DC riot proves racism still lethal
A pandemic spawned the lockdown of the National Civil Rights Museum — the place where an assassin’s bullet left Martin Luther King Jr. lifeless and bloodied on its balcony 52 years ago.
Now, on the day that would have been his 92th birthday, the twin viruses behind the bullet that killed King in Memphis — viruses that he spent his life trying to eradicate — have forced the lockdown of Washington D.C.
Those viruses would be violence and racism.
They’ve led to the virtual shutdown of the nation’s capital because racists have threatened violence during the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president and vice president.
They’ve sparked the shutdown of the city where King’s monument stands along the National Mall — the place where King sketched out his dream of racial reconciliation in a speech 57 years ago.
Yet while science has developed a vaccine for COVID-19, King’s life has yet to inspire an inoculation against racism and violence.
In fact, they’ve spread. Mutated even.
Mutated to the point where they drove thousands of white supremacists to riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the electoral votes for Biden and Harris from being counted.
They were enraged at the thought that their leader, President Donald Trump, was defeated by a massive turnout of Black voters,
Their actions amounted to the 21st century equivalent of the white racists who poured milk, hot coffee, ketchup and other condiments on Black protesters to stop them from ordering meals at whites-only lunch counters in the 1960s.
Except this time, their destructiveness wasn’t driven by them sharing a public space with Black people, but by having to share democratic power with them.
None of this, however, surprises Charles Mckinney.
“One of the foundations of that ideology [white supremacy] is that this [country] is theirs, that building belongs to white people, democracy belongs to white people and the government belongs to white people,” said Mckinney, who is the Neville Frierson Bryan Chair of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History at Rhodes College.
“We’ve seen these types of eruptions before, going back to Recon
struction, when the construction of a multiracial democracy led to high levels of anxiety among white people who thought they were losing their nation…”
That “anxiety” was painfully clear in the Capitol terrorists, who were screaming about wanting to take their country back; who listened and acted when Trump said things like, “You’re the real people. You’re the people that built this nation. You’re not the people that tore down our nation.”
It was abetted by GOP lawmakers, like all of Tennessee’s Republican U.S. representatives, who chose the Jim Crow path and challenged the results of a presidential election in which Black voters played a decisive role.
“All of this was undergirded by the notion that the presence of non-white people, and Black people in particular, is automatically deviant,” Mckinney said. “There’s something illegitimate about the presence of Black people, whether it be in white neighborhoods, or in white schools, or in this case, on voter rolls.
“So clearly, if Black people surged the vote in Pennsylvania, or in Georgia, or in any place where Trump lost, then it clearly must be a function of irregularity. It can’t be a function of Black people voting their interest and being organized…it can’t be that Black people are working to include themselves in the mainstream of society and are exercising their constitutional rights…
“It has to be something illegal. Something deviant.”
So, how did these viruses re-emerge 50 years after King championed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act as steps toward stamping them out?
How did this Capitol riot commence after Black people and white people elected the nation’s first Black president more than 40 years after those acts were passed?
How?
Too many people weren’t paying attention. Too many people, after the election of President Obama, gave air to the idea that America had reached a post-racial era.
Too many people chose to view America through the gauzy idealism of King’s dream while ignoring the hard, racist-fueled reality that culminated in the Tea Party movement, some of whose members spat on and lobbed racial slurs at lawmakers like civil rights icon John Lewis as they tried to pass health care reform in 2010.
That movement morphed into Trump’s Make America Great Again movement — which was built around vilifying Black and brown people, and immigrants who weren’t white.
And too many either didn’t understand or were hesitant to face the signs that led to the racist insurrection that ripped the Capitol apart.
“Post-racial was always ridiculous because it assumed that racism was a function of proximity when it was a function of power,” Mckinney said.
“It didn’t’ matter that he [Obama] graduated from Harvard Law. It didn’t matter that his mama was white, or that he loved his wife and daughters. None of that mattered. It was irrelevant.
“Racism is about power, and when it is exercised by people in power who are trying to maintain power, your personal characteristics are irrelevant.”
That reality lends new resonance to King’s last question, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”
And despite the chaos of the moment, a path to community remains. In fact, it’s quite clear, Mckinney said.
First of all, he said, Americans have to confront racism as the virus that it is. White folks, he said, must stop engaging in what James Baldwin once called “perpetual forgetting,” by saying that the racist insurrection at the Capitol, “isn’t who we are,” when history shows otherwise.
Next, Mckinney said, Black Americans and their allies must move to aggressively and affirmatively confront racism and the barriers it poses to equality.
“Structural supports, like the Voting Rights Act, that have been undermined need to be bulked up,” he said, “and we need to have folks who are willing to name the problem and to do the things that are necessary to fix the problem.”
Yet what the white supremacist violence in the Capitol — terroristic violence that occurred right before King’s birthday and the inauguration of the first woman, and Black and Asian vicepresident — says is that he was battling a virus spread by being ignored, even as it spawned an entire political cult now bent on racial terror.
But right now, the nation’s capital city is being transformed into a military outpost at a time when it should be filled with parades. Racists who stormed the Capitol have shamed the United States before the world in much the same way their doppelgangers did in the 1960s.
So the virus behind this violent racism must be met with the same urgency as the COVID-19 pandemic.
A virus that King tried to lead the nation in eradicating 52 years ago — before it ended him.