Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and we're back with The Takeaway. Take a listen to some of the troubling headlines that have filled our airwaves in recent years.

News anchor 1: Experts say the many pictures and inflammatory words on the website featuring 21-year-old Dylann Roof reveal a lot about him and his recent embrace of white supremacy theories.

News anchor 2: A judge sentenced devout white supremacist James Fields Jr. to life plus 419 years.

News anchor 3: A federal jury now ordering white nationalist leaders and organizations to pay more than $25 million in damages to nine victims.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A recent report by the Associated Press found that there are white supremacists working as prison guards across Florida's incarceration system. Their actions include assaulting prisoners and intimidating coworkers of color often without consequences. According to a report by the Center for Extremism of the Anti-Defamation League, white supremacist propaganda spiked in 2020.

What responsibilities do journalists and scholars have to understand and to assist the public with understanding the history, consequences, and current manifestations of white supremacy? I spoke with Kathleen Belew, co-editor of the new book, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times opinion columnist, who wrote a chapter for the book titled, The Pain We Still Need to Feel. I asked Jamelle to reflect on the piece.

Jamelle Bouie: I wrote that piece on the occasion of the opening of the memorial to lynching done in Montgomery, Alabama created and opened by the Equal Justice Initiative. The accompanying museum it's quite something to visit the memorial to the victims of lynching across the country, but specifically in the south. I was reflecting on recent racial violence in the country, the Charleston shooting obviously, but also these smaller events that had happened since the election of President Trump in 2016, and just reflecting on the idea that racialized violence doesn't simply happen and then vanish into the ether.

It has an impact. It has an effect over time. It affects communities, it affects people, it affects psychologies, and trying to understand how it affects communities and psychologies and politics, I think is an important project especially in a moment when you had, or I think when you still have an overtly racialized nationalism that's ascendant.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kathleen, building on that response from Jamelle that racial violence doesn't just happen and then recede and go away. There is these pathways left in our politics, in our geography, in our biology even. Talk to me about what a field guide is and why we need a field guide for white supremacy?

Kathleen Belew: In the academy, you have an enormous amount of thinking and writing about white supremacy as a category ranging from legal categories, exclusion to structural racism, to individual belief, and much of that we have not done a great job of translating for the people who tell stories day to day like journalists and activists and people in their own communities.

The field guide is really meant as a resource for that. I think Jamelle's essay is such a standout for me in the volume because the United States is not alone in its history of white supremacy, its history of racial inequality, but it is somewhat unique among other countries that have experienced this phenomena in that we've done hardly anything in telling this story and understanding our common history together.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You begin the book with an Associated Press Stylebook. As you're talking about this being a reference, talk to us about what that means. I think, obviously, those of us who are journalists know what the AP Stylebook is, but for listeners who may not know what the AP Stylebook is, tell us a bit about that and why that works as a resource and to start with it.

Kathleen Belew: The AP Stylebook is the reference manual in most newsrooms for those who might not be familiar. It includes everything from what is the preferred spelling or capitalization practice to instances when those decisions are very, very weighty like do we or do we not capitalize the word black as one of the ones that has been talked about a lot recently.

I picked up the Stylebook, and I write about a movement that includes Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads. Then the groups that now we would think of as sort of the militant right, so the Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, The Base, The Atomwaffen. The AP Stylebook had nothing on most of that. It had long entries on ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and it had an entry on the Irish Republican Army, which has not been top of mind for me lately. I don't know about others.

It didn't have anything on the white power movement. This is a movement that has been organized and has declared war on the government and has been waging acts of violence against people and the state since 1983, at least. It was stunning to me that we didn't have that set of information for reporters.

There are also just places where historians can really contribute to sort of the contextual framing of pieces based on best practices about what we know. When we think about arriving groups of immigrants to the United States, we know that when they are described in demonizing language like a swarm or a hoard, or as a flood or a tide or a wave, we know that when that happens in reporting, it is accompanied by waves of violence against those communities.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jamelle, let me ask you to build on those insights and to maybe say a bit about writing as a journalist, storytelling as an opinion writer in the context of the Trump presidency, and the ways that exactly those challenges seem to be for those who are paying attention very much working themselves out in real time during the four years, maybe even five if you want to take the year of the campaign, and then also of the presidency.

Jamelle Bouie: Right. One thing I found challenging over those years and that is still, I think, a challenge in this current climate, is that the popular understanding of what racism is and what it entails is really in stark conflict with what I think are more scholarly understandings, academic understandings, the understanding that come from thinking deeply and thinking historically about these things. Which is to say that the popular understanding is simply that racism is bad thoughts, bad feelings, mean words, prejudice, bias, that sort of thing. The more scholarly academic historical understanding is racism as a structural force. The phrase systemic racism has recently entered the lexicon, but yes, racism as a systemic force something that shapes society, something that shapes the various relationships within society.

In writing about Trump and writing during the Trump presidency, one thing I saw quite a bit was a reluctance to describe him or any part of his administration as racist in part because that didn't jive with the popular understanding. I think in mainstream journalism, mainstream political writing, there is a real reluctance to use those terms because they are understood in that manner.

I know when I was writing as an opinion writer, I was constantly trying to clarify for readers and show for readers that you have to understand these things in a broader sense than simply individual belief or individual bias. That these things work on a societal level, that they work on, again, a structural level, that they shape how disadvantage is distributed, they shape how power is distributed, and that's going to be the most useful lens for understanding something like the Trump presidency.

