Crowd sourced data collection & sharing on police brutality in Floyd protests

An effort is underway to “document examples of excessive force being used by law enforcement officers during the 2020 protests sparked by the death of George Floyd.assemble reports of police brutality occurring in the George Floyd” in order to “assist journalists, politicians, prosecutors, activists and concerned citizens.”

You can report an incident here (you’ll need to register for a GitHub account if you don’t have one).

To see/use the data already assembled or to learn more, go here (no account/login required).

This is a crowdsourced effort, so spread the word.

Questions? Contact Dan Myers (danm@american.edu).

What kinds of repression should I anticipate when I am active in a democratic country?

Paul Chang

What kinds of repression should I anticipate when I am active in a democratic country?

Recent work by the author:

Chang, Paul. 2015. Protest Dialectics: State Repression and South Korea’s Democracy Movement, 1970-1979. Stanford University Press

Classic:

Koopmans, Ruud. “Dynamics of repression and mobilization: The German extreme right in the 1990s.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 2.2 (1997): 149-164.

Review:

Earl, Jennifer. 2011. “Political repression: Iron fists, velvet gloves, and diffuse control.” Annual Review of Sociology 37: 261-284.

Contemporary:

Suh, Chan S., Ion Bogdan Vasi, and Paul Y. Chang. “How social media matter: Repression and the diffusion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.” Social Science Research 65 (2017): 282-293.

White Supremacists go to College: New Tactics, Same Old White Supremacy

By Abby Ferber

The landscape of organized white supremacy has dramatically changed since I conducted my research for White Man Falling: Race, Gender and White Supremacy in the 1990s. At that time, most organized white supremacist groups were isolated, disconnected, disorganized, and difficult to follow. They seemed to be easily identifiable as “extremist.” Since that time, the broad contours of White supremacist ideology appears to be the only thing unchanged.

A Long View on the Alt-Right’s Doomed Emergence From the Shadows

By David Cunningham

August’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where more than a thousand white nationalist adherents conducted a torch-lit march chanting “white lives matter” and “Jews will not replace us” before provoking widespread street violence the following day, was viewed widely as a watershed moment for the burgeoning Alt-Right. As the “largest hate gathering of its kind in decades in the United States,” the Charlottesville rally demonstrated that the diffuse movement – whose vibrancy had been most prominently displayed online – could mobilize in large numbers in physical space. It also showcased a level of organization that seemed far from ad hoc, and a set of media-ready male leaders who sought to embody the modern white supremacist brand: clean-cut, neatly dressed, with coifed “fashy” haircuts.

Why the reduction of racial disparities and expansion of Black mobilization would incapacitate the alt-right

By Kim Ebert

Many of us were introduced to empirical research on racism through popular psychology, which suggests that racism is an individual-level problem among whites. The idea is that racism stems from prejudice, which is “an antipathy based on a faulty and inflexible generalization,” meaning that it’s negative and hostile, irrational, rigid, and inaccurate. According to this perspective, prejudice may be “felt or expressed;” it can involve both the intent to discriminate and actual discrimination. To “cure” white racism and to solve this prejudice problem, then, we should endorse more education, training, and diversity initiatives. Such initiatives would expose individuals to accurate and scientific information, replacing antagonistic and inaccurate information with harmony and truth, resulting in the reduction of prejudice. Policy initiatives that take this approach may address interracial conflict, but what about the underlying racial inequality?

What the Alt-Right Tells us about the Strategic Uses of (Racial) Identity

By Hajar Yazdiha

Just nine months prior to the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, a New York Times profile of the alt-right explored the potential force of the movement but tempered the immediacy of the threat, explaining, “…at this point, [they] would have trouble holding a serious street rally, let alone turning into a mass political party.” Many journalists and scholars alike highlighted the “nebulous,” “loosely-assembled” nature of the alt-right, as a disparate collection of largely anonymous online communities – white supremacists, anti-Semites, nativists, neo-fascists, masculinists, conspiracists, nihilists – without any clearly shared goals or motivations. Yet, less than a year later, they marched unified through the grounds of my alma mater, tiki torch-wielding young men clad in polo shirts and khaki pants, angry faces illuminated in collective rage. Horrified publics grappled with the seemingly spontaneous re-emergence of overt, unapologetic white supremacy, the explosive violence in the streets, and the question of how our political polarization reached such depths.

Explaining Contemporary Extreme Right Mobilization in the U.S.

By Nella Van Dyke

On the weekend of August 11, 2017, right-wing extremists, or what many call the Alt-Right, gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the pending removal of a statue of Confederate leader Robert E. Lee from a city park.  Many were shocked to see images of the protest on Friday, with Neo-Nazis and other extreme right supporters carrying torches en masse, in one of the largest extreme right protest events in recent history, and were horrified when participants in the protest on Saturday murdered a counter-demonstrator and injured dozens more.  President Trump suggested that both sides were to blame for the violence, generating an outpouring of dismay and arguments that he was “Giving the right a boost,” and sanctioning the violence.  However, while many may have been surprised by the protest, those of us who study the extreme right were not.  And, while President Trump’s support for the Alt-Right does enable them, their mobilization started long before he became a candidate for President.  I argue here that social movement scholarship on extreme right mobilization predicts this contemporary mobilization.  Particularly relevant are theories regarding the mobilizing effect of economic and political threat, including power devaluation theory, as well as scholarship on political and discursive opportunities.

The “Alt-Right” ideas are nothing new but they are taking advantage of new opportunities

By Robert Futrell & Pete Simi

Since the 2016 US presidential election, observers have tried to explain the sudden rise of the “new alt-right.” This focus on newness belies the persistent and continuous aspects of US white supremacist activism. In our new research, we explore the ebbs and flows in white supremacy over the last several decades. We identify two phases and describe the longest one as a period of “active abeyance,” in which white supremacists embraced a conscious strategy to withdraw from traditional public activism and recruitment, in favor of more informal, private activism directed at sustaining the movement. Recently, white supremacist leaders and networks have pushed to more openly advocate for white supremacist goals. The “alt-right” is one manifestation of a broader effort to rebrand racial and anti-Semitic extremism and move it from the shadows into mainstream politics, culture, and consciousness.

2 Lessons from the History of the Alt-Right

By Ziad Munson

The Press Under Attack

The press in the US is under permanent attack by President Donald Trump. But the press is also under fierce attack by presidents and other elected officials in many deeply polarized countries, including Russia, Hungary, Venezuela, and Mexico. Whether through smear campaigns, strict regulation, or physical attacks, including abduction and murder, journalists who publicly expose illegal actions by government officials in a wide variety of democratic, semi-democratic, and undemocratic countries have become targets of aggression – covert or overt, lethal or non-lethal. This dialogue invites social movement scholars and journalists to consider attacks on the press as a case of state repression. While the nature and mechanics of these attacks might be different across countries and political regimes, this dialogue strives to find similarities among uncommon cases.

Many thanks to our wonderful group of contributors.

Lance Bennett, University of Washington & Steven Livingston, George Washington University (essay)
Katherine Corcoran, University of Notre Dame (essay)
Jennifer Earl, University of Arizona (essay)
Anita Gohdes, University of Zurich (essay)
Samuel A. Greene, King’s College London (essay)

Editors in Chief,
Grace Yukich, David Ortiz, Rory McVeigh, Guillermo Trejo