The Impunity of White Insurrection

According to the Associated Press, the Capitol Police knew about the potential threat of the riot days before it took place, but rejected offers of help from the National Guard and the FBI. Officials said that they wanted to avoid using federal force against Americans, as they had done this summer. The choice to turn down help amid warnings of an insurrection is as revealing as it is disturbing: Why did law enforcement assume that they’d encounter violence from protesters marching for Black lives in June, but think that a largely white crowd of pro-Trump extremists and conspiracy theorists would remain peaceful? The difference in the Capitol Police’s response shocked many who bemoaned the double standard. But police brutality against Black Americans and police inaction toward white Americans is not some surprising anomaly; it is the status quo.

Read: The Capitol riot was an attack on multiracial democracy

The genesis of modern American policing can be traced in part to the institution of chattel slavery and its white-supremacist orthodoxy. It started with the slave patrols of the early 1700s and continued with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a federal statute strengthening laws that prevented the enslaved from fleeing bondage and left free Black people vulnerable to kidnapping. White citizens were employed as slave catchers to return the “stolen property” of southern planters by any means necessary. In his 1903 text The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the “police system was arranged to deal with blacks alone, and tacitly assumed that every white man was ipso facto a member of that police.” The ideologies of that earliest iteration of American policing—designed to prevent the freedom and enfranchisement of Black people and to protect the interests of white people—still persist in today’s policing system.

Read: The double standard of the American riot

In December, a 111-page investigative report about the New York Police Department revealed that last year’s Black Lives Matter protests had been grossly mishandled by officers. The report, conducted by a city oversight agency, confirmed what millions of Americans had seen after the killing of George Floyd on May 25: Police responses during peaceful protests were characterized by “excessive enforcement” and the violation of First Amendment rights. Yet one month before Floyd’s death, on April 30, the country had watched as white protesters, some of them heavily armed, swarmed the Michigan state capitol to object to stay-at-home orders, resulting in little incident from Michigan State Police troopers and only two arrests. Du Bois characterized occurrences such as this one as part of the “double system of justice, which erred on the white side by undue leniency and … practical immunity.” After an insurrection by hundreds, which resulted in the resignation of the chief of the Capitol Police, just 82 arrests have been made so far. These facts give credence to the idea that with regard to American policing, consequences are split down color lines.