Racism — Not Outside Agitators — Is Fueling the Uprisings in America
As mostly peaceful protests over George Floyd’s death spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the nation, elected officials have blamed outside agitators for troubling incidents of violence, looting and arson. Republicans in particular have embraced this narrative, with President Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton claiming the nebulous political group Antifa was behind many riots, without clear evidence. On Thursday, the president shared a letter calling peaceful protesters in Washington, D.C., terrorists.
Such official rhetoric mischaracterizing local protests as the result of external influences and security threats is unfortunate, but not unusual in American history. Between the 1940s and 1960s, Southerners seeking to protect racial segregation papered over homegrown anger and demands for change by dismissing activism as the result of outside organizers and communist meddling. The goal was to silence critics and build alliances with white Americans who prioritized national security ahead of domestic equality. Though such rhetorical attacks did not save Jim Crow, they ultimately weakened the civil rights movement’s ability to address the deeper social and economic inequalities that today are at the heart of the Floyd protests.
The rhetoric of outside agitation evolved from a Southern segregationist mind-set that prioritized a rigid social order. Beginning in the 1880s, the hierarchical and patriarchal system of Jim Crow separated the races based on the presumed inferiority of African Americans and the need for supposedly superior whites to manage society. A strictly enforced color line limited African American opportunities in the South, with aggressive policing and brutal, informal violence suppressing dissent. This allowed segregationists to perpetuate the fiction to themselves and the wider country that African Americans were content in their inferior position.
Whenever African Americans challenged the Jim Crow system, segregationists preserved this fiction of contentment by blaming outside agitators. Targets in the first decades of the 20th century included major civil rights organizations like the NAACP and organizers such as the Mississippi-born Ida B. Wells, who often operated out of more permissive, though still segregated and sometimes dangerous northern cities. In the 1930s, Southerners also began criticizing the federal government, linking its past interventions during Reconstruction to the moderately reformist efforts pursued by Franklin Roosevelt’s administration during the New Deal.