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white nationalism
How Communities Like Springfield, Ohio Can Push Back Against Fear and Racism
The case of Shelbyville, Tennessee is proof that when communities come together—across racial and class lines—they can challenge hate and demand real change.
Sep 27, 2024
As racial tensions escalate in Springfield, Ohio, Haitian families are facing violent threats and harassment, reflecting a wider pattern of fear and division that’s being felt across the country. This isn’t just about racism and xenophobia; it’s also about political leaders exploiting white fear to distract from systemic failures.
But there is hope. Shelbyville, Tennessee—a town with similar challenges—demonstrates how communities can transform this tide of hate into a movement for justice.
While smaller and less white than Springfield, Shelbyville shares a common profile: Both towns have faced long-standing economic hardship, spurred by the loss of manufacturing jobs. Both have also seen more recent immigrant arrivals. With this combination of economic struggle and demographic shifts, both towns have been targeted for racial scapegoating and organized white hate.
Unlike many anti-racist efforts among white people that focus on personal behavior or privilege awareness for a liberal, middle-class audience, the BCLP focused on real-world issues affecting white working-class people.
Much like how the Proud Boys and KKK descended on Springfield, white nationalists set their sights on Shelbyville five years ago. They chose the town because Somali refugee resettlement challenged their vision of a “white ethnostate.”
But instead of giving in to fear, many in Shelbyville pushed back. They organized counter events, like a pozole potluck just blocks away from the white nationalists’ rally—a peaceful, community-centered response that drew far more participants than the hate rally itself.
Similarly, many in Springfield have flocked to Haitian businesses in support, rejecting white, racist hate.
In Shelbyville, a handful of residents knew more needed to be done to confront the hate long-term, and they could not leave the fight solely to their immigrant neighbors. They needed to address the root causes of division and show white community members that their true enemies weren’t refugees or immigrants.
They started small, going door to door to alert neighbors about the hate group’s presence, identifying allies, and asking residents about their real concerns. What they found was telling—most people were far more worried about economic issues than about immigration. Residents complained about a few exploitative landlords monopolizing rental housing in the mostly low-income town.
Springfield faces similar challenges: a severe lack of affordable housing (a crisis across the nation) and politicians blaming Haitian Americans for those problems instead of tackling the real culprits—such as failed policies and exploitative landlords. Indeed, residents of Springfield have long faced a lack of adequate services across the board. One Springfield resident, interviewed by journalist Aymann Ismail, explained how he receives just $23 per month in food stamps, nowhere near enough to survive. When pressed further, many residents agreed that government neglect, not Haitian families, was responsible for their struggles.
Back in Shelbyville, the rejection of organized hate grew into something bigger—the Bedford County Listening Project (BCLP). The group adopted a “shared interest” approach, highlighting how white residents, struggling just as much as their immigrant neighbors, could benefit from joining forces to fight systemic injustices. The BCLP shows white residents that racism isn’t just morally wrong—it is a tool used by the powerful to divide them and maintain the status quo.
Unlike many anti-racist efforts among white people that focus on personal behavior or privilege awareness for a liberal, middle-class audience, the BCLP focused on real-world issues affecting white working-class people. They organized for tenant’s rights, fought to improve housing policies, and even helped elect one of their own to the city council—unseating a decades-long incumbent. They also tackled racism head-on, playing a key role in defeating an anti-refugee ordinance in 2019 and standing up to the KKK’s efforts to intimidate the town during the 2020 election.
This isn’t some story about a group of progressive activists. As their staff organizer explained, “None of them were activists prior to this. And nobody was Democrat.” Some even voted for former U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016, though most had not voted at all. What united them wasn’t ideology, but a shared desire to improve their lives and community.
One BCLP member summed it up: “That [anti-]refugee thing was doing nothing. It was just another dumb tactic” to distract from what really matters—jobs, schools, and housing.
The Shelbyville case is proof that when communities come together—across racial and class lines—they can challenge hate and demand real change. The real question is which groups will reach these communities first, those like the Bedford County Listening Project or hate groups like the Proud Boys?
The BCLP isn’t an isolated example. It’s part of a growing movement, supported by national groups like Showing Up for Racial Justice and other grassroots organizations that are working to unite predominately white communities with people of color in the fight for justice. These groups know that we’re all in this fight together, and they need our support.
As our nation encounters mounting levels of extremism and political violence, intentionally fueled by mainstream political actors, communities like Shelbyville and Springfield show us two ways forward. One succumbs to fear and division, while the other fights for solidarity and justice.
The choice is ours.
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The Michigan GOP Is Campaigning on Hate
Its campaign mailers showcase the logo of a political advocacy group called FAIR and a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, both anti-immigration hate groups with ties to white nationalists.
