Babies gutted. Elderly slaughtered. Limbs amputated. Brains damaged. Families devastated.
As I recently watched black conservative activist Candace Owens address a congressional panel about white nationalism, I wanted to be able to cheer for her. I wanted to be proud that a fellow young, black conservative woman was given a prominent platform to deliver a powerful message about an increasingly important issue affecting the globe – but I couldn't.
I couldn't root for Owens because I couldn't get those horrible images of victims of terror out of my mind.
I couldn't cheer for Owens because I was disappointed that during a month when America will be honoring National Oklahoma City Bombing Commemoration Day and Israel will be marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, a black woman was denying the importance of a hearing on white nationalism and refusing to recognize its global rise in the modern political era.
I'm not singling out Owens as an individual but rather examining what her words signify for the United States.
Despite being the most powerful and prosperous country in the world, when it comes to addressing our deepest scar of racism, America is "walking wounded."
The Oklahoma City bombing happened on April 19, 1995 – 24 years ago this Friday – and is seared in American history as our worst domestic terrorist attack. Timothy McVeigh, a white nationalist and anti-government extremist, activated a truck bomb murdering 168 people, including 19 children, plus three unborn babies, while injuring over 600 innocent citizens.
On the surface, we wear a good face, but 24 years after this heinous crime, America still bears a nasty, unhealed scar of bigotry. Unfortunately, the slightest pluck at that scab reopens the wounds all over again. America hasn't been to therapy, so we still don't know how to address our emotional injuries.
Having studied counterterrorism in Israel and now doing a producer stint on a film about Oklahoma City bombing survivors, I have firsthand experience with victims of crimes carried out in the name of extremism. In Israel, I met people blinded and maimed by terrorism. In Oklahoma City, I met people with brain damage, burn wounds and missing limbs.
However, not every victim had major or physically visible wounds. Former Oklahoma City firefighter Major Chris Fields first introduced me to the term "walking wounded," coined for victims who could self-evacuate the site with little or no assistance from a first responder.
Fields became known to worldwide audiences as the "face" of the Oklahoma City bombing when a photo of him cradling a deceased 1-year-old baby was splashed on newspaper covers around the globe. Fields had no physical wounds after the explosion, but mentally, he suffered immeasurable damage that nearly cost him his livelihood and his family. He attempted to conceal this by continuing to work, but inside, he was struggling. He was functioning but he was walking wounded.
Fields tells his fellow emergency responders suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder: The No. 1 thing you can do to exacerbate the problem is to not address it. The longer you ignore it, the deeper the damage, and the heavier the negative impact to those in your orbit. You're like a walking ticking time bomb ready to explode at the slightest trigger.
Unfortunately, the mere mention of white nationalism or even the slightest mention of race relations is a trigger to those who don't want to address this issue. Republicans do not own this flaw. White Democrats can be just as guilty of racial bias and in many liberal circles, their so-called open-mindedness is largely limited to elite educated white circles. There is only one black Republican United States senator, but for all of the talking about diversity from the Democrats, there are only two black Democrat senators.
To be clear, I am a black, female Republican who has worked for some of the most prominent names in the Republican Party including former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the late Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas Winthrop Paul Rockefeller and Senator John Boozman, who introduced me as a 20-year-old keynote speaker to the 2004 Republican National Convention.
The number of times I've been asked why I'm a black Republican is too high to count. I'm not a Republican because of their history on race relations. I am a Republican because I am a conservative and in America's two-party dominant system, the Republican Party aligns closest with my policy views.
Owens accused the Democrats of race-baiting and she isn't totally wrong in her sentiments about the politics of division. I have personally witnessed Democratic candidates target largely minority districts with falsely edited Republican candidate statements and disseminate them in the ninth hour to scare the voters.
However, from the nascent stages of American politics through the present day, political strategists have often used underhanded tricks appealing to the lowest common denominator to win elections, including stoking culture wars.
Political operatives on both the Left and Right do whatever it takes to win. If you believe that Democrats use race as a wedge issue, then you also have to believe that there have been Republicans who played on the racial and ethnic fears of southern whites of that time – whether or not they themselves are actually racist.
Contrary to Owens' erroneous claim, a number of Republican strategists did indeed utilize the so-called "Southern strategy" from the 1960s to the 1980s in an effort to siphon southern votes from the Democrats. In 2005, sitting Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman issued a formal apology for the damage this caused. Republicans took another notable shift in strategy during the 1990s-2000s, believing that they could court more minority votes by appealing to their religious values and beliefs.
There are those who stoke racial fears for political advantage, and there those who are actually racists. Either way, it's wrong – but operatives continue to do it because it works, and part of why it still works is because America is still clumsy when it comes to speaking about or dealing with racism. Instead of healthy communication about our fears, biased beliefs and stereotypes, we unhealthily tiptoe around the issues like landmines. We keep it inside and we let it eat away at us like cancer until we explode in PTSD fashion.
