Not long ago, there was a powerful unifying moment after the nation witnessed a white police officer murder George Floyd on May 25, 2020. We saw an unusual groundswell of support for social justice from white allies and corporate titans who pledged to join the struggle for racial equality.
The momentum for change has all but disappeared in the face of a white supremacists counter-offensive.
Confederacy culture runs deep and – if we’re not careful – could turn back the clocks. Since 2020, anti-Black forces have painstakingly reversed gains made at the height of the now-fading social justice movement.
In one of their latest victories, Virginia’s Shenandoah County Public Schools voted to reinstate the names of Confederate heroes (Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby) to two public schools.
Board member Gloria E. Carlineo told CNN that the decision had nothing to do with race. But that’s hard to believe.
Four years ago, the majority-white school district found itself swept up in the wave of schools, universities, government facilities and public monuments that were renamed, relocated or contextualized because they paid homage to white supremacists and enslavers.
Since then, Conservatives took control of the Virginia school board. Three school board members elected in 2023 campaigned to get the “woke Leftists agenda” out of schools, signaling that they would vote to reinstate the Confederate leaders’ names if elected, according to The New York Times.
The backlash is unsurprising given the deep-rooted nature of the Confederacy cult, which, by the way, historians say also took root outside the Deep South when white racists migrated after the Civil War.
After losing the war, white supremacists launched the “Lost Cause,” a revisionist history that included the fable that the Civil War was not really about slavery, Michel Paradis writes in The Atlantic. According to the fictitious retelling, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was a gentleman warrior and the KKK was a noble organization that defended Southern culture and the virtue of white women from savage Black men.
The cult’s strategy of denying racism and rewriting history hasn’t changed a bit. In response to the social justice movement, they’re trying to sanitize America’s racist past by whitewashing what’s taught in classrooms.
Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set off a wave of conservative governors rejecting the College Board’s Advanced Placement African American Studies course, saying it lacks educational value. DeSantis, who has kissed the ring of his political godfather, Donald Trump, claimed that the curriculum aimed to indoctrinate students on issues that the Movement for Black Lives promoted.
They’re also targeting authors who denounce racism in their work. According to The New York Times, “a rapidly growing and increasingly influential constellation of conservative groups” is behind the wave of book bannings at public schools and libraries across the nation.
At the same time, their agenda to eliminate diversity at academic institutions, in government, and in corporations is also gaining momentum.
Make no mistake, dangerous times are ahead if Trump wins re-election. He vows to champion the white supremacist fight against so-called “anti-white racism.”
“I think there is a definite anti-white feeling in this country, and that can’t be allowed either,” Trump told TIME when asked about his supporters who believe anti-white racism is a bigger problem than anti-Black racism.