Capitol Siege
By MATTHEW WHITAKER, Ph.D.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
GUEST COLUMNIST | JAN 14, 2021 AT 6:00 AM
A mob comprised almost entirely of white people, carrying zip ties, pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, knives, military weapons, and Confederate flags, stormed our Capitol, unfettered by police, the National Guard and the military, to disrupt the transfer of power after an election upheld by a conservative Supreme Court.
This stain on our history tells me where this nation’s human priorities are not — with Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC).
Some compare the treachery of last week to Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, but random infiltrators of peaceful BLM protests throwing chairs through a Walgreens window do not come close to the vile and treasonous actions on display last week.
On Jan. 6, so-called patriots scaled the Capitol walls, broke through windows, and ransacked offices with classified documents. They brutally beat a police officer with an American flag, nearly crushed another in a doorway stampede, defiled the inner chambers with urine and feces, called for the first female Speaker of the House with unspeakably vulgar and sexist language, before looking to lynch her, Vice President Pence, and perhaps others, with a makeshift gallows erected on the Capitol steps.
This was not a protest. It was an attempted coup by proxy.
Notwithstanding the principled stances that conservatives like Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney and Pat Toomey have taken on this issue, too many mainstream Republicans, despite the gravity of the situation, continue to enable Trump’s madness and mob.
Indeed, what we saw in Washington, D.C., is a result of the mendacious and narcissistic disregard for the truth, the U.S. Constitution and America’s status as a respected authority in global society by Donald Trump. His horde of violent white extremists, and their sycophants, whose blind allegiance to a fascist Trumps any love they claim to have for America. If these were BIPOC, the Capitol Police and National Guard might have been lying in wait, with rubber bullets, tear gas, military grade weapons and riot gear.
I used to believe that the white supremacist buck would stop with an attack on Washington, D.C., incited by a sitting president, but like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”
The far white right is bold, dangerous, deeply committed and enabled. Acceptable “white moderates,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described them, will not protect us from the former, because the latter is more devoted to “order” than justice. This leaves democracy, let alone BIPOC, underserved, betrayed, abandoned and devoid of dependable allies. I firmly believe that it was this divided duty among white America that inspired and animated what happened on Insurrection Day.
So, white America has to make up its mind. Does it want to continue to enable white ignorance, fear and fragility, and contribute to America’s implosion through epidermal restraint and complicity, or look deeply at itself, embrace hard truths, and let go of its craving for both racial justice and white intra-racial harmony?
Some of the last images of the revolt were of Black Capitol staff members cleaning up the mess made by a white mob. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain once said, and clearly white America still expects us to clean up their mess. They want our rhythm while giving us, and democracy, the blues.
Dr. Matthew C. Whitaker is the Founder and CEO of Diamond Strategies, a firm that helps small businesses with diversity issues, and co-chairman of the board of the Stono Institute for Freedom, Justice and Security in Orlando.
Photograph: Whochit