Rioting for Its Own Sake

Like begets like, and the progenitor of the recent violence at the United States Capitol building, though some may hesitate to admit it, was the ongoing fervor and volume of the country’s antiracist demonstrations. It should be obvious that this is not to say that antiracist protests, no matter how raucous they have gotten, are comparable in any way to what happened on the sixth of January. One should be able to spot the difference between convenience store arson and an attempted coup d’état, or, better yet, between the desecration of government buildings in the name of baseless conspiracy, and violence in response to literal centuries of significantly worse violence.

How many of these Raiders of the Lost Election have seen family members or friends killed by Democrats? How many of their ancestors were stripped from their homes and turned into property in order to develop a nation predicated on their eternal destruction? Now, how many of them committed treason because their exorbitantly privileged cult leader told them to?

As painful as it is to have to clarify the embarrassingly obvious, I am not a champion for the murder of police officers, for the burning of buildings, and certainly not for any form of domestic terrorism. And you would be hard-pressed to find a term more suitable for the events at the Capitol than “domestic terrorism.” Though it is surely an overtrodden point by now, the “terrorism” of the “Radical Left” that the rioters at the Capitol believed they were fighting against is dwarfed by the actual terroristic acts that they committed that day. The “ayes” have it all across the world: there was no stolen election, there is no grand conspiracy against American patriotism, and the belief that Black lives matter is not a war cry. This was violence for the sake of violence.

I almost feel responsible for this nonsense, as I wrote in July of last year that I wondered if protestors would “evolve into hot-blooded revolutionaries and seriously attempt to overrun the White House instead of rallying outside of it….” I am embarrassed by my naivete—at the time, I felt positive that it would be those protesting for common sense and not white supremacy partaking in ruthlessly direct action. Now, it feels like the way it really went down was the only way that it could have.

As long as there is motion in the direction of equality, there will be resistance of a similar, often more destructive intensity. With its depiction in the 2019 Watchmen reboot, there has been a resurgence of conversation regarding the destruction of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921, an event that offers an example of this characteristically American tit-for-tat. Black person works to make their life better, white person reminds them what they were brought here for. It is a tale as old as the country and just as depressing. These occurrences are indicative of the perpetual racialized struggle in America that sees people of color, primarily Black people, fighting for their humanity while elites (and their less privileged cronies) fight to uphold the core tenet of Alexander H. Stephens’ infamous Cornerstone Speech, being “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”

And what else should we expect from a nation built by white supremacy and for the purpose of strengthening it? For this reason, it is difficult to imagine the freedom struggle without violence, whether it is coming from one end or the other. The violence that America began with has made fighters out of too many of us, and it has culminated in the present, where fighting seems a more rational practice than loving. The late Dr. King tried loving and received a bullet for his efforts. With that in mind, can you really blame those that seek alternatives?

The fact is that people of color in America have been dealt an abysmal hand. They have thrived under incredible duress, but they remain targeted by those who would prefer to thrive in isolation instead of together. This is a very American mentality. As previously stated, America was built to secure success for a select few by oppressing a select many. And when the many show their frustration, the few do their best to beat the many into submission. All of this being said, I believe it is the duty of those that believe in equality and general benevolence to work on figuring out how to disrupt this bloody, seemingly infinite cycle.