Ana Navarro’s comments on “The View” are stirring up some debate online about the workings of white supremacy in America, especially as it relates to radicals who subscribe to white supremacist ideologies as a basis for committing mass shootings and killings.
On Monday, while speaking about Saturday’s mass shooting at a mall in Allen, Texas, Navarro said, “We all have to remember, the head of the Proud Boys, his name is Enrique Tarrio.
The Proud Boys is a white nationalist group,” Navarro said. “Look, being Hispanic or being Black or being anything does not make you immune from being racist, from being radicalized, from being a white supremacist, from being evil, from being homicidal, and we are seeing it over and over again.”
The shooter, 33-year-old Mauricio Garcia, took the lives of eight people and injured several more at an outlet mall before a cop fatally shot Garcia.
Investigators are looking into one of Garcia’s social media accounts where he spewed extremist beliefs about women, Jews, and racial minorities and also shared posts about his struggles with mental health. While the investigation is still in its early stages, officials are checking if Garcia was motivated by white supremacist or neo-Nazi beliefs.
Co-host Sunny Hostin responded to Navarro, remarking that while the shooter’s ethnicity is “bizarre” in this case, he also identified as white.
“But this shooter who happened to be Hispanic and Latino, which is bizarre to me, had a white supremacy moniker on him,” Hostin said. “So [FBI Director] Christopher Wray, these are not my words, so people don’t start with the ‘I’m a race baiter crap.’ Christopher Wray said that the biggest threat to our democracy is white supremacy and domestic terrorism. He testified before Congress,” Hostin said.
In response to Navarro’s comments, one user on Twitter posted a meme of Dave Chappelle from his well-known Clayton Bigsby skit on the “Dave Chappelle Show,” where the comedian plays an old, blind Black man living in an all-white, backwoods community who claims to be white and dislikes minorities. The skit is a parody that speaks to some Black Americans who showcase an inability to own their identities as Black people and assimilate into white culture as a result.
As for other reactions, some people support Navarro’s viewpoint, saying it’s possible for people of color to own white supremacist views. Others said she missed the mark entirely, with some claiming the Proud Boys aren’t a white supremacist group but instead are a nationalist organization that values constitutional rights in America.
According to the Anti-Defamation League, some members of the Proud Boys “espouse white supremacist and antisemitic ideologies and/or engage with white supremacist groups.”
There have been other instances where people who aren’t white alone have killed Black people out of bigoted motivations.
George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin in 2012 despite the indications of the shooting being a racially-motivated crime.
Martin was walking through a gated community where his father’s fiancée lived at the time when Zimmerman spotted him while driving through the neighborhood. He called police to report a suspicious person and described Martin as a guy who “looked like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something” on the phone with a dispatcher.
Zimmerman followed Martin and shot him and was later acquitted by a jury of the second-degree murder charge he faced after claiming self-defense.
