Readers Respond: The U.S.’s white supremacist character has long claimed lives on its own land and abroad. Evangelical leaders on the religious right who’ve subscribed to a white nationalist agenda advance the violence in racist terror attacks, immigrant hostility, and exclusionary policies.
White Nationalism. White Supremacy. White Power. (by Jim Wallis)
These are words that white people — particularly white Christians — don’t like to talk about, don’t like to see and hear, want to put in the past, want to dismiss as applying to only a few white people, and refuse to see as systemic, structural, or still deeply embedded in our American history and national culture. Certainly, then, they don’t want to acknowledge these combined forces as the greatest terrorist threat now to America’s safety, and the greatest political threat to genuine democracy around the world.
That is the heart of our problem.
From Oklahoma City to Charleston to Charlottesville to Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue to Christchurch, New Zealand, to Norway and other places in Europe, white nationalism and the white supremacy underneath it is a movement — and a growing one. White power has historically killed untold numbers of people and is still killing people today. It’s the most rising terrorist threat: white people who believe that their exclusive power and superiority is being taken away by the growth of more inclusive democracy.
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