The Sixth of January
What to call what happened? An attempted auto-coup? An insurrection? Vigilante antidemocratic paramilitary violence? Treason? Sedition? It’s hard to pin down a name because the character of the political contest changed in the course of an afternoon. A political battle, executed via words and images and publicized in newspapers, magazines, television, and, above all, social media, became a battle for the control of public buildings and public space (figure 1). Words and images matter—Trump and his acolytes are adept at weaponizing them—but on the Sixth of January they were not the sole weapons of choice. A verbal fight, the stuff of politics, materialized into a physical assault, and into what for all intents and purposes appeared to be the stuff of civil war.
Figure 1. The mob, with smartphones, on the steps of the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Photograph by Brett Davis, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0.
The world awoke that morning to news of a stunning victory. The Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff were headed to the U.S. Senate. Georgia had elected its first Black senator, and its first Jewish senator, and Black voters had made this revolution happen. They’d turned out in record numbers—thank you, Stacey Abrams, Fair Fight Georgia, and thank you, LaTosha Brown and Cliff Albright, Black Voters Matter—to defeat white supremacy, and hand control of the Senate to Democrats.
Here was Black Power. Here was Black Power in action in Georgia—a state in the Deep South with a landscape stained with the atrocities of anti-Black racism and marked by the courage of the people who stood up to it: Charlayne Hunter, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr. and so many more. Maybe this is what Dr. King meant when he preached in his Atlanta church, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Maybe, just maybe, thanks to Black Georgians, white Americans were finally going to be forced to face the historic flaws that since the beginning have compromised this experiment in multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy.
It looked like Trumpism, and the white male privilege that it courts, were being kicked out of the door.
A few hours later, the news told a different story—a story that eclipsed joy with outrage. It would burn the Sixth of January into collective memory, not as a day of anti-racist triumph but as a day of infamy. An amoral president in love with himself, with dictators, and with power, incited a riot, applying the tools of fascism to indulge his fantasies. He fabricated, “The Big Lie,” as historian Timothy Snyder frames it, because he couldn’t face the fact that he had lost. Trump lied, again and again, staking his fallacious claims that the election was stolen. He fabricated a fragile political artifice with words, and used truth claims to incite his followers.
Figure 2. The crowd at the “Stop the Steal” rally, Jan. 6, 2021. Photograph courtesy Voz de America / Voice of America, via Facebook.
They left the rally on the Ellipse, near the White House, walked up the Mall, and invaded the Capitol, confident in their assertion of white supremacy (figures 2 and 3). In their audacity of claiming the “People’s House” as their house they made a mockery of the phrase “We the People” that had augured a new republic. Their actions made it clear that not all Americans fit the inclusive and united gesture of that phrase—not now, not yet.
Figure 3. Scaling the walls of the Capitol. Photograph by Blink O’fanaye, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0.
Their objective was to occupy, to seize, a sprawling neoclassical building, clad in creamy white stone. Sited on a hill (the crossing under the dome marks the highest point in Washington), protected by a podium, surrounded by rusticated walls, the design of the symmetrical building simplified securing the perimeter and controlling the order of access and the line of command (figure 4). An orderly progression, the promise of neoclassicism, is enforced on the usual route for visitors, which, especially in the aftermath of 9/11, is ridden with security checks, devices, fences, and cameras. Instead, the monumental failure of policing revealed other aspects of the Capitol space: the gas mask at every seat, the pattern of egress, the underground tunnels through which lawmakers were squirrelled in and out during their lockdown, the glamour above and the dark network below.
Figure 4. The Capitol, Jan. 7, 2021. Photograph by Joe Flood, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
At first, the occupiers appeared to be an ineffectual military force. Consumed with recording and webcasting themselves inside “the People’s House,” they were taken with the opulence of the Capitol interior, waving selfie sticks, brandishing flags, wearing carnivalesque costumes that were intended to project an emboldened masculinity, and destroying property with abandon (figures 5 and 6).
Figure 5. Occupying the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Photograph by Brett Davis, courtesy Flickr, under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC 2.0.
Figure 6. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli Tours the U.S. Capitol to survey damage from violent protests earlier in the day, Jan. 6, 2021. Courtesy U.S. Department of Homeland Security, via Flickr.
This was “performative violence,” and in the end it failed. The mob was evicted, and the vote was certified.
