G.O.A.T. Tournament Round 2: Profiles in Caucasity
Our quest to find the Greatest Oppressor of All Time continues with the Mobs and Movements division.
Welcome back to the tournament of white champions!
There’s still time to cast your vote for the Greatest Oppressor of All Time before we enter the Not-So-Sweet 16. Today, we focus on the Mobs and Movements division, which features unorganized groups and individual crusaders who weaponized whiteness to change history.
While they may not be crack babies who were rescued by a loving white adoptive family who rescued them from a single-parent home and taught them how to play football, these brave champions of hate deserve to have their stories told. That’s why we borrowed the template from the lesser-known NCAA basketball tournament, the Olympics and “America’s Got Talent” to compile a series of heartwarming profiles to highlight the struggles that these heroes had to overcome.
Remember, you have three days to vote on each matchup, and the winner will move on to the next round. At the end of the competition, we will crown the G.O.A.T. of white supremacy (You can see the whole bracket with updated scores here.) As usual, voting is only open to paid subscribers to ContrabandCamp.
Here are the heroes competing in the Mobs and Movements division.
Republicans
As you know, the Party of Lincoln was born in 1854 to freedom-loving, anti-slavery activists who believed “all men are created equal.”
Except that is a lie.
The Grand Old Party wanted to stop the expansion of slavery into new states and territories. If the Republican Party supported the abolition of slavery, the founders forgot to bring it up in the Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States, the party’s founding document. The words “abolition” or “emancipation” or even the concept of banning the institution of slavery do not appear in the GOP’s first platform document. They did not fight to end slavery, they fought to preserve the Union after an attack by pro-slavery traitors. And when Abraham Lincoln, the party’s first presidential candidate, was accused of wanting to abolish slavery and ensure that “the colored man and the white are absolutely equal before the law,” the highest-ranking original Republican said this:
[A]nything that argues me into his idea of perfect social and political equality with the negro, is but a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse-chestnut to be a chestnut horse.
I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of Slavery in the States where it exists…I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races…I am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary.
Just when was the GOP not racist?
Was it when Lincoln reversed Union officers’ policy that freed the enslaved? Was it when the Lily White Republican movement emerged to wrest back control from the Negro Republican Party and the faction of not racist white “Radical Republicans” as soon as Black American gained the right to vote? Were they racist in 1877 when eight hand-picked Republicans unanimously agreed to usher in 100 years of Jim Crow apartheid in exchange for one presidential term? Was it during the lynching era when they controlled both chambers of Congress but refused to pass an anti-lynching law?
Why did Black people stop voting for Republicans in 1936? Why did the racist flock to the party when they embraced the Southern Strategy? Why did the Republican messiah Ronald Reagan kick off his presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech, literally dancing on the graves of victims of a racial murder? Explain the War on Drugs and mandatory minimums and 100-1 crack sentences and “welfare queens” and “shithole countries” and why Republicans love Proud Boys and Nazis and the alt-right but hate “woke” and “CRT” and “BLM” and DEI.
Look at how far they’ve come.
White Tulsans
Focusing on one little racial massacre does a disservice to the good white racists of Tulsa, Oklahoma.
First of all, white Tulsans were committing acts of terrorism long before they looted, bombed and burned 1,256 homes and “nearly every church, school, business…hospital and library” in the Greenwood neighborhood known as “Black Wall Street.” From Oklahoma’s founding until the Tulsa Race Massacre, twice as many Black residents were lynched in Tulsa as were legally sentenced to the death penalty. When you factor in the population percentage, a Black Tulsan was 25 times more likely to be executed than a white citizen. Today, the county still has the second largest per capita execution rate in America
Plus, what about forgiveness? Why don’t we ever mention the good white people of Tulsa? There are Black victims of the 1921 massacre still living, surely some of the white people are still alive. The city had 72,025 residents in 1920. Only 12.3% were Black. Even if you excluded the people who were too young to remember, in 104 years, I’m sure there’s been at least one single white Tulsan who revealed the names of a parent, grandparent, sister, brother, friend, neighbor, co-worker, or church member who participated in a mass murder. Why do we still hold this 100-year-old incident against people who confessed their sins and paid for their crimes?
There’s gotta be one goddamned good white person in the entire city of Tulsa, right?
Right?
White Women Voters
White women have done so much to fight the patriarchy.
Sure, they made up 40% of slaveowners and profited from the intergenerational wealth created by the international human trafficking system. And sure, their testimony was used to justify nearly 1,000 lynchings between 1880 and 1930. But why would we castigate the people who excluded Black people from their suffrage movement for not supporting civil rights? Sure white women could have voted to end 100 years of Jim Crow and 50 years of “separate but equal.” But, to be fair, Plessy v. Ferguson was barely 20 years old when white women got the right to vote.
Even though they receive more welfare funds than Black women, white women can’t be “welfare queens,” so they voted for Reagan at 53% (For some reason, that number sounds familiar). Black women didn’t vote for the politicians who reversed reproductive rights; white women did. They benefit the most from affirmative action and DEI, but voted for the people who promised to eliminate the programs. They use illegal drugs more often (41.8%) than Black men (36.1%) or Black women(24.9%), but use their ballots to support arrest disparities, felony disenfranchisement and harsh drug penalties.
In 1964, most white women voted for Democrat Lyndon Johnson over anti-civil rights Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. This was the beginning of the Southern Strategy and white people fleeing to the GOP. But it happened before the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, when most Black Americans could not vote.
