The New Republic Kandist Mallett
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/kandist-mallett>/January 18, 2021
The Response to the Capitol Riot Is Whitewashing the History of Black
Insurrection
A turn toward nationalism following the MAGA storm on D.C. erases
the Black radical tradition of rebellion—and endangers its future.
MARK MAKELA/GETTY IMAGES
In 1811,between 200 and 500 enslaved Black people
<https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-orleans-forgotten-slave-revolt-by-dan-rasmussen-american-uprising-author>armed
themselves in a revolt that began on a sugar plantation a few miles
outside of New Orleans. Charles Deslondes, a slave driver of Haitian
descent, marshaled an insurrection against the slaver Manuel Andry,
turning the tools of the plantation—the axe, the sugar cane
knife—against his master. “An attempt was made to assassinate me by the
stroke of an axe, and my poor son has been ferociously murdered,”
Andrywrote
<https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=TvE8AQAAIAAJ&rdid=book-TvE8AQAAIAAJ&rdot=1>of
the attack in a letter to William C.C. Claiborne, then-governor of
Louisiana.
Once off the plantation, Deslondes and his cohort marched toward the
city, where they sought to declare an independent republic. Looting,
burning plantation houses, and recruiting other enslaved people on the
way, the insurrection that began at Andry’s plantation grew its numbers
and eventually arrived in New Orleans, where they facedfederal troops
and a local white militia
<https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/louisianas-slave-revolt/>.
Deslondes and his fellow insurrectionists, outnumbered and outgunned,
were met with brutal, lethal force and a subsequentsham trial
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/4232918>. Still, news of the rebellion
traveled anxiouslythrough white newspapers
<https://www.jstor.org/stable/4232918>and their legacy endured. “The
revolt had been much larger—and come much closer to succeeding—than the
planters and American officials let on,”according to
<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/its-anniversary-1811-louisiana-slave-revolt-180957760/>Daniel
Rasmussen, author of/American Risings: When Slaves Attacked New
Orleans/. “The slave army posed an existential threat to white control
over the city of New Orleans.”
Two decades later, in 1831, a similar existential threat emerged and was
again met with overwhelming state violence: The rebellion led by Nat
Turner in Virginia was violently put down after President Andrew Jackson
used the Insurrection Act, at the request of Norfolk’s mayor, to send
three army artillery companies to suppress the uprising. (That same law,
which allows the president to authorize use of military force against
citizens, is the weapon Trumpthreatened
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/02/trump-military-insurrection-act/>to
use against Black Lives Matter protesters last summer. It also may not
come as a surprise that Trumphad a portrait of Jackson
<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/22/andrew-jackson-donald-trump-216493>hanging
in the Oval Office.) Despite the brutal response, the insurrection
forced Virginia to critically examine the institution of slavery, nearly
leading to its end in the state. Another insurrection decades later,
this time launched at Harpers Ferry in West Virginia by a multiracial
militia led by the abolitionist John Brown, is nowregarded
<https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4narr5_txt.html#:~:text=The%20raid%20on%20Harpers%20Ferry,to%20lead%20a%20slave%20revolt.>as
a precursor to the Civil War.
Throughout the period of chattel slavery, there were250 recorded
rebellions
<https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/>that
took place before the Thirteenth Amendment was passed. For generations,
Black insurrectionists have worked to overthrow the anti-Black system of
racial and economic exploitation in the United States. From slave
rebellions to the unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd, American
history is a history of Black insurrection.
This radical tradition has felt lost, orflattened into false equivalence
<https://twitter.com/thomaschattwill/status/1346968129528848384>with
reactionary violence, in the wake of the Capitol riot, as a strange
political coalition has come together to respond to what transpired on
January 6—a chaotic assemblage of police officers, veterans, small
business owners, QAnon yoga moms, current and former elected officials,
and other Trump loyalists. The primary narrative that has emerged is one
of overwhelming nationalism, not unlike what transpired after September
11. Trump is cast as treasonous while Democrats and a handful of
opportunistic Republicans clear a path to reclaim the greatness of the
country after four years during which resistance to the federal
government was a fashionable position. We must consider what this
sweeping condemnation of “insurrection”—and turn toward unquestioning
patriotism—might mean for Black people, for whom insurrectionary acts
and rebellion have been part of our pursuit of true freedom for more
than 400 years.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although slavery technically ended in 1865, the Jim Crow era meant that
despite a freedom defined under the Constitution, Black people were
still forced to fight for basic civil rights and freedom from violence.
It would take a century for that particular apartheid regime to fall in
another bout of national Black rebellion. Faced with the radicalism of
the civil rights movement, President Lyndon B. Johnson would use the
Insurrection Act againstseveral Black uprisings
<https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/insurrection-act-invoked/story?id=71020988>:
The Detroit Riots of 1967 and,following the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr.,the uprisings in Washington D.C., Baltimore, and
Chicago in 1968.
In D.C. that year, the riots lasted four days,amounting to
<https://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2018/03/30/dc-riots-1968-then-and-now.html>hundreds
of millions of dollars in destruction in today’s dollars. A local
publicationreported
<https://wtop.com/dc/2018/04/everything-was-on-fire-remembering-the-dc-riots-50-years-later/>in
an anniversary series of the riot that Johnson, “could reportedly smell
the smoke in the Oval Office.” In the 1969 book/Ten Blocks from the
White House/, former/Washington Post/reporter Ben Gilbert interviewed
some of the participants. In response to the question of violence, one
replied: “We call it revolution—for freedom and liberation of Black people.”
During the rise of the era of mass incarceration, the site of
insurrection also started to include prisons. In 1971, at Attica prison
in New York, an uprising of mostly Black and Puerto Rican inmatesoverran
the guards
<https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/attica-prison-riot-1971-2/>using
pipes, chains, and baseball bats. They took hostages and demanded better
conditions—/The New York Times/reported
<https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/books/review/blood-in-the-water-attica-heather-ann-thompson.html#:~:text=Isolated%20in%20the%20far%20western,one%20sheet%20per%20day%2C%E2%80%9D%20went>that
prisoners were given only one roll of toilet paper a month and one
shower a week—and amnesty for crimes committed during the riot.
Conditions worsened after prison guards and law enforcement took back
control after four days of unrest. In 2000, a class action lawsuit filed
in 1974 wassettled
<http://edition.cnn.com/2000/US/01/04/attica.settlement/>on the behalf
of more than 1,200 Attica survivors who said they were tortured as
punishment for the uprising. Some prisoners were forced to crawl naked
over broken glass and were denied medical treatment afterward,according
to
<https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/15/nyregion/ex-attica-inmates-recount-shattered-lives-and-dreams.html>the/Times/.
Larry Smith, one of the former inmates who spoke about their experience
in court said, “When you explain to your kids and your grandkids what
the whole essence of Attica was, you’ll be able to tell them that it was
to be treated as human beings.’’
The most recent use of the Insurrection Act wasunder President George H.
W. Bush
<https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/insurrection-act-was-last-used-1992-los-angeles-riots-invoking-n1224356>.
The year before, the nation watched as footage of four police officers
beating Rodney King hit their television sets. After the officers were
acquitted in 1992, the city was overtaken by five days of uprising. I
remember watching it on TV as the city burned only a few miles from my
house.
The media tried to paint the rebellion as nihilism, but as Raven
Rakiawrote <https://thenewinquiry.com/black-riot/>for/The New Inquiry/on
the ways in which Black rebellions are viewed by non-Black America,
“Looting is the opposite of apolitical; it is a direct redistribution of
wealth. And yet, even on the left, when a black or African protester
destroys and takes property, they are stripped of the tactical or
historical will inherent in the decision.”
More than 20 years later, on August 9, 2014, officer Darren Wilson shot
and killed Michael Brown. The militarization of American police forces
meant that the response to the uprising in Ferguson resembled a military
occupation. Despite curfews, clouds of tear gas, and crowd control
munitions, the people of Ferguson and St. Louis stayed on the streets,
awakening a new generation of Black insurrectionists. Deandre Smith, a
Black barber whospoke to
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/20/ferguson-11-days-on-we-are-sitting-on-a-powder-keg>the
Guardian about the unrest, said that, “Mike Brown was the straw that
broke the camel’s back ... That’s when we said this is enough. That’s
it.” He added, “Plain and simple, this is the revolution. The one
everybody was waiting on. It happened like this. By a people who want
respect. African American people in this country.”
Following Ferguson, there were uprisings in Baltimore in 2015, after the
shooting of Freddie Gray; in Baton Rouge in 2016, after the killings of
Alton Sterling; and in Indianapolis that same year after the killing of
Philando Castille. There were insurrectionary elements tied up in each
of these events, in addition to moretraditional aspects of Black
reconciliation
<https://news.yahoo.com/baltimore-pastor-compares-protests-1968-riots-162113065--abc-news-topstories.html>.
But it was the summer of 2020, after George Floyd was killed by a police
officer with a knee on his neck, that set off the largest uprising we
have seen in recent history. The murder would ignite a rebellion that
demanded more than justice.Floyd was killed on May 25. By that Thursday,
people had burned down Minneapolis’ third police precinct. The rebellion
carried across the country: By the weekend, cop cars had burned in at
least a dozen cities, as courthouses, municipal buildings, and retail
stores also went up in flames. The language of abolition—including a
demand to defund the police—soon forced its way into the mainstream. The
desire was clear: Revolution, an end to the white supremacist capitalist
state, and the violent system that underpins all anti-Black social
relations.
The tactics of these rebellions—from property destruction to demands for
decarceration and abolition—were condemned by many elected officials and
the political press. Former Attorney General Bill Barr, stoking a
narrative of “outside agitation,”falsely claimed
<https://newrepublic.com/article/158087/limits-dangers-fixation-nonviolence>that
the uprisings had been driven by people outside the communities in which
they occurred, “many of whom travel from out of state to promote the
violence.” Even former President Barack Obamacriticized
<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/02/barack-obama-criticizes-defund-the-police-slogan-backlash>the
“defund” demand of the uprisings.
But abolition—from the abolition of slavery imagined in the uprising of
Charles Deslondes, to the abolition of racial capitalism, violent
policing, and the white supremacist state imagined in Detroit and
Minneapolis a half a century apart—is at the heart of these
insurrections. They were rebellions towards the realization of
liberation—physical, mental, and social autonomy.
The objectives of the Capitol riot, in so much as they were coherent,
were to reverse the results of a democratic election in service of
maintaining the Trump regime’s particular brand of nationalism and white
supremacy. These are not the same things. In fact, one was a warning
against the other. “The insurgencies of the Movement for Black Lives and
its dozens of allied organizations have warned the country that unless
we end racist state-sanctioned violence and the mass caging of Black and
brown people,” the historian Robin D.G. Kelleywrote
<https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/race-capitalism-justice>at the start of
the Trump era, “we are headed for a fascist state.”
There has been very little engagement with this substance in the
mainstream response to the violence at the Capitol. What has followed
instead has been blanket condemnations of insurrection, a patriotic
posture—shared by Democrats and Republicans—that holds the American
state as a stable force for good. In his address to the nation
responding to the Trump loyalists’ attack, President-elect Joe Bidensaid
<https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/01/06/transcript-joe-biden-capitol-chaos>that
America “is about honor. Decency, respect, tolerance—that’s who we are,
that’s who we’ve always been.”
But Black history exposes another version of America, one far different
than the one Biden describes. The wave of nationalism that has flowed
from the Capitol riot poses the threat of an unchecked expansion of
state power and a turn against the liberatory rebellion and uprising of
last summer. Just as the War on Terror gave us the Department of
Homeland Security and a massive surveillance state, this new language of
“domestic terror” may be used to further harm Black insurrection and
rebellion against white supremacy. (As/The New Republic/’s Alex Pareene
recentlywrote
<https://newrepublic.com/article/160887/domestic-terrorism-law>, “The
state is extraordinarily good at using violence to suppress activists on
the streets. It does not need more capability for violence. It has
plenty.”)A hollow turn toward nationalism in this moment not only erases
the history of radical Black rebellion—it endangers its future.
Kandist Mallett
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/kandist-mallett>@kandistmallett
<https://twitter.com/kandistmallett>
Kandist Mallett is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles.
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