From Home Rule to Homeland: Counterterrorism as a Way of Life

Abstract

he US War on Terror reached its twentieth anniversary while I was teaching an Introduction to African American Studies course, a coincidence that inspired a historical comparison of racial terror, minority rule, and state violence across time. More specifically, on September 11, 2021, my students and I discussed W. E. B. Du Bois’s essay “The Propaganda of History,” from his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America . Du Bois discusses how Reconstruction—the unprecedented opportunity for the United States to realize a vision of abolition democracy following enslavement and Civil War—was viewed as a failure by many US historians. A consensus developed—propaganda—within the historical profession that Reconstruction failed because it was imposed against the will of the former Confederate states by carpetbaggers, scalawags, and radical abolitionists and because the freedmen, when they achieved political power, were incompetent and corrupt. This consensus understood Jim Crow segregation, supported in law and by white vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan, as restoring order to the nation while enabling continued white supremacist power as a governing rubric. As my students and I considered how the Reconstruction amendments to the US Constitution helped realize and guarantee abolition democracy, and how Jim Crow limited those possibilities, we noted that the forces of white supremacy, including the Ku Klux Klan and so-called Red Shirts, constituted a sort of insurgency and that terrorism had undermined Reconstruction’s promise. 1