I’d note that racism is frequently expressed by making exceptions for “one of the good ones,” so being fond of a token African-American member is not evidence that one isn’t a racist.
I do agree that not all “sovereign citizen” militias are driven by racism, but that doesn’t mean the same thing as few. To the contrary, a large number of the whites in them are driven by the idea that the U.S. is becoming a “socialist” nation that stifles basic freedoms, and they often point to “government handouts stolen from taxpayers” (i.e. welfare programmes) and a culture of “censorious political correctness” (i.e. not being an arsehole) that primarily benefit the “undeserving” (i.e. minorities) as evidence.
The paranoia about the government coming to take their guns away is strongly rooted in the idea that they won’t be able to protect themselves from criminals, which are characterised as people of colour. All that overlap in the Venn diagram occurs before you get to the proud white nationalist contingents.
And much of this mindset arrives in the 1970s and 1980s, as a kind of coded racism, where all of a sudden good programs are now “bad” programs, primarily because they are no longer restricted to the deserving whites.
You can’t accurately label all sovereigns and miltias as racist christian terrorists, but you will hit nearly all of them with that category.
In my area, all the sovereigns and militia wannabes* I’ve encountered are people of severely limited education and intelligence, whose existing phobias and hatreds (which may include racism) are being exploited by charismatic leaders who often live parasitically in the homes of those they are “leading” and gather money from them in return for inflammatory literature (often racist).
* No active militias in my area, although several abortive attempts have been made to start one.
I think we go down the wrong path when we think that people don’t mean what they say and are instead using code words. My experience is that most people do try say what they mean. I think that if we want to get inside their heads we should look at their actions. For the five incidents listed I count 15 people shot, two of which where black (and one of the black people shot was shot by a black sovereign citizen). I don’t see a link between race and their actions. It appears to me that what these people did was consistent with their stated objectives.
The headline of both articles is based on the 2014 START survey, but neither BB nor Guardian bothered to link it. https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_UnderstandingLawEnforcementIntelligenceProcesses_July2014.pdf
It is worth reading. It might bear mentioning that the survey was intended to quantify the “perceived” risk from different groups, instead of concluding which groups present a larger actual threat.
Most of the 364 officers whose responses were used in the survey were selected from officers who had attended courses at the Oklahoma City Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, which has now closed, but was founded by survivors of the Oklahoma City bombings.
The survey was carried out prior to the Boston Bombings, The San Bernardino and Orlando shootings, The 2016 Dallas shootings, where 11 officers were shot, or the 2016 Baton Rouge shootings where six officers were shot.
It might be that a survey of officer perceived risk taken in a year where there were 32 officers killed by gunfire in the line of duty might not remain relevant after 2016, when 63 were shot and killed, including 20 shot and killed in deliberate ambushes.
“It is worth noting that this data was collected in early 2014, before the self-proclaimed Islamic State (also known as ISIS) began actively recruiting Americans.” (START, Patterns of US Extremist crime, 2016)
That is an assumption I don’t make regarding the vast majority of American conservatives after the Southern Strategy. Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s confession makes things very clear regarding the American right’s coded language and appeals to racists:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Ngger, ngger, ngger." By 1968 you can’t say "ngger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Ngger, ngger.”
Not to mention that all other things being equal, to them even the “good ones” are not. Sure, they’ll die for that guy in a fight against the “bad ones”, but odds are they aren’t going to make him leader of the group, and if the “enemy” were to vanish, he wouldn’t be quite as welcome as he is at the moment.
The articles are about the perception of threats, but new threats have emerged since the research was undertaken. That does not mean that the Sovereign Citizens nuts are less of a threat. But the data is from a time when police shooting deaths by extremists of all types averaged three per year.
It’s not a case of using code words. It’s a case of being steeped in a culture that genuinely believes in racial difference and the mythologies of the lost cause. It’s a convoluted set of beliefs and to ignore white supremacy/nationalism as part of that set of beliefs is missing key parts of the ideology.
I happen to be reading “History in Three Keys” about the boxer rebellion, which actually seems a very relevant historical example, perhaps even moreso than Taiping, though they’re only separated by a few decades. The book does a really good job of examining the interplay between anti-imperialism, anti-foreign sentiment, ecological and economic failure (successive droughts and floods) and the frame of magical/spiritual thinking.
The picture is painted of a group of rural nationalists scapegoating foreign religioun and native “traitors” to nationalism, all exacerbated by unemployment and lack of resources, and variously supported by/resisted by local politicians, depending on which they see as being to their advantage. It’s been interesting to read right now, and helpful, as it pulls apart the historian’s perspective explicitly from the lived experience and both from the uses of the rebellion by propagandists later. It’s given me a frame for getting perspective on our times…
As Cory noted in his opening sentence, the data source* is terrible. Most likely disgruntled ex-military** are currently scarier to police than Freemen On The Land, and in many jurisdictions I imagine the primary source of cop consternation is a media-fueled fear of brownish non-Christian people.
* a “2014 survey of 175 US law enforcement agencies,” so basically outdated cop opinions about what is scary.
** People who’ve seen the reality of the Endless War to Keep the Economy Broken from the front lines, and who have modern military training, not just armed stupid people (which, in my opinion, describes the average “sovereign citizen”).
When militias kill police, they do so to engender feelings of “terror”.
or
Militias kill police because they (police) are an armed occupation, and the enforcers of imperialism.
It IMO sounds like another centrist liberal crankpiece to alienate the militant left and portray all militants as right-wing white-bread tax-evaders. It doesn’t say that they all are, but also makes no effort at any distinction.
Paul A. Cohen. I’d feel out of place trying to judge its quality, I’ve been out the academia game for over a decade now. I only stumbled across it when I had grabbed Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novels, Boxers and Saints off the shelf at the library and eanted to dig in more (he also wrote American Born Chinese). Of all the research sources Yang cited, this one seemed to have the most interesting framework.
I’m liking it though, its refreshing to read something obsessively researched and so carefully written again, though having been away from academic writing, I was not mentally ready to try to parse sentences with clauses. nested. so. deep…
In the simplest terms possible, the title of the article uses the word “is”, but would be more accurate had the word been “was”.
But I know you are just trolling me a bit.
