This blog has many things over the last nine years. It started out as a parenting blog in 2014, as Andi went back to work after the birth of our child, Cozy, and I did the John Lennon “househusband” thing. Then Ferguson, Missouri and the murder of Michael Brown happened, and I went into “sociology of racism” mode. Since then, it’s covered a wide range of the personal and the political. From the fascist rise of Donald Trump to the collapse of my marriage. Over the summer, I posted a blog entitled “Dating While Married,” where I shared the excitement and trepidation of rejoining the dating world while separated.
It was both the most read blog post in ages and the worst thing I’ve written.
I was all in the flush of a new romance with a wonderful woman named Jaime. Unfortunately, I used the opportunity to lash out at Andi and did a pretty obvious job of throwing her (and her boyfriend) under the bus. There was a juvenile tone that, upon reflection, looked like, “My new girlfriend is better than your dopey boyfriend.” There was anger and pettiness and a lot of unobserved shittyness. I could have made the same pitch about the challenges of dating and finding love after marriage (that so many responded to) without the barbs. I can’t even bring myself to go back and read it. Maybe it was my cruel summer.
2023 has been the year that I finally learned how to let go of my anger. It’s still there, but now I’m better equipped to deal with it. The mantra, “You are not your emotions” and regular mediation provided a new path. By December, June seemed like a century ago. And I like this new me that is emerging from all the pain.
Friends often ask me, “What happened to you and Jaime?” Jaime is an incredibly smart woman and I think she recognized she was being pulled into someone else’s drama, even, perhaps, being used as a game piece in that conflict. After a few months she wisely backed away slowly and then cut off contact. I can’t say that I blame her even though I constantly missed her wit, charm, and obsession with all things Taylor Swift. I’m sure there are others entering the DWM zone who have faced similar dynamics. It reminded me of Princess Diana talking about the “three” people in her marriage.
The hardest lesson was reflecting how quickly I brought my daughter into the picture. I love my time with Cozy and I thought I could combine Cozy time and Jaime time. I was sure they would hit it off, and they did famously. But they met each other after Jaime and I had only been dating one week and now that seems like an impulse that could have been slow rolled. The relationship should have been on more solid ground before bringing Cozy in. When it ended, I had to answer Cozy’s question, “When are we going to see Jaime again?” Cozy needed consistency not chaos. And posting that first picture of Cozy and Jaime probably could have waited as well. I wanted to tell the world, I’m OK! I have a new love! But it probably felt crummy to Andi, who I was trying to rebuild trust with.
The good news is that over the holidays I reconnected with Jaime. I even spent Christmas Eve with her and her mom in a dimly lit bourbon bar in Northwest Portland. Jaime and I are going to explore our friendship while keeping the drama, ulterior motives, and bus-throwing-under at a distance. Kindness is more fun than anger. I can’t say what 2024 holds. I imagine this separation will become something more settled and formal. So many of us have been through this minefield of the transition of a relationship. If we care about “love” as a thing, that can be the emotion we become. Lessons learned.
Watching the Wheels began as a parenting blog but it’s turning into a policy blog. My broader social commentary started with the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and exploded with the ascent of Donald J. Trump. I promise we’ll get back to the kid, but there is a pressing reason I’m spending some extra energy on right wing extremism: April 19.
April 19th is the anniversary of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people, including 19 children, collapsing a federal office building, and has since been linked to “Patriots’ Day” by the right-wing underground. That underground is now very overground and the chatter in their world is that is that the January 6th Capitol attack was just the warm up. Fasten your seatbelts for April 19, 2021. We could see another wave of right-wing violence as they make their play for Civil War II.
It’s been encouraging to see the Biden Administration pivot to make the threat of domestic terrorism a priority, including ordering a nationwide assessment of the emerging threat, with the National Security Council responding in a way reminiscent of how the intelligence community responded after 9/11. The Biden team’s focus and the fact that capable experts like Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) will take the lead on the Counterterrorism Subcommittee are an encouraging start. There are plenty of challenges ahead, including our lack of a federal definition of “domestic terrorism” and the policing of such actions that also respects our first amendment protections.
