Yes, violence is us

Editor, The Commercial:

This is not who we are. How many times have you heard that?

On Jan. 6, 2021, the violence at the Capitol was incited, encouraged and condoned by the President of the United States. The violence was fueled by Trump’s insistence that specific people stole the presidency. He has pushed for Republican legislatures to overturn the election.

While Trump’s demand may seem strange, precedence for such a claim dates back to our nation’s founding.

Trump’s mob rebelled against the same things that inspired the 1877 Hayes-Tilden Compromise, the 1898 Wilmington insurrection, the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, and numerous other violent incidents against Black people, businesses and the state.

In 1877, through a compromise, Rutherford B Hayes was awarded the White House over Samuel J. Tilden, subjecting Black Americans to a century of Jim Crow terror, a trade-off for electoral peace. By the end of the 1898 Wilmington insurrection and massacre, a thriving, middle-class Black community had been destroyed. At least 60 were dead, and white supremacists replaced the entire city government.

The Tulsa race massacre took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked Black residents and businesses of the Greenwood district in Tulsa, Okla., destroying what was then known as “The Black Wall Street.” The area featured shops, restaurants, movie theatres, a library, pool halls and nightclubs.

As in the past, the rise of Black Americans to political, cultural, and scientific achievements, enfranchisement, and land ownership, makes some white Americans question the wisdom of democracy.

As Keith Reed writes, “The riot validated what history has always shown and what Trump has always known he could exploit since he was a candidate: that racialized violence, even to the point of treason, is tolerable if the perpetrators are white and their political aim is disenfranchising or oppressing Black people. Those who claim otherwise speak from ignorance, both of this election cycle and history.”

I beg to differ: Violence is in our DNA. This is who we are. CHESTINE SIMS

WHITE HALL