PART 3: The investigators take us deep inside to reveal how race touched every piece of the January 6th investigation. Their perspective is necessary to show how ethnic identities still define so much of how this nation operates. Stephanie Jones, who was an editor on the January 6th report and daughter of one of the leads on the Kerner Commission of the 1960s, provides historical context on how the government does – and doesn’t – address structural racism
By now, the story of what happened on January 6 2021 is seared into the public psyche. But there is still an untold story.
Many of the investigators and team leads on the January 6th Committee were people of color. In this podcast, we bring you the story of their leadership, and why their mix of lived experience as descendents of enslaved people; children of immigrants; or immigrants themselves deeply shaped the committee’s quest to protect and uphold a multiracial pluralistic democracy.
The story they tell about the inner workings of the committee also reveal deep rifts over the role of race and Christian Nationalism in the insurrection, and how much of that inquiry should be told while proving former President Trump’s role in the insurrection.
As America winds up with endless court cases over the former President and his alleged co-conspirators, it is also, arguably winding up for an increase in domestic violent extremism. In “January 6th: An American Story,” we show – through the investigators of color and lawmakers helping lead the committee – that January 6th is not over, and the ways we continue to make sense of its reverberations could save – or imperil – us all.
The story of January 6 is an American Story.
It just might be different from the one you thought you knew.
(Sound from Black Lives Matter demonstration)
Farai Chideya: It is the summer of 2020. The nation is roiling.
(Sound from Black Lives Matter demonstrations)
Farai: A few months earlier, George Floyd’s last words, “I can’t breathe,” were caught on camera. As white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin crushed the life out of a man, in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers, Floyd's name joined a growing list of Black people killed by the police. In city after city, Americans voiced their anger and said enough, no matter that Covid was omnipresent. People took to the streets to march.
(Sound from Black Lives Matter demonstrations)
Marcus Childress was no exception.
Marcus Childress: I didn't just watch it. I participated in it. Uh, my wife and I were active participants in the Black Lives Matter protests. We threw a protest in Richmond myself, where we led and organized it.
Farai: Marcus, a lawyer and former military prosecutor who has often been the face and voice of the law, was also afraid of it in those days, because of the color of his skin.
Marcus: Um, and look, I can tell you the fact that we were scared, more scared of the police throughout the entire time we were protesting.
Farai: In Washington, D.C., a stone’s throw away from the White House, people came out every day for more than a week.
(Sound from Black Lives Matter demonstrations)
Farai: The city’s Mayor Muriel Bowser closed off the street and had it renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza.” It was boldly painted on the street for the nation to see.
Six months later, on January 6, an overwhelmingly white crowd from all over the country descended on D.C. to voice their anger. They claimed that the presidential election was stolen from their candidate. That was a lie – one repeated by the defeated President Trump himself.
Here's Bryan Bonner.
Bryan Bonner: The complexion of the crowd likely affected how law enforcement and the intelligence community viewed the level of the threat. I think that that's something that a person of color, particularly a person of color that comes from an impoverished background, has a unique perspective on
(Sound from January 6 insurrection)
Farai: Marcus, again.
Marcus: And then to watch all the footage that I watched of January 6th and not see that same type of fear or even deference was something that was hard to circle or or square for me. I mean, I, I understand why. I'm not naive, but when you live those experiences just months apart it's, uh, it’s telling.
Farai: This split-screen world is something Black Americans have had to live with since the inception of this nation. The Black and brown investigators we speak with here have had to live with this double standard. In this episode, we go deep into race.
This is “An American Story.”
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Farai: Marcus’ take on the reaction to the January 6 protestors – and how people perceive it based on race – is not his alone.
Soumya Dayananda: On a really personal note, watching the attack on January 6th, the first thought was if these were people of color attacking the Capitol, there would be an incredibly different response.
Farai: That is Soumya Dayananda. She questions whether intelligence-gathering failed because the brewing storm was white, not Black.
Soumya: If people of color had posted on Parler these exact same words, would they have been deemed credible? Would there have been this initial reflex of, “This is First Amendment-protected speech”? Would it have been perceived differently by those in law enforcement who are tasked with assessing intelligence? And I don't think you can put that aside.