But domestic terrorism is also an international issue.
I was having a conversation last week with a representative of a foreign consulate who was looking for ways that her government could navigate the post-January 6th world that the Biden Administration had inherited. (I won’t name her nation, but we’ve had a relationship with them since 1776.) As we spoke, it became clear that there are multiple international intersections in our efforts to confront right-wing extremism. The issues that came up revolved around three themes; intelligence, trade issues, and international relations. There are probably more but this is what came up in our hour-long talk.
White supremacy as a global movement
Over the last thirty years we’ve seen a decidedly internationalist trend in the nationalist responses to globalization. For me, this began in 1990s and charting how racist skinheads in America were looking to Serbian nationalism and the Balkanization of Yugoslavia as a roadmap to a race war in the United States. Notorious white supremacists like David Duke have cultivated large followings (and income flows) from Mother Russia. Any European nation that has struggled with an inflow of migrants has seen a surge in Neo-Nazi violence. In July 2018, I was in the UK to study British CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) programs and I worked my way into an English Defense League rally in London, under the shadow of Big Ben. Supporters of banned nationalist Tommy Robinson were laying out anti-immigrant tirades to a crowd of angry white men, many in Trump hats. In England. Two weeks ago, Germany handed a right-wing extremist a life sentence after he was found guilty of shooting a pro-immigration politician in the head at point-blank range, killing him. Racist nationalism is an international problem. The fact that mass casualty events in Oslo, Norway, lead to similar attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand, which lead to similar attacks in El Paso, Texas is proof.
The specter of a pan-Aryan movement has long been a reality. I discussed it in my search on Odinist prison gangs in the 2000s. An international network of racist pagans shared plans for their racial holy war from behind prison walls. Before that, research on white power rock bands traveling to Europe, revealed the trafficking of Neo-Nazi paraphernalia and ideology across the Atlantic. In 1991, I was interviewing a skinhead in (what had just been East) Berlin, Germany, and told me, in broken English, “We have many friends in your country.”
Last summer, the U.S. Senate introduced S. 4080 – the Countering Global White Supremacist Terrorism Act. It’s a great start (if it ever passes) to assess the nature of the global connections to the domestic white supremacist call for a racial revolution. In the wake of the “dry run” on January 6th, the intelligence part of this effort needs to include four key elements.
Foreign support for domestic extremists. While privacy rules make the work difficult, intrepid journalists have started following the money and unmasking the financial backers of the radical right, like the Mercer family. It is likely that money coming to back the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and other groups hell bent on their “boogaloo” civil war is also coming from sources outside the United States, including Russia. The financial streams must be revealed and interrupted.
Foreign disruption and misinformation. If the 2016 election taught us anything, it’s that a little disinformation dropped into your cousin’s Facebook feed can turn a country upside down. In 2015, few people (including Republicans) thought Donald Trump had a snowball’s chance in hell of becoming president. In January, 2017 he was sworn in. We know that Russia played a role in that campaign. Foreign interference that repeats tropes like “Black Lives Matter is a communist organization” are a part of our digital realities and serve to push “I’m not racist, but..” Americans into white supremacist worldviews.
Encrypted communications. A lot of racist cross-national communication is right out there in the open, on Parler, Twitter, 4chan, and even Instagram. But white supremacists have long utilized encrypted communications. Whether they are sending messages on Telegram, Tox, through video game networks, or communicating in handmade codes on the deep deep web, the chat includes bomb making techniques, hit lists, and potential coordination on terrorist plots. They’ve looked to ISIS and other international terror groups for both mainstream recruitment techniques (ex. YouTube) as well as for tips on secretive channels of communication. We must work with our international partners to penetrate this information flow.
