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Early on in Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Devil in the Grove, there’s a scene where Thurgood Marshall, at the time a lawyer for the NAACP, is followed and eventually flagged down by a convoy of cars in Tennessee, driven by a mix of white civilians and local highway patrolmen. These eight men know who Marshall is. They know he’s scored important court victories for African-Americans. And so they have tracked him. Stalked him. Waited for him. They have planned for him.
Marshall is accused of drunk driving (he is sober), pushed into a sedan, and driven deep into the countryside and down a dirt road to Duck River, where another group of men are waiting to lynch him. On that night in 1946, the only thing that saves Marshall is his three colleagues who were in the car with him when he was apprehended—including white reporter Harry Raymond—who follow the caravan to the river and kick up enough of a fuss that the lynching party can’t do its dirty work without attracting extra scrutiny.
Now, that story is terrifying for a lot of reasons. It goes without saying that Marshall’s narrow escape was a rarity when, according to the Tuskegee Institute, nearly 5,000 people were lynched between the years of 1882 and 1951. And King’s book details a white supremacist culture that was relentless in its pursuit and persecution of black people. Juries were conveyed in secret and in haste to hang black suspects before the NAACP could get wind of it. Local sheriffs and deputies would spend all night chaining black suspects to pipes and beating them with rubber hoses. Notoriously monstrous Lake County Sheriff Willis McCall personally oversaw the jail transfer of two (falsely accused) black prisoners so that he could pretend to have car trouble, and then shoot both men in the dead of night, killing one and wounding the other.
The book is an appalling document of institutionalized American racism but also of the EFFORT put into that racism. It takes effort to stalk a lawyer and game plan his execution. It takes effort to furiously goad the judicial system into executing people before justice can arrive on the scene. It takes effort to create an entire infrastructure of suppression around a group of minorities who just want to be left alone. It's as if the racists involved in the book lived for no other purpose. It is an effort that is not only horrifying, but inexplicable. Why? Why would anyone put so much time and effort into hatred when they can just stay home and have a beer?
This weekend, James Alex Fields drove his car into a group of protestors in Charlottesville. And whether or not Fields acted on impulse or if he woke up that morning intent on using his car as a deadly weapon, it’s terrifying to think of what he was willing to do in the name of white supremacy. This is a man who deliberately disregarded his future and was willing to face jail time and personal ruin, all so he could murder another person whose only crime, in Fields’ eyes, was wanting to declare that Nazis are bad people.
Fields was not alone in deeming all this sacrifice to be worth his hatred. Those neo-Nazis who marched on the UVA campus the night prior? They had to organize. They had to buy their rinky-dink Tiki torches at the Home Depot. They had to be willing to disregard the prospect of being fired by their bosses at the hot dog stand the following day. They put work into their hatred, because it meant just that much to them.
And those marchers were not alone, either. It has been sickening to live here for the past eight months and witness the staggering amount of work that many newly emboldened white Americans have put into destroying people unlike them. I’ll happily write a 1,000-word hater’s guide to a retail catalog, but my hateful efforts are nothing compared to the work these men put in. Think of Mitch McConnell, working feverishly day and night to secure votes and secretly drafting bills and calling late night Congressional sessions, all so that he could take health care away from poor people. Think of how FRENZIED he was to do this. Obsessed. Think of the sense of urgency that led him to disregard all other work just to pass a bill that could potentially harm so many, and you know that urgency hasn't faded.
Think of President Trump, who is the world’s laziest man and yet spent DAYS in order to properly frame a condemnation of Nazism that wouldn’t get him in too much trouble with his racist base. Think of the convoluted ways he had to find to ensure liberals also got blamed for something in the wake of this. Think of him overturning every possible work of President Obama—including removing protections for certain national monuments and stripping nursing home residents of the right to sue their caregivers for abuse and/or neglect—merely because Obama was Obama.
Think of ICE scouring records in order to find vulnerable people to deport—students, newlyweds, children—and breaking up families in the process. Think of Jeff Sessions, as virulent a racist as his Southern forebears, making sure any sanctuary city gets starved for funding. Think of him enduring routine public humiliation from his boss because he cherishes the power to strip minorities of their rights just that much. Think about the late Roger Ailes and the lengths he went to degrade and sue anyone who displeased him, and think of how his legacy network goes into every morning with a battle plan to explain why nothing is white people’s fault. Think of Rush Limbaugh—deaf but wealthy beyond imagination—willing himself to spend three hours every day in front of a microphone talking without interruption and conjuring racial and feminist bogeymen, simply because he wants to.
Think of the utter indefatigability of these men and their champions. It’s not simply that they hate, but that they have made hatred their life’s work.
And then think of all the effort needed simply to keep these men at bay, or to undo the evil works they’ve already secured. Trump is a miserable, awful man. And even though I have heard a million times that he secretly loathes being president, the man still endeavored to get the job and shows no sign of relinquishing it, not when he can take time every day to satisfy whatever hateful itch he needs to scratch. It is exhausting to deal with him, and what’s scary is that he’s not even close to being the hardest-working white supremacist in his own government. These are men who are counting on your fatigue. These are men who are hoping that their insatiable hunger for repression wears you down eventually, and that you resign yourself to the idea that inequality is both inevitable and irreversible. It will take GENERATIONS to undo the damage they’ve inflicted upon modern America, if it can be undone at all. It’s like cleaning up after a flood.
You can ascribe other motives to Trump and his ilk, particularly greed. And yet, there is the grotesque, nagging sense that—beyond personal enrichment—they share the same brand of obsession as that caravan in Tennessee back in 1946. They crave power and dominance and victory over anyone they consider to be Other, and will seemingly do anything to attain it. They will wait for you to drive by and follow you to the ends of Earth to ensure your ruin. It is easier to love. It easier to accept one another. It is easier to let people be. It takes work to be a monster. And so I’m left angry and dispirited and confused by all this. But above all else, I am left with the urge to scream what should be screamed at every last white supremacist and public official who works tirelessly in that cause’s best interests:
Get a fucking life.