Farai: Soumya and the others had good reason to believe this. One of the items provided to the January 6 investigators was an email from the intelligence division of Washington, D.C.'s police force to the Capitol police.
The tip, on January 1st, identified a website – Donald.win – that contained specific threats, including Lincoln Park as a rally point on January 6th, plans to storm federal buildings, commit crimes against public officials and a detailed plan to storm the Capitol.
(Sound from January 6 insurrection)
Three years on, we all know the tip was more than credible. Here is Robin Peguero’s take on what law enforcement was thinking before the insurrection.
Robin Peguero: They would stand between us and BLM in supposed defense of the police. And so they just couldn't imagine that they would turn.
There were warning signs in plain sight on social media about what was intended on January 6th and that the police could be a target if they were standing in between them and what they saw to be the rightful winner of the election.
Farai: And then on January 6th, rioters violently turn against police officers – whether they were Black or white.
Robin: You know, use flags that have a thin blue line on them, pro-police flags to, to beat and hurt police officers. In a way, it seems counterintuitive. But again, if you were reading what they were writing, they were saying, “We're going to kill cops.”
Farai: There were other warning signs.
Robin: There were three MAGA marches, right? One in November, one in December, and then the third, finally, in January 6th. And there were warning signs in plain sight on social media about what was intended on January 6th and that the police could be a target if they were standing in between them and what they saw to be the rightful winner of the election. Um, whether all of that wasn't taken seriously because they looked like the people we don't normally associate, I suppose, with riotous behavior.
Farai: For our investigators, their lived experiences informed their perspective.
Bryan, the father of two daughters, sees learning about race and risk as a sadly needed life-skill.
Bryan: I tell them that America is literally the greatest country on the planet, right? And they should be very blessed to be American citizens. But then I have another conversation with them about what it means to be Black and in America. We live in a predominantly white neighborhood. My kids go to predominantly white schools. They have African-American friends. But I have to have conversations with them about what it means to be the only Black person in the crowd. What does it mean if and when you encounter law enforcement? These are the things you need to do when, why do you have to do them that way? And it's just weird dichotomy.
Farai: Marcus agrees – security is not a given.
Marcus: I find, as minorities, we are forced to learn that security early on in life – of being perceptive in rooms and understanding who's best positioned to get the information or learn what needs to be learned in that moment.
Farai: Living while Black and brown in America means calculating every move every day. Like most people of color, Temidayo Aganga-Williams is intimately familiar with this reality.
Temidayo: When you grow up in this country, that isn't a new sentiment to be faced with, right? And it's not a new feeling to walk in a room and question who values you and who doesn't. I can only speak as a Black person, but I think a lot of us have the understanding or the feeling that we walk into rooms and we're always doing, like, a math calculation. You're gauging people. You're wondering how they think of you. You're wondering how they think of Black people. You're looking for clues to understand whether or not they're pro-Black or anti-Black, and we've been all doing this since we were children.
Farai: Marcus recalls his time in the military.
Marcus: For a lot of my peer airmen, I was not only their first Black officer supervising them, I was probably the first Black person they'd ever talked to – ever.
I was in the military during the Colin Kaepernick situation. I was actually leading a group during that time, and it was super controversial in my unit. I thought it was important for us to have a conversation about why he was kneeling. And look, not everyone agreed with my belief of why Colin Kaepernick was kneeling. But we had the conversation. I felt like it allowed us to move past it and, like, have our own thoughts and keep it moving.
Farai: For Robin, he drilled down on race in his studies at Harvard. He looked at what it means to be white.
Robin: I wrote my senior thesis in college about how remarkably inclusive the white label can be. And then, of course, remarkably exclusive, right? It really in this country has meant non-Black. It's always in stark contrast to Black people.
Farai: Robin remembers how race came up behind closed doors during a deposition of former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund.
Robin: We were getting on him for sort of shifting blame to others below him. Something had been put out by the Capitol Police that had warned the target would be Congress. Its own intelligence division said that and put that out. And he read it, but still thought the intelligence didn't necessarily support different preparations. So we were, we were grilling him. We were really laying into him, I guess. And I remember Vice Chair Cheney jumped in, and she was, "I just have one question. Could you have foreseen that the American president would direct a mob of armed people who he knew were armed to the Capitol to storm it?" And then the Chief says, "no." And she goes, "Okay, thank you. No further questions."
