Fifty to sixty predominantly white high school boys, hands up, saluting: "Sieg Heil!" They are "proud" students of Baraboo High School in Wisconsin. "Welcome to Baraboo."
"We even got the black kid to throw it #barabooproud."
And look closer.
There's the top of the black young student's head. Dreads. There's one white student, hands at his side. No salute. But look at the one in the front row, center. He's giving the symbol of white power.
"Sieg Heil!"
The photo appears on Twitter, and, immediately, media outlets denounced the photo. Appalling! Disgusting! Let's not show the American public, heaven forbid!, the offensive saluting hands! How could this happen--in America, of all places!
Anchors and pundits appearing on CBS, CNN, MSNBC angered. USA Today, AP, The New York Times show the photo and insists that there is no place for this kind of hate in America. Democracy Now!, a news outlet that frequently appears in Madison, fundraising, also showed the photo too. But the Koch brothers don't fund progressive, liberal or Left news outlets. Nor "celebrity" activists. So silence on certain unpleasant issues becomes beneficial to the "good guys and gals" too. Who wants to lose their funding? Even if that funding is from within the white progressive/liberal camp.
No wonder there's a rise in hate groups throughout the US.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center ( SPLC ) hate crimes are up in 2017, the third worst year since the agency started collecting such date. There have been 7,106 hate crimes last year. There are 953 hate groups in the US ( SPLC ). Two blacks are shot dead, on October 25, 2018, at a Kroger's in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, after the killer (a believer in white supremacy) tried and failed to enter a black church. On October 27, 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue lost 11 of its worshipers, shot by an American who hailed white supremacy.
Some neighbors, friends, family members even. Very fine people, huh?
I can't imagine what it's like for the average white child in Wisconsin to grow up and see blacks so infrequently as to think us a novelty. But we are there on the local news channels, under the news heading: "crime." Blacks appear in prison orange garb not in red or white sweatshirts with the "W" logo. What must these children hear from parents and other adults at the kitchen table about black and brown people? What do they learn in school about colonization, enslavement, the practice of genocide as the foundational violence of this nation? What do they learn about themselves? What do the white students of Wisconsin learn about their responsibility toward ensuring social justice prevails as opposed to learning how to be competitive toward the racial other, exclude the racial other because all are "criminal," a threat, until proven "dead" to resistance? What do these students learn and observe from friends and neighbors? What is it that white children come to understand about the other when these children hear adults speak of "certain" people from Chicago or Milwaukee invading Madison? Or Baraboo?
I hear echoes of Thomas Jefferson, "from cradle to grave..." In in his Notes on Virginia , Jefferson writes that he fears what will become of young white children who witness, day in and day out, the violence afflicted on enslaved blacks by their parents, neighbors.
The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it: for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do"
The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to the worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities.
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