Sunday’s attacks that killed a federal judge’s son and seriously injured her husband in their New Jersey home bear haunting witness to the toxic forces mushrooming up in recent years to reverse progress toward racial and gender equality.
The suspect, a racist, misogynist attorney who later killed himself, hated Latina judges, and Judge Esther Salas in particular. He once had a civil case in front of her, though he removed himself from it after getting cancer. It involved his contention that the military draft was unconstitutional because it didn’t apply to women. It’s not clear whether that case had anything to do with his fixation with her; she ruled partially in his favor. But he attacked her with claims that Latina judges were products of affirmative action driven by an inferiority complex.
He railed against President Barack Obama for, among other things, appointing Salas to be the first Latina to serve as a federal judge in New Jersey. He volunteered for President Donald Trump’s campaign.
And he allegedly killed Salas’ son and injured her husband.
Den Hollander hated feminism and called those who support it “feminazis.” He hated what he called “PC ideology,” claiming it “deems those whose ancestors spent more time in a temperate climate than a tropical climate, and any middle-aged guy chasing a pretty young skirt, as nonhuman and lacking in rights.”
In his words — 1,700 of which are gathered in an online screed — organizations are “trying to convince America that whites, especially white males, were barbarians, and all those of darker skin complexion were victims.”
It is significant that those skewed, rage-filled diatribes are coming to light at a time when Black, white and brown people are nightly putting their bodies on the line to end the mistreatment of people of color.
Den Hollander may have been an outlier even among extremists. He launched legal challenges to such offenses as women’s studies programs and “ladies’ night” drink specials at nightclubs. He argued that the federal Violence Against Women Act injured American men because it allowed battered undocumented women to remain legally to fight their cases in U.S. courts. He claimed that feminism is a religion “promoted and financed by the state and federal governments” in violation of the Establishment Clause. He called for men to “take the law into their hands.”
But the beliefs and the grievances he verbalized may be more widespread than some of us would prefer to believe. We know some of those were shared by a voting constituency that swung in Donald Trump’s direction in 2016. And those people angry at the prospect of losing their privileges to minorities and women have been nurtured by the president since he took office. There were, of course, others who supported him who weren’t driven by rage or prejudice.
He has disparaged the Black Lives Matter movement as “treason, sedition and insurrection.” This week he repeated his intolerance for athletes who take a knee against racism. And he has company.
The truth is, you don’t have to scratch too far below the surface to reach America’s fault lines, and whether these views are the result of misinformation and misguidance or deep bigotry, the current Republican leadership has done little to dispel them. We’ve heard them on an Iowa high school baseball field, directed at a Black Charles City player, Jeremiah Chapman. Fans of the other team shouted that he belonged in slavery or should have been a victim of police homicide as George Floyd was. They did so yelling “Trump 2020.”
These are people who sit next to other team parents and move around in neighborhoods where, if their views don’t find outright acceptance, they may just be shrugged off as Oh, that’s just him, or her. Ignore them. Maybe they’re even on the PTA. This is the mindset we’re up against as we try to undo generations of institutionalized racism and sexism. This is how far some will go to preserve their privileges.
Prejudice kills. It harms physically and psychologically. It interferes with educational opportunities, careers, earning power, voting rights. Women die at the hands of their male batterers because perpetrators know they can get away with it. People of color die at the hands of authorities for the same reasons.
It’s that simple to see and that complicated to end.
Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her email at rbasu@dmreg.com.