Farai: This back-and-forth over how much focus white supremacy should get was recurring. Here's Candyce Phoenix, leader of the Purple Team.
Candyce: I think one of the things that really helped me dissect and define what I saw in the crowds on that day, on January 6, because I remember talking to some other staffers and some members about how I did think white supremacy was the central theme.
Farai: Yes.
Candyce: Of what happened, and some of the responses were, you know, “Well, that's too broad a brush because, you know, QAnon, they're not white supremacists. They're just, you know, conspiracy theorists” or this other group, they're not white supremacists. And having to do a lot of education for folks to understand, to draw the parallels, to understand the history that that's rooted in when QAnon has very anti-Semitic tropes and memes and, and language that people may or may not consciously understand being rooted in that, but that's where it comes from. And trying to help people understand that what we saw on January 6th was, you know, different denominations of white supremacy.
Farai: Sandeep Prasanna picks up on the themes that stood out to Candyce:
Sandeep Prasanna: Generally, I think you see that there is a lot of overlap between people who might identify explicitly as white nationalists with people who are generally anti-LGBT or have elements of misogyny or sexism in their belief structure. So, it's a pretty toxic soup, and it can often be hard to pick out different parts of that to understand it.
Farai: To understand January 6, Candyce firmly believes that the report needed to explain the legacy of structural racism.
Candyce: We saw it with the Civil Rights movement and then the rise of the militias in the 70s and the mass incarceration that was the new Jim Crow that disenfranchised people. And we're seeing it now with the election of Barack Obama, with an era of sort of unprecedented liberal expansion and the mass disenfranchisement of people in this country.
Farai: Stephanie Jones, one of the writers and editors of the January 6 report, came onboard later than the investigators. She has a unique long view, and they leaned on her.
Stephanie Jones: I did feel an obligation toward the staff that I was working with to keep them motivated. You know, not get too frustrated. I also spent a lot of time just encouraging them and sort of playing auntie.
Farai: Stephanie’s father, Nathaniel R. Jones, was a civil rights activist and a federal circuit court judge. His influence still guides her.
Stephanie: He was born in the ‘20s to a family that had come up to Ohio as part of the Great Migration. He was the first in his family to go to college. and was mentored by an amazing, African-American lawyer in Ohio who guided him and helped him and taught him. He was one of the first African American assistant U. S. attorneys in the Kennedy administration. But what really turned everything around for him was the Kerner Commission that President Johnson put together in the ‘60s to study the urban uprisings.
Farai: The Kerner Commission Report, of which Stephanie's dad was assistant general counsel, explains the nature of structural racism in America. It sold millions of copies. The best-seller explained how frustration at the lack of economic opportunity for Black and Latino-Americans was a root cause of the riots in 1967. Martin Luther King, Jr. pronounced the report “a physician’s warning of approaching death with a prescription for life.”
Stephanie says she grew up with a lot of advantages. When she was younger, she believed they might shield her against bias and racism.
Stephanie: I thought I have too much privilege to go around saying, “Oh boy, I'm going to be discriminated against because I'm Black.” I had so many privileges that other people didn't have. It was almost that I felt that I wasn't entitled to expect to be treated badly. But over time, I often got smacked in the face with the fact that your relative position in society as a Black woman, in terms of where you stand in the socioeconomic realm, doesn't protect you from a lot of these things.
Farai: Stephanie says her upbringing didn't stop her from speaking up when she saw or experienced racism. Even during the early parts of her career.
Stephanie:They said, "Her father's a judge. She's very, you know, she's very upper-middle class. She'll fit in really well and she won't be any problem." And they weren't really expecting me to speak up and say anything. And that became very annoying to them. And I was often treated as if I would, you know, “How dare you? You're not grateful enough to – “
Farai: Oh yes, I've heard that myself. Yep, yep.
Stephanie: “We let you in.”
Farai: Stephanie’s father had a unique definition of segregation.
