Fani Willis, Esq. and the Fight Against Fascism
Dedicated to one of my teachers, Jerome L. Reide, Esq., Ph.D.
I find it fascinating that a Black woman is in charge of the legal process to prevent outright fascism from taking place nine months from now, but it doesn’t surprise me that she’s being rebuked. When I first saw Fani Willis, Esq. in the news last year, I thought, she looks like she does not suffer fools.
Trump and Giuliani’s mob of lawyers are working to ensure the perpetual rule of the Confederacy, to clear the path for Trump to become master dictator. And the mob’s main mouthpiece, Ashleigh Merchant, called Fani Willis out her name. In 2016, Merchant supported Nathan Wade’s campaign for a Superior Court judgeship, because he was, according to her, qualified for such a position. Now, Merchant is attempting to have Mr. Wade disqualified from prosecuting Trump because she believes he is unqualified. Is it the money she’s being paid, as part of this mob that caused her to change her mind? What else could it be?
Merchant is the kind of woman that made me fear the “Fearless Girl” statue down in the Financial District. I have known many women like Merchant, in my professional life, in corporate America. Some women view the Fearless Girl, standing akimbo, with her head held high and defiant, to be an inspiration. White, corporate feminists appear to love the representation of that child. Down to her posture in the courtroom, Merchant assumed the Fearless Girl stance, as she strode to the podium, stepping hard and mighty. Standing front and center, her legs set wide apart, with her pelvis thrust forward, as though she was doing her version of man-spreading. At a certain point, as she approached Fani, she even had her hands on her hips. Because I know what the real-life, adult version of that statue is capable of, I know that Merchant personifies a particular kind of evil. The kind of evil that prompted her to repeat, much to Fani’s chagrin, the alleged whereabouts of Fani’s daughter, seemingly sending out a dog whistle to the people who scaled the wall, on January 6th, in Washington, DC, who would find pleasure in locating the child and doing something hideous to her. That is what Merchant and that little statue girl represent to me. Not the banality of evil, but the strident committing of it, in the name of fascism and gender equality. And, as Fannie Lou Hamer said, when asked if she wanted to be equal to white men, she said, “Why would I want to stoop so low.”
The past is never dead. It’s not even past. — William Faulkner
Recently, I’ve been reading Keri Leigh Merritt’s Masterless Men. The book is a scholar’s spreading of white men’s secrets. The kind of secrets that once you hear them, your understanding of poor white men and their love of Trump is deepened. They love him so deeply that they built a gallows to lynch Vice President Pence, on the grounds of the capitol, and attempted to overthrow the government. These are the kind of white men that fought for the continuation of slavery, though they owned not one slave, and, as the old folks say, they didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.
Before whiteness had tainted the true foundation of America, which is African and Indigenous People’s blood in the soil, in the bedrock, the masterless men, resplendent in their poverty, ignorance, and illiteracy had white skin, but it was not valued anywhere near its value today or in the centuries leading up to today. So, the slave-holding gentry dictated who the white masterless men would vote for — that is, if they allowed them to actually vote. Voting rights were tied to property ownership. On election days, the gentry would feed the masterless men because they were frequently starving. They would also ply them with alcohol. The ballot box was not confidential. The masterless men had to vote in the open, that is, if they were allowed to vote. The team defending Trump and Giuliani remind me of those masterless men. Since the team went to law school, it’s apparent that they can read, and it’s for certain that they are getting paid well and upfront. They ain’t that stupid, but I wonder if they have truly considered what their lives would be like under fascism, or what this country would be like under fascism. Maybe they will love it. Maybe they just don’t care. Those men on that team have that good-old-boy twang and tone, and it spooks me. Reminds me of George Wallace and Strom Thurmond and Bull Connor, the last century’s fascist, Confederate leaders. Maybe there is some piece of a memory in me, passed down from one of my ancestors, who was tormented by some man with that same twang and tone, and had never gotten over it, so the pain and fear have filtered down in my spirit.
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being… — Toni Morrison
Right now, in Atlanta, Fani Willis’s office, should be preparing to prosecute the latest incarnation of fascist Confederates, but she’s been attacked by them. Most people, when invoking an image of what fascism looks like, refer to Hitler and Mussolini and the well-organized hard-on they rode in on to advance their project to rule the world, but Black America suffered under what was, perhaps, the longest stretch of fascism that the world has ever known. From the 1500s, when Spain brought enslaved Africans to what is now Florida, all the way to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, my people experienced a fascism so physically, psychologically, and spiritually brutal that, to this day, we still suffer what Joy DeGruy, Ph.D. terms post-traumatic slavery syndrome — another form of PTSD. She defines it as a “a condition that exists as a consequence of multigenerational oppression of Africans and their descendants resulting from centuries of chattel slavery. A form of slavery which was predicated on the belief that African Americans were inherently/genetically inferior to whites. This was then followed by institutionalized racism which continues to perpetuate injury.”
Black people’s acclimation to suffering and the struggle to “make it through,” is why Dave Chapelle, in one of his performances, told sensible white people that they can learn from us how to contend with the heinous debacle of Trump as president. My friend says, essentially, the same thing — that we have been through all of this before — but my position is who wants to keep going around and around, over and over again? We have been literally burned in the crucible of a racialized dictatorship, but that does not mean we have ever given up. I don’t think we believe in that. And don’t nobody want to live in a country where the good old boys, the MAGAites, and any others enamored of Trump, no matter their color, will be free to engage in unmitigated acts of Confederate terror.
