Insurrection and Questions

• Lucinda J. Garthwaite, ILI Directo

This past Wednesday the first Black and first Jewish Georgians were elected senators, there was also an armed insurgency at the US capital, and it was the worst day of Covid-related deaths in the US since the pandemic began.  It was, to state the obvious, a big news day and today many, many people are writing about it.
 
The Institute for Liberatory Innovation is all about thinking together, making sense in new ways and turning that learning into strategies that drive equity and decrease violence. Usually this essay reflects my own thinking. For this issue, we thought together.
 
It started with a conversation early Thursday  morning with a good friend who told me she was struck by the number of questions in the air. Then she reminded me that where there are questions, there are opportunities for innovation. Where there are questions there are new insights, reminders of old wisdom, new directions, encouragements for change.
 
That got me wondering, what questions are our advisors, research associates, and supporters asking today?  What are they thinking about?  So I checked in with as many people as I could, in a short day, to find out.
 
We were largely unsurprised by the insurgency. There was nothing there we didn’t recognize, just a different expression of something insidious and abiding with which we’re too familiar. Many were troubled by, even irritated with leaders and pundits who cried out, “This is not who we are!” when we know well that violent racism and destructive rage is indeed part of who we are. Some in the ILI have been on the other end of that fist, literally. But not all of us, and we wondered, again, why do we see this when others do not?
 
We were troubled by exceptionalism, the claims of the US being the best country in the world, ignoring the long and recent history that brought us the insurgency, the uncomfortable fact that the historic firsts in Georgia took until now. 
 
That exceptionalism felt to many of us like an uncomfortably close cousin to nationalism, about which one of our donors asked, what is nationalism anyway?  And what is a patriot?  And what do “patriots” want?
 
Several of us noted that the insurgent who broke into the office of the Speaker of the US House and posed for a French photographer with his feet on her desk was quoted in a Washington Post article today saying, “I am white. There is no denying that. I am a nationalist. I put my nation first. So that makes me a white nationalist.” Then he added that if someone did not identify as a nationalist they should leave. Actually, he said, “get the f--- out of our nation.”
 
We asked, what does it mean to put nation first?  First before what?   If a nation is owned (my and ours), who decides who owns it?  If we are defined by our diversity, how do we settle that question? 
 
Almost immediately yesterday people began to note the stark difference between preparation for and response to recent Black Lives Matter events, and the arrival of crowds of virtually all white, many armed protesters. The former, many have pointed out, were met with organized lines of armed police, many officers deep.  The latter a smattering, and barriers that looked like bike racks.
 
That, we noted with grim satisfaction today, is being talked about in many quarters. But we’ve seen no discussion of what our advisor Gunner Scott pointed out today, that the differences we saw yesterday extend beyond responses to antiracist gatherings. Peaceful events organized for GLBTQ, free speech, and economic rights are also regularly and aggressively met by armored officers with automatic weapons. Stuck in a DC hotel during a winter storm some years ago, Gunner and other transgender activists were forced to leave, had to call on the Red Cross for help.  Today, there were numerous reports of yesterday’s protesters partying in Washington DC hotels, decidedly not required to leave.  After breaking into the Capitol building, looting, disrupting a joint session of Congress, injuring scores of police and today, we learned, killing one. During a pandemic. And the weather was fine.
 
What’s that about?
 
In that same conversation, we realized together that no one is talking today about something we did not see:  There were no counter-protesters yesterday. They stayed home. Gunner knows, because he is connected to organizers, that they exercised conscious, strategic restraint. They knew counter protests would lead to violence, and would do their cause no good. 
 
Why are those who chose restraint not hailed as patriots?
 
Earlier in the day, our advisor Daniel Alexander Jones wrote,  “In the last 24 hours we have seen two kinds of fruit from two different trees with entangled root systems. . . . One from a tree carefully cultivated by grassroots organizers over years in the heart of the South, and informed by a long line of Black Women. . . . The second, this seditious pageant grown from a tree carefully cultivated by white supremacists since Reconstruction and those who have benefitted materially from their work and felt no ethical conundrum about so doing.” 
 
Daniel’s question, “The second tree needs to go; can it be taken down without taking the first one with it?” 
 
I thought about trees, how they compete and thrive through their root systems, how dying trees, even trees long dead, feed the living. How, as other trees die and the canopy opens, stronger trees reach for the light.   I thought of a quote Daniel had shared, from South African freedom fighter Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe.  “We are fighting for the noblest cause on earth, the liberation of mankind [sic]. They are fighting to retrench an outworn, anachronistic vile system of oppression. We represent progress. They represent decadence. We represent the fresh fragrance of flowers in bloom; they represent the rancid smell of decaying vegetation. We will win.” I wrote back to Daniel, I think that the first tree will survive.
 
What matters here are not so much the answers though.  What matters is that we do not let moments like this pass without thinking. Hard. What matters is that we question what happened and notice what didn’t, make connections to histories, between movements.  If we’re surprised, we can ask if there was anything we missed, and why.  If we’re not surprised, we must, I think, brush away cynicism, which is the enemy of action. In moments like this we need to figure out what we need to figure out, then act on it any way we can.
 
I’ll end where I began, on Thursday morning, my dear friend reminding me, where there are questions, there are opportunities for change. Let’s keep asking questions.