On Wednesday, we saw not only an attempted coup at the seat of the legislative branch of our government, we came face to face with reality of the America that we have been trying to deny since its creation. Donald Trump’s actions over the last five years shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has paid attention and nor should the resulting riots and insurrection be a shock. We’ve known who Trump is and what he has stood for since he descended down Trump Tower’s golden escalator in June of 2015, yet we’ve tried to ignore it and discard it as an anomaly within our American machine. We watched him spread baseless, dangerous lies throughout his campaigns and presidency and we chalked it up to a phenomenon that would pass. Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not a glitch in the system. He is who we are. We just finally got a full throated display for the world to see.
If you’re still shocked about what happened earlier this week, either you’re unaware of the realities of our country, or you’re sympathetic to it. Trump’s words and actions have brought a rise to white supremacy that we thought didn’t exist. Not here in America, the country that defeated fascism and the Nazis in World War II. Not the America that stands for freedom and liberty and justice for all. Not the America of racial equality and progress that has been consistently championed. No, this is our America and Trump’s rhetoric has always been what we are. He has made it more visible and loud enough for us to finally recognize. Yesterday, we saw it come to a head through the actions of his supporters as they stormed the Capitol building for the first time since the War of 1812. And yet, some of us are still asking “why?”
What’s truly tragic about the riots are the comparisons to the Black Lives Matter movement and protests over the summer. The fact that an angry mob of White people aided by the police could make it to the top of the Capitol steps, let alone inside the building is both unfathomable while simultaneously realistic. But yet, while Donald Trump supporters screamed chants of “patriotism” and “taking back their country” while scaling the stone walls, the were met with little resistance. As a matter of fact, they were welcomed and celebrated despite clearly being violent and wanting to subvert our democratic process. The saddest part is, many of us have acknowledged that if it were a group of African American citizens that had attempted such a display, it would never have happened. The demonstrations that we saw Wednesday would have been met with much more force by law enforcement: rubber bullets, tear gas, flash grenades, they all would have been used not a second before a march had begun. You might disagree, but think back to this summer where millions of Black Americans were simply marching for the right to not be killed by the hands of police. An overwhelming majority of them were peaceful, yet we saw bloody images of protesters shot and beaten and even killed. These protests were met with aggressive tactics by officers that are typically used for what we saw yesterday. But the Capitol protests were not.
Of course, violence by any means should not be accepted. In an ideal world, this movement would have been viewed as a desperate call for change; millions of Americans risked their lives during a deadly pandemic to take a stand against the brutality of unarmed African Americans by police. But for far too long our voices have been heard and silenced without tangible change and the ensuing violence is a result of it. The oft-quoted Martin Luther King Jr. said, “a riot is the language of the unheard” as a response to the antithesis to his strategy of peaceful protest. Realistically, MLK understood that peaceful protests will work if the oppressed voices are heard and accepted. Though he insisted upon reaming docile, he was consistently ignored and met with hatred by white onlookers and dissenters. Still, though counterintuitive in his eyes, he sympathized with those who rioted and understood their pain and anger. 70 years later and not only was he correct, but his words ring true and strong.
“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
— Stokely Carmichael
Frustratingly enough, people seem to want to compare the BLM protests and the insurrection at the Capitol. The only parallels that can be drawn to these events was violence and anger with our institutions. Other than that, there is no comparison to be made when one side is fighting for the right to live and the other is trying to overthrow an election based upon lies and conspiracy theories spewed by a racist coward. The intent of both causes are vastly different in nature and reasoning. Apples to apples isn’t applicable to this situation no matter how hard you want make it out to be, and it is a shame that such a comparison exists. We can’t keep defaulting to “violence is never the answer” as our response to such uprisings.
This is what America has always been. Instead of addressing the institutional racism and white supremacy that has been baked into our society for centuries, we ignore it and oppress those who fight against it under our own delusions of “equality”. We clutch our pearls, shield our eyes and pretend that the present reality is not who we are, despite very clearly having evidence to the contrary. Unfortunately, Trump isn’t going away on January 20th, both physically and metaphorically. Donald Trump will still exist and the movement that he spurred will as well. It will only grow despite the end of his time in office and we have to spend time fighting back against it. So many of us want to go back to “normal” after that date because the normality that we accepted prior to his presidency was a normality that we could ignore. Instead we must truly understand what America’s normality is. We must take a long hard look in the mirror and face the centuries of white supremacy and white rule that got us to Wednesday. We must spend time unpacking, studying, and understanding our history and societal structure to make sure that we do not continue to make the same mistakes that got us as far as we’ve come. We need to spend time listening to the millions of POC that have been oppressed and suffered because of our inaction, cruelty, and ability to accept the status quo. Most importantly, we have to make change. Fundamental, tangible, change. Not circumstantial change that simply comes as a result of the last four years, but change that is long lasting and resounding. If we do not, the consequences that we will face will be worse than a Donald Trump. And we are all too lucky that we only had Wednesday’s attempted coup as the worst of it.
