As Washington focuses on what happened on 6 January last year, more attention must be paid to why such events took place.
We need to understand not just the short-term planning and incitements that led to the Capitol riots, but the deeper waves of misplaced racial resentment and fake news that set this blight in motion and that continue to drive an epidemic of voter suppression and election sabotage across the US.
The tragic events that took place a year ago today, were in no small measure a backlash – to the 2008 election of America’s first Black president, the racial justice uprising that followed the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, and the emergence of multiracial democracy, evidenced by the surge in voting by people of color that helped drive meaningful change in the presidential election later in 2020. The latter was perhaps most notably seen in Georgia, which elected Raphael Warnock as its first Black senator and Jon Ossoff, the first Jewish statewide official in the state’s history.
