Racist backlash thrives in times of social upheaval.
 | By Honor Jones Cover Stories Editor |
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I’ve been thinking hard about two questions this week: |
How do you cover a white supremacist? And should you cover a white supremacist at all? |
It goes without saying — or it should — that it’s the job of journalists to show people what’s happening in the world, including the bad things. Sunlight disinfects, and all that. But as the media expert Whitney Phillips warned in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, “you need to be a little bit wary of who you’re shining the light for, and what you end up illuminating.” |
Wariness is perhaps the first rule of good reporting, and I think Seyward Darby followed it for this week’s cover story. It’s about the descent of a young woman named Corinna Olsen into the heart of the white supremacist hate movement, and her eventual journey out the other side. The essay is adapted from her new book “Sisters in Hate.” |
Seyward argues that it’s important to tell stories like these because to defeat hate you have to understand it. “Not what it seems to be, but what it actually is. That includes who embraces it, and why.” |
She argues that it’s particularly important now because of the threat of a future white racist backlash. |
The protests against police brutality are arguably the biggest in American history, and support for the Black Lives Matter movement has never been greater. That’s heartening, Seyward writes, but she also warns that hate tends to surge “during periods of social upheaval, offering racist explanations for seismic change.” In recent decades, hate has fed on the backlash against “second- and third-wave feminism, the expansion of L.G.B.T.Q. rights, and shifting racial demographics,” as well as the election of Barack Obama and the birth of Black Lives Matter. |
Now we’re facing a pandemic, a recession and an election — probably a magnitude 9.5 on the seismic change scale. How does America stop people like the women Seyward profiles from turning to white nationalism? |
After spending years reporting from the bowels of the hate movement, Seyward is not exactly optimistic. But hope, she writes, “dwells in increments. There is hope if white Americans can confront the true face of hate and their own complicity in bigotry. There is hope if we can see white nationalism as a crisis of individual and collective responsibility.” |
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