<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail-taxonomy"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/white-settler-uprising-capitol">https://www.blackagendareport.com/white-settler-uprising-capitol</a></font>
</div><div class="gmail-taxonomy"><br></div><div class="gmail-taxonomy"><a id="gmail-label" href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/white-settler-uprising-capitol" rel="bookmark"><font size="4"><b><span>White Settler Uprising at the Capitol</span></b></font>
</a>
</div>
<div class="gmail-author gmail-clearfix">
<div class="gmail-author-container">
<div class="gmail-author-details">
<span><a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/author/Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor">Glen Ford, BAR Executive Editor</a></span>
</div>
<div class="gmail-authored-date">
14 Jan 2021
</div>
<div class="gmail-translated-by">
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-share-icons"> <a class="gmail-facebook gmail-fbc-has-badge gmail-fbc-UID_1 fbc-has-badge fbc-UID_2" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.blackagendareport.com/white-settler-uprising-capitol" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a><a class="gmail-twitter" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=White Settler Uprising at the Capitol&url=http://www.blackagendareport.com/white-settler-uprising-capitol" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a><a class="gmail-mail" href="mailto:?subject=White Settler Uprising at the Capitol&body=NewsClick - http://www.blackagendareport.com/white-settler-uprising-capitol">
</a>
</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail-content">
<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-field-cover-image gmail-field--type-image gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field--item"><a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Glen_845x400_0.jpeg" title="White Settler Uprising at the Capitol" class="gmail-colorbox gmail-cboxElement"><img src="https://www.blackagendareport.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/Glen_845x400_0.jpeg" alt="White Settler Uprising at the Capitol" class="gmail-img-responsive" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="424" height="201">
</a>
</div>
<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-field-image-caption gmail-field--type-string gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field--item">White Settler Uprising at the Capitol</div>
<div class="gmail-field gmail-field--name-body gmail-field--type-text-with-summary gmail-field--label-hidden gmail-field--item"><p>Last week’s assault on the Capitol was essentially a race riot, the product of white racial grievance.</p>
<p><strong><em>“Race has been as central to Donald Trump’s presidency as it was to Woodrow Wilson’s, a century ago.”</em></strong></p>
<p>“If it can happen in the United States, it can happen anywhere,” wrote <em>New York Times</em> Berlin bureau chief <a href="https://mediaklik.net/world-leaders-express-horror-at-us-capitol-attack/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Katrin Bennhold<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>,
purporting to sum up world leaders’ reaction to the white nationalist
assault on the U.S. Capitol. The truth is precisely the opposite: mob
violence by white people aggrieved at perceived threats to their
political hegemony due to the growing influence or presence of the Other
— most often, Blacks — is trademark <em>Americana</em>, an historically
repetitive phenomena that is, to varying degrees, also characteristic
of other white settler states that share the U.S.’s genocidal history.
It cannot “happen anywhere,” because similar conditions and histories do
not exist everywhere. Bennhold’s interpretation of global sentiment is
pure American exceptionalist propaganda — an erasure of U.S. history to
project a false view of the present. (In fact, the only world
semi-notable who mouthed words similar to Bennhold’s was former Romanian
prime minister <a href="https://www.romania-insider.com/ro-reactions-us-capitol-violence-jan-7-2021" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Dacian Cioloş<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>.)</p>
<p>White mobs and armed groups have been inflicting violence against the
non-white presence in their colonial settler state ever since their
ancestors arrived on these shores. The Puritans – a colony-in-arms — had
all but completed the mission of racially “purifying” New England
within a century of setting foot at Plymouth Rock. Far more Native
Americans were killed by massed, armed settler civilians than by
uniformed armies of the British Crown or the young U.S. republic. Whites
in the slave states of the U.S. South were a people perpetually in arms
in “defense” against slave rebellions, with every able-bodied white man
obligated to aid in suppressing real or threatened Black revolts.
