THIS is who “we” are.

I have spent many hours in the Capitol: as an erstwhile tour guide (with my friend Larry); as a teacher of United States history; as a Black/Chicano man in an edifice built by my enslaved ancestors on land pilfered by violence and shored-up on foundations of white supremacy; as a devotee at the altar of Jefferson’s stated ideals; and most poignantly, as an American walking the halls of We the People.

It never, in my myriad sojourns in the Capitol, really dawned on me that I could lose that opportunity until January 6th, 2021. Much as I took for granted walking loved ones all the way to the gate prior to September 11th, 2001, I assumed naively, perhaps with some measure of determined ignorance, that I would always have the opportunity to pose by the offices of lawmakers with whom I agreed, to castigate those public servants who were wrong in word and deed, and to, on occasion, sit in those revered seats just below the Speaker’s podium, where, on occasion, Justice sits in black robes to hear the president deliver his (so far) State of the Union address.

All of that has changed with the mutated pandemic of whiteness that overran the Capitol waving TRUMP 2020 flags, building gallows, smashing doors with bullhorns carrying zip-ties, waving Confederate flags, screaming “Stop the Steal!” in their revulsion and anger over the first Black president and the first Black vice-president. “The steal” was not about Joe Biden’s election as the forty-sixth cisgender White man elected to the office presiding over the Executive Branch of the United States government. “The steal” is the weakened grasp of racism and white supremacy on the levers of power in the United States.

And I am an optimist! I am a poor writer of fiction because I cannot bear to write those characters like Ted Cruz or Josh Hawley whose only aim is self-aggrandizement and the accumulation of power, though they obviously exist. I cannot bring myself so far from my Jesuit teachings to write malice as a character trait or selfishness so powerful that it consciously propagates poverty and violence simply to serve itself.

But again, my faith in humanity, in the people of these “united” States shakes and cowers because I watched White people pledging their fealty to the “white supremacist in chief” by bludgeoning a policeman (yes, we should defund the police) they claim to revere with a flag so sacred to them Colin still doesn’t have a job because he genuflected instead of stood.

Ad nauseum I’ve said blue lives don’t exist. Ad nauseum I’ve said Black Lives Matter. Ad nauseum whiteness has lied about both, thrown red herrings called reverse racism and disrespecting the military and patriotism, and placed its fear and loathing into ballot boxes and legislative sessions, into presidential speeches, calls to the police for sleeping and barbecuing in order to strangle quite literally the brown and Black voices crying out for Justice, for Equity, for peace in this country.

I don’t know when or if I will walk those halls again. That makes me sad. They are places where I could pretend, for a moment, that Tulsa and Charlottesville were aberrations, that “this isn’t who we are.” The insurrection, though, proved in 2021 what was true in 1860 and in 1776.

THIS is exactly who “we” are.