Was there a more poignant photo of America at 250 years old than the one Reuters captured of a young Black woman on a Washington commuter train surrounded by white nationalists with covered faces?
There were photos of fireworks on July 4. Photos of the president preening at Mount Rushmore. Photos of the predictably over-the-top red, white and blue patriotic display in Philadelphia before the holiday’s World Cup match between France and Paraguay. But those spectacles provided a facade that only sees the country as “America the Beautiful,” when reality is far more complex. The journalist on the Washington Metro who photographed the young Black woman beset by members of the racist Patriot Front provided an uglier and more honest image of this American moment.
The journalist who photographed the young Black woman beset by members of the racist Patriot Front provided an uglier and more honest image of this American moment.
America’s 250th birthday should have been a celebration of democracy, but that’s not Patriot Front’s thing. According to its website, “Democracy has failed this once great nation.” It favors a “hard reset” and a “return to the traditions and virtues of our forefathers.” My forefathers (and foremothers, too, for that matter) had traditions and virtues worthy of praise and emulation, but nobody in Patriot Front should be expected to see the beauty in Black people’s essential contributions to this country.
Reuters reported that hundreds of members of Patriot Front took public transportation before and after marching in the nation’s capital carrying their own flag, several variations of the U.S. flag and, of course, the old racist standard, the Confederate battle flag.
The George Washington University Program on Extremism describes Patriot Front as a white nationalist organization founded after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. James Alex Fields Jr. , a self-described white supremacist, murdered counterprotester Heather Heyer at that rally.
The GW center says Patriot Front “promotes an ultra-nationalist ideology centered on the idea of creating a white ethnostate in the United States, rejecting multiculturalism and diversity.”
When Norman Rockwell created a painting inspired by 6-year-old Ruby Bridges’ daily walk through a gauntlet of white supremacists to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, he called it “The Problem We All Live With.” In the 1960s, when Bridges integrated what had been an all-white school and Rockwell drew inspiration from her ordeal, that problem was easy to name: White people terrified at the thought of a multiracial democracy were trying to threaten everybody fighting for it into submission.
Almost 70 years later, with a civil rights movement in between, an increasingly diverse America and even after a Black family spent two terms in the White House, the problem we face is the same: The ideological descendants of those segregationists, with their talk of “replacement,” their rants against diversity and their descriptions of everything they don’t like as “wokeness,” are trying to threaten everyone fighting for a multiracial democracy into submission.
Members of the Patriot Front who marched July 4 chanted “Reclaim America,” Reuters reported.
Besides, Black people never have to go looking for white supremacy to be confronted by it. They can count on it showing up soon enough.
Though there have obviously been moments when those white supremacist voices were quieter, at no point between the 1960s and now have they gone silent. The Ku Klux Klan marched a few blocks from campus when I was a student at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1990s. A beloved Black professor chided the Association of Black Students for not making a show of opposition to the racists on parade. But our decision to ignore them arose from the belief that responding to provocation is unproductive and that nothing good would come from gifting them our attention.
Besides, Black people never have to go looking for white supremacy to be confronted by it. They can count on it showing up soon enough.
That is the story of that photo: A young Black woman on the Metro going about her business and then finding herself surrounded. While more details about her background and where she was going would be nice to know, those details aren’t necessary to absorb the symbolism to see that she, in that moment, has a particularly acute case of a chronic problem that infects us all.
Some may see that photo and think of the passage in a New Testament letter in which Paul describes himself and others as “troubled on every side, yet not distressed … perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.” At least, that’s what I think when I see it. I see a young woman who’s surrounded by trouble — but hasn’t succumbed to it.
That appearance of equanimity in the middle of encompassing hatred characterizes the depictions of a young Ruby Bridges, too, and so many civil rights-era photos of people in frightening predicaments. But its similarities with photos of that bygone era is what makes the photo so jarring.
In fact, it should make us ask how much of that era is bygone.
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