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The FBI can't investigate white extremism until it first investigates itself

<span>Photograph: Jeff Dean/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Jeff Dean/AFP/Getty Images

Following the fascist riot at the US Capitol, the FBI appears to be finally taking action against white supremacists who have infiltrated police departments across the country. It is odd it took this long – while most news outlets are reporting that the FBI identified this threat almost 15 years ago, the FBI has been aware of white supremacist infiltration of police departments since at least 1961. It has also engaged in the work of white supremacy, spending the last century targeting Black leaders for surveillance. If the new Biden administration is to take seriously the threat of white supremacist infiltration of American institutions, the FBI needs to be held accountable for its past and present actions.

Related: Biden continues to unpick Trump's legacy as impeachment trial looms

The FBI has a long history of fulfilling the function of white supremacy in the United States. While the Tulsa Massacre was ongoing, the FBI’s predecessor was busy investigating Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association. The FBI’s first director, J Edgar Hoover, waged war on the Civil Rights Movement from its onset. The war was ramped up in the age of Cointelpro, an FBI program designed to surveil, dismantle, and destroy any movement working to end racism or capitalist exploitation in the United States. The FBI occasionally investigated white supremacists during this era (1956 to 1971),but spent the vast majority of its resources fighting those committed to Black and Indigenous liberation. And many of the bureau’s investigations of white supremacists were disingenuous; the FBI knew for a fact that the Birmingham Police Department had been infiltrated by the KKK, for example, but continued to feed the department information about civil rights activists. During Hoover’s half century as director, the FBI sent a blackmail letter to Martin Luther King encouraging him to commit suicide and was likely involved in the assassination of 21-year-old NAACP and Chicago Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton.

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Towards the end of Hoover’s tenure, the FBI even went so far as to allegedly create and arm a far-right paramilitary organization in San Diego for the purpose of disrupting, attacking, and potentially assassinating leftwing, particularly Chicano, leaders. On 6 January, 1972, the FBI’s secret army attempted to murder Peter G Bohnier, a Marxist economics professor, and Paula Tharp, who had previously worked for an underground newspaper. The offices of that same newspaper had been previously raided twice by the FBI’s army. The army also bombed a movie theater and planned the assassination of leaders of the leftwing Chicano organization the Brown Berets, along with a second attempt on Peter Bohnier. No member of the FBI has been held accountable for these actions.

While the FBI likes to pretend that those were crimes of the past, there are more recent examples of white supremacist behavior in the organization. There is evidence that some FBI agents and other federal agents frequented an annual party called “The Good Ol’ Boys Roundup” from 1980 to 1996. The “Roundup” was known as a whites-only gathering that involved the selling of fake “N----r hunting licenses” and T-shirts with King’s face in a sniper’s crosshairs. While the Department of Justice insists that federal agents weren’t overwhelmingly engaged in racist behavior, their investigation of the Roundup was primarily conducted through interviews with participants of the event itself.

And it wasn’t just individual officers engaging in racist behavior. In the late 1990s the FBI launched an investigation of the Wu-Tang clan, classifying it as a “major criminal organization”, with one agent comparing it to the Bloods. The FBI’s history of harassing and surveilling Black artists includes targeting Duke Ellington in 1938 and Gil Scott-Heron in the 1970s and 1980s. The FBI has long feared Black artists and their ability to reach the American public, which is why, in 1989, Milt Ahlerich, its assistant director of public affairs, sent a threatening letter to NWA’s record label in response to their evergreen classic Fuck tha Police.

The modern FBI has a problematic track record, too. In 2017 the bureau created a new counter-terrorism designation in response to the rise of Black Lives Matter and a new wave of the Black Liberation Movement. The new designation “Black Identity Extremists” has already been used to surveil and arrest at least one Black activist, Rakem Balogun, an open socialist and member of a number of leftwing Black power organizations. The FBI cited Balogun’s Facebook posts to justify raiding his home and arresting him; all the charges against him were unsubstantiated and later dropped. The designation has been criticized by many, including the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the nation’s largest organizations of Black police officers. And while Balogun was the first to be openly targeted, it is clear he is far from the only Black activist currently being surveilled.

The FBI needs to be thoroughly investigated and its racist practices, past and present, brought to light

All this is on top of the racist and Islamophobic targeting of the US Muslim population. Since 9/11, the FBI has placed spies in mosques across the country and surveilled Muslim-Americans for crimes as simple as researching video games and ordering computers from Best Buy. The surveillance did not cease in our arguably “Post-Post-9/11” world; the FBI visited at least a hundred Muslims in the United States in the runup to the 2016 election. At a time in which hate crimes against Muslims were increasing, the FBI spent valuable resources doubling down on racial profiling.

The internal culture and individual behaviors of FBI agents are also of concern. In 1991, a group of Black agents filed a class action lawsuit against the bureau, claiming a history of racial discrimination. Despite the agents winning the lawsuit, the FBI made no attempt to alter its culture. Just a few months ago, a group of Black former FBI agents had to form an organization just to argue for more racial diversity in the bureau, especially at the highest ranks, which have remained nearly exclusively white for the entirety of its 100 years in existence. While representation won’t even begin to address the FBI’s racism, it is telling that Black agents represent an even smaller percentage of the FBI than they did in the midst of the early 1990s lawsuit.

The FBI has made some effort to reform itself over the years, but those attempts were undone in the aftermath of 9/11 and the rise of the new surveillance state. In 2011 the FBI decentralized its operations, giving individual agents more autonomy to conduct low-level searches and investigations with no paper trail. Given the racist culture within the organization, and the new designation created specifically for Black activists, there is reason to be concerned about the bureau’s future.

Given the FBI’s long history of upholding white supremacy, it is clearly ill-equipped to investigate white supremacist infiltration of other organizations. The FBI, like our country’s military and police departments, needs to be thoroughly investigated and its racist practices, past and present, brought to light. Failing to hold the agency accountable will prove the current administration’s claims of combating extremism a farce.

  • Akin Olla is a Nigerian-American political strategist and organizer. He works as a trainer for Momentum Community and is the host of This is The Revolution Podcast