Trump’s Inauguration Is Ushering in a New Redemption Era of White Power Politics and Violence
On Monday, January 20, two political legacies will collide in real time. Donald Trump will become our 47th president on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It feels poetic in the worst possible way. The cartoonish bully apparently intent on destroying civil rights — among countless other hard-won freedoms — will assume power on the day we celebrate a civil rights icon. I can already see the memes that will fill up my family’s group chat, comparing the holy patron saint MLK Jr. to a man with 34 felony convictions and an insurrection to his name.
But Monday is about more than two men or their dueling legacies. There are also two political cycles that will come to a head: Reconstruction and Redemption. Pick up any McGraw Hill textbook and you can read that we’ve had only one round of Reconstruction and Redemption in the US. Reconstruction, the textbooks say, was the transformative period immediately after the Civil War, from roughly 1865 to 1877, when the US sought to integrate newly emancipated Black Americans into its institutions and workplaces. Redemption was the violent white supremacist backlash, ignited by Southerners.
But the story isn’t so simple. At the end of his life, King believed the “black revolution” went beyond the issue of civil rights for Black Americans; it was about confronting “racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism” and required a “radical reconstruction of society.” That reconstruction, a decades-long political struggle that is often downplayed in how we mythologize King, became broadly known as the Civil Rights Movement. It ushered in our second attempt at making multiracial democracy real. Undeniably, Trump is an enemy of that legacy, but he seems intent on going even further. He wants to destroy many of the gains of our first Reconstruction. He’s championing a new age of Redemption.
Redeemers were, first and foremost, losers. Literally. They lost their right to exploit, enslave, and subjugate entire groups of people after the Civil War. Never mind that President Andrew Johnson pardoned Confederate soldiers “unconditionally and without reservation” in 1868 or that a number of enslavers received reparations to compensate for their “lost property”; Redeemers wanted the old ways — the old America — back.
That mission was supercharged when Rutherford B. Hayes agreed to pull federal troops out of the former Confederate states as part of a compromise that secured his victory in the disputed 1877 presidential election. Redeemers finally had freedom again — freedom to violently seize elections and purge Black people from political office and the voter rolls. It was the “resurgence and bloody normalization of White Power politics,” historian N.D.B. Connolly wrote in Boston Review, a time when “southern whites took over the political and propaganda apparatus in all eleven states of the former Confederacy.” This period, also known as “the nadir,” or the lowest point, overlapped with the Gilded Age. If you’ve seen the HBO show, you might associate that phrase with incredible gowns, Meryl Streep’s daughter, and rich people fighting over who has more money. But it was also a period, from roughly the 1870s to the early 1900s, when the super-rich rose to power and political corruption ran rampant.
Resurging white power politics. Political violence. All-powerful billionaires. This should sound familiar, because Trump played on all these forces to return to the White House. And his administration is taking aim at some of our greatest Reconstruction victories, such as birthright citizenship and public education, while pushing an agenda straight out of the 19th century. Censorship, forced pregnancy and birth, immigration bans, and destroying racial progress were all cornerstones of life under Redemption. We are days away from a world in which abortion access for millions of people could be imperiled by attempts to invoke the Comstock Act, an essentially defunct “zombie law” passed in 1873 that J.D. Vance joined other Republicans in urging Joe Biden’s Department of Justice to enforce in 2023 to crack down on the mailing of abortion pills.
Trump claims he won’t invoke Comstock and that abortion will be a states rights issue, but even if we believe him, that means more people will continue to die in states with abortion bans that force doctors to delay life-saving medical care. And if Vance’s ramblings about the need for higher birth rates and his contempt for childless women are any indication, “your body, my choice” seems likely to soon become a national slogan.
I’m not going to mince words: Things are bad, and this brand of Redemptionist politics probably isn’t going away any time soon. But here’s the thing: History is instructive, not prescriptive. Knowing where we’ve been can help us imagine where we can go, but it does not dictate where we will go. It’s up to us to make hard decisions now about where to put our energy so we can build a bridge to where we want to end up.
Some of us have been here before. I was just a few years out of college when Trump first took office, and I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I spent those four years fighting like hell in Washington, DC, at a nonprofit committed to gender justice. I thought that’s how I would make a difference. But, looking back, my day job was the least impactful thing I did. What mattered was joining Black Youth Project (BYP) 100, a national membership-based group of young Black organizers. Those weekly, in-person meetings are where I first learned what political education is, where I first sang and danced to Frank Ocean’s second album, Blonde, and eventually, where I learned to become a prison abolitionist.
I’ve blocked out a lot from Trump’s first year in office, but I remember meeting people I admired, thinking deeply, and learning the basics of community care and defense. Then as now, we don’t know what the next year will hold. It’s one of the reasons I chafe at giving neat and tidy advice about how to survive. I don’t believe there’s a silver bullet for surviving fascism. All I can say is that the next few years will depend less on our daily bubbles and more on the bonds we build with people we don’t know.
Elections will matter, but building political power in our daily lives — at work, in school, in our neighborhoods — will matter more. Because, contrary to popular belief, Black people didn’t spend all of Redemption being hunted by the Ku Klux Klan. They organized unions and established schools. They championed new forms of political and cultural defense. They broke laws and demanded new ones. They embraced communism, Marxism, Black nationalism, and made art that eventually dominated mainstream culture. Their work paved the road to the revolutions of the 20th century and the world we live in today.
This Redemption era will likely have something similar in store. Our democracy will change, but its future can be measured in the fabric of our lives; in the power we build, the stories we tell, and the freedom we assert. In 1877, they had no idea what could happen next — we have the benefit of perspective.
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A New Redemption Era Starts Now
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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