Sep 20, 2024
Although the Michigan Republican Party experienced a severe cash shortage under ex-chair Kristina Karamo, that appears to have been solved for the time being. Karamo was removed as chair this year due to her poor fundraising ability. With current chair Pete Hoekstra, the state GOP found the money to begin flooding inboxes with campaign mailers.
Some houses in my neighborhood in Hazel Park received six pieces of campaign mail or more per week. Most of these mailers contain the standard accusations, that Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is “failed, weak, and dangerously liberal.” Some showcase the logo of a political advocacy group called FAIR and a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, both anti-immigration groups with Michigan connections and ties to white nationalists.
FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) is quoted on these mailers alleging “Harris Hints Big Amnesty Bill on the Way.” The mailer summarizes an argument from the FAIR-affiliated think tank the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) that amnesty for undocumented immigrants “would cost Social Security $1.3 trillion, destroying benefits for American seniors.” Part of this cost would come from immigrants who had been paying into the system through payroll taxes suddenly receiving citizenship. The CIS admits that many undocumented immigrants “are currently paying into the system without accruing any benefits in return...” Many publications have criticized the center’s methodologies and conclusions in previous reports, such as Snopes,Factcheck.org, and NBC News. Wiredran an article classifying the group as a “fake think tank.”
Putting out mailers with two hate groups prominently cited is a clear example of dogwhistle politics.
FAIR was founded by a Petoskey ophthalmologist named John Tanton in 1979, who also co-founded CIS in 1985. He had been active in the environmentalist group the Sierra Club, but shifted his focus to restricting immigration. Tanton, who died in 2019, promoted eugenics—the idea that the human race could and should be perfected through selected breeding and sterilization. While some anti-immigrant activists couch their arguments in terms of economics or nation security, Tanton made his arguments explicitly in terms of race. He was against immigration from non-white countries and was quoted in The New York Times to that effect. “One of my prime concerns,” he explained, “is about the decline of folks who look like you and me... for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
That emphasis on racial opposition to immigration at FAIR and CIS was not unique to Tanton. Dan Stein, the current head of FAIR, defends the 1924 Immigration Act, a piece of legislation enthusiastically supported by the Ku Klux Klan. Stein argues that the replacement of that law by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act was done as a way to “retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance and hubris…” Stein would prefer an immigration system modeled on the 1924 act, one that explicitly favored not just whites, but Anglo-Saxon ones at that.
The CIS, which is also on the advisory board of the Donald Trump-affiliated Project 2025, has recommended notable bigots to supporters. In its weekly listerv, it has promoted Holocaust deniers, Islamophobes, and white nationalists. Both FAIR and CIS are listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as anti-immigrant “hate groups.” When an offended CIS filed suit against the law center over this designation, the lawsuit was dismissed.
The inclusion of FAIR and CIS on campaign mailers comes at an awkward time for Michigan Republicans, who have been trying to make inroads with Arab, Black, and Hispanic voters. They are trying to balance appeals to those groups with a commitment to their base, who are overwhelmingly white. Putting out mailers with two hate groups prominently cited is a clear example of dogwhistle politics. Most will think nothing of the presence of the two groups, but anyone with ears properly attuned will get the message.
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Black MAGA No Better Than the Rest of MAGA
Consider Trump’s first term nothing but an appetizer, should he be reelected.
May 20, 2024
Consider Donald Trump to be in a racial bind when it comes to election 2024. After all, he needs Black voters to at least defect from Joe Biden in swing states, if not actually vote for him. Yet, more than ever, he also needs his white nationalist base to believe that a second Trump term will be even more racist than the first and he’s been openly claiming that he’ll address the ghost of anti-white racism. Not surprisingly, his evolving strategy for the Black vote has been high on empty symbolism and viral moments, but distinctly low on specific promised policy benefits for the Black community.
Milkshakes and far-right policies are all the presumptive Republican presidential candidate has recently offered Blacks. Take his orchestrated photo op at a Chick-fil-A in Atlanta a preview of things to come. The event was organized by Black MAGA supporter and Republican operative Michaelah Montgomery, who recruited some young African Americans, probably students from nearby historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to cheer for Trump when he entered the place. He proceeded to buy milkshakes for everyone. Montgomery herself gave Trump a picture-perfect hug and, to the glee of MAGAworld, stated, “I don’t care what the media tells you, Mr. Trump. We support you.”
Naturally, while there he made false claims about what he had done for Black folks while president. It wasn’t quite a speech, but he more or less mumbled that he had great support in the area because “I have done more for the people of Atlanta than any other president by far. I have done more for the black community than any other president since Abraham Lincoln and maybe including Abraham Lincoln, but since Abraham Lincoln. And it looks like our polling is very good in the state of Georgia overall. We are very happy about it. We have had — you see the support. It’s been really something.”
