By Robert Koehler
I still see the noose in front of the capitol building, dangling oh so metaphorically.
“No matter how all this plays out, it’s only the beginning,” wrote a user on TheDonald message board, according to the Associated Press.
Actually, it’s anything but the beginning—though I get what the writer means, that there’s more to come. All 50 state capitals are now in the crosshairs of the armed protest movement, apparently, not to mention, once again, the national capitol, where Joe Biden is scheduled to be inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Indeed, Huffington Post reports that Capitol Police briefed congressional Democrats this week on three “potentially gruesome demonstrations planned in the coming days,” which could include assassination attempts, and among other things suggested that on inauguration day all representatives and senators be put through metal detectors before they’re allowed to enter the halls of Congress, just to make sure they aren’t armed. Some of them are . . . uh . . . “in league with the insurrectionists.”
As one lawmaker explained to Huffington Post: “You can’t just let them bypass security and walk right up to Biden and Harris at inauguration.”
Thanks to Donald Trump, a national return to some sort of centrist “normal” is now impossible. Lots of people believe a civil war is already underway and they’re excited as hell about it. Political Correctness meets Jim Crow—finally!
The “rigged election” craziness Trump and his minions have pushed to justify their armed insurrection is reality-based to the true believers, at least in one sense. You wanna know how the election was rigged? People of color—lots of them—voted! They swayed the damn election. If Jim Crow (code name: MAGA) were still the law, the orange-haired guy would have his second term and then some.
The noose, the Confederate flag, the poisoned American flag, the guy in the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt, T-shirts proclaiming 6MWNE (6 million were not enough) . . . stir these obscenities in with the Second Amendment and what you have is Hell, also known as the good old days. American racism is anything but superficial.
Its language and manifestation may change, but make no mistake: It never goes away. “Whites only” restrooms morph into the prison-industrial complex. And we always have our wars to wage, our enemies to dehumanize. White supremacy will never be defeated, but I’m certain it can be transcended, both personally and collectively, and the time to do so is now. But this can only happen if we stare unblinkingly at our national history.
As a starting place I recommend browsing through Without Sanctuary, a.k.a., the coffee table book from hell, a collection of lynch mob photographs and postcards from the first four decades of the 20th century, compiled by James Allen, which came out in 2000. It’s truly unbelievable and well beyond horrifying, but indispensable in helping one understand the depth of collective rage in the human soul, making the United States of America the equivalent of an active volcano. One of these days it will erupt—again.
I wrote about the book at the time: “July 19, 1935. Rubin Stacy, lynched in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Stacy, a homeless black tenant farmer, had asked a white woman for food, frightening her. Mob justice converted this to the capital offense of rape.
“In the photo, the dead man’s pain is palpable. He hangs from a scrub pine in ghastly, almost prayerful repose. The noose around his neck cuts a deep gouge, pulling the flesh taut to the jaw line. The onlookers are mostly women and little girls. The other central figure in the picture is one of the latter, maybe 9, sweet-faced, in a sleeveless, wide-collared dress you could imagine her wearing to Sunday School. She stares almost beatifically at the dangling corpse.”
Raw, racist violence, for much of the country’s history—and well beyond the Civil War (that earlier one, which started in 1861)—existed front and center, without shame. It was as American as apple pie.
And sometimes, when necessary, elected governments were overthrown. Consider the Wilmington. N.C., massacre of 1898, when a white mob torched much of the city and overthrew a racially integrated government that had been made possible in the brief era of Reconstruction, when black people could vote. By some accounts, as many as 300 of them were killed in the insurrection, led by former congressman Alfred Waddell, who had produced a “White Declaration of Independence” that declared: “We will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”
Waddell led a mob of 2,000 armed white men, who burned the building housing the black-owned newspaper, the Daily Record, to the ground, stormed into black neighborhoods with rifles and a Gatling gun, and eventually took over the city government.