Pan-Aryan movements. More must be done to understand the international connections of white supremacist terror organizations, like Atomwaffen Division. We’ve tended to think of these groups as “home grown” and disregarded their international connections. The internet has linked racist organizations in South Africa to similar groups in South Carolina. The role that Facebook live-streaming played in the 2019 Christchurch shooting that left 51 dead demonstrated that these so-called nationalists are playing to an international audience.
How trade policy impacts white nationalism
During my discussion with the consulate’s office, the issue of trade policy came up. It wasn’t a topic I was expecting or felt qualified to talk about, but it was clear there were some issues that were relevant. Much of racial nationalism is fueled by globalization. Globalization diminishes national identity (There’s an infinite number of McDonalds and Starbucks in Paris) and increases immigration. This was an obvious driver in Britain’s 2016 Brexit vote, the rise of Trump (“America first!”), as well as racialized nationalist movements in Poland, Germany, and Greece. Trade policies designed to reduce pushes into white supremacist movements and their calls for violence must be mindful of the following two questions:
How does this policy impact agrarian or manufacturing labor segments? The very first of racist skinheads I studied in the late 1980s were racist skinheads because of deindustrialization. Their parents were being laid off of their manufacturing jobs which were being shipped to Mexico and China. And the only analysis they were getting was from the White Aryan Resistance who told them that it was a global Jewish cabal that was destroying their shot at the American dream. My 1990s skinheads added the giant sucking sound of NAFTA as the backdrop of their downward mobility. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that over 600,000 manufacturing jobs moved to Mexico after President Clinton signed NAFTA in 1994. Any trade policy must look at the impact on blue collar labor, whether in the factory or the field. An example of countering the trend, Samsung ovens are now made in Tennessee. The profits still flow to South Korea, but a lot of workers are getting to bank their money thanks to the push to revitalize our industrial labor force. This type of trade policy breaks the back of jingoism.
How does this policy impact labor migration? Environmental policies will impact migration patterns as the planet warms. Refugees leaving drought ravaged lands where farming and access to clean water are stressed will become a fact of life unless international policies tackle climate change. Similarly, trade policies (which now often have an environmental component) can be mindful on the impact of the migration of labor. If a policy is likely to increase the migration into the United States, the benefit to Americans must be made clear. Otherwise, the policy (and the earnest foreign workforce that emerges because of it) becomes a white supremacist weapon for scapegoating, xenophobia, and hate crimes.
To work with America you must understand America
There is also a conversation going on from Philadelphia to the Philippines about what kind of country America is in 2021. Especially after four years of Trump. Our standing on the world stage has plummeted as our national interests were supplanted by Donald’s personal interests. As the Biden diplomatic team repairs the damage done to our international relationships, our global partners need to be mindful of four factors that drive activism in the extreme right.
Because each of these is a complex issue, worthy of pages of analysis, I’ll be incredibly brief.
Understanding the split in the Republican Party. The symbolic division between the party of Representative Lynne Cheney (R-WY) and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) reflects the split between the “Grand Ol’ Party,” with it’s core conservative values, and the nut-job wing that remains loyal to Trump, QAnon and the calls for an uprising to defeat the “communist” Democrats.
Understanding that nationalism is a response to globalization. Over one hundred years ago fervent calls to “(Your country here) first!” set the stage for the “war to end all wars” and paved the way for the rise of fascism. Without the strength of our international treaties (I’m looking at you, UK), we’re back to square one.
Understanding paths to radicalism and access to resources for deradicalization. There’s more than enough scholarship on why people become extremists. Programs in Sweden (Exit) and Britain (Prevent) have pioneered excellent methods to deradicalize extremists. It’s time to share the wisdom.
Confronting extremism in the military. We are not the only nation whose militaries contain Neo-Nazis who dream of bombing Israel, African and Arab countries, and liberal metropolitan areas. A global strategy to confront this issue should be the first step in an international effort to prevent large scale attacks.
