[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show, on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Do you remember this moment from that fateful night of November 8th, 2016, the night that Donald Trump was declared president-elect of the United States? His supporters were celebrating, of course, but many other Americans were not just disappointed, but really scared. Black Americans, Mexican Americans, American Muslims, others, because of what Trump ran on.

CNN Van Jones, who had previously been an Obama administration official, turned to the Trump supporters on the set that night and said, on one level, the election had to be seen as what Van Jones called a white lash.

Van Jones: This was a white lash against a changing country. It was a white lash against a Black president, in part. That's the part where the pain comes. Donald Trump has a responsibility tonight, to come out and reassure people that he is going to be the president of all the people who he insulted, offended, and brushed aside. Yes, when you say you want to take your country back, you got a lot of people who feel that we're not represented well either.

We don't want to feel that someone has been elected by throwing away some of us to appeal more deeply to others. This is a deeply painful moment tonight. I know it's not just about race. There's more going on than that, but race is here too. We got to talk about it.

Brian Lehrer: Van Jones, from election night 2016, on CNN. Now comes a new book, by another prominent Network News correspondent, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley Lowery, who you may know from 60 Minutes on CBS the last few years. A new book that uses Van Jones's white lash moment as a jumping-off point for a deeper look at the United States, since Trump was elected.

Not just in the context of these last seven years themselves, but of the whole continuum of American history as we enter the 2024 election cycle, which we can all see is already getting intense early. The book is called Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress. Besides reporting for 60 Minutes, Lowery has been a national correspondent for The Washington Post, and just started last week, as a professor of investigative journalism at American University in Washington, and executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop there, the nonprofit newsroom based at the school.

He also has a Washington Post op-ed you might have seen just recently, that's an excerpt from the book, called how the activist wave inspired by Ferguson helped free a St. Louis man. Wesley, thanks so much for joining us. Congratulations on the book and your new move to American University. Welcome back to WNYC.

Wesley Lowery: Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Would you like to start by explaining the title of the book a little more, and why you use that Van Jones moment as a jumping-off point?

Wesley Lowery: Sure. Well, I think it was a term that, while at the time not quite defined, captured a truth and a documentable truth. The historian Carol Anderson writes in her book, White Rage, that moments of perceived Black advancement lead to white violence. What we've seen throughout our history have been moments in which steps towards a multiracial democracy, the perception of steps towards equality, or equity, is met with a violent response.

Now, I think that one thing that's worth noting and defining, always, when we talk about issues of race, is that race is a sociological construct. It's not a biological reality. When we talk about white people, white Americans, or American whiteness, we're not actually talking about literal physical people and biological traits. What we're talking about are people who are perceived socially as belonging to a class that we have collectively created.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, can I jump in for a second on an interesting style point from your book, that I think listeners might be interested to hear? You write in a note at the beginning of the book that you chose not to capitalize the word Black, as is often done these days, out of respect to Black America, but because of what you were just saying, about how race isn't a real thing, would you go into that just a little bit, as a point of writing style?

Wesley Lowery: Well, sure. Race is not a biological reality. Racism is real. Race is a real societal construct. I do think that in a book, that in a project that was deliberately going to be examining white supremacists, and people who would preach that race is a biological fact, I thought it would be counterproductive to make a stylistic choice, that they would welcome the emphasis on the idea of there being an innate biological difference.

This isn't a book or a project that's about Black culture. I do such projects. This is a book that's about white supremacists.

Brian Lehrer: Got it. Do you want [unintelligible 00:05:36]? [crosstalk]

Wesley Lowery: [unintelligible 00:05:37] organizations. We have organizations like my former employer in The Washington Post, that not only capitalize the B in Black, but the W in white, as if there is a white race of people. There is not.

Brian Lehrer: Much of the book is about white supremacist violence, and that it has been spiking ever since President Obama was elected. That's 15 years ago now. You highlight six horrific killings in particular. I'll invite you to tell one or more of the stories as we go, but can you describe that arc since 2008, statistically? People may think of it as starting with Trump, or however else you see it, as part of a big contemporary picture.

