More Than a Coup
“I have never beheld a spectacle more terrible and at the same time more magnificent.” — French minister, Louis Sérurier, on the Capitol breach of 1812.
I don’t feel any sympathy for the woman who was shot and killed by police officers at the U.S. Capitol — certainly not when peaceful protestors have been killed at the hands of police officers for much less and for much more endearing causes than that of fascism and white supremacy.
What qualifies an armed response if not an armed invasion of the U.S. Capitol? BlackLivesMatter taking up space on the streets of Washington D.C.?
There are images coming out now of the police letting Trump’s supporters into the Capitol building with little resistance. There is documented footage of a lone Black officer being forced to retreat, left to a mob of white wolves, howling and whooping, confederate flag waving on his heels. There are Twitter posts about riot police walking an elderly participant down the stairs, hands held, taking care not to miss a step.
The failed coup d’etat attempt will encourage lawmakers in many ways, but the juxtaposition of the police response to last summer’s protests and their response during the Capitol riots emphasizes what some of us know intimately: the police consistently choose to care for white bodies, often at the expense of Black people.
Imagine an America that provided its Black children the same care and humanity as it gives to its white supremacists. Nothing about the Capitol police response on Wednesday suggests the actions of the rioters were extreme or radical. It was business as usual. While I hope that one day we can address the issue of state-sanctioned violence against its own citizens, today is not that day.
The going narrative is to call them traitors. But they do not betray the history of this country; they choose embrace the darkest truths of this nation. They speak loudly, the quiet parts that moderates wish to deny. The parts that centrists wish to move past with empty platitudes and bury with boneless promises.
There is a desire to call them domestic terrorists. But they do not terrorize the white moderate, who loses nothing should they install the ethno-state they so desire. To acknowledge that they are terrorists without plainly stating who it is that they terrorize is an exercise in futility.
There is movement to call them rioters and thugs; but to do this is to convey a false sense of equivalency between the actions of antifa, BLM, and the progressive left with those of the Trump supporters yesterday.
None of these are adequate descriptors alone. You cannot call them traitors without acknowledging their contributions to white supremacy. You cannot call them domestic terrorists, without acknowledging the danger they pose to the Black and Indigenous people in your community. You cannot call them rioters without acknowledging how white power has given them preferential treatment in the eyes of the police.
Notice how many of your white peers are explicit in calling the Confederate flag-bearing instigators white supremacists; take a deeper account of those who attempt to distance themselves from the ‘Trumpsters’.
The Trump cult of personality is merely the latest vessel in a long line of figureheads that cape for white supremacy.
