{"id":38867,"date":"2021-02-13T15:40:56","date_gmt":"2021-02-13T15:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/radiofree.asia\/?guid=20d3d97003ee884f6ebd8ebacca41797"},"modified":"2021-02-13T15:40:56","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T15:40:56","slug":"the-capitol-siege-was-white-supremacy-in-action-trial-evidence-confirms-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/13\/the-capitol-siege-was-white-supremacy-in-action-trial-evidence-confirms-that\/","title":{"rendered":"The Capitol Siege Was White Supremacy in Action. Trial Evidence Confirms That."},"content":{"rendered":"\"Trump<\/a>

New footage aired at the impeachment trial of Donald Trump has flooded the U.S. once again with images of the violent mob that stormed the Capitol last month, reigniting our horror and attempt as a nation to make sense of the event.<\/p>\n

What we witnessed was white supremacy on full display. There were Confederate flags, nooses, symbols of antisemitism. There were members of \u201calt-right\u201d groups such as the Proud Boys. Combine these facts with the reality that the white mob was there to overturn legitimate votes, especially votes cast by majority-Black voters who played a significant role in electing now-President Joe Biden, this was a case of white power and white rage unhinged. And we must not forget about the two Black Capitol police officers who were called the n-word multiple times. Given Trump\u2019s white nationalist fervor and white racism, the majority white mob reflected his image, his anti-Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) sensibilities. All of this confirms that the Capitol Siege represented the brazen reemergence of white supremacy in our country.<\/p>\n

Two east Texans described the mob violence as an attempt at a \u201csecond revolution<\/a>,\u201d while GOP Sen. Roy Blunt has sought to describe<\/a> it as a right-wing equivalent to the Black Lives Matter upswell of protest against police brutality. Both of these formulations are hard to stomach.<\/p>\n

\u201cRevolution,\u201d connotes the attempted overthrow of an existing power structure that is oppressive and unjust, but the \u201coppression\u201d articulated by the majority-white mob who stormed the Capitol was actually a fabricated stew of conspiracy theories about election theft and the existence of threats to white supremacy.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, to conflate what took place at the Capitol with what took place on the streets of the U.S. (and around the world) last year regarding resistance to police brutality is to denude the latter of righteous indignation against current and historical systems of racial injustice.<\/p>\n

The emergence of unabashed white supremacy was certainly on display at the Capitol on January 6, which is not to say that every white person there was a card-carrying member of a white supremacist group. The unprecedented storming of the Capitol and the brazen reemergence of white supremacy in our country, forced a set of questions regarding the meaning of revolution.<\/p>\n

As I considered these things, I wondered what Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. might think. To tackle these questions, I spoke with Peniel E. Joseph, who is the Barbara Jordan Chair in Political Values and Ethics and Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Joseph\u2019s most recent book is The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.<\/em>, which was named by Time Magazine<\/em> as one of the 100 Must-Read books of 2020. <\/p>\n

George Yancy:<\/strong> During the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the term \u201crevolution\u201d was bandied about. When I think about Black revolutionary discourse and Black revolutionary consciousness in the U.S., I think about Black people who have had enough of white racism, its violence against and dehumanization of people who look like me. My point is that the discourse of Black revolution is grounded not just in self-determination or even armed struggle, but steeped in bringing an end to anti-Black racism, the brutalization of Black bodies and the reality of systemic racial discrimination and oppression. And even if one opposes armed Black struggle, as Martin Luther King Jr. did, one certainly understands that Black people are sick of being treated as sub-persons. So, what do you make of the discourse of \u201crevolution\u201d or \u201cinsurrection\u201d vis-\u00e0-vis the largely white-led attack on the Capitol? The attack wasn\u2019t motivated because of the weight of \u201chistorical anti-whiteness.\u201d The U.S. was not<\/em> founded upon anti-whiteness. What then was at its core, especially when one considers the demonstrable racist oppressive plight that Black people lived under and continue to live under? What I\u2019m suggesting is that the term \u201crevolution\u201d that was used by some within the white mob was not only a misnomer but was denuded of a single thread of political integrity and righteous indignation.<\/strong><\/p>\n