This is exactly what the Black Panther Party was trying to prevent, which is probably why Fani’s father, Attorney John Clifford Floyd III, as a young man, joined. I wonder how far he can trace their ancestry that may connect to some abolitionist-minded man or woman, who sought alternatives to suffering Confederate evil.
The many threads of this situation tell a complete story. Beginning in the middle. The seditionists rose up against Lincoln’s government because they wanted to retain slavery, which, by then, had been in effect for centuries, fueled by the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade: Millions of African slaves were forced to the Americas, with slightly less than 500,000 winding up in what, ultimately, became the United States. Sherman burned Atlanta down to prevent the seditionists from taking over the nation. Throughout the many eras, Africans on the continent were kidnapped by and/or sold to Europeans, so Africa had little chance to continue its development. Throughout the many eras, Europe pillaged Africa of natural resources and people, and expanded its power to the detriment of people of color across the planet (also to the detriment of white people, but that’s another essay). Throughout the many eras in this country, Red land and Black labor allowed international capitalism to grow. Subjugation, however, is not something that human beings are good at accepting. So, when the Dutch took over South Africa, for example, of course there were those who stood up for freedom and self-determination for hundreds of years. So, by the time the 20th century hit, and apartheid was in full swing, there were revolutionaries like Nelson Mandela and others in South Africa who had to be neutralized, which is how he and many others wound up in prison. This situation was not unlike what happened in this country, with many of the Panthers, so Mr. Floyd represents at least two strands of what I’m saying here about linking the threads. He is a former Panther and he retired to South Africa, where he worked with Mandela in some capacity. Mr. Floyd and his daughter’s testimonies spanned HBCUs, the Divine Nine, and Black people’s “mad money” that some of us hide in our homes. Some women always have a pocket full of bucks when they go out on a date, just in case the man becomes strange. This situation also brings Reconstruction into focus, which, similar to the Obama presidency, caused the Confederates to lose their minds. The losing of their minds is on display in Atlanta right now and in the fact that Trump is the Republican front runner. The Lost Cause and the Daughters of the Confederacy whose educational lies, accepted as fact, permanently deranged the thought processes of too many white people (and some Black people who are intoxicated by whiteness), leading them to believe that they are the planet’s most superior beings.
Listen to us, Thy children: our faces dark with doubt/are made a mockery in Thy sanctuary.
— W.E.B. Du Bois, from “A Litany of Atlanta”
And the Confederacy has always been acting up and acting out in violent, demonic ways. In his testimony, when Mr. Floyd mentioned his Harvard Fellowship, I could not help but think of W.E.B. Du Bois, an alum of that school, who, during the Atlanta Riots in 1906, had his shotgun ready to protect his family, to shoot any white man who came near. In the lines above, he beseeches his god to deliver Black folks from white violence. In Atlanta, true to type, the Confederacy went about maiming and killing Black people, because Black men were, allegedly, fooling around with white women. And, just as Du Bois had done more than a century before, Mr. Floyd had to be vigilant in protecting himself and his daughter’s house. I presume that he, like Du Bois, was armed.
Why the defenders of fascism, otherwise known as Trump and Giuliani’s legal team, asked Mr. Floyd, an elder Black man about his homeownership and finances is beyond me, but I found it offensive. Were they trying to humiliate him? Were they trying to keep him in his little Black “place,” so they can continue the defense and exaltation of a man who clearly has the psychological capacity to put them on a firing line, kicking them to the curb the way he did Michael Cohen?
I have a feeling that that those two funky-looking reprobates, who stank New York City up, big time, lay awake at night, tossing and turning. I know they have wracked their brains trying to figure out how, in the name of whatever god they worship, a group of Black people, calling themselves lawyers, are gunning for them. Attorney General Leticia James is another woman who does not suffer fools. Her crowning glory, as far as I’m concerned, is the multi-million dollars that Trump has to pay for his business misdeeds that her office successfully prosecuted. Alvin Bragg just requested a gag order to prevent Trump from mouthing off about people related to the Stormy Daniels hush-money case. So much is riding on Fani. Her office can see to it that Trump will never become president again. Clearly, I am not a lawyer, but what am I missing? I think it matters that there are married/dating couples among the eighteen members of the Trump-Giuliani legal team. Why is it wrong for her to have appointed a former lover? And it’s clear that she did not need money from him. Everybody knows that her office is, in the name of democracy, attempting to make it clear to Trump, Giuliani, and their minions that you cannot organize a coup to nullify an election that you clearly lost.
How this all will turn out worries me. Fani was not even supposed to testify at the hearing, but after Merchant got up there saying that Fani slept with Mr. Wade a few minutes after she met him, Fani was compelled to let everybody know that she would not ever allow anybody to call her out her name. In doing so, she may have said things she should not have said, but she and her office are the only hope that the god to whom Du Bois prayed for deliverance is the one who’ll prevail, and not the one to whom Trump and Giuliani pray. ❦
