We're often covering white supremacy, whether you recognize it or not. Now you can't ignore it.
If you follow my reporting or trainings, you know I make it clear that we're all on the race beat. A new report on white supremacy and an ICE employee made me want to drop some history in Fortify.
On Wednesday, journalist Steven Monacelli dropped an outstanding open source investigation revealing the identity of the federal employee behind a X account that espouses white supremacist ideology.
According to the Texas Observer report, the “GlomerResponder” X account belongs to James Rodden. The Frisco resident serves as ICE assistant chief counsel. That means he represents the agency in Lone Star state deportation cases, making his social media posts declaring “‘Migrants’ are all criminals” clearly problematic. That’s matched or eclipsed in disturbing nature by other posts like “All blacks are foreign to me, dumb fuck” and “Nobody is proposing feeding migrants into tree shredders…Yet. Give it a few more weeks at this level of invasion, and that will be the moderate position.”
These types of posts are plentiful, including one written last month that reads:
“America is a white nation, founded by Whites…our country should favor us.”
Take the time to read Monacelli’s entire report here.
But beyond the obvious vile nature of the posts and the conflict that arises when the power of ICE is interwoven with this ideology, it is the more granular detail of Rodden’s identity that I want to focus on here.
He’s a Wake Forest University law school graduate, suited from day-to-day in the courtroom, a military veteran and longtime employee of the federal government.
So he’s highly educated, positioned with authority and living in what Wikipedia describes as an idyllic “bedroom community for professionals,” outside of Dallas. The same “safe space” one of my dear childhood friends calls home alongside his beautiful Black family. Our fathers served honorably in the United States Army and we’ve gone on to excel in our chosen professions.
What’s my point here?
White supremacy can look like your neighbor, the people at work and the folks you cover as journalists for work. White supremacy doesn’t have one easily identifiable characteristic nor is it immune to infecting or affecting those with “respectable” identities.
White supremacy can look like your neighbor, the people at work and the folks you cover as journalists for work. White supremacy doesn’t have one easily identifiable characteristic nor is it immune to infecting or affecting those with “respectable” identities. It has proximity to all of us no matter who we are or how much we’ve “made it.” White supremacy is poor and meek in health. It’s rich, strong and smells like expensive cologne. It may be wearing a judge’s robe or carry a mayor’s title. Hell, it may not even be white (remember, this is an ideology rooted in racism, which is rooted in power structure, which means someone may align with it as they seek the benefits of proximity to such power).
White supremacy has always been as big as a one-size fits all fit. It’s name may be that of the common folk, boss man, Ma’am or Sir, officer, Miss... It’s subtle and overt. Sometimes it sounds reasonable if it’s polite enough in speech or gestures. It’s present in the absence of a fly on the wall and hidden behind closed doors.
That’s what makes the shock and awe associated with the routine reveal of the identities behind such ideology so curious to me.
Now I know it’s easy for us to remember the likes of loud, unapologetic white supremacists. Who can’t quote the infamous George Wallace and hear his resounding 1963 inaugural address declaration?
As he took the oath of gubernatorial office, Wallace bellowed:
“I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say - segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”1
But ideologies don’t have to present themselves this boldly and white supremacy didn’t die when we declared ourselves to be living in a post-racial America.
Let’s look at a few time periods and a variety of coverage the historic and present-day press, government reports, non-profit arms, and journalists’ research (including my own deep reporting) tell us about white supremacy.
Screengrab of the Inaugural address of Governor George Wallace in 1963 from the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
CARTER CAMPAIGN
Our nation’s longest living and perhaps the most beloved president in modern history once understood that aligning with white supremacy was necessary to advance his early political career.
We lost President Jimmy Carter before the new year and his homegoing services this year appropriately highlighted his lifelong commitment to the betterment of humanity.
But when we study how white supremacy played a role in Carter’s 1970 bid for Georgia governor, we can see how aligning with such ideology-often chalked up to mere segregationist politics accepted as a reasonable norm for this era-was necessary for Carter to avoid a second gubernatorial defeat.
The newsletter Reading the Score does a great job of laying this out in detail and linking you to newspaper and campaign archives. Check it out as you read this.
Since we’re fresh off a Wallace reference, it’s worth noting that Carter borrowed the white supremacist’s campaign slogan- “Our kind of man”-to promote his own campaign here in Georgia. He also cozied up to his predecessor, the staunch racist Lester Maddox whose highway we drive along every day when we cross the Chattahoochee River through Cobb and Fulton counties.
