“This is the American Norm, Not Its Exception.”

Pro-Trump rioters gather at the U.S. Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021 [Reuters/Leah Millis]

By Sarah Leonard

Our last 24-hour news cycle produced a couple of indelible moments.

First, Rev. Raphael Warnock declared victory over Republican Kelly Loeffler in their Georgia Senate race. In his victory speech, he honored his 82-year-old mother who “used to pick somebody else’s cotton” as a teenager in Georgia. He’s only the second Black senator from below the Mason-Dixon Line to be elected since Reconstruction.

Hours later, largely white right-wing rioters stormed the Capitol, and one man marched through the halls with the Confederate battle flag. He was captured by photographer Saul Loeb striding past two portraits that hang in the building: abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner (once beaten nearly to death on the Senate floor by a South Carolina congressman after an anti-slavery speech) and John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery seventh U.S. vice president.

Yesterday’s events reminded us that Reconstruction – the decade after the Civil War when the nation’s laws and Constitution were altered to guarantee rights to formerly enslaved people, and when large numbers of Black people entered Southern governments for the first time – was never allowed to succeed.

In his book, Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois showed how enslaved men and women engaged in a mass strike during the Civil War and began to build freer, fairer governments afterward. Reconstruction was cut short around 1877 by so-called redeemers (many of them planter elites) who reasserted white supremacy in the South with the support of the federal government. Du Bois argued that this was possible because the Southern working class was divided by the ideology of racism, a division fed and stoked by wealthy whites desperate to maintain their power after the war. Decades of brutal repression continued unabated until the powerful confrontations of the civil rights movement – what many historians and organizers have called the second Reconstruction – when, again, the right responded to human rights claims by mobilizing racism for the sake of power.

Today, there is a new movement to continue the work of ending American white supremacy by protesting the murder of Black people by police, mass incarceration, poverty and generally what scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has called the “production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Today, Confederate statues honoring slave-owning white supremacists are only just being pulled down, while Georgia (which is 30% Black and was closer to 50% before the Great Migration) sends its first Black senator to Washington.

Perhaps there is no more predictable coda to this era than a white mob, incited by a wealthy white property owner, rioting to preserve minority rule. This is the American norm, not its exception. As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, the majority of people denouncing the election results likely know that Trump didn’t win. What drives them is the notion that “Biden’s win is a fraud because his voters should not count to begin with.”

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