American Unity Is a Fantasy

By Jamil Smith, Rolling Stone

16 January 21

National harmony is impossible without true accountability, especially when a major political party enables sedition and white-supremacist terrorism

onald Trump should be happy that he has presided over more than 390,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the United States instead of over the Flint water crisis. Otherwise, he might some day face legal consequences.

Former Michigan governor Rick Snyder was finally brought up on charges Thursday, more than six years after his administration oversaw the decision to switch the water supply for the majority-black city to the corroded Flint River. Thousands of adults and children were contaminated with lead and other pollutants, and at least nine people who contracted Legionnaires’ disease died. Snyder pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor charges of willful neglect of duty. He is one of nine total officials facing a total of 41 counts, including 34 felonies, in connection to the Flint catastrophe.

Imagine the absurdity, if you will, of saying that this – accountability for actions that took human lives – was all too divisive. That having Snyder and his cronies finally face criminal penalties would not be what Michiganders needed to heal. Poisoning Flint’s water was surely terrible, but inflaming racial and political tensions is what we truly want to avoid, yes? Moving on is really the best thing.

However, while it would clearly be ridiculous and immoral to let Snyder and his cronies escape accountability in the name of “unity,” that’s exactly the approach Republicans are demanding we take to the white-supremacist mob that attacked the Capitol – and to the white-supremacist politicians who encouraged them.

Many a Republican this past week brushed away the seditious January 6th attacks as they sought to keep their president from being impeached by the House for a second time. The word “unity” may seem newly robbed of meaning when wielded by people who have themselves been, very recently, trying to overturn an election. In our current dystopian politics, these words are now opiates for the masses, intoxicating us daily with notions of American exceptionalism even as scourges of our nation grow more dangerous.

As violent extremists retreat to the deepest recesses of the internet to plan their next eruptions of entitlement, their elected representatives tell us that “unity” is in our collective best interests. It will surely work out well for the politicians and terrorists alike, helping both escape accountability, repentance, and remedies for their actions, as well as preventing any work necessary to reverse damage wrought upon our social fabric.

If we want to stop the next wave of white-supremacist violence, and root out the people and power structures that made the current one possible, we need to hold white supremacists accountable for their actions.

What should that accountability look like? Surely, a lot of people in and out of Congress need to lose their jobs. A lot of them, including the current president, should face prosecution for what they have done. However, we should exercise some caution. Addressing the racism within the Capitol Police would be a start, and overdue. However, The Marshall Project finds that civil-liberties experts fear that due to prosecutorial bias, responding to white extremist violence like what we saw at the Capitol with some kind of new “War on Terror” will undoubtedly result in harsher penalties for the very people supremacists target. Its report detailed that hate-crime laws unfairly target black Americans while but are under-enforced against white perpetrators: black people accounted for 13% of the U.S. population in 2019, yet were accused of 24% of the hate crimes. Conversely, white people were 60% of the population and made up only 53% of the defendants, respectively.

Unifying with those seeking white supremacy, voter suppression, and government overthrow seems like the very definition of madness. If Republicans were the only ones calling for this, it would be easier to dismiss. But consider that days before he was arraigned, Snyder joined his successor, current Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, “calling on people of goodwill across America to pray for peace, calm, and healing” after the Capitol riot and asking them to unify “to defeat our real enemy, which is the pandemic that has taken far too many of our friends, neighbors, and loved ones.” Unfortunately, both Republicans and Democrats are engaging in this vain pursuit of political unification at precisely the time when we should be focusing on reconciling the truth of Trump’s malevolent governance while at the same time putting forth policy that fully rectifies his shortcomings.

Joe Biden, the president-elect, made a speech in Wilmington on Thursday outlining a new, comprehensive $1.9 trillion “rescue and recovery plan” for the pandemic, which he called “the path forward with a seriousness of purpose, a clear plan with transparency and accountability with a call for unity that is equally necessary.” I couldn’t disagree more with that last part. How is unity as essential right now than the plan’s extended housing and nutrition aid? How is some amorphous harmony with people who have tried to deny Biden’s ascendance to the presidency with violence and death getting a $2,000 check into the accounts of Americans making $75,000 or less? (And not $1,400, as the Biden plan outlines, merely making up the difference of the Trump/Mitch McConnell $600 pittance. Give Americans what they should have had all along.)

The Washington Post reported that Congressional Republicans are already predicting widespread opposition to Biden’s sweeping plan, which includes a raise in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour and $350 billion in state and local aid. The American economy and job market are heading, with even more precipitous speed, into the commode — yet these folks Biden wants “unity” with consider his proposal a “non-starter.”

I would ask kindly that the only party that ostensibly represents the interests of black people and other Americans of color stop trying to ally with Republicans, who could only get 10 of their 211 House members to vote to impeach a president who provoked a seditious, deadly, white-supremacist attack on the Capitol while all of Congress was inside, certifying the vote for the next President of the United States. Republicans mockingly refuse to wear masks, still — resulting, it appears, in at least three positive diagnoses for Democrats cooped up with them during the riot. Since the attack, they’ve petulantly avoided the new metal detectors. The party of Trump is an obstacle to be outmaneuvered, not a partner to be persuaded. And some of its members, frankly, should be expelled and prosecuted.