And now the work begins
We talked about a great deal in one hour. I can really squeeze a lot in when I think there’s a ticking time bomb, like April 19th. That day may come and go without event, which I desperately hope will be the case. (April 20th is Hitler’s birthday, so wait to exhale.) America is starting from less than zero because of the hole Donald Trump dug. But, with the help of our friends around the world, we can put our shoulders to the wheel and ensure our common dream to live in a safe and stable nation.
We went out of the county for a Friday night date. The next county over is in Phase 1, which means you can have drink in the radius others doing the same. It was an odd break from COVID and the daily anti-racism demonstrations reminding us how racist America is in 2020. So it seemed like an obvious date night activity to head back into downtown Portland to see how “Little Beirut” was gearing up for the weekend.
The short version of the story is we found ourselves among a few thousand protestors outside the Justice Center, which had become a focal point of the protests against police brutality in the Rose City. The parks in front of the Justice Center are circled by City Hall, federal and county courthouses, and were the scene of a prolonged occupation during the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.
As I’m fond of explaining to the media, protests are complex phenomena with numerous types of participants, from earnest aggrieved citizens to hooligans, from career activists to agent provocateurs. And that’s just one side of the fence. So we wandered around black-clad white protestors with Black Live Matters signs and African-American teenagers, chanting “Fuck Trump!” The police, in their stormtrooper riot gear, seemed to hold the line on the other side of the fence, occasionally dodging a water bottle hurled from the crowd. We took pictures and made note of clever signs.
Then the whole thing went sideways. Concussive flash-bangs and tear gas hit the crowd. I wanted to film it but was unprepared for how the tear gas would choke me. I was blind and fell behind Andrea as we ran from the park. Fortunately, some seasoned protesters poured milk into my eyes so I could see my way out. After some marching around, some of the protest leaders (well, they had megaphones) encouraged protesters to head east, away from the hot zone where clashes with police seemed inevitable. Our car was in the other direction, so we headed back towards the Justice Center, and found a spot in front of City Hall to watch the show.
Tear gas was banned in warfare by the Geneva Convention in 1925 but it seems to still be A-OK in Portland 95 years later. We wanted to witness this moment in history and see which way it went, even if it was in a haze of fog. I thought about friends who were cops and friends who were antifa locked in this moment of change.
Just after midnight, the police made their move on the protestors, driving us through the rose bushes at City Hall and over a wall. About two blocks away, on the corner of 5th and Madison, we stopped to watch truck-fulls of militarized police deploy to launch noxious CS gas into the streets of Portlandia. I was filming and an officer, who might have been a county sheriff, pointed me out to another officer, and then he launched a gas grenade at me, my reward for flashing a peace sign. I was filming the whole time so the recording got both Andrea and I on the ground, gasping for breath. (Video below.) Fortunately, two anarchist angels were there to rescue us. From that point I just wanted to go to the babysitter and pick up our daughter.
After a very long shower (and a desire to burn our clothes), I laid awake wondering how this thing ends. Tonight will be the tenth night of consecutive protests in Portland, with surely more tear gas. Solidarity marches have been happening all over the world. There was an anti-racism march over my beloved Charles Bridge in Prague yesterday, and in Bristol, England, protesters pulled down a statue of a 17th century slave owner and dumped him in the bay. It feels like 2020, is going to make 1968 look like 1954. We are at a tipping point. But tipping to where? 1968 gave us President Richard Nixon.
The “Defund the Police!” chant is half right. We must defund the militarized police and fund an alternative model of policing. We need police. There will always be rapists and murderers who need to be caught (by detectives with dry senses of humor). But we also need social workers to address the root causes of crime before there are crime victims. There are models from around the world. British Bobbies still don’t carry guns, but can get them if they need them. The police department in Camden, New Jersey rebuilt its entire department and not only saw a 95% drop in excessive force complaints but saw a steep decline in murders. It can be done. It is being done.
