Racism Knows No Boundaries
Instead of doing Zoom classes from my dorm this semester, I decided to spend time working on a small, organic farm near Yellville, Arkansas. Yellville is about five hours from my hometown of St. Louis and just past the southern Missouri border.
On the evening of my first full day at the farm, it was one of my host’s birthdays. They held an outdoor, socially-distanced gathering with their friends. As I was about to introduce myself, I caught a glimpse of one of their friend’s masks. “Go T—-,” which my brain automatically filled in with “Go Trump!” I felt my heart rate rise in anticipation of having to exchange pleasantries with a man who would be so bold as to get a custom Donald Trump Covid-19 mask. To confirm my suspicion, I slowly crept towards the group he was talking with to catch another glimpse of the mask. Once I was close enough, I saw that the mask actually said, “Good Trouble,” a tribute to the late Civil Rights leader John Lewis, who passed away earlier this summer.
My assumption was largely informed by a recent viral video filmed in Harrison, Arkansas, which is only about a thirty-minute drive from where I am staying. The video, titled “Holding a Black Lives Matter Sign in America’s Most Racist Town,” was made by white LA filmmaker Rob Bliss.
Shortly after the Fourth of July, Bliss stood outside of a Walmart Supercenter in Harrison holding a Black Lives Matter sign. The video shows the reactions of locals, most of whom spew hateful language, some even threatening violence if he doesn’t leave. Linked in the description of Bliss’s video are the coordinates for a billboard in Harrison that shows a young white girl holding a puppy next to the words “It’s not racist to love your people” and “www.WhitePrideRadio.com.” The ad space is being leased by the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The leader of the Harrison branch of the KKK, Thomas Robb, says they have no plans to take it down.
In USA Today, Bliss explains his intent behind the video: “I think people assume that ‘real racism’ doesn’t really exist anymore. That it’s more like, it’s institutional or it’s implicit or it’s subconscious, when really, one of the reasons why I like this video is you can see this is very real. This is very present and it’s very visceral. It’s like Level 1 racism and we’re still at this level in many places around the country.”
I agree with Bliss here—his video succeeds in highlighting how explicit racism, including slurs and hateful language, is alive and well. As a method for inspiring change, however, Bliss’ video is ultimately incomplete. Exposing racist behavior and raising awareness is necessary, but for accountability to be effective, it must be initiated by and engage members of the community. Bliss’ video does neither. He chose Harrison because of its reputation for “struggling with race and white pride billboards” he told CNN, not because he wanted to engage with the community.
When I brought up this video to my host, she shared with me how she thought it painted an unfair and dishonest picture of Harrison. She has lived nearby for over ten years and has numerous friends who call the town home. She gave me insight into many of the things community members of Harrison have been doing to combat racism in their community.
In 2003, Harrison established a Community Task Force on Race Relations, which helped the City Council adopt two resolutions denouncing racism, one in 2006 and another in 2012. Harrison has also hosted the Arkansas Martin Luther King Jr. Commission Nonviolence Youth summits, two-day sessions that teach Black and white students how to incorporate nonviolence in their social justice activism. In 2016, the Arkansas MLK Jr. Commission awarded Harrison its highest recognition for its extensive anti-racism work. Three years later, Black Harrison resident and taskforce member Kevin Cheri won the commission’s Trailblazer Award. Mike Masterson highlights these accomplishments, along with many others, in his Arkansas Democrat Gazette article titled, “Harrison and the Haters.”
“Truth clearly played no part in this man’s payday,” explains Masterson. “Facts would spoil his narrative, since he makes a living off the negative reactions in videos for YouTube that pay him for how many are watching them. Plus, Bliss establishes GoFundMe pages for each of his video hit jobs.”
With that additional context, Harrison hardly seems like a place that can honestly be labeled “America’s Most Racist Town.” Task forces and commissions don’t absolve the handful of hateful individuals featured in Bliss’ video, but these patterns do indicate that there are community members actively dedicated to addressing racism. Despite Bliss’ supposed intention of spreading awareness about racism, his designation of a singular, 13,000-person town as the “most racist” in America detracts from the larger issue at hand: racism exists everywhere you go in the United States.
Bliss’s video does not truly force its viewers to confront this uncomfortable reality, but reaffirms the comfortable stereotypes of a backwards, racist rural America, and progressive, “good,” liberal cities. Concentrating on racial slurs rather than systemic and institutionalized injustices is also rather tone deaf, as this video was filmed and released just about two months after George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin. Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, a city that is largely considered one of the most progressive and Democratic in the country, not a small, rural town. Why focus on “level one” racism at a time when the United States is finally having a long overdue, public reckoning with the institutionalized police violence that has tormented Black communities in America for centuries?
Bliss’s video is little more than a façade of white allyship, the sort of disingenuous, self-centering activism that many white liberals have a tendency to perpetrate. Nowhere does Bliss reference consulting with Black members of the Harrison community or including any Black people in the planning and implementation of this project. It is not activism for a white individual to “spread awareness” about racism or insert themselves in the Black Lives Matter movement without having consulted or included any Black people.
White liberals like Bliss hide behind their supposed wokeness in order to set themselves apart from “real racists” like those featured in the video. Progressive, often white, people who perceive themselves as more ‘woke’ than their rural counterparts are equal, if not greater, impediments to combating racism since they do not see themselves as part of the problem and often exempt themselves from examining their own racist tendencies.
Instead of working to prove that “Level One” racism still exists and pinning the bulk of the responsibility on small, rural communities, we should work to expose how racism exists everywhere, not just the places you most expect it. We need to take the intention of community engagement beyond a two-minute video in a Walmart parking lot, and that starts with seeing the problem with stereotypical and narrow definitions of racism. So, I urge you: Be more critical of generalizations and stereotypes, even if they may seem to be exposing something as insidious as racism. Question the motives of white, liberal activists acting on their own accord. And make sure to listen to and amplify the voices of Black communities always, but especially in your activism.