Understanding the Role of Violent Extremism and Its Implications for School Interventions: Historical Lessons From America’s Past and Present

• In Event: Understanding and Addressing Racialized History and Violent Extremism Across P–12 Systems and Settings

Abstract

Among the many obstacles to the dismantling of racial injustice and constructing of inclusive and equitable educational possibilities across P–20 systems is violent extremism. Violent extremism has repeatedly disrupted efforts for social justice in the United States. Drawn from the original research of five eminent historians, this session delineates historical patterns of violent extremism in the United States through brief historical case studies from the 19th and 20th centuries. This history includes a pattern of normalized and pervasive racialized violence, racialized domestic terrorism, economic exploitation, land expropriation, and cultural attacks directed at people of color of all ethnicities. The role of the state is a central theme in this presentation: in many instances local, state, and federal officials perpetrated, reinforced, and legitimated extremist violence, while in other instances they ignored or dismissed it.

An understanding of this history and how it continues to play out through historical trauma can help psychologists and educators prevent and address the harmful psychological effects of historically grounded violent extremism and its denial in our current fractious political and social environment. The history that will be discussed in this presentation has been misunderstood, ignored, suppressed, and dismissed as exceptional, which in turn has impeded an understanding of violent extremism and the prevention of extremist violence.
With the aim of enlivening the session, the presenter will provide the audience with copies of several historical sources, including an 1828 newspaper editorial and a 1917 news report, that illustrate the physical and discursive violence of American extremism.

Author

• W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill