When White People Realize American Politics Are Violent

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a55682/alexandria-shooting-political-violence/


When White People Realize American Politics Are Violent

It's not news to anyone else.

By Charles P. Pierce
Jun 16, 2017


Because I am an elderly gent with my crochets, I watched the Congressional Baseball Game Thursday night on CSPAN. (Both halves of my professional life are coming together in odd ways these days. Mike Pence just lawyered up with Tiger Woods' wife's divorce lawyer.) The Democratic team won, 11-2, and, let me tell you, Cedric Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana can flat bring it—a complete game victory on the mound and three-for-four at the dish with a triple. Naturally, the broadcast crew, from a Washington radio station, kept up the patter and there was a lot of talk about unity and civility, because that was the order of the day. And I continued to wonder where it was that all these people grew up. For example, on MSNBC Thursday morning, Joe Scarborough unlimbered himself on the topic.

I get it. Truly, I do. This was a workplace shooting in a company town. But I do wonder, for example, what African-Americans in my age bracket (or older) think about when they hear white politicians express amazement that political violence exists in this country. Just in my lifetime, people of color have seen their leaders—from Dr. King to Fred Hampton—shot down in acts of political violence. They've seen activists murdered and buried in earthen dams. Children killed in church bombings, Vernon Dahmer burned alive in his home and Harry and Harriette Moore blown up in theirs. Fifty-four years ago this past Wednesday, Medgar Evers was shot down in his own driveway in an act of political violence, and it took more than 30 years to put his killer in jail. Proof that John Lewis, for example, is an infinitely finer person than I is that he never goes to work in the morning carrying a tackhammer with which to explain such things to his dimmer, melanin-deprived colleagues in the House.

Political violence has been a way of life in this country for most of its existence, reaching a kind of peak in the years between 1850 and 1865, but continuing in many forms for most of the next century. (Just recently, New Orleans took down a monument to an act of outright seditious political violence.) Lynchings were acts of political violence. In the 1920s, anti-lynching bills couldn't even get out of committee in the Congress because the political power in the South needed lynchings to sustain itself. The destruction of thriving African-American communities in Greenwood in Tulsa and in Rosewood in Florida were both acts of political violence.

I don't know what Native Americans in my age bracket (or older) think about when they hear white politicians express amazement that political violence exists in this country. Political violence of one kind or another has been directed at them since the first white people stepped off the first boat. It has been the one constant in their lives for as long as there has been a United States of America. And this has been merely a precis of acts of actual political violence. The political violence of the mind—which these acts were aimed to induce—is even more widespread and just as damaging.

The destruction in that case is culturally hereditary, passed from one generation to another, from Reconstruction New Orleans to Ferguson, Missouri, from Wounded Knee to Standing Rock. So, yes, I wonder about how all of these people hear white people earnestly deploring the "tone" of our political discourse without hurling themselves out a window. A workplace shooting in a company town is a terrible thing to witness and to endure. There's a monument to that simple truth in a place called Ludlow in Colorado. You can visit it.