Source: Jacobin
The most important struggle in the US today is stopping the growth of the racist right-wing.
The white supremacist rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia was the predictable outcome of the Republican Party’s racist agenda and Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
The racist violence of the Right has been unshackled by Trump’s election. White racists have not just been emboldened by President Trump, they have also been encouraged by the Trump administration’s silence amid the dramatic growth of white supremacist organizations and violent racist attacks.
Antiracist activist Heather Heyer is one of a growing list of people who have been killed by white racists since Trump’s election. Just months ago, self-described “alt-Reich” activists murdered African-American student Richard W. Collins III. Earlier this year, Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai Meche were savagely murdered when the two men intervened to stop a white racist from verbally abusing two young black women, one of whom was Muslim and wearing a hijab.
Collins’s murder received no response from the Trump White House, while the vicious slayings of Best and Meche elicited a rare and underwhelming comment from Trump. Trump’s muted comments in response to acts of racial terrorism stand in stark contrast to the bombast and vitriol he uses when he’s whipping up his base into a racist frenzy.
When Trump finally made a public statement many hours after the racist melee in Charlottesville began, it was intentionally vague: he claimed to oppose violence “on many sides.”