The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas

"I think it makes sense to conclude with a text that really confronts, head on, the twin problems of the history of white supremacy and contemporary denial or misremembering of that history. In this book, Martinez is interested in a largely ignored example of racial violence—the mass lynching of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in South Texas in the early 1900s. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This book both gets us beyond a binary, black-white model of white supremacy, which is a complex phenomenon that impacts a multitude of racial and ethnic groups. And it also shows the lingering power of white supremacist history to shape lives, futures, and more across generations, even when people no longer hold it as an individual ideology. Martinez does this really effectively with stories like a local restaurant that still displayed photographs of lynching into the present, and the profound resistance to creating museum exhibits, highway markers, and textbooks that even mention—much less adequately and sensitively treat—the history of white supremacy in the United States. Bring the War Home is a history of a very small subsection of white supremacy called “the white power movement.” Some people might recognize it as “white nationalism.” That phrase gets us into some confusion because when people think about nationalism, they think about patriotism and actions in support of the state. This movement is not interested in supporting the government. It’s a group of people who declared war on the federal government in 1983 and attempted to overthrow the government in order to establish a transnational “Aryan nation.” The white power movement includes people like Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, militia men, radical tax resisters, and a bunch of other people who came together after the Vietnam War, using a widely held belief in government betrayal to gain recruits. The movement is fueled by the idea that racial annihilation is imminent and that therefore everyone should take up arms. I follow that story to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which despite the fact that it was the largest deliberate mass casualty event on American soil between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 remains a deeply misunderstood event. People still don’t recognize the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as part of the domestic terror movement. It isn’t included in our common knowledge or our history books. Exactly. Beginning in 1983, this movement took on a strategy called leaderless resistance, which predates jihadism in this way. The idea is that activists could work in common purpose, with or without communication, with or without direct orders from leadership. They implemented that strategy to foil surveillance and prosecution, in large part because they were frustrated by infiltration of the movement by the FBI and ATF in the 1960s. The larger legacy of that strategy has been that we have lost sight of the fact that white power was a social movement. Each instance of white power violence is portrayed as the act of lone wolves, when in fact these activists are tied together through deep social connection. Their goal is guerrilla acts of violence and sabotage, softening the way for the seizure and maintenance of a white homeland, leading to the eventual overthrow of the United States and perhaps the world. That’s the big imaginative vision of this movement. Of course, individual activists have different versions of the movement’s ultimate goal, but it is a movement that declared war on the federal government in 1983. After 1983, the nation for white nationalism is the Aryan nation. This is why ‘the white power movement’ is a better term: it conveys the radicalism of what they’re trying to do. White supremacy is a deeply held and deeply internalized belief system for a lot of people in our country. I’ve learned it is crucial for the United States to eventually have some kind of dialogue about our history of racial inequality. Efforts like the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission showed that the process of talking to one another about racial violence and the history of racism can bring about consensus and change. We’ve never come together as a nation to address this part of our history. It’s critical that we do so."