by Jayson Hawkins

The images that emerged from the Jan. 6, 2021, siege of Capitol Hill left many people around the world appalled that such events could occur in the cradle of modern democracy. Yet the then­president’s rhetoric of incitement — as well as subsequent acquittal by the same government body at which he spurred the attack — came as little surprise to anyone who had followed American politics over the previous four years.

The shocking part was the glaring lack of security given the explicit threats of violence leading up to that day, coupled with the knowledge that, had the protesters­turned-combatants been people of color, the response of law enforcement would have been far different.

In the aftermath of the attack, the FBI repeatedly assured the public that the responsible parties would be brought to justice. While rounding up those who gleefully posted about their involvement in the insurrection on social media was no difficult task, the question remains as to how effective an agency whose past is rooted in systemic racism will be at investigating white extremists.

According to an opinion piece in The Guardian January 26, 2021, the FBI has known about white supremacists working in local law enforcement for the past 60 years without taking action. The agency’s own legacy of racism can be traced back a century to its probe of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, while turning a blind eye to the massacre of hundreds of Blacks in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI expended its time and resources battling the movement for civil rights.

These efforts reached their peak during a counterintelligence program named Cointelpro (1956-71), which worked to investigate political groups, including anti-racist or anti-capitalist groups, in the U.S. Although there were a few token investigations of white extremists amid this period, little came from them. The weight of the FBI was focused on crushing organizations that could potentially benefit people of color.

Claims that the bureau’s systemic racism is part of a past that it has outgrown should be treated with skepticism. Evidence suggests that agents of the FBI attended “the Good Ol’ Boys Roundup” throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, an annual event open only to whites where faux “N----r hunting licenses” were reportedly sold.

Nor were such attitudes limited to extracurricular activities. The FBI threatened the record label of N.W.A. in 1989 due to certain lyrics on the “Straight Outta Compton” album and listed the hip-hop Wu-Tang Clan as a “major criminal organization” in the late 1990s, The Guardian reports. More recently, the FBI began to track “Black Identity Extremists” — a label created in 2017 for activists involved in Black Lives Matter and other politically involved organizations.

Several Black agents prevailed in a class-action lawsuit against the FBI in the early 1990s that exposed racial discrimination within the bureau, yet the percentage of Black agents today is less than it was then; moreover, the top ranks are almost all held by whites.

Before such an agency can be expected to ferret out any white supremacist lawbreakers in other branches of law enforcement and the citizenry, it must take a hard look at its own ranks.

Source: theguardian.com

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