[ Just as the Lost Cause denied the brutal racism of slavery in
order to perpetuate violent inequity through other means, at the heart
of the Big Lie is also a drive to protect a racist order]
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AT THE JAN. 6 HEARINGS, RACE ISN’T DISCUSSED MUCH. STILL, IT’S A
CENTRAL ISSUE  
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Sandhya Dirks
August 23, 2022
NPR
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_ Just as the Lost Cause denied the brutal racism of slavery in order
to perpetuate violent inequity through other means, at the heart of
the Big Lie is also a drive to protect a racist order _

Rep. Bennie Thompson, chair of the Jan. 6 Committee, speaks virtually
during a hearing on July 21., Bloomberg via Getty Images

 

In the opening moments of the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, Chairman
Bennie Thompson drew a line across history, connecting the Lost Cause
to the Big Lie.

"I'm from a part of the country where people justify the actions of
slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching," Thompson began.

"I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try and
justify the actions of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021."

The Lost Cause is the racist myth that justifies chattel slavery. It
tells a false story of generous slave owners and happy slaves, as well
as lies that the Civil War wasn't really fought over slavery — it
was about states' rights. Everything that follows, the nadir of
American race relations, the violent dismantling of Reconstruction,
Jim Crow, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the erections of Confederate
monuments and the conflation of a treasonous Confederate flag with
patriotism, are all in the name of this Lost Cause.

The Big Lie has come to mean the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020
presidential election but that it was stolen from him. It was a lie so
large that it drove the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and extended out
to include another lie, one that painted the violent attempt to
overturn the election as a peaceful protest.

Just as the Lost Cause denied the brutal racism of slavery in order to
perpetuate violent inequity through other means, at the heart of the
Big Lie is also a drive to protect a racist order, according
to Stanford University political scientist Hakeem Jefferson
[[link removed]].

The Lost Cause and the lie that Trump won the 2020 election are myths
to justify violence and preserve white power

Jefferson says both the Lost Cause and the Big Lie are myths meant to
justify — and at the same time deny the existence of — violence
meant to preserve white power.

Thompson's direct mention of race and America's legacy of racism at
the top of the hearings was a bit of an aberration. There has been
little direct mention of race during the televised hearings, which
paused in August and are set to resume in September.

While not a criminal trial, the proceedings have had a legal laser
focus, to show the culpability of the former president.

But just the symbolism of Thompson at the helm of the hearings places
race and history on display, Jefferson says.

"How striking to see someone who looks like Bennie Thompson wield this
amount of institutional power, against a person like Donald Trump, who
is awash in the markings of whiteness and privilege and all that it
affords."

Trump, born into his wealth, has previously peddled a racist
conspiracy theory denying the legitimacy of the nation's first Black
president. Thompson got his start in politics registering Black people
to vote in Mississippi during the civil rights movement.

It's Thompson's very Black Southern-ness that allows him to "weave
into this narrative, both explicitly and implicitly by way of his
identity, how much this has to do about race," Jefferson says.

"We were watching, in real time, a racial backlash"

"It's not by some dent of the universe or some sort of random act that
the faces that we see in these photographs and videos from Jan. 6 are
a bunch of white people," Jefferson says.

"We were watching, in real time, a racial backlash."

More precisely, he says, it is part of a white backlash against the
very perception of racial progress and the idea, unrealized though it
may be, of multiracial democracy.

"Some white people are really concerned about a loss of power and
status in American society," Jefferson says.

Jefferson says at the center of the Jan. 6 insurrection is the
maintenance of white power. But not all white power cloaks itself in a
white hood.

"It is also about the power to tell a narrative of one's self and
one's identity group," he says. "The power some white people want to
hold onto is a power of narrative."

"So it's not about power that's maintained by burning crosses. It's
about power that's maintained about telling some stories and not some
others in schools," he says. "It's about power to elect people who you
think will do your bidding."

It is also about power, Jefferson says, that has been wielded
explicitly through the disenfranchisement of others. When Republicans
"talk about protecting 'our' country and making sure 'our' country
isn't taken away from us by other people," Jefferson says, "the 'our'
is doing some work here."

"What's implied is that this country is moving in a direction where
white people have less power."

Supporters of President Donald Trump take the steps on the east side
of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.  NurPhoto via Getty Images

That, says political scientist Robert Pape, is what drove the events
of Jan. 6, 2021. "What we are really observing are the consequences of
the fear of white status decline," Pape says.

Pape, the director of the Chicago Project on Security & Threats
[[link removed]], has been researching those who were
arrested for storming the Capitol, digging into the data
[[link removed](2022-01-05).pdf?mtime=1654548769] of
who was there that day.

The results have surprised him. "Of the over 800 people who have been
arrested on Jan. 6, we see a striking pattern," he says.

The pattern?

"They don't fit the profile of a far-right extremist."

Fox's Tucker Carlson consistently denies that Jan. 6 had anything to
do with race

At Fox News, Tucker Carlson, who has peddled variations of the Big
Lie, has consistently denied that the Jan. 6 insurrection had anything
to do with race. A few months after the riot at the Capitol, he spoke
to his nightly average of 3 million viewers: "There's no evidence that
white supremacists were responsible for what happened on Jan. 6.
That's a lie," he said.

"Contrary to what you've been hearing, there's also no evidence that
this was a, quote, 'armed insurrection.' "

Except there is evidence
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both counts.

In June of this year, Carlson again reiterated the building blocks of
the Big Lie to his audience, both in denying the culpability of the
pro-Trump Jan. 6 crowd, hinting that FBI agents were planted in it,
and in suggesting the 2020 election was compromised. "A lot of the
protesters on Jan. 6 were very upset about that, and they should have
been, all of us should be," he ranted. "But the Jan. 6 Committee
ignored all of that completely. Instead, on the basis of zero
evidence, no evidence whatsoever, they blamed the entire riot on white
supremacy."

Unpacking almost anything Carlson says is like having to undo a
Russian nesting doll of falsehoods, dangerous innuendos and outright
lies. The Jan. 6 Committee has very carefully not come out and blamed
the riot on white supremacy. In fact, it has had a light to almost
nonexistent touch when addressing the role of race in the
insurrection.

Instead, the committee has carefully crafted a credible narrative that
blames Trump's lies about a stolen election for riling up the crowd.

But why was this crowd so susceptible to those lies, and why did they
act so violently in response to them? That, says political scientist
Pape, has everything to do with race and the preservation of white
supremacy.

The counties with the greatest decline in the non-Hispanic white
population produced the most rioters

While members of violent extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the
Oath Keepers certainly helped plot the attack and were mixed in among
the swelling crowds, "nearly 90%" of the people arrested for their
actions on Jan. 6 "are not members of these militant extremist
groups," Pape says.

They were mostly white and mostly men, but other factors are markedly
different
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"We see that over half of those charged with breaking into the Capitol
are business owners, CEOs, are from white-collar occupations —
doctors, lawyers, architects, accountants," Pape says.

Most traveled to Washington from their homes in suburbs and cities,
places that Joe Biden won. And this is what is so key, Pape says. The
ZIP codes that the insurrections call home "are the parts of the
country where diversity is happening the fastest."

"The counties that lost the most non-Hispanic white population are the
counties that produced the most Jan. 6 insurrectionists," Pape says.

They came from places that used to be almost all white and aren't
anymore.

Pape says that this fact parallels another recent incident of
explicitly racist violence
[[link removed]]:
a white supremacist's targeting and killing of 10 Black people at a
Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., this May.

The shooter went to a supermarket in a Black neighborhood of a diverse
city to commit a racist massacre. But the place he came from, Broome
County, is small, population-wise, but has a rapidly shifting
population.

"It's in the top 15% of counties who have lost non-Hispanic white
population since 2010," Pape says. Broome County, like many of the
places that produced insurrectionists, is becoming less and less
white.

Pape says people, like the shooter and the Jan. 6 insurrectionists,
are being radicalized online and by right-wing media and politicians.
Taken together with living in places that are no longer white spaces,
it creates a toxic mix.

"This is dovetailing with rhetoric by politicians and by media figures
— stoking fear about the great replacement," he says.

The racism of replacement theory, a conspiracy theory peddled by the
likes of Carlson, purports that people of color are replacing white
people as part of a nefarious Democratic plan to take power and steal
elections.

