This April, PBS aired a groundbreaking documentary series on the fate of Reconstruction—and therefore of Black America. Featuring more than 40 scholars (myself among them) and Black descendants of key figures in Reconstruction’s history, this copiously researched chronicle also doubles as a powerful and chilling window on to our own age of violent and resurgent white nationalism. With nuanced commentaries about the rise and fall of Reconstruction, the series revealed how African Americans—in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois—emerged from bondage, and stood briefly in the sun before being returned to the unyielding weight of white supremacy.



The repudiation of Reconstruction’s initial promise was launched in shockingly brutal fashion, via a burgeoning series of massacres and lynchings, carried out by white vigilantes and law enforcement officials alike against Black people. As Southern Redeemers worked to put down burgeoning alliances between Blacks and whites—a coalition that foreshadowed precisely the class-based politics now rhetorically championed by left and liberal critics of “identity politics”—Black bodies served as the scapegoats; their ritual sacrifice permitted postbellum whites to reunite across class and region.

This vicious scourge of lynchings and mass killings was perhaps the decisive factor in reducing Black representation to nothing by the early part of the twentieth century. It’s important to note, though, that like all concerted denials of Black civil and political rights, this campaign was not inevitable. Had the Supreme Court not hamstrung the federal government from protecting its citizens from massive violence, effectively nullifying the transformative possibilities of the Civil War, the white supremacist hold on national politics might have given way to a far more robust vision of democratic pluralism. But radical Republicans lacked the raw political power to triumph over an ideology of white supremacy that shaped the foundations of our federal Constitution.

As Henry Louis Gates Jr., the documentary’s host, makes plain throughout the series, this shameful chapter in American history is no antiquarian set piece in the age of Trump. Indeed, the same day that Reconstruction debuted, the House Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on the resurgence of white nationalist violence. Anyone seeing the Judiciary panel’s inquiry alongside the PBS series could be forgiven for thinking that our baseline structures of power are still mostly arrayed around the projection of violent force behind white privilege. With dismaying formulaic rigor, the actions of “both sides” came in for criticism, even as the overwhelming body of evidence shows that white nationalist attacks have surged exponentially over the last few years both domestically and abroad. And in a real-time illustration of just how ineffectual this rhetorical mopping-up operation was, YouTube was forced to pull the plug on its comments system, which became overrun with vicious hate speech ... as congressional investigators addressed the malignant spread of racialized hate speech on YouTube.

Beyond such pantomimes of elite concern, a real crisis of racial violence has taken root. In April, The New York Times conducted an analysis of data gathered by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, a nonprofit organization that tracks terrorist attacks, and estimates that hate crimes have spiked in recent years. According to the Times’ summary, white extremist violence—“an umbrella term encompassing white nationalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi, xenophobic, anti-Muslim and anti-Semitic ideologies”—accounted for about one-third of such attacks in the United States from 2011 to 2017. This spring, to take but one shocking-yet-now-commonplace example, Holden Matthews, the 21-year-old son of a Louisiana deputy sheriff, was arrested for allegedly setting fire to three predominantly Black churches. Matthews was charged with arson and then hate crimes, but it is telling that he has yet to be charged with terror-related offenses. A report by the Brennan Center for Justice noted that there is a tendency to charge white supremacists with hate crimes but not with domestic terrorism, even though many perpetrators of hate crimes meet the formal and legal definitions of terrorism. Neither Dylann Roof, the killer of eight Black parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina, church, nor James Alex Fields Jr., who killed white counter-protester Heather Heyer during the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for example, was charged with committing an act of terrorism.