How Extremism in the United States Led to a Second Presidential Impeachment

Two historic political events have already happened within the first month of 2021 in the United States, including the first large-scale violent attack/breach of the U.S. capitol building, and the second impeachment of a president within a single term. The last attack on the capitol took place nearly 200 years ago by the British and this recent attack was incited by a speech given by now former President Donald Trump. This speech encouraged his supporters and the crowd to march on the capitol to protest voter fraud and the corruption within the U.S. government. According to an ABC News article, a large group of protestors breached the capitol, broke into the building, damaged windows, attacked capitol police, and threatened violence against the senators inside the chamber. Many of them carried or wore garments bearing references to QAnon, the Confederate flag, Gadsden flags, historical Nazi campaign references, and symbols of the American Revolutionary War.

Several people died due to the events that transpired, and based on the nature of this attack, Trump is now in impeachment trials for “inciting violence against the government of the United States”. These impeachment trials started only one week before the date of inauguration of President Joe Biden and will be ruled on after President Donald Trump has left the White House. Since impeachments are such rare occurrences, these events, and the timing around them, have raised many debates among political experts and many are stating that the actions spurred by Donald Trump are a form of domestic terrorism. However, some are questioning the validity of impeaching a government official who has already been removed from office, debating the Constitutionality of impeachment on previously held elected positions, and many supporters of Donald Trump are eluding that the protests were amplified by Antifascists, an anarchist movement supporting the Democratic party. 

To provide the latest research on the social, psychological, and political aspects of radicalization and terrorist recruitment, Prof. Benson G. Cooke, from University of the District of Columbia, explains how right-wing extremist groups have become more vocal resulting in civil rights organizations creating a significant rise in hate crimes and threats, and what role President Donald Trump played in this in his chapter, “An Overview of the Impact of Racial Hate and Its Manifestation of Homegrown Terrorism in America” sourced from Research Anthology on Violent Extremism: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice (IGI Global).

Research Anthology on Violent Extremism: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice Copyright: 2019 | Pages: 541 | ISBN: 9781522571193 | EISBN: 9781522571209 This publication is a critical source of academic knowledge on the social, psychological, and political aspects of radicalization and terrorist recruitment...Learn More.

THE LEGACY OF HATE, RACISM, AND HOMEGROWN TERRORISM IN AMERICA

It can be argued that America’s greatest sin (Wallis, 2016) was not simply the enslavement of African abductees who became victims of international human trafficking to America as early as 1619, but the very act of racism itself, which existed before kidnapping became a catalyst for the capture, bondage and oppression of African male and female children, youth (King, 2011), and adults brought to America (Horton & Horton, 2005; Horton & Horton, 2006; Bennett, 1998). Racism allowed for untrue beliefs to become a significant part of an effort by those who subjugated other people to establish hegemony, which demonstrated a need to convey supremacy in domination and authority of power and control. The legacy of racism, hate and homegrown terrorism in America calls for an in-depth examination of the fact that racism preceded and inspired almost four centuries of intense personal and institutional cruelty and brutality throughout both the slave trade, as well as the eradication of Native American Indian populations in pursuit of a European manifest destiny in America.

Before, during and following the Civil War (1861-1865), racism would continue to be the driving psychological and social force used by those invested in sustaining and maintaining systems of oppression and domination through practices designed to confine, and inhibit in particular people of African ancestry. This was accomplished by creating slavery by another moniker – Jim Crow¹. Jim Crow² was an era in American history in which legal and civil rights were denied to African Americans. The price for challenging either local practices/rules/statutes, societal values, states’ rights (especially in the South), was to become a victim of assault, personal property destruction, unwarranted incarceration and even death. Historians often refer to the Jim Crow era (Chafe et al., 2001; Packard, 2002) as being worse than slavery (Oshinsky, 1996). During this era, only Constitutional laws and statutes would begin to spell out the protection of specific civil rights of all American citizens. The laws governing the rights of all citizens regardless of race or color to vote was ratified by the U.S. Congress in the 15^th Amendment in 1870 (Heffner, 1991, p. 38). The rights of women to vote was approved by the U.S. Congress in the 19^th Amendment in 1920 (Heffner, 1991, p. 39). The 24^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1964 addressed the ongoing discrimination of rights of African Americans –especially those living in the Southern states– who continued to be denied the right to vote by majority whites during national, state or local elections. Many Southern whites in official positions used of illegal, deceptive, and unfair practices like poll taxes (Heffner, 1991, p. 41) to prevent African Americans from voting. Again, it is important to know that while African Americans were the target of these acts of hate, other groups suffered from similar indignities as well.