And it is no longer a fringe ideology; it's now believed by a
majority of Republicans
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Nearly 7 out of 10 Republicans believe replacement theory ideas, a
recent poll from the Southern Poverty Law Center
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Pape's research shows that the driving force among the
insurrectionists — and those who support them
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is replacement theory. The conspiracy theory is a racist lie, but the
fear it stokes is real — fear that the white majority is becoming a
minority and will have to give up power.

And that isn't just driving elections and politics, Pape says. It's
driving violence.

"What's dangerous is when a group like this begins to adopt the
mindset or the rhetoric of an oppressed minority," says Jefferson, the
Stanford political scientist.

Jefferson says when members of a group that still holds very real
privilege, like white people, imagine themselves on the margins —
that is precisely the moment when violent white nationalism takes
hold.

The right to vote remains fragile

Race has been a subtext in much of the Jan. 6 Committee hearings,
simmering beneath the surface. Most of the witnesses have been
Republicans and Trump loyalists, telling their story of that day and
the days leading up to it, often from the inside. The story presented
has been that of a petulant, out-of-control president, desperate to
hold onto power.

But there is one notable exception: Ruby Freeman and her daughter,
Shaye Moss.

"I've always been told by my grandmother," Moss told the committee and
the country, her voice shaking slightly, "how important it is to vote
and how people before me, a lot of people, older people in my family,
did not have that right."

Moss and her mother are Black women, and both were poll workers during
the 2020 elections.

Moss told the committee she loved her job and she was proud to help
people vote, especially older folks. Her job was not partisan; she
didn't work in the service of one party or another. Her work was to
help average, everyday voters, to facilitate the small moments that
make democracy function.

Then she was falsely and publicly accused by Trump of tampering with
votes. After he called out her and her mother by name, they
were bombarded with death threats and racist harassment
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Jefferson says these two women represent the opposite of people in
power — they represent the right of the average person to vote. "So
many Black people, Black women in particular, work on these front
lines of democracy," he says.

Shaye Moss, a former Georgia election worker, is comforted by her
mother, Ruby Freeman, as Moss testifies during a hearing of the Jan. 6
Committee on June 21.  Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

They often do so, Jefferson says, because voting is a right that for
many was achieved only in recent memory. Black people have an intimate
understanding of how precious — and how fragile — the right to
vote has been and still is.

Increasingly fragile, Jefferson says, because America's incomplete
multiracial democracy is in grave peril.

The Jan. 6 insurrection was not, in the end, a successful coup. But,
Jefferson says, the spectacle of that day both reveals and conceals
much more subtle threats.

"Americans are really responsive to the spectacular," he says. "The
problem for us is that democracy dies not often in these moments of
the spectacular." Instead, it dies "in these sort of incremental or
seemingly legal — or at least procedural — ways of taking away and
short-circuiting democracy."

That slow-moving threat is happening right now, Jefferson says, and
it's being driven by the Republican Party.

This racial project has been about maintaining white power at the
expense of democracy

The Supreme Court is set to take a case that could allow a fringe
legal theory
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give state legislatures control of elections, leaving the choice of
who gets power in the hands of those who already have it. Because of
gerrymandering, many state legislatures don't function as
representative democracies
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especially as maps are drawn to dilute and diminish the votes of
people of color
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A temporary Supreme Court ruling
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February made it even more difficult to push back against deliberate
racial gerrymandering.

And then there are voter suppression laws, like some of the ones now
on the books in Georgia, overseen by Republican Secretary of State
Brad Raffensperger.

When Raffensperger spoke at one of the Jan. 6 Committee hearings, he
was lauded and applauded for standing up for democracy and against
Trump.

But back in his home state of Georgia, he is championing laws that
make it harder for people of color to vote.

"January the 6th was a racial project," Jefferson says. "But the
everyday undos and attacks on American democracy are also a part of a
racial project."

It is a racial project as old as the Lost Cause, reborn in the Big
Lie. The project has always been about maintaining white power, often
at the expense of democracy itself.

It is part of a larger battle that has never really ended, over whose
votes get counted and whose votes get to count.

To Jefferson, race is not just the elephant in the room during the
Jan. 6 Committee hearings. "It's the whole damn room," he says.

"This is all about race all the time."

_Sandhya Dirks is a National Correspondent covering race and identity
for NPR._

* Jan. 6 Hearings
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* Racism
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* white replacement theory
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