What we witnessed on January 6, 2021—a live-action coup to overthrow our government where thousands of individuals ran through the Capitol with abandon, ransacked governmental offices, and took photos with law enforcement—was always just beneath the surface of our body politic. That the vast majority of these individuals were white and sent to the Capitol under Donald Trump’s orders was not lost for a second on most Americans’ minds. Just months before, a torrent of gun violence and racist policing set forth a nationwide uprising where Black and Brown people were tear-gassed, shot with rubber bullets, beaten, and handcuffed for merely showing up. People pleaded for less violent action by the hands of police, and on that day we saw that all it took was a shift in racial politics and optics.

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