The Eternal Fantasy of a Racially Virtuous America

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://newrepublic.com/article/161568/white-supremacy-racism-in-america-kimberle-crenshaw

In the weeks since the storming of the U.S. Capitol by a lie-emboldened mob of Trump-branded insurrectionists, many political leaders and mainstream pundits across the political spectrum have assiduously sought to displace white supremacy’s starring role in the attack. On the far right, those who stormed the Capitol to “Make America Great Again” understood themselves to be patriots—asserting their standing as supercitizens, unbound by either election results or civil legal restraints, thanks to their privileged relation to American politics as a white propertied project.

In response, hand-wringing moderate commentators reached for their well-worn “this is not who we are” response. Their plea to conjure up the better angels of American memory amounted to a séance for the countless lives lost in the overthrow of Reconstruction’s multiracial democracy. Meanwhile, left pundits debated the “are we there yet?” question by looking to European history to find out whether January 6 signaled the onset of fascist decline. Neatly sidestepping the centuries-long reign of white supremacy in America that fed and sustained distinctly fascist currents in our politics long before Kristallnacht and long after the fall of the Third Reich, they inadvertently revived the same amnesiac refrain that prompted Langston Hughes to note, in 1937, “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

Indeed, each story line on the Capitol insurgency—particularly from the left and center—reflects a great deal of bowdlerized history, especially when it comes to the enduring legacies of American racial terror. This denialism bespeaks a broader failure to face up to the real nature of white supremacy across the political spectrum. Even at this late date, our commentariat overwhelmingly treats white supremacy as an over-there topic that warrants cursory interrogation and minimalist intervention—an excusable affliction of prejudice, an ancillary dimension of class power, or the distant echo of a long-ago social order with secondary significance in today’s crisis. Only the far right takes white supremacy onboard directly as its stolen birthright, and even the Confederate flag–wavers in its ranks routinely often deny that the “way of life” it symbolizes was grounded in defending the dehumanization of Black people.

To understand how explicitly anti-democratic desires can be framed as defending freedom, as well as how moderate and left responses to this political violence seem to underestimate its continuity from the past and its threat to our future, we have to grapple with the foundational role of white supremacy in our republic. Indeed, the drafters of our Constitution sanctioned the very notions of security and property as racialized interests hardwired into our political system. As a result, subsequent actions seeking to dismantle this legacy have been framed as illegitimate, preferential, and deeply threatening to the social order. The retraction of entitlements that were once taken for granted within a white supremacist order not only spurs vigilante violence; it also infects the color and code of law enforcement itself.

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

Thank you, btw. For your support.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

2. Another world is possible. In the meantime, the struggle continues.

[Solly Mack]

3. I believe that.

And to you

[leftstreet]

4. DURec

Great sentence early on:

The retraction of entitlements that were once taken for granted within a white supremacist order not only spurs vigilante violence; it also infects the color and code of law enforcement itself.

indeed

[WhiskeyGrinder]

5. Kick.

[dalton99a]

6. Kick

This racialized construction of law and order explains the jaw-dropping difference in the fully militarized response to Black Lives Matter protests and the collegial escort of the insurrectionists out of the ransacked Capitol. To begin to address this obscene disparity between those who marched to uphold the republic’s ideals and those who spilled blood to overthrow them, we must grapple with the fact that whiteness—not a simplistic racial categorization, but a deeply structured relationship to social coercion and group entitlement—remains a vibrant dimension of power in America.

As Cheryl Harris, David Roediger, and others have argued, property in whiteness has long served as a critical source of sociopolitical status. As a robust ideology, it ties wildly conflicting cross-class interests into a political stranglehold denying any sustainable and actionable sort of racial or socioeconomic equality. The cry of law and order has wrapped this family bond into a repetitive refrain in modern American politics, obscuring the violent ways in which a racialized underclass has been repeatedly disenfranchised and disciplined by the dictates of a white majority. The murderous January 6 insurrection furnished a snapshot of this racialized model of social order that’s long been familiar to America’s racialized others. Under this hermetic system of repression, white disorder simply does not compute as an existential threat to the republic. Even though the nation was nearly destroyed by the treasonous explosion of white rage in the Civil War, the would-be cautionary tale about the mortal threat of a fully weaponized supremacist agenda has largely remained, in the words of President Woodrow Wilson, a “quarrel forgotten.”

Thanks to the privileges and immunities of whiteness, those who have credibly questioned its hold—dreamers like Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X—were targeted, surveilled, and martyred before they reached the age of 40, while white supremacist agitators and murderers lived long lives as their suit-and-tie enablers brokered power in an unrepentant republic. To this day, racial justice advocacy comes with risks that few white nationalists will ever know—even those who kill. Kyle Rittenhouse has largely resumed his life; protesters from Ferguson to D.C. who took no one’s life have been arrested, dragged through the legal system, and even killed.

At the center of this twisted notion of law and order is the nation’s hagiographic self-narrative of being “born perfect and improving ever since.” Dominant in popular and political culture, this ideological mythmaking was scaffolded into political discourse over a century ago by the likes of the filmmaker D.W. Griffith. Still heralded as the father of American film, Griffith supplied a vigilant defense of the Confederacy’s Lost Cause mythos in The Birth of a Nation, which was purportedly hailed by President Wilson as “like writing history with lightning.” This propaganda offensive has hidden in plain sight in textbooks throughout the twentieth century, and in rituals that celebrate the American nation’s supposedly unbroken commitment to freedom and justice for all—a story that again demands a virtual conspiracy of silence about that ugly little matter called the Civil War.