How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism Eric K. Ward
On a red-eye from Los Angeles, looking through social media, I realized it was forty years ago this month that I snuck out the window of my house to go to my first punk show, the Germs, in Orange County. I think about that night now, not only because it was a great show but also because it shaped my life in really significant ways. I am a child of Los Angeles. I grew up there. I’m part of four generations of Los Angeleans; my family came to LA in the early 1900s. We often don’t talk about it in this context, but my family were refugees. They were fleeing Shepherdsville, Kentucky, for their lives. My aunt, my great-great aunt, was coming around a bend one day in—I always think of it as a carriage with horses, but it was likely a cart and a mule. She came around the bend and came across a lynching that was happening in Shepherdsville. This was the story in our family. About six or seven years ago I started searching around— because I didn’t know how true this was, right? Memory is a strange thing. Myth is a strange thing. But I did find the story of Marie L. Thompson—the lynching of Marie L. Thompson. Marie L. Thompson was a sharecropper. She and her son were working a portion of property that was owned by a white man who one day accused her son of stealing tools and started to beat him. She intervened and began to fight this man and ended up killing him. She was arrested and put into jail. Later that night a lynch mob came, and they lynched her. The official newspaper story went on to say that somehow she was able to wrap her legs around the neck of one of the lynch-mob persons. Somehow she was able to pull him toward her and somehow it knocked her off the tree. She grabbed his knife, and she held off the lynch-mob crew. They ended up killing her by shooting her to death. That was the story in the newspaper. Then, two years ago, I found another story, the lynching not of Marie L. Thompson of Shepherdsville but of Mary L. Thompson of Shepherdsville, Kentucky. And in this story, Mary L. Thompson actually survived her lynching and died at an old age. These stories together tell the cautionary tale I’m trying to convey: often we perceive that we know exactly what is happening, particularly those of us who are human rights activists or academics. We believe that we actually know what is happening in the world, often relying on conventional wisdom rather than research to understand phenomena. I’ll relay this in a different story, one that will tell you how I came to this work. How Antisemitism Animates White Nationalism
Eric K. Ward
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