On Jan. 5, exactly 10 days before what would have been the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s 92nd birthday, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of King\u2019s former church, won election to become Georgia\u2019s first Black senator.<\/p>\n
As The Associated Press officially called the race in the wee hours of the next morning, pundits on TV hailed the moment as a long-awaited milestone, half a century after Jim Crow had been evicted from the Deep South.<\/p>\n
But then, just 12 hours later, those channels were flooded with images of Trump supporters smashing their way into the Capitol building. It was hard to miss the stark symbolism of the push-and-pull: President Trump\u2019s high-profile attempt to overturn his loss in Georgia and other states had helped bring these rioters to the Capitol \u2014 and Warnock\u2019s victory only seemed to add fuel to their fire.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s something people of color are fairly accustomed to in the United States: these moments of progress, moments of advance, that always seem to be tempered by these moments of backlash,\u201d Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and democracy, said in an interview.<\/p>\n
In a sense, the Capitol riot can be seen as a collision of two main pillars of Trump\u2019s political messaging: disinformation and racial resentment. And in fact, history suggests that they go hand in hand.<\/p>\n
James Baldwin often pointed out that since white supremacy is a myth, it requires lies to uphold it. \u201cBecause they think they are white, they do not dare confront the ravage and the lie of their history,\u201d he wrote in his essay \u201cOn Being White and Other Lies.\u201d \u201cBecause they think they are white, they cannot allow themselves to be tormented by the suspicion that all men are brothers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just over a century ago, during the Red Summer of 1919, a rash of anti-Black riots broke out in cities across the country, driven by a similar cocktail of unsubstantiated and often baldly false claims (frequently about crimes by Black people) and thinly veiled white fears about threats to their own political power in cities.<\/p>\n
Today, as we officially celebrate King\u2019s birthday, Jefferson views Trump\u2019s alternate-reality politics as embodying the very same commitment that Baldwin talked about: to \u201cwhiteness as a kind of fantasy,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think what we saw at the Capitol is a culmination of a kind of white grievance politics that the president has stoked for four years, and even before, as an original birther,\u201d Jefferson said. \u201cIt\u2019s this imagined world where whiteness is without competition.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reeling from the attack on the Capitol, Joe Biden and other politicians have insisted that the violence does not represent \u201cwho we are\u201d as a nation, pledging to bring the country together under shared ideals and to reject Trump\u2019s divisiveness once and for all.<\/p>\n
But writing last week in The Undefeated, the critic Soraya Nadia McDonald took issue with the president-elect\u2019s insistence that the country\u2019s true identity had nothing to do with what happened on Jan. 6. \u201cI\u2019ve long found these sorts of proclamations baffling, because if one is honest about the history of the United States, it prominently features white violence, terrorism and revanchism, particularly toward Black people, Indigenous people and women,\u201d McDonald wrote.<\/p>\n
This calls up King\u2019s own words about America\u2019s commitment to mythmaking. It\u2019s not just extremists and self-proclaimed white supremacists who engage in this practice, the civil rights leader said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNegroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says, and they have taken white Americans at their word when they talked of it as an objective,\u201d King wrote in his 1967 book, \u201cWhere Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?\u201d White Americans, however, often think of equality as \u201ca loose expression for improvement,\u201d King wrote. When it comes to the gap between Black and white prosperity, white America \u201cseeks only to make it less painful and less obvious but in most respects to retain it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The riot inside the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6,\u00a0followed a rally at which President Trump made an inflammatory speech\u00a0to his supporters, questioning the results of the election. Here\u2019s a look at what happened and the ongoing fallout:<\/p>\n