Brad is joined on a special Wednesday episode by co-host Dan Miller to discuss a question that many will be hearing at BBQs and on social media:
Why is the 1/6 insurrection bad but you have nothing to say about the BLM protests? Those protests led to property damage and violence. Aren't 1/6 and the BLM events the same?
Dan draws on his expertise in populism and material from his new book, Queer Democracy, to explain why the very premise of the comparison is bad, how these movements represent two different types of popular responses to political and cultural events, and how to discuss this issue with friends and family members.
Subscribe for $5.99 a month to get bonus episodes, ad-free listening, access to the entire 500-episode archive, Discord access, and more: https://axismundi.supercast.com/
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/StraightWhiteJC
Order Brad's new book: https://www.amazon.com/Preparing-War-Extremist-Christian-Nationalism/dp/1506482163
SWAJ Apparel is here! https://straight-white-american-jesus.creator-spring.com/listing/not-today-uncle-ron
To Donate:
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/BradleyOnishi
Venmo: @straightwhitejc
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Axis Mundi You're listening to an irreverent podcast.
*Ohhh* Visit irreverent.fm for more content from our amazing lineup of creators.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I'm Brad Onishi, faculty in religion at Skidmore College.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB.
And in a special Wednesday episode, I'm joined today by my co-host.
I'm Dan Miller, associate professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College.
It's weird to see you on a Wednesday, Brad.
I trust that you're still like wearing pants and doing normal Friday things.
Yeah, the whole week is off now.
We are middle-aged men, so the routine has been thoroughly unbalanced.
I'm gonna think tomorrow's Saturday, wake up late, all kinds of weird stuff.
Why are we meeting on a Wednesday?
Well, we had somebody email us after a couple of shows where we talked about January 6th, and their email was basically articulating the fact that yes, January 6th was bad, it was wrong, it was all kinds of things.
But what's the difference between January 6th and the uprisings that have taken place all over the country in the years since the killing of George Floyd?
We are almost to the day, the one-year marker of George Floyd's murder.
We are certainly one year away from the beginning of what was a summer of protest, a summer of uprising, a summer of marching.
I remember a year ago leaving my house to walk downtown to march.
I remember the tear gas and all of that.
Now, the question is this.
Hey, January 6th is bad, but what about broken windows?
What about riots?
What about, fill it all in Dan, Black Lives Matter.
What about People getting hurt.
What about Portland?
Portland had sustained protest where a police building was occupied.
What about all those things?
Aren't those the same?
I mean, come on, aren't you guys giving a break to one side and not criticizing the other?
Didn't both things result in the damage of property, the loss of life, People being injured, and so on and so forth.
So, I guess, Dan, that's why we're here today.
You have spent significant time thinking about this, partially because of your new book, which we'll be talking about over the course of the summer.
But let's just start with this.
Is the comparison of 1-6 and the national uprisings in response to George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others, are those the same?
Can we even compare them?
Is it a bad, is it a situation of oranges and apples from the start?
What do you think?
Yeah, so I think you hit on the key, like, first question, right?
The premise that, and we've talked about this, right?
This need to construct parallels, that there has to be an equivalency between, you know, two sides, even the creation of two sides.
I think you framed it exactly right.
What about the other side?
As if there has to be an other side, as if you couldn't, I don't know, you know, that if you support one of these kind of movements, you are in a side opposed to the other or something like that, as if somebody couldn't support Black Lives Matter and still have questions about it or vice versa.
The long, the short answer is no, I don't think they're symmetrical and what we talked about was kind of doing a deep dive in this because people get this question, right?
You're a professor, I'm a professor, we've had students who ask this question, right?
People I know from emailing us and from discussions I've had, people have family members and friends who ask this question, the what about, right?
And sometimes it's asked in good faith, right?
It really is somebody who says, how are these things different or why do you look at these differently?
Sometimes I encounter people who I think really have a sense that there's something fundamentally different about the social justice protests and the occupation on 1-6, but they can't articulate what that is, right?
And they sort of want help just thinking through that, but a lot of times it's not a question asked in good faith.
It's not because somebody thinks that there's a problem with 1-6 and they also think that there were problems with the social justice protests.
It's because they just fundamentally disagree that 1-6 was anything really bad and they think that the social justice protests were.
So we kind of talked about this and decided that rather than trying to sort of Hit it real quickly on a standard weekly roundup.
We would just give a little bit of time to it.
So, the first thing I think we have to start with, right, is the actual, like, the facts to which people appeal behind these.
You and I have talked about these a lot.
I don't want to belabor this a lot.
But what started the social justice protests and what sort of kicked off the events that led to the occupation on 1-6?
As you said, the most sort of proximate cause of the social justice protests was the murder of George Floyd.
If you like the trigger point or the final straw or what have you, it came right on the heels of revelations of what had happened to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, but years and years and years of unarmed extrajudicial killings of people of color.
And part of what happens with those is that I think given that history, Whenever there's a police shooting like this, or in the case of George Floyd, he was suffocated to death, basically.
He was asphyxiated.
It bears the weight of the entire history of those events.
That's why it's so big.
And I know that for a lot of white people who don't follow this or whose communities maybe aren't as directly impacted by this, you see these things like what happened with Derek Chauvin and Floyd and they feel like isolated incidents or they feel like they happen every now and then.
But if you talk to communities of color, These stories are amplified over and over and over.
And so part of it, what you get is you have real killings of real people that go unaddressed that kicked off these protests.
And so if you ask, well, what's the purpose of the protests?
And lots of people did.
What's the purpose?
The purpose would be, the aim would be to create a more just society where this doesn't happen, where people of color have the same rights and recognitions and the same protections under the law that the constitution says they're entitled to.
And the success, if you were to say, what would it look like if this movement succeeded, is you would have U.S.
citizens that, in this case people of color, who are not systematically wronged by the government.
So that's where the social justice protests take off.
Thanks for listening to this free preview of our Swag episode.
In order to get access to the full episode and so much more, become a Straight White American Jesus Premium Subscriber by clicking the link in the show notes.
It'll take you like two clicks, I promise.
In addition to getting access to this episode, you'll have access to the entire Swag Archive, over 550 episodes.
You'll also get an extra episode every month, ad-free listening, Discord access, and so much more.
All that for less than six bucks a month, and it helps us keep our flag up and continue to safeguard democracy from religious nationalism, extremism, and rising authoritarianism.
