Assault on the Capitol: an attack on racial equality

The images of a far-right mob, spurred on by outgoing President Donald Trump, storming the Capitol are undoubtedly unusual and difficult to imagine before they occurred on Wednesday.

Yet they are rooted in decades of denial of democracy by a small but significant part of American society: They are unprecedented, but they do have a past.

In the United States, as in many democratic countries, there is a long tradition of contested elections and allegations of fraud.

Some are so well known that they have become a cliché, such as John F. Kennedy's father's mafia dealings to win the crucial State of Illinois, which ultimately gave him the presidency.

The tongo was very popular, in fact, it appears in films like Martin Scorsese's last,

The Irishman

, but the loser, Richard Nixon, gave up on his resources.

The first elections that George W. Bush won in 2000, thanks to a handful of votes in Florida, a state ruled by his brother, also provoked deep controversy, but Al Gore also acknowledged his defeat after a Supreme Court ruling.

Historians and journalists maintain that the closest precedent to the dispute raised by Trump, based on lies and against all evidence, is found in the 1876 presidential elections, where a confrontation also took place over the Electoral College votes - the President is not designated by direct suffrage, but by delegates of the States chosen by universal suffrage.

However, then as now, what lies behind that shock is much deeper and more terrible: the denial of the right to political representation of a part of the population, minorities, especially African Americans.

Note the t-shirt: Camp Auschwitz.

There is antisemitism on the left, for sure, but it there on the right too.

https://t.co/v45iFxqJoJ

- Deborah E. Lipstadt (@deborahlipstadt) January 7, 2021

You have to rub your eyes before confirming that the photo of a guy with a naked torso, full of tattoos, wearing a fur cap with bison horns, occupying the presidential rostrum of the US Congress, is real. Paramilitary aesthetics, southern flags, Nazi t-shirts with the slogan "Camp Auschwitz", the cult of arms and, above all, the defense of institutional racism are aberrant, but not surprising.

They are those to whom Trump said Wednesday night “you are very special, we love you”, but also those whom he refused to condemn when another neo-Nazi mob, sympathizers of the Ku Klux Klan, attacked leftist protesters and protesters in Charlottesville in 2017. Black Lives Matter.

Trump has never hidden his identification with white supremacism, in fact, one of his main arguments against the presidency of Barack Obama was to promote the falsehood that he was not born in the United States although, in reality, what he meant to say is that, by being black, he had no right to occupy the White House.

The rejection of the electoral result by the outgoing president also has to do with racism, with the denial that all votes are worth the same.

In fact, one of the most persistent political battles in the United States is the Republican resistance to voter registration that affects mainly blacks, but also Hispanics.

Precisely, the turnaround in the results of Georgia, which the Senate has handed over to the Democrats, has been possible after 10 years of struggle by activist Stacey Abrams to register black voters.

That very long fight has its origin in those presidential elections of 150 years ago.

As the White House correspondent of

The New York Times

, Peter Baker,

recalls in a chronicle

, "those elections of 1876 were the most contested in American history and surely the ones with the greatest repercussions."

The paradox, Baker emphasizes, is that almost nobody remembers the two protagonists of that fight, the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who took the presidency a year after the vote, and the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden, despite his lasting imprint on American politics.

The dispute, referenced by Ted Cruz, one of the few Republican senators to have followed Trump in his career of false accusations to nowhere, erupted when Democrats and Republicans from three southern states, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida , they sent different delegates because they did not recognize the result of the other.

All three territories were still occupied by Union troops: the Civil War had ended in 1865. The dispute was resolved in 1877: the Democrats accepted defeat in exchange for the federated Army withdrawing from the south of the country and ending the so-called Reconstruction policy, which sought to give rights to blacks, who until recently had been slaves.

"The final deal was that the Republicans got control of the White House," Columbia University professor Eric Foner, an expert at the time, explained to

Law & Crime

magazine

.

“It was recognized that the Democrats were in control of the entire South, and that led to the slow, not immediate, but slow, imposition of what we call the Jim Crow system and eventually taking the right to vote from blacks and women. imposition of segregation ”.

The civil rights movement, which brought civic representation back to African Americans, has its continuation in the Obama presidency or in the struggle of crucial figures like Stacey Abrams who has managed to turn the tables in Georgia;

but it has never failed to meet resistance from those who deny equality.

Using an imaginary electoral fraud as a pretext, the assault on the Capitol on Wednesday is part of this long fight.

Subscribe here to the

newsletter

about the elections in the United States