Hundreds of Blacks were massacred in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831
rebellion. </p>
<p><strong><em>“Mob violence </em></strong><strong><em>is trademark </em></strong><strong>Americana<em>, an historically repetitive phenomena that is, to varying degrees, also characteristic of other white settler states.”</em></strong></p>
<p>Northern white mobs also rejected the Black presence in their cities
in the pre-Civil War era. Racists attempted to drive Black people out of
Cincinnati, Ohio, three times: in 1829, 1836 and 1841. (In 1853 and
1855, white Cincinnati nativists also fought with German immigrants who
had been influenced by revolutionary trends in Europe.)</p>
<p>After the Civil War, white mobs and racist armies spent 30 years subduing Black Reconstruction, from the <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/new-orleans-massacre-1866/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">New Orleans massacre of 1866<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> to the armed overthrow of the Black Republican-white Populist government in <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/wilmington-massacre-2/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Wilmington,<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> North
Carolina’s largest city, in 1898. During this period tens of thousands
were killed — far more than the four thousand-plus Black lynching
victims recorded by the great journalist/organizer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/04/26/fearless-ida-b-wells-honored-by-new-lynching-memorial-for-fighting-racial-terror/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Ida B. Wells<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>.</p>
<p>White civilians annihilated the remaining natives of California in
the gold and land rushes, and terrorized and forced the mass expulsion
of Chinese from the state.</p>
<p>For the first 160 years of the U.S. republic’s life, the term “race
riot” applied almost exclusively to white mob attacks on non-whites.
Every boxing victory won by Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson set
off <a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unforgivable-blackness/about-the-film" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">lethal rampages<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> by northern and southern whites in the early years of the 20th century. The “<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/07/27/744130358/red-summer-in-chicago-100-years-after-the-race-riots" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Red Summer<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>” of 1919, dubbed such by the Black public intellectual and activist <a href="https://time.com/5636454/what-is-red-summer/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">James Weldon Johnson<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>,
saw white “race riots” in dozens of cities and the massacre of hundreds
of Blacks in rural areas around Elaine, Arkansas. In Washington, DC,
however, Blacks fought back, killing 15 white attackers while losing 38
to the mob. Heartened by the Black resistance to armed racist assault,
Black poet and activist Claude McKay wrote the poem, <em><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44694/if-we-must-die" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">If We Must Die<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a></em>:</p>
<p><em>“… O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!</em></p>
<p><em>Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,</em></p>
<p><em>And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!</em></p>
<p><em>What though before us lies the open grave?</em></p>
<p><em>Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,</em></p>
<p><em>Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”</em></p>
<p>Just as the current president is blamed for inciting the white mob in
Washington, President Woodrow Wilson was viewed as a prime instigator
of mass racist violence during his terms in the White House, including
the <a href="https://www.lindenwood.edu/files/resources/the-confluence-fall-winter-2017-2018-bachelier.pdf" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">East St. Louis riot<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> that claimed the lives of hundreds of Black people in 1917. An <a href="https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/woodrow-wilson-racism-federal-agency-segregation-213315" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">arch- segregationist<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> who introduced Jim Crow to the federal civil service, Wilson endorsed the Ku Klux Klan-glorifying film <em>Birth of a Nation</em> as “<a href="https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/jimcrow/stories_events_birth.html" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">History written in lighting,”<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> in 1915. The presidentially-endorsed movie ushered in a “gilded age for the Klan. In the summer of 1925, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/08/17/the-day-30000-white-supremacists-in-kkk-robes-marched-in-the-nations-capital/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">30,000 hooded terrorists<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> paraded in a show of force in Washington, DC.</p>
<p><strong><em>“President Woodrow Wilson was viewed as a prime instigator of mass racist violence during his terms in the White House.”</em></strong></p>
<p>The term “race riot” was synonymous with white mob attacks against
people of color until 1935, when an estimated 4,000 Blacks in Harlem,
