[News] Want to Meet America’s Worst Racists? Come to the Northwest
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Wed Jul 8 16:21:36 EDT 2015
Want to Meet America’s Worst Racists? Come to the Northwest
*Confederate sympathizers have nothing on the ‘Northwest Front.’*
By CASEY MICHEL
*http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803_full.html?print#.VZ2FtvnqV_A*
July 07, 2015
Much of the national debate over racism in the aftermath of last month’s
mass murder in Charleston, S.C., has focused on the South and its
strange and sometimes jarring nostalgia for the Confederacy. And yet
tucked away in the Pacific Northwest of the United States is a vicious
group that most people have never heard of but the nation’s most
virulent online racists know well (among them, accused South Carolina
murderer Dylann Roof, who wrote about the group in his now-infamous
“manifesto”).
The group is called the Northwest Front and its final solution to the
race "problem," if you will, is to expel non-white people from the
Pacific Northwest and to establish a mono-racial republic there.
Racism knows no region, it’s safe to say. While the Pacific Northwest
can abstain from the debate on the removal of traitorous colors from the
Capitol grounds—Oregon was the last state in the Union before the Civil
War’s outbreak, after all—the region bears a racial legacy tinted by an
ignorance, a decades-old vision of minority-free lands, as stark as any
in the United States.
To be sure, the Northwest Front represents a fringe campaign, a minority
of a minority seeking to expunge the Pacific Northwest of any color but
white. According to Harold Covington, the group’s leader, the union of
Washington State, Oregon, Idaho and western Montana would be
<http://www.vice.com/read/this-guy-wants-to-start-his-own-aryan-country>
“kind of like the white version of Israel. I don’t see why the Jews are
the only people on Earth that get their own country and everyone else
has to be diverse.” Covington knows precisely what he’s gone in for: “Of
course it’s racism. What’s wrong with racism? It’s the purist form of
patriotism.”
Numbers on the Northwest Front are hard to come by—the group does
without formal membership—but the Southern Poverty Law Center maintains
Northwest Front as one of the foremost white nationalist groups in the
region. The group’s reach has as much to do with its push as it does
with its leader, Covington. While no direct connection between Roof and
Covington has yet emerged, aside from Roof’s broadsides about Northwest
Front, circumstance and parallel motivations twin the two.
In 1972, while a member of the U.S. Army, Covington wormed his way into
his first neo-Nazi organization
<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2001/fall/the-ties-that-bind>.
He soon found himself in Bulawayo, Rhodesia (a nation whose colors Roof,
coincidentally, didn’t hesitate to sport
<http://www.vox.com/2015/6/18/8806633/charleston-shooter-flags-dylann-roof>).
While there, Covington managed to start both the Rhodesian White
People’s Party and the South African Friends of the Movement. But
Covington quickly outstayed his welcome, and his screeching
anti-Semitism soon saw him deported from one of the most racist regimes
extant.
Not long thereafter, however, Covington set his sights more
domestically—and tapped into a vein of racial stratification long
overlooked within the U.S. For Covington, the Pacific Northwest could
prove the well-spring for the white supremacists’ dreams. An independent
/ethnie/. A Rhodesia regained.
But don’t think Covington’s claims—that he can flip the vertiginous
Northwest into an autarkic ethno-state—are novel. Rather, Covington
tapped into a racist longing that has long festered in this part of the
country, a tide of American history that’s never been properly
addressed. From its earliest American outset, the Pacific Northwest was
long meant to be a land for the white caste. “Whites Only” writ large.
Look at Oregon
<http://gizmodo.com/oregon-was-founded-as-a-racist-utopia-1539567040>,
for instance. As Walidah Imarisha of Portland State University’s Black
Studies Department told me, “Oregon was founded as a state, as a
territory, as a white homeland. Folks who answered that call wanted to
build their perfect white society.” And not in the same vein of a
three-fifths-clause South, where black Americans would be tolerated, if
in servitude. Oregon would be different. While the state remained in the
Union—and actually proved pivotal
<http://www.amazon.com/Team-Rivals-Political-Abraham-Lincoln/dp/0743270754> to
Abraham Lincoln’s nomination on the Republican ticket—Oregon’s founders
mentioned racial unity in the state's original documents. To wit, the
1850 Oregon Donation Land Act allowed
<http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf> free
land to whites alone. And during an 1857 vote on the constitution’s
formulation, some 83 percent of participants voted to prohibit “free
negroes” from living or working in the state. Chief Justice George
Williams, who later served as attorney general for President Ulysses
Grant, summed the sentiment, lobbying voters
<https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/4561/83_2_731.pdf?sequence=1> to
“consecrate Oregon to the use of the white man, and exclude the negro,
Chinaman, and every race of that character.” According to one researcher
<https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/4561/83_2_731.pdf?sequence=1>,
Oregon was “the only state ever admitted with a black exclusion clause
in its constitution.” There’s a reason, growing up in Portland, that my
seventh-grade teacher informed us Oregon was often considered the most
racist state west of the Mississippi.
