The War at Home, or Why Los Angeles is not Beirut
Photo by Keith Birmingham, Pasadena Star-News/ SCNG
Steve Bannon, once Donald Trump’s White House strategist, says no one in the US is to blame for the May 25 murder of George Floyd.
Bannon spoke to the Asia Times about the killing that sparked Black Lives Matters marches across the US and the world, recycling disinformation and slander of Floyd:
The converging forces of Asia led to Mr Floyd’s current situation, his life, that he was sick. He had drugs in his system. He didn’t have a great job. And he was passing counterfeit money. All four of those come from Beijing, essentially.
The allegations are ludicrous, but this is not the unhinged anti-Chinese rhetoric of a former Trump official. Bannon is exploiting a phenomenon of US political culture: at moments of great domestic turmoil, Americans point a finger abroad.
Federal and state officials, Trump allies, and pundits blame external sources for the violence within. They feed the denial that the uprisings after Floyd’s homicide are part of the American fabric; instead, they are distorted into the opposite, the “un-American”.
This is both the reluctance to accept that racial violence is endemic to the American fabric, and the erasure of violence abroad as the consequence of US imperial interventions.
This is Not America
Many white commentators describe the current protests and the accompanying physical destruction and looting as a war zone. Meghan McCain described midtown Manhattan as a battlefield and lamented that “this is not America.”
In this deflective discourse, the war is never at home. Minneapolis, the site of Floyd’s murder, resembles Baghdad for these critics. Los Angeles resembles Beirut, Seattle has turned into Aleppo and Manhattan looks an awful lot like Fallujah.
Those taking part in the uprisings assume the role of terrorists occupying cities. Ted Cruz referred to protesters toppling a Columbus statue as the “American Taliban”. Robert J. O’Neill—a former US Navy Seal who fired the shots that killed Osama Bin Laden, likened American protestors to “ISIS, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban” in a viral tweet.
This assertions are Islamophobic and Orientalist in their equation of the Middle East with perpetual violence and unrest. They also ignore that the US has had a hand in conflicts in the region with the objective of creating a global security system, a sometimes thinly-veiled excuse to exert power in a region abundant in natural resources. US foreign policy has been dominated by interventions in the Middle East, and is in the midst of what critics have called a “forever war”, a transnational battlespace that involves both overt and covert wars and intertwined “policing and security arrangements”.
This deflective discourse positing violence as a foreign entity cuts across political lines. Liberals also frequently lament that “this is not [insert any Middle Eastern city]” to voice their disapproval of the presence of the National Guard or militarized police officers in American streets.
“This is not Kabul but Buffalo! Armed military forces pointing rifles at innocent drivers!” one incredulous Twitter user wrote. Even in narratives that have nothing to do with violence, such as the current Lebanese economic crisis, the trope of bombs falling amid nightclubs booming is persistently rehashed.
Like its conservative counterpart, this rhetoric ignores that policing has always been an integral part of the state apparatus and has been a key mechanism for safeguarding the white status quo. In addition, it reinforces the idea that western military violence is permissible in certain areas of the world. “This is not Kabul” implies that in Kabul, the presence of an American soldier armed to the teeth is normal.
American Violence
Locating violence as a formation that exists only outside of the United States is not just misleading. It is also harmful. From the Civil War to the long Civil Rights Movement to the Los Angeles uprising to today, Americans — and especially racialized Americans — have always had to confront a system that violently suppresses their equality. The protests did not occur in a vacuum, they are a response to the institutionalized violence that has marked the lives of non-white Americans from 1619 to today. That is the real violence at the heart of the American project, not the anger of the protesters.
When asked about the violence in LA following the Rodney King in 1992, Toni Morrison observed:
What struck me is the restraint they showed. Not the spontaneity, the restraint. They waited for justice and it didn’t come. They didn’t do a thing. That’s amazing.
For years Black, indigenous and other Americans of color sought legal recourse from within the existing system: through reform, through trials, through hard-fought legal battles, and often through heartbreak. As Morrison notes in her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, American identity has always based itself on the symbolic excision of Blackness. Calling Black protesters un-American is merely an extension of this notion of racialized belonging, where whiteness is taken as the universal.
In a system founded on “racial capitalism”, the violence is part of normal operations. By labeling the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and countless other incidents as aberrations, instead of confronting the structures that enable and even sanction such violence, justice can never arrive.
This responsibility is also needed on a global scale. As Angela Davis has noted, it is not only that the West failed to take responsibility for perpetuating violence at home. Even progressives have not acknowledged their complicity in the “continuation of military and ideological attacks on people in the Arab world”. This is yet another reason that the invocation of the Middle East is so pernicious, and why transnational solidarities between Black freedom movements and Palestinians, for example, have proven so evocative.
This is America
Change begins by acknowledging that this is America. The system is functioning as it was designed, and it is important to understand the current uprising within this context.
Ironically, when rapper Childish Gambino released a much acclaimed song and video titled “This is America” in 2018, a chronicle of anti-Black racism in the US, Meghan McCain --- in her role as part of the team on The View --- reacted with enthusiasm, congratulating Glover on his powerful social commentary. That she so easily resorted earlier this month to the refrain that this current uprising is not American, demonstrates how powerful and pervasive this logic of deflection is.
It is imperative to be conscious of the rhetorical moves taken to discredit the uprisings and the agenda behind such moves. As Davis writes in her book about Ferguson and Palestine, “Placing the question of violence at the forefront almost inevitably serves to obscure the issues that are at the center of struggles for justice.”
Suzanne Enzerink is Professor of American Studies and Media Studies at American University of Beirut.