What Americans Across the Political Spectrum Got Wrong About the Attempted Insurrection

by Corrie Decker and Elisabeth McMahon

Corrie Decker is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Mobilizing Zanzibari Women and co-author of The Idea of Development in Africa: A History.

Elisabeth McMahon is an associate professor of history at Tulane University. She is the author of Slavery and Emancipation in Islamic East Africa and co-author of The Idea of Development in Africa: A History.

As they struggled to make sense of the attempted insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, observers embraced two strands of history to help contextualize them: the deep and enduring history of racism in the United States and the alarming parallels to the rise of Nazism in Germany. But to understand white supremacy among the pro-Trump mob, we need to look at America’s historical connections to global anti-Black racism.

As the shocking event unfolded, some media commentators and legislators noted that the United States looked like a “third-world country” or a “banana republic.” The idea that such violence doesn’t happen in the United States is premised by the assumption that the United States is the most advanced nation-state and the “leader of the free world.” And that concept — like that of Trump supporters who celebrate the antiquated and exclusionary image of White America as the pinnacle of progress in which America’s “greatness” means prosperity and political power for Whites — is steeped in racialized ideas of progress. This commonality reveals how white supremacy shapes thinking on both the right and the left.

Since the 1950s, the United States has been touted as the global superpower, while African nations are considered the least-developed countries. As critics of development have argued for decades, Western notions of social progress and wealth promote a racialized distinction between the “developed” and “underdeveloped.” White supremacy, and anti-Black racism in particular, has been the driving feature of this idea of development, and it undergirds both conservative and liberal notions of progress.

Applauding American greatness perpetuates implicit racial hierarchies that emerged in Western thought during the era of the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century European thinker Immanuel Kant celebrated the new scientific empiricism of the Enlightenment as a “maturity of thinking” that fundamentally reframed knowledge production in European societies. The foundation of progressive intellectual growth allowed European theorists to see themselves at the forefront of political, economic, social and scientific progress globally. Europeans perceived their civilizations as the yardsticks against which all other societies should be measured.

Throughout the 19th century, European distinctions between who was and who was not civilized became increasingly racialized. The Enlightenment, the global abolitionist movement and the emerging theory of evolution (e.g., Charles Darwin’s 1859 “On the Origin of the Species”) offered ideological, moral and scientific justifications for European efforts to “civilize” the rest of the world. Pseudoscientific studies of race and social evolutionary interpretations of Darwin placed racial difference at the heart of the civilizing mission. As the last continent to be conquered by Europe and the home of Black people, whom social Darwinists placed on the bottom rung in racial hierarchies, Africa became the primary target for intervention.

Read entire article at Made By History at the Washington Post