Wesley Lowery: Sure. You can't think of it as starting with Trump, nor can you even think of it as starting with Barack Obama. We have seen racialized violence in the United States of America throughout the entirety of our history. Prior to 911, the deadliest terror attack in American history was the Oklahoma City bombing, and attacked by a white supremacist Timothy McVeigh. This has been present in our society since our inception.

What we see, however, is in moments when there's the perception of Black advancement, or steps towards multiracial democracy, and this is what I was getting at earlier. We have to understand that American whiteness is something that has been created in our laws. There are people who then benefit from being socialized as white when that inequality gives rise to activist movements to try to create equality.

Whether that be abolition, suffrage, civil rights, or you have people who are the beneficiaries of the inequality who pushed back, who there's backlash to that. Sometimes that is physically violent. Other times, that is through systems and structures, be the segregation, Jim Crow laws. What we see in this moment is, we see not only the election of a Black president, which comes in the context of us now having a multiracial society following the Civil Rights Movement.

What we also see is the massive demographic change across United States of America, which creates a significant anxiety among white Americans. By the end of the Obama administration, 55% of white Americans believe they are racially discriminated against. One Black president creates the average American believing they are a racial minority, in essence. What we see in that moment, when white Americans, who are by far the majority of Americans, are so anxious, so upset, and so concerned, is-- We see white supremacists.

First, we see politicians who play via their rhetoric to that anxiety with open bigotry and dehumanizing language, and we see white supremacists who now see that 55% of white Americans as a fertile recruitment ground into their violent, destructive, conspiratorial movement. What we've seen since, and in this period of time, has been a further coarsening of explicit bigotry and racialized bigotry in our mainstream politics.

We've seen an in-bold admit of white supremacist movements that have caused a massive spike in the amount of attacks happening, that are domestic terror attacks, and that are committed by white supremacists. FBI director Chris Wray has said the single biggest terroristic threat in the United States of America today is homegrown white supremacists.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I was just going to cite that this is a mainstream view that you're articulating, FBI--

Wesley Lowery: Well, it's a fact. It's true.

Brian Lehrer: Exactly, which also sometimes helps it become a mainstream view. Sometimes, facts don't become mainstream views, as we do well know.

Wesley Lowery: Too often, it doesn't. Christopher Wray, the FBI Director appointed by Trump, has called white supremacist violence the biggest domestic terrorism threat of these days. Even the FBI accepts that fact. If you start one timeline after the election of Obama, Wray, in his congressional testimony about this, in 2021, might have started another after the election of Trump, as the AP reported at the time--

In quantifying the scale of the FBI's work, Wray said the number of domestic terrorism investigations had increased from around 1,000 when he became director, in 2017, at the beginning of Trump, to about 2,000 by 2021, at the end of the Trump presidency. He testified that the number of arrests of white supremacists and other racially motivated extremists had almost tripled during Trump's four years. White supremacism and white supremacist violence have always been with us, yes.

I'm curious to get your take on how much Trump just tapped into, what was already there, and how much he created a set of new white extremists.

Wesley Lowery: Well, what I think is interesting is that, again, we remember, and that's why I want to root us in that polling, right? At the end of the Obama administration, we've got 55% of white Americans believe they are racially discriminated against. That is across the political spectrum.

Brian Lehrer: Now we've got six of the nine Supreme Court justices believing that, apparently, too.

Wesley Lowery: Correct. What we see though is, I cite in the book a sociologist named Gordon Allport who does a famous study of prejudice. What he talks about is that we all have prejudices. The issue when you have public figures and political leaders who openly stoke those prejudices and openly traffic in dehumanizing rhetoric against people who we might hold prejudices against, is that our prejudice starts moving along a scale towards violence, that just simply holding a belief or having a skepticism of someone else is human, right?

We start moving along a sliding scale in response to a public square and a permission structure that doesn't make us feel shame about these prejudices, in fact, leads us to embrace them. We go from just holding a prejudicial belief to now segregating ourselves, avoiding the people who are different, to actively discriminating, not inviting them to a thing, or not hiring them to a job, to interpersonal animus, to taking offense to someone at a red light, or who bumps into you at a restaurant, all the way up to societal violence.