Note to Trump: You had such great support in Georgia in 2021 that the GOP lost two Senate seats in run-off elections there (while you were trying to overthrow the government). And that was primarily because of the turnout of Black voters who, the previous November, had voted for President Biden and returned to vote Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock into office.
Without actually engaging the students at Chick-fil-A, and speaking in his usual broken fashion, Trump boasted: “That’s really nice. We took care of the — black colleges, university. They are taken care of. Biden did nothing for them. I did everything.”
Note to Trump: The Fostering Undergraduate Talent by Unlocking Resources for Education Act (or FUTURE Act) you signed ensured that permanent funding for HBCUs would remain at essentially the same level as during the Obama administration (about $85 million). The Biden administration, on the other hand, has invested over $7 billion in HBCUs. That includes “$3.6 billion for HBCUs through the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief,” “$1.6 billion in capital finance debt relief for 45 public and private HBCUs,” and “$1.7 billion in grant funding to expand academic capacity and provide support for low-income students.”
MAGA and HBCUs
Michaelah Montgomery is steeped in contemporary MAGA politics. She has ties to the Blexit Foundation, a group started by far-right provocateur and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens to sway African Americans from the Democratic Party. Montgomery states on her LinkedIn page that she was Blexit’s city director for the Atlanta metro region. She is also the founder of Conserve the Culture, a group apparently devoted to converting young African American students to conservative, that is, Trumpublican, politics.
In interviews with the right-wing media, she made it appear that Trump had encountered a group of everyday young Black people at that Chick-fil-A who spontaneously expressed their love for him. In fact, it was a handpicked group that did not represent most HBCU students or the Black community more generally.
If she really thought Trump had developed significant popularity among Black students, why didn’t she schedule him to speak at an HBCU? Montgomery later said: “The media will definitely have you thinking that if [Trump] were to show up to our neighborhood… that an angry mob of some sort would form or a riot would ensue.” She can pretend otherwise, but if Donald (“the Black people like me”) Trump actually ever showed up to spew his usual lies to any HBCU audience or Black community in the nation, there would indeed be massive protests.
While he claims he’s had great relations with HBCU presidents, he only visited one of those schools during his presidency and it turned into a scandalous Trumpian event. In 2019, he gave a talk at Benedict College in South Carolina to crow about his criminal justice reform policies. However, Benedict students were asked to stay in their dorms, where they were essentially imprisoned for an hour and served lunch while Trump bloviated. The faculty, too, were requested to stay away. According to USA Today, only seven students were allowed to attend the event and they were not allowed to ask questions.
Black and Far Right
Trump’s Black supporters continue to propagate the false notion that he’s going to make a historic breakthrough in voter support in the coming election. Polls are one thing, election results another. While his campaigns in 2016 and 2020 were wish-casting that he would get 15% to 20% of the Black vote, he only won 6% and 8% respectively.
And it should be noted that Trump desperately wants to dump Black votes not cast for him. The Big Lie that he won in 2020 was premised on his contention that voting in Black-dominated cities was corrupt and that millions of votes should have been discounted. Accepting that “reality” is the price of admission to Trumpworld, whether at the Trump-colonialized Republican National Committee or for any prospective vice-presidential candidate.
And worse yet, his African American sycophants continue to drink the Kool-Aid. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott humiliated himself recently on NBC’s Meet the Press when he clumsily refused six (yes, six!) times to state that he would accept a Trump defeat in the fall. Repeatedly asked, he demonstrated that his desire to stay in Trump’s good graces and potentially become his running mate took priority over the most basic stance for maintaining a constitutional democracy.
In the service of Trump, Scott also launched a video series, “America’s Starting Five,” a weekly discussion between him and the other four Black Republicans in Congress, Representatives Burgess Owens (UT), John James (MI), Wesley Hunt (TX), and Byron Donalds (FL). The goal: to convince Black voters that the GOP and Trump are the only way to go if African Americans want to get ahead.
The first episode, however, didn’t focus on policy differences between the Democrats and Trump, but on two ill-advised and well-criticized statements by Joe Biden. In 2019, he said that “poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids,” implying it was a given that white kids were bright and talented. He immediately recognized his mistake and tried to clean it up with gibberish. (“Wealthy kids, black kids, Asian kids, no, I really mean it, but think how we think about it.”) In 2020, as he was finishing an interview with the popular Black radio host Charlamagne tha God, Biden said, “Well I tell you what, if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.” At the time, criticism flowed from across the political spectrum in the Black community, chastising the president for seemingly attempting to police Black racial identity.