The calls for healing in the aftermath of the Capitol riot recall another egregious avoidance of accountability, one that serves as a cautionary tale. When President Lincoln in 1862 emancipated enslaved people in Washington, D.C., he paid their captors up to $300 for each human being they held in bondage. Even a passing look at what came next reveals the payments did nothing to win over enslavers to the cause of “unity.” Instead, they rewarded possibly the ugliest white entitlement there is. The United States has a long history, indeed, of ignoring the pain of its most downtrodden so that the salve of “unity” may be spread over the same festering wounds. In the wake of the Capitol riot, many are all too eager to repeat Lincoln’s mistake. As he begins his presidency, Biden should avoid doing the same.

Joe Biden's Looming War on White Supremacy

By Ronald Brownstein, The Atlantic

16 January 21

The insurrection could spur a federal-government crackdown on white-nationalist groups, as well as strengthen the case for systemic police reform.

or four years, Donald Trump downplayed the risk of white-supremacist violence and denied that racial bias is pervasive in law enforcement. In a single, searing day, the assault on the U.S. Capitol exposed the price of both of those choices—and may have provided Joe Biden new political momentum for reversing direction on each front.

At once, the rioters demonstrated how much the threat of white extremism has metastasized under Trump, while the restrained police response vivified a racial double standard in policing. The attack could strengthen the case for systemic police reform, both through congressional action and a revival of Justice Department oversight of local police practices that the Trump administration essentially shelved. Representative Karen Bass of California, the lead sponsor of a police-reform bill that passed the House last summer, told me she believes that the lower chamber will approve a new version “within the first quarter” of 2021. “This was yet another example in the disparity of treatment between African Americans and others,” Derrick Johnson, the president and CEO of the NAACP, told me. “This is yet another example of how police agencies viewed citizens differently.”

The attack could also make it tougher for congressional Republicans to resist the Biden administration’s expected efforts to dramatically increase enforcement against white supremacists through the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. “This isn’t just a Trump thing that goes away when Trump goes away,” Elizabeth Neumann, the former DHS assistant secretary for threat prevention under Trump, told me. “And this isn’t just a bunch of really crazy Trump people. This is something darker and deeper that has been around a very long time. We have aroused the sleeping giant … and we’re now going to be dealing both with [Trump’s] radicalized supporters and this white-power movement on steroids for the foreseeable future.”

Biden signaled his intent to invert Trump’s law-enforcement priorities when he unveiled his top Justice Department nominees at a press conference the day after the Capitol assault. When Biden introduced Merrick Garland, his attorney-general nominee, the president-elect pointedly noted that the Justice Department was formed to enforce the post–Civil War constitutional amendments ending slavery and promising equal rights under the law. The department’s founding mission, Biden said, was “to stand up to the Klan, to stand up to racism, to take on domestic terrorism. This original spirit must again guide and animate its work.” When identifying their priorities, Garland and Biden’s other top DOJ nominees pointed to the same two issues: tackling the threat of violent domestic extremism and confronting systemic racial bias in law enforcement.

The nominees bring unusually relevant credentials to each side of that equation. Garland, a federal judge, helped lead the prosecution of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, in the mid-1990s. Lisa Monaco, Biden’s nominee as deputy attorney general, served in Barack Obama’s administration as assistant attorney general for national security and his White House adviser on counterterrorism. The other two nominees Biden announced were selected from the heart of the civil-rights legal establishment: Associate-attorney-general nominee Vanita Gupta, another Obama alumnus, is the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; Kristen Clarke, the nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights, is the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Yet on both the white-extremist and policing fronts, the magnitude of the Biden administration’s challenge is formidable. The white-nationalist threat has been on “an upward trajectory” over the past four years, Neumann told me. Although white-supremacist organizations have always existed, and their efforts accelerated after Obama’s election as the first black president, Trump acted as a “kind of an accelerant,” she said. “There was already a fire, and he was adding fuel to it. He was expanding the number of people who were participating in the extremism.”

Greg Ehrie, a former section chief of the FBI’s domestic-terrorism operations center and now the vice president for law enforcement at the Anti-Defamation League, told me that throughout Trump’s presidency the white-nationalist movement has also felt more comfortable stepping out into public. “It is certainly growing in identified numbers, people who are coming out openly and saying ‘I believe in it,’” he said. “You are seeing people become emboldened.” At the same time, extremist groups are solidifying their organization, with more clearly identified leaders and something more akin to a chain of command. “Their structure is actually codifying itself, which is a really scary development,” Ehrie added.

While experts I spoke with agree that Trump’s rhetoric has dangerously encouraged these groups, they disagree on federal law enforcement’s response. Ehrie said federal agencies have made “some inroads” in combatting them. But others told me that the catastrophic attack on the Capitol made clear that the government has not treated the threat with sufficient gravity—either because of Trump’s own downplaying of any problem or because of cultural and racial blind spots in their own ranks.

“From what I watched, they made changes, they adjusted, but they were a little too slow, in my book,” including DHS, said Neumann, who resigned last year and publicly supported Biden during the election. “I still wonder, based on what happened on January 6, if there is kind of an unconscious bias—an assumption that a bunch of white guys like to yell at each other on the internet and play dress-up with militia [gear] but there are only a handful of them that we actually have to worry about.”

Many African American leaders see nothing to wonder about. Rashad Robinson, the president of the civil-rights advocacy group Color of Change, argues that federal law enforcement puts much more emphasis on monitoring and pressuring racial-justice advocates than white nationalists. Under Trump, federal officials “have treated NFL players who kneel as national threats and white men who are talking about overthrowing the government with guns as patriots,” Robinson told me.

“I don’t think they’ve dealt with it at all,” said Bass, referring to the Trump administration’s approach to white nationalism. “I don’t think they consider it a problem, and that’s a part of our history.”

Despite the heroism of individual officers resisting the mob, the Capitol Police’s strikingly muted response—as well as the presence of law-enforcement personnel from around the country among the rioters—raises a larger, often unspoken issue: the presence of white-nationalist sympathizers in law enforcement. The force’s reaction “brings [up] a lot of questions” related to whether there were “people internal to the [Trump] administration, within the Capitol Police, and others who were in collusion” with the attackers, Johnson, the NAACP president, told me. Adds Bass: “I think when all is said and done, you will find that [among] members of the Capitol Police, my Republican colleagues, and their staff, there was involvement at different levels and participation in what happened.” (Although no specific evidence has emerged, House Democrats have said they are investigating the possibility of collusion.)

More broadly, the lax response, as well as the decision to allow the rioters to leave the Capitol unmolested, dramatized in an unusually visceral way a key complaint from Black communities: that law enforcement treats white people differently in any kind of encounter—in this case, even an armed and violent attack on a foundation of the American government. The stark contrast between how the rioters were treated and how Black Lives Matter protests were handled last summer “further cements for people of color [that] America, for all of its good, has a long way to go in achieving its promises of equality under the law,” Sakira Cook, the Justice Reform director at the Leadership Conference, told me.

The Capitol riot could spur a new effort to overhaul police departments, including through Bass’s police-reform legislation, which the House passed in June without a single dissenting Democratic vote after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. (The Senate did not take the bill up for a vote.) Among other measures, that bill would have banned chokeholds and no-knock warrants at the federal level; established a national registry of police misconduct; and scaled back the “qualified immunity” legal defense for officers accused of wrongdoing. Under Gupta and Clarke, the Biden Justice Department is certain to revive its oversight of local police departments through “pattern or practice” investigations of systemic bias, which can result in judicial consent decrees.

More contentious is whether Congress needs to provide federal law enforcement with expanded legal authority to confront domestic terrorists. Neumann and some other terrorism experts say yes, while many civil-rights advocates fear that law enforcement could turn such authority against minority communities. “Addressing white supremacy does not require creating a new statute,” Becky Monroe, who heads the Leadership Conference’s hate and bias program, told me. “It requires the will and investment in existing statutes and existing authority to ensure that these insurrectionists are held accountable.”

Robinson said that truly defusing white nationalism’s rising threat will require more than prosecuting direct participants—or even pursuing sympathizers in law enforcement. Instead, the incoming administration and civil-rights advocates must look at the broader range of institutions that extremist groups rely on to grow, including social-media companies that spread their message and financial institutions that process their fundraising efforts. “Some of the biggest, most profitable institutions have also played a role in getting us here, because they have looked at so many of the people behind these groups and they have not seen them as a threat,” Robinson said. “They see people that look like them, that look like members of their families, and they don’t take the threat seriously because it’s not targeting them.”

Neumann pointed to another dimension. Because extremists are relying so heavily on Trump’s unfounded claims about the election to mobilize support, stunting them will be extremely difficult unless more Republican officials publicly refute him. “The biggest thing that could help the scope of the problem is for the bulk of Republicans to come out and say, ‘The election was not stolen, Donald Trump lied, I was complicit in that lie, and I apologize,’” she told me. An internal federal intelligence bulletin disclosed yesterday by The Washington Post also warned about more violence if the lie about the “stolen election” isn’t dispelled.

The responsibility for confronting this mounting threat now falls to Biden and his team. The president-elect has not appeared particularly enthusiastic about imposing consequences on Trump for his role in the Capitol attack through impeachment, and many legal experts believe that he will resist pursuing criminal charges against his predecessor. But throughout the campaign and the tumultuous transition period, Biden has focused on racial inequities more consistently and forcefully than even many civil-rights advocates expected.

By demonstrating both the danger of white nationalism and the bias in policing, last week’s assault has not only elevated those issues even further, but also exposed their common roots. “At its core, police brutality against people of color and white supremacy … in the way we have seen it displayed by Trump supporters are part and parcel of the same thing,” Cook told me. “What we want members of Congress to understand is that to address both of these problems, we must deal with the root causes of inequity and racial discrimination in this country.” Amid the wreckage of last week’s right-wing insurrection, and the ongoing threats of more violence looming over next week’s inauguration, that assignment looks only more urgent.