By Lewis R. Gordon
Among the critical responses to white supremacists’ attack on Congress on the 6th of January 2021 was the cry of “white privilege.” Storming the U.S. Capitol Building is not a “privilege.” It is an example of presumed license afforded a violent white insurrectionist mob under the shield racism.
One properly has the privilege of doing what is right, often from what is earned; a license protects one from accountability for wrongful actions, whether earned or not. White supremacy is a white license.
It’s obvious that the instigators of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, from U.S. President Trump to his enablers Vice President Michael Pence, U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, Josh Hawley, House of Representatives Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and the long list of Republican Party members of Congress in cahoots with them, should be removed from office. We know what would unfold if Black Congresswomen and men had instigated such actions. White license/supremacy affords a lack of accountability for those white elected official.
Think about this: They planted pipe bombs, attacked police (killing one despite one of their rallying cries of “blue lives matter”), openly declared planning to murder Congresspeople, vandalized the Capitol building, and more, and most of them were able to leave under the protection of the law enforcement officers they were attacking.
#BlackLivesMatter advocates were and continue to be brutalized for speech, assembly, peaceful protest (all supposedly protected rights under the U.S. Constitution). Beyond political action, Black people are often brutalized by the police and many in white so-called civil society simply for appearing in public.
None of the white people who attacked the Capitol were disenfranchised; they were fighting for the continued disenfranchisement of people of color, especially Black people. They ransacked the Capitol building, assaulted officials and others resulting in five homicides, with the Confederate flag—a symbol of white supremacy in all its incarnations since 1861—held high.
We live with the continued charade, not only in the United States but in many countries in which right-wing populism sets root, of a “both sides” discourse when all the evidence of an asymmetrical assault on democracy, Black and Indigenous peoples, refugees, immigrants of color, and the poor is clear: taking advantage of liberal fetishizing of tolerance, right-wing forces across class lines regard all those who are not them as targets for elimination.
White supremacy affords the expectation and grace for critics to make every effort to see the humanity of treasonous whites, however violent their history. The truth of the matter is that the angry whites who have become the GOP’s base want the old and unfortunate game of false democracy, where their votes are expected to count more than everyone else’s, where, even when fewer in numbers, they are to count more than the rest of us.
Everyone who votes in U.S. elections know that each voter is afforded a single ballot on which is listed each candidate. It’s thus logically not possible for other Republican candidates to have won on a ballot that didn’t include Trump’s name. In short, Trump lost because the ballots were counted. He received little more than 74 million votes while his opponent President-Elect Joseph Biden received 81 million. There were 159 million votes casted. The takeaway? Presuming possibly all, if not most, of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol had voted Republican—if all or most of them had voted at all—then they were well aware their votes were counted, but they didn’t like the outcome.
Bad faith—the ability to lie to oneself—is, however, capacious. This includes suspending the force of evidence. In bad faith, one could make oneself believe what one wishes to believe. Add a full assault on evidence from Trump and his enablers, along with their portraits of themselves and their supporter as victims of a vast conspiracy, the conclusion is an incendiary situation.
In truth, January 2021 marks the culmination of an already volatile situation of hate in a country whose effort to erase the historic achievements of President Barack Obama, its first African American President on whom so many double standards were imposed that his accomplishments were daily revelations of a long history of white mediocrity. The response of narcissistic rage, of which Donald Trump was the chief spokesman, took the form of an effort to do to the civil rights movement what was done to Reconstruction by the end of the nineteenth century: erase it by means of propaganda and violence.
An event such as the attack on the U.S. Capitol rarely ever has a single cause. Already brewing was what was at stake in the U.S. Senate from the runoff elections in Georgia. To add insult to white supremacist aspirations, the two Democratic candidates were declared winners on the day of the attack. The first declared winner was Reverend Raphael Warnock, who is African American. Then came the news of Jon Ossoff, who, though considered white, isn’t white enough for most white supremacists because he is Jewish. The symbolism of a Southern state electing to the Senate—a branch of government designed, along with the Electoral College, to protect states historically committed to slavery and racism—embodiments of a Black and Jewish convergence is no doubt a blow struck against white supremacy. Add to this the importance of the enfranchisement activist Stacey Abrams and her organization Fair Fight; white supremacists are reeling with rage from a triple threat through which remains the vestige of white Christian settler colonialism: the plight of Indigenous peoples in the United States.
Want a democratic republic in the United States (and similar countries)? Do what W.E.B. Du Bois argued should have been done since 1865: take up the actual task of building democracy and not blocking the material and social conditions needed for the flourishing of dignity and freedom.
Lewis Gordon
Lewis R. Gordon is Chairperson of the Awards Committee of the Caribbean Philosophical Association and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs and Head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He is also Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies and Distinguished Scholar at The Most Honourable PJ Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona. He is the author of many books, including, most recently, Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021); Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA, and Penguin-UK 2022); Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon, edited by Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (Bloomsbury, 2023); and “Not Bad for an N—, No?”/ «Pas mal pour un N—, n'est-ce pas? » (Daraja Press, 2023).
Hmm, thought for the mind.