Our History Our Time
Today is January 7th, 2021. When I was in college at the University of Minnesota, in the 70s, getting my degree in history, I never believed I would see this history. I had seen plenty, riots, protests, sit ins, demands for change, most I didn’t really have a deep grasp of.
I did understand the deep resentment for some of the protest back then. The war in Viet Nam. I could see that to an extent. I understood that we really had no reason to be there and young men were sent to be fodder.
But some of the protests just left me afraid, for instance the protests in Minneapolis and St. Paul MN in 67 and 68. I was around thirteen at the time. I remember seeing it on TV. My brother, who was nineteen, stood watching with me. He understood the violence and the rage better than I did. To me it was just chaos.
My mom once told me that during the depression, the great depression, my dad went down to Indiana from Minnesota with his father for work. He was replacing workers who were out on strike. They told the ‘scabs’ to leave. And the next day, my dad witnessed a lynching of a black man who had the nerve to replace these workers, or he saw the aftermath, the man hanging. He was about eighteen. He and my grandfather left quickly. I don’t know what he saw because he never told my mother or their friends. It was much to horrifying a memory.
I remember being a young mother, in the mid eighties, in a museum in Duluth Minnesota. I happened upon a poster, protected behind glass. It was a poster that had been, at one time, nailed to a wall or a tree, advertising the sale of slaves. A family would be separated during the sale, the man, the woman, a small child. Separated. I remember looking at that poster and thinking to myself, if the glass wasn’t there, I could touch the DNA of those that placed their fingers on the poster to read the words, or contemplate the worth of those human beings. I was shaken by the poster. Who could do this? Who could do this?
At the time of the riots and protests around in 1967 and 1968 in the Twin Cities, when I was a child of thirteen, I didn’t really understand racism. I lived in a White suburb. They were all White suburbs. Redlining. Keep the minorities out. I didn’t even know redlining existed because it remained in the shadows. I didn’t understand that when freeways were put in all over the country, they avoided White neighborhoods. They demolished Black communities. It was as if they ceased to exist. Every good, strong, vibrant, progressive and nurturing thing about those Black neighborhoods was crushed and sent into the wind, as were the people who now had begun to find places to live. They were not a neighborhood anymore. They were separate people looking for anywhere to set down new roots. They had no chance to find new lives in the suburbs, the White suburbs. And they had no way to reconnect with all those within the community that made them whole.
So much has happened since then, good and bad. More protests last spring and summer in Minneapolis and St. Paul, after the death of George Floyd. A family lost their father, son, brother. For what? Nothing really. What was behind this killing? Resentment by the officer who had his knee on Floyd’s neck? That could have been part of it. They worked together and Floyd blew the moonlighting officer off, didn’t give him the ‘respect’ the officer was looking for. But I know what it was in large part. It wouldn’t have happened if George Floyd was White. It was racism. Racism again. And again. And again. In one sense, none of these cases of police killings, shootings and brutality in our country are a separate issue. They all have a deep racism driving them. It is a fundamental and ongoing sin we can not wipe free from our souls, like blood from our hands. It is everywhere, and it will not go away. And because we are finally, demanding change, finally dealing with the roots of this sin, we are dealing with those who feel they are being wronged. Their White superiority is no longer a given.
Why do you think there is so much anguish by Whites over the removal of confederate statues? Because it is the symbol of racism. As long as those statues remain, racism remains. And for many Whites, even those who deny the undeniable, it is a comfort. White move farther and farther away from the suburbs that have been infiltrated, that are now less white. In the meantime, as Blacks walk beneath those statues that Whites insist remain, they see their past, the slavery, the separations, the lynchings, the Jim Crow, the sharecropping, the unfair justice, the deaths by police. And they know that the Whites glory in that past. The Confederacy still lives. When Donald Trump demands that the military bases keep the names of confederates, the Blacks soldiers and the families of this nation know what he knows, that they serve their country, on a base where a confederate is honored. As Donald Trump rubs their face in it, rubs every Americans face in it, there are those who love the defiance shows. It’s an open secret between him and his followers. They are still superior and will remain that way as long as he is president.
Donald Trump understands those followers. He knows them because he’s one of them. None of them are innocent, even if they didn’t partake in the protests through the last four years, or make comments on places like Twitter and Facebook. Their vote is enough. They didn’t vote for him because they are true red Republicans, because he has helped the economy, or they watched their portfolios jump, or that Trump had done a superb job as President. None of that is true and everybody knows it. COVID is a prime example. His leadership in dealing with it has been a frightening disaster. Everybody knows who Trump is, and what the Republican Party would prefer people not think about them. Despite what they are, who they are, what they stand for, and all the things they have grown to be, they are racist. And they allowed Donald Trump to be open about it.
Donald Trump knew the group he called to the Capital. They are the perfect people to start an insurrection. They feel wronged, and forgotten. They are White and this is a White country. They watch BLM protest go from protest into riots, and they criticized it for the damage it caused, the mayhem. They never heard those in the communities who had been hurt by the system, who were betrayed, who felt vulnerable.
Here’s the reality for all those who witness at the Capital on January 6th 2021. For these insurrectionists, it isn’t about the protest. The Blacks who protest are tired of being invisible and disposable. They are tired of justice never working in their favor. The Blacks, the Indigenous people, the Latinos and immigrants of this nation do protest and most of the time are very purposeful in their peacefulness. They protested with their vote. They voted in 2020 and they were heard.
The people who came to the Capital had a mission. Because they lost the election, they feel they are denied their rights, even though, as in every election, one side loses. No one cheated them out of their rights. It was a clean and fair election. So really, what grievances do they have? What injustices have they been forced to endure? What act of peaceful protest would shine a light on what they have gone through? What was their mission? Be noticed. Show who is in charge. Keep Donald Trump as president.
There were no protests. There was no peaceful intent.These were riots from the beginning. It was apparent from the start. The rioters had their mission. They broke into the Capital building and they defiled it. And they did it for themselves and for Donald Trump to keep him in power. He gave them the okay to be violent. And he allowed them to be who they are, racists. He said it from the first moment he became a candidate. He signaled that their Whiteness, their crassness, their coarse behavior is acceptable and what makes them true Americans. And funny thing is, it is acceptable and it is what makes them as true as any other Americans. None of us come from the same cloth. America is the melting pot. What isn’t acceptable is racism, or the belief that the color of your skin makes you better. No one, NO ONE, should ever be comfortable as a racist and no leader should ever promote it.