The current policing model isn’t broken. It was built wrong. Detroit, Los Angeles, Ferguson, Minneapolis, have all told us the same thing. You can tweak the system and get slight changes in outcomes, but its the system that’s the problem. You can wave the banner of “community policing,” but if it’s the same armed officer harassing the “usual suspects,” nothing has changed. Our current form of policing is rooted in medieval notions of control. The root of the term “sheriff” is in the English shire reeve from a thousand years ago. Maybe it’s time to give it the old heave ho, like those folks in Bristol did to that statue yesterday.
Yeah, we need to talk about racism in America. We really need to talk about it. But we also need to talk about remaking how we police ourselves.
As rioters ravaged Portland Friday night at 2 am, a local news anchor lamented how sad it was that the Louis Vuitton store was being looted. I thought Luis Vuitton Incorporated would survive, unlike the man named George Floyd.
There was a time when the lure of an exciting riot would have drawn me to the street. The belief that social justice could be advanced by screaming at authority would have inflamed my voice. Then I learned how deeply social evils, like racism, were woven into our society and how broadly complex anything approaching a solution would be.
Let’s start with the obvious, the murder of George Floyd on May 25th was a racial lynching by police. It took Minnesota authorities four days to arrest one murderer, Derek Chauvin, the officer who had his knee on the neck of Floyd for nearly nine minutes, including three minutes in which Floyd was unconscious. The fact that in took law enforcement four days to arrest this murderer must have surprised a lot of black people that it was so hard to get arrested in Minneapolis. The other three officers that participated in Floyd’s murder, well, we’ll see, I guess. And arrest does not equal conviction; the track record favors the murderers in these types of cases.
But we’re supposed to have faith in the system. After generations of George Floyds, I’m not 100% sure why.
I’ve written so much about this issue and I want to write something now, but I’m glued to the TV watching another night of America convulsing as it tries to marshal that antibodies to fight the pandemic of racism that’s ravaged its body since its birth. I’m trying to explain this to my five-year-old and trying to find evidence that anything will be different this time. My thoughts are disjointed. Do I support the rioters? Do I invite a cop out for beer and race talk? Do I make a bid on Ebay on a looted Louis Vuitton bag, a souvenir of the great uprising of 2020?
So here are some random thoughts as America burns. Again.
America was founded by rioters and looters (read about the Stamp Act of 1765), when they are white and want freedom they are called “patriots.” When they are black and want freedom, they are called “thugs.”
This not about George Floyd or “honoring his memory.” This about the thousands and thousands and thousands of George Floyds and the inability of black people to have a right to just be alive in America.
White people act shocked when black people let them know they are sick of this shit.
The “coded” language the president is well understood by people of color even if his base pretends that “MAGA loves the black people.”
I had a brief fantasy that the protestors in Lafayette Park stormed the White House and dragged Donald Tump out by his ankles, but then I realized he was probably hiding in a vault, crapping in his diaper.
There should be no doubt that Trump is a white supremacist, no goddamn doubt. But racism is woven into complex systems, including the police.
The economic strain of this pandemic has added to suffering of those who are marginalized day after day, and are understandably at their breaking point.
The history of police officers who are arrested for murder rarely leads to police officers who are convicted of murder (less than a third of cases). The history of riots often lead to tangible results, including Watts (1965), DC (1968), LA (1992), and Ferguson (2014).
If you feel like your city doesn’t care about you, why would you care about your city?
It seems like a lot of privileged violent white protestors, who call themselves “allies,” think they are “smashing the system,” while simultaneously bringing the heat down on the peaceful black protesters they think they are defending.
I worry about how right-wing extremists might exploit this moment or even be working as agent provocateurs to push their racist agenda.
There are so many police officers that were disgusted by actions of Derek Chauvin and his three fellow Minneapolis officers. I wonder if any are currently engaged in the police assaults on protestors I am witnessing on TV right now.
As hard as this is to explain to my 5-year-old, I can’t imagine how hard it is for black parents who must prepare their children for life in a white supremacist country that refuses to do the work to change things.
It would be nice to hear local reporters and anchors express as much concern for the historical trauma of black people as they do for Chase Bank and the Apple Store.
Someone said lawsuits filed against abusive police departments should collect their awards from police pension funds. That might get their attention!