Scott and the others used those statements to draw a conclusion about Biden’s bigotry and then extend that critique to the Democratic Party. This required, of course, burying decades of Trump’s racist statements and behavior in a memory hole that went deep into the center of the earth. It was an act of epic historical revisionism. They functionally erased the fact that he gave succor to white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, attacked voting rights, expressed a desire to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters, demanded that there be less immigrants from “shithole” nations and more from Norway, defamed black prosecutors, judges, and district attorneys with racist verbal attacks, insulted Harriet Tubman, and so much more during his presidency.
The Racial Storm Is Coming
Yet consider Trump’s first term nothing but an appetizer, should he be reelected. According to his campaign website, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, and Project 47, he will unleash a program of racial authoritarianism unseen since the worst days of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. And he’ll be emboldened and enabled by a constitution filled with ambiguities and undemocratic provisions, by an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court he helped appoint, and by millions of his supporters (many of whom have shown a propensity for using violence to meet their idea of his agenda).
Trump’s second-term racial program is already emerging. He stated while president and recently reiterated that “we will terminate every diversity, equity, and inclusion program across the entire federal government” and end Biden’s “Marxist executive order that seeks to impose racist and woke sexual ideology across the federal government.”
Believe him.
And it won’t just stop at the federal level or in the public sector. As the Guardian recently reported, MAGA forces are planning to go after all efforts at inclusion (whether related to racial, gender, religious, or sexual-orientation), including in the corporate sector and the non-profit world. Trump’s former adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal group and other far-right actors have already filed suits against Fearless Fund, a venture capital business founded by Black women; Hello Alice, which provides grants to small Black business owners; and the George Floyd Memorial scholarship program at Minneapolis’s North Central University, among other initiatives. America First Legal has been on a hyper mission to end diversity efforts, all of which it perceives as harmful to white Americans.
In a broader context, Trump has stated, “But if you look right now, there’s absolutely a bias against white and that’s a problem.” First and foremost, Trump sees himself as a victim of racism by Black public authorities and has been signaling that he’s all in on a campaign of overt white nationalism. It couldn’t be clearer where he’ll focus the resources of the White House and federal government should he return to power.
And one thing is guaranteed: he’ll have support for his actions. As USA Todaynoted, citing a CBS November poll, “Most white voters supporting Trump believe that racial minorities are favored over white people.” About 58% of Trump voters (as opposed to 9% of Biden ones) believe “racial minorities” are favored over “white people.”
And his plans (as well as those of his GOP allies) to get back into office include not only voter suppression tactics like closing polling sites, ending early voting, and questioning mail-in or drop-box ballots, but attempting to employ an army of Election Day militias who will look for “irregularities” and “illegal” behavior. Is there any doubt where those 100,000 election watchers will be sent (or what they will look like)? And by the way, there has been stone-dead silence from Trump’s Black supporters on the plan to send hardcore MAGA troops to Black and Latino communities in swing states.
Absurd to the End
Trump has said to his Black backers, “I’m being indicted for you, the Black population.” That’s his way of attempting to link his own misconduct and corruption to his conviction that the Black community is overwhelmingly filled with criminals. Even worse, he has insultingly compared himself to South African leader Nelson Mandela, one of the most famous prisoners in the world for nearly three decades. Of course, he knows absolutely nothing about Mandela or what sent him to prison, only that he was famous for it. Mandela became a global hero to tens of millions who fought for years for his freedom.
You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that, according to former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, The Donald had a remarkably low opinion of Mandela. Cohen wrote in Disloyal: A Memoir that, after Mandela died in 2013, Trump told him, “Mandela f—ed the whole country up. Now it’s a s—hole. F— Mandela. He was no leader.”
Of course, Trump knew little and could have cared less about Africa, or South Africa in particular. There is almost no record of him discussing or tweeting about South Africa. The one time he did, based on a news report by far-right commentator Tucker Carlson, he tweeted a white supremacist talking point, falsely claiming that there were “large-scale killings” of white farmers in that country. From former Klan leader David Duke to hard racist websites like the Daily Stormer, white supremacists naturally celebrated Trump’s tweet.
In 2016, every white nationalist and supremacist in this country supported Donald Trump. In 2020-2021, in the wake of the Charlottesville riots, immigration cruelties, and the January 6th insurrection, they supported him again. And now, as the 2024 election looms, and Trump fights “anti-white” racism, he has once more earned their love and their votes.
Singer and activist John Legend who, along with his wife Chrissy Teigen, has battled Trump for years, summed up the former president best. He said: “He’s done very little for us and he is at his core, truly, truly a racist.”
Welcome to the 2024 election season and a world in which Black MAGA is still MAGA to the core.
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