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Cover photo by Evan Vucci for AP.
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On the occasion of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X famously offered his remarks on the event, describing it as “the devil’s chickens coming home to roost.” The metaphor was as straightforward as it was jarring to a national audience: chickens have a finely-tuned homing instinct, and will always return to their own pens when sent out. In using this analogy, Malcolm declared that Kennedy’s death at the hands of a sniper was merely the inevitable result of the violence perpetrated by the American government in Southeast Asia, Africa, and elsewhere, as well as the violence the American government allowed to happen throughout the former Confederacy. Moreover, according to Malcolm X, this was not a cause for mourning, but rather celebration. “Now, being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never made me sad. ln fact, it's only made me glad.”
This was a bold statement to make during a period of national mourning, setting off a firestorm of controversy and permanently ruining Malcolm’s relationship with his erstwhile mentor Elijah Muhammad. However, it is worth noting that it was not the first time that Malcolm X had made a statement to that effect. About a year prior, Malcolm described the Air France Flight 007 Crash of 1962 as “beautiful” and “an answer to prayers” because it contained over 100 natives of Atlanta, Georgia, a segregated city. This did stir up controversy, but to nowhere near the extent of the Kennedy statement. It would get him the attention of Playboy Magazine, who asked him to defend the statement, to which Malcolm said: “Sir, as I see the law of justice, it says as you sow, so shall you reap. The white man has reveled as the rope snapped black men's necks. He has reveled around the lynching fire. It's only right for the black man's true God, Allah, to defend us—and for us to be joyous because our God manifests his ability to inflict pain on our enemy.”
This was, of course, a statement of Malcolm’s religious beliefs as they stood at the time, but it also speaks to a natural and inevitable human response to injustice and oppression. Malcolm X tended to characterize what were often random tragic events as a form of divine retributive justice, and would always contextualize his statements accordingly. With respect to the Air France statement, he referred to a police raid on one of the Muslim temples he had founded, which resulted in the brutal, violent attack on seven unarmed men, one of whom was killed and another paralyzed for life. With respect to the Kennedy assassination, Malcolm referred to both the CIA-initiated assassination of Vietnamese president Ngo Diem Dinh and to the killings and beatings inflicted by civil rights activists in Birmingham. Malcolm X preached not from schadenfreude, but rather from profound frustrations at systematic violence perpetrated against people who often seemed powerless to strike back. More than mere frustration, however, Malcolm was giving an object lesson in the hypocrisy of public condemnations of violence. Why, the unspoken question went, is it ok to tolerate or celebrate the use of violence for political purposes abroad or to maintain “order” in the Jim Crow South, but not elsewhere? Martin Luther King Jr., an apostle of nonviolence himself, recognized how the sense of powerlessness in the face of manifest injustice and the self-serving hypocrisy of those in power can lead not only to the celebration of violence, but to violent outbursts themselves. Visiting the aftermath of the Watts Uprising of 1965 alongside his mentor Bayard Rustin, Dr. King remarked: “The economic deprivation, racial isolation, inadequate housing, and general despair of thousands of Negroes teaming in Northern and Western ghettoes are the ready seeds which gave birth to tragic expressions of violence. By acts of commission and omission none of us in this great country has done enough to remove injustice. I therefore humbly suggest that all of us accept our share of responsibility for these past days of anguish.”
On July 13th, 2024, a sniper took aim and fired several shots at Donald J. Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The gunman, a 20-year-old PA resident, was shot dead, but not before coming within millimeters of instantly killing the former president. Instead, he killed one of the attendees, who was killed while shielding his family from the stray gunfire. At the time of writing, no one knows what motivated young Thomas Crooks. Errant pieces of information about his life are at this point too scant and innocuous to form a coherent narrative about the whats and whys. But it was only a short amount of time before reactions to the event flurried about. Former President Barack Obama declared “there is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy.” Current President Joe Biden, Trump’s electoral opponent, said “violence has never been the answer.” Progressive senator Bernie Sanders said “American democracy must be a clash of ideas, not political violence.” Beyond the denunciations of political violence by leaders across the country, there were the inevitable attempts to assign blame. Some linked the event to the worsening proliferation of gun violence in America, some said increasing political polarization was to blame. Some said Trump opponents were at fault for declaring that Trump was an existential threat to democracy who must be stopped at all costs, some said Trump and his supporters were at fault for normalizing violence in American political life.
Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about the commentary on the assassination attempt, however, was the swift and incisive counter-reaction. Critics of Biden and Obama’s foreign policy immediately seized upon their language. Contra Obama, the death toll of his authorization of the predator drone program was touted; contra Biden, the fact that he continues to countenance an unconscionable civilian death toll in Palestine while continuing to arm and fund the Israeli military effort. Others took issue with the notion that we should perceive political violence as unusual or aberrant. Ariel Gold of the Fellowship of Reconciliation took issue with Biden’s statement that “[w]e can’t allow this violence to be normalized,” pointing to the surfeit of politically motivated shootings in Pittsburgh, Charlottesville, and elsewhere.
Donald Trump is a polarizing figure for a wide variety of reasons. The combination of Joe Biden’s flagging poll numbers and Trump’s links to the so-called Presidential Transition Project of the highly influential Heritage Foundation have led to an outpouring of emotion regarding the possibilities of a second Trump presidency. In some ways this is beside the point; a sincere condemnation of political violence would hold regardless of the political views of the target. In other ways, however, it is impossible to understand the decidedly fractured response to the assassination attempt without reference to what Trump stands for. There is certainly cause for pathos in the platform Trump runs on, from the dehumanizing language used for immigrants and citizens of foreign governments, to the valorization of carceral violence, to the promises to increase the militarization of American foreign policy, to the usage of “woke,” “CRT,” and “gender indoctrination” as boogeyman words. Moreover, Trump’s conduct in his previous term in office, perceived as emboldening and encouraging racial and gender violence, is cause for concern for those who have justified fears of being on the receiving end of such violence. Frustrations at the lack of a meaningful, effective political alternative to a man who represents all of the above may in fact cause a person of goodwill to celebrate the assassination attempt and lament only its failure.
It is important and necessary to recognize that violence is endemic to American politics, and any insistence otherwise, that “there is no place in America for political violence,” is simply not true. It is important and necessary to recognize, highlight, and denounce the hypocrisy of political leaders who condemn political violence in one context and promote and celebrate it in another context. It is important and necessary to recognize that celebrations of political violence by the powerless against the powerful is a natural and inevitable reaction against oppression. It is important and necessary to do all of these things, while still unequivocally condemning political violence.
The late, great Reverend Jim Lawson, in his final book Revolutionary Nonviolence, identified violence as “the use of power to harass, intimidate, injure, shackle, kill, or destroy a person or persons.” This definition rightly includes, along with interpersonal physical violence, abuses of political power, the use of dehumanizing rhetoric, the denial of fundamental human rights, and noxious ideologies such as racism, sexism, and militarism. It is this definition that allows Rev. Lawson’s philosophy of nonviolence to take on its revolutionary character: it is “the use of power to try to resolve conflicts, injuries, and issues in order to heal and uplift, to solidify community, and to help people take power into their own hands and use their power creatively.” His condemnation of violence, beyond the immorality of treating any person, regardless of who they are, as less than human, is simple: it is ineffective.
The ineffectiveness of violence as a tool for positive social change is clear enough from the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on the 13th of July. Whatever the gunman had hoped to accomplish, all he actually managed to accomplish was wasting his own life and that of a random bystander, foiled merely by a chance turning of his target’s head. This is simply unavoidable; even a trained shooter firing wantonly into a crowd cannot guarantee that he will hit his intended target and only his intended target. And even if he had managed to kill Trump, Crooks would not have killed what Trump represents. Trump’s death would have left the Republican Party Platform and the Presidential Transition Plan intact, only changing who would be responsible for implementing it. To recognize that violence is systemic is to recognize that the death of any person or group of individuals is not sufficient to work against it. He would have simply killed a human being senselessly, and probably still paid for the act with his life. More importantly, however, the would-be assassin hasn’t actually empowered anyone. No one is better off, no one is in a stronger stance against the reality of violence in America because of what Thomas Crooks has done. The same is ultimately true of self-righteous, conditional condemnations of political violence. Denying the reality of violence in American society disempowers its victims and makes violent outbursts — however ineffective they may be — inevitable. We do not know and may not ever know if this was the case for Thomas Crooks, but the all-too-familiar logic that one’s political views are best expressed through the barrel of a gun is not unique to him.
Lawson, Dr. King, and Mahatma Gandhi all systematized their philosophy of nonviolence differently, but it always begins with the same step: focus, an awareness of what the problem is, and how to solve it. The problems of American life cannot be reduced to the person of Donald Trump or the person of Thomas Crooks. Myth-making in the service of the ideal of American democracy by scapegoating Crooks as the exception is not the answer to anything that ails us as a society, but neither is wistful dreaming of a world in which Crooks’ aim was slightly better. Both are distractions from the fundamental truth that the disorder at the root of both the violence that maintains the American system and the violence that led Crooks to take to the roof with his gun are the same. As long as the politics of dehumanization is normalized in American society, the insistence that “there is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy” will ring hollow.
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