From January 6 to January 20: Why We Need To Rethink White Supremacy & Terrorism
By Nicole Nguyen & Yazan Za3za3
(graphic violence is referenced)
As the world watched the armed deadly takeover of the Capitol on January 6, many of us struggled to define the political moment. An insurrection? An act of domestic terrorism? A coup? As military soldiers and police officers flooded D.C. in the name of national security, many commentators importantly noted that labeling the January 6 takeover as domestic terrorism risked increasing police powers that “inevitably get turned on communities of color, even if they [are] ostensibly aimed at White violence at first.”
How we understand January 6 — the concepts we use, the vocabularies we invoke, the histories we recognize — necessarily informs what we do in response. Despite the growing consensus that the label of terrorism is dangerous as it can intensify policing and security regimes, the concept of terrorism is also dangerous. As academics and community organizers, we both affirm the use of terms like “state terror” and “white terror,” and understand that we cannot call on the state’s concept of terrorism to inform our political analyses and our political demands. Using the concept of terrorism to understand January 6 offers us few analytical tools to understand this political moment and, more dangerously, entices us to adopt political positions that defy our abolitionist principles. As Black feminists have taught us, abolition is a worldmaking project that requires a radical imaginary free from the state’s own political vision. We therefore resist the impulse to widen who counts as a “terrorist” to include white supremacists as we ultimately reject the state’s concept of “terrorism” altogether.
Scholars have documented how the term terrorism is an empty concept that doesn’t help us understand political violence. Invented by the state, the concept of terrorism intentionally separates politics and violence, meaning we understand the January 6 takeover as an extremist siege led by fringe white supremacists. This directs our attention to the violence of individual actors, not as a product of a white supremacist society, but as the exceptional or extreme behavior of individual racists driven by a radical ideology accelerated on social media. In adopting this analysis, we demand the arrest of the individuals who stormed the Capitol or their banning on social media, leaving intact the white supremacist institutions, including the criminal-legal system, that harm communities of color every day. By design, the US government’s concept of terrorism makes the political agenda of armed groups like al-Qaeda illegible, despite the very clear and straightforward political values they articulate in their own statements. For example, without a robust framework to make sense of political violence, it was difficult for many US citizens to understand the September 11 attacks as a brutal act to effect political change rather than a simple expression of misguided religious fanaticism. Similarly, the term domestic terrorism has little value in making sense of the political ideologies that informed January 6 — to say nothing of the explicit erasure of the uneven geopolitical conditions and power asymmetries between white supremacists and al-Qaeda operatives.
Since 2004, terrorism experts strategically have invoked the concept of “radicalization” to indict the cultural, theological, and psychological pathologies of individual actors using violence to effect political change (“terrorists”). By refusing to consider how US foreign policy and military interventions contribute to the rise of nonstate violence, the concept of radicalization effectively locates the “root causes” of terrorism in individual pathologies. Such an approach justifies preventative policing programs that call on community members, mental health professionals, teachers, and religious leaders to identify and report individuals who exhibit behaviors or beliefs that indicate their vulnerability to terrorist radicalization, such as “wearing traditional Muslim attire,” “giving up cigarettes,” and feeling frustrated with “US policy and events around the globe.” By treating political violence as an expression of an individual’s pathology, the concept of radicalization justifies the increased policing and monitoring of Muslim communities perceived to be more vulnerable to terrorism radicalization. It also absolves the US government of its responsibility in producing the conditions that armed political groups have contested through the use of violence, such as military invasions.
Such reductive analyses similarly frame police violence as the result of poorly trained or rogue police officers, rather than recognize such violence, and its resultant enclosure and elimination of communities of color, as the primary purpose of policing in the United States. For example, federal authorities have used social media to identify and arrest police officers who participated in or used their on-duty status to support the escalation of the January 6 protests. While many have rightfully cited this social media activity as an indication of the relationship between racism and police, this commentary typically focuses on the individual politics harbored by these select officers. This approach treats policing institutions as “infected by” racism or damaged by the “explicit bias” of individual police officers. Such analyses miss how policing institutions are white supremacist organizations, formed, at their very inception, with the intention of protecting white lives, white property, and white supremacy. Our political demands therefore must remain focused on the abolition of these institutions, rather than on their reform.
By separating politics from violence, the concept of terrorism also collapses different political groups, their grievances, and their goals, such that we cannot understand how sectarian organizations like QAnon, Proud Boys, and Boogaloo Bois can unite for the explicit purpose of further entrenching white supremacy. The concept of terrorism refuses such nuance by treating these factions as synonymous if not interchangeable. In doing so, we fail to examine the emergence of a sectarian yet unified white supremacist movement in the United States, making it difficult to develop a coherent counter-campaign.
As these conceptual limitations demonstrate, using the language and frameworks created and circulated by the state-sponsored terrorism industry circumscribes how we understand white supremacist violence and, necessarily, how we mobilize to end such violence, in both its institutional and interpersonal forms. To nourish an abolitionist imagination, we cannot turn to state-created concepts and solutions. By rejecting both the label and the concept of terrorism, we recommit to abolitionist demands to end all forms of policing, including the vigilante surveillance undertaken by community members.
This renewed commitment to abolition is needed now more than ever. This past summer, thousands took to the street to demand justice for George Floyd and so many other victims of police violence — named and unnamed. These demonstrations arguably normalized the understanding that all forms of policing are inherently white supremacist on a systemic level. With this recognition, the call for abolition — rather than police reform — amplified on a national level. Yet, after January 6, much of this organizing work came undone as political commentators and even community organizers criticized the presence of “known” white supremacists in police forces and the need to purge these white supremacists accordingly. This refusal to recognize the structural roots of state violence returns us to the simplified claim that police officers are individual agents capable of transcending racism. In the regressive return to “racial individualism” that erases the inherently systemic nature of racism in the United States, many, including President Joe Biden, have called for identifying and rooting out the bad apple white supremacists cops who are culpable in the incitement and enactment of January 6.
By individualizing white supremacy, we reduce police brutality to the actions of a few bad police officers rather than a form of structural state violence that the United States uses to maintain power and control. While many celebrated the January 20 inauguration of President Biden as both the ousting of the “white supremacist-in-chief” and the welcoming of a progressive world leader, President Biden’s record reflects a deep investment in moderate politics that (re)produce racist harm. In fact, President Biden has expanded police budgets, supported the launch of Countering Violent Extremism programs, and declared intentions to widen domestic terrorism laws. Vice President Kamala Harris similarly established a record as a former “tough on crime” prosecutor and district attorney, roles that intensified policing institutions across California. Given their role in maintaining white supremacy, President Biden and Vice President Harris do not represent a departure from the political orientation that organized the January 6 takeover but an extension of it.
Although the January 6 armed takeover of the Capitol frightens us, we cannot turn to solutions that harm our communities and further entrench white supremacy and white supremacist institutions. The arrest and increased sentencing of select individuals will not protect our communities from ongoing violence inflicted by police officers, ICE raids, DHS agents, deportation, or war — all violences that find home in white supremacist ideology. Expanding domestic terrorism statutes, directing law enforcement to police white supremacists, reforming failed countering violent extremism programs, and calling on Congress to form a January 6 investigatory commission simply intensifies, and emboldens, the criminal-legal system, itself a white supremacist institution. We cannot call on the state, and state-created concepts, to do the work only mass mobilizations can undertake.
We therefore call on communities outraged by the January 6 deadly armed takeover to:
- Learn more about President Biden’s “tough on crime” track record and his current plan to provide $300 million in funding for the Community-Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, despite demands by the American Civil Liberties Union and other community groups to end it.
- Learn more about the dangers in treating white supremacy as domestic terrorism in our community report.
- Join #stopCVE listserv and join us for a workshop
- Learn more about #SurveillanceNotServices (#SNS) campaign
Learn more about the efforts to #AbolishICE and #AbolishDHS
Nicole Nguyen is associate professor of social foundations of education. Immersed in political geography, critical education studies, and critical sociology, Nicole’s research ethnographically investigates the intersections of national security, war, and US public schooling. She is on the Vigilant Love’s steering committee.
Yazan Za3za3 holds an MA in Women’s/Gender Studies and their research focuses on the rhetorical analysis of surveillance and counterinsurgency programs like Countering Violent Extremism. Yazan is a longtime community organizer. They are an organizer with Vigilant Love.