During the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the Supreme Court heard important court cases that would further validate hate and shape the fate of citizenship rights and the moral question of fairness concerning the idea that a nation could impose pseudo-equality by sustaining racial separate but equal laws. Regrettably, the inconvenient truth was that at the heart of fierce legal debates coexisted a racial bias, prejudice, bigotry and structural and institutional racism supporting proslavery. These debates also revealed an economic institution that devalued African Americans and considered them sub-human (Carroll, 2015). For example, one of the first Supreme Court rulings that supported the institution of enslavement is referred to as the Dred Scott Case. In 1857, the Dred Scott vs. Stanford case involved an enslaved man born with the name Sam Blow was sold to an Army officer stationed in Illinois, “a state where slavery was prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787” (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 208). When the officer died, he left his property including enslaved Africans to his wife. Mr. Blow (subsequently renamed Dred Scott), sued for his freedom as he resided at that time in a free state. However, the widow of his former slave owner appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court restoring him back as her enslaved servant. The case would eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court with the argument that “Scott was still a slave and even if he were free, a black descendant of slaves was not entitled to bring suit” (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 209). Eventually, on March 6, 1857, “a mostly Southern 7-to-2 majority found that Scott was still a slave” (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 209). A major interpretation of this decision rendered by the then Chief Justice Roger Taney was that “…The Constitution never intended blacks—even free blacks in free states—to be citizens” (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 209).

Less than 40 years later another Supreme Court case would further buttress the emotion of hate and reinforce the idea of minimizing equal protection under the law for non-dominant races, especially affecting African Americans. This case, 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson, was in direct contradiction of the 14^th Amendment, which was established to guarantee equal protection under the law for all citizens. This case allowed for state-imposed racial segregation under the phrase “separate but equal” (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 755). In this case, a man named Homer Plessy refused to leave his seat on a New Orleans train in 1892, thereby initiating a legal argument that would become a major Supreme Court challenge to the 14^th Amendment.

The court ruled seven to one (one justice did not participate) that Plessy’s constitutional rights had not been violated. In a lone but strong dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan, a Southerner, cited cases in which segregated juries had been found unconstitutional and went on to say in plain language what Plessy’s opponents would not admit: that the separate car law not only separated the races but did so to accommodate white racial prejudice. Harlan’s words provided prophetic. The “separate but equal” doctrine relegated African American children to inadequate, unsafe schools, while the South’s Jim Crow laws forbade black citizens from exercising their rights as citizens on an equal footing with white citizens. (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 756)

Another 60 years would pass before another major Supreme Court ruling impacting attitudes toward hatred that embodied statutory inequalities and the need for the U.S. Constitutional right to equal protection under the law to become true. This case occurred on May 17, 1954 and is known as Brown vs. The Board of Education. There were numerous court cases leading up to the Brown vs. Board of Education that would not be hampered by hate, prejudice, bias and bigotry. However, this case is historic because it helped to move the nation closer to establishing justice in civil and human rights struggle for equality. Throughout the Jim Crow era, segregation was an institutional practice and was state sanctioned by earlier Supreme Court rulings like the Dred Scott Case and Plessy vs. Ferguson. During the 1950s, a burgeoning civil rights movement began in the South and impacted the educational, economic and political institutions in America. In particular, majority Americans found it increasingly problematic to deny the humanity of a people who continued to make collective sacrifices to the nation’s defense in both world wars and other armed conflicts, as well as their significant contributions to national economic, educational and political growth of this nation. This era was also a time when key alliances of faith groups, civil rights organizations, educational institutions, and concerned citizens would unite to support overturning the harsh inequities of ‘separate but equal’. For example, through the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers were focused to make a stand against ‘separate but equal’ policies and practices that denied constitutional rights and equal protection under the law.

One critical argument that helped overturn past Supreme Court rulings would come from an expert educational witness – the noted psychologist, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark. He explained the harmful and negative psychological impact of the nation’s imposed racial segregation policies and practices that deprived educational resources to African American students and schools. He helped expose the psychological message of hate that was interwoven within the educational lessons. He revealed a subliminal propaganda with racist overtones that conveyed a negative self-concept concerning black appearance (i.e., racial-colorism). Clark’s method for validating the impact of bias, bigotry, prejudice and racism on damaging the self-esteem of African American children was by using a doll study. Simply put, this doll study allowed children (boys and girls), ages 3 through 7 to assign positive or negative characteristics to either a black or white doll. Unfortunately, the African American children overwhelmingly preferred the white doll as more desirable and the black doll as less desirable. This action helped to convey to the Supreme Court the devastating and traumatic impact of racism on self-concept and psyche of African American children, who for centuries had been exposed to unwarranted negative stigmas about their race. This was especially deleterious as it often validated a view of Black Americans as being inferior just because they were Black. Consequently, his doll studies demonstrated that an adverse outcome of hate, prejudice, bias, and bigotry was that Black children more often would display dislike or even hatred toward the doll that looked like them while valuing and liking a doll that looked white.

