I couldn’t not write about the train wreck that was Wednesday’s insurrection. Once again, I heard the oft repeated litany, “This is not the America I know, the America I grew up with.” As I have repeated, this America is exactly the America I know. This is the America experienced by Black people for the first 350 years. A fact-finding mission would uncover centuries of genocide, enslavement, and systemic, nationwide, federally enforced bigotry that white America would not just rather not see, they refuse to see it. When forced to confront it they scream, “Fake news!” “What about-?” and “Antifa!” They would literally rather believe in a conspiracy theory of blood drinking, cannibal pedophiles than accept that white supremacy is not only embedded in the country but strangling it to death.
None of this is new to the American Black. This America in which people can think racist things, say racist things, and do racist things but are not racists. The America where armed white people are practically escorted in to vandalize the Capitol in the capital while peaceful Black protestors are teargassed and shot- with rubber bullets if they are lucky. Some in the Capital Police are obviously at least sympathizers to the insurrectionists. Worse they, like much of law enforcement, have probably been deeply infiltrated. It’s been happening for years.
But this is DC. Where was the FBI? Where was the Secret Service? The SS protects the President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, the Secretary of State, and others in the presidential line of succession. Why the hell didn’t they prepare for this? They had to have known it was going to happen. The Proud Boys have been publicly planning this for months! I mean, I knew it was going to happen and I’m just some chick with access to social media.
America has a long history of playing with fascism and authoritarianism. We’ve always been elitist and resisted extending inalienable rights to those who were not landed and monied white men. Nazis and the architects of South African Apartheid based their playbooks on the laws of the US. The poor of all races have been vilified, blamed for their condition, sterilized, and even left to die. Wages for Americans below the top quintile have stagnated for decades.* When the Black Civil Rights movement of half a century ago forced the government to acknowledge that it would have to provide civil and human rights to the members of even the lowest castes, the state literally washed its hands of its societal responsibilities and has been doubling down on that response ever since.
We’ve had spate of recent disastrous Supreme Court decisions. By declining to hear Richard Brakebill, et al v. Alvin Jaeger North Dakota Secretary of State in 2018 the SCOTUS essentially stripped the vote from Native people. The same year in Abbott v. Perez SCOTUS for the most part rejected a lower court’s finding that the Texas Republican Party had calculatedly weakened the power of black and Latino votes in legislative and state maps that it had redrawn after racial gerrymandering challenges in 2011. There is 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder which stopped requiring the mostly former slave holding, Jim Crow enforcing, or Sundown states, and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting which led to the almost immediate development of ID laws, poll taxes, and the closure of polling centers in any neighborhood that might be perceived as Democrat leaning. And then there’s the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, January 21, 2010. case in which the U.S. Supreme Court opened up a flood of corrupting “dark” money into our elections. This case allowed the wealthiest Americans to buy politicians outright, rather than under the table, by giving birth to super PACs permitted to collect secret contributions of millions of dollars. All of this before the court was stacked and packed by the Republicans.
The Democrats don’t fight against these policies as they should because both parties want that power. It also helps the opposition that the Dems are ineffectual and are immersed in respectability politics that haven’t been relevant since at least the 1980s. They allow Republicans to enforce rules against them that the Republicans themselves break with impunity while pushing for a center that the Republicans draw further and farther right. Democrats, right up to president-elect Biden, keep trying to seek compromise even when it’s a mistake on all levels often alienating their supporters in the process. They try to pull in moderate independents at the expense of a base that, lacking inspiration, is either failing to show up at the polls or is actively abandoning them for other parties that they perceive as more vibrant- including the Republican Party. I used to think that the Dems refused to understand that the majority of white America still clutches tightly to the tattered cloak of white supremacy. Now I think that too many also embrace it.
Then there is the media. There are Fox and the other Murdoch properties, OAN, America First, New York Post, Washington Times, National Review, Sinclair, the pro-Trump, conservative company taking over local news stations, and even Newsnet whose 24 news hour channel typical parrots Republican talking points in a softer tone. The people who close themselves up in these echo chambers become as brainwashed as any cult member. Then there is the unconfronted White Supremacy of the mainstream press. They write about the uprisings in much the same way that law enforcement reacts to them. Quick to name a group of protestors on the left, especially those of color, as rioters and to focus on the small minority of bad actors rather than the validity of the protester’s complaints. Meanwhile armed assailants attacking the Michigan capitol building are protestors. Even when they try to do better they are guilty trying to present a balanced picture which gives the deranged rantings of conspiracy theorists both weight and exposure.
That balanced presentation is one reason why a man in New York state can declare that he would raise a Confederate flag if he had one because both sides were just fighting for what they believed in- making what they were fighting for not just equally legitimate. Don’t even get me started on the way in which opinion has been given the power of fact. I remember a reporter talking about how he “felt” Obama was a Muslim even though there was, and is, no evidence to support these feelings. Somehow, this was considered appropriate for the news.
This shitshow was years, decades, in the making. Animosities built up by catastrophic economic policies that resulted in hundred billionaires and a minimum wage that is far below poverty level. By racial resentment inflamed by Republicans to the point that straight, white, Christian men truly believe themselves to be victims of the power dynamic despite all evidence (which is all the evidence) to the contrary. By the blood of far too many unarmed people spilled by the state. Biden promised to return us to normal. We deserve better than that.
*This is hidden, in part, by the second wave of feminism that brought middle and upper middle-class women into the workforce. Working-class women have always worked.