J Paul Johnson
According to the American right, it seems, there is no such thing as racism, unless it’s that directed at white men. Theirs is an Orwellian perversion of the institutional and historical—and exceedingly well-documented—racism that has plagued the United States, in both overt and covert forms, since its inception and continues, if in ever-evolving forms, in its oppression of people of color today. The new documentary film White With Fear, premiering on PBS, lays out with compelling detail exactly how conservative politicians and operatives since Richard Nixon have for decades stoked the fears of racial “others”—not to guide policy or improve lives—but to consolidate power and enrich themselves.
It’s a long con that today, with Republicans holding the Presidency and both chambers of the U.S. Congress as well as a conservative supermajority of the Supreme Court, seems nearly complete. The executive branch can dictate legislation, ignore the courts, arrest and detain citizens without due process, and wage war without congressional approval. As well and as thoroughly as White With Fear makes its case, the documentary seems almost oblivious to the fact that the tactics used by conservatives and their political operatives were not only in and of themselves racist at their core but wildly successful, resulting in a second term for Donald Trump that has been, in its first 14 months, nothing if not authoritarian.
What White With Fear does very, very well is to explicate, with precision and detail, exactly how, when, where, by whom, and why the stoking of white fear as a political strategy began. In the wake of the turbulent 1960s Civil Rights movement and protests, Republican Presidential candidate Richard Nixon ran on a “law-and-order” campaign dog-whistling to the right wing of the party. It was a strategy that proved successful enough to win him that election and, when he doubled down further on the messaging during his 1972 campaign for re-election, a second term in an unprecedented landslide.
Only Nixon’s own fecklessness and economic malaise slowed the right’s momentum and resulted in Carter’s election in 1976 before the Reagan-Bush years of 1980-92, campaigns won in no small part by the demonization of “Welfare Queens” and “Willie Hortons“: black women and men were characterized as either leeching off the government dole or ready to rape and murder if furloughed from the imprisonment they supposedly deserved. The tactics were so successful they’ve been in place for decades since. But the demonization of ethnic and racial minorities never stopped: the 9/11 attacks in 2001 led to a prevailing Islamophobia; Barack Obama’s election re-ignited white fears of Black people, exacerbated further by the Trump-revived “Birtherism” conspiracy theories over his origins; and the later Coronavirus pandemic provided a similarly convenient opportunity to blame any and all Asians for its spread.
White With Fear documents how at each of these discrete historical moments the conservative right has relied on, for now over 75 years, a single strategy: to demonize those deemed “other,” whether they are Black, women, feminists, socialists, liberals, Muslims, immigrants, Asians, Hispanic, or practically anyone other than white men. Each, depending on the moment, has been categorized as an imminent and essential threat to an imagined American way of life, and to stoke fear has been, essentially, as sure-fire a way as there can be to motivate the base, align constituencies, and, importantly, win elections.
Director Andrew Goldberg lays out this case largely in chronological order up through COVID-19, January 6, and the George Floyd protests of 2020-21 and leading to, but not including, Trump’s second term. There’s no single guiding narrative voice and only a little use of print-media artifacts; instead, Goldberg tells the story primarily through televised news coverage and a surprisingly diverse array of interviewees. Included for extended interviews are conservative political operatives like former Fox News reporter Carl Cameron, The Lincoln Project founder Stuart Stevens, former Breitbart writer Katie McHugh, convicted conspiracist Rick Gates, and former Jeb Bush operative but now never-Trumper Tim Miller. Even the notorious podcaster, strategist, and ex-convict Steve Bannon lends his insights, such as they are, with a palpable sense of pride as he reminisces about his accomplishments.
That Goldberg can elicit from his conservative-minded interviewees such forthrightness about their stoking and exploitation of racial fear is impressive. His other interviewees—including sitting Senator Jamie Raskin, Trump’s 2016 opponent Hilary Clinton, CNN correspondent Brian Stelter, and others—are no less forthright, if somewhat less surprisingly so. It should be said, though, that not all interviewees are equally persuasive: one, unnamed here, gets at least two or three minutes’ worth of incomprehensible word salad. Overall, however, Goldberg’s interviews are not only a highlight of White With Fear: they are its very narrative structure, scaffolding its argument from Nixon’s candidacy to the rise of Fox News, the Tea Party, and today’s Trump-led MAGA movement.
Recently nominated by the Writers Guild for Best Documentary Screenplay, White With Fear is one of those films that should be required viewing for anyone invested in the country’s future. Sadly, however, those who would benefit most from its content—those white folks who have been steadily, mercilessly manipulated by politicians and their operatives to believe that their liberties are constantly under assault by the bogeymen du jour—are least likely to see it. It’s hard to imagine your MAGA aunt and uncle from a deep-red state sitting down to an educational evening on PBS and suddenly seeing the light.
In fact, as much as I sympathize with and admire White With Fear, I have to confess my own fear: that a documentary like this, as good as it is, like the recent and equally excellent American Pastoral, too little too late. When it airs on PBS—a platform that has sadly become so politicized conservatives deem it radical—it will do so at a time when our democracy has nearly, if not completely, surrendered to the very authoritarianism the film argues so cogently against.
I can only hope I’m wrong.
White With Fear premieres Tuesday, March 24,10:00-11:30 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS app.
