Potential Violence: The Right is Animated by White Supremacist Paranoia that has Defined America for Generations

On Tuesday, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden picked Senator Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential nominee, setting off an almost-immediate firestorm of racism, sexism, and unfounded paranoia among Republicans. On Fox News, they turned to openly discussing her racial heritage, deciding moment from moment whether Harris was black, Jamaican, or Indian. President Donald Trump, in a hurried and discombobulated press conference, referred to Harris as “nasty” and an agent of “the Radical Left.”

Questions about the logic of Biden’s choice, whether it will help or hurt his candidacy, is the stuff of punditry and better left to channels and fronts that seek to promote horse-race coverage over substance, but what is of particular note in this moment is how Harris’s ascension has only crystallized a trend among Republicans that has animated the party for decades now, picked up momentum with President Barack Obama’s terms, and recently reignited and escalated with the Black Lives Matter protests.

The worldview that unites the Right is one in which people of color represent, at all times, the potential for violence. This white supremacist mindset convinces them that people of color are incapable of taking care of themselves and if left to their own devices, or allowed to be manipulated by outside forces, be they Jewish puppetmasters, Marxist revolutionaries, or New World Order cabals, they are liable to be directed at the status quo like a loaded weapon. This baseless ignorance has afflicted American politics since its Founding, ensuring slavery as a system of control and law enforcement as defense.

Since that problematic beginning, white supremacy has infected everything in our system, from our economics to our education to our politics to our criminal justice system, all of it brimming with an unfounded and disgusting belief that people of color are both unworthy of self-governance and capable of nation-destroying violence. It is the fundamental belief that has drug us down and enabled fascism to gain purchase in America time and time again.

Of course, this is not unique to our time. These conspiracy theories and white supremacist leanings led to the Confederate States of America, the crushing of civil rights movements going back to the 19th century and then over and over again in the 20th. It has plagued America’s progress and, through the ceaseless fearmongering of Right Wing propaganda arms like Fox News, has created a radicalized white population ready to massacre peaceful protesters and desperate to follow an authoritarian like Donald Trump into the fascistic abyss.

What has already happened with Kamala Harris in a few short hours is only a sad preview of what’s to come. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are telling a story of a pluralist America, laying out a narrative where Biden will serve as a bridge from a tumultuous country on the brink of disaster might unburden itself of this white supremacist ideology and give way to a different, fairer nation. Meanwhile, Trump and his allies, with no other playbook besides the one that has guided white supremacists and the Republican Party for decades, are peddling the same paranoia and blatant racism.

The issue is already whether Biden, as a symbol of the Democrats, is being manipulated by people of color and outsiders desperate to topple the United States. Harris, already framed in Trump’s ads as angry and aggressive, will become the face of what white supremacist Americans fear and what their ancestors have feared for centuries: a person of color who might, at any moment, unleash their potential violence and overwhelm white, patriarchal dominance.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. He currently serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.