I’ve spent a career a partnering with law enforcement to work on issues like hate crimes and domestic terrorism. I’ve worked on trainings for law enforcement and helped to develop policies that help police understand the trauma experienced by crime victims. I went from “cops are pigs” to “police reform” as I matured and understood the social work aspects of law enforcement and the healthy communities well-intentioned peace officers can help create.
But now I’m not sure that’s enough.
While we still have departments that allow various choke holds, and don’t immediately arrest officers who are accused of the murder of unarmed civilians, and defend a macho police subculture, it seems like Eric Garner, and George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and all the others will just be names on an ever-growing list that only magnifies the trauma of black America. The murder of black civilians by police has not significantly decreased since Ferguson even with the important changes that have been made. Maybe it’s the very structure of policing in America that’s the problem. Maybe we should start figuring out how other countries keep the peace and chase the crooks. Maybe we should burn the old system down. Out of the ashes…
I really don’t have the answer. I just know it’s up to white people to do the work to end racism.
I didn’t really plan on getting into the muck this early but, for the last 24 hours, I’ve been doing a lot of interviews about the Ferguson grand jury decision and the riots that have followed. Besides my interest as a criminologist who studies racism, this issue intersects with this blog for two very important reasons.
First, my daughter is brown. I may be a white guy (with all the privileges that wins), but my wife is Mexican. That means our baby is Chicana (Sorry, honey. We got us a Chicano baby.) Life for non-white people is different than for whites in America, as much as “color-blind” whites try to deny it. I’m sure I will write plenty on white privilege, but this morning I am just thinking about how justice is not color-blind for people like my daughter. She is more likely to be pulled over by the police and less likely to believed when questioned by authorities. I don’t have to make the case that this is true; the data backs me up. I just hope it is less true by the time she is old enough to drive.
The second issue has to do with the fathers of Ferguson. Or the lack of them. The “War on Drugs” targeted poor minority communities not white kids in frat houses snorting coke. Besides quadrupling the prison population, this trumped up war also served to remove black fathers from their communities. In 2007, one in 15 black kids had a parent in prison, mostly fathers.
We have romanticized the image of the black rogue male with multiple kids from multiple women (Just turn on any episode of The Maury Povich Show.) But as much as I loved to hear The Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” on the radio when I was a kid, this archetype undermines the recognition of the challenges of poor black fathers in America. This includes the days of AFDC, when welfare support was withheld if a father was present (Giving a valid reason not to be). The War on Drugs had a place for an awful lot of those fathers, behind bars.
So here we have a community decimated by poverty, disenfranchisement, and police targeting with a vacuum of fathers to help raise their children. It’s not surprising that many of those young men find empowerment in what Richard Majors and Janet Billson called the “cool pose.” (Two books for your reading list are Majors and Billson’s Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.) A version of masculinity exists in urban America that many whites (including at least one white police officer) find threatening.
I had a conservative white friend who was driving into the city. He asked me a curious question. “Randy, why do black people walk so slow when they are crossing the street?” He was upset that black pedestrians were holding up traffic (mainly, his huge pickup truck). Now I don’t know if black people walk slower or faster than any other group of people, but I asked him, “Do you know any other group that does that?” “Yeah, teenagers do it all the time!” he said.
So, then, I told him, if you felt like you didn’t have much power in the world, what would be one thing you could do to feel powerful? Stop your truck!
It’s not surprising the people are rioting. Especially young black men. It’s not sad that they are rioting. What’s sad is that there is still a reason to riot in 2014. The Watts Riots were almost 50 years ago, but the issues are exactly the same. Oppression is a complex matrix and masculinity intersects with race in ways that many whites never see. But the cumulative removal of minority fathers by a criminal justice system that has repeatedly demonstrated racial bias at every stage, from policing to parole, has a price. Each generation pays for that with fire and heartbreak.
Here’s an interview done right as the riots were starting. Don’t judge my fashion choices.
Watching the Wheels 