Leaders who get themselves elected and they draw their political power from this type of racialized anxiety, what they do is that, through this repetition of dehumanizing rhetoric, be it about immigrants, be it about trans people, be it about folks from who are refugees, be it about the inner city Black people who are committing crime. What ends up happening is, they play to the base prejudices that already exist in their voting base, but they, in turn, by reflecting those prejudices back to them, intensify them, and have them start showing up in more intensified ways.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few questions for journalist Wesley Lowery. His new book is called Whitelash: A Changing Nation and The Cost of Progress. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, on today's era of white supremacist violence, the longer historical arc of it, or how he anticipates the 2024 election cycle in this context. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. You mentioned social media, of course, and relate that to the risk of lone-wolf domestic violence extremists.

One of the things that really jumped out at me was that you write about how organized white supremacists, the organized ones, hope the lone wolves' spark of violent response to their violence, that leads, eventually, to an all-out race war. Now, some might see that as conspiracy theory thinking, but then, conspiracies do exist. Can you elaborate?

Wesley Lowery: It's what happened with Timothy McVeigh. It's what happened with Dylan Roof. It's what happened with the shooter in Buffalo. In fact, the idea of the lone wolf actually does us a deep disservice in understanding what is happening. That the stated tactical strategy of the organized white supremacist movement is that their aim is to create enough proselytization and enough propaganda, preaching their ideology, that they can empower individuals who are not connected to hierarchical groups to carry out their own attacks.

What we see, what we live in, we live in an era-- Not that there are not hierarchical groups, not that there are not people attempting to do this, but that we live in an era where the most significant acts of white supremacist violence are committed by individuals who self-radicalized by finding the ideologies and the propaganda of these organizations. Then know what to do because the organizations lay out the marching orders, even if they do not have to actually explicitly help them plan. We see this time and time and time again.

Dylan Roof, who shoots up Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, he becomes radicalized, in part, because he Google searches Black and white crime statistics after following mainstream media coverage of the Trayvon Martin case. That Google search leads him down a dark path, into the white supremacist internet. If you've tried to search immigration crime statistics, or anything having to do with this type of infra-racial violence, they have built the internet to lead you to them.

Before long, this teenager, Dylan Roof, is writing a manifesto about the Jewish problem and storming into a Black church to murder people. That is what the white supremacists want. That's what Louis Beam, a white supremacist leader, wrote in the 1980s, would be "leaderless resistance." Louis Beam's dream is playing out in America every single day today.

Brian Lehrer: Does the Lone Wolf threat call for a different kind of law enforcement, in your view? We know how the infiltration of people's lives before they do anything violent has been used against Black Americans, Muslim Americans, and others. It is also ripe for abuse in the hands of the FBI and local police, historically, in various situations. Is it also ripe for abuse when potential white extremists are the targets?

Wesley Lowery: Well, I think anytime you're talking about law enforcement activity, it's ripe for abuse, right? When we give people power, someone is going to abuse it. That said, in the past, that's one of the reasons why more aggressive federal programs targeting these types of groups and movements have faced headwinds, have faced headwinds from groups like the ACLU, and also from civil rights-minded Democratic lawmakers.

That said, what we know is that, historically, our law enforcement infrastructure has not taken seriously the threat presented by these organizations. They don't have the same tools, necessarily. The things that are illegal in the context of international terrorism are very often constitutionally protected speech, if you are an American citizen in a domestic terrorist context. It is hard, it is difficult.

I'd be very interested in knowing, given the rise in the number of arrests that we've seen, as you noted from Christopher Wray earlier, I'd be very interested to see what tactics and tools law enforcement is using to make those arrests, if they have begun more aggressively doing such things. I do think that we have to grapple with, and we have to think about how we-- We've got two things. We've got a funnel that's too big.