In the modern era, these explosions are not only verbal but literal, and they have resulted in life-and-death situations.
Amid calls to "just forget about it" and "let's not talk about race" lies the ugly truth that turning a blind eye to the uptick of hate crimes and attempted hate crimes is the very essence of white nationalism's purpose.
Owens' declaration that the congressional hearing was "not about white nationalism or hate crimes, it's about fear-mongering, power and control" won't fly in the current political airspace.
Aside from the more widely known synagogue and mosque shootings of late 2018 and early 2019, just a modicum of research on hate crimes in recent years debunks Owens' statements:
- In 2017, a teenage member of the "secretive neo-Nazi" group National Action who openly praised the assassination of British MP Jo Cox was convicted of making a pipe bomb.
- In 2018, an 18-year-old student was charged for planning a school shooting and bombing at ACES High School in Everett, Washington. April 19, the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, was his planned date of attack.
- In 2018, an al-Qaida supporter plotted July 4 bombings in Cleveland and Philadelphia with plans to target federal buildings and the U.S. Coast Guard utilizing a truck packed with explosives, inspired by the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
- In February 2019, a man was convicted in federal court for attempting to detonate what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb at a downtown bank in Oklahoma City. According to court papers, the man acted out of hatred for the U.S. government and admiration for Oklahoma City bomber McVeigh.
- Also in February 2019, a U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant and self-identified white nationalist was arrested after federal investigators uncovered a cache of weapons and ammunition in his Maryland home that he planned to use to "establish a white homeland."
- In March 2019, at least 30 gravestones in Fall River, Massachusetts were desecrated with swastikas and anti-Semitic messages at the Hebrew Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts.
- This month, a South Carolina man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for attempting to hire the Ku Klux Klan to murder his black neighbor. He requested that his neighbor be hanged from a tree and a "flaming cross" burned on his front lawn.
- As I write this article, authorities in Colorado are searching for an armed woman obsessed by the April 20, 1999 Columbine shooting, the perpetrators of which were inspired by the Oklahoma City bombing. Hundreds of schools in an around Denver closed this week because of the threat.
Ignoring the effects of white nationalism is not an option. Owens has declared herself a hate-crime victim of the far Left extremist group Antifa, so why label the congressional hearing a farce? If she felt there was an anti-right-wing bias at the hearing, why not correct the perception by citing threats to fellow black conservatives?
Why not cite the experiences of black Republican D.J. Jordan, a former Capitol Hill operative and current Virginia State House candidate whose past includes the trauma of being held at gunpoint by white policemen who mistakenly racially profiled him as a drug dealer in a neighborhood where he owned a home? How about black Republican former Capitol Hill operative and current CNN commentator Tara Setmayer, who received such malicious racial and misogynistic death threats that CNN provided her with security and the FBI had to get involved?
Better yet, why not cite the policy record of sitting Arkansas Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson, who made national headlines in the 1980s when Republican President Ronald Reagan appointed him as the youngest U.S. attorney in the nation. Hutchinson put on an FBI flak jacket and personally negotiated a peaceful conclusion to a standoff with The Covenant, The Sword, and The Arm of the Lord, a white supremacist organization founded by McVeigh associate James Ellison, and later successfully prosecuted the organization.
Contrary to what another commentator wrote, we cannot just ignore Candace Owens' clumsy attempt to dismiss white nationalism's rise. We cannot "be over it" with her when she characterized Adolf Hitler's actions as problematic only because he wanted to take his ideology "outside of Germany." Owens tried to clean this up at the hearing but to make a statement like this in the first place shows a shocking lack of knowledge of history and dismisses the 165,200 Jews, 15,000 Roma, and countless others within Germany who were among the 17 million civilians – 6 million of them Jews – murdered by Nazi Germany.
Black conservatives are often unfairly accused of assuaging "white guilt" but delusional statements like Owens' provide credence to those claims. I will never find any reason to justify or minimize Hitler's actions. Shame on Owens for doing just that.
The message for our walking wounded nation is simple: America, we do not have to rewrite our history but rather work to correct our mistakes. Republicans do not have to ignore or make excuses for the stain of the Southern strategy but rather acknowledge it, correct its effects, and ensure that we not repeat it.
Otherwise, we will continue to be plagued with headlines like this one from Esquire magazine: "The Republican Party will do anything to camouflage that white supremacy is a critical part of its base," further contributing to our nation's division.
Until we address these issues like mature adults instead of petulant teenagers, our internal wounds will never heal and we shall remain a nation of the walking wounded.