I was on a plane returning home from Panama in December. Since I’d just finished teaching students about the United States-supported Jim Crow practices in the Panama Canal zone and the Torrijos-Carter Treaty, I decided to watch an in-flight film about the president. The PBS American Experience documentary touched on Carter’s pandering to white supremacists during this early period of his political life.
“If you are really trying to accomplish good moral ends, you may have to be a low-life politician to get there,” political scientist Betty Glad said in the film.” And he (Carter) didn't probably like doing it that much, but he was willing to do it.”
Much to the anger and disappointment of that “working class, blue collar” racist vote that Carter clinched to secure his gubernatorial win, Carter’s acceptance speech sounded nothing like the white supremacist-aligned campaign he’d run.
“I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over, Carter declared. “No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity of an education, a job, or simple justice.”
The late Leroy Johnson, who was Black, served as a Georgia state senator at the time. His recollection of this Carter moment was also featured in the film.
“We were extremely pleased,” Johnson said. “Many of the white segregationists were displeased. And I'm convinced that those people that supported him, would not have supported him if they had thought that he would have made that statement.”
Fast forward to today’s politics and we understand that President Donald Trump’s choice words about “very fine people” on both sides of a deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally or his summoning of violent insurrectionists to our nation’s capitol in 2021- is not often called out as white supremacy by those who seek to maintain the power afforded by the association to what’s routinely chalked up to a political norm.
The alignment with this ideology can be easily forgotten, unidentified in news coverage or not publicly decried with force by politicians who remain committed to acceptance and power. Like Carter during that 1970 campaign, Georgia’s current governor Brian Kemp—who was recently named to Trump’s bipartisan governor’s council- remains committed to unwavering public support of a powerful politician who has not condemned white supremacy nor subscribed to the truth as he targeted Black voter blocs in his stolen election lie. That lie lived in Georgia. And Kemp himself adopted the racist undertones of language and dog whistles that are now considered the political norm-decrying the “woke” (insert anything here) and vowing to pull non-existent Critical Race Theory out of public schools. The latter occurred even as the governor’s own actions suggest he understands and appreciates the theory’s core tenets about structural racism (i.e. publicly condemning and repealing an 1863 slave capture law that was used as a legally credible, albeit failed, defense of the killers in the 2020 Ahmaud Arbery lynching).
Usually this alignment with white supremacist themes, language, people, campaigns, or reasoning is simply characterized as a side. It’s just called politics. It’s considered a party matter. It’s rarely called white supremacy, at least not in real-time.
TULSA INVESTIGATION
Just this year and more than a century removed from the actual event, the federal government confirmed what the historic Black and liberal press along with those targeted in the horrific attack had always known to be true- the Tulsa Race Massacre was a highly coordinated, military-style ambush by local leaders terrorizing Black folks.
Those leaders included law enforcement, members of the military, the mayor, airplane and airfield owners who all played significant roles in the harm—from recruiting or standing watch while white supremacists unleashed fire and fury upon Black victims to spying on the communities and directing the deadly attacks.
Members of the Tulsa police department handed out real and proverbial badges to white men, deputizing them and welcoming them into a violent mob. Those men may not have been sober or qualified to serve as law enforcement, but their whiteness and hate were the only prerequisites to handing over the authority to kill. That came with the benefit of never being called or charged as a murderer. It was city officials who armed them, encouraged them to “go get a nigger.” It was some of “the news” that placed the details in an information blackout. And it was commonfolk who cheered on the violence.
But there were some wealthier, “more respectable people” in the mob. Of note in the report is the finding that Curtiss Southwest airline and Sinclair Oil likely owned the aircrafts flown by pilots who tracked and reported the movement of Black victims to law enforcement. That served as key coordination in the attacks.
The investigation points to and explores multiple eyewitness and press accounts of bombs, kerosene, turpentine and other flammables dropped from those aircrafts and into the Black neighborhoods.
The courts never called these wealthy aircraft owners to testify, some white journalists described the claims as far-fetched while others corroborated victim accounts2. The Justice department has concluded that despite the likelihood that this sort of attack took place-they had insufficient evidence to call the “fire from the sky” theory a fact.
