 1920s on, however, enfranchised white women have played an increasing role in racist movements of all types. Most Ku Klux Klans and white power skinhead and neo-Nazi groups recruit women as full members, although few allow women in formal leadership positions.

scholarly journals Antisemitism in the Urban Dictionary and the Responsibilities of Online Publishers

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (3.1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Daniel Allington
Keyword(s):  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Hate Speech ◽  
User Generated Content ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Doing Business ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Right ◽  
Internet Companies

This article focuses on antisemitic and racist content in the Urban Dictionary: a global top-1000 website built upon user-generated content. It argues that the Urban Dictionary’s founding principles have directly facilitated the site’s exploitation as a platform for the dissemination of antisemitic hate speech and white supremacist ideology. These principles can be seen as typifying the free speech absolutism that became dominant within the US tech industry during the 1990s. However, the right to free expression cannot reasonably be taken to exempt internet companies from responsibility for content whose publication they facilitate. The article concludes by arguing that websites such as the Urban Dictionary are essentially publishers, and that the solution to the problem of their indulgence of big-ots may be for those who do not wish to be associated with bigotry to refrain from doing business with institutions that publish content that they consider abhorrent. Keywords: alt-right, antizionism, brand contamination, definitions, dictionaries, free speech, Urban Dictionary, user-generated content, Web 2.0

Creating Human-Centered Systems to Address Racial Disparity in Schools

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gloria Rosario Wallace
Keyword(s):  
Racial Disparity ◽  
School Leaders ◽  
School Community ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
Racial Equity ◽  
Systemic Oppression ◽  
The Right

This article explores how school leaders can strategically organize to create humanist systems within their schools to effectively counter the racial bigotry and systemic oppression that has existed since the founding of this country but has gained more attention in the current political climate. Many school leaders are trained to operate as a superhero—where one person makes the right decision and saves the day. Racial equity challenges us to think beyond an individualistic approach and operate in a collaborative way that recognizes and supports all the individuals within that school community including staff, families, and students.

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