Too many people via our mainstream political platforms and our public town squares are finding themselves adjacent to racist ideologies based on the things our politicians are saying, and things that us, in the media, are allowing to play out here. That's on the front end, and then, on the back end, too many people are being able to execute and carry out these ideas. That's the law enforcement question.

Brian Lehrer: I want to get to the subtitle of the book. We focused, at the beginning, on the main word in the title, Whitelash, and played the Van Jones whitelash moment from CNN, when Trump was elected, but it's Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress. Are you seeing progress as well as the backlash that we've been talking about so far?

Wesley Lowery: Well, what we see, I think, in every case, is that acts of violence and acts of white supremacy lead to a rise in anti-racist activism following it. What we have is a tug-of-war between diametrically opposed forces. Each time that there's a pull in one direction, there ends up being a pullback in the opposite direction as well. For example, we see the most robust reparations movement this country has ever seen, in this moment. We see a rise in elected officials and progressive elected officials.

Brandon Johnson, in Chicago, is possibly the most progressive mayor ever elected to run a major city in the United States of America. The son of Black migrants, who came from the South, or grandson, the descendant of Black migrants who came from the South. I think that it's unquestionably true that sometimes we think about this in a-- Are we seeing progress, are we not? Are things getting better, are they getting worse? History, doesn't quite work that way. It's not a binary.

Brian Lehrer: Joanne, in Toms River, you're on WNYC, with Wesley Lowery. Hi, Joanne.

Joanne: Hi, Brian. How're you doing? I just was telling the guy that I spoke with-- I'm showing my age. I'm going back over 40 years. I remember watching a history program and they showed pockets of these white people, with their compounds. Can you hear me, Brian?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, we got you. Go ahead. We're listening, Joanne.

Joanne: All right. Well, all these compounds in different states, and this one group-- I don't know, I'm thinking Idaho, but there was a compound of them, and all the children were dressed the same. They were from 7 to 12, and they had their arms stretched out like they were heiling Hitler. They were singing Amazing Grace. I thought, "Well, these are some ignorant folks. They don't even know the origin of Amazing Grace," which was written after the ship captain--

Years ago, everything was by ship, and he had been transporting these people. When he saw their fate, he stopped doing it, and he wrote the poem Amazing Grace, how sweet that was.

Brian Lehrer: Joanne, thank you so much. Does she have that history of Amazing Grace right? Do you happen to know that poem?

Wesley Lowery: I believe that is true. I know that the man who wrote Amazing Grace was a clergy, John Newton, I believe. This tested my Baptist upbringing. What was, in fact, later, was an abolitionist. I know he was. I do know Amazing Grace was written on a ship. I believe they were undergoing some tragedy, or dealing with weather, and were saved. That was part of what led to it.

I'm sure the listeners will fill in the details that I don't quite remember. Like I said, I went to churches in North Jersey for a long time growing up, so if any of my fellow Sunday school attendees are listening to this, call in and let me know what I didn't remember correctly.

Brian Lehrer: Jane, in Mendham, you're on WNYC with Wesley Lowery. Hi, Jane.

Jane: Hi, how are you? Hello.

Brian Lehrer: Good. Thank you.

Wesley Lowery: Good.

Jane: Good. I'm calling to say that there's a name I have not heard you guys discuss today, and I didn't hear Van Jones mention it on the night of the 2016 election. That name is Hillary Clinton. The erasure of Hillary from this discussion, and the recasting of the election as being between Barack Obama and Donald Trump is part of a systemic erasure of women from public life.

I noticed you didn't even mention women as one of the groups that might be concerned about a far-right turn in our country's power. We actually lost bodily autonomy. There are women being denied lifesaving chemo drugs because they could impact a fetus. This is not even bothered to be mentioned. It was an election between Hillary and Donald.

Wesley Lowery: As much as we may want to litigate 2016, let's be clear, when we talk about Black people, immigrants, refugees, and Jewish people, we are talking about women. Who was killed in Charleston? Who was killed in Buffalo? Who was killed in Pittsburgh? There's no question. It's very hard. When I hear someone talking about violence against a group of women, when I talk about violence against Black Americans, I think about my Black grandmother.