Stephanie: He said, "It's not, not to separate you, white folks don't mind being around us."we're often in very close proximity. The purpose is to make you feel that there's something different about you, and there’s something special about them that you can't attain."
Farai: The Kerner Commission Report came out in February 1968, during one of America's most turbulent moments. Protests and riots were a usual occurrence.
Stephanie: It wasn't quite, I think, what people expected. I think they thought it would be a bit of a whitewash. And they were very honest. And they said, "These problems are stemming from racism, discrimination, poverty,” all sorts of problems that were happening in the country that the country was ignoring.
Farai: The report was prescient. In April of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down, followed by the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June of that year.
Fifty years later, Stephanie says:
Stephanie: A lot of the advice and recommendations went unheeded. And when you read the report, it could have been written last week.
Farai: History repeats itself. And America ignores it at its own peril.
Here's Sandeep:
Sandeep: I think, in general, what we're seeing is a backlash to historically marginalized communities demanding a seat at the table, demanding equal rights, and that challenges existing power structures.
Stephanie: In Black and brown communities, we have people who are kind of hanging on for dear life who really want to believe in our government, want to believe in our institutions, who have always been the groups that kind of kept everything afloat. They’re the ones who keep turning out to vote, the ones who, you know, who continue to work as election workers and who believe in the system. But they're losing faith. And January 6th really shook people to the core.
Farai: Towards the end of working together some investigators doubted whether their work would have impact. Stephanie took on the role of the sage elder and often invoked her dad.
Stephanie: I told them what he would say to me is, “Did you do the best you could do?”
Farai: Mm hmm.
Stephanie: And if the answer is yes, then you did a good job and you did what you're supposed to do, because a project like this, there's only so much control you have –
Farai: Absolutely.
Stephanie: And you only have control over what you do.
Farai: Still Stephanie agrees with Candyce about how much content about white supremacy and its origins should have been in the report.
Stephanie: There's a discomfort in speaking about racism, white supremacy, white nationalism. There is a sense that people have that if we're talking about it, we're accusing them of it. People are so terrified of being thought of as a racist. They think being accused of racism is worse than being a victim of racism.
Farai: In many ways, the arc of January 6th is about the persistent failure of the United States government and its citizens to view racial animus as a threat to all of society – not just Black and brown Americans. Will the arc of history bend towards justice, as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. hoped? Or are we stuck in a time loop, doomed to repeat the mistakes of January 6th in years to come? Much of that depends on what we make of the work of this committee and all the other advocates in civil society arguing for a deeper look at race and democracy.
Coming up in episode four:
Farai: I have to ask about Vice Chair Liz Cheney.
Candyce: Mm hmm.
Farai: How did her work on the committee land with The Book of Purple?
Candyce: I think there is, and remains, value in her approach. I think there are people who were not interested in hearing from people of color, who were not interested in hearing from Democrats, who were not interested in hearing from academics. So there is tremendous value in the way she structured things, but there was a lot that was lost.
Farai: What is The Book of Purple, and why does it matter?
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CREDITS
Thanks for listening to "January 6: An American Story,” a special series from Our Body Politic.
I’m host and executive producer, Farai Chideya. For this series, Joanne Levine is our executive producer. Morgan Givens is our senior producer.
The series was written by Joanne Levine, Morgan Givens and Farai Chideya.
Mary Mathis and Nicole Bode are our fact-checkers. The series was sound designed by Rococo Punch. Jordan Greene is our researcher.
Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora Farms and Rococo Punch. Nina Spensley and Shanta Covington are also executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Our technical director is Mike Garth.
Special thanks to the folks at Clean Cuts, including Carter Martin, Emma Shannon, Harry Evans, Archie Moore, Mike Goehler, Adam Rooner, Molly Mountain and Aliza Jafri.
This series is produced with the support of Ruth Ann Harnisch.
This program is produced with support from the Surdna Foundation, Ford Foundation, Katie McGrath and JJ Abrams Family Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Meadow Fund, Democracy Fund, Heising-Simons Foundation, Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Open Society Foundations, The Henry L. Luce Foundation, Compton Foundation, Harnisch Foundation, Pop Culture Collaborative, the BMe Community, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.