Kara Ireland
AMST 7000
Dr. Lieberman
February 7, 2021
By Any Means Necessary: The Fight to Protect White Supremacy
Racial violence has proven to be one of the perpetual thorns in the bouquet of the history of the United States. In the age of the Black Lives Matter movement, those who have turned a critical eye onto the U.S. for their insufficient and incompetent handling of racial strife may wonder how Black American demands have remained the same for over a century. Alternatively, it may raise the question of how white supremacy prevails and enables callous acts of terrorism under the guise of patriotism. The race problem in the U.S. is dated and seemingly timeless; although nearly a century separates their work, W.E.B. DuBois and David Roediger have interrogated the dichotomies of race and the race relations within the U.S. Their theories and proposed solutions offer a lens to assess the Capitol Siege and to better understand how it happened. DuBois’ The Soul of Black Folk and Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness help to contextualize the evolution of racial violence that led to the events of January 6, 2021. Through DuBois and Roediger’s analyses, I posit that the psychological effects of white supremacy and the infringement of white supremacy were the predominant factors enabling the terrorists to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
For the purposes of this paper, I would like to adopt a wider notion of the word “violence” that removes the emphasis on mere physical attacks. Violence, per my usage, is “the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation” (Violence Prevention Alliance). In short, violence is the intentional, unyielding, and harmful leverage of power over another. Whiteness is the violent entity, and the U.S. is its victim.
Comparing and contrasting common themes and approaches amongst various scholars and theorists in the American Studies canon is the backbone of American Studies, but what use is it if those texts cannot be applied to current events? The Capitol siege was not a spontaneous event; it was planned and executed with impunity, inspired by the white supremacist narrative that has governed the U.S. since its conception. A violent insurrection of that degree should be unthinkable, but it was made possible under the system that has continually prioritized and protected whiteness. Whiteness, namely, white privilege—the amorphous quality that elevates one above the law and above other races—is to blame for the Capitol siege in the abstract. However, the evolution of white supremacy is not at all an abstract concept.
White supremacy is a disease of the mind, but it is not a discriminatory illness that only affects those it benefits. Those who bear witness to white supremacy are also deeply affected by it, because as W.E.B. DuBois claims: “the systems of control, thus started, rapidly grew … into strange little governments” (13). Those aforementioned “little governments” distort the psyche of every person beneath the thumb of white supremacy, regardless of sociopolitical identity. DuBois, who weighs in on this phenomenon, has proven to be an invaluable source for the interrogation and analysis of race in the U.S. from the perspective of the oppressed.
In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois provides a historical account that was inspired by the current events of post-Civil War America. My intent in establishing his ethos is to maintain relevancy because his contributions were the direct response of events he witnessed and was personally affected by. Hence, when DuBois illuminates the psychological effects slavery has had on the U.S. citizens, it was wrought out of observable, objective truths. Notably, DuBois does not limit his scope to the newly freedmen but includes an analysis of how the psyche of all men was marred by the institution of slavery. Because “the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate,” such an atmosphere would inevitably reproduce those detrimental ideologies in both the oppressor and the oppressed (DuBois 7). Moreover, DuBois’ idea that “[when white workers] received a low wage [they were] compensated in part by a ... public and psychological wage” provides grounding for the snowball effect that led to the radical terrorists storming the Capitol (qtd. in Roediger 12). The most poignant of DuBois’ ideas is the notion that the psychological legacies of slavery have negatively impacted generations of men because of the internalized white supremacist ideals—the most violent of ideologies.
David Roediger, nearly one hundred years later, adopts DuBois’ sentiments and brings the institution of whiteness further into question. Roediger provides the contemporary analysis after DuBois, inspired by his conclusions and offering new analytical patterns. Wages of Whiteness interrogates the ideological influences for white working men to define themselves distinctly as white workers. While the Capitol siege was not merely the result of a working-class dispute, it has significant origins in Roediger’s theory that “white labor does not just receive and resist racist ideas but embraces, adopts and, at times, murderously acts upon those ideas” (12). The embrace, adoption, and murderous execution of those ideas led to the audacity of those terrorists, coupled with the evidence that they are untouchable because “the police were drawn from [white] ranks and the courts, dependent on [white] votes, treated [white people] with leniency” (qtd. in Roediger 12). Roediger is in conversation with DuBois in the introductory chapter, and it fortifies the idea that the race problem has evolved into more nuances rather than solutions.
This is perhaps the most defining, summative excerpt of Roediger’s discoveries within Wages of Whiteness:
...the idea that the pleasures of whiteness could function as a 'wage' for white workers. That is, status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships, North and South. "White workers could, and did, define and accept their class positions by fashioning identities as 'not slaves' and as 'not Blacks'” (13).
This harsh dichotomy has presented itself time and time again in recent history, but most notably at the Capitol. In what I posit should be called “disidentity politics,” the construction of whiteness seems to be measured against otherness, in which whiteness is the superior antithesis of said other group. If the Negro was imbecilic, lazy, and wicked, the white man was intelligent, hard-working, and righteous by default. The emancipation of the slaves threatened to overturn the legislated caste system that cemented their role as the superior group because it offered the slave the same rights and opportunities as those who had once enslaved him. The terror that seized these power-holding whites is understandable, especially when their superiority was only realized by a narrow margin in the circumstances that defined their power. In 2021, since the realizations of cases like Brown vs. The Board of Education, affirmative action, and mandated diversity clauses in most academic and workspaces, the provisions that created an obvious line of privilege have been blurred.
Nonetheless, in The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois provides a triage of factors that ultimately influence racial violence in the U.S. DuBois identifies these factors as such: 1) The disfranchisement of the Negro. 2) The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3) The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro (37). In order to assess the progression of racial violence in the U.S., one must acknowledge the hideous prejudices that created our current systems: “slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice” (DuBois 4). Due to centuries of color symbolism and racism, Blackness has always been regarded as the inferior subject to all other races; connotations of deviance, imbecility, and wickedness have long been used to justify the maltreatment of Africans and Black people worldwide. The dehumanization enforced by white supremacy led to internalized immoral distinctions because “slavery … classed the black man and the ox together” (DuBois 21). Those ideas, coupled with reinforcement from religious texts, helped to enslave millions of Africans without culpability. When there are insurmountable compounding forces that collectively dehumanize the African, rallying for his legitimacy and humanity is increasingly difficult.
In order to supplement DuBois’ theories, it is necessary to introduce another theorist who has greatly informed both DuBois (and Roediger’s) politics: Karl Marx. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels make a compelling argument in The German Ideology about the subsistence of man and the differentiation between man and animal. Many accounts of pseudoscience have ‘proven’ the genetic inferiority of the African, but they neglect to contribute to discussions of sentience or subsistence. Denying the Negro of his humanity begins at the base level of how they define man:
“… it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”
In DuBois’ comparison of the Negro to the ox, the same thought processes apply. Power is afforded to those who, at the very least, are understood as human.
White supremacists have used general ideas like Marx and Engels’ to support the notion that whiteness exists as the antithetical better half of every other racial group. In chapters four and seven of Wages of Whiteness, Roediger demonstrates the various degrees that poor and ethnic whites resisted any association with Black people, even as they were also being discriminated against. Roediger aptly describes the paradigmatic shift in his assertion that “the imperative to define themselves as white came but from the particular 'public and psychologi¬cal wages' whiteness offered to a desperate rural and often preindustrial Irish population coming to labor in industrializing American cities” (137). However, this oppositional desperation for perceived and acknowledged power over the enslaved people and free Blacks was asserted against all nonwhite populations:
“'Civilization' continued to define itself as a negation of 'savagery' - in¬ deed, to invent savagery in order to define itself. 'White' attitudes toward manliness, land use, sexuality, and individualism and violence were in¬fluenced by real contacts with, and fanciful ideas about, Native Americans” (Roediger 22).
Similarly, the argument can be made that the U.S. exists solely out of defiance and opposition to the other nations because, as Roediger highlights, “The American Revolution would help create an America in which many more working 'freemen' would be tempted to define themselves against slaves” (27). When whiteness has gotten away with being defined as the opposite of the damning perceptions of nonwhites, the sense of entitlement can swell and distort into a monstrous entity that becomes harder and harder to overturn; that is, one that leads to the storming of a government building without obstruction.
For these reasons, the emancipation of the Negro was by far the biggest threat to whiteness because of its narrowly defined existence. By elevating themselves above the Negro simply by means of “not being a slave” and scarcely any other definitive quality, white working men were scandalized by the prospect of enslaved people’s freedom. This claim is substantiated by DuBois when he spoke of the Freedmen’s Bureau: “The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue,—that life amid free Negroes was simply un-thinkable, the maddest of experiments” (DuBois 20). Since the Emancipation Proclamation, the U.S. has taken one step forward and three steps back in every endeavor to correct their sins against nonwhites.
DuBois and Roediger have valuable contributions to the historical timeline of racial violence in the U.S., and they are both revolutionary for their time. However, by merely offering various targeted explanations of racism, the absence of the outright condemnation is a weakness. Revisiting racism and rebuking it are different. Sometimes, highlighting the inconsistencies, hypocrisies, vulgarities, and atrocities of history is not enough to change the hearts and minds of future generations; sometimes, you have to condemn it. The power structures that enable racial violence are strokes of violence themselves. Racial violence is the unrelenting wielding of power over an overexerted and exhausted system. Racial violence is the burgeoning proof that Black Lives Matter protestors get bludgeoned and bloodied while the police infiltrate and protect the “patriots” storming the Capitol. Racial violence is a perpetual symptom of white supremacy because it was designed to be that way. DuBois and Roediger both contribute to the conclusion that the psychological impacts of white supremacy are responsible for the origins, causes, and continuations of racial violence.
Works Cited
DuBois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk. A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903.
Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. Verso, 2007.
Violence Prevention Alliance. Global Campaign for Violence Prevention. 2021. https://www.who.int/violenceprevention/approach/definition/en/