Trump's Acquittal: American Apartheid and the Struggle to End It
This essay is a good addition to the record when we misperceive, overlook, misconstrue or deny the basis for white racists who deny their racism. It explains related racist histories that are used to justify the internal logic of their militia building, law enforcement prevalence and 'law and order' activity.
South African Tony Karon offers Americans descriptions of the structural commonality of their apartheid systems. He adds some authority to the argument that democracy will never exist without eliminating structural racism, connecting the seditious insurrectionists' outlook on America to the Founders' and settlers' view of a white America -- an outlook that Jan 6 participants like military vets, law enforcement officers (and their 'conservative' adjacents) feel justified in holding. Once called "normal," and now called racist, Republicans intend to preserve ("conserve" ) their white rule at all costs.
As they hide, they don't hide because they acknowledge themselves as domestic terrorists.
They hide as freedom fighters.
That Republicans know more where they are coming from than we do when they correct us with "No, we're not a democracy. We are a constitutional republic," is a claim made with conviction, made because of their awareness of a structural racism that has always been there.
In my view, the DC Brooks Brothers Republicans believe they have been sent to Congress to uphold that view, along with its adjacent structures of corporate capitalism and patriarchy -- all the 'archies.'
Rooting out freedom fighters themselves will never be enough.
The Biden administration's DOJ must know this.
I consider the lawsuit by Bennie Thompson (Head of Homeland Security), NAACP, and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll lawsuit vs Trump, Giuliani, Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, basing their case on the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which bans any conspiracy to prevent members of Congress from discharging their duties -- AND provides monetary penalties -- an example of the long overdue structural attack that our government must make on racist leaders.
This suit is so overdue that we likely hadn't even heard of this law.
The House Independent Commission on Jan 6 (Truth & Reconciliation Commission?) is another overdue action that will now redefine the basis for future federal legal attacks on structures that prop American Apartheid.
This essay builds the antiracist's knowledge of structural racism that we must again fight at federal levels.
Fear of a Black electorate is exactly why Trump and his party seeded the ground for the Big Lie they rolled out on Election Night, targeted at the BIPOC turnout had flipped states for Biden.
The Republicans were essentially telling their white base what they wanted to hear: That the votes of Black and Latino voters were illegitimate, fraudulent — part of a devious plot to rob them of “their” country, meaning their privileged status in a settler democracy.
Fear of a Black electorate — and of democracy — remains a core theme of the party of American apartheid, just as it was for the white minority regime under which I grew up in South Africa.
Trump lawyer Michael Van der Veen’s closing arguments in the Senate trial — stirring the fears of Republican voters about a risen Black population challenging the murderous systemic racism in US policing reminded me of what I heard as a teenager in white South Africa during the 1976 Soweto uprising: The police had to kill Black people to “keep them in their place”, or else they’d come and kill us.
Today’s political drama in the US is not a case of a "democracy" suffering an authoritarian hiccup; it's a settler-colonial system that has been slowly and unevenly democratized through bitter struggles by the excluded over almost two centuries, and which is now suffering a white-nationalist backlash to much of the progress that has been made towards establishing a genuine democracy in America.
To respond effectively, though, we must begin by recognizing that American democracy is an unfinished project; the institutions and practices of settler democracy bequeathed by the constitution were not designed to create a society where everyone, and every vote, has equal value.
But while those institutions can be effectively used to block progress towards democracy, they can and have been effectively used, also, as vehicles to pursue democratic equality — when driven by grassroots organizing and struggle outside of the corridors of power.
The GOP is seeking to limit the extent to which the constitutional system can be used to democratize America. So, we are challenged to both defend democratic gains that have been made over centuries of struggle — remember, the Founding Fathers never intended that Black, Indigenous and Latino Americans would vote (or would even be recognized as citizens); they never even intended white women or white men who owned no property to vote — and at the same time never lose sight of the goal of extending them.
The United States of America will never be a true democracy until every citizen is able to cast a vote of equal value in choosing our government. And we were a long way from that goal before Trump and his Capitol riot. Then again, the white nationalist backlash that is Trumpism and today’s Republican Party may be a sign that in the big picture, we’re making progress, after all.
https://tonykaron.substack.com/p/trumps-acquittal-a-tale-of-american?fbclid=IwAR21C3KoAQ5dVhU-dLC80asLh0P-OafN1n_4NnVyDFQ9qz0duVHaR-uvuac
= new reply since forum marked as read
