Once More, Unto the Breach

Why We Must Destroy American White Supremacy, Once and For All

John Minchillo/AP

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;

Or close the wall up with our . . . dead.

-Henry V

Yesterday, I tried to watch a video of what happened in the tunnel leading into the Capitol building during last week’s insurrection.

For more than thirty minutes, white supremacists assaulted Capitol police in an attempt to get into the building through the tunnel we use at every inauguration, for the birth of every new administration, and from which every new president emerges. These white men, at the instruction of their leaders, used lead pipes and bear spray and flagpoles and fire extinguishers and just brutalized the Capitol police, beating and screaming that the Capitol was “their house.” Blood was everywhere. Screaming. So much violence my stomach turned.

I lasted about five minutes, no question as I turned it off that America narrowly avoided a massacre of unimaginable proportions just seven days ago, unable to take any more of it. Even still, we do not yet know the absolute depths of the horror of what went on inside that building. No less than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to her Instagram last night, shaken and exhausted, and told the world that she had an encounter that day, the details of which we still aren’t allowed to know, in which she thought she might die.

Today, in the wake of his incitement of this violence, the president will be impeached for a second time-- the first president in history for whom that will be the case.

Dominoes are falling, yes, and the chances grow by the hour that he could actually be removed.

But let’s not forget that we had the chance to do this a year ago— before 380,000 Americans were dead of COVID, before a riot in our Capitol building, before five people died in that place and hundreds of others feared that they were going to be executed on livestream.

He could have been stopped. He was not.

And so, here we go again, America. Here we go again.

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Over the last few days, I’ve thought a lot about what happens when wounds fester, how when we do not clean out a wound, disinfect it, dress it and treat it and allow it to heal, it can destroy the entire body on which the wound was inflicted. Ignore a serious wound, in other words, and it will kill you.

So it goes with American white supremacy. Over and over again, we have mythologized our history, white-washed it, denied its horrors and refused to reckon with its harm. Not so much as an apology has ever originated from the highest office in the land for the forced labor, rape, murder, enslavement of thousands of Africans in the furtherance of the building this nation. Similarly, just the bare passing acknowledgements exist for the genocide of indigenous Americans over several hundred years at the hands of men who believed they could take whatever they wanted, that they were entitled to what they wanted, no matter the cost.

And because we have never reckoned with what made us, nor even attempted to clean out those wounds, the stink, the infection of these events thrives in America, hundreds of years later. Until we truly seek to reconcile with the horrors at the foundation of this nation, and tell the truth, and seek to repair and acknowledge and heal them, that violence will continue to live in the body politic of this nation and in its people.

The line from our origins in this country runs from 1492 straight into the Capitol building today. 

White supremacy lives in all of us. We are indoctrinated into it in elementary school, when rhymes about Columbus “sailing the ocean blue” are taught to us as the story of how America began, never mind the people who lived here at the time. We sing the words of a national anthem that includes a verse on how slaves should fear what could befall them if they tried to escape. We are taught words like “manifest destiny” in history class to describe the colonialism and genocide of native peoples as white Europeans moved across this land from one sea to the other. 

We lie to ourselves, over and over, about who we are and what made this nation. We lie. And then we bury the shame of the violence that built us, and that shame festers and infects and rots us, breeding more and more violence, over and over again.

It is no surprise, then, that we are here, is it? We came within minutes of the end of America last week. The infection is quite literally killing us.

Today is the day, another chance and the last one, to acknowledge that the removal of this one man— and with any justice the removal of all of his enablers— is only the start.

Will we collectively admit, once and for all, that white supremacy and white power has to end? That there is no other way out, save our ultimate destruction?

Will we choose to engage, at long last, in the messy work of rooting out white supremacy in every institution and every structure of our society, to change the story of who we are to one that tells the truth, and to create a better nation built on truly just foundations?

Will we apologize, for once and over and over again, for the generations of enslaved and indigenous dead in the land on which we live, for the graveyard of American violence on which our house currently stands?

Will we repair it, acknowledge the harm that continues to this day in the descendants of enslaved people and indigenous Americans through intergenerational and epigenetic trauma?

The choice is here, and it is obvious.

Let us look it all dead in the eye, and tell the truth, and start the work of becoming a better nation.

Speaking the truth and reckoning with our history stops the manifestation of future generations of violence. Confronting the truth and seeking to heal it creates accountability-- past, present and future. This work will break the legacy of centuries of racism and violence that deserve to be broken, that must be broken, right now.

It MUST happen. It is an American invitation that cannot be denied.

“Now or never,” shout the ancestors.

“Now or never,” shouts the future.

Now or never. Everything we are and have been and could be is on the line.

If we do not accept the challenge, we will continue to pile up the bodies of our dead, and American democracy will come to a blazing end.

We all understand that, yes? It’s now or never, clearer than it has ever been.

We’ve got so much work to do.

Let us hope that in the highest halls of our government, it starts today.