Begin Again
The mob that stormed the Capitol this week was as old as America. It climbed the steps carrying the shadows of the lynch mobs that have terrorized people for centuries. It echoed the mobs that ran through towns, attacking black people, killing, and destroying any trace of black lives.
Like white people generations earlier, rioters in the Capitol paused to take pictures of themselves, enjoying the power of their destruction. Many of the more than 5000 lynchings in this country between 1890 and 1930 were captured in photographs, turned into postcards, sent with banal messages. Such images often show white men, women, and children enjoying a picnic as the bodies of black men, women, and children hang from trees. It is our countries Strange Fruit.
All of us know that such mobs turn to blood lust in a second. All of us know what was likely to have happened if this mob encountered Nancy Pelosi, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. We would be telling a very different story today. These women have been repeatedly targeted for violence . Calls to attack Speaker Pelosi are clearly heard on tapes. Had the mob captured Mike Pence, we would also be telling a different story, as people shouted for his murder. He was singled out for special fury directed at a “race traitor.”
We know these mobs are not going away.
In response to the violence, President-elect Joe Biden rightly labeled it as an “insurrection.” He said, “This isn’t America.”
Clearly, our incoming president needs some education. This is America. This has always been America. Most white people have just been able to evade the reality of the violence necessary to keep their own power and privileges in place.
They have been able to evade this violence because until this week, the violence of the mob was mostly hidden from national view. Covered with hoods, in small towns and rural areas far from the national spotlight, terror was normal. Often white mobs burst into cities and towns, killing. The memories of this white violence in Springfield (1908), East St Louis (1917, Tula (1921) and Rosewood (1923) are buried in our national consciousness, along with the victims. From 1917 to 1923 at least 97 lynchings were recorded, thousands of Black people were killed and driven out of homes and businesses in at least 26 different cities, including Washington DC. Yet, this white violence is rarely acknowledged as the essence of who we are and how we have come to be.
It was on full display as the mob roamed through the Capitol. As so often in the past, the mob was assisted by the police, who welcomed them in, aiding and abetting the assault.
The mob of January 6, however, has some significant differences from its earlier incarnations. First, earlier violence was in the service of an expanding Empire. Today, that Empire is in decline. It is unravelling . Every day the systems that define the American Empire are proving incapable of resolving the crises we face.
Over the last year we have all been forced to grapple with the evident inability of our government to provide for the basic health and safety of our people. We have seen how we are warped by racial injustice and inequity. We have to recognize that our systems benefit the few at the expense of the many. In moments of system collapse, the actions of individuals and small groups can have an enormous effect, for good or for ill.
What each one of us does now, matters. For while this violence is who we are, it is not who we have to be. We have the opportunity to finally confront the lies we have told ourselves about the violence of white supremacy that created this nation.
As people rushed up the steps of the capital, they held up a mirror. It is an opportunity to find the ways to tell the truths of who we have been, and decide what we need to do to create a real, living democracy, rooted in the protection and dignity of every life. This possibility is now in front of us. It is the opportunity to create a new future, based on the full truth of our past. As James Baldwin so urgently hoped, we can perhaps “begin again.”