Capitol Riot: Race in U.S. Politics

On the 6^th January extraordinary scenes unfolded in Washington DC. Violent rioters stormed the U.S. Congress some wielding flags of the Confederacy – the losing side in the American Civil War. That evening, anti-racism scholar, Ibram X. Kendi tweeted ‘white privilege is on display like never before in the U.S. Capitol’.

While ‘white privilege’ may not have previously assailed the corridors of Congress it has stalked American politics since the foundation of the state and its long, brutal legacy has been leveraged for political power ever since.

As the United States expanded westward after its War of Independence from Britain, again and again the status of slavery in the union arose. So-called ‘slave states’ fought to ensure new states admitted would be balanced between ‘slave’ and ‘free’ so they would not be outnumbered and subject to abolitionist whims.

The Electoral College was originally conceived to give extra weight in the nascent republic’s presidency to ‘slave’ states by allowing them to count enslaved people as part of their population (albeit only as three-fifths of a person and, of course, without freedom or a vote).

Even today, due to the nature of the political system, the Democratic caucus in the Senate represents over 41 million voters than the Republican one.

In the antebellum South, slavery did little to benefit poor whites. If anything, it economically undermined them. To bind disadvantaged whites to their wealthy neighbours, Southern elites promoted the notion of ‘white supremacy’.

They contended that abolition of slavery threatened not an economic system and vast wealth based on enslaved people as property but rather a ‘way of life’, a culture and the right of states to decide their own laws.

Following its loss in the Civil War, the South initially underwent a period called Reconstruction where Black rights were recognised, and many African Americans took up positions in local and national government including sending two men to the Senate. However, ‘white privilege’ was soon reasserted.

Intimidation by white mobs ensured most Blacks retreated from political life and the polling booth. Voter suppression was rampant and blatant. Violence was endemic. Between 1877 and 1950, over 4,000 African Americans were lynched across 20 states largely in the former Confederacy.

Originally, the Democratic Party in the South upheld the rights of slave-owners against Lincoln’s Republican Party, but this was flipped during the Civil Rights era.

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, which outlawed segregation in schools, prompted the issuing of the Southern Manifesto. The Manifesto backed a campaign of ‘massive resistance’ to the ruling in the South and was signed by 101 members of Congress from Southern states – 99 of them Democrats. The Manifesto reframed resistance to desegregation as an issue of states’ rights in the face of federal overreach.

The Civil Rights movement met brutal reaction in the South as it pursued its aims. Mobs of white segregationists attacked buses of activists, bombed churches, harassed Black students and assassinated leaders.

Four young girls were murdered in the attack on the 16^th Baptist Church in Alabama. When six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first African American student to attend a previously all-white school, she was met with screaming mobs of segregationists and had to be escorted into class every day by her mother and four Federal Marshals. The photographs of the protestors show well-dressed, young white men and women with ‘save segregation’ signs.

The enrolment of African American student, James Meredith, in the University of Mississippi in 1962 provoked a riot by white segregationists that was only subdued by the deployment of the National Guard, US Army troops and Federal Marshals. 

Ultimately, just a decade later, another Democrat, President Lyndon B. Johnson, steered the Civil Rights Act and, subsequently, the Voting Rights Act through Congress, famously commenting ‘I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for some time to come’.

At the time, a young Republican political advisor, Kevin Phillips, was developing a strategy that would make this a reality. He believed that the Republican Party could convert white ethnic groups from the Democratic Party by appealing to their resentment of African Americans gains during the Civil Rights era and their racism.

He argued that ‘Republicans would be short-sighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are’. 

Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign incorporated some of these propositions. He advocated for ‘states’ rights’ – widely seen as coded language for opposition to the federal guarantee of civil rights. He promised ‘law and order’ in response to protest.

The southern states transformed from ‘solid blue’ into Republican strongholds over the coming years as the party further committed to this course.

Ronald Reagan also championed ‘states’ rights’ and ‘law and order’ and criticised programmes such as affirmative action and welfare schemes which were believed to mostly benefit African Americans. 

None were as blatant as Donald Trump, however, who made clear his disdain and disrespect for America’s first Black president, Barack Obama, by fuelling the ‘birther’ conspiracy querying Obama’s birthplace and right to be president.

Trump echoed Nixon’s and Reagan’s ‘law and order’ rhetoric in response to Black Lives Matter protests.

Trump opposed renaming military bases that were called after Confederate generals.

Trump argued against removing statues of these leaders from public spaces saying they ‘are trying to take our history and our heritage away’. The history and heritage Trump is invoking is that of the fallen racist Confederacy.

When Mr. Trump was first elected, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates described him in The Atlantic as America’s ‘first white president’ arguing that his political assent and agenda was driven by reaction to the election of Obama.

While the protest march on 6 January was weeks in the planning, its seems no coincidence that this explosion of white rage came the day after the election of the first Black senator ever in Georgia, Raphael Warnock. A pastor linked to two Civil Rights titans, Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis. For Trump supporters, it seems to be a case of ‘when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’.