Looking at the pictures in the mirror

I began by writing: “Once I got over the shock of seeing rampaging protesters in the halls of the Capitol” and then I stopped. No, we should never, ever get over that shock and we have to use our rage to act. This cannot ever happen again.

We will learn a lot about how this specific incident happened; Why was there not enough security, especially in contrast to almost every protest demanding racial equity? Why were guards taking selfies with protestors and why were rioters disrupting our government allowed to simply walk out of the building?

All that and a whole lot more.

However it would be a horrendous mistake to believe this is about one incident, and an even bigger mistake to believe we can just address this in isolation and move on.

This was years, decades and generations in the making. Four years of a President spewing hate and inciting violence; his political and media enablers silent or egging him on for political and ratings gain. Anyone who was surprised by this was simply not paying attention.

It is also a mistake to stop here. This is not just about the President or even his complicit enablers:

Stand back with clear eyes and take this in within the context of an American history and its original sin of racism. From our founding on the backs of slave labor, every step of emancipation, every movement toward that “more perfect union” — -emancipation of slaves, Reconstruction, the civil rights movement, first Black president — has been met with a backlash. Open your eyes: We are in one now and we have to, finally, make sure this one ends with justice.

History books I read growing up gave me the message that the noble cause of emancipating slaves created a racist backlash because the “radical Republicans” went too far too fast and scared white southerners. “Stony The Road”, Henry Louis Gates’ book about reconstruction taught me a very different story. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, the election of Black leaders at all levels, the creation of Black institutions (churches, schools, colleges) led directly to the hideous oppression of Jim Crow laws and the KKK.

The Democratic Party was at the center of that oppression, feeding aggrieved White Southerners the lie that they were the victims here, not the former slaves. Democrats led widespread voter suppression across the South. Woodrow Wilson screened “Birth of a Nation” in the White House. Franklin Rosevelt looked the other way because he needed Southern votes to pass the New Deal.

The unholy alliance broke apart with the Civil Rights movement, especially when President Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner who spent years at the center of a Democratic establishment feeding the racist lie, woke up. The Voting Rights Act, the Great Society’s massive investments in anti-poverty programs moved us forward.

Once again, creating fairness for Blacks was exploited by cynical politicians who told Whites they were the victims. A great book about this time, directly relevant today, is Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.” When White southerners saw themselves as victims deserted by their old Democratic allies, Nixon and many other Republicans were more than ready to feed them the victim lie. The roles of the parties flipped, and a whole lot of the “victims” flipped out when, of all things, we had a Black president.

Along comes Donald Trump, on the back of Birtherism, with a campaign centered on victimhood, taking it much further than anyone had before, at least in public. So many “good people” stayed quiet, so many politicians who objected to him at first suddenly fawned over him because they were afraid of his followers, an ecosystem of slated media outlets — they all did everything they could to make The Lie the Truth.

What did people honestly expect was going to happen? Cue the mobs storming the Capitol, complete with Confederate flag, hopped up on The Lie that they were victims in a fair election that was “stolen” from them.

Through this complex sweep of our country’s history there is one clear truth:

In complex times, with complex challenges, there will always be people attracted to the simple answer that you are the victim and it’s someone else’s fault. When race and racism enter the picture, it’s toxic.

Something even deeper is at work. A week ago — for escapism, I thought — I started reading Charles King’s “Gods of the Upper Air” about Margaret Mead and a group of other anthropologists a century ago. Suddenly I was right back in the issues we face today as I read about this group’s revolutionary work disproving the widely-believed premise Whites used to “prove” they were smarter than Blacks, and one culture after the other around the globe used to assert their own superiority.

We have created myths, we have told ourselves lies and we have to understand we often do this because of a fear we will lose our position and power. The myths and lies have been used to keep us from looking reality in the eye: A country built on white people having such an inequitable amount of power can only heal if the power is shared.

This tough but urgently needed conversation gets easier if we recognize power is not always a zero-sum game — -if you get more I get less. White people will have a smaller percentage of the power but there is the potential of us all having more when every person is able to have the freedom to use all their talents.

This is not an abstract theory to me. The largest body of my work over the past 15 years has been about building pipelines for young people of color into the workforce. I’ve gotten to know many of the 20,000 young people of color who had Step Up jobs, and so many other remarkable young people in programs like Urban Scholars, the Power of You and ConnextMSP. Seeing first-hand what happens when doors of opportunity open to this diverse generation coming behind gives me an extraordinarily inspiring picture of what our shared tomorrow looks like. I don’t have to be an aging white person clinging to my share of power. I see so clearly now that I, and my family, and all of us will be dramatically better off in this shared future.

I hold that unbelievably uplifting picture of tomorrow right next to the enraging picture of mobs swarming the Capitol because they are part of the same whole. They show us the stark choice we face.

We have stood at this point before in our history; when we could have moved boldly to a better place but didn’t do enough to challenge those pushing the lie of victimhood. That cannot happen again. Progress is possible, and in spite of each backlash, each wave of history has brought us closer.

If you don’t believe that, remember this:

At Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church — where Dr. Martin Luther King used to preach that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” — the Senior Pastor is a descendant of slaves whose mother picked other people’s cotton. In a few days he will walk into that same Capitol building ransacked by terrorists and Senator-elect Raphael Warnock will take the oath to represent Georgia, the heart of the old Confederacy.