Not The Darkest Day
For many Americans, yesterday’s coup attempt was deemed “the darkest day” in American history. I would contend that it is far from the darkest.
As a second grade teacher of 99.9% Black students (I have had one Latina student in my 3 years of teaching public school), I am tasked with teaching four subjects. My favorite, and the favorite of my students is by far social studies. We engage in discourse, annotate primary documents, watch videos, and read stories and letters from historical figures. I teach my students about many events throughout our nation’s history, from marches to assassination to elections, and over the course of a year, I teach them about many, many dark days in American history.
I would add that while yesterday’s coup attempt was indeed an embarrassing, ridiculous, violent day, I would certainly not call it the darkest. Many are comforted by the phrase, “this is not who we are as a country”. I would assert that this is exactly who we are as a country. As my aunt always said: “when someone tells you who they are, believe them.” And America has told us time and time and time again that this is exactly who she is.
Last summer was a particularly violent summer for Black children here in Saint Louis. Every time I got an alert on my phone saying yet another child was murdered in the street, in the alley, or even on their porch by gun violence, I braced myself before opening, terrified I would see a name I recognized.
As I watched the news coverage of the pro-Trump band of violent domestic terrorists invade the Capitol, I felt a twinge of familiarity in my gut of hiding in back coat closets with crying 8-year-olds who simply didn’t understand that we weren’t under attack by a gunman, just practicing for when we were. We run regular armed-intruder drills at our public school. I have my own memories of hiding as a child with the lights off for several minutes in my classroom while administrators jiggled the door handles and banged on the floor outside in the hallway.
Politicians have regularly shown just what they will tolerate. They will tolerate Black men and women being murdered in the streets, in their cars, in their homes, in their beds. They will tolerate immigrant children being stripped of their parents and locked in dog cages and brown women being forcibly sterilized. They will tolerate 20 students and 6 educators being murdered by a gunman at Sandy Hook.
But what they won’t tolerate? Attacks against them.
Black and brown people in this country have experienced many, many dark days throughout American history. Wounded Knee, the Tulsa Race Massacre, the 2019 El Paso Shooting that left 26 dead and targeted Latinos… the list goes on and on and on, unfortunately. School shootings occur year after year and yet nothing is done to stop the violence. Even just over the summer, white supremacists and police intimidated, threatened, and inflicted violence on peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors, leaving them bloodied, injured, hospitalized, and dead.
The acts yesterday were not at all surprising to me because quite frankly, they have been happening for a very, very long time. Violence from far-right-wing groups is not new.
These violent acts have been happening in minority communities forever, and they have been allowed to happen. In fact, they have been encouraged and reinforced by many right-wing politicians who have refused for a long time now to acknowledge the violence perpetuated by these groups. They started the train and now it has run away from them… and it has run into their home now.
For a long time the violence has been occuring and they have sat on their hands or actively encouraged it. But you threaten a politician? Invoke the 25th, remove him from office, and re-evaluate policing immediately!
So while I did teach my students that yesterday was a bad day for our country, I did not teach my students that this was the darkest day in American history, because to do so would undermine the many, many dark days mine and their ancestors and living relatives have had to live through.
I for one, do not believe this is as low as America can go… because for Black and brown communities and school children all over the country, the bar has already been set lower.
