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About Last Week
The more I watch these terrifying videos of the insurrection, the attempted coup, the brutality at the Capitol, the angrier I get. I struggle to process the open display of white supremacy and its symbols: the confederate flags, the nooses, the Nazi salutes, the sweatshirts declaring that the deaths of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust was not enough.
I get angry because I feel the conflict that so many of you feel, when you want to believe that we are better than that, but you know that we are not better than that, not fully, not completely, not yet.
I don’t like that feeling.
And then I pause, and I remember that this is just the latest example of white supremacy in this country, albeit perhaps one of the most egregious ones I’ve seen in some time, perhaps since, oh, just last summer. (Have you (re)watched the murder of George Floyd lately?)
There is a long, long history of white supremacists resisting or refusing to be governed by Black people or other people of color.
Of white supremacists coming up with the most creative, insidious, and brutal ways to prevent the voices of Black people and other people of color from being heard, and to prevent their votes from being counted.
Of white supremacists fighting to protect their own power, rights, privileges and advantages at the expense…