The story changed quickly, thanks to intrepid reporters, doing their jobs while they themselves were under siege. What caused the monumental failure of policing? Incompetence? A conspiracy at the highest level of government? Trivializing racism? It is now clear that there was an organized plot to take the Capitol—one that the NYPD and the FBI uncovered a week before the certification vote and that higher ups on the Capitol police ignored. While some police officers collaborated with the invaders, many others stood their ground even though they had been abandoned by their leaders and left to fend for themselves (figure 7). Who cannot be impressed by the heroism and courage of Eugene Goodman? He distracted a mob of men, leading them through corridors away from the Senate chamber, and giving senators time to escape—the representatives of the people forced to hide in the tunnels underneath the “People’s House.” A couple of quick-thinking young women, aides to senators, grabbed the wooden boxes containing the votes, and carried them to safety.
Figure 7. Tear gas used to keep the mobs from the storming the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Photograph by Tyler Merbler, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0.
The boxes, with the votes, surely would have been destroyed by the rioters. Videos taken inside the Capitol show the mob in action, wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the words Civil War and Camp Auschwitz, and carrying a Confederate flag. Emboldened by Trump, they ransacked the place, consumed with wreaking havoc, with damage, with leaving physical marks, physical evidence of their presence (figure 8). In viscerally offensive acts of desecration, they urinated and smeared feces in the building. Some meant to take hostages and to kill them. “Execute the traitors,” was a rallying cry on the Mall. Mike Pence, a traitor according to Trump, was first on the list. Trump’s followers carried plastic handcuffs into the building. A noose was erected outside the Capitol (figure 9). Bombs, Molotov cocktails, assault rifles, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were stashed in cars and trucks. Nancy Pelosi was threatened with assassination. Policemen were beaten, attacked, and hauled down the Capitol steps, one policeman and four protestors died. Reporters were harassed, threatened, and insulted, and their equipment destroyed; racial epithets tossed with abandon.
Figure 8. Damage to the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Courtesy U.S. Department of Homeland Security, via Flickr.
Figure 9. A gallows with a noose erected by protestors outside the Capitol, Jan. 6, 2021. Photograph by Tyler Merbler, courtesy Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0.
This isn’t America, Joe Biden promised skeptical listeners, while the president hid in the White House, watching what unfolded on television, and cheering on the attack from afar. Hardly a man of courage. And yet this was America—an America that has always thrived on violence, an America that is a flawed democratic experiment, an America where evangelical Christianity feeds white nationalism, an America that is consumed with wealth, power, celebrity, grievance, racial hatred, and social media (and the sensationalism, essentialism and determinism that are embedded in these networks), an America where audacious, straight, working-class white men refuse to cede their power and privilege; an America where white cops treat white rioters with kid gloves and brutalize Movement for Black Lives protestors.
Historians were quick to point out that the birds had come home to roost. Violence is as embedded in the historical DNA of this building as it is in the history of the United States. Neoclassicism is a language of white supremacy and imperialism. The Capitol, like the plan of Washington D.C., is rooted in the violence of enslaved Black labor. Among them were skilled workers, carpenters and masons, and common laborers who built and rebuilt this structure in the nineteenth century. To understand the building and the events that took place last week it is also necessary to connect this edifice to a larger landscape of racial inequity. What happened last Wednesday has happened before in scores of other venues in the United States—in small towns and in state capitals. The riot of white supremacists stretches across the neo-baroque vistas of D.C. that are formally conducive to such acts of violence, to the wrong side of the tracks, to eviscerated urban ghettos and antebellum plantations.
This Capitol building has been attacked before: it was burned in the War of 1812, it was the scene of a brutal beating, a caning by one senator of another during the build-up to the Civil War, and it was stormed by vigilantes during the certification of the Electoral College vote in 1861. It has also been the site of numerous protests and arrests in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This one stands out: in 2017, the Rev. Warnock prayed under the dome, expressing his support of the Affordable Care Act during a Congressional vote. He was arrested, immediately.
Next week, the Rev. Warnock will walk into the Capitol and take his seat in the Senate—a seat that was once occupied by the arch-segregationist, Lester Maddox. Maybe this is what Dr. King meant when he preached, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
— Swati Chattopadhyay, Marta Gutman, Zeynep Kezer, Matthew Gordon Lasner, Kishwar Rizvi