Remarkably, such laws remained in force in Oregon until 1926, allowing a
white population to steer a demographic legacy apart from other parts of
the country. At one point, Oregon boasted the highest per-capita
membership
<http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wou.edu%2Ftri%2Fusp%2F556%2FOregonRacialLaws.pdf&ei=24iRVfPnKYagyASH9YIQ&usg=AFQjCNE7-wX2682KG5ome_k-dTNO2ST6MQ&sig2=6EJ68HyEynRIdCkLdzQO4g&bvm=bv.96783405,d.aWw> in
the Ku Klux Klan. For good measure, Oregon failed to ratify the 15th
Amendment, allowing African-Americans the right to vote, until 1959; the
state also didn’t formally ratify the 14th Amendment, allowing equal
protection under the law, until 1973. “Oregon was a Klan state—it was as
prejudiced as South Carolina, so there was very little difference other
than geographic difference,” Otto Rutherford, one of the state’s leading
civil rights activists, said
<http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEEDING-ALBINA_-A-HISTORY-OF-COMMUNITY-DISINVESTMENT-1940%E2%80%932000.pdf>.
Despite its current trappings of progress and tolerance, mid-20^th
century Portland, according
<http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/series/historical-photo/oregon-historical-photo-portlands-struggle-for-racial-equality/> to
Oregon Public Broadcasting, “was still considered the most segregated
and prejudiced city on the West Coast.” Today, not only does Portland
remain the whitest major metropolitan area
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/03/24/how-the-whitest-city-in-america-appears-through-the-eyes-of-its-black-residents/> in
the country, but the city managed to slough its remaining
African-American population even further in the 21^st century, dropping
from 6.6 percent in 2000
<http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk> to
6.3 percent in 2010
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/41/4159000.html>. Seattle’s
decline has proven even steeper, with the city’s black population
sagging from 8.4 percent
<http://factfinder.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/DEC/00_SF1/DP1/1600000US5363000> to
7.9 percent <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53/5363000.html> in
just 10 years, with no end to the drop in sight.
All through it, Oregon—and the Pacific Northwest more broadly—remained a
bastion of white supremacist visions of isolation and conformity. Trends
peaked
<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/winter/extremists-are-coming-together-in-mon> in
the mid-1980s with Richard Butler, founder of the Aryan Nations, helping
to push the idea of the Northwest Territorial Imperative, of a piece
with Covington’s recent push. Butler’s compound in northern Idaho
eventually fizzled, but his dream, tied directly to the region’s days of
primordial statehood, has continued.
Indeed, the Pacific Northwest was recently the site of an attempted
white supremacist bombing that could well have outpaced the carnage
unleashed in Boston a few years ago. In early 2011
<http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/09/nation/la-na-mlk-bomb-20120209>, Kevin
Harpham planted a backpack tangled in wire, fishing weights, and rat
poison along the route of Spokane’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day
parade. Fortunately, sanitation workers spotted the device before
detonation. A few weeks later, after Harpham’s white supremacist screeds
<http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2011/summer/mlk-day-bomb-suspect-has-extensive-wh> came
to light, officers camouflaged as road workers–and using a backhoe to
pin his car–grabbed Harpham. But not all domestic terrorists in the
region, operating under the auspices of white supremacy, are caught
prior to their crime. A white supremacist and his girlfriend out of
Washington State recently
<http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/24/us-usa-crime-supremacist-idUSBREA3N02G20140424> murdered
a black man alongside a separate 19-year-old, the latter of whom they
“thought … was Jewish.”
No ties have come to light between any of the criminals and Covington,
nor between Covington and Roof—though it is worth noting that the
Northwest Front was apparently recently recruiting
<http://www.foxcarolina.com/story/26693968/white-separatist-groups-card-ends-up-in-greenville-county-mans-mailbox> in
South Carolina. But Covington chose his swath of America for a reason.
Not only does the region’s white supremacist legacy—legal and
otherwise—linger, but check the latest Census figures. Washington
State’s population remains only 4 percent black
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/53000.html>. Oregon? Two
percent <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/41000.html>. Idaho?
Eight-tenths of a percent
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/16000.html>. Montana?
Six-tenths of a percent
<http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/30000.html>.
For the accused South Carolina killer, apparently, the Northwest Front’s
goals were too meek. “I think this idea is beyond stupid,” Roof wrote
<http://lastrhodesian.com/data/documents/rtf88.txt> in his presumed
manifesto. “Why should I for example, give up the beauty and history of
my state to go to the Norhthwest? (sic)”
But other racists have, and they will continue to do so. And we
shouldn’t forget about them.
<http://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/facebook/offer?pco=tbx32nj-1.0&url=http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803.html&pubid=politico.com><http://api.addthis.com/oexchange/0.8/forward/twitter/offer?pco=tbx32nj-1.0&url=http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/northwest-front-americas-worst-racists-119803.html&pubid=politico.com>
/Casey Michel is a recent Master’s graduate from Columbia University’s
Harriman Institute. His writing has appeared in the/ Atlantic, Foreign
Policy, /and/ Slate, /and he can be followed on Twitter at @cjcmichel
<http://www.twitter.com/cjcmichel>./
--
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20150708/39b66d37/attachment.htm>
More information about the News
mailing list