The report, can be read in full here. And if you haven’t read journalist Victor Luckerson’s book, Built from the Fire, go ahead and cop that before it’s on a banned book list (I’m being real and cheeky simultaneously, cause we know nothing will stop us from reading and spreading the truth of our history). Here’s a link to buy the book.
It should also be noted that the massacre, long misnamed a riot, gave rise and opened the door to a fortified Ku Klux Klan in Oklahoma and beyond.3 I pulled the clip below from a July 19, 1921 Tulsa Daily World article published about a month and a half after the massacre. The paper reported about a Texas woman named Beulah Johnson who was kidnapped from her front porch, tarred and feathered by the Klan. Then, the “secret group” took her to jail where she was accused of being a bigamist.
Part of the reason we (modern-day press) often excuse or fail to call out white supremacy is because it shouts about morals (I’ve talked about this much in explaining my investigations of the white-led parental rights movement). It also concocts ways to criminalize folks (like teachers) based on those declarations of morality. Those declarations can be made by folks who often behave radically and immorally in the name of that high social and religious standard.
I’ll move on from Tulsa to talk about today’s military.
In 2024, journalists with the Associated Press cited this University of Maryland study in their sweeping investigation of extremists who were active duty servicemembers or veterans of the United States Armed Forces.
The study broke down ideological affiliations of those folks who overwhelmingly identified as veterans. Take a look at the chart below. As the AP reports: “…researchers found that more than 80% of extremists with military backgrounds identified with far-right, anti-government or white supremacist ideologies, with the rest split among far-left, jihadist or other motivations.”4
Chart of ideological affiliations of U.S. extremists with Military Backgrounds, 1990-April 2024 from the Asymmetric Threats Analysis Center.
Forty-seven percent of the 480 people arrested for extremist crimes from 2017 to 2023 were detained in connection to the January 6 insurrection.
This same year, a report by my former newsroom ProPublica explored the origins of Christian Nationalism.
This quite obviously is dissecting a history, not of a racially and ethnically diverse people who identify as Christians, but of white extremists holding a variety of titles and powerful positions-from the church house to the schoolhouse and in pursuit of an ideological victory in the White House.
While these are all large-scale national examples, and a theme that I’ve pointed to in my own fairly recent investigations into school board uprisings across the country, I like to remind reporters that we cover this ideology quite frequently in our backyards.
In 2021, I got my hands on additional body camera video from a former Harris County, Georgia police chief and officer. They were fired after the recordings revealed them throwing around the N-word, fantasizing about slavery and make lewd, sexual remarks about Black women, including then-Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
As they were preparing to work a local Black Lives Matter rally, they talked about how good white people had been to the enslavement.
“For the most part, it seems to me like they furnished them a house to live in,” one of the officers said in the video. “They furnished them clothes to put on their back. They furnished them food to put on their table, and all they had to do was fucking work.”
These were two of the people dressed to protect and serve a community grieving the public and private lynchings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as we were fresh off the police killing of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta.
Public shame and an employers’ standards forced an end to their careers. But what happens when cultural acceptance makes society as numb to or tolerant of the disgrace as we’ve become in the aftermath of mass shootings?
Look, I could drop a million examples of how we interact and are impacted by white supremacy here, but it’s time to wrap this post up.
I am no stranger to blank stares, tears, affirmation or the whispers that come when I report on or talk about white supremacy in the context of our journalistic and broader reckoning. It’s an uncomfortable theme to broach. It’s presented danger to those of us who have covered it and called it out. It requires us to understand history and power. And we’re usually in denial that it can factor into so much of our routine coverage about the people, places and issues we explore.
But I’ve got a newsflash: We ain’t never been a post-racial anything (and don’t clock my grammar).
We are all on the race beat. We are all on the democracy beat. And we’d better get comfortable with covering White supremacy, sticking it in the headlines and cold opens and understanding it in its many forms, with its many faces. If you’re getting to the root cause of much of the extremism supporting our current political climate and culture, you’ll be doing or consuming a lot more reporting like Monacelli’s in the near future.
https://digital.archives.alabama.gov/digital/collection/voices/id/2952
What Role Did Airplanes Play in the Tulsa Race Massacre? | HISTORY
Tulsa Race Massacre ‑ Facts, Photos, Coverup | HISTORY
Takeaways from The Associated Press' reporting on extremism in the military | AP News