Anti-Racists Spreading Racism? The Case Against the SPLC

By Ellis Cose

Anti-Racists Spreading Racism?

Could one of America’s more revered civil rights organizations be actively supporting white supremacists? Is the Southern Poverty Law Center’s fight for equal justice just a cover for aiding random bigots, the KKK and American Nazis?

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche certainly seems convinced to believe so. In indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center, Blanche accused SPLC of “manufacturing racism to justify its existence.” While “vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups,” the organization was actually funding the facilitation of “state and federal crimes.”

It’s a shocking accusation: a bit like accusing abolitionists of selfishly fighting slavery solely for financial gain. But is it true?

Certainly, SPLC’s crusade has sometimes focused on money. In 2008, SPLC’s lawyers won $2.5 million from Klans of America. The case focused on Klan members who had beaten and permanently injured a teenager of Panamanian descent. SPLC’s victory was celebrated in progressive circles and the organization proclaimed to be world-class Klan killers.

“Nearly six months after the Southern Poverty Law Center won a $2.5 million civil judgment against Kentucky-based Imperial Klans of America, the Klan group's membership has shriveled,” reported The Louisville Courier. After the Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the verdict, Thomas Wells, a former president of the American Bar Association, dubbed SPLC co-founder Morris Dees, “the lawyer who bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan and effectively put them out of business.

Years before Blanche targeted the organization, critics accused SPLC of profiting from exaggerating the danger from largely harmless hate groups and of being obsessed with raising money. But Blache’s indictment goes far beyond that. It accuses SPLC of fostering the very evil it was created to combat. It’s a bit like blaming the NAACP’s undercover investigations of lynchings in the 1920s for Blacks being lynched in the South, or for blaming abolitionist critics and investigators for the myriad evils of slavery.

It nonetheless is a message that Blanche and many others in the Trump orbit seem determined to sell. As they see it, the biggest racial problem America has is people complaining of racism. And if those people would only shut up (and also stop stealing jobs and university slots from inherently more qualified white people), America’s racial problems would vanish. That such a view does not align very well with history only shows, in their eyes, that history must be rewritten. After all, is the notion that non-whites are the main perpetrators of racism any more farfetched than the notion that America was much better off when everyone understood it to be a white Christian nation that could only be diminished if it somehow tragically became less Christian and less white?