White Supremacy Is the Deeper Virus
June 4th 2020
Driving for racial justice (Judy Rohrer)
By Judy Rohrer
We have experienced days of escalating protests over the killing of George Floyd, police brutality, and state violence more broadly. The National Guard has been called up in 23 states. Mayors are instituting curfews. President Trump declared Monday he will invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active duty military if Governors are unable to “dominate” their citizens. This is after a weekend of Trump doing his best to escalate the violence, including the tweet: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
On the other hand, some business owners standing in front of the charred remains of their stores are saying effectively “I can rebuild. George Floyd’s life is gone forever.” Evidence is emerging that far-Right agitators have been literally enflaming actions in many cities, but Trump said he will designate Antifa as a terrorist organization. A recent FBI report finds “no intel indicating Antifa involvement” in D.C.-area protests May 31. And all of this is happening against the backdrop of the pandemic.
How do any of us make sense of this? It really should not surprise us that the country has exploded in outrage over the latest spate of the killing of Black people – George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, and too many others. Viral videos help catalyze the outrage, but we’ve had videos before. The fire this time (with a nod to James Baldwin) is lit on ground where 100,000 and counting have perished from COVID-19, and the unemployment rate for Black Americans doubled to 16.4% in April. More specifically, the ground where the fire was lit is the Twin Cities which have one of the largest income inequality gaps in the country. Further, even with a lack of data on the virus, it is estimated that the mortality rate for Black people is 2.4 times that of white people. That is structural racism made deadly clear. That is racial terror.
A top story in Sunday’s New York Times announced, “Two Crises Convulse a Nation: A Pandemic and Police Violence.” But these aren’t two separate crises. They are both deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy that values white lives and property above all else. The overwhelming cry from the streets is, It Has Got To Stop. And while Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is often appropriated by white liberals in times like these, we would do well to remember that the last time the country saw such widespread racial rebellion Dr. King reminded us: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”
I’m not the first to point out that the National Guard was not deployed when white men with assault rifles stormed Michigan’s capital as part of orchestrated “Reopen America” protests a few weeks ago. It is no coincidence that those protests came after some of the first data emerged verifying that communities of color were being hit hardest by COVID-19. The white supremacist masculinity on display in those rallies was not lost on communities of color. They didn’t need the noose that appeared to recognize that a key “liberty” being demanded was white entitlement to Black and Brown labor. It was the pandemic version of MAGA: “Let’s get this racialized gendered capitalist party started again.”
How do we make sense of it? I don’t think we do quickly or easily. I do know that those of us who are white need to act in solidarity with communities of color, not just as allies, but as accomplices. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin instructed: "To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”
Before we act as accomplices, we need to listen. And I mean really listen hard, especially to young leaders of color. This includes people like Brittany Packnett Cunningham, co-founder of Campaign Zero. On a recent AM Joy broadcast, Cunningham schooled us: “This country sits on looted land and was built by looted labor and it loots Black life every day. That is not to excuse the white supremacists and other forces that are coming in to take advantage of protests that are all about systemic racism and ending systemic racism. But what is true is that what would set all of this to calm and to peace is to deal with the conditions that caused people to react in the first place, instead of spending all this time on the symptoms. People are frankly tired of America dealing with the symptom and not the virus.”
We can’t get to peace without addressing the virus of systemic racism, just like we can’t end the lockdown without effectively containing and eliminating the coronavirus. If we don’t deal with the symptoms, the virus of white supremacy will continue ravaging our body politic.
Judy Rohrer is a scholar-activist and has written previously about whiteness, racial politics, and settler colonialism for both academic and popular audiences. She is currently the Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Eastern Washington University.