Nation Shrugs as Armed, White Right-Wingers Take the Michigan Statehouse

News outlets everywhere reported that on Thursday, hundreds of right-wing protestors in Michigan, many of them armed with rifles, stormed the Michigan statehouse.

But none of the articles I read felt it was newsworthy to mention that these protests are overwhelming white.

And they were. You have to look really really hard, and zoom in a ton, to find any people of color.

To tell you the truth, this silence about race in the media coverage functions like a sort of gaslighting for people of color. We see these rallies and see armed, white Trump supporters. We see an event that we are going to distance ourselves from whether there is “social distancing” or not.

6 feet? How about 6 miles.

Or 600 if we can.

The “colorblind” news coverage is just infuriating.

But that’s why I’m here, to give you the correct headlines. Just like I told you 10 days ago that White Supremacists, Sexists, and Neo-Nazis were leading protests in Ohio.

Call it an essential service.

Truth be told: whether the news wants to mention race or not, the fact is that the whiteness of the protestors shapes the media coverage in fundamental ways.

The April 30 protests were a lot smaller than the ones in Michigan two weeks ago. But the flag-waving white bigots came out to the “American Patriot Rally” for one reason: Governor Gretchen Whitmer had asked the legislature to approve her request to extend her emergency powers, and they wanted to stop it.

I mean, our hearts should go out to Michigan, which is among the hardest-hit states in terms of both cases and deaths.

Detroit, with over 1,000 COVID-19 deaths, the Detroit Metro Times reports, has just passed New York City in fatalities per capita.

Unemployment is skyrocketing, and it is absolutely understandable that people are getting desperate.

But what we are seeing in Michigan and elsewhere is not a massive, popular uprising against the way that the politicians and bosses are trying to pay for the crisis on the backs of the most vulnerable.

No, that looks very different. More like the May Day strike that workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and Target are calling for today, on international workers day.

Behind the Michigan protest is a deeper, explicit right-wing politics in which white supremacy plays a key part. And the media’s refusal to talk about this, to talk about the racial politics at work, is a measure of its willingness to coddle white anger and see it as a legitimate expression of national will.

One aspect of the poor reporting around the protests is the neutral tone that many news reports adopt — implicitly normalizing people who are literally rallying with rifles.

Fox 2 News in Detroit reported, for instance: “Second Wave of Protests Hit Lansing Capitol on Thursday.”

What sort of angle is this? Did anyone see the mass of white men with rifles and think, “Hm, is this the third protest? Oh, it’s the second? Wow, ok.”

A CNN headline read: “Protesters pour into Michigan Capitol calling for end of state of emergency.” As if they are just voicing legitimate opinions about the pros and cons of Michigan staying closed.

The second level of poor reporting is when the news’ so-called objectivity merges with the outright lies of protesters, and projects them to a wider audience.

Here’s a sign that the Fox2 News story focused on in their video, for example, saying that “Truth and Freedom are Bipartisan.”

While this might be a smart sign for the protestor to make, seeking to mask their rally’s politics and to appeal widely, does the news need to do their propaganda work for them?

What does such a sign do but normalize the event for viewers?

Some coverage was certainly better, as reporters and headline-makers pointed to the stunning spectacle of armed protestors moving without fear, and dug into the right-wing nature of the event.

The New York Daily News had the headline: “Multiple armed men storm Michigan statehouse; unfazed Gov. Whitmer extends emergency through May 28”

The Guardian headline read: “Armed protesters demonstrate against Covid-19 lockdown at Michigan capitol.”

The article went on to report violent slogans like “Tyrants Get the Rope” directed at the Governor, and reporter that “Members of the Michigan Liberty Militia were at the protest, armed with guns, and one member said that the group was there as a ‘security detail’ for the event organizers.”

But even this article, which usefully names and calls out the right-wing militia groups, stops short of talking about the race of the protestors and the dangers of white supremacy.

Why does this happen? Why are these important demographic and ideological details, central to the politics and culture of the militia in Michigan, Ohio, and elsewhere, repeatedly left out?

The silence about race when white majorities are involved is itself about race.

This is where we need to start talking about “colorblidness” as not just ignorance about racism and racialization, but as a basic acceptance of white normativity.

Oh wait, did I get all academic on you? My bad. Let me restate.

US society trains us — including people of color — to see “white” as “normal.” So we often don’t remark on race when there are groups of white people around. It’s only when people of color appear, according to this logic, that race magically appears.

Naming the absent and implied “white” in “colorblind” rhetoric is crucial to understanding the racial politics at play in a given situation.

And that’s why you find the media covering these white Right protests “objectively.”

Because these people are just normal, right? Just like “you and me.”

So you are told again and again that it’s legal for them to carry those rifles in Michigan — and not problematic. You are shown signs again and again to show they mean well — like “the truth is bipartisan!”

If you think that I’m wrong, and that the normalizing of armed white protestors is not due to the invisibility of whiteness, then do a simple thought experiment and tell me what happens.

Imagine if the armed protestors were mainly Black.

Imagine if they were mostly Indigenous people.

Imagine if they were Muslim. Or “Muslim looking.”

You know what? Forget about “imagine” and let’s talk about history.

When the Black Panther Party used their constitutional rights to bear arms, the power of the state came down on them hard, to suppress their militancy — which was not only about guns but about the utter militancy of organizing, of refusing to turn the other cheek, of free breakfast programs and community building.

And when Black, Indigenous, and Brown people are adamant in organizing but unarmed they — we — are still perceived to be a threat far greater than armed white racists.

What happened in Ferguson and Baltimore?

What happened at Standing Rock?

What happens every time there’s a shooting at a school or mall or dance club and the state and the media wait to figure out if the shooter was Muslim before deciding whether to label the event as “terrorism”?

Belief in inherent white harmlessness underlies the tepid media coverage of the protestors and the avoidance of questions of race — because if the protestors were “not white” the entire narrative would change in a flash. As it has through U.S. history.

Not treated as normal, not shown as relatable, and suspected to be downright dangerous, a group of people of color marching into the statehouse with arms would be immediately suppressed.

In their coverage of the waves of deaths in Detroit, particularly in the Black community, The Detroit Metro Times pointed to how structural racism in housing and health care made the Black community an easy target for the coronavirus

“Long before the coronavirus swept across America, underserved Black communities have been struggling with a severe health crisis. Generations of racist housing and economic practices have trapped many Black people in impoverished neighborhoods without adequate resources. In Detroit, where more than a third of its population is impoverished and many are uninsured or underinsured, residents are far more likely to have pre-existing health conditions like diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure, heart disease, and obesity. Asthma-related hospitalizations, for example, are three times higher in Detroit than the rest of the state.”

When we reflect on the devastation this virus has wrought among Black people, among Indigenous people, among people of color, we can reflect on another way that white Right anger is operating.

Rather than seeing the rush to open as just a moral issue (“they are so selfish!”) or just through a speculative class lens (“they are small businessmen!”), we can read this as the white supremacists’ utter disregard for POC life.

We need many more studies like the one about Black Detroit above and a real care about the sort of disproportionate pain that this virus is delivering in communities of color — and a lot less coddling of and silence about these white, armed protestors who represent a tiny minority but are being given outsized and often uncritical coverage.