What the July 4 photo of a Black woman surrounded by white supremacists says about America

Was there a more poignant photo of America at 250 years old than the one Reuters captured of a young Black woman on a Washington commuter train surrounded by white nationalists with covered faces?

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There were photos of fireworks on July 4. Photos of the president preening at Mount Rushmore. Photos of the predictably over-the-top red, white and blue patriotic display in Philadelphia before the holiday’s World Cup match between France and Paraguay. But those spectacles provided a facade that only sees the country as “America the Beautiful,” when reality is far more complex. The journalist on the Washington Metro who photographed the young Black woman beset by members of the racist Patriot Front provided an uglier and more honest image of this American moment.

America’s 250th birthday should have been a celebration of democracy, but that’s not Patriot Front’s thing. According to its website, “Democracy has failed this once great nation.” It favors a “hard reset” and a “return to the traditions and virtues of our forefathers.” My forefathers (and foremothers, too, for that matter) had traditions and virtues worthy of praise and emulation, but nobody in Patriot Front should be expected to see the beauty in Black people’s essential contributions to this country.

Reuters reported that hundreds of members of Patriot Front took public transportation before and after marching in the nation’s capital carrying their own flag, several variations of the U.S. flag and, of course, the old racist standard, the Confederate battle flag.

The George Washington University Program on Extremism describes Patriot Front as a white nationalist organization founded after the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. James Alex Fields Jr. , a self-described white supremacist,  murdered counterprotester Heather Heyer at that rally.

The GW center says Patriot Front “promotes an ultra-nationalist ideology centered on the idea of creating a white ethnostate in the United States, rejecting multiculturalism and diversity.”

When Norman Rockwell created a painting inspired by 6-year-old Ruby Bridges’ daily walk through a gauntlet of white supremacists to William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, he called it “The Problem We All Live With.” In the 1960s, when Bridges integrated what had been an all-white school and Rockwell drew inspiration from her ordeal, that problem was easy to name: White people terrified at the thought of a multiracial democracy were trying to threaten everybody fighting for it into submission.

Almost 70 years later, with a civil rights movement in between, an increasingly diverse America and even after a Black family spent two terms in the White House, the problem we face is the same: The ideological descendants of those segregationists, with their talk of “replacement,” their rants against diversity and their descriptions of everything they don’t like as “wokeness,” are trying to threaten everyone fighting for a multiracial democracy into submission.

Members of the Patriot Front who marched July 4 chanted “Reclaim America,” Reuters reported.