Without a common narrative about the past, the U.S. will never be united.
On a day steeped in tradition, a denial and a distortion of American history has brought us to this painful moment of troops, tanks and barricades that have made Washington, D.C., virtually impassable.
Long before former President Donald Trump provoked supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, Americans had been drinking from his fire hose of alternative facts. Some, like Ashli Babbitt, the military veteran who was killed during the insurrection at the Capitol, got drunk on the lies and hate. Including the biggest lie of all — that the election was stolen, and not just anywhere. The allegations of voter fraud centered on places such as Philadelphia, Atlanta and Detroit, home to large Black populations, fueling the simmering white fears that Trump steadily stoked as a politician.
Trump provided the megaphone for voices that lived in the shadows, a part of the American story we don’t want to tell and that we insist isn’t us. But as historian Eric Foner has said, we witnessed two themes of our national story on Jan. 6: the violence at the Capitol and the election of Georgia’s U.S. senators, the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who is African American, and Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish. Continue reading.