It's a remarkably-- It's an interesting perspective to me that you would hear someone talk about concerns about violence against Black people, and you would not think that includes women. Now, what is true, what's unquestionably true is that we see, in the same way that we see attacks on advancements towards gender equality and equality of the sex in the United States of America, and you see entrenchment and gains of patriarchy in the United States of America.

We are seeing this in the context of race. I don't necessarily know that it's appropriate, when we're talking about the history of race and white supremacy in America, to say that, in fact, the real conversation we should have is about something else.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe another way to put it is your beat--

Wesley Lowery: [corsstalk] I don't think Hillary, as a white woman, is the victim of white supremacy.

Brian Lehrer: Your beat is race. This book has that frame. One could certainly write a book, and books have been written, about gender.

Wesley Lowery: [crosstalk] Well, the argument absolutely is not--

Brian Lehrer: Is Whitelash also a male lash in the Trump election?

Wesley Lowery: The argument is not that Donald Trump won the election in 2016 against Hillary Clinton solely because of X, Y, and Z. In fact, this is literally not a book about the election in 2016, which is why Hillary Clinton is not mentioned. If we were writing a different book, that was about a different thing, maybe that's what we would talk about. I think that, again, what is important to note, though, is to understand, in this context, that the movement we see rising is very similar to the movement of the 1920s, the original rise of the Klan.

As it notes in the book, which I would invite the listener to read, that those movements are reactionary Conservative movements that include waves of grievance against immigrants, against urbanization, against changing gender and sexuality norms. Again, all this stuff is detailed pretty extensively in the book. This is not a book about the 2016 election.

Brian Lehrer: It is a book that's, to a meaningful degree, about the victims of white supremacist violence. Heather Heyer, killed at Charlottesville, is probably the best known, but you center other names too, like Susan Bro, Mindy Corporan, Rick and Richard Collins, and Marcelo Lucero. You end the book by returning to the Lucero and Collins family stories. Would you just talk briefly, and we're almost out of time, about Marcelo Lucero?

I'm going to pick that one, and your interactions with his brother, Joselo, since the Luceros are local to our New York audience.

Wesley Lowery: Of course. Marcelo Lucero was an Ecuadorian immigrant who was murdered just days following the election of Barack Obama. He was murdered in a context where he was living in Patchogue, Long Island, where there was a county executive who demonized immigrants. This is the early 2000s, where, in the economic downturn, we're seeing demographic shift that is happening. We see the rises of rhetoric that would later be used by Donald Trump.

What we see is that Marcelo Lucero was walking home one night, and he is attacked by a group of high school boys who have gone out specifically with the purpose of committing acts of violence against immigrants. I think that's important. I think, at its core, what we understand and what we have to understand is that when we dehumanize people in our political rhetoric, those people stop being treated like humans by our political followers.

What we have seen is that the most powerful movement in our politics in this moment, one that has seized control of one of our major political parties, is one that, as its calling card, above all else, dehumanizes people who are different than those who perceive themselves as white Americans. That has been, throughout our history and throughout the history of humanity, a powerful and dangerous way of playing politics, and one that unfortunately has been successful.

Brian Lehrer: 30 seconds. How are you looking at the 2024 election cycle in the context of your book?

Wesley Lowery: Well, I think that we've already seen people who attempt to run this similar effective playbook. Governor Ron DeSantis came out saying that he would get rid of birthright citizenship, a thing he's not even empowered to do, if he is president, but did so to send a message and to play to a specific sensibility. The idea that this country is changing and people are concerned and scared about it, that they are going to fix it, and they're going to change it.

Brian Lehrer: Birthright citizenship being that even if your parents are undocumented immigrants, if you were born on US soil, you were automatically a US citizen. Ron DeSantis is putting that in his sights. There we end it, with Wesley Lowery. You may know him from 60 Minutes. You may know him from The Washington Post. He just started a teaching and investigative reporting workshop gig at American University. His new book is Whitelash: A Changing Nation and the Cost of Progress. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.

Wesley Lowery: Thank you.

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.