By now, the world has witnessed white rioters seize the Capitol building in Washington DC. After hearing Donald Trump encourage them to reject the presidential election’s outcome, thousands reportedly pushed through cops to storm ongoing congressional debates and reign supreme over politicians who fearfully scurried out of the halls of power. Draped in American, Confederate, and Trump flags, the raiders invaded the House floor, occupied representative offices, and filled balconies and scaffolds that line the windows. Joe Biden took to a podium to respond, cautioning the country that “our democracy is under unprecedented assault”.
On television, I saw paramedics rush a stretcher in the pandemonium. The woman bearing a bloodied face laying on top startled me, the anchor, and the cameraman. Please God, don’t let that woman be dead, I prayed, though her eyes lacked an animating essence. When I saw the video of the Proud Boys burn a Black Lives Matter banner a few weeks ago, I knew there would be more violent acts of desperation because they need a cause to feel empowered. Envying the resistance of the oppressed, Trump supporters want reasons to march and chant, so they create enemies and feign vulnerability as their cause grows lost. They sacrificed their lives to save white supremacy, even though it threatens them, too, materially and morally. And Black lives may never matter to people, like the woman, who will risk their own white lives during a pandemic to attack the nation’s capital to protect Donald Trump.
A senior Capitol police officer reportedly shot and killed her. But even the police shooting of the Trump supporter did not immediately catalyze significant law enforcement action to stop the conservative Caucasian invasion. Later, I watched a group of unmasked white men and women chase down a Black law enforcement agent who wielded only a stick in return. I was angry. Not because I felt bad for the cop, but because in that moment, I watched him realize that he was Black, outnumbered, and per the Dred Scott supreme court decision, “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Wednesday was a reminder of one difference between white rebellion to feigned oppression and Black resistance to actual oppression: where there is radical Black resistance, there is state repression. Where there is white rebellion for conservative causes, there is collusion with the state. Even when the white cops are outnumbered, like the McKinney, Texas, cops who assaulted Dajerria Becton in her swimsuit, they escalate; he just pulled the gun out on Black teens who came to her rescue. Police have stomped, beat, shot, teargassed, and arrested protesters who organize, march, pray and sing for our multi-racial liberation movements. Including me. Yet on Wednesday, activists and bystanders knew damn well that if the election refusers who raided the Capitol were Black, then the same politicians who kneeled for George Floyd and painted yellow “Black lives matter” letters onto the streets would have sent the full force of the law to stop it.
However, calling for the police to treat white election-outcome deniers like they treat Black people fighting for social justice misses the purpose and function of police, which is largely to manage inequality. No parity exists for these protesters. When the political activist Bree Newsome scaled a pole to pull down the Confederate flag following the Charleston Massacre in 2015, a diverse pair of cops promptly arrested her. On Wednesday, police stood by as the Capitol raiders scaled a window to replace the United States flag with Trump’s. White rowdy groups like this do not threaten the fundamentally racist, militarist, and capitalist foundation of the country; they are molded by it. So local and federal government usually let them have their way, from raiding and occupying federal property in Oregon, to massive biker shootouts that killed nine people in Texas; from the Oathkeepers militia group patrol in Missouri, to the militia groups that police thanked in Wisconsin, right before Kyle Rittenhouse did when he killed two men.
“Trumpism” is the predominant paradigm that accounts for the current capitol siege. Trump is obviously to blame for the most recent events. But only partly. I even forget this sometimes. Last year, I shared a story about an anti-immigration rally that I counter-protested in college. Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Kris Kobach were the headline speakers. White Republicans filled the packed Kansas auditorium, angry that they were losing their country to Mexicans that colonizers forced further south. Each speaker’s xenophobic and racist rhetoric was so violent and familiar that I finally said, “It was like a Trump rally, seven years before he took office.”
What racial justice activists make plain in the spectacle of Trumpism, law and order, and white nationalism is the violent failure of liberals and conservatives to foster any real democracy within these borders. Most of America’s violence is mundane and happens on the floors that were taken over by rioters. Just last week, Congress issued meager $600 pandemic relief checks to people facing widespread hunger, eviction, unemployment, disease and distress. There were no riots. Senate Republicans refused to raise the relief to $2,000 but rallied bipartisan support to override Trump’s veto of a nearly $800bn military budget. Biden, the president-elect, has veto dreams of his own. If Congress passes universal healthcare during the deadliest month of the coronavirus pandemic, Biden will kill the bill. Unless we organize, there will be little resistance.
Trump refuses the legitimate election results, which is staunchly anti-democratic. However, the legitimate election results are also anti-democratic. The financial and social costs to run for most offices run high, though less violent than stealing an election or staging a coup. Candidates spent $14bn alone on advertising for the 2020 election cycle, and at nearly $1bn, the most recent Georgia special and runoff senate elections were the most expensive of any state in history. Democrats presented two billionaires and five millionaires as presidential candidates last year. The race, gender and sexual orientation diversity of the field obscured the desperate need for wealth redistribution, campaign finance reform and publicly funded elections. But without resistance, many of us celebrate the few people who overcome the barriers, and carry the “our ancestors fought and died for this right” card in our pockets, all the way to our own graves.
And while witnesses are now championing for DC police to quiet and quell the white riots tonight, Muriel Bowser, the mayor, will have additional support to secure the tens of millions in police overtime pay that will be most practiced on the Black and brown residents in the city. Why would a Black mayor concede to defunding the police when she can be celebrated nationally for renaming a plaza “Black lives matter?”
Ousting Trump is a good start to changing the Oval Office. But changing the president only changes the spectacle; the mundane violence will remain. As much as we ought to condemn the nationalists outside the walls of Congress, we must continue to organize against the politicians inside who maintain the racist, capitalist, and militaristic agendas that wreak their destruction beneath the galleries – away from the cameras, away from the scrutiny, and away from the rest of us who actually have good reason fill up the streets.
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist