Perspective: Why Donald Trump’s response to the New Zealand shooting is dangerous
A police officer stands guard in front of the Masjid Al Noor mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Sunday. By Zachary Smith Zachary Smith is the author of"Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity during World War I." He teaches writing and rhetoric in Birmingham, Alabama. March 17 at 6:00 AM Most Americans were shocked to learn about the massacre of 50 people at two mosques in New Zealand on Friday. They shouldn’t be.
Racial nationalist hatred and violence reached its peak during the World War I era. Americans in the early 20th century, particularly those who identified as a white “Anglo-Saxon,” tended to view their world through the intersecting paradigms of race and progress. White Western nations, the United States included, used what then passed as science to explain their superior cultures, economies, education, militaries and imperial domination of “lesser” beings.
To make sense of their German enemy, white Americans fell back on their understanding of the linked nature of race and progress. When German wartime actions were reframed within the context of race, the German people began to take on a shape that fit closely with stereotypes of the most prominent “others” that had haunted the nightmares of anxious whites: the crazed, bomb-throwing foreign labor radical and the docile yet lecherous African American.
American leaders, President Woodrow Wilson’s administration in particular, responded to white vigilantism with indifference or justified the violence by blaming it on the weakness of federal sedition laws that allowed enemy agitators the freedom to spread the enemy’s gospel. Wilson’s white supremacist beliefs and his administration’s consistent endorsement of German otherness are probably explanations for his apathy. Nationalist violence was protected by the nationalist wartime state.
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