“Let us be clear, this was a domestic terrorist attack perpetrated by rebel mobs of white supremacists, armed, equipped and very skilled in police and military tactics that came to overturn an election in which their candidate Trump lost,” Rep. Joyce Beatty, of Ohio Congressional president Black Caucus said at the group’s hearing.
“Madam Mayor, St. Louis and I stood up in support of the impeachment article against Donald J Trump. If we fail to remove a white supremacist president who incited a white supremacist insurrection, it is communities like the Missouri First District that suffer the most. ” Bush said during his speech.
People marched by the thousands in both after believing that harm had been done to them. Calls for racial justice across America during the summer were supported by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and the pain of subsequent generations of anti-black sentiment. Contrary to the BLM protests, the Capitol insurrection was triggered by deep-seated racist lies and racist stereotypes, experts say.
Convinced that the presidential election was stolen, protesters called themselves “patriots” and repeatedly shouted “USA, USA” while vandalizing and destroying the building at the heart of American democracy. Trump, who adopted canine whistle tactics such as calling Mexicans “rapists” and called the words Black Lives Matter a “symbol of hatred”, incited them.
“Once something like this seems true, you can’t dissuade them with the facts,” said Ian Haney López, the author of “Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals have Reinvented Racism and Wreck the Middle Class”.
Here is a summary of what drove the Black Lives Matter movement for almost a decade and why Trump supporters invaded Capitol:
False and denied claims attracted thousands to the Capitol
After weeks of hearing false claims that the presidential election was rigged, Trump supporters gathered in Washington to fight the ceremonial count of electoral votes that would confirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
Hours before the insurrection, Trump addressed a crowd of supporters gathered at Ellipse, near the White House, spreading false allegations of electoral fraud and telling them to “fight like hell”.
“I am absolutely 100% behind what happened here today,” Todd Possett, who was part of last week’s crowd, told CNN’s Donie Sullivan. “It is terrible how this election was stolen. I had to come here and do my patriotic duty.”
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, said on Wednesday that the crowd was motivated by racial resentment and “a conspiracy theory rooted in the effort to invalidate blacks”.
“The crowd was greeted with empathy and deference by some law enforcement officers and some from a military establishment that houses white supremacy, say, among its own ranks,” testified Morial at the Negro Caucus Congressional hearing in response to the riots.
After the election, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, were among the cities that the Trump campaign falsely accused of electoral fraud and corruption. These cities are mostly black or have large black populations.
During a press conference in November, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, said: “You knew if you lived in Philadelphia. Unless you are astonished – that’s an Italian expression for stupid – unless you are stupid, did you know that a lot of people came from Camden to vote, “he said. “They do it every year. It happens all the time in Philadelphia. … And it can happen because it’s a democratic (sic), corrupt city, and it has been for years. Many, many years. And they did it in some places. where they could escape from it. “
Protesters believed in a narrative deeply rooted in racist stereotypes that has been consistent throughout the Trump administration and used by other politicians for the past 50 years, according to Haney López, who is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Mostly what they are trying to provoke is the feeling that people of dangerous color are coming to dominate the country,” said Haney López.
“They believe this because in their hearts it is true that this multiracial coalition is taking over,” he added. “It is simply wrong for them that blacks in coalition with Latinos and Asian Americans and whites take power.”
Political leaders have long used whistle phrases to exploit White America’s racial fears. Some of these terms are “illegal alien”, “bandit” and “Welfare Queen”, which was used by President Ronald Reagan when he ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1976 to attack welfare bureaucrats during campaign speeches.
In his first public comments to reporters since the insurrection, Trump insisted that his speech inciting the riot was “entirely appropriate”.
He said the “real problem” was what other politicians said about the summer protests in Seattle and Portland, Oregon.
The Capitol uprising was also an impressive display of strength for marginal movements, with various symbols of white supremacy and extremist groups on display.
A global rallying cry for black lives
In 2013, the unexpected verdict in the murder trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old black teenager walking through his father’s Florida neighborhood, led to the birth of Black Lives Matter – one of the best known organizations that fight for good -being black.
What started out as a hashtag became a website, an organization and later grew to more than a dozen local chapters in the United States and Canada. They were driven by the series of deaths of black Americans at the hands of police and security guards.
According to the BLM website, its mission is “to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in the violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes.”
But the BLM’s goal is not just to protest police brutality. At the local level, the organization advocates mutual aid, depriving the police and access to housing and health care for black and brown workers.
“We live in a country built to keep us from these resources we need,” said Kailee Scales, managing director of the Black Lives Matter Global Network. “People in the movement have consistently struggled to reverse this trend, to raise awareness that this is not how we should live.”
Studies show that segregation persists in many American cities, leaving black-majority neighborhoods behind. Black communities do not have the same access as whites to health care, quality education, good jobs and other resources.
“You know, for many of us in this country, we know what it’s like to be treated differently. And we also know what it means to say that all the things we experience every day don’t exist or that if they do, it’s our fault (and) that we somehow created the conditions of inequality, “said Alicia Garza, who co-founded the Global Black Lives Matter Network with Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi.
In the wake of Floyd’s death last summer, large crowds took to the streets in several cities in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter. The protests were bigger and more sustained. The BLM signs that appeared in many people’s backyards were only the first signs of a racial reckoning across the country.
People marched against police violence, systemic racism, to be seen and heard.
“If you don’t speak and say nothing, you’re like the cops who stood and watched,” said Randy Fikki, a protester in Kansas City, to the affiliate of CNN WDAF-TV, referring to the officers involved in Floyd’s death. .
Critics responded to the phrase “Black lives are important” by coining their own slogans, such as “All lives are important”, which some argue that minimizes the current struggle that blacks face against systemic racism and “Blue lives are important”, referring to to the lives of the police.
Last week, Trump supporters were criticized on social media after using another phrase that for years has been known as racial justice.
They used the hashtag #SayHerName when referring to Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old white woman who was shot dead while the crowd tried to force their way towards the floor of the Chamber.
They seemed to ignore the #SayHerName campaign, which aims to raise awareness of black women and girls who are victims of police brutality – and who are often overlooked and forgotten.
The campaign, launched in 2014 by the African American Policy Forum and Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, worked to highlight the cases of dozens of black women, including Atatiana Jefferson and Michelle Cusseaux, both killed by police in their homes.
