U.S. President Donald Trump has committed sedition in broad daylight and incited a violent attempted coup that had the unintended effect of disrupting a political one. Both attempts failed for many reasons, but the question is how they even got that close. The answer is simple. The invaders were not Black.
While many of the police present made heroic efforts to protect the people inside the halls of the Capitol building during the mob attack on Jan. 6, and one gave his life doing so, they were hampered by leadership that did not see the real threat that the mob posed, by law enforcement posing in selfies with the attackers, but most of all by the assumption of white innocence and the years of white supremacist infiltration into police forces across the country. It is commendable that the police tried to show some humanity and attempted to keep the situation from escalating. But the juxtaposition of the images from the police response in the Capitol and to Black Lives Matter protests is telling. Had the Capitol rioters been Black, the police would have been ready with tanks.