White women voters have not sided with Black voters since Black people gained the right to vote.
The Alt-Right
According to the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center, the “Alternative Right, commonly known as the ‘alt-right,’ is a set of far-right ideologies, groups and individuals whose core belief is that ‘white identity’ is under attack by multicultural forces using ‘political correctness’ and ‘social justice’ to undermine white people and ‘their’ civilization.”
The more moderate Associated Press describes the alt-right as a movement that “emphasizes preserving and protecting the white race in the United States in addition to, or over, other traditional conservative positions such as limited government, low taxes and strict law-and-order… The movement criticizes ‘multiculturalism' and more rights for non-whites, women, Jews, Muslims, gays, immigrants and other minorities. Its members reject the American democratic ideal that all should have equality under the law regardless of creed, gender, ethnic origin or race.”
Using that definition, here’s a list of the alt-right’s most prominent members:
Donald Trump
Nazis
The Proud Boys
Every Fox News host
Tucker Carlson
The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists
Ron DeSantis
Christopher Rufo
Target
Columbia University
The Department of Education
J.D. Vance
Every member of Donald Trump’s cabinet
The Republican legislative caucus
Six of the nine Supreme Court Justices (Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett)
The United States federal government
Resegregationists
I can’t do better than this:
The battles of the Great Resegregation are now taking place in at least three overlapping arenas. The first is politics, where right-wing legal organizations have succeeded in rolling back many civil-rights-era voting protections; they want to now fully destroy the remaining shreds. The second is education and employment, particularly at elite institutions, such as the media and academia; right-wing legal strategies have been similarly fruitful here in attacking diversity, thanks to the conservative capture of the Supreme Court. The third is popular culture, where conservatives have sought to leverage anger and nostalgia against movies, television, books, and other creative media brought to life by artists of color.
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
— Adam Serwer, “The Great Resegregation”
Christian Nationalists
The rise of Christian nationalism is not new.
White people have promoted the idea of a Jesus-based America ever since the Founding Father who wrote the Constitution suggested its first revision:
“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”
The people who betrayed their nation to create a separate white supremacist slave empire wanted to create “the first government ever instituted upon the principles … of the Creator. For His own purposes, He has made one race to differ from another … Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws.”
Christian nationalism.
After declaring “segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever,” Gov. George Wallace warned “those, of any group, who would follow the false doctrine of communistic amalgamation that we will not surrender our system of government, our freedom of race and religion.”
Christian nationalism.
You never hear municipal officials refusing to perform a ceremony for someone who is previously divorced or bakery owners breaking the law by refusing to make a wedding cake for someone who’s being married on the Sabbath. People who use the Bible to justify their opposition to gay rights or why “there are only two sexes” are not exercising religious freedom. They’re trying to enforce their religion through the state.
What would Jesus do?
Not that.
Democrats
Who’s better at insurrections? The inept racists who failed to overturn an election on Jan. 6, 2021, or Democrats responsible for overthrowing governments with the Wilmington Coup, the Hamburg Massacre, the Colfax Massacre and the Kirk Holden War?
Yes, Republicans have some racist politicians, but it was Democrat Roger Taney who said a Black man had “no rights a white man was bound to respect.” The only president (Harry S. Truman) and Supreme Court Justice (Hugo Black) who had Klan membership cards were also members of the Democratic Party, and Democratic Klansmen governors lead Republican governors 4-2 (To be fair, if you include Nazis and Klan-affiliated college frat Kappa Alpha, Republicans win by a landslide.)
Republicans have always been playing catchup, but John Fetterman, Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and the new breed of pseudo-progressive power-grabbers are still holding it down for Democratic racists.
Carolyn Bryant, et. al
We talked about the men who participated in the brutal murder of Emmett Till during the opening round. But let’s not forget about the white woman who started it all.
Everyone in town — Black and white — knew that Carolyn’s husband Roy and his brother J.W. Milam were dangerously violent racists. Carolyn knew it. Every Black person in Money, Miss., knew it. When Carolyn told her sister-in-law about Till, they agreed not to mention a word to their husbands. Yet Carolyn still told her husband.
Carolyn didn’t say anything when they brought Till to the farm to torture him. She didn’t say anything to the police when they questioned her. She only acknowledged that Till grabbed her, “whistled” at her, and made “ugly remarks” during her husband’s trial. She didn’t say anything to Emmett’s aunt and uncle about her husband breaking into the house and holding their entire family hostage before kidnapping Emmett Till. She didn’t comfort Emmett’s mother. She was quiet when her husband was acquitted. She didn’t say anything when he revealed that he was Till’s killer in a magazine article. She didn’t say a goddamned word the entire time.
And then, in 2007, when Mamie Till was dead and Mose Wright was dead and Mose Wright’s aunt was dead and Roy Bryant was dead and J.W. Milam was dead and Emmett Till had been dead for half a century, when a researcher asked her to detail how Till grabbed her and to clarify the “ugly remarks,” Carolyn Bryant said: “That part’s not true.”
And then, the person who recorded the statement waited another 10 years to tell the world that the boy who was beaten for hours, pistol whipped, held in a vice while his murderers drilled a hole in his head before strapping an industrial fan to his back and throwing him into a river.
I pray that God has mercy on all of their souls. Well …
That part’s not true.