Black Americans react to the pro-Trump riot at the U.S. Capitol
On the morning of Jan. 6, many Black Americans celebrated the news that the Rev. Raphael Warnock had defeated Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a runoff election to become the first African American U.S. senator from the state of Georgia. But just hours later, President Trump addressed a mass rally of his supporters in Washington, D.C., exhorting them to head to the U.S. Capitol to make their displeasure known to lawmakers who were set to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Black Americans share their reactions.
Video Transcript
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
- USA! USA! USA!
RYAH TAYLOR: The protest that was happening on January 6, I feel like it was a hissy fit.
TINA WATKINS-QUAYE: I was horrified. I was afraid for the people who are serving our country that I knew were inside of that building.
GARY ANDERSON: I was angry, and I was crying because I know that we're better than this. But because of the bigotry and hate of others, we've been brought to a low point in our history. So I'm saddened.
LUCIOUS WRIGHT: They had no control of themself, and there weren't nobody there to control them. Five people wind up losing their life. That's a disgrace.
ANDREW WILKES: Seeing the image of nooses and Confederate flags in Washington DC, it's just a reminder that too frequently, these symbols of terror are used as a stand-in for white supremacy.
TINA WATKINS-QUAYE: My grandfather fled a lynch mob when he was 13 years old to come here to Los Angeles as part of the Great Migration. A noose in America means something very specific.
GARY ANDERSON: They were literally sticking a knife into the side of America. It is beyond belief that they would think they're entitled to go in and interrupt the Democratic process like they did. I didn't serve the nation as a soldier, putting myself in harm's way, to allow people like that to come in and have their second voice heard.
TINA WATKINS-QUAYE: We know that the Confederacy, that the Confederate flag, was treasonous, that it was anti-American, that people who were part of the Confederate states wanted to form a different country so that they could keep people like me and my family enslaved.
- We learn violence from you.
GABBY CUDJOE WILKES: When people try to say that Black folks are making things up, that we are oversensitive, get over it. As the demographics began to come out about who these people were who were walking into the US Capitol barraging through, they were folks that we live with, work with, go to school with. Our children play with their children. These are folks who are ingrained in our communities, and that to me, as a Black American, is the most alarming thing.
GARY ANDERSON: I happen to have participated in several marches, recent marches, in DC and that scene, personally, as well as on TV, the preparation that existed at that time, during those times, the presence of armed guards, police everywhere. You watch the Black Lives Matter incidences where they arrive with riot gear on and masks.
RYAH TAYLOR: The fact that these people that came and were treated so compassionately by the police and with such kindness, and most of them were not injured, body slammed or anything like that like we could compare at the Black Lives Matter protest-- that it's only OK to protest when you're not brown or Black. And people aren't acknowledging the fact that this is an outdated system, and it was literally built around the benefit of white people.
GABBY CUDJOE WILKES: It may be furious to see that actually in the presence of real harm, actually armed individuals, folks who are actually armed and dangerous, somehow the police learned how not to shoot first and ask questions later.
TINA WATKINS-QUAYE: The Black Lives Matter protests are taking the bare minimum of a human right to acknowledge that a life is valuable and putting everything on the line for that, while another group was coming from a place of entitlement and sort of throwing a temper tantrum about the last, kind of, attempt to manipulate the political system not going in their favor. This was an armed tantrum.
GARY ANDERSON: We have a corrupt society in which people who are in power, who have the power, have forgotten about those who don't.
ANDREW WILKES: You have an entire political culture which is responsible for and which helped to cause this moment that we saw last Wednesday. Last Wednesday didn't happen in a vacuum but was encouraged by the president of the United States, was encouraged by several sitting US senators from different states. And so you have, and all three of those entities were encouraged by an entire political party, and so there's a political culture that is creating discontent with our democratic institutions, and it's creating-- really undermining the sense of E pluribus unum, that out of many folks from different backgrounds, different cultures, we can be one nation committed to equal justice under the law. And for those principles to be real, we have to be honest about the corrosive white nationalism that is pervasive in our US political culture.
GABBY CUDJOE WILKES: I think a part of why they love him so much is because he represents you can do whatever you want to do and still be on top, and that's a scary thing, but that is the definition of white privilege.
LUCIOUS WRIGHT: I lived through it all my life. Double standard. White only. That's the bathroom. Water fountain in the courthouse where we pay tax. That's a double standard. They made money at the factory, maybe $1, $1.50, more than we made. That's a double standard.
GARY ANDERSON: People who can say that the election that was ran and held, because our guy didn't get elected, we're not going to accept the outcome of that law. I mean, that's a privileged type of idea that you can determine for your own self how the rules are to be applied and to be enforced.
GABBY CUDJOE WILKES: Privilege. White privilege. At the end of the day, it is-- they are given the benefit of the doubt that there is a reason for why they showed up, that even if they've got guns on their waist that they're not going to shoot and kill you. There's a benefit of the doubt that gives them the ability to live freely in this nation that people of color do not have.
