If you’re black, no great shock about Capitol attack

A noose and gallows erected by Trump supporters in front of the Capitol. Photo: SHAY HORSE (NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES)

I’m shocked. But unlike like millions of US citizens, the reason for my shock at last week’s Capitol Hill insurrection isn’t what you might think.

I’m shocked that this type of white nationalist mob violence didn’t happen years earlier, during the election and resultant eight-year tenure of Barack Obama, this country’s first African-American president.

But here’s why I’m shocked most of all: so many of my white countrymen saying they’re shocked by the Capitol carnage.

Seriously?

What the hell else would they or anyone else rightfully expect after a white supremacist despot ruler demonized non-whites almost from the moment he announced his candidacy, rode a toxic wave of white nationalist bile to America’s highest office, then with his rhetoric, mobilized a troglodyte army to “fight like hell” to disrupt certifying a democratic election he handily lost?

The US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have publicly stated for the last four years that white nationalist domestic terrorism — not, as the despot falsely claimed, “radical Islam,” not an imaginary group, “Antifa,” and certainly not the anti-police brutality group, “Black Lives Matter” — is America’s deadliest national security threat.

It has been, actually, since 1619. For us non-whites, white nationalist mob terrorism is American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. To millions of us, the grotesque orgy of violence was predictable, and it unearthed profound, shared cultural trauma.

For me, the attack was not only familiar — it was familial.

Just as it has for countless other African-American families, white racist mob violence has cast its malevolent shadow over mine. A seismic white domestic terrorist event in 1915 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, forever jolted the trajectory of my lineage.

My maternal grandmother and her sister, my great aunt, then teenagers, witnessed the trauma of a white supremacist vigilante mob lynching a black man in public.

Historical records from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based America’s Black Holocaust Museum identify the murdered man as Edward Johnson.

Lynching was hardly rare in the institutionally racist Jim Crow South. There were exactly 3958 other documented lynchings of African-American men and women there between 1877 and 1950 (an average of 54 per year), according to a study by the non-profit organization, the Equal Justice Initiative.

Just weeks later, as my mother tells the story, her grandmother — my great-grandmother — hastily gathered my grandmother and great aunt and all their belongings and boarded a northbound train for Chicago.

The terrorists — none of whom were even charged with a crime — drove away not just mine, but hundreds of other black Vicksburg families, who fled on the same train.

Even as its wheels turned, leaving the station, the refugees couldn’t feel safe. Word of the exodus had spread to the racists. They quickly realized they were losing their cheap labour source. But instead of reconciling to treat them with humanity, instead the racists threatened to bomb the train.

Weeks later, my maternal great-grandfather and his two sons, my great uncles, left Vicksburg. They joined the rest of the family in Chicago, where they and hundreds of thousands of other African-American refugees made a new life on the city’s south side. But like a predatory beast, white nationalist mob violence would follow them.

In 1919, at an unofficially segregated Lake Michigan beach, a white mob, furious at the sight of a black teen boy swimming there, stoned and then drowned him.

Despite black community leaders applying whatever pressure they could on Chicago police to make arrests, none were made. A white vigilante mob then descended on the south side, killing nearly two dozen black residents and leaving about 1000 more homeless after burning down their homes.

Fortunately, none of my family members were victims. My maternal grandmother — who died when I was a toddler — described a harrowing scene to my mother, recounting her and her family hiding in their homes as they heard screaming and saw violent clashes.

My maternal grandmother remained in Chicago, where she started her own secretarial service. She would later meet a young medical student, who had also left Jim Crow Virginia. He started a private medical practice in the neighbourhood, and decades after he and my grandmother brought my mother into the world, he would become my grandfather.

I don’t have to wonder too deeply about what both sets of my grandparents — my maternal Chicago and paternal South Carolina sides — would have thought about last week’s white nationalist assault on the US Capitol.

They wouldn’t have been shocked to learn that nearly 20 US Capitol police officers have been suspended or are under investigation for misbehaviour, including possibly aiding and abetting the mob, allowing it to spread like a virus as it broke windows, trashed offices, stole property, and menaced workers.

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They certainly wouldn’t have been shocked by the sight of one insurrectionist carrying a full-sized, Confederate battle flag — a prominent symbol of slavery — marching through the building, or a gallows the mob built, complete with a hangman’s noose, on the lawn.

They wouldn’t have been shocked seeing members of the mob wearing disgustingly anti-Semitic t-shirts celebrating the Jewish Holocaust with such acrid slogans as “Camp Auschwitz” and “6MWE (“Six Million Wasn’t Enough”).

But my grandparents, all college educated, would have clearly recognized the bitter irony in the white nationalist mob’s hypocrisy: publicly painting themselves as “patriots” and chanting “U-S-A!” while desecrating an iconic American building, and even going so far as to murder one police officer by bludgeoning him to death with a fire extinguisher, and assaulting other officers with poles with the very star spangled banner itself on the ends of them.

Maybe the most shocking statement I’ve heard some Americans make about last week’s travesty is this one: “This isn’t who we are as a country”.

Like hell it isn’t.

Land dispossession and genocide of the indigenous peoples from sea to shining sea, and across the Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands, and the enslavement of Africans, all made America what it has become and who its people are.

So does the outgoing, now twice-impeached fascist strongman’s placing a travel ban on Muslims and locking up brown undocumented immigrant children in cages on the border to Mexico, and exhorting his feral acolytes to storm the US Capitol and “fight like hell” to carry out an insurrection.

Because of his incendiary rhetoric, as of this writing, the FBI is reporting threats of armed demonstrators swarming all 50 state capitol buildings. America is on a state of alert not seen since the early days after September 11, 2001.

Once this vile, tinpot dictator leaves office, will the US Justice Department, under the leadership of President-elect Joe Biden, crush white nationalist domestic terror organizations and imprison its ringleaders?

Hopefully. And not a moment too soon.

But will white nationalist mob violence ever abate or cease? With 402 years of history suggesting otherwise, I’d be shocked by that, too.