White supremacy live on network news
Timothy Welbeck, a civil rights attorney and adjunct African American studies professor at Temple University, said last week’s deadly riot was a symptom of America never reckoning with its history of racialized oppression. It was white supremacy alive and that it could not be easily explained away.
“There has always been this desire to speak about America’s goodness,” Welbeck said. “Part of the insidious nature of white supremacy is the imagination of fostering this notion of the implicit good of whiteness and so this idea that people would engage in vile, racist behavior is just something that some people are just not willing to believe until they see it.”
Welbeck remembers being originally introduced to George Washington as a child with the myth that he was a man who could not tell a lie and confessed to his father that he cut down a cherry tree. He didn’t learn until much later that he actually owned 317 enslaved people at the time of his death.
“What we teach children about our nation and its founders, we’re inculcating this sense of American exceptionalism and virtue in not only in the character of this nation but also its founders,” he said.
He said white supremacy will always be an issue until America addresses its racist roots.
“Our nation was literally founded by eradicating the Indigenous population of this land and then enslaving African people,” he said. “We became an economic superpower because for 249 years we got to exploit unpaid Black labor and then assume this large landmass from people who had lived on the land for thousands of years.”
After that, the country put in place institutions that continued to disenfranchise marginalized groups causing America to “only be a true democracy since the ’60s.”
For Black people in particular, there’s mass incarceration and the legacies of segregation that still exist.
“It’s hard to divorce the context of racism from the U.S., especially when you’re looking at history,” he said. “There’s often a disconnect between Black people and white people and seeing the reality that race has played in America,” he said.
Among those under investigation in relation to the insurrection are local police and elected officials as well as many middle-class or upper-income professionals. Welbeck said that’s also important to recognize.
“People have reduced racism to ignorance and a lack of economic opportunity but racism is so firmly embedded in all America’s institutions that it’s [all kinds of] people who are holding these beliefs,” he said.
Michael Coard, a criminal defense attorney, said that’s the part that reignited a fear in him. He loves his moniker as “the angriest Black man in America” but it’s only now that he’s seriously considering getting a gun and training to use it.
“I knew there were threats, violence, and racists out there but it seemed distant [and] abstract to me,” he said. “But in seeing those people on Jan. 6 carrying weapons … those are white people I see every day.”