‘This is not who we are’? Testimony tests that
My mind keeps returning to Shaye Moss’ brave, devastating testimony at the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol.
Moss described the threats and abuse she and her family have endured since former President Donald Trump and his top campaign lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, spread a vile lie that Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, both election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, rigged the 2020 presidential election. In a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shortly before the Jan. 6 attack, Trump mentioned Freeman by name and called her a “professional vote scammer and hustler.”
Angry mobs, fed a pack of lies, came after Moss online and in person, wielding their racism and misguided indignation. She and her mother had to move out of their homes. To this day, both women fear for their lives and cringe when someone says their names in public.
Neither serves as an election worker anymore — an infuriating detail in and of itself.
“I’ve always been told by my grandmother how important it is to vote and how people before me, a lot of people, older people in my family, did not have that right,” Moss, who is Black, told the House committee.
“What I loved most about my job were the older voters. Younger people could usually do everything from their phone or go online. But the older voters liked to call. They liked to talk to you . ... I was excited always about sending out all the absentee ballots for the elderly, disabled people. I even remember driving to a hospital to give someone her absentee ballot application. That’s — that’s what I loved the most.”
She invested herself in protecting a system that, in its original form, didn’t even make room for her. That takes a special sort of conviction — the sort this nation relies on to become a more perfect union. That conviction was squandered, when it should have been held sacrosanct.
Shortly after Trump and Giuliani’s lies went viral, a group of people showed up at Moss’ grandmother’s house looking for Moss and Freeman, determined to make a citizen’s arrest. She called Moss in tears, terrified.
“This woman is my everything,” Moss told the committee. “I’ve never even seen or heard her cry, ever in my life.”
“I told her, ‘Close the door,’ ” Moss continued. “‘Don’t open the door for anyone.’ She’s a 70-something-I-won’t-say woman. She doesn’t like having restrictions. She wants to answer the door. She like to get her steps in, walking around the neighborhood. I told her, ‘You can’t do that. You have to be safe.’ ”
She likes to get her steps in. For some reason that detail gutted me.
“I have always believed it when God says he’ll make your name great,” Freeman told the committee, during videotaped testimony. “But this is not how it was supposed to be.”
Her community in Georgia, where she was born and lived her whole life, knows her as Lady Ruby, she told the committee. She built a small business, Ruby’s Unique Treasures, around her good name.
“I wore a shirt that proudly proclaimed that I was and I am Lady Ruby,” Freeman said. “I had that shirt in every color. I wore that shirt on Election Day 2020. I haven’t worn it since, and I’ll never wear it again.”
She stopped introducing herself by her name. She gets nervous, she said, when she sees someone she knows in public. She doesn’t want her name uttered out loud because she doesn’t know who will overhear.
“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation,” she said. “I’ve lost my sense of security. … There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere.
“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one,” she continued. “But he targeted me, Lady Ruby, a small-business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of a pandemic.”
At the end of their testimony, U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff said this: “In city councils and town councils, on school boards and election boards, from the Congress to the courts, dedicated public servants are leaving their posts because of death threats — to them, and to their families.
“This is not who we are,” he continued. “It must not become who we are.”
I’ve grown a little weary of hearing “this is not who we are.” I understand the pull to believe it, and I respect the intention of people who say it, especially if you or someone you love has toiled or even died to make this country free and fair for all. But “this is not who we are” has always felt like a little bit of a dodge to me, like a refusal to acknowledge the darker parts of our history and present.
Last year, the day after the Jan. 6 attack, CNN hosted former Defense Secretary William Cohen to talk about what we had just witnessed. He talked about who we are and, I think, put the phrase — and the attack — into clear, important context.
“People say this is not who we are, but it is a good part of who we are and who we have been,” he said. “These are the same people that used to be the Night Riders, and I know this from my wife’s experience of having to fall to the floor and put out lanterns when the Night Riders came up on the porch of her uncle with their horses. These are the same people who were the Jim Crows. These are the same people who were segregationists. These are the same people who are white supremacists. So this has been a part of our history.
“So when we say it’s not who we are,” Cohen continued, “it’s a part of who we are. And who we have been, and what we hope we won’t be going forward. But this is an indigenous part of the United States and we have added to the myth that we’re different, we’re exceptional, this is not who we are — these kind of incendiary bomb throwers, arsonists, anarchists. Yeah. They’ve been with us since the founding of this country.”
What we hope we won’t be going forward. That’s the part that needs our focus and our work.
We owe that much to Shaye Moss and to Ruby Freeman and to every other family whose faith and security were shaken by Jan. 6 and all the days since.