3 June 2020
Monday evening, President Trump announced he would mobilize the U.S. military on domestic soil in order to bring “law and order” to American cities, harkening back to the 1968 campaign for the presidency during which both Richard Nixon and George Wallace invoked the language of law and order to mobilize white citizens against the gains of the Civil Rights movement. By the close of Trump's address to the nation, that “promise” had been realized in Washington, D.C., a predominantly African-American city (that should rightfully be a state) over which the federal government has jurisdiction. Not only did military personnel clear the area around the White House with flash bangs and tear gas in order to facilitate a photo-op for the President, by nightfall Blackhawk helicopters flew low, as if to strafe the crowds, to get peaceful demonstrators to disperse. War-zone tactics have come, squarely, “home.”
War as the framework of contemporary crises is all over American public discourse today: The pandemic is an “invisible enemy,” for some of Chinese extraction; medical workers and other “essential personnel” have come to be referred to as workers “on the front lines.” Demonstrations in protest of the execution of George Floyd are referred to as “urban warfare,” as police departments, the national guard, and now the military police resort to tear gas, pepper spray, flash bangs and rubber bullets.
This just cannot become the new normal. War is a poor metaphor—and certainly a disastrous tactic—for addressing the long-term, structural violence of racism in U.S. society, which manifests as much in the disproportionate rates at which African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and impoverished immigrants are dying in the pandemic as in the seemingly endless summary executions of black citizens. Whether in the U.S. or in Iraq, in Palestine or in Afghanistan, turning streets into war zones and training military firepower on populations is not the answer. As marches and sit-ins spread across the country, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens are expressing not just anger and disgust, but more important, they are demonstrating a capacity for solidarity that crosses race and class lines. We can only hope we are witnessing the birth of a radically different political movement and imaginary that will effect real change not just in how the U.S. governs itself, but also in how it enacts its power across the globe.
Professors Nadia Abu El-Haj & Brian Boyd
Co-Directors
Center for Palestine Studies
Columbia University
