White with Fear
For people whom have been paying attention for the past decade, whom have looked into the recent history of racist dog whistle politics since the Civil Rights Movement, the words and sentiments in Andrew Goldberg’s “White with Fear” will not be new. Birtherism. “Law & Order” as a campaign slogan. “Low IQ” voters. The Great Replacement Theory. Critical Race Theory. The post-9/11 Islamophobia. The “both sides” of Charlottesville. Migrant invasion. If you’ve had a vested interest in American politics in the late 20th/21st Century, these are going to be familiar to you. For a good part of its intended audience, this is 86 minutes of the same thing a lot of people have been decrying for decades. As a primer for how Donald Trump and MAGA’s white supremacy is not an aberration, however, “White with Fear” has value.
The film begins in 1968, around the time of the Detroit riots. We see old footage of white women from Dearborn, Michigan practicing firing guns. I can’t imagine how these women would feel knowing that, in Dearborn, there is now a significant Muslim population; no doubt similarly to how they feel about the Black population of neighboring Detroit. We see footage (and hear recordings) of Richard Nixon as he works through his dog whistle language to polarize the white voting public to vote for him. No Democratic presidential winner since has carried the majority of the white vote. The Republican party have done a great, horrifying job with playing racial politics, but doing so in a way where their voters do not see themselves as racist. When 9/11 occurred, Bush talked a good game about trying not to make the response about all Muslims, but ask Muslim-Americans how they felt after then. Eight years later, a not insignificant amount of voters would say that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and no doubt still believe it. And then, there’s Trump, who took the racial animus against Obama and has turned it into becoming President, although his weekly appearances on Fox News no doubt helped with that.
I’m struck by how this film deals with the fear stoked into white America for just under an hour and a half, and not once is Lee Atwater- a political strategist for Reagan and Bush, best known for the “Willie Horton” ad in HW Bush’s 1988 run- mentioned, but Goldberg has plenty more dirty tricks merchants to discuss. Roger Ailes, Tucker Carlson, Bill O’Reilly, Steve Bannon, and Atwater’s spiritual successor, Stephen Miller, Trump’s awful strategist in both his presidencies. This is a well-made film, with a lot of good choices for talking heads, but because its content feels so familiar, it falls into that category of “more informative than interesting” when it comes to political documentaries.
