A small group of white nationalists
stormed a bookstore in Washington, D.C., to protest an event for a book
on racial politics and how it’s impacting lower- and middle-class white
Americans.
The group stormed the Politics and Prose bookstore on Saturday
afternoon, interrupting a scheduled talk by Jonathan Metzl, a professor
of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University who released his
book “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is
Killing America’s Heartland” this spring.
Videos filmed by those in
attendance showed the group standing in a line before the audience
chanting, “This land is our land.” At least one man was yelling white
nationalist propaganda into a megaphone while people in the bookstore
booed him.
Catherine Wigginton, who tweeted a video of the brief chaos, said she was “impressed” with how Metzl handled the interruption.
Metzl, who is also the director
for Vanderbilt’s Center for Medicine, Health and Society, was speaking
at the bookstore for an Independent Bookstore Day event.
The bookstore protest happened
on the same day a 19-year-old white supremacist opened fire on a
synagogue in Poway, California, before a Passover celebration, killing
one woman and injuring three others, including one young girl.
The bookstore protest ended without injury or damage, The Washington Post reported.
Metzl told NBC Washington that before the protest broke out he was speaking to a man who had helped Metzl’s father and grandfather flee Nazi Austria.
He told the Post that the incident was “very symbolic for me.”
“In case anybody’s wondering what’s happening right now, they’re illustrating my point,” he said.
