D.C. and UNC
From Silent Sam to Capitol insurrection
“THIS ISN’T WHO WE ARE.” That was a common refrain last week when violent insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol and attempted a coup d'état of the federal government. “This isn’t America,” so many said, despite all evidence to the contrary from the last 5 years, from the last 12 years, 61 years, 245 years, 402 years. Evidence that many either have never learned, barely learned, or chosen to ignore.
Several smart people have since pushed back on the notion of “not who we are,” in long and short form. As just one fine example, I point you to this column by Pulitzer-winner Brent Staples titled “The Myth of American Innocence.”
The piece begins: “The history of the United States is rife with episodes of political violence far bloodier and more destructive than the one President Trump incited at the Capitol on Wednesday.” Staples argues that our “ignorance of a grisly past” paved the way for the complacency that led us to Wednesday. “This willful act of forgetting — compounded by the myth of American innocence — has shown itself to be dangerous on a variety of counts.” He goes on to write specifically about North Carolina and Wilmington, among other places.
While I absorbed the events of January 6th and the reflexive “not who we are” commentary, I also thought about Chapel Hill, which to be fair could be any locality in the country. The reasons my mind drifted between the macro of America and the micro of this college town went well beyond the similar coup that once happened here and that I wrote about before the election.
“Not who we are” was a common refrain heard around Chapel Hill during the heightened tensions over Silent Sam in the Trump era. I imagine the phrase has been uttered quite a bit in Charlottesville too. But “not who we are” is an impulse for soothing white feelings and smoothing reputation. It is a tool for smothering introspection. It is a sentiment for moving on without looking back.
Below is a photo taken in August of 2017. This was the day after Charlottesville, which in itself should’ve been a moment that shook awake any American “not who we are” believer from fantasy and into reality.
Next is a photo taken nine days later. It generally represents how UNC’s Confederate monument, and later its stump, looked for 17 months thereafter:
Protected. Fortified.
(At great expense.)
Valued. Sacred.
Not who we are? UNC answered plainly and repeatedly.
During the extended period of frequent demonstrations over the campus Confederate monument, many of the same people and peoples who descended upon Washington, D.C., last week were in Chapel Hill. I was hardly at the forefront of the antiracist resistance here, but even in my sporadic attendance I saw and heard for myself the Nazi SS tattoos and words to match. I saw militia-styled men who’d traveled from around the country in IP3 ordering pies because they heard it was “the best pizza in town” and walking down Franklin Street in shirts that whimsically lauded the mass murders by Pinochet, whose coup made him a dictator and who had political opponents hurled from helicopters.
Since the Confederate monument fell after being a predictable flame for racist moths throughout the 2017-18 school year, there was also a string of local property damage that felt racially targeted, which I outlined last summer in this Twitter thread.
A hole was shot through the plate glass window of Midway Barber Shop, the oldest Black-owned business in town. (September 2018, weeks after Silent Sam was toppled)
An African clothing boutique, Vivid Emporium, had the glass of its door smashed. (late 2018)
The Unsung Founders Memorial and a campus art installation were vandalized, including threatening messages to antiracist leaders. (March 2019)
Headstones were knocked over and a noose left behind in a cemetery that was apparently mistaken for a nearby slave cemetery. (February 2020)
An apparent arson attempt was discovered at Vimala’s Curryblossom Café (July 2020)
Yet throughout most of this modern saga, the signals from UNC administrators and campus police seemed to clearly say that who we are simpatico with is those willing to terrorize our community for white supremacy’s preservation. The powers that be make decisions in our names. They took a good look around and decided to view those who opposed the white supremacists as the threat. The antiracists — who were being threatened with violence online and in-person by neo-Confederates, white supremacists, and fascists, and who have had to mask their locations ever since — had dared to criticize the powerful, so the powerful decided they were the enemy. Meanwhile the people making the threats, the people aligned with those who would storm the U.S. Capitol and attempt a coup, were treated to protective barricades and escorts, free reserved parking, grins and pleasantries, and handshakes for gun carriers.
Not who we are?
In contrast, antiracists, largely UNC’s own students, got undercover spying by police, smoke bombs and pepper spray, violence with bicycles and aggressive questionable arrests, trumped up charges, dishonest testimony, barred from the quad on their own campus, and a cooked “independent” report. And also, to this day, they’ve received not a peep of contrition nor a whiff of an apology.
Who are we? Well, there were also the millions of dollars UNC proposed to spend on a shrine for the statue, and then the millions placed directly into the hands of neo-Confederates along with the statue itself in our names. Courts had to reverse the payment that was so shady it might as well have been made in a dark parking garage with a briefcase full of cash.
Last Wednesday in D.C., many outnumbered law enforcement officers, specifically Eugene Goodman, acted valiantly against the coup-minded mob, and two even lost their lives. But there also seems to be an inside-job nature that cascaded from the top, and some officers on hand displayed a deference to hateful fascists similar to what we saw in Chapel Hill, rooted in an assumption that these insurrectionists were not the enemy. (Let’s not forget that a Chapel Hill cop was even caught with his Three Percenters tattoo on display while guarding Silent Sam.)
Police departments around the country are now investigating officers who went to D.C. to participate, and a U.S. Army psychological operations captain who led a group of 100 North Carolinians there has resigned. There has been a public call for local culpability.
As I watched on TV officers escorting out of the Capitol the intruders who’d invaded it rather than arresting them on site, I was also reminded of the white supremacist bikers who were let go by police in 1970 right after murdering James Cates at the heart of UNC’s campus. Those bikers called themselves the Storm Troopers, the name of the paramilitary force that aided Hitler’s rise. They too had to be arrested another day.
Lindsay Ayling, one of the most prominent of the local antiracist activists these last few years, was in D.C. on Wednesday and posted this detailed thread (click below for the whole thing, it’s an education) about the hate groups and symbols she saw there, an expertise she’s gained while confronting this extremism in Chapel Hill and nearby.
The journalist Jordan Green, who’s been thoroughly on this subject locally and beyond as well, wrote this story about North Carolinians who by the weekend had already been arrested in connection to Wednesday in D.C. His reporting includes links to events in Chapel Hill and an Orange County resident. The arrested are people, as Ayling stated, who are “familiar to anyone who has protested against fascism and neo-Confederacy in our area over the past few years.”
The side of this modern moment that stormed the U.S. Capitol, the side that at minimum aimed to disrupt the peaceful transition of presidents, and might well have been hellbent on stopping that transition via hostages and the murders of congresspeople, senators, and the vice president … that is the side that UNC, both its statewide system and its Chapel Hill campus, sided with. It’s the side they favored even after Charlottesville had made clear what was at stake. It was the side they favored after it was obvious there were only very fine people on the other side. It is the same side that UNC has typically taken for 230 years, optics and platitudes aside.
This isn’t America. This isn’t Chapel Hill. “Not who we are” is a roadblock to progress. “Not who we are” is a blindfold to the problems in our faces. We can either open our eyes, or we keep resting upon our blind faith in the “Southern Part of Heaven,” the rhetorical Confederate monument still standing in our way.
ONE GOOD THING:
SOURCES & CREDITS:
“The Myth of American Innocence” by Brent Staples: New York Times
“Coup d'état in Chapel Hill” by Mike Ogle: Stone Walls
“Who took aim at Carrboro barber shop?”: Herald-Sun
“Carrboro barber shop tries to move on after destruction of property”: Daily Tar Heel
“Local boutique, Vivid Emporium, gives back to West African communities”: Daily Tar Heel
“Vivid Emporium brings fashions from West Africa to Chapel Hill”: News & Observer
“Incident reports provide more detail to defacement of the Unsung Founders Memorial”: Daily Tar Heel
“Southern Village’s Arlen Park Cemetery Vandalized”: Local Reporter
“Vimala’s Curryblossom Café in Chapel Hill Reaffirms Commitment to Social Justice”: Chapelboro
“Eugene Goodman: Police Officer Hailed as Hero for Diverting Rioters From Senate Chamber”: Slate
“At least 2 Capitol police officers suspended, more than a dozen under investigation over actions related to riot”: Washington Post
“Officer resigns as Army investigates her involvement in Washington rally that led to U.S. Capitol riot”: CBS News
“North Carolina extremists pledge to escalate beyond DC insurrection” by Jordan Green: Triad City Beat
“The Southern Part of Heaven” by Mike Ogle: Stone Walls
All photos: Mike Ogle