The attack on the United States Capitol is another example of racial inequality

“When whites commit a coup, they encounter a small number of agents who can do nothing and even take selfies with terrorists,” he said.

After the crowd walked through Congress for hours without being disturbed by anyone, their action was condemned by members of both parties. The event aroused astonishment and disbelief among many citizens, who believed that such incidents were unthinkable in a democracy as deeply rooted as that of the United States.

However, the response to chaos is consistent with an old pattern, in which racists are admitted and violent white supremacist ideology is tolerated, and the claims of whites are given more weight than those of African Americans, to often poor and marginalized people.

Since the inception of democracy, whites’ destructive and obstructive behavior has been labeled as patriotism. It is a fundamental aspect of a national myth about which claims are justified and which are not.

Newly elected Representative Cori Bush was one of the protesters who confronted the police and National Guard in 2014 after Michael Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri. And he says the race of the crowd was one factor that facilitated his takeover of Congress.

If the crowd had been African American, “they would have turned us into mush,” Bush said.

“And these are the same ones who call us terrorists,” he added. “Confederate flags, ‘don’t trample me’, ‘Blues lives matter’, Trump flags … All this symbolizes the same thing. It symbolizes racism and white supremacy ”.

Police presence on Capitol Hill was negligible compared to the efforts of national guards and other law enforcement agencies last year to protect luxury goods companies, government buildings and routes used by protesters across the country.

Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, the nation’s largest racial justice platform in the nation, told the AP that these episodes “are a clear example of how racism works in this country and how it works. the different rules according to your race ”.

The Congressional seizure wasn’t the only incident on Wednesday. Alleged Trump supporters are said to have disrupted law and order across the country, including those in Georgia, New Mexico and Ohio.

It is not the first time that the unequal response of the police to these kinds of actions has led to unrest and criticism. In May last year, a large group of mostly white people armed with rifles stormed the Michigan Legislature building in Lansing to protest the governor’s restrictions on containing the coronavirus. There were few arrests and almost no convictions in the White House.

In June, Trump government officials had federal troops spread a peaceful Black Lives Matter rally with tear gas and anesthetic grenades so the president could take a photo at a church near the White House.

BLM protesters and their supporters in Portland, Oregon, pointed out the vast disparities between the response to racial injustice protests in that city last year and the way violence was encouraged in Washington.

On July 27, after deploying agents to end weeks of demonstrations, Trump tweeted, “Anarchists, agitators, protesters who destroy or damage our federal court in Portland or any government building in a city or state, according to we are being tried. new law of statues and monuments. MINIMUM 10 YEARS OF PRISON. Don’t do it. “

The thousands of rioters in Congress, many of them backed by Trump’s comments on Wednesday about his electoral defeat, heard a very compassionate message from their leader.

“I know what they are suffering, how much it hurts,” Trump said in a video he posted to Twitter, but later retracted. “Now they have to go home. We want them. They are very special ”.