White Vigilantism Is American History & How Disinformation Powers Vigilantism

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DAME Magazine
@damemagazine
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Mar 14, 2022
In part 2 of our series on vigilantism, we take a closer look at the current state of vigilantism in America. @brooklynmarie speaks to several experts on what's fueling the phenomenon across the country, and ways we can combat it. Read the full story here:

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How Disinformation Powers Vigilantism | Dame Magazine

DAME Magazine
@damemagazine
ICYMI, you can read the first installment from @thejournalista here

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White Vigilantism Is American History | Dame Magazine
Since this country’s founding, white people have taken the law—that they created—into their own hands to terrorize and brutalize Black people.
9:22 AM · Mar 14, 2022

White Vigilantism Is American History

https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/07/white-vigilantism-is-american-history/

The Ku Klux Klan. Kyle Rittenhouse. The extrajudicial killing of Black people by the police. Dylann Roof. George Zimmerman.

They show up under different names and labels, but the premise is always the same: white people, mostly white men, exacting violence on Black people.

Some people call it white vigilantism. It has also been called white terror.

Cleveland Sellers, Jr. prefers to call it “state terror.” “That’s the correct name because the folks that did all the shooting were state troopers, who all ended up getting promotions and raises when it was all over,” Sellers says.

He’s referring to an incident known as the “Orangeburg Massacre.” Sellers was just 23 years old in February 1968 when a student demonstration on the campus of South Carolina State University—a historically Black college—turned deadly. State troopers opened fire on student demonstrators who were trying to integrate a local bowling alley, killing three and injuring 28—most of whom were shot in the back as they tried to flee—including Cleveland.

At the time, the town of Orangeburg, South Carolina, was home to two Black colleges—SCSU (then South Carolina State College) and Claflin University—and had a majority Black population, but four years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, things still looked the same as they always had in Orangeburg, and the whites in charge of the town were reluctant to fall in line with the “new normal.” A local bowling alley refusing access to a Black Vietnam war veteran was the catalyst for a series of peaceful demonstrations by hundreds of students from both of the Black colleges.

*snip*


How Disinformation Powers Vigilantism

https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/14/how-disinformation-powers-vigilantism/

It was a normal, quiet night in 2009 in the tiny town of Arivaca, an unincorporated community in Pima County, Arizona, nestled among the mountains just 10 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border. The Flores family—father Raul Flores, Jr., mother Gina Gonzalez, and their daughter, Brisenia Flores—were all asleep. The two parents were in bed, and Brisenia was on the couch in the front room to be near her new dog.

Just before 1 a.m., Flores woke his wife. There appeared to be law enforcement hammering at the door, claiming they were looking for a fugitive. Immigration raids are a constant threat in border communities, as so many live in a legal gray zone of documentation in which they can work but are not permitted to be American citizens. Millions of people are at risk of deportation without notice while waiting for citizenship hearings and green cards. While the Flores family were American citizens, in 2009 in Arizona, many people of Latino descent, documented or not, lived in fear of these surprise raids and the state’s cutthroat immigration policies.

The two parents, alarmed, opened the door where they were confronted by Shawna Forde, Jason Bush, and Albert Gaxiola, armed and dressed in camouflage fatigues. “Don’t take this personal, but this bullet has your name on it,” Bush, a suspected serial killer with white supremacist ties who that night was in blackface, told Flores.

Forde was an involved and enthusiastic member of the national Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, a civilian “border watch” group already rife with extremists and nativists. But after a series of grifts, she was thrown out of the organization, only to create her own splinter group, the Minutemen American Defense, or MAD for short. Bush and Gaxiola were some of her recent recruits, and when she heard of a “drug house” in Arivaca, the vigilantes headed there ready to execute justice by any means necessary.

*snip*