It was a race riot

We should retire the phrase, “this isn’t who we are.” It’s us, folks. It is who we are.

They were white, to a man and a woman, the terrorists who rampaged through the United States Capitol on Wednesday, and they flew the Confederate flag on its steps and in its halls, something that never even happened during the Civil War. It was a race riot, pure and simple, no quibbling.   The only reason no Black people were killed on Wednesday was because they were not there.

The rioters were responding to incitement by Donald Trump.  He wanted the Congress to stop the certification of ballots from the Electoral College.  He wanted Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over a joint session of Congress during the counting and certification process, to overturn the election and declare him the winner.  So he sent an army of his loyal followers from his rally at the White House down Constitution Avenue to the Capitol.  When they got there, they rioted, fighting with police — even killing one of them — and broke through doors and windows to get into the Capitol.  When they achieved entry, they looted the House and Senate chambers, they destroyed the office of the Speaker of the House, they stole classified documents and laptops, they defecated and urinated on floors and into desk drawers, and they attempted to kidnap the Vice President and congressional leaders. 

And they were white, every single one of them.  The only black faces visible on videos taken during the riot are Capitol Hill police officers. 

It has happened before, white people rioting to try to stop something that was perfectly legal but which they didn’t like.  Here is how NPR described the riot that broke out on October 1, 1962, the day a black man, James Meredith, tried to become the first African American student at the University of Mississippi.  “The town of Oxford erupted. It took some 30,000 U.S. troops, federal marshals and national guardsmen to get James Meredith to class after a violent campus uprising. Two people were killed and more than 300 injured. Some historians say the integration of Ole Miss was the last battle of the Civil War.”

Before that, in September of 1957, a mob of white people stormed Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas, in an attempt to stop the integration of the school by several black children.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to prevent Governor Orville Faubus from using them to block the children from entering Central High.  In October, Eisenhower sent armed elements of the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to enforce the federal court order integrating the schools.  In retaliation, Faubus closed Little Rock’s high schools for the 1958-59 school year.  Rioting by white people had caused the crisis that necessitated Eisenhower’s dispatching federal troops to Little Rock.

Years later, President John F. Kennedy had to put the Army’s 2nd Infantry Division on alert at Fort Benning, Georgia, to enforce the integration of two black students at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.  White students rioted, threatening and spiting on the black students who had to be protected by federal marshals when George Wallace stood in the “schoolhouse door” trying to prevent their registration at the university.

We should retire the phrase invoked so often by so many politicians and pundits, “this isn’t who we are.”  It is who we are, it’s who we’ve been since before our founding as a nation.  It’s who we were when the Congressmen and Senators from the states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina walked out of the same Capitol Trump’s mob invaded in Washington D.C. and joined the Confederacy.  It’s who we were when Reconstruction was dismantled and the years of Jim Crow darkened the skies all across the South for Black people.  It’s who we were when the United States military was segregated by race, when Black applicants to West Point and Annapolis were denied admission, and finally when they were admitted, when they were “silenced” and shunned by all the white cadets and midshipmen.  It’s who we are every time an unarmed Black man or woman is shot down by a policeman, or choked to death by a policeman, or suffocated by a policeman, or shot in the back and paralyzed simply because they were attempting to get into their car. 

It’s who we were on Wednesday of this week when Trump’s mob of angry white men and women broke into our Capitol and wreaked havoc in his name.  It’s who we are today as we anxiously await the inauguration of Joe Biden and hear of another assault on our nation’s capital being planned by the leaders of Trump’s angry army of insurrectionists and traitors.

It was a race riot. Racism was with us on Wednesday as a noose, long a symbol of lynching, was hung on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, and racism will be with us the next time we are caused to fight for equality and freedom and our democracy.  And there will be a next time.  Trump may be gone on January 20, but what he stands for has always been with us and will not be eradicated with his departure from the White House.

Remember it every time you see the Confederate flag waved in angry defiance, every time you see one of their red, enraged faces, every time you hear them chant his name.  It is ugly and despicable and unacceptable but get used to it.  It is who we are.