White Supremacist Violence Against Black and Minority Elected Officials is Really Old News
As our nation rounds the November-December peak of the holiday observances - Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas,and Kwanzaa - we are painfully and sadly reminded almost daily in the news cycle that white supremacist domestic terrorism against Black and minority elected officials is always in season. We note below the heartbreaking press conference in which Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), the first African refugee elected to Congress and the first woman of color to represent the state of Minnesota, in which she played a graphic recording of a death threat that she received [warning: threat of violence]:
This disgusting voicemail was preceded earlier in one of the darkest weeks of the year by incendiary, Islamophobic comments directed towards Omar by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), words which she later apologized for, but showed no remorse for when called to accountability by Omar. But what we must understand about Boebert's demagoguery is just part of the larger and undeniable pattern of dehumanizing and denigrating racist political rhetoric that precipitates white supremacist terroristic violent attacks targeting Black elected officials. We've seen this over and again throughout the blood-stained history of American politics, where duly-elected Black officials and people exercising their Constitutionally-enshrined rights as citizens are lynched, sometimes politically and metaphorically, sometimes literally, oftentimes both. Today marks the 147th anniversary of the very bloody Vicksburg Massacre of 1874,in which unruly mobs of white people murdered Black citizens who had just elected the first Black sheriff of that town.
Some who are ignorant of this historical pattern of racist violent white backlash against Black progress may be surprised by any or all of this. But those of us who are African-American and relatively conscious are painfully aware of the exorbitant price that our ancestors before us paid and we continue to pay for daring to exercise the power of our votes and our voices to reach for precious civil freedom and equity - for all of us! We have not bought into the narrative that, with the election of its first African American POTUS, Barack Obama, somehow America suddenly became "post-racial." We understood that as a myth as we witnessed the predictable white backlash that promised to make Obama a one-term president; that pushed the false and dangerous "birther" narrative that he was not really born in American or an American citizen, but a pretender from his father's native Kenya. Donald J. Trump, relying on the same political calculus that many white politicians or would-be politicians have used to attempt to derail the campaigns and political aspirations of Blacks and other minorities, hoped to win the GOP nomination. He would fail in that initial attempt. However, Trump turned that failure into political win in the 2016 Presidential Election, rebundling the racist rhetoric in a campaign promise to "Make America Great Again," a slogan which purposely hearkened back to the days when the Ku Klux Klan violently lynched and terrorized Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities in a white backlash to minority ascension to nascent civl freedoms and political gains. White nationalist politicos like Trump and Boebert are not as ignorant of American history as some would have us to believe. They are representative of the new proto-fascist GOP, by design about as far-removed politically and ideologically from the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.
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Sent from my iPhone
This disgusting voicemail was preceded earlier in one of the darkest weeks of the year by incendiary, Islamophobic comments directed towards Omar by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.), words which she later apologized for, but showed no remorse for when called to accountability by Omar. But what we must understand about Boebert's demagoguery is just part of the larger and undeniable pattern of dehumanizing and denigrating racist political rhetoric that precipitates white supremacist terroristic violent attacks targeting Black elected officials. We've seen this over and again throughout the blood-stained history of American politics, where duly-elected Black officials and people exercising their Constitutionally-enshrined rights as citizens are lynched, sometimes politically and metaphorically, sometimes literally, oftentimes both. Today marks the 147th anniversary of the very bloody Vicksburg Massacre of 1874,in which unruly mobs of white people murdered Black citizens who had just elected the first Black sheriff of that town.
On this day in 1874, white mobs attacked and killed dozens of Black citizens in Vicksburg, Mississippi, who had organized to help a duly elected Black sheriff regain his office. To overcome racial inequality, we must confront our history. https://t.co/cIxWbUWGAk
— Equal Justice Initiative (@eji_org) December 7, 2021
Some who are ignorant of this historical pattern of racist violent white backlash against Black progress may be surprised by any or all of this. But those of us who are African-American and relatively conscious are painfully aware of the exorbitant price that our ancestors before us paid and we continue to pay for daring to exercise the power of our votes and our voices to reach for precious civil freedom and equity - for all of us! We have not bought into the narrative that, with the election of its first African American POTUS, Barack Obama, somehow America suddenly became "post-racial." We understood that as a myth as we witnessed the predictable white backlash that promised to make Obama a one-term president; that pushed the false and dangerous "birther" narrative that he was not really born in American or an American citizen, but a pretender from his father's native Kenya. Donald J. Trump, relying on the same political calculus that many white politicians or would-be politicians have used to attempt to derail the campaigns and political aspirations of Blacks and other minorities, hoped to win the GOP nomination. He would fail in that initial attempt. However, Trump turned that failure into political win in the 2016 Presidential Election, rebundling the racist rhetoric in a campaign promise to "Make America Great Again," a slogan which purposely hearkened back to the days when the Ku Klux Klan violently lynched and terrorized Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities in a white backlash to minority ascension to nascent civl freedoms and political gains. White nationalist politicos like Trump and Boebert are not as ignorant of American history as some would have us to believe. They are representative of the new proto-fascist GOP, by design about as far-removed politically and ideologically from the party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator.
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