Tag: White nationalism

Book Review: In Open Contempt, by Irvin Weathersby Jr.

In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space, by Irvin Weathersby Jr. Part travel memoir, part political and historical art criticism, and part soul-baring about white supremacy, this debut book by a Black author trying to grasp how to deal with public art and racial trauma. He starts with the easy-to-grasp: Confederate monuments in New Orleans coming down in the wake of the George Floyd protests. But he moves from there through his own life and Black American history to the presentation of history in plantations to the different presentations of Black history and stories in modern Black art.

The sections of the book about the Confederacy were deeply personal to me, a white woman with Confederate slaveholder ancestors who attended a school with a Johnny Reb mascot. Weathersby’s unpacking of the effects of white-centered Confederate and slavery-related public history on Black Americans recontextualized discussions around the mascot change at my school. But the discussion of Wounded Knee, Mount Rushmore, and New York also led me to stories I lacked context for and needed the foundation Weathersby offered.

Weathersby also discussed white myth-making in public art and history with various interested parties of all backgrounds in places he visited. Black, white, and Native Americans all offer insights on white supremacist myths around their sites of interest. Weathersby’s questions elicit thoughtful answers from them that in turn elicit reconsideration of the old civil history of the United States. At the same time, Weathersby’s interviews and commentary demonstrate that there’s no single answer to how to approach America’s racist history. What some minoritized Americans find helpful will harm others.

As with other books I’ve read since January, I find it hard not to reconsider the effect of the second Trump administration on the subjects of interest to Weathersby. Confederate naming is back for military bases; DEI is out and restoring so-called truth to American history is in; white supremacy is federal policy. The lessons of In Open Contempt will show the thoughtful reader the ways art and popular history could support both the Trumpist view of America and the alternatives offered by politicians and commentators with other goals and viewpoints. We don’t need to have suffered racist trauma to understand the messages conveyed in art and public space.

Book Review: Stolen Pride, by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. This is a follow-up to Strangers in Their Own Land, about Lousiana; the new book covers the rise of the right in rural Appalachia. Hochschild’s focus is on how rural men hold pride in rural ways and providing without government assistance, and how that pride is “stolen” when changing economic times destroy their jobs and way of life, bringing shame on them in their own eyes.

One of Hochschild’s focal points is a white nationalist march in Pikesville in the runup to 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. She interviewed local officials, a member of the group putting on the march, and men who might be drawn into the orbit of white nationalism. Part of the appeal of white nationalist politics is that it gives rural men something to be proud of in the face of lost jobs, drug addiction (the opiate crisis), and the strongly felt contempt of urban liberals.

I came away with a stronger understanding of why conservative men place such a high value on “owning the libs”. They generally share this pride versus shame orientation and project their shame onto their supposed opponents. Passing shame onward doesn’t work in online slapfights, but it does explain part of the “conservative” MAGA delight in undermining institutions perceived as liberal, such as universities and law firms. Even when it hurts MAGA supporters to burn down part of the government, as much of Project 2025 will, stealing the pride of liberals who “destroy” and deride their rural-based way of life is satisfying to men whose own pride has been stolen.

The story Hochschild elicits from her interviews and research wouldn’t work if she didn’t give all of her subjects a full three dimensions, even the man who led the white nationalist march in Pikesville and the imprisoned KKK devotee. But what was most intriguing for future research and practical politics was the concept of the empathy bridge, which Hochschild discusses in an appendix. The bridge connects the experiences of rural whites with Black Americans, either by an upper deck that educated, wealthy whites travel or a lower deck travelled by whites in precarious circumstances. In a time when unity across class and ethnic lines is vital to opposing American authoritarianism, Hochschild’s research points to a way forward that can include former MAGA men.