New York, took to the streets against <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/harlem-riot-1935/" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">police brutality<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>. Harlem <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Harlem-race-riot-of-1943" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">exploded again in 1943<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>,
for the same reasons, establishing the modern pattern of police
repression/Black urban resistance. (The “Zoot Suit” riot by white
servicemen and cops against Latinos in <a href="https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sxsrf=ALeKk01IBe9yLK58EBUUKV6Lf1ZyYwl8qQ%3A1610560660711&ei=lDT_X5zFKuyh_Qbt8qbwDw&q=zoot+suit+riots+of+1943&oq=zoot+suit+riots&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQARgBMgsIABCxAxDJAxCRAjIECAAQQzICCC4yAggAMgIIADICCAAyAggAMgQILhBDMgIIADICCC46BwgjEOoCECc6CAguEJECEJMCOgUIABCRAjoFCAAQsQM6CAgAELEDEIMBOgsILhCxAxDHARCjAjoQCC4QxwEQrwEQyQMQQxCTAjoHCAAQyQMQQzoICAAQsQMQkQI6BwgAELEDEEM6BQguELEDOggILhCxAxCDAToHCC4QFBCHAjoNCAAQsQMQyQMQFBCHAlD4FFi-NmDLRWgBcAB4AIABW4gBsQiSAQIxNZgBAKABAaoBB2d3cy13aXqwAQrAAQE&sclient=psy-ab" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">1943 Los Angeles<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a> was a mixture of both old and new patterns of white domestic aggression.)</p>
<p>Police repression/Black urban resistance has become such a part of
the modern American experience that white mob violence is often not
characterized as a “race riot” – especially if the rioters are cops. </p>
<p>Race has been as central to Donald Trump’s presidency as it was to
Woodrow Wilson’s, a century ago. Last week’s assault on the Capitol was
essentially a race riot, the product of white racial grievance. Since
1968, the Republicans have successfully sought to position themselves as
the White Man’s Party. Not since 1964 has a majority of whites voted
for a Democratic presidential candidate, and Donald Trump won 57 percent
of white votes last November. Having feasted on Trump’s racist “red
meat” rhetoric for the past five years, the most volatile elements of
the white hordes mounted an assault on the “nigger lovers,” as they used
to describe people perceived as allies of Blacks, on Capitol Hill.</p>
<p>Of course, the U.S. Capitol is no stronghold of Black Power — the
Congressional Black Caucus voted overwhelmingly to make police a
protected class, <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/black-caucus-sells-out-its-constituents-again-cops">in 2018</a>, and to continue the Pentagon’s militarization of local cops, <a href="https://blackagendareport.com/node/22056">in 201</a>4.
But racists are cognitively challenged; they see phenomena that doesn’t
exist, and are blind to what’s right in front of their eyes. The
denizens of white settler colonies, worldwide, have always perceived
their states as precarious outposts of “civilization” – a worldview that
justifies any and all atrocities against the natives and imported
“lesser” humans, including genocide. </p>
<p><strong><em>“Racists see phenomena that doesn’t exist, and are blind to what’s right in front of their eyes.”</em></strong></p>
<p>Given the mass murderous record of every white settler colony on the
planet – which includes all the nations of the Americas, with the
possible exception of the Caribbean countries -- it was surprising to
find that only one recent book on Latin American white settler states
turns up in a Google search engine. Richard Gott’s <em>Latin America as a White Settler Society</em>, published in 2007 by the Bulletin of Latin American Research, can be read at <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/27733923" class="gmail-0" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">JSTOR<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>.
Gott sees race as central to understanding the white settler mentality,
even many generations after settler arrival on foreign shores.:</p>
<p>“A recognizable feature of all ‘settler colonial’ states is the
ingrained racist fear and hatred of the white settlers, alarmed by the
continuing presence of the expropriated underclass. It is built-in to
the history of the European colonial states in Africa as well as that of
the antipodean colonies of Australia and New Zealand. Yet the race
hatred of the settlers has only had a minor part in our traditional
understanding of the drama of Latin American history and contemporary
society. It is often underplayed or ignored – as it is too in the USA –
and even politicians and historians of the Left have preferred to
discuss class rather than race.”</p>
<p>In the case of the United States, American exceptionalism erases
actual history and denies U.S. commonality with any other nation. <em>New York Times</em> reporter Katrin Bennhold can get away with pretending that the United States is <em>both</em> unique
and a bell-weather for “democracy” everywhere on the planet – which is
ridiculous on its face. The events at the Capitol are absolutely
consistent with racist white mob behavior throughout U.S. history, and
totally understandable in the white colonial settler context. Outside of
that context, these events make far less sense.</p>
<p>The U.S. is best understood as the first of the planet’s white
colonial settler states – a species of state that includes most of the
rest of the western hemisphere, Australia, New Zealand, and the last of
the settler breed, Israel.</p>
<p>In clinging to the exceptionalist fallacy that the U.S. is a model of
democracy and unique in the world, rather than the end-product of
colonial white settler predation, the Democrats reveal that they share
much the same delusions as the flagpole-wielding Trumpsters they revile.</p>
<p><strong><em>BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at <a href="mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com" class="gmail-0">Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com<span class="gmail-0"><span class="element-invisible"> </span></span></a>.</em></strong></p></div></div>
</div>