There's quite a bit of pushback from some readers around that, quite a bit of readers embracing that as well, but I think it was and remains a challenge for thinking through these issues in public, that there really is this big gap between how the general readership understands what racism is and how scholars understand it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: This is not a small point. When we're communicating, Kathleen, our responsibility is both to be reasonably honest and fair towards the concepts that we are writing about, but also to write in a way that we are understood by those to whom we are writing, presuming that this is not our personal journal that we're writing. We're actually writing in order to either inform or persuade or engage in discussion with an audience.

I'm wondering, as you put together this field guide meant to help us see and locate and identify, how you thought about the challenges of precisely these definitional differences that Jamelle is framing for us here that I can see something, understand it to be part of this phenomenon, but if I'm trying to communicate with folks, who don't necessarily see it as part of that phenomenon, do I choose those words, new words? I'm just wondering about that, maybe it's a translation or a collective language creation problem.

Kathleen Belew: Maybe so. I've been playing with analogies for this very point actually, and I’ve come to think of this as a wooden fence, like the kind you find in somebody's backyard where racial violence and the white power movement are one plank of the fence. The fence was constructed by people with overt, outright racist belief. People put up that fence expressly to create opportunities for white people on unequal terms. Sometimes hundreds of years ago, sometimes somebody's come along last week and added a plank, and the whole fence is white supremacy.

Racial violence is one plank, but then we have to think about the accumulation of wealth, the way our immigration laws are structured, the way that our incarceration rates turn out, the way that-- you can look at any number of measures that are still dramatically unequal by race like maternal health outcomes or educational outcomes. That whole fence is white supremacy. It's not enough to simply not believe in racism, because the fence will still be standing there.

I think that's hard for folks to understand because it really points to those who have not understood it this way. It really shows how far we have to go, but it's absolutely critical even to something like confronting outright racial violence. One episode I write about in my first book is the 1979 shooting of leftist demonstrators by Klansmen and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina. It's an event that was captured on tape. You can see who was shooting whom, and it is an event that is very clearly an exercise of racist violence. They were acquitted on state trial, they were acquitted on federal trial, and they were mostly acquitted on a civil suit.

What we have to do, if we want to look at all of this is to understand, okay, how was an all-white jury appointed in the first trial? How did the jury instructions convey beliefs about white supremacy? How did this whole system concentrate policing in the way it did? How did journalists talk about it to make the Klansmen seem innocent compared to the people who were killed?

These are the same issues that's still coming up in the Charlottesville trial and Ahmaud Arbery trial and the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Our systems still have inequality built into them. If we want to really pursue equality, we have to understand the work, not only of individual belief, but also the systems that are built all around us.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Jamelle, I'm wondering, given your beat over the past, whatever 5, 10 years now that it's been, do you think we're trying to achieve equality? Again, just building on Kathleen's point if we're trying to achieve an equitable system. Is that the kind of forward propulsion of the work we're doing collectively as a nation?

Jamelle Bouie: [chuckles] I think that is-

Melissa Harris-Perry: I appreciate that that is funny to think about. [chuckles]

Jamelle Bouie: Yes, that was me trying to be judicious. I think that that is the work that some Americans are doing. I think most Americans don't really think too much about this stuff. I think that there are some Americans who very much oppose that work. I think that what has been perhaps useful about the last five years is that they have served as a reminder that one of the things that I think some people and maybe especially people who you might describe as liberals, something taken for granted is this idea that we're all trying to move in the same general direction, but that just isn't true.

There are plenty of Americans who think that received hierarchies of various sorts are good and provide structure in security for society and find efforts to undermine them to be deeply threatening and worthy of intense opposition. To answer your question directly, I don't think that you can describe that as a project for our society as a whole. I think our society as a whole, as always has been, is a contest between rival visions of what it means to be a democratic country. Does that mean a substantive equality for all people, not just political equality, but economic equality? Or does it mean a kind of liberty for those who are at the top of the various hierarchies or structural society.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kathleen, in this work, if we were to imagine the creation, or as President Obama might have called it the further perfecting of our union, how do you respond to the critique that we don't need to focus on these negative moments that Jamelle's piece about racial terrorism only draws us back into a pass that encourages us to think in divisive ways, and that rather than creating a field guide to white supremacy, why not you and your co-editor, Professor Gutierrez, why not do the field guide to equity, to justice, and to our highest ideals?

Kathleen Belew: That's a fair question and perhaps somebody ought to edit one, but I think to me, there is a-- my best answer is that there's work to do, and I think that people need resources. What we're trying to do in this book is simply get these histories to more people and to create a starting point for people who would like to learn more about this.

I don't think that it is an inherently pessimistic act to learn about the hard parts of our history. In fact, I think that what it shows is that this is perhaps an optimistic viewpoint of it, but I think that what our history shows, even the hardest parts, is the way that people have come together, formed coalitions, held each other up, joined hands, and worked to be included in those ideals of democracy.

I agree with Jamelle that our nation is deeply rent apart by these two different visions of what the nation ought to be, whether it ought to be hierarchical with people taking advantage of the top, or whether it ought to be everyone included in life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. We need look no further than the latest attacks on voting rights to see how precarious and incomplete those promises are.

The story of American history over time to me is about this radical promise and people fighting to be included. Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, that was never meant for any of the three of us on this conversation but over time, people worked to demand inclusion, people mobilized and formed coalitions, and did the work of demanding inclusion in that freedom. To me, I see this as part of that legacy of work.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kathleen Belew, co-editor of the new book, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago, and Jamelle Bouie, New York Times opinion columnist. Thank you both for being here.

Kathleen Belew: Thank you very much.

Jamelle Bouie: Thank you.

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