April Dinwoodie was riding high Wednesday morning. The diversity and inclusion consultant from Westerly was working on a podcast she hosts about transracial adoption and soaking in the election news coming out of Georgia. Then she saw reports of a mob of President Trump’s supporters breaking into the Capitol.
“When I was literally stunned and couldn’t take my eyes off the TV was when we saw folks like literally breaking windows, on scaffolding, in Nancy Pelosi office, in the chamber,” she said. “I’ve been to these places countless times. So, I’m still processing it. I’m still processing it in real time.”
As a Black woman, Dinwoodie said she had a visceral reaction to images of a predominantly white mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol and running amok in the halls of Congress. She said it highlights the extent of white privilege and the threat people of color face in America.
“I do think that there’s a fully ingrained, internalized essence and identity around supremacy that many white folks have literally been born with, and that is going to be almost impossible to deconstruct,” Dinwoodie said. “So, yes. It is, for me, those folks that do have to be sort of left behind. There is no reaching out and having a conversation.”
Carter Santos, a 17-year-old high school student from Wakefield, said he heard the news Wednesday through friends on social media.
“I was just like, ‘What is going on at the Capitol and why? Why is it being labeled as a protest, when I think if other things happened, it could have been labeled as terrorism?’”
In a Zoom interview, Santos, who is Black, motioned to a poster of Martin Luther King, Jr., Barack Obama, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, and Bob Marley hanging behind him in his room. He questioned why there have been harsher responses to Black Lives Matter protests than the mob at the Capitol.
“Our capitol got raided and no one did anything,” he said, “which obviously sparked outrage from most of America just saying like, ‘What is going on, and are people safe?’”
Steve Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the scene at the Capitol on Wednesday “was not a protest.”
“Democracy relies on a lot of norms, not laws, but norms: what people believe in, acceptance of certain values,” Brown said. “And what we saw yesterday was a not insignificant portion of members of the public ignoring that.”
John Marion, of the non-partisan good government group Common Cause of RI, said the the attack on the Capitol shows the susceptibility of many Americans to conspiracy theories. Marion said his national organization supports removing Pres. Trump from office.
Rep. Brian Newberry (R-North Smithfield), a former GOP leader in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, condemned the actions at the Capitol.
“What happened yesterday is completely unacceptable. These people should all be put in jail,” Newberry said. “You can’t tolerate this in civil society.”
Newberry said he does not think Pres. Trump should be removed from office with less than two weeks left in his term. He said he believes people on the left have also been responsible for a share of bad behavior during demonstrations.
Dr. Pablo Rodriguez, medical director for community affairs at the Care New England health system and host of the radio show “Nuestra Salud,” called the scene at the Capitol an assault on democracy and placed the blame on Pres. Trump and his enablers, drawing parallels to Nazi propaganda.
“What we’ve seen in the last few years, is an insurrection in the United States,” Rodriguez said. “So this is not going to end with the reign of Donald Trump. And I think that we need to fortify our institutions, we have to make sure that civic education is part of what happens in schools, so we do not fall victim to another demagogue in the future.”
Amid the outrage, some local supporters of Pres. Trump stood behind him Thursday. Laura Larrivee, of Barrington, has been rallying in support of the president since the summer. She said blame should not be placed on the president, who encouraged his supporters to go to the Capitol.
“That’s just silliness,” Larrivee said. “It’s just unfortunate, because the movement is now being overshadowed with all of this. And I feel like now we have a movement, and we have valid points.”
Some people saw a silver lining Wednesday. Jean Gagnier, a former Westerly Town Council member and one-time Republican who turned unaffiliated in 2016, says he was shocked earlier in the day but encouraged after Congress later reconvened.
“This I haven’t said in years, but I was actually proud of the United States Congress,” he said. “They sent the right message, getting together last night and refusing to put off their duties. So it’s unusual for someone to say they’re proud of the U.S. Congress, but they were good.”
Gagnier said he hopes this moment marks the beginning of a turn to more centrist politics in America.
“It could be the morning of the moderates in that the center comes back,” he said.
Paula Whitford, a member of the South Kingstown School Committee, said she believes the events Wednesday embarrassed America on the world stage. But Whitford, who is a woman of color, said she hopes the shock of seeing a mob at the Capitol will bring more attention back to issues of racial justice.
“We need to encourage the conversation to continue, because I don’t feel like people had enough time and enough conversation to fully understand what the people of color have actually gone through,” Whitford said. “So I’m kind of hoping that what happened yesterday will kind of bring that conversation up again, because it has died down to this point.”
Rabbi Marc Mandel, of Touro Synagogue in Newport, said he encourages people to be optimistic and look to scripture for guidance, despite what happened Wednesday.
“It’s very easy to get discouraged when we hear about things like this, and it’s easy to give up hope, but that’s not what the Bible wants us — that’s not what the Torah wants from us as a guide for our lives, which the Torah is,” Mandel said. “It teaches us that we need to find the ways to create harmony in our lives, and that has to be our goal. It has to be our mission. That has to be what we strive for.”
Mandel said the country needs to come together as one and “look for ways to get ourselves out of this roadblock that’s really bringing us down.”
We’re asking members of the community to share their thoughts on the future of our American democracy. Read their stories here.
Lynn Arditi, Antonia Ayres-Brown, Ian Donnis, and Nadine Sebai contributed reporting.
Alex Nunes can be reached at anunes@thepublicsradio.org.
