[ The United States has a terrible habit of letting white
supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American
democracy] [[link removed]]

WHITE SUPREMACISTS DECLARE WAR ON DEMOCRACY AND WALK AWAY UNSCATHED
 
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Carol Anderson
November 10, 2021
The Guardian
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_ The United States has a terrible habit of letting white supremacy
get away with repeated attempts to murder American democracy _

‘This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in
a full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to
walk away virtually unscathed.’, Photograph: Shannon
Stapleton/Reuters

 

American democracy’s most dangerous adversary is white supremacy.
Throughout this nation’s history, white supremacy has undermined,
twisted and attacked the viability of the United States. What makes
white supremacy so lethal, however, is not just its presence but also
the refusal to hold its adherents fully accountable for the damage
they have done and continue to do to the nation. The insurrection on 6
January and the weak response are only the latest example.

During the war for independence, after the British captured Savannah,
the king’s forces set out to capture a wholly unprepared South
Carolina. John Laurens, an aide-de-camp of George Washington, pleaded
with the South Carolina government to arm the enslaved because the
state didn’t have enough available white men to fight the
8,000-strong British force barreling toward Charleston. This was a
crisis born of South Carolina’s decision to divert most of the
state’s white men from the Continental Army to fight the Redcoats
and, instead, enlist them in the militia to control the enslaved
population, whom they defined as the primary threat.

The response to Laurens’ plan was, therefore, “horror” and
“alarm”. Umbrage even. The state’s political leaders were so
appalled that they questioned whether “this union was worth fighting
for at all
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The United States of America was not nearly as important as
maintaining slavery. They, therefore, toyed with the idea of
surrendering to the British, making a separate peace. For that
flat-out refusal to fight with every resource at its command, and
clear willingness to sacrifice the United States simply to maintain
slavery, South Carolina suffered no consequences. It wasn’t
ostracized. It wasn’t penalized. Instead, the state’s leaders were
fully embraced as Founding Fathers and welcomed into the new
nation’s halls of power.

Several years later, at the 1787 constitutional convention, the south
once again put white supremacy above the viability of the United
States. In tough negotiations, South Carolina, North Carolina and
Georgia’s representatives were willing to hold the nation hostage
and risk its destruction unless protection of slavery and the
empowering of enslavers was embedded in the constitution. The
negotiators acknowledged exactly what was going on and even,
sometimes, how reprehensible it was. When, for example, the delegates
bowed down to the south’s demands for 20 additional years of the
Atlantic slave trade, James Madison admitted that without that
concession, “the southern states
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not have entered into the union of America”. And, therefore, as
“great as the evil is” he added “the dismemberment of the Union
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be worse”.

The same refrain played after the infamous three-fifths clause passed
under the southern threat to walk away and, thus, scuttle the
constitution and the United States. Massachusetts delegate Rufus King
called the nefarious formula to determine representation in Congress
one of the constitution’s “greatest blemishes
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while lamenting that it “was a necessary sacrifice
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the establishment of the Constitution”.

The enslavers’ extortionist threats – white supremacy as the price
for the nation to come into being – should have created a massive
backlash. But it didn’t. There was no retribution, only compliance
and acquiescence. The demonstrated lack of accountability for
threatening the viability of the United States served only to embolden
the slaveholders, who bullied, harangued and pummeled
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leaders, including the brutal 1856 beating of Senator Charles Sumner
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southerner Preston Brooks on the Senate floor, to get their way.

When the bullying and beatings no longer worked, and the nation dared
elect a president opposed to slavery spreading any further, the
slaveholders launched a military attack against the United States.
They wanted, according to Alexander H Stephens, vice-president of the
Confederate States of America, the “disintegration” of the Union
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said that the United States had to be destroyed because, unlike the
US, the Confederacy’s “cornerstone
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upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man;
that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and
normal condition”.

To wage its war for white supremacy, the Confederates killed and
wounded more than 646,000 American
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In addition to the loss of life, fending off the CSA’s devastating
military assault
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the United States billions of dollars. The CSA also tried to badger
and entice the British and French
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Confederacy and attack the United States.

For doing so much to destroy this nation, after the CSA’s defeat,
the consequences were disproportionately minimal. President Andrew
Johnson granted
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of the Confederacy’s leaders amnesty
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resume positions of power in the government. The entrée into American
society for the traitors was also paved by the way the US supreme
court dismantled many of the protections put in place by Congress for
post-civil war Black citizenship – the 13th
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as well as laws banning racial segregation
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domestic terrorism
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allowed the bureaucratic and lynching violence of Jim Crow to
eviscerate the “self-evident” principles of equality. And to
ensure that a narrative of white supremacy’s innocence permeated the
nation’s textbooks, the Confederacy’s treachery became the “war
of Northern aggression
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and the south’s “Lost Cause” became nothing less than noble
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The forgiveness tour continued as the states, not just in the south,
allowed the erection of statues in the public square
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those who committed treason.

The 6 January invasion of the US Capitol, provoked by the lie that
cities with sizable minority populations, such as Atlanta, Milwaukee
and Philadelphia, “stole” the 2020 election is, at its core,
white supremacists’ anger that African Americans, Hispanics, Asian
Americans and Native Americans
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only voted but did so decisively against Donald Trump
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The invaders constructed gallows, stormed the US Capitol, wanted to
hang Vice-President Mike Pence, who would not hand the election to
Trump, and hunted for the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. They
beat police officers, yelled “nigger” at others, carried the
Confederate flag through the halls of the building and decided that
those defending the Capitol were the actual “traitors
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who needed to be killed.

This horrific attack on American democracy should have resulted in a
full-throttled response. But, once again, white supremacy is able to
walk away virtually unscathed. US senators
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were at the rally inciting
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invaders were not expelled from Congress. Similarly, in shades of the
post- civil war Confederacy, several politicians who attended the
incendiary event at the Ellipse were recently re-elected to office
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And those who stormed the Capitol are getting charged
with misdemeanors
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being allowed to go on vacations
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of the country, and, despite the attempt to stage a coup and overturn
the results of a presidential election, getting feather-light
sentences
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It also took months to establish a congressional committee to
investigate 6 January, but it’s already clear that its subpoenas, as
Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Clark so brazenly demonstrated, can
be violated
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will with no consequences. And, like the Lost Cause, its adherents
have tried to rewrite this assault on America as “a normal tourist
visit
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or simply “law-abiding, patriotic, mom
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pop, young adults pushing baby carriages”.

In other words, this nation has a really bad habit of letting white
supremacy get away with repeated attempts to murder American
democracy. It’s time to break that habit. If we don’t, they just
might succeed next time.

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_Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler professor of African
American studies at Emory University and the author of White Rage: The
Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide and One Person, No Vote: How Voter
Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy. She is a contributor to the
Guardian_

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