“As bullets were still flying,” according to the Zinn Education Project, “Waddell threw out the democratically-elected aldermen and installed his own,” who quickly named him mayor. “This was nothing less than a coup d’état.”
A century-plus later, is another coup in the making? How many secret, and not-so-secret, adherents does a possible coup have within the nation’s political and defense infrastructure? Are we in a state of national emergency?
And how do we become a different country?
This question hasn’t had such urgency in a long time.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, “Courage Grows Strong at the Wound” (2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
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Deborah Coffey says
Make overt racism an automatic firing from a job and a hate crime. White supremacists have never been held accountable.
Truth says
Deborah Coffey, I agree with you 100%. That also means that some people in charge of hiring/firing should be fired themselves.
Richard says
If a second civil war does happen the people to blame are ALL of the two faced hypocritical corrupt politicians across this country and in Washington DC who have ruined this country just for the sake of lining their pockets with money and power. Elected officials have been lying to us for many years promising BIG changes once they are elected only to succumb to BIG wealthy businesses, BIG Lobbyist’s, BIG Tech, BIG media and BIG social media companies. What you now have are millions of people fed up with these corrupted politicians. Change the political culture and get back to an open, honest and transparent government who works for the American people and not for themselves.
James M. Mejuto says
re: Capitol police RACISM: How was it possible that racist, fascist groups were able to erect a gallows
on the Capitol grounds ?
Where were the police, the guards, the guardians of democracy ?
This cabal, the Capitol police has to be completely overhauled !
There was absolutely no sane reason the Capitol police could not
have fired their weapons to control the mob.
There has to be a total investigation of this racist, fascist Capitol Police Dept.
James M. Mejuto says
Well ! . . . We have the ‘blue wall of silence’ up against citizen outcry regarding police abuse
and MURDER !
This is what happens when one political party controls the entire state.
Floridian voters have themselves to blame, disregarding signs that there are major problems in
our infrastructure.
What happens when racism and fascism meet to deny a voice in government ?
Steve Kaplan says
We are now engaged in a war against the disease that is sickening and killing our fellow citizens at an accelerating rate. So far, the enemy disease is winning the battle. Our lack of cohesive efforts in combatting this threat to our survival is beyond verbal description. I am old enough to recall our nation’s response to emergencies like the 2nd World War, when we put aside our political differences and fought together to prevail against our common enemy. We were wise enough to join together and understand the term that “in unity there is strength” (the converse is also true that “in disunity there is weakness”) The only way to “make America great again” is to unite for the common good. We must stop concentrating on personal gain or we will fail, and our nation will fail as others have in history – nations that have risen and fallen in the past. A cohesive national policy must be established to fight the pandemic. Private industry must be encouraged to produce more vaccine . People must stop hiding behind constitutional law in justifying their position of lack of cooperation in logical, sensible methods of resisting the disease. Our public officials must be motivated and consider the priorities. If this is not done, we will lose.
Richard says
Political correctness is itself politically incorrect, it is intended to suppress free speech guaranteed by the constitution. There is nothing illegal about hate speech, as they say, the first amendment is not intended to protect speech that we like. Not to say that that seems to be what a lot of politicians and political extremists would like to do, silence their critics or silence ideas that they do not agree with. Fortunately we are not China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela etc who actually decide what is politically correct.
Mike Cocchiola says
This article pretty much describes the future of MAGA if we go to sleep and let that future happen. That future is actually the past as in the Jim Crow era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. White privilege and White supremacy.
The Trumplicans learned a lot with their attempted coup on January 6 to reinstall Trump as their leader. They learned that frontal assault won’t work so long as law enforcement and the military remain committed to the Constitution and to the rule of law. Just like the Tea Party zealots infiltrated and captured the Republican Party, the new MAGA Party will try to infiltrate senior ranks within the military services and state law enforcement agencies, legislatures and the courts. We already see many of them in our national Congress. They are not going away. They are gaining power. Remember… they are not seeking to heal America. They want to capture America.
Erobot says
Political correctness and Jim Crow are both on the same side.