The opinion, written by Justice Warren and read on May 17, 1954, was short and straightforward. It echoed Marshall’s expert witnesses, stating that for African American schoolchildren, segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone. (Appiah & Gates, 2003, p. 97)

It is important to remember that while the Founding Fathers drafted the Declaration of Independence in 1776, many of them owned enslaved Africans that were transported to America after their capture and kidnapping (Wiencek, 2003; Wilkins, 2001). This recognized fact highlights the hypocrisy of their signature achievement in declaring freedom for some, but not for all. It underscores how our government’s identity would continue to be troubled by principles that did not live up to the creed that all men were created equal. Instead, the fact of this nation’s beginnings would see enslaved Africans (men, women and children), assigned to a wide range of responsibilities (e.g., toiling on plantations, managing farms, maintaining homes and raising the children), of the founding fathers. While some enslaved African Americans resisted, others willingly gave of themselves in the belief that the promise of freedom to some would one day apply to all. Consequently, being forced to comply as enslaved property, some secretly hoped that their denial of freedom as human beings and citizens would one day be realized. As a result, many willingly fought for the freedom of America to become an independent nation (Berlin, 1998; Bennett, 1998).

Psychologically, public contradictions and political and social incongruences created generations of cognitive dissonance in the mind and soul of both the oppressor and of those oppressed. One of the most glaring contradictions conveyed was the inconsistent rhetorical language expressed in the writing of the Declaration of Independence “…We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Heffner, 1991, p. 15). Ironically, the document would continue to be both an emotionally depressive reality for victims of oppression as well as a glimmer of hope that one day the noble idea of equality and freedom would extend beyond the concocted barriers of color, gender, and religious practice. However, hate would continue to cloud the guarantee of civil rights and freedom to those held captive to build, feed and clothe the citizens of their newly founded nation. Instead, it would require more than a century of struggle, a Civil War and numerous state and federal legal debates to address the inequities that sustained discrimination and injustice for groups devalued by color, gender or religious practice. It would take more than three hundred years of nationwide protests, marches and legal interventions, hate crimes and homegrown terrorism before socio-economic, educational and political systems would address the influence of hate. Racism driven by a hate directed at African Americans would become the cornerstone of personal and institutional practices of hatred carried out throughout American culture. Hatred that became reflected in the greater societies acquiesce to both hate and white supremacy would continue to sustain America’s greatest sin. Thus, hate would become the arbiter of terrorism against people perceived as less than human. Hate would fuel the century’s long period of lynching, race riots, and discrimination. This, in turn, would fuel political, educational and economic oppression, the internalization of beliefs supporting the psychological objectification, dehumanization, marginalization, humiliation, disrespect, rejection, nullification, degradation, and stereotype of people. In addition to hate, fear clouded the prospects for lifting the scourge of oppression. Fear and hate may have influenced Thomas Jefferson in his correspondence to George Washington. He stated, “We have the wolf by the ear: and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other” (Wiencek, 2003, p. 358). Like many other slave owners, it is likely that their expressed hatred of their enslaved captive was driven by an unconscious fear that emancipation of enslaved Africans would ensure the wrath of freed Africans who suffered immensely throughout their captivity in America. Thomas Jefferson would go on to write:

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.—To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral. (Wiencek, 2003, p. 359)

In other words, Jefferson is explaining that the object of hate – enslaved Africans – must be controlled and restricted by exerting educational, political and economic prejudice and bigotry or else the fear is that the person who is hated will one day take over and destroy the one who hates. This reasoning might help explain why homegrown terrorism became an extension of the personal hatred, racial prejudice, and bigotry stoked by the fear of reprisals.

Understanding the need for research around this topic, this research is featured in the publication  Research Anthology on Violent Extremism: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice (IGI Global). This Research Anthology is ideal for libraries, as it features 25+ hand-selected, highly cited comprehensive chapters on trending topics in social, psychological, and political aspects of radicalization and terrorist recruitment. Examining violent extremism through a critical and academic perspective, this book is ideally designed for researchers, analysts, intelligence officers, policymakers, academicians, and graduate-level students interested in current research on violent extremism.

It is currently available in print and electronic format (ISBN: 9781522571193; EISBN: 9781522571209) through IGI Global’s Online Bookstore at a 20% discount. Additionally, to ensure that the research community can easily and affordably access this content, this publication and all IGI Global titles are available on the individual article and chapter level (pay-per-view) for US$ 37.50 through IGI Global's InfoSci-Ondemand. Recommend this publication and view all of the chapters featured in this title on the book webpage here.

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