A Spotlight on U.S. Capitol…ism
by Ranna & Ayva
White nationalist mobs are not holding the country hostage; they are protecting it. While exerting white privilege, they are protecting white supremacy, white AmeriKKKa, white entitlement, white systems, white education, and white ideologies. This is not an attempt to destroy but preserve this racialized capitalist settler nation. They were let onto the grounds of the Capitol by the same people whose job it is to ‘protect and serve’ — it’s like pointing the finger at your own shadow.
Also, this is nothing new. State-sanctioned threats and violence rose at the dawn of the nation, as did authoritarian capitalism and the prioritized protection of white lives and property. And as we see now, when the Occupant makes a public call to maintain these longstanding systems, there is an upsurge of blatant and overt violence in an attempt to stronghold what the Capitol was designed to do in the first place.
White folks, if you are truly for the call to justice, your actions will go beyond the words on your social media accounts. Performative words only get you so far. If you don’t speak up, if you don’t actively disrupt, if you don’t hold yourself and your white peers accountable, you might as well catch the next flight to DC to stand with your extended racial family at the U.S. Capitol. Silence is complicit in the global project of white supremacy.
People of color, it is not your job to step up to do the next professional development training in your workplace that will likely be pulled together as a response to these anticlimactic national headlines. Transformative change will not come about through diversity and equity trainings, nor can it solely rest its weight on the shoulders of minoritized peoples. It is not your job to dismantle the white supremacy in your white counterparts; it’s theirs. It is not your job to fix a mess that you did not create.
People of color, take care of yourselves, your families, and your communities right now. And remember that there will come a hard-fought time that our strength will no longer be juxtaposed with oppression, that our resilience will be a symbol of peace, and that our ancestors will have carried us to liberation.
We will continue to build belonging within our communities as an act of love and resistance not only for ourselves in our lifetimes but also for the ones who will come after us. We must move beyond reform because systems and institutions that were intentionally created to destroy the well-being and lives of Black and Brown people cannot be improved.
We must disrupt and tear down systems. The only way out of this is through abolition.
