The Rules Are…There Are No Rules
THE RELENTLESS STAYING POWER OF WHITE SUPREMACY ENDURES BECAUSE WE LET IT.
One of the first things I learned about white supremacy in the United States is that it is a system without consistent rules. It is amorphous and has one goal only: to persist. The “rules” are made up, tweaked, or erased on the fly in order to accommodate a nonsensical racial hierarchy. Once I understood this simple fact, I saw it everywhere. Now I see it daily (hourly?) in how we are treating the violent Trump-inspired mob that invaded the Capitol on January 6th in an attempt to undermine, if not unravel, our democracy.
I saw it in my thesis research on African American soldiers in World War I, when Black soldiers encountered obstacles that sought to limit or prevent them from enlisting. The fear among, well, almost all white people in 1917, was that a Black man in uniform would be granted the same station as white soldiers in uniform, that of citizen par excellence, the masculine ideal. Of course, not allowing Black men and other “hyphenates” (many of whom weren’t yet sufficiently “white”) to enlist went counter to the federal government’s main goal which was to scale manpower. The rules were changed. Even then, Black soldiers were segregated and held to lesser labor-focused roles. Promotions in rank, advanced training, and overseas postings for Black soldiers came only once the realities of war set in among white families and the powers that be: that sending only white men overseas to potentially die would not bode well for the post war racial hierarchy at home. The rules were changed. The brutality that awaited African American soldiers at home after the war was consistent with the basic tenant of white supremacy: change the rules. In that moment and for a certain type of soldier, the uniform did not imply honor or elevated status. It was a target. It was desecrated. They were lynched. The rules were changed.
We have continued to see these ad hoc rule changes in government-sanctioned housing discrimination when it was deemed “natural” to separate the races despite the fact that the practice was illegal. We see it today in who gets to sell marijuana legally at a great profit (I’m talking to you John Boehner, former Speaker of the House and staunch anti-legalization advocate, who now sits on the board of a lucrative marijuana investment firm) and who remains in jail for selling it “illegally.” (According to a 2020 report compiled by the ACLU, Black people are four times more likely than white people to be arrested for possession even though white and Black people partake at equal rates). We see it most egregiously in the criminal justice system, which preys on Black and brown people at a disproportionately higher rate and with harsher sentences. It is a vicious loop: the more Black people we see in prison, the more we are conditioned to believe that people of color are naturally depraved and lawless. The more we view “them” as such, the more likely we are to protect a system that portends to protect “us” from “them.” Muslim bans, caravans of illegals, scary Mexicans, suburban “invasions,” all of these narratives work to give us tacit permission to go along quietly when the rules are changed.
To be clear: rules and laws are not always the same thing. Sometimes they contradict each other, in fact, they often do. We (“white” people) accept illegal practices for many reasons: we are busy, comfortable, tired, confused…but mostly it is because we are complicit in a system that privileges us. Most of us accept this until we see, for example, people being brutalized while walking across a bridge. In other words, we become unbearably uncomfortable with lawlessness and chaos.
This lawlessness is what brings me back to my main topic, the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Like many, I felt a mixed bag of emotions that day, the earliest being fear. But as the day wore on, anger overtook fear as I watched policemen take selfies with rioters draped in Trump or Confederate flags. I watched criminal insurrectionists being ushered out of the Capitol doors as if they were leaving Bryant Denny Stadium after a raucous tailgating session. Anger was then joined by confusion. Was I not seeing what I thought I was seeing? Was I overreacting?
No, I was not over-reacting. What I was witnessing was the persistence of white supremacy: the rules were being changed before our eyes, in real-time. Profiles of the rioters and interviews with their family members appeared in major media outlets. Preposterous narratives of misunderstood, middle-aged, middle-class men were coming at us from every angle. The worst had happened…and it was a misdemeanor? This was nothing more than the misguided, youthful exuberance of…40-year old white men? After a day of rioting, menacing lawmakers, and worse, they were peacefully apprehended and one by one released on bail to their mothers and wives.
This Sunday the New York Times ran a story on the front page that featured a quote from the husband of Ashli Babbit, an insurrectionist who was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer after she “…tried to vault through a window” into the House chamber. “She didn’t have any weapons on her…I don’t know why she had to die in the People’s house.” Babbit and the angry crowd felt entitled to be doing what they were doing and unbound by the rule of law. They took selfies and filmed themselves with glee, unmasked, and unafraid of consequence.
Contrast this with Miriam Carey who, in 2013, drove to Washington D.C. with her 13-month old daughter strapped into her car seat. Carey was fatally shot 26 times by Secret Service after attempting to make what may have been nothing more than an illegal u-turn at a White House security checkpoint. Consider the contrasts between the immediate suspension of the Capitol police officer who shot a white woman who invaded the U.S. Capitol and the prolonged handwringing over how to treat the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless other innocent Black citizens. One recent internet meme hurt in its simplicity, “It’s not that I want the insurrectionist mob participants to be shot. It’s that I want you to stop shooting us.”
Sleeping, walking, jogging, protesting while Black: extrajudicial justice, death. Violent insurrection on federal property by a white mob: give us a minute while we tinker with the rules.
