COMPARISONS BETWEEN SIEGE, PROTESTS DECRIED
Black activists say equating Capitol insurrection with BLM protests is a false equivalence
Black activists are coming out strongly against a growing narrative among conservatives that equates the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol with last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests of racial injustice.
Republican lawmakers defending President Donald Trump made the comparison again Wednesday while building their case against impeachment and accused Democrats of being hypocrites with selective outrage. Their comments mark the latest effort by Trump and the GOP to misrepresent the Black Lives Matter movement as an extremist, violent faction tied to anarchists.
“You can moan and groan, but he was far more explicit about his calls for peace than some of the BLM and left-wing rioters were this summer when we saw violence sweep across this nation,” Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said in defending Trump before the House voted 232-197 to impeach the president for inciting an insurrection.
But the two events were fundamentally different. One was an intentional, direct attack on a hallowed democratic institution, with the goal of overturning a fair and free election. The other was a coast-to-coast protest movement demanding an end to systemic racism that occasionally, but not frequently, turned violent.
“The GOP has become the party of false equivalences,” said James Jones, assistant professor of African American studies and sociology at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J.
Many BLM protesters were responding to the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man who was seen on video gasping for breath as a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck. Police repelled the demonstrators using rubber bullets, tear gas and military assets like helicopters.
The mob at the Capitol was fueled by baseless conspiracies propagated by Trump that the election was stolen from him through massive fraud. The rioters acted on the president’s direct urging to “fight like hell.” They attacked police with pipes and chemicals and planted bombs. They were met largely with restraint by law enforcement.
The unrest that followed Floyd’s death included vandalism, arson and looting, but the vast majority of demonstrations were peaceful. Some of the worst violence was in Portland, where thousands of protesters turned out nightly for weeks.
But prominent BLM activists repeatedly distanced themselves from provocateurs and brawlers. An analysis of more than 7,750 demonstrations in 2,400 locations across the country found that 93 percent happened with no violence, according to the US Crisis Monitor, a joint effort by Princeton University and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project.
The mob at the Capitol smashed its way into the heart of the federal government, seeking to interrupt constitutionally mandated proceedings to affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Lawmakers fled into hiding, and five people were killed, including a Capitol police officer who was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher.
The “overwhelmingly nonviolent” demonstrations cannot be compared to the violence at the Capitol, “where White supremacists, mobilized by falsehoods peddled by President Trump and his GOP allies” laid siege to the Capitol “resulting in its desecration,” Jones said.
Freshman Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said Democrats should be removed for inciting violence by supporting the protests that followed Floyd’s death in May.
Trump “has held over 600 rallies in the last four years. None of them included assaulting police, destroying businesses or burning down cities,” Greene said.
In fact, occasional violence has happened at Trump rallies, and the president has all but invited crowds to attack critics and journalists. At several events, Trump supporters and protesters have come to blows, including as recently as November, when clashes between people protesting the election results and counter-demonstrators ended with at least one stabbing and 20 arrests.
The president in a tweet called the Capitol rioters “great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” Over the summer, he called the Black Lives Matters protesters “thugs” and “terrorists.”
In 2020, law enforcement agencies made more than 14,000 protest-related arrests, often detaining people who engaged in civil disobedience, as well as acts of violence.
Equating the pro-Trump rioters to the Black Lives Matter movement could lead to even heavier law enforcement surveillance and actions against BLM, said Scott Roberts of Color of Change, the nation’s largest digital racial justice advocacy group.
“There is a real danger of this false equivocation leading to ramifications, whether intended or unintended,” he said.