Photographing a Movement

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Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory. Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Nathan Connolly: I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians, and each week, along with our colleague, Ed Ayers, we explore a different topic in American history.

Joanne Freeman: Today we’re talking about a difficult issue, so just a disclaimer here, some things in this episode might be troubling for some people to hear.

Glenna Gordon: If you think white supremacy is only the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross or white men in khaki pants and white polo shirts marching before Charlottesville, then you’re getting it wrong.

Brian Balogh: This is Glenna Gordon. She’s an award-winning documentary photographer, and she’s spent a lot of time covering women in the far right and white supremacist movement.

Glenna Gordon: Some of my portraits, some people find some of them difficult. Some people find some of them upsetting, because not everybody looks like a meth head from Tennessee joining the Klan, which is what I think a lot of people think people on the far right look like. And people can sometimes be really surprised when they see my portraits and they just look like another pretty girl from another town. Others of my portraits, I hope, are a little bit layered and will show people in a way where I want the image to do the talking, so [crosstalk 00:01:43].

Brian Balogh: Glenna says the far right and white supremacist movement can’t function without women. Case in point, a woman Glenna met in Charlottesville, Virginia after the deadly Unite the Right rally in August, 2017. It all started with an invitation to a party from white supremacist leader Richard Spencer.

Glenna Gordon: It was like a VRBO or some other sort of vacation rental house that was being rented by Identity Evropa, which was Spencer’s group, was one of the more active groups responsible for Charlottesville. And this is seven hours after Heather Heyer has been killed and after the day’s events. There was probably about 100 to 150 people at this party that I show up at. It’s mainly men. I’d say it’s like a 10-to-1 ratio of men to women, but I’m there to meet some of the women who are in leadership in Identity Evropa.

Glenna Gordon: A really good example of this is a woman like Erica. Erica, who asked me not to use her last name, and those were the terms of the interview, so I will not use her last name, she has been active in IE, it used to be IE, now it’s the American Identity Movement, for years, and she’s a known organizer. When you think about what happened the day of Charlottesville, you think about Heather Heyer dying, but there’s a lot of other people who are responsible for that day. Someone like Erica, in the lead-up to Charlottesville, she’s posting on Discord, which is an app that people are using to communicate and plan, and she’s helping people organize riots. She’s hosting the party. She’s walking around the party to make sure that nobody’s trashing this rental house. Women do women’s work in these groups. They are not necessarily leadership front and center, because that’s the role of men, but they are making sure everything happens.

Glenna Gordon: Another example of that is this woman Amanda Barker, who I met in North Carolina, who’s the wife of a Klan leader, and so she’s called Imperial Commander Amanda. Even though her husband Chris is the one putting up the cross and setting it on fire, she’s the one organizing the carpools for everybody to get there, organizing the potluck beforehand. And why are people going? They’re going to burn a cross, but they’re also going to have a potluck and to hang out with the people who they believe share their identities and have their backs.

Glenna Gordon: And so somebody like Amanda is making sure that that happens. She’s also the one addressing all of the mail that goes out when people call and leave their address on her hotline. She’s doing labor to support this group, even though people think of Chris as the leader. Alone, he could not run one of the most active chapters of the Ku Klux Klan in America. He needs her to actually do most of the quote-unquote “women’s work,” the support work that is actually what is the daily grind of these groups.

Brian Balogh: Sometimes Glenna receives pushback about the nature of her work, that taking photographs of white supremacists amplifies their message. Glenna says she takes this concern seriously, but that we ignore white supremacy at our peril.

Glenna Gordon: All of these groups already are out there. I think that part of why we got to where we are is because so many people are like, “Just ignore them and they’ll go away. Don’t give them air. If you give them air, then they just spread their messages.” And I disagree with that. They’ve spread their messages while we were ignoring them. While all these coastal elites are busy celebrating the progress of our first black president, these groups were thriving, and that was because we ignored them.

Brian Balogh: Glenna says one way we’ve ignored white supremacists is by not seeing them, which is why photography is so important.

Glenna Gordon: I think the best photos, when I’m trying to take a good photo, I’m trying to take a photo that has a complicated set of layered meanings and that somebody will look at and sort of stop and say, “Oh.” And you know, the photo of Erica, she’s beautiful, but it’s also kind of a creepy photo. Actually, I only hope it’s creepy. I think it’s a little creepy. There’s very dramatic lighting, and you see her tattoo on her chest that says, “I will never be silenced.” And I think we have to look at these things, and I think that they have an ability to punch us in the gut in a way that’s really different than another 1,200-word opinion piece in The New York Times that gets some clicks, not too many.

Glenna Gordon: If we need to change the way America talks about race and thinks about white supremacy, we have to look at woman, and we have to look at how these ideas are spread. And if you only look at acts of violence, if you only look at acts of vandalism, then you’re only looking at the tip of the iceberg, and you will always only be responding afterwards, when there is an act of violence or where is an act of vandalism or there is a rally or anything like that. You’re responding after. If you are looking at the entire iceberg, if you are looking at how white supremacy operates as a system, you have to look at who are the people keeping it afloat. Because women always do as much if not more work than men in most arenas most of the time, that is also true for white supremacy. Women are what keep these groups alive.