DNA, Racism, and the Assault on Democracy

By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma

Some points from my experience defending violent crime and debunking police lies can help understand what happened in Washington yesterday without falling back on hollow judgments about how awful other people are.

First, as the climate scientist Jim Lovelock told me when I was ten years old, tribal warfare is in our DNA. It is a sickness that has always been part of the human condition and affects us all whether we know it or not.

Second, almost all violence, especially homicide, is moralistic: people think they are doing good by hitting their child, killing a rival gang member, bulldozing a family's home on promised land, or invading a corrupt seat of power. Anakin Skywalker believed he was justified when he slaughtered his mother’s killers, then younglings at the temple.

Third, white supremacist thinking is deeply embedded in American law enforcement. Put another way, Trumpism has infiltrated the police, which is why they let the Capitol be overrun yesterday and did not arrest anybody.

Police were created to protect white property rights. The invasion of the Capitol was perpetrated by people who enjoy police protection expressing themselves against what many police see as an increasingly threatening and corrupt institution as Congress becomes more diverse. As we focused on this summer (but happens all the time), most white police are incapable of treating people of different races equally. Some people cannot see that because they are unaware of how tribal feelings alter their perceptions.

Tribal feelings of identity are stronger than rational ones for many people and are at the root of irrational fears of everything from non-existent child molesters to proven-safe vaccines (if you are afraid of either of those things and believe your fears are justified, think about someone else's irrational fears as an example). Irrational fear rooted in racial feelings can destroy everything, including democracy, as it did in Europe last century and in the Middle East and parts of Africa today. Tribal feelings got hundreds of Western women to volunteer as sex slaves for the Islamic State. Tribal feelings drew 35-year-old Ashli Babbitt to the Capitol, where she met her death.

While Babbitt’s death was quick and, to her co-religionists, glorious, on the same day 3,963 people died slow, painful deaths, suffocating in their own mucus from the coronavirus. Preventable devastation from the virus is orders of magnitude more destructive than the street battles over Trump. But we focus on politics because it is an expression of identity. It’s in our DNA in a way that fighting virus-borne disease is not.

We must battle the expression of these tribal feelings by anyone entrusted with power over others, especially the police. But we must also be aware of them